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23rd April, 2025 - Webinar replay

In conversation with Lea Turner – how to build thriving communities of clients and professional connections

Phil Bray 

Good morning, everybody, and welcome to today’s webinar with our very special guest, Lea Turner. What are we going to be talking about today? We’re going to be talking about how to build thriving communities of clients and professional connections. I’m really delighted to have Lea with us today, and looking forward to a fabulous session. Lea is the director of The HoLT, a former LinkedIn trainer, and an expert community builder with over 200,000 followers across social media. So, we’re delighted to have you here today, Lea. Let’s start though with the usual introduction from you, Dan, about how we do things here.

Dan Campbell 

Yes, of course. Thank you. Welcome to today’s session. So, what do we all need to know? Well, we’ve got a special guest with us here today, so make sure you will get involved as much as humanly possible. Lea is going to help us build a community today, and with community comes conversation. Your microphones and cameras are not on, but you can still talk to us. You can send us a comment in through the chat box or use the Q&A system and have your say. So, ask questions about the things that Phil and Lea are discussing, tell us you agree, or, even better, tell us you disagree. Yardstick webinars are famously a safe space, and we’ve made them a safe space since we began them many years ago. We’re all here to learn, so make the most of the hour, I know I’m certainly going to be. Phil’s going to lead with his own questions for Lea, but I’ll be sweeping up comments and questions at regular intervals. So, for those of you who submitted a question in advance to put forward, thanks for that. I’ve got them all here with me, so I’ll be reading them out as we go. Let me answer a question that we often get right at the start: Yes, we are recording today’s session, a video is going to be sent out along with a summary of any links or resources we mention. Of course, we’ve got the real hero of the webinar, Abi Robinson, to thank for that; a big thank you to her, as ever, for making sure that it lands in your inbox as soon as possible. Now, enough of me, let’s have some of Phil and Lea shall we? Over to you!

Phil Bray 

Cheers, Dan. I think we first need to admire the attention to detail behind your left shoulder Lea. The way the mugs are set up, and the colour coding of the books, I think that’s fab.

Lea Turner 

And there’s a sign as well that you can’t see. It’s all backwards, unfortunately. But yeah, no, not quite in shot, my monitor’s a little bit closer than usual.

Phil Bray 

No, it’s all the right way around for us. So, talking about backgrounds, tell us a bit about your background, your journey to this point of focusing on building communities, what The HoLT is, and why it’s got a capital H, L, T but not O. Just, just give us the background to you, Lea, if you would.

Lea Turner 

Okay. I started my first business when I was 26 working for building consultants. And I decided I wanted to – well, I was drunk on a beach in Thailand, and decided I needed to come back and do more traveling, but I was skint. So, I decided to start a business. My business was transcribing. I used to type audio, which is a good job I left it because AI would have stolen my job. I did that for nearly 10 years, including when I had my son. I’m a solo parent, and my son is nearly 10 now. In 2019, I was looking for more clients, I stumbled onto LinkedIn and absolutely hated it. I didn’t really have many other options to find more clients, so I started using LinkedIn, but I found it horribly dry and boring, so I did it a bit differently; I just made it fun for myself, and didn’t really care what people thought, and just started telling my story. It quickly got a lot of followers which resulted in loads of people saying, “I want to work with you” because I was quite clear about the transcription that I did, I had lots of building surveyors, lots of doctors coming to me, wanting to work with me. I was getting so many clients that people were saying to me, “How are you doing this on LinkedIn? How are you getting all these followers? How are you getting all these clients?” Because I had about 100 in three months, grown my team, and then COVID hit, and I didn’t have any clients to generate work for because they couldn’t see their own clients. So, I dipped my toe into LinkedIn training, and it was really popular and successful, very fast. I went from being a solo mum on government support that could barely make ends meet to making my first six figures in 10 months, which I then continue and I did that for a couple of years before launching the community. The community came about because of my LinkedIn training, because I was working with all these business owners that I could teach how to do LinkedIn, but there was so much else missing because it takes a long time to nurture relationships on LinkedIn, you’re relying on algorithms to show your content to people regularly. They didn’t have a marketing funnel, they didn’t have mailing lists set up, they didn’t have a decent website, or lead magnets. I realised that I know many people that teach this stuf. A lot of them had been my clients, were supporters, and a lot of them wanted something from me because I had this huge audience, so, I decided to start talking to them about whether they would be interested in hosting something for a community if I set it up. Would they be interested in teaching small business owners how to do the things that they teach, but obviously for a lot less than they would charge for one of their own coaching programs? Loads of them said yes. So, I started a waiting list, started talking about this community, and in June 2022, I launched it. We sold the first 100 spaces in four hours, and then shut the doors. We sold the next 50 places two months later, and there was theory behind that, because I wanted to make sure we ironed out any issues for the first couple of months and improve what needed to be improved. Then we launched it again. We’re now at just over 500 members who all pay monthly or annually, and there are no tiers, it’s all it’s all equal. We’ve done parties, we’ve done in-person meetups, and it’s a whole lot more than just master classes now. The name, I agonised over for ages, it stands for The House of LT. The thought process behind that was I just didn’t want my name in it, in case such a time comes that I decide to exit it, or it becomes bigger than me. That comes from the LGBTQ+ community. Back in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, in the ballroom culture in New York City, transgender, gay, and transvestite people were absolutely excommunicated from mainstream society, they were outcast, and they would create these houses. They would have a house mother, and then a group of them would come together, a lot of them would live together, and they would create these amazing outfits and do these dance/catwalks in the clubs in New York. They would all look after each other, and the house mother would sort of oversee it all, deal with any arguments, deal with any conflict, protect and look after them. I quite liked the idea of being a house mother to people and one of the things that our community promotes is inclusivity and belonging. We attract a lot of the people that don’t really feel like they’ve ever belonged in the business world or that it feels uncomfortable to them. We also attract lots of other people, but we advertise it as a very safe place, and it’s very non-judgmental, it’s incredibly inclusive, and it just suited the vibe that I wanted, as well as honoring the LGBTQ + community in doing so. So, that’s where the name came from.

