EP 21 | Lessons from a Writer on Building and Exiting a Successful Community

How to build a sellable online business with community growth, membership retention, and solid KPIs.

Carol Tice joins Paloma Goggins to share how a $25/month writing community became a business buyers wanted—even during the first COVID winter. She breaks down the steps that made it exit-ready: clean numbers, focused offerings, documented SOPs, and systems that didn’t rely on her daily.

From managing churn and LTV to handling due diligence and avoiding fake buyers, Carol reveals the practical moves that turn an online community into a valuable asset. Post-sale, she shares her blueprint for sustainable growth and high-touch member engagement.

Press play to learn how to build, scale, and sell an online business with confidence.

Transcript

Show Intro And Guest Welcome

SPEAKER_01 0:01

In the world of business, not all deals are what they see. Fortunes rise, empires crumble, all with a stroke of a pen. Mergers, acquisitions, hostile takeovers. Welcome to Mergers She Wrote, where we examine strategies and stories behind the biggest deals in business. Because in MA, the real risks are the ones you don't take. Welcome back to another episode of Mergers She Wrote. I'm Paloma Goggins, your host and the owner of Nocturnal Legal. Today I welcome Carol. Am I saying Tice? Is it Tice? Carol Tice to my episode. Thank you so much, Carol, for joining me from the road.

SPEAKER_00 0:51

My pleasure.

Carol’s Path From Music To Journalism

SPEAKER_01 0:52

And so, Carol's story today, what I'm going to talk to you about is how she built a community and ultimately sold that community and her back, uh, her background as a writer and a reporter. And so, Carol, I want to dive right in. Tell me a little bit about your background, how you went from writer to community owner, and and then we'll dive in a little bit about how you went to the sale process.

SPEAKER_00 1:17

I kind of I was a songwriter once upon a time, and I wrote an essay that won a contest and kind of fell into the world of journalism and reporting. And I liked it better because I did not have to worry whether the drummer was going to take psychedelic mushrooms and the overnight party bus to Vegas instead of showing up at the gig. Like I was in complete control of my product. I found that very exciting. And um didn't have to hang around smoky bars at two in the morning. So I I feel like I was kind of the last person they let in the door without a J School degree. And I wrote for the Alternative Press, and then I wrote for a business trade pub based in New York, covering the West Coast, and then I wanted to get off the road because I had a little child, and I wrote for the Puget Sound Business Journal in Seattle, which is where we're based. This obviously not Seattle. They're having a 15-inch of rain atmospheric river right now, and we are happy to be in the RV out in Courtside, Arizona.

SPEAKER_01 2:25

Oh, I am sure.

Layoff To Six-Figure Freelancing

Blogging And The Spark For Community

Launching Freelance Writers Den

Recognizing A Saleable Asset

Professionalizing For An Exit

SPEAKER_00 2:27

So I, because I had a background as a legal secretary, I was kind of the person that people threw a lot of SEC document-related stories, IPOs, mergers and acquisitions. So pretty much from the minute I got there, I was diving into public documents about transactions going on, spAC deals, all kinds of um, you know, private equity funding and learning about that world. And I loved the people I was working with, loved my editors, and I thought I would work there forever. And I had no plans to like go into business myself until um those editors left and a new team came in and the party was totally over. And I was the most highly paid uh reporter on staff, and then in 2005, I believe, uh I was uh let go. And I thought I would just freelance write until I found another job, you know. Um, I had freelanced before of my jobs, but I replaced my income pretty quickly, and then during the eight-09 downturn, I ramped it to six figures, and I gradually became aware that that was not the experience a lot of other writers were having. They during this time period, they thought the macroeconomic condition made it impossible for them to make a good living, and they were making$5 an article on content mills, and I saw that like most freelance writers did not have the kind of business discipline that I sort of instinctively brought to my freelancing business because I'd been hanging around business people, and that I could kind of offer that. And I started a blog. I was super excited. There was a uh new way of communicating where I didn't have an editor and I had the publish button. And I just started writing about how I was doing what I was doing, how to make a good living, how to find better clients, get a raise. And I thought maybe I'd write a book, you know, and it would sell a million copies and I'd be rich. That was some I had very vague, you know, business ideas of how to monetize the blog. I knew that I didn't want to slap ads all over it. My all of my mentors were like, don't do that. And um, that really erodes your authority. And there are better ways to earn. I had done paid webinars, I'd done this and that. And then I joined a paid community, I think it was 20 bucks a month for bloggers to learn how to make my blog better, you know, and be more successful. And as soon as I got in it, I went, This is amazing. I love it, I'm learning so much. The look at this course stuff, and being able to talk to other people who are doing this is amazing. And there's nothing like this for freelance writers, and there really kind of should be there because and I knew that because I was getting emails all the time, you know, oh my god, Carol, I have a meeting tomorrow and I don't know what to say, and I don't know what to bid, and what should I do? And um I, you know, was not interested in signing up to be the 24-7 Free Dear Abbey of freelance writing. And but there was clearly a need for information, and I felt like the community platform was the way to deliver it because writers are broke. Um, you know, selling them a$10,000 coaching package was not gonna be very easy. And um I loved the I loved the concept of using the power of low ticket to drive mass adoption to be able to help many, many people, not like I get, you know, eight coaching clients this year. I really wanted to change the whole industry. I was kind of on a mission to like shut down writer scams and uh fight for fair pay, make more writers understand their value, you know. So I had kind of a a like crusader mission, you know, and I wanted to be paid for my time. And I just started talking to my blog audience about I'm thinking about building this, you know, could you take this survey about what you would like in a community? And that's how I built Freelance Writers Den and opened it. And it pretty I had maybe 750 blog subscribers when I launched it. And it ramped to 500 members pretty quickly. And uh then hit a wall, ended up getting over that, going to a thousand. At that point, I think I started to get approached by uh by business brokers and buyers, and started to become aware that what I had was kind of a saleable asset.

