If you’re gonna have success as a business owner, you need to have some type of community.
Now I’m gonna talk about two different types of community in this article.
But you need some type of community because otherwise it can just get really hard and be really lonely. Not to mention if you were from home and you had one of those private offices. Kinda like what I do.
So today we’re talking about community and why you should build a community. But I’m gonna talk about this in the space of like, “I need a community right now”
My disclaimer is I always talk to you all about things that I’m in a process of doing or have done.
And so this is kind of where we are today.
Again, we’re talking about this from two different angles.
One angle is from needing community for you as it pertains to entrepreneurs, business owners, and all that type of stuff.
But the second type of community that we’re talking about is people that love what it is you do and not only do you help them, but they also help each other.
Four years ago I moved from Houston, Texas to Redding, California.
Now, prior to moving to Houston, I lived in Richmond, Virginia for eight years.
And then prior to moving to Richmond, I lived in Kentucky.
So most of the people that I’ve always known have been in Kentucky.
And then when I was building my business in Virginia, I was there for eight years, got married, divorced, and all the things, but you just wanna leave the past.
When you move, it’s just not just your city, but like a state, you lose a lot of friends.
You lose a lot of community.
And I don’t think that it’s always because people don’t care about you. It’s kind of like the out of sight out of mind type of thing.
Where now you’re over here and their life is still going on where it was before.
And so you lose people and you lose touch with people when you move.
Unfortunately, I’ve moved a few times. I love just being in new environments or whatever.
I like staying put, but sometimes when God asks me to go somewhere, I just go.
And so I’ve moved a bunch of times actually. And that means I have lost community.
I’ve lost my friends.
And so then when you move again, now you’re restarting.
And so for me, when I moved to California, that was the biggest move.
Moving from Texas all the way to California.
And I didn’t know anybody here. But I did because God asked me to.
And so then I started living in Redding, California for a while.
And then of course COVID hit.
And so when COVID hit, a lot of us lost all types of community because we were now all just kind of locked into our little small environments.
We weren’t really traveling as much.
And two years later I moved down here to San Diego, which I absolutely love.
When I was moving to San Diego, I said to myself, “I wanna make sure that I move into an apartment complex where there’s a lot of people”
That is where I can meet people and build community, which I did.
And I started connecting with people or trying to at least.
But one of the things about running a business and running a virtual business is you work by yourself.
I am a content creator, so I need to be in a space by myself, somebody who’s not on the phone, not texting, not talking, because I create content and do all the things in my space.
And so that limits me with the amount of people that I’m exposed to all the time.
And then when I moved to San Diego, there weren’t a lot of networking events or events going on in general.
So I’m definitely not able to meet more people at all.
So it has been a journey. It has been a very lonely journey especially the last two years because of COVID and then I’m just doing all the things.
I think it was less than a year ago when somebody had talked to me about this organization called Entrepreneurs Organization.
It also has something called EOA and they accelerated a group for people.
Because EO is basically where you have to make a million dollars a year or you can be an EOA where you’re almost at a million dollars or what have you.
And so I met somebody at a pool party that introduced me to EO.
And I have slowly started to kind of develop relationships and connect with people, but it’s a process and it can be very lonely.
It was just yesterday, when my mentor from EOA connected me to a guy who owns a digital marketing agency.
And it’s like a $50 million agency and he has TikTok as part of his agency.
Now, that is the first time in the last years that God has had me on TikTok that I’ve ever been able to talk to somebody who understands what I’m doing.
Who understands why I’m doing or who understands where things are going.
First time ever.
And I was just like, “oh my God”
I did not know that I needed that.
That I needed to have a conversation like that. But I did.
It’s not just reassuring, but it’s also like you’re just able to just have conversations with a person who just gets it.
And when I think about having community as it pertains to my own needs, It’s really important to have people around you who understand what you’re doing.
So I pay for a Mastermind. It’s like $20,000.
A lot of money, I know.
And a lot of them are on that journey of doing the same things that I’m doing.
Like building their businesses and all that.
It’s nice to have people around me who are doing it, who have the same type of struggles.
They’re doing something different, but it’s the same digital marketing.
It’s very reassuring to be around people like that.
I’m not against my friends that have jobs.
It’s like, “hey, it’s cool. It’s no big deal”
But when you run a business, you’re able to have different conversations.
So the other day, I was talking to my best friend about how much money we spend out every single month, and she was in shock.
And I said, “Well, just because we spend that much money doesn’t mean I’m making all this crazy money”
It took a minute for her to connect with like in order for you to have employees, you gotta make enough money to pay these employees.
And so there’s different stresses when you’re running a full business.
It’s a blessing, but it’s more stressful, you know what I mean?
And so having people around me who understand taxes, contractors, payroll, or the other different things that I may not understand is really good for the soul.
Now, for the second type of community. Let’s just say “you are a digital marketer.
You are a coach or course creator.