Phil Bray 

That’s a very cool story.

Lea Turner 

Yeah.

Phil Bray 

And over the past three or four years, I’m sure, you’ve had your ups and downs, and I’ve seen other people try and create communities, and it’s hard work to create a community and maintain its momentum, and you’ve got to pay the bills. So, what’s the business case? Because the majority of people on this call are financial advisers, financial planners, mortgage brokers, and we were talking just before we came live about working with a financial adviser. What’s the business case for the people on this call building a community?

Lea Turner 

It depends what kind of community you’re building. So there are lots of communities where there is peer-to-peer support. You’ll have communities of lawyers or accountants, who are hive-minding ideas, helping each other out, drawing from each other’s experience, collaborating over competing, referring customers to each other when they can’t manage it, especially if they’re specialists. Because we all know, when you’re a specialist in something, you often get other enquiries for things that you’re not a specialist in, and having other trusted people that you know will do a good job under your name, is really beneficial. I think the overall benefit of having any kind of community is that you can accelerate the trust that’s built between you as the leader and the people within the community, because you get to know each other a lot better. You feel safer to talk a little bit more openly, because it’s not on social media, it’s not living forever in the public eye, and it allows you to have those private communications. You also know instantly that the people attracted to that community have got some sort of shared values with you, you’ve already got something in common, so that gives you a foundation to build a relationship on, rather than just like approaching a total stranger on social media that you don’t know has any shared values or shared interests with you. So, I think when people come into a community it’s peer-to-peer support, they’re looking for support, and they’re looking to offer support. So you already know they’re coming in for the right reasons and the same reasons as yours. So, you skip over that awkward introduction, and straight away you’ve got something in common. I think that really works.

Phil Bray 

Accelerating trust points is really interesting point, because traditionally, one of the challenges financial advice and financial planning has had is gaining people’s trust. It’s a profession that has notoriously struggled, unfortunately, to be seen as a trustworthy profession. So, it’s an interesting point. If we’ve got the business case now, what does a community look like? Because it feels like a nebulous thing, that’s hard to pin down. What does a community look like? Is it online? Is it offline? As Mr. Sinek says, let’s start with the why, start with the end in mind, and just talk about what a community looks like. Is it online? Is it offline? Is it physical events? A mixture of both? Just try and paint a picture of what a community looks like.

Lea Turner 

I think there are very different types of communities especially in the online space. You’ve got community everywhere. Your neighbourhood is part of your community if you know your neighbours, the people in your local Facebook group who you might not know and meet, but if you’ve got a problem, they might pop-up and offer support. A community is a group of people that are there to support one another, in some sense; I think that’s the sort of overarching definition of it. Back in the olden days, when the only people we ever knew were the people who lived in our immediate vicinity, you’d have a single grocer, a single baker, a farmer that grew the veg, a butcher, and they would all help each other out. It’s very different these days, because there are thousands of everything and there’s so much choice. So, I think community has now evolved to be a place where people have something that’s shared, a shared interest, value, or goal. Those people gravitate together especially in the online space, and I think we lost community a lot during Covid, that face-to-face community, and for a long while, we were all quite comfortable living in our little online world and not meeting people face-to-face because we got a little bit too used to our isolation. Whereas I think people now crave more face-to-face interactions. People want to have meetings over coffee in person, people want to go to networking events now, so it is evolving back into the real world. But I think overall, the broad definition of community is people with a shared interest in something that want to help each other. I think that does get muddied a lot, because the word community is bandied around a lot on LinkedIn, and I think there’s quite a strong difference between what a community is and what a membership is. A membership will generally be a place where, say, a founder, will have a free membership, and in that membership you can also buy their services. There are upsells that you can pay for, and the relationship very much is the founder and the members individually e.g. me as the founder and each individual member. A community, for me, is about fostering the relationships between each other, and I’m just like a conductor at the front of the orchestra. It’s not about me, I’m there to make sure everybody else is working harmoniously together, so I think that’s quite different but people will use the word community when actually they mean a membership.

Phil Bray 

Right, okay. The majority of people on here are financial advisers, financial planners, and mortgage brokers, and also some representative of organisations that supply services to advisers, planners, and mortgage brokers. And they will, I think, in a large part – but if I’m wrong, put something in the chat please, everybody. But I think their aim here is to build community, rather than membership. If I’m wrong, then stick something in the chat. The common thread here is, if we just look at advisers and planners, the common thread is that they’ve all got clients. They’re at the center, and then they’ve got clients around them, but those clients don’t necessarily know each other. There might be some connections where client A has referred to client B, but the majority of clients of a financial advice or planning practice don’t necessarily know each other. So, what are the practical things that the advisers, planners, and mortgage brokers on the call can do take those one-to-one relationships between the adviser and the client and turn those clients into a community of clients? What are the key things that they could be doing?