SPEAKER_01 7:13

Well, and so your background is in MA reporting, which you talked about, like using you know seeing the SEC documents and all that. And so did that play a factor in how you built your community or how you thought about potentially selling your community at some point?

Brokers, Multiples, And Target Metrics

COVID Timing And Buyer Dynamics

SPEAKER_00 7:29

I think I had a dim sense that, you know, it was a saleable asset. For a long time, I wasn't thinking about selling it. Um, you know, I was just still building and building it up and um it was providing a great lifestyle. It was a lot of work to do. I think a lot of people who found paid communities, like 18 months later, they're out. They've sold it off, you know. And I did it for over a decade. So um I I was kind of hooked on how gratifying it is to change so many lives and impact so many people. And um just, I don't know, you know, I think there's a certain type of person who really has a big heart for helping other people succeed. And if you are that kind of person, community is such a beautiful business model to work in. And, you know, in the past year we actually went to Europe for a month, and I got to talk with and meet with several of my den members, and you know, one of them lives in Paris now with her daughter. Her husband actually died very shortly after her daughter was born, uh, very young. And she was able to build an a fantastic career for herself and live in a great city, and you know, and uh, you know, literally it was said, you changed my life. You know, it just it's hard to walk away from it. It's so it's so fulfilling. And I I was earning an income I never could have imagined as a freelance writer, but eventually I came to feel a little tired, um, to feel a sense of an ending. My kids were getting to the end of high school. I kind of felt like I had taught everything I knew was a course in was somewhere in the materials. Um, and I had this vision maybe I'd retire and we we'd sell the five-bedroom house on Lake Washington in Seattle that we had for the kid years and downsize and you know, and I'd kind of be done. But I flunked retirement partly because kids continued to bounce back. We have two with some special needs, and they're sort of slower launchers than maybe others. And um we had bought the RV and done a tryout trip. We liked it. We kind of didn't know where we wanted to retire to. And at the same time that's going on, um, you know, I am hearing from brokers and I'm hearing from kind of prospective buyers, you know. And I started to get at least mildly curious and to say, yeah, why don't you send me over your run sheet of what all you ask? Uh, uh, so I can start learning about what it is you want to know about me. And I learned that I needed to professionalize the business in some important ways, um, like monthly PLs, which I wasn't doing. Uh, you know, I was doing my taxes once a year and going, this is awesome. I'm have a great lifestyle, you know. I have more, I'm making, you know, double six figures in good years, and I'm I'm very happy, and there's clearly profit in it for me. I had a team of 10. I was paying them.

SPEAKER_01 10:56

Just to go back to the brokers approaching you and you realizing that you had a saleable business. Did you have multiple people that came to the forefront that were looking? Like, did you have bidding wars, or was it more like you had a couple of people show up and you're like, oh, actually I I can make a go of this? And that's when the wheels started turning that you could maybe get your house in order and then make it a true sale.

