From idea to six figures in one year—with zero churn

Twelve months ago, Tom O'Reilly had an idea. Today he has a six-figure membership business