Lea Turner 

I’ll mention the things that work best for us. We run our community on an app called Heartbeat. If anybody is looking for a great app to run a community on, I highly recommend it, and have a referral code if anyone wants it. It’s sensational. It has chat rooms and chat threads. You can have either a chat room or a chat thread. One of the things that we do is weekly, we have questions schedule. Some of them are serious and some of them are a bit playful, and we will have those questions go out every Monday. Last week it was, “Have you ever had a paranormal experience?” And so you’ve got people answering this thread, and they’re finding different comments that other people have left, and they’ve written, “Oh my god, I went through that too. I had that too.” And suddenly, two strangers are finding a shared experience. We’ve had, I think last week, “If you had a wild animal as a pet, what would you have?”, and we’ve just gone through, my weird brain has gone through and created lots of questions. Some of them are more like, “What was your first business?” Some of them are, “Why did you start your business?” So, we’ve got a mixture of questions, and people find commonalities, and they’re just answering a simple question. We’re asking them about their selves, and we all love to talk about ourselves, it’s our number one subject that we know the best. So, it’s easy talking points that are created for people to find little commonalities and feel a connection. We have things like that that help people to loosen up and get to know one another, and then we also have community pools and I do annual parties. Big Christmas parties, where it’s not about swapping business cards, we call it networking so that they can write it off with the tax man, but it’s, it’s very much a party. They’ve all got a glass of champagne in their hands, they’re all wearing sparkles, and they go there to get to know people on a friendship basis. I think when you start with fun and friendship and not being too serious, it makes people relax, and when people relax and have fun, they find connection a lot easier because they don’t feel like they’re putting on a mask and they’re there to impress people. I think it’s also really important to make sure that the place feels safe and we do that by enforcing our rules with an iron fist. This is why I have my “No knobs” policy, because anyone who thinks, “Oh, you know what, I might be a bit of an arse” they are not attracted to The HoLT, they think, “Yeah, she’s not going to like me. I’m quite a brash person. I’m rude. I’ve been told that I’m offensive. This isn’t going to be the right place for me.” The people with open hearts and kindness are attracted to it and they’re comfortable being vulnerable, because they know without question that I will kick somebody out if they violate our rules or make someone feel uncomfortable. I think that needs to be conveyed in your marketing. I do it in mine, if I kick somebody out, while I won’t say who it was, I will talk openly about the reason and I will post in the community saying “A person has been removed. This is why they’ve been removed. Protecting you is more important to me than making money from that person.” Because one really unpleasant person in a community who dominates conversations, takes over things, is rude to people, is inconsiderate, can ruin a whole community. It’s always putting people’s experience in front of how much money you’re making, that’s what makes people feel safe. The feedback we often get when we ask people is how safe and inclusive it feels. It’s about not making people feel stupid for asking a question that might feel quite basic, always being responsive, and I think the key thing for keeping a community engaged is whoever starts that community needs to be in it. It’s not just a little side-hustle that you spend 10 minutes per day engaging with. If people see you leading from the front and getting involved because you’re the reason why they’ve joined, they are much more likely to want to involve themselves as well.

Phil Bray 

So that’s really good point. It sounds as though to people on this call the advisers, planners and people who supply those services should only do this if they’re prepared to be present in the community for the long-term.

Lea Turner 

Yeah. Alexa off. Sorry, Alexa is shouting reminders at me. There are a lot of people who start a community, get all excited about it and put loads of effort into it, but they don’t check that there’s actual interest in the community. They just think, “Oh, I’m going to start a community. I’ve got 250 followers on LinkedIn, 250 people will join me.” It’s not going to work like that. Especially when trying to get people to actually pay money, you have to be creating something that gives them value because they’re paying a monthly subscription hopefully, to be part of this. People’s expectations of a free community can be a lot less, but you’d be surprised how much people often expect from a community, even when it’s low priced. So, you need to really think about how committed you are and what it’s going to take for you to give that commitment. I always say to people when I’m consulting about communities, “You need to think about how much you want to charge, how much they’re going to get for that, how much time you have available, and then work out what your minimum number of members is to make this a financial incentive.” For me, when I had 100 people sign up immediately, that was £5000 per month in my bank. That was enough to motivate me to spend a couple of hours a day working on the community alongside my LinkedIn training. The more members we got, the more financially motivated I was, the more I expanded my team, and eventually gave up LinkedIn training to do this full time. So, you need to figure that out. If you’re going to charge, £20 per month for it, and you’re only getting 40 members, that’s not going to be enough to motivate you, you’ll lose your enthusiasm, and it’s hard to get people into memberships, don’t underestimate that. The churn rate on members is high. We’ve got a very low churn rate for communities comparatively but we will still lose up to 50 members in a month. We’ll get more, but we can have months where we will lose up to 50, the usual month is no more than 10, which is low. So, if you only have 50 – 60 people in your community, that’s going to feel like a big hit. Communities are the first things people stop paying for when things get tight, because it’s a luxury rather than a necessity, or that’s how they see it. So, you’ve really got to work out how many people you’re going to need to make it financially viable, what you need to include in that community to make it worth people paying that and spending more time on their phones, because we spend a lot of time with a device in our hands or in front of us. You need to give them a good reason to spend more time on a device, more time talking to people, because most of us want to put those things down in the evening and switch off. So you’ve really got to have a good plan mapped out. And don’t think just because you’ve got the plan mapped out that your community will stay looking the way it does when you start. You have to evolve with what people want, and that’s why you need to be in the community so much. You need to pay attention to what people want, how people are using it, why they are leaving, and why they are signing up. Having those conversations with people, seeing what people are saying about it online, finding out what they’re saying about it behind your back, because that will all help to shape what you evolve into. Because your first iteration will not be the final iteration. You’ve got to be flexible.

Phil Bray 

Yeah, I can see that. It would be useful for anybody attending the webinar to pop in the chat what your plans are with community. If you are thinking that this webinar today is going to be the launch point for a community, where you’ve learned and can then can go off and build one, what are you planning on doing? Are you building a community for existing clients, where you won’t charge a membership fee, and it’s an added benefit of being a client of Henwood Court? For example, I can see Nick’s here. So is it an idea to build a community where it’s an added value, or is it a membership that you want to charge for? Jacob mentioned earlier in the chat, that it’s a membership that he wants to charge for. So what are you doing here? Is it a free community for your clients, something to add value, or is it a paid-for membership? Stick something in the chat. Lea, I want to go back to something you said earlier, what’s the name of the platform? Was it Heartbeat?