Fixing Bad Financials And Devaluation

SPEAKER_00 11:21

Well, a couple of years before I sold, I started, I hired accountants, started doing monthly PL, started thinking through taking myself out of the all the branding. There was like a little cartoon carol me that was part of my blog branding. And to me, it the community and the blog were kind of a package. And so, you know, I had started making some moves that I knew would position it better. I also did$10,000 of business consulting about how to go from a thousand members to$1,500 because I had talked to brokers enough to understand my multiple, my sale multiple, and I could see I would need to get to$1,500 for it to be a sale number that I would feel like it makes sense to sell. That would be enough of a payday, and I'd feel like this is good.

SPEAKER_01 12:08

Why was$1,500 like a marker, just out of curiosity?

Deciding To Close Despite A Lower Price

First-Time Exit Lessons Learned

SPEAKER_00 12:11

Just uh it's about a three and a half X, three X kind of multiple, and so 1,500 members at$25 a month, plus some course upsells and things that that was gonna be the number that to me was like, okay, I could go have a great life with this exit. Yeah. Um, I had put away quite a lot of money in the course at running the business, but you know, I I was looking for a real exit. What tipped it over into okay, let's actually do try and do this, is that I met a broker who I thought had a deep understanding of the online business space. They only did digital business, had some exits I kind of knew about as I recall, and I just thought they could sell it, you know, and they had a large network of you know, people who buy and sell business, they seemed to have the connections and be positioned to actually seriously sell it, not just some random online marketplace, you know, like as you know, there's mu many of these, and all the businesses seem to be like say for sale for about 50 grand or something, like it's all really tiny money. And so I felt like I I trusted them enough to hand them. I think it was 12 grand up front, you know, whatever the that was a big thing to me to just take that flyer and you're not getting that money back, and um I uh yeah, and then we started kind of engaging in the process. I wish I could say I ended up in a business bidding war, and I maybe could have if I'd wanted to have more patience with the process. But um, this was the depths of COVID winter, the first one. Um, so we started the process, maybe it was already COVID, maybe spring, just when it was just starting to happen, and you're we were still thinking, well, I'll stay home for six weeks and then it'll be over, you know, just really early.

SPEAKER_01 14:21

And so did COVID negatively impact or positively impact your deal?

Focus The Offer: All Roads To Community

KPIs Buyers Really Care About

SPEAKER_00 14:26

Hmm. I don't know. I have nothing to compare it with, but that's an interesting question. Um, I did end up selling to people I never was able to be in a room with because of COVID. And I don't know that that would have changed much of anything, but we had nibbles from a few people, and then we had one very live lead where they were very excited about the company, and we had a nibble from Writer's Digest, I think. And but they were like, uh, this is like November. And they were like, We're really busy and we want to look at it in January, maybe. And I was like, Well, I don't want to sit around for like three more months waiting for to see if you maybe want to get involved in this. Um, because I have, you know, a a fish on the hook here. And um, so we kind of rolled along and it was super stressful. You know, you remember we were all like totally isolating, and you know, every day I'm being asked a new question I don't know the answer to in due diligence. You know, I'm doing the two full-time jobs where you're running the company and making sure sales don't go down and the numbers continue to look great, and you have the full-time job of selling the business. And um, we had a guest unit in the basement of our house, and I actually like ran away from home. And there was a lot of sort of family teenage drama stuff going on, and I was like, I cannot deal with any of your stuff now. I am going to go down there and buy myself some frozen food, put it in the freezer and of the fridge downstairs, and I will see you when this is over. And like, really, I barely said hello to them for a couple of months. Just, I don't know if that was like harsh or but that was what I needed to do because my head was blowing off, you know. I mean, I had a team, I had a lawyer, I had the people around me, but s these were uh we weren't some of these metrics we were tracking, but a lot of them we weren't. What's the lifetime value of one of your members? I don't know, you know. I just it makes money, you know. Like I I I just I I was I was a word person, a writing person, not a numbers person. And um I wasn't I didn't come out of sales, which many people in online business have a marketing background. I came out of journalism. So I wasn't one of these people of like, oh, if a thousand people go in the funnel, the conversion rate is X this, and you know, they've got all these metrics at their fingertips. I did not have these things, so they all had to be hurriedly created during due diligence. And we had to create an operations manual. We had some things documented, but it really needed to be pulled together. It was a lot.

Guarding Data And Competitive Risks

SPEAKER_01 17:18

Well, I was gonna say I've worked with plenty of clients that have had that same experience where they haven't done any of the legwork up front. And so when they're going to actually sell a business, they're realizing they have to do that double duty where they're operating their business, running it, you know, in the thick of just daily operations, but also preparing all the diligence and everything else. And you get to a point where you're like, I can't, you know, something is faltering, right? And a lot of times people realize that they've kind of neglected, I would say, their business in the process because their full attention is required more so on the actual diligence or like making the deal happen. So I I understand completely where you're coming from on that piece.