Similar to what it is that I do.
It is important that you learn how to build a community of followers.
I hate saying the following word, but when I explain, you’ll understand.
It’s important to build a community of followers.
People who, like they may watch you online, connect with you online, and they may buy into a program or they’re just online so they could be a student of yours and it could be with just following you.
And it’s important that you start developing these relationships with people online because you have a community.
So I’ll give you an example.
I am headed to New Castle England, London, Paris, and Rome this summer. And I’m gonna be speaking on TikTok and connecting with TikTok Paris when I’m there.
And for me, one of the things that I am doing is when I get over there, I wanna already have people that I have met before I got there that can take me around.
Because I don’t know what I’m doing.
I don’t speak Italian. I’m gonna take some classes and I speak a little bit of French, but, I’ve just never been there.
And I wanna have people that I can connect with and do all that.
And I was also invited to speak at a conference in Oakland and I wanna reach out and check if I know anybody in Oakland that wants to come to this event and come support me, or take some footage and give them free access to the event.
And maybe be able to have dinner or lunch with a person.
You know what I mean?
Well, that one part when I build that community, then I’ll have people to talk to.
But not only that, when you’re building a digital community, what ends up happening is that when people are talking and then you’ve made a video or whatever and people are talking in the chat now.
They’re all talking to each other and now they’re all supporting each other.
Or we can come on live streams together.
For example, my favorite online right now is Antonio.
I talk about Antonio all the time. He just turned 19 years old and he came on my live one day, and was just like, “today’s my birthday”
And I was like, “Everybody. Say Happy Birthday Antonio”
And he got all these people saying Happy birthday.
And then the next day he came on and I told the next group that day, “Hey, Antonio’s birthday was yesterday”
And it was just kind of the support of the community for his birthday.
And I don’t know how he felt, but for me it felt good to just remember him when he comes on and to be able to ask my community to say happy birthday.
Or just starting to understand something like learning about some of my friends, their kids, or like my online people’s kids or whatever.
It’s just when you build these online communities. One, you don’t feel as alone.
So one of my favorite people online right now is Emily D. Baker.
She has this law community.
She covers all these big cases, like celebrity type cases.
Right now, she’s covering the Alex Murdaugh murder trial and she has this whole community.
And every time I’m there with her. They’re having all these conversations and saying all these things.
And it’s so fascinating to just watch them, like they have their own language, have an emoji, and they know what that emoji means to them.
It’s just something special about having that community.
But also one of the special things about having that type of community is they refer other people to the community.
With her, it’s called Law Nerds.
And so if they’re in conversations with people at a bar and Emily is nowhere in their sight because she doesn’t live there. And they’re talking about this murder trial that she’s covering on YouTube, her people may start talking about law nerds and whatever.
And then someone else may go, “what is that?”
And then now she connects them and then it brings other people into this community in a way that advertisement couldn’t.
I’m not against paying for ads and all that type of stuff but it’s when you have a community, the community just does something different.
It’s just something else that happens with that.
Like we all follow these people online who we just saw or we hear about them.
And we love them and we support them, but it’s only because they started so. And they kept doing a thing and then they kept connecting with the people that were coming to them.
Does that make sense?
And so having these online communities like help on what it is that you’re doing. It just feel less lonely.
We are in the process of really learning how to do this even better for my community, but it helps me feel less lonely.
It helps my team feel less lonely.
And then it helps those that are a part of the community feel less lonely. But it’s looking like a family.
It becomes a thing. It’s like you’re not by yourself.
Like there’s these conferences that happen in general that may not have anything to do with Emily D. Baker, her law nerds, but she could be talking about Bravo Con she went to, and she could say, “I’m gonna be a bravo con. Is anybody gonna be a bravo con?”
And she may find out that 50 people in her community are gonna be a bravo con.
She can say, “oh, I’m gonna get space at the hotel, let’s have a meetup”
And now everybody can meet up at this conference.
And so it’s like these really big opportunities, not just to make money, but to just build a community that supports you.
If you’re listening to me, you’re probably thinking of some of the communities that you’re connected to or you’ve heard about or you’ve seen and you can see how having a community can be such a big blessing to your personal life as well as to your business.
And so if you have not intentionally started building a local community of people that are doing what you’re doing, they may not be doing exactly what you’re doing, but they’re in business, then I would encourage you to do so.
It’s a process.
It’s scary and it’s scary for me to be texting people, connecting with them.
But I don’t wanna be sitting at home every day white with my cats.
I just don’t wanna be doing that.
And I don’t wanna build this business alone.
I wanna have people like the big communities that I have connected with where I can support and they can support each other.
It’s like a whole thing.
So I just wanna talk about this to encourage you, because community is just so life-giving.
Especially in a world in a time where everybody is on their phones and so disconnected when you have these moments of being connected.
It just feels like something we all have never experienced.
So I hope you enjoyed this article.
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