Lea Turner 

Heartbeat, yeah.

Phil Bray 

Heartbeat. So, if you could send that code to Abi, and we can stick it in the follow-up.

Lea Turner 

It’s about $500 a year, and then you can pay, I think an extra $12 a month for the additional support package from Heartbeat themselves. It’s a great platform because they listen to their users, they take the feedback and evolve the platform based on the people who are using it and what they need, which I really, really love.

Phil Bray 

And why did you choose to build there, rather than, say, Facebook, which people use on a regular basis, or, Skool or something like that? Why did you choose that particular platform?

Lea Turner 

We chose it, and one of the things that our members really love about it is because it’s not on a social media platform, so it’s away from everything else. It doesn’t matter what social media platform they prefer to use. LinkedIn groups, just forget about them, they’re utterly rubbish. Facebook groups, I don’t spend much time on Facebook. I try to avoid spending time on Facebook, and I feel like I’m doing something beneficial, because I don’t get that sense of, “I’m probably wasting time. I probably shouldn’t be on social media, and I don’t really want to be scrolling it in the evening.” If I log on to the app, I’m thinking, “I’m helping people here. I’m having conversations with my members, I’m getting to know people in this private space” and I’m not distracted by notifications from other places all the time, I’m being intentional with my use of the app. It also is so much better than Facebook when it comes to keeping in contact with your members, because it allows you to tag members into groups. For example, we’ve got a load of people that have joined that are virtual assistants, so they’re all tagged as they come into the community as virtual assistants. Then, if an opportunity for a virtual assistant comes in or a question that’s specific, we can tag the whole group. We can also arrange automated workflows that go out to people via email, DM, and pop-ups that come up. We can celebrate an anniversary, we can advertise a new feature via pop-ups, which we can automate and schedule regularly. We can check in on members if they haven’t logged in for a week, we can send an automated email that says, “Hey, we haven’t seen you for a week, is everything okay? Is there anything we can help with?” Platforms like Circle and Heartbeat allow that, and they’re very user friendly. We can store all of the videos there because we host master classes from experts four times a month, and we also allow members to host their own master classes, to share their expertise with the group. We record all of those and keep them in a library that is searchable. If you decide you want to learn about lead generation, you can pop it in the search bar and it will show the different options that we’ve got on lead generation. It’s so much easier to have it separately and super organised with all the automation options that something like Heartbeat offers. And you can make it look how you want. You can change all the colors, headings, and the graphics that are available. So, yeah, it’s really good. If you want to see behind the scenes, let me know, because I’ll show you. I can screen share and show you what it looks like behind the scenes if you’re interested in that.

Phil Bray 

Yeah, if anybody wants to see that, then put something in the chat or the Q&A, and we’ll certainly do that. Do you find there’s any friction by the fact that somebody’s got to download another app compared to the fact they’ve already got Facebook on their phone, or is that just not a problem?

Lea Turner 

It’s not something we’ve ever heard. We had one lady who left and said she didn’t really understand the app and she would have preferred it as a Facebook group. That’s one person out of well over 1000 members we’ve had through the gates now. So, and she was, I’m not trying to sound ageist but she was probably in her early 60s. We have people in their 60s in our community that have zero issues with using Heartbeat, but I think it might have been more of a generational thing and the resistance to change. But there’s no way I’d be hosting on Facebook, because I try and spend as little time as possible on there.

Phil Bray 

Thank you. That makes that makes perfect sense. We’ve talked a lot about the platform and The HoLT, so, now seems to be the perfect time to spend a couple of minutes, I’m going to share the screen again, to talk about The HoLT. Do you want to just talk about what it is, Lea? What you offer etc.?

Lea Turner 

It’s funny, I was at a community conference a couple of weeks ago called The Big Festoon in Bolton, and a lady who was interested in the membership came up to me, and talked to me a little bit about it, and I told her about it, and then she went away and joined. She came in and said, “What the hell. You did not tell me all of this was in here. This is so much more. You completely undersold it.” So, I’m not very good at talking about it because I guess, I’m so used to it. When you come into The HoLT, you will get a welcome video that explains to you exactly how everything works, where everything is, and says message me if you’ve got any problems with it. Every week, we have an expert masterclass. It can be on anything from lead generation to a social media platform, to copywriting, to setting up your automations, to getting the best out of Calendly, there are over 150 recordings that are accessible immediately when you join. We also have a wellness circle every month with a wellness expert to help prioritise you. We have a LinkedIn clinic that I host doing a Q&A of everything, we have a tech expert who goes live every third Monday of the month and will fix your tech problems; any tech problem, so you don’t have to pay an external provider to do it, she’ll do it live for you. We have sales clinics to help you improve your sales calls and conversion rates. We have content and video clinics to help you improve your content creation. We get together every Friday for a community call, and we vary the times to support different time zones and when I say the chat is busy, it’s really busy. There are people in the advice and questions chat. They’ll ask a question, and they’ll get an immediate recommendation, help from another member, or a recommendation of who they need to speak to. You know you’re getting a trusted source, because these are people with shared values who wouldn’t risk their reputation to recommend someone that isn’t truly great. It’s basically just a shortcut. We get to know each other, we have so much fun in there, and I know everyone’s going to think I’m just saying that, but it genuinely is incredibly fun, and incredibly supportive. Every answer to any business question you could possibly need, and so much more. So, if anybody does want to join who’s on this call, drop me a DM, and you can skip the waiting list. We’ve got a waiting list of over 1000 people, and we sell out in under 10 minutes every month. So if you’re interested, even if you just want to come in and look around and understand it for your own benefit, for when you start a community platform, you’re more than welcome to join. Drop me a message, but do check out the website as well, because it’s great.