Building Lists And Launch Cycles

SPEAKER_00 18:01

Yeah. Fortunately, I had a staff of 10, so I had that going for me. And I brought one admin kind of into my confidence about it eventually, because like I was asking for so many word numbers. Eventually I just felt like I'm exploring. I finally said I'm exploring selling this, you know, which was what I was doing in my mind. Um, you know, not like, hey, I'm selling this off, you're all out of a job, you know. But um, and actually that one admin still works for them five years later. She is she ended up being retained, so but she was off digging up numbers and stuff, and then we hit like a crisis point because they dug into my accountants' PLs, and what we learned is that my accountants were kind of incompetent and their numbers were crap, and it all had to be redone, and the business got devalued, and that was the like dun dun dun, you know, just drama cliffhanger, you know, moment where I had to decide if I still wanted to do it.

Scarcity, Open-Close Windows, Retention

SPEAKER_01 19:07

So when you say that the devaluation occurred, like, and obviously having good PLs, right, is is critical to this whole process. But was the devaluation something that you kind of you got to a place where you're like, okay, this is not financially what I thought it was going to be because of the devaluation? And then I guess what did you go through mentally in this process of like, okay, I'm gonna still proceed, or like at what point does this still make sense?

What Makes A Community Valuable

Delegation, Experts, And Mod Team

How To Judge A Good Community

SPEAKER_00 19:33

Yeah, so I liken this a lot to when we were adopting the first of our two adopted kids. Like we met a birth mom, she liked us, and we uh she was about maybe seven months pregnant, and then we went through the 60 days of um under Washington Law, they can change their mind at any point after the baby's born for until it's finalized, you know. And you're just kind of riding this roller coaster hoping you're gonna get a baby. And towards the end, before the ba before our son Eileen was born, we looked at each other and said, if this doesn't work out, we're not doing this again. Because no one can go through this amount of stress. Like it's just so in, you know, people who tend to be relinquishing a baby have chaotic lives, and there's a lot happening. And we were just like, yeah, this is a one-shot. And I kind of started to feel the same way. And maybe COVID was a factor in that. Maybe I would have pulled it back and just said, yeah, let's keep looking for buyers. And maybe writers digest would have paid more. Maybe I would have cleaned up my numbers better. Maybe I would have ended up with more money. Um, but I was so far down the stress rabbit hole of it that I kind of made my piece with a 200 grand less number. And I just felt like I can't go through, I can't start over doing this with another buyer. Like I maybe I'm just not even selling it, you know, if I don't do this. And I feel like I want to sell it. And maybe the stress of being in that first winter of COVID where there was just no shots yet, and so much uncertainty. And as someone who almost died of a severe asthma attack in my past in my 30s, I felt like this thing was coming for me. Like it had my number on it, you know? Um, I felt very afraid of getting COVID and thankfully did not until after I think I was vaccinated. But um, you know, there was a lot of stress and fears just sort of in the air. And I felt like I wanted to be able to not to take a break, to be done, you know, kind of working this hard and to have that payday. I there was money on the table. You know, I don't know, you don't know when you have a buyer if you will ever have another buyer. You know, we all know how many businesses do not ever successfully exit. It's most of them, you know. And I had watched, I had watched a friend of mine who had a bigger blog than I did for freelance writing just shut the doors.

SPEAKER_01 22:22

Looking back, what do you wish you knew about first-time exits that no one told you about? Obviously, in light of like the PL stuff and the the revaluation, obviously that plays a role in it too. But is there anything else from a first-time exit that you wish you knew?

Credibility Checks And Trust Signals

SPEAKER_00 22:37

Just be documenting, documenting, documenting. Know every possible metric. Have an operations manual. You think it's all cash and it's you you think you've kind of got it written down. Really be formal about your processes and who does what job descriptions for all your people. You know, you'll just save yourself so much stress and anxiety in the process if you're more ready to go, you know, and yeah, look at all the stats that buyers like to have and um think about cut getting those tracking because they'd like to see, you know, 18 months of them, not just, you know, the three months you're doing this deal. Um yeah, I mean, understand your business better. The thing I did get a ha a hang of is um focusing the business. This is the process of going from a thousand to fifteen hundred members. Over the years I had gotten kind of diverse. I had a co LLC with someone else over here, and I had a coaching program, and that first round with my business consultant was like, if you're thinking about buying, uh selling, these don't matter, these aren't part of the sale. So get rid of them and just all roads lead to your community, and that's how we drove it up. So you have to look at it as like what of this survives your departure? And that is the only part the buyer cares about. Make that part as great looking, uh drive that bit part of the business up as much as you can. That's what's selling.

Post-Exit Freedom And New Strategy

SPEAKER_01 24:17

Well, and I was gonna say, you mentioned having KPIs and like them being really fascinated with like what was the lifetime value of this member and some of these other nuances. Like, I think many business owners don't think about that in their daily operations, right? As like, okay, I have maybe a basic PL or basic balance sheet, but I don't, I also don't have this kind of big picture financial perspective. I mean, besides the lifetime value of a community member, were they looking at any other KPIs that surprised you, or was there anything else they asked you that you were like, oh wow, I hadn't thought about that before?

Free Tiers, Ads Fatigue, And Trust

SPEAKER_00 24:52

Oh, every day it was a new one. You know, every day of like 90 days of due diligence. You know, how many emails do you uh send in a campaign? How long is a campaign? How we were not always not always open. Community, how often are you open? How long can I see a year's worth of campaigns? Go dig up those emails. You know, just they, you know, the buyer's job is to poke around your business and ask as many questions, just keep asking questions until you say no to learn as much about the business as they can. So that's what they're doing. And your your job is to decide when you're done answering, you know, as the seller, you know, like enough, you know, you know enough. I think I feel I've told you what I'm going to tell you, you know. And I definitely we hit that point where we were like, Enough is enough. Yeah, this is what I'm I'm doing. Do you want to buy it or not?

SPEAKER_01 25:43

Well, I think it's fascinating. They wanted you to drag, you know, drug dug up like old emails and like pull things up that like arguably as a business owner, you aren't necessarily archiving your your old emails. I mean, perhaps as like a good practice. Well, I was.

Trade-Outs, SOPs, And Sustainable Ops

SPEAKER_00 26:01

I mean, they're in a CRM. They definitely were still around because we would crib from them for new campaigns, and that stuff still existed. But the thing you start to think about is whether these buyers are really in league with some competitor of yours and they're not really buyers, and they're just looking to steal ideas from you. So you hit a point where you're like, Yeah, that's that's kind of all I'm sharing with you.

Closing Thoughts And Listener CTA

SPEAKER_01 26:29

Oh, 100%. I've we see that a lot in the insurance world, is um insurance agencies will have competitors poking around, and a lot of times the advice is look, we're not going to hand over our client list until closing, and we'll give you a redacted version so that you feel like you can see some of the KPIs, the metrics, the financials, but we're not handing this over without either a significant portion of the purchase price that becomes non-refundable. And then and at what point we kind of had this moment where we were like, okay, at what value is it to them, right? You put a dollar amount as like a barrier to entry for them getting access even with an NDA to your client book. And maybe they're a big competitor, and so you know, a hundred thousand dollars is kind of a drop in the bucket if they think that they can go and and remarket to your group. So I could not agree more. There's definitely a balance in that whole stance in the in the deal. And so I I know you had mentioned growing kind of rapidly and then hitting a wall. And you know, I'm I'm not very familiar with building a community, and I'm sure there's a lot of people listening to this episode that aren't either. When it comes to my understanding, my basic understanding of like running campaigns and having community built is that you do have to have a list that you're actively cultivating. And for someone who is thinking about potentially growing a list, I feel like if you Google it, there's like a million ways to build a list and to grow a community and all these other things. So I think from your experience, like is building a list like this magical unicorn or is there like a formula? Like, how does how does one even get into this space? Because even I think about it, right? I've got I've got a newsletter. I I'm never planning to build a community, but you know, my newsletter grows as my client base grows and my connections grow, but I'm not actively out there building uh a list from advertising or anything else. So if someone was listening and thinking about like, okay, how do I build my list as like a platform? How do you even go about doing that?