Phil Bray

Thank you, Lea, that’s perfect. Dan, let’s do some questions that are coming through, if that’s okay? Come back to me when you done Dan, and we’ll talk about the role of the founder in the community and how often you need to show up.

Dan Campbell 

Sure thing, and it’s an overwhelming yes. People would love to see the platform behind the scenes. So, if you could share your screen at some point, Lea, I think a lot of people would love to see what it looks like.

Lea Turner 

I can do that now if you’d like?

Dan Campbell 

I’ll tell you what, let me ask a couple of questions and get a couple of answers first, and then we’ll get into the screen share part because we’ve got a few questions in. Russell says, “Lea, so many questions! Is your community specifically designed to support business owners? And what are the other shared values you encourage as part of being the whole community?”

Lea Turner 

It’s targeted at small business owners, however, we do have employees join too. A lot of them who are in there work from home, and they just want the company of the community calls, the co-working times, and they’re there for the company and community element more than the master classes. We’ve got a lot of people who have side hustles who are learning all of the things so that they can go into full-time business with everything already set up. They’ll already know how to make sales, they’ll have their website, and they’re learning everything so they’re ready. So we’ve got quite a lot of those, but it is specifically targeted at kind of lonely solopreneurs who want to learn and want the company and the hive mind of all of these business owners. We welcome basically anyone who feels that they can benefit from it and is coming in with good intentions. The shared values are honesty, integrity, trust, humor and fun. I think that’s a really key one for so many of us. We don’t just want to be taking business so seriously all the time and we want to help each other. That spirit of “a rising tide lifts all ships” underpins everything that we do in The HoLT. That shared support is key, if you’ve got a problem, inevitably, somebody is going to hop on and say, “Hey, yeah, I can help with that. Do you want to jump on a call and we can talk it through?” We’ve got people that charge thousands of pounds for their time, and they offer a quick 15 minute call with someone to help. So, those are the real key values as well as belonging and inclusivity. We have zero-tolerance for anything that is considered racist, homophobic, transphobic, ageist, sexist, etc. it does not happen in there, and if it ever did, they’d be removed immediately.

Dan Campbell 

Wonderful. Thank you. It sounds like a very wholesome place to be. I can see why you avoid a lot of social media for it and go separately.

Lea Turner 

Wouldn’t think it by the look of me would you?

Dan Campbell 

A question here from Scott, “Lea, what is the minimum number of people you think a community needs to be effective? Also, if you set up a community as part of your day job, what’s the maximum number of people that you could handle before it becomes too big of a task to manage?”

Lea Turner 

There are so many variables in that, because a community could just be five or ten people. It needs to be based on what the goal of the community is, because you’ll have people that run an eight-week training program, and then that group of people continue to be their little community. A community can really be any size. I think if it’s to be effective, you’re going to need at least 10 to 15 people; otherwise, you’re not going to have people present to have conversations at the same times, and it’s going to be a bit sparse; it needs to feel like a group. In terms of having a community as part of your day job, the maximum number of people is going to be really varied. I’ve got members who message me every single day, and I’ve got members who don’t message me for six months. I’ve got some members who have signed up and are paying but they only ever watch the master classes and never come in the community, some that only come in the community and don’t watch master classes. So, I think that’s going to really depend on the type of support that you’re offering and the the people who sign up for that. I find it tends to be the people with more money who want less hand holding because they’re busy and they’re not scrapping around for clients, whereas you’ve got people who to them, my membership cost would feel like more of an investment per month, and they tend to want more input from me. That’s fine, because we’re there as a community to help them get to the point where they don’t need as much input. So, it balances out, but it really depends on their demands and the nature of the people who are joining. So, I’m sorry I can’t be more specific on that.

Dan Campbell 

No, that’s great. Should we have one more question before you start showing us behind the scenes of the platform? Let’s have a question –

Lea Turner 

It helps as well Scott, sorry Dan, if it helps, once I got to 150 members, I brought in a community manager. That was my tipping point. Again, it is very dependent, but for me, that was my tipping point, and now I have two community managers.

Dan Campbell 

Brilliant. Well, a community manager might be the answer to this question, but let’s see. Here we go. Rachel asks, “How do you keep up with the community and adding value while keeping sane? That’s my fear in starting one.”

Lea Turner 

I’m not sure I would count myself as sane, to be honest. I think having some good boundaries. I turn the notifications off on my app when I’m not working. We do have WhatsApp groups for local people to be able to communicate with each other. The phone it’s on hasn’t got any data on it, it can only work when I’m at home, so I don’t take it out with me and I don’t look at it when I’m not working; it stays in my office. So, I have created some boundaries like that, also having a community manager really helps because we’ve got a separate email address for the community. The community managers manage that, they will deal with it. I’ve also got a tech team now, so any tech problems are sorted, that’s something that people really underestimate, and I say this with all the love because I am just as bad, but the amount of people who say, “I can’t log in”, “That’s because that’s not the email address that you use to log in, you’re signed up with a different email address.” “Why am I getting all the emails twice?, Why am I still getting the waiting list emails?” “Because you signed up to the waiting list with this email address, but you signed into the community with another and our robots don’t know it’s the same person.” So, you can’t underestimate the amount of tech glitches that happen that are sometimes your fault, but also very often user error. That’s the bit that probably used to drive me insane, trying to deal with all of those things, because I was so busy running my other business, I didn’t have time for all of those things. And it’s often such a simple fix and that used to irk me so I bought tech support. You can get those people on retainer, it doesn’t have to cost a lot. If you need recommendations like my team, they work with loads of communities now, since working with me, and they manage all the back end stuff so I don’t have to deal with payments that have failed and all of that. That’s also why automation is so great, because if someone’s payment fails, you can have automated emails that go out showing them how to fix it themselves before a human has to get involved and sometimes they still do, but it minimises it. So it’s beneficial to have conversations with people who’ve done it, like me, who can tell you all of these things that you could get set up in case it happens, to minimise the overwhelm on yourself. Once you get into the hundreds of members, you’re going to need some kind of support because trying to do that alongside a business, a home life, trying to have some semblance of a social life, and hopefully get some sleep, sanity is not going to be held onto for too long.