SPEAKER_00 28:37

Well, there are many ways, and I'm sort of marketing method agnostic. I'm not here to say the one true way is this. Um it with that community, I built it for three years over three years of blogging. At the start, five days a week blogging, thousands of posts, you know. It we did it with content and selling expertise and built a list. Eventually it was like 20,000, 25,000 names. And you don't need a gigantic list. I have a million people on my list. If you have a highly engaged list, which I did, and who felt like Carol knows what she's talking about. I want in her community. It's only 25 bucks. It's a no-brainer, you know. I don't come out of marketing and don't enjoy marketing, so this was the model that I liked. Um, on my new community, where I am teaching people the answers to all your questions, uh, Community Growth Academy on School, I we have a whole sort of portmanteau of strategies that different members are using and that we're talking about permission-based marketing in LinkedIn DMs is popular these days. Um, I just opened a free level of my community, and just convening a free level community you can upsell is actually something that's succeeding big time for some very big earners on uh, you know, four million a year type earners on school. So there's a lot of ways to skin the cat, but generally all roads lead to you're building a list you could send a marketing email cycle to. You know, and ours would be like, heads up, the den's gonna be open, it's gonna happen on Tuesday, watch your email, you know. It's open, you can join now. You know, here's the success story, here's all our FAQs. If you have questions, overcoming objections, you know, we would just kind of run through our deal. We're doing a live event, come ask questions live. Um, and then we'd close the doors again. So we had a lot a model of a lot of scarcity and exclusivity in that. And people would stay in because they didn't know if they could get back in, and people would join because they didn't know when they could get in and get another chance. And we'd be open like four, six times a year for maybe a week. And that so the rest of the time we were busy serving members. It helped us administratively to not constantly be onboarding.

SPEAKER_01 30:54

Yeah, for sure. Well, I was gonna say, so obviously, you know what the buyers wanted when they looked at your business from a metrics perspective, but like from your perspective, having truly operated one for a decade, you know, what what do you think is the most valuable components to a community that's available?

SPEAKER_00 31:14

Uh they're looking for persistence for those members who stay. There's not a ton of churn. Our churn rate was pretty low. So that was attractive. There's a lot of um communities that there's sort of not a lot of there, there, and they're good marketers and people are just churning through. You know, it's like 100% churn in a year. That was not us. And um, yeah, we definitely did not show them our member list, our email list that we market to. Uh, we'd show them like the number count at the bottom of the of the form, you know. Um, what else did they want to know? Just um, I think one of the big things that we did that made it very saleable was that this community in terms of expertise was not all me. That's super important. You're having guests on, and you have guest presenters teaching courses, and I paid them super well, and you know, but they could see that there are a range of experts in the snit that they could maybe tap to do another course or to come be the substitute for me in the community. Um, that was that was important, and just kind of being able to take yourself out of the business really at every level. I had moderators, I was not in there answering every forum question, you know, answering every homework assignment in a class. Uh, you know, I could step away, go on a vacation. Um, my team pretty much knew how to do all the things somebody on my team knew knew how to do, you know, pretty much everything.

SPEAKER_01 32:51

I'm hearing like delegation is key. I'm hearing diversification is key. Um, I'm just trying to spell it out for listeners who are like, okay, what does that mean in my business, right? Is especially if you're listening and you're like, this is really neat, but I don't have a community, like what might this look like in my business? Um, but I think that's that's super helpful. And I mean, I think generally speaking, you know, one of the biggest constraints for anybody who's selling is not knowing what that potential buyer is going to find value in. And you highlighting the the potential, like, okay, holy smokes, hadn't really been tracking that right. And so it should hopefully give listeners an idea of like, okay, maybe I'm not selling today, maybe I'm selling in five, 10 years from now, but what can I start doing now to help tee this up at a later time so that I'm not digging in my archives, I'm not building SOPs on the fly. Um, all these things that are just super common in the merger and acquisition space for everyone. Um but so you got got this deal done in COVID. Um you know, I think you you lessons learned along the way are super critical and I think super helpful for anyone who's listening and thinking about going the this road for themselves as well. Um I feel like, you know, generally speaking, and and this is maybe a totally a difficult question for you to answer, but the the world of the internet, right? I just there's so much information, there's so many gimmicks. I feel like it can be so difficult to determine what's a good platform, what's a good community, what's a good resource. And so, you know, having built something in a space that arguably I would say most people, like you had said, don't find that success. Um, you know, how can someone go out there and, you know, not only I think potentially find success on the internet, but also determine like what is really worth their time and energy like because you said it just perfectly, which is there's some of these communities that have a hundred percent turnover rate because the value that they're providing is is nothing, right? It's fluff and there's so much of that.