Dan Campbell 

That’s fantastic, thank you. Steve, Samantha, and Waseem all mentioned that they’d love to see your platform with a screen share. So, if you could spend a few minutes just giving us a glimpse behind the scenes, that’d be fantastic.

Lea Turner 

Absolutely. Sharing is not turned on, can you change that?

Phil Bray 

Okay? There we go. You should be able to share now. Like Dan says, If we spend a few minutes doing this, then I’ll wrap up with a few other questions, and I’d like to get to Russell’s question as well, Dan.

Lea Turner 

This is the behind the scenes of Heartbeat. We’ve changed the colours to our own branding, but you can see the member list is down there, you get notifications of what’s going on in the corner. You get alerts of what’s coming up, we put all these events in the calendar so you can see all of the upcoming stuff; we’ve got all of these, and then you RSVP, and it just puts it right into your calendar. So we’ve got master classes coming up. When you go into the library, you’ve got all of these different master classes, and there’s a lot of them. Then you’ve got the resource centre as well, which allows you to upload documents. So, we’ve got libraries of content ideas, masses of discounts, and then we’ve got links down here to recommend people to join the community. We call it back door Barr, he’s our fictional security guard. Merchandise and a discount thing, which has got hundreds of discounts for software and products. We’ve also got things like tips on how to use it, and then chat channels where there’s so much going on. This is always the one that’s the most busy. Someone asks a question, and you’ve got a whole bunch of members supporting each other and helping each other with responses to their questions. My personal favourite is the pets channel, because that makes me happy. We’ve got rants, wins, gratitude, a mental health support for if someone’s having a tough day. Then you’ve got the back end, which is probably the most interesting bit, it’s where you can create all these automated workflows, and you’ve got the analytics on people’s behaviour. You can set up all of these automations that run when anything happens in the community, like pop ups to say, “Thank you for being such a valued member” when they’ve been really active and left lots of comments, etc. So it’s really, really brilliant. I can’t explain how easy it’s made it because we originally started with hosting the master classes on Kajabi, and then we had the chat on Slack before, and when it got to about 150 members, that was when my sanity was very much slipping, because slack was pure chaos with that many people. Having the chat channels and the threads now has made it a lot more manageable to come back to things. So, that’s a little glimpse behind the scenes of how it works. Abi, I’ll send you that referral code if anybody does want to join, and you can get a free seven-day trial with Heartbeat ,so you can try it out before committing.

Phil Bray 

Thanks. Lea, that’s fabulous. I think the biggest community that’s probably most well known in the financial services space, is something called Live talk, and it sits on a couple of platforms, Facebook, and another one that I think sits on Skool. It’s run by a guy called Phil Calver, and he’s been doing it for donkeys years. Phil’s a great guy and a lot of people here will know him and he spends time in the community. Everyone’s got day jobs, wants a social life, would like some sleep like you suggested, and probably want to see their kids from time-to-time as well, so, how much time do people who are thinking of starting a community need to commit to it, to maintain its momentum, especially in the early days?

Lea Turner 

It’s difficult because I think it depends how many members you’ve got, and it also depends how much you’re charging for it. If you’re doing a £5 per month membership, it’s fairly low touch and you don’t need to be there all the time, and people aren’t going to be expecting that from you. I personally spend over an hour a day in the community, and I have done since the start, I’ve typed very quickly and I use voice to type, which makes things a lot quicker as well. But I think it is going to depend on how many members that you’ve got. If you’ve go your first 100 members, and they see you in the community, they feel like they’re getting more value for money, and it keeps them coming back. I know people who started a community, loaded it with resources, and then let people get on with it and they’d show up once a week on a call. They got really popular at first, and then everybody just started leaving because they’d think, “Well, I joined so that I would have chance to speak to this person and get advice and feedback from them but I’m not getting that, so I don’t feel like I’m getting value for money.” So, it depends on what you’re selling. If the weekly calls where it’s a Q&A and advice is the main thing, then they’re not going to expect you to be in there every single day for an hour, but they get that call with you and you answer all the questions in that one hour, and they can watch back the recording. So I think it really depends, but I think you need to want to spend time in there so that when you’ve got the opportunity, that’s something that you choose to do. Because for me, when I’ve got a spare 10 minutes, I don’t go scroll Instagram, I’ll go and scroll the community to see if there is anything else I can answer, or that I can help people with. So, I think making it a place that you want to spend time is the key, because then it doesn’t feel like more work. It feels like you’re doing something that’s fun, that’s also them, building your future.

Phil Bray 

If you don’t enjoy it, you’re going to be less likely to do it, aren’t you? Talking of enjoyment, we can’t do a conversation about financial services marketing without compliance. You’ve obviously got your no dickhead policy, as you talk about on your website, and that’s one form of compliance, I guess, but clearly, in the regulated world there are other compliance considerations. Do you have any tips for advisers and planners on monitoring what goes in the group in a regulated sector? Is there anything that you can add in there?

Lea Turner 

Something that you can have in Heartbeat, I don’t know about other communities, is when people join, you can have a pop-up with your rules of play. Having the expected behaviours and things that will not be tolerated or that might get them in trouble listed, for example, “You’re not allowed to give specific financial advice and recommendations on social media as a financial adviser, but you can give a general overview of this would be something sensible that you could do. I’m not saying you should, but could.” So it’s specifying what can and cannot be discussed in the community. That is quite important to set those expectations from the get go, giving them an opportunity if they want specific financial advice, pointing them to where they can get that, or where they can book so that you can give them personalised advice. Give them a booking link so that they can pay extra or book some time where that’s possible. Setting expectations with people and also politely but confidently reasserting those rules. We have a rule in The HoLT where people are not allowed to share their social media posts and ask for people to engage with them, because that’s engagement-pod activity that I don’t approve of, and it would turn the community into absolute carnage if 500 people were saying, “Please comment on my post” every day. We don’t allow that, and on the occasions that people have done it, I’ve deleted the post and just sent them a very polite but firm message saying, “Please don’t do this. This is actually against the rules. We’ve just removed the post, but please understand that we can’t do this, because then everyone will expect it and it will cause chaos in the community.” And they’re always really nice about it, and it doesn’t upset anybody. So have the confidence to politely reinforce it when you need to. Set people’s expectations and make sure that it’s covered in your marketing as well. It should be on your website, what is and isn’t going to be okay to talk and where those boundaries are going to be.

Phil Bray 

Over the time you’ve run HoLT, if you were talking to the Lea that set HoLT up, what are the mistakes that you would tell her to avoid? What would you do differently?

Lea Turner 

I would choose the right platform from the get go. It sounds like I’m doing a massive Heartbeat ad now, but the worst part was moving people from Kajabi and Slack over to Heartbeat, because at that point we had 350 members, and they all had payments that needed switching over. We couldn’t do it for them, they needed to do it themselves, so it was a one-to-one conversation with 350 people to get them to change their payments over to the new platform. It was long, and we had to close the community for a month or so while we did it and it was very difficult. The other thing that I think I would have done from the start is, we launched with a waiting list model, and then we opened the waiting list again for the second intake, but then we had the community open after that and just allowed people to come in whenever they wanted. We noticed way more churn at that point than the way we do it now with the waiting list model and the monthly launch. People would just constantly trickle in and out. They’d join for a month, leave for a month, come back for a month, which causes no end of admin for us. So, we switched it up to have a waiting list model where we do monthly launches, we can get people excited, we can talk about what’s coming, 25 people come in, the team know we need to make the welcome graphics, I need to book the new members call and invite people to it, and we do all of that within a couple of days. So for the admin side of it, it’s great, but it also means members know when to expect a little influx of people and it’s not just constant like, (10 people joined today, 3 people join tomorrow, another 10 people left) because it just it becomes a little bit unmanageable. So those would be the two things. I would have stayed entirely on a waiting list model, and I would have chosen the right platform from the get go, because that was messy.

Phil Bray 

Sounds painful. For your waiting list point, Dan, let’s do Russell’s question. Russell has put a couple of questions in, let’s do the first one first, if that makes sense, because that links to Lea’s point about the waiting list.

Dan Campbell 

Yeah, of course. So Russell is curious to know “To achieve the 100 paid community members, how many did you have on a waiting list? I’d love to understand a bit more about the ratios of people who are interested versus people who are actually prepared to pay.”

Lea Turner 

When we launched, I think we had approximately 550 people on the waiting list, and we sold it to the 100 people. However, I have a huge brand online, which I have been building trust with for five and a half years. So that’s far more than you would usually find. The average is about a 10% conversion. So, if you work on that 500 it would be about 50 people, if you’re lucky. But that doesn’t mean you’ve got a waiting list and 50 people will convert. You need to nurture that waiting list, you need to get them excited, you need to have a proper launch that explains exactly how they can sign up, what the time slot is etc. I have a professional email marketer now who’s taught me a proper launch process. You need to keep in touch with them because otherwise they’ll sign up to the waiting list and forget what it’s about. So you need to be keeping in touch with them, between the waiting list arrival and them seeing the launch. They need to be constantly kept up to date. Things like “We’re working on this”, “We’re looking at a launch date of this”, “I’m really excited about this thing that we’re going to be doing”, “When we do the launch, this is how it’s going to be working. These are the options that you’re going to have” so that they’re ready with their credit card in their hands and they know exactly what they’re getting and what they’re signing up for and how to do it. And I think that’s the process that I’ve seen lots of people do very wrong. They think, “They’ll join the waiting list, I’ll send them an email two weeks before, then I’ll send them an email the week before, and then I’ll send them an email to say we’re launching and then they wonder, why only 16 people signed up out of 600 people on a waiting list.” Leading up to a launch, for the for the 10 days before or so, you want to be emailing them every day, which feels like a lot, but people who are really interested will open them. Don’t have too long between when they join your waiting list and when you actually launch, six months maximum, I would say.

Phil Bray 

Lots of really good tips there for Russell. Dan, let’s do Russell’s last question, then Scott’s, and that’ll probably take us to the point where Abi talks about our webinar next month.

Dan Campbell 

Yeah, sure thing. So Russell says “One last question for me. Live events, how many do you run? How regularly? And how do you charge?”