SPEAKER_00 35:07

Or there's one introductory course and like kind of there's that's kind of all there is, and and um the the founder is like, God, they're in the wind, you know, they are not showing up at all, they're not on a live call even once a month. There's there's no sign of them, you know. Um, what I want to say is what I want to I want to circle back on one thing and then I want to answer that. That like the first question buyers are gonna ask you is how many hours a week do you have to spend in the business? Because that's like a red flag for them. If you're like, well, I'm working 80 hours a week doing this thing and I can't wait to get out of it, you know, they're like, Well, I don't want to work 80 hours in your business, you know. They are hoping you're going to say a very low number, or that, you know, I do it because I love it, but like my team I also leave, and you know, like one of my community members now, he goes on like month-long trips routinely. He's like 80. But when he's in town, and he doesn't do anything when he's on the trips. He is out, he has everything delegated. You know, that's the kind of story they want to hear is that your team has your back, it's all delegatable. You do it if you feel like it, if you're in town, if it's fun, you know. He did he's like, I love to talk to people about investing because that's his that's his niche, so he'll get on there if he's in town. Otherwise, he's out. He comes on like and does a live once a month, you know. Um, but I'm sorry, cycle cycle back to your the question we were at. Oh, how do you how do you know what's a good community to join to like learn?

SPEAKER_01 36:37

Or if you Yeah, I think generally speaking, like knowing knowing like the the secret sauce on the back end and and knowing that there are people who are just good at marketing, right? And they're not necessarily selling education or something that's at providing value, like how do you, as just a person who potentially is running a business and you want to find those people that can actually help you? Like, what what would be a good way to figure out a good community or a good group coaching or like whatever it is, the platform? Like, how can you tell the good from the bad?

SPEAKER_00 37:08

Find their resume. What have they actually done in the space? In my space in freelance writing, there were so many charlatans, it was it made my head explode. People who are like, I had one good month on upwork, and now I will teach you to be a freelance writer. I'm not making that up. That's an actual example. Literally, and it went so badly that I believe now she trains VAs or something. She had to get out of the space. She didn't really know anything. So that was incre that's incredibly common. That, or what they call the learn along with me model. I am doing this, and you also could be doing this, and I'll tell you what I'm doing. But I I I'm not ahead of you in this game. You know, I used to go look at their writing resumes, who they're written for. There would be like no brand names. You know, I had written for Entrepreneur and Forbes and, you know, won national journalism awards and um really look at their cred. How long have they been doing that thing? You know, I am like a dinosaur of community now in my new community. I've been at this 14 years. I'm old, I my experience is older than the platforms that now host these. We hand built it all on a WordPress platform and had to make all these plugins, talk to each other. It was like thousands and thousands of dollars of back-end costs every month. And now I pay$97 to school. But yeah, I mean, really, go look them up, look at their LinkedIn profile, look at what have they done? Look back in their resume. Did what's their cred really? Yeah, except good marketing. There's a lot of people who who do have that. Yeah. And like, and how much are they in the community? How much are they gonna help you? What what all do you get? What are the benefits? You know, what are you gonna get out of it? And I built a I built a course called Built to Sell at with all of the stuff we've been talking about. So hopefully my students will do better than I did in prepping for sale.

SPEAKER_01 39:11

Well, I was gonna say that the hard part is people, you know, in business, you're so busy and people have shiny new object syndrome, they uh they want the easy button, and and there's so many people online willing and ready to take advantage of that positioning, right? Is that you just want someone to solve all your problems. And and especially in in our world, right, in the legal world, it's it's a done for you type of service, right? You're not coming to someone to say, okay, I want help drafting this document. No, they want you to draft the document. And so, but there's plenty of other options in businesses where they're looking for guidance because they don't want to outsource something or they want to learn it themselves. And I I I've been in that position, my my own business, and thinking, okay. You're right. What am I getting from this? What am I getting from this community? What am I getting from this group? Because there's a million places you can spend your money and join, and and it's endless.

SPEAKER_00 40:11

I think um smart people who sign up for communities, you know, follow along with that person for a while. That's why blogging was so great. Is and now it's just me posting on my LinkedIn and people kind of following along with my van life and with how I'm building this community kind of in public, talking about what's working and not and um why I'm making X business decision in the business and not, and you know, what the members are doing and um I you know, I I think usually you don't spend a lot of money for a solution from somebody you kind of just met on the internet, hopefully. But, you know, if you're if you've got several of them, you know, really compare the offers and like, yeah, how there for you are they gonna be, and how active is that community? Um, because yeah, there's a lot of communities that you go in, and the forums are kind of a ghost town. I used to hear from them, they'd be like, Carol, can you tell me why this is happening? Um, because they knew our community was pretty dang engaged. But and that is the magic of what makes it saleable, is that the community is the community. You're really selling the passion for this topic and the involvement of all the people who are the paying members in the community. That obviously, you know, can go with that's not you. That is the magic of peer sharing. And that is an asset, you know, and yeah, you want there's work to do to foster engagement and get people talking, but you know, and you want to do it because that is a key factor. Buyers are gonna look at the activity level and how many of you people buy that course upsell, how many of those free mem level members convert to paid members? You know, these are metrics they're gonna want.