Lea Turner

With the Christmas party, I get a sponsor. We had two sponsors last year, and they get to speak at the event. We do not charge members for that. We charge people outside the community, if we’ve got any tickets left, we sell those. And also, if people want to bring their partners along, but it’s included as part of their membership price, and covered by sponsors, predominantly. With the in-person, co-working stuff. We do co-working days. We do one every month in Manchester. I’m going down to London for one on Friday. Some of them are regular, some of them a bit more sporadic, because we liaise with people about when they’re going to be available and if I can come along, we don’t charge for those either. We’ve got arrangements set up with places across the country where people can come and use their co-working space for free. Sometimes in restaurants, because they get food and drink payments from us, and when they’re quiet during the day it’s good for them. So we’ve got those all organised and we don’t charge for any of the in-person stuff, unless we’re going to do a fun event. We did a Pong and Puck recently, and karaoke, and we just charged through a stripe link to cover the cost of the tickets, rather than to make any profit. That’s how I do it. If I was doing it as a paid event, I’d be doing it through either a Calendly thing or event site, TicketWeb, or something like that and they arrange all the payments and everything, you just have an event page. That would be how I would do it if I was charging for them.

Phil Bray 

And Pong and Puck is?

Lea Turner 

Oh, it’s like a shuffleboard and ping pong night. A group of us went and had pizza and played ping pong together. We do fun things like that. If you’re in London, BAM Karaoke Box do a drag queen karaoke on a Thursday, and 20 of us went and did karaoke. I’m not even a karaoke person, and I don’t drink, but I was getting well in with my Bonnie Tyler anyway.

Dan Campbell 

Brilliant. Let’s have a question from Scott. This is on the back of you talking about throwing people out of the community, if you have to. You mentioned back door Barry, the security guard that will do the same. So Scott says, “Talking of rules, do you have a rule to control or stop people from using AI transcription tools and their own recordings, which could then see content popping up elsewhere, outside of the community.”

Lea Turner 

We don’t allow them and we just remove them. If someone brings a transcription tool into the community, we just remove it. Into the calls, we just remove it and whoever’s leading the call knows to do that. People can’t use the record function. They can’t have the recordings unless they screen recorded their own computer. They can’t download the recording. So we have them all stored in the Google Drive, and then we embed them within the community, but there’s a setting on Google Drive to stop people being able to download or save them themselves. So we have that turned on.

Dan Campbell

I suspect vetting people with shared values minimises that much of the time, doesn’t it?

Lea Turner 

Yes. I don’t think anyone would be likely to do that. We had one person that came in and tried to basically get as much as they could in a month of membership, and then kicked up a huge fuss and demanded a refund, saying it he hadn’t used it and he didn’t want to use it. I said “Well, I can see the back end, and I can see that you’ve watched all these master classes. I can see that you’ve asked for help, and people have offered calls, so I’ll give you one week back, but I’m not giving you a full refund. Our T&Cs were very firm. He was just being a bit of a rude bully and I was glad that he’d left, obviously, but he was the only person in recent times that slipped through the net and was obviously in there deliberately to try and get as much for free and then demand a refund. I think there’s always going to be the odd one that the vast majority of people really are good and they’re not going to be able to use that content to make money, because it’s your IP. I have ownership of everything created within the community. It’s owned by me, it doesn’t matter who created it, I own it. So, I don’t think that that’s very likely to happen.

Phil Bray 

Good. If anybody’s got any final questions for Lea, put them in the chat or the Q&A. Meanwhile, Abi, could you talk about our webinar next month please, if that’s okay? Everyone should be able to see the screen there and the QR code.

Abi Robinson 

I can. Thank you. Now that everybody’s aware of Lea, aware of the HoLT, what you’re going to do? You’re going to go on Google her, and then you’re going to go and have a look at her website. If you are a small business owner who isn’t a knob, and have all of the values that Lea is looking for, then the website will appeal to you and then you might get in touch, because it will impress. Can you say the same about your website? We’ve been asking that question a lot, we’ve been doing a lot of digging, and it turns out, there are quite a lot of websites that could be a lot more effective in terms of attracting your ideal clients. So, the very brave Ian, Alifa, and Paul at three financial planning firms that you will be familiar with – if you scan the QR code, you’ll see the businesses, have bravely agreed to let us review their websites live on air next month. We’ll be having a look at what they’re doing really well, what they could do to improve, how to spot what’s working and what’s not on your own website, and you’ll come away with loads of practical ideas of how you can improve your site. So, scan the QR code on there. I did check it this morning so, hopefully it works and let me know if not. The link will be in the follow-up email anyway. But have a look and register. It’s on the 21st of May at 10am Paul,Alifa, and Ian will be on the call with us we hope, and we’re really looking forward to it. It’s a first, so we’ll see how it goes but it should be a good one.

Phil Bray 

Thank you, Abi. Right Dan, over to you. Are there any final questions for Lea to wrap up?

Dan Campbell 

Just one comment from Jacob, who says, “I don’t think I’m a knob, but I guess it depends on who you ask.” I’m sure you’re not a knob, Jacob. So, that’s it, thank you for everyone that added questions and comments, it’s been a really engaged session.

Phil Bray 

Lea, thanks for doing this for us, thanks for spending the hour with us. We’ve had some fantastic feedback in the chat. It’s the first Bonnie Tyler mention we’ve ever had on a Yardstick webinar, so that’s a big box tick. Abi will be sending out a recording later on today, there will be some additional links in there, we’ll put the discount code to Heartbeat in there as well. Lea, just a massive thanks for being here today and sharing your knowledge over the last hour. Dan, myself, Abi, and everybody on the call really appreciate it.

Lea Turner 

It’s been really great, thank you so much everyone. If anyone’s got any other questions, please do feel free to DM me on LinkedIn. We don’t need to be connected, you should be able to just send me a DM. So I’m happy to have a chat about it.

Lea Turner 

You’re welcome, have a lovely day, everyone.

Phil Bray 

Thanks, everybody. Bye bye.

Dan Campbell 

Bye guys.