SPEAKER_01 42:02

So I I'll ask a final question because we mentioned you RVing, and um, you obviously we could we could see that you are currently in your RV and I love it. So, how has the freedom post-exit changed the way that you approach entrepreneurship and the advice you give other creators? Because obviously, building another community while you're also on the road lends itself probably to an entirely different lens than where you were originally.

SPEAKER_00 42:29

It's a whole different game for me now. Having had an exit, I'm actually not thinking in terms of scaling this one massively. I'm thinking about exclusive hundred person because that would be like a 10k a month income. Like that would be an income. I have other sources of income now. I sold a big house and didn't buy another one, you know. So uh I feel like that's sort of my comfort zone. And I I've learned that I want to actually work closely with these members. You know, launching a successful community is reasonably complex, and there's a lot to it, and I'm trying to get people to do steps in order so that they are engineered for success. And I I may just go to a hundred and then keep raising the price and keep it very exclusive and small. So, yeah, very different. And I just opened this free level a week ago as an experiment, and I'm completely sold on it. Things have changed so much, and you may know we are in a trust crisis that, yeah, and there's AI things selling things, and that it's it I did six grand of Facebook ads to launch this community and it converted zero. Built a big list off it, was a very successful campaign in terms of list building, no conversion. And it's because they those people didn't know me for very long. They just came in on an ad. And with a free level, you can just let people start experiencing the value you deliver, and then they build you build the trust that way. And to me, that's a lot easier than paying for Facebook ads. I'm thrilled to have these people membership doubled like immediately. And uh, I already had several upgrades to paid, and so you know, that's I'd say one of the biggest humps right now is yeah, if you don't already have a try, but maybe if you're a longtime coach, you got a big list already, you're sat. You're you're a 60 to 90 day launch in my world. I'm like, come do these steps and we're open. Um, but if you're building audience that can be a way to do it without spending a lot on ads and things.

SPEAKER_01 44:46

Very cool. Well, and I would imagine you've learned a lot from your past transaction with delegation and and with you being on the road and maybe perhaps having moments where you're not capable of always being online, like the delegation piece comes in.

SPEAKER_00 45:01

You know it. I I already I already have a moderator and a someone doing the newsletter both on trade outs, um, which is the other great thing about the community model, is you now have something that's valuable to members and you can trade them out for labor if you want to and make their membership free, get a little help, and um it's very high value to them that they get free access and it really costs you almost nothing to do. So I that's one of the things I love about the community, and you get people from the community who really get the audience and get the people and understand what's going on.

SPEAKER_01 45:39

Oh, absolutely, yeah. That's excellent, excellent uh advice. I think most people don't think about trade outs or even swapping, right? I I think that's in a world where everyone is just wanting to get paid. A lot of times I think they lose sight of the fact that um there's potentially you're you're losing out on really solid talent that perhaps like you can do that bartering system. So well, I I really appreciate your time today, Carol. And it has been so fascinating learning about how you built this community and sold it. It's really awesome. Thank you for sharing it.

SPEAKER_00 46:10

My pleasure. Yeah, build it to sell it. You know, I I really got sucked back into doing the new community because I you just meet a million coaches and their name of their business is their name.com. And I just die a little inside every time I see it because I know there's no exit. This is a work till you drop, you know, can't take a vacation, that's a no pay a week, you know, it's not good. It's you're not building an asset that you can earn that will earn for you while you're not around. And that's uh and and like leaving that legacy, you know. I still get people connecting to me on LinkedIn who are like, oh, I just got in the den. And I'm like, I sold it five years ago. But I'm so glad it's still helping you, and I don't have to do anything, you know. But like all of all of the information I imparted, it is still helping people, and that's it's it's like it means a lot to me to leave that legacy, you know.

Outro: High-Stakes Deals Reprise

SPEAKER_01 47:09

Well, thank you so much for tuning in and listening to Carol's story. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it, comment or like, and tune in next week for another episode of Mergers G Wrote. In the world of business, not all deals are what they see. Fortunes rise, empires crumble, all with a stroke of a pen. Mergers, acquisitions, hostile takeovers. Welcome to Mergers G Row, where we examine strategies and stories behind the biggest deals in business. Because in MA, the real risks are the ones you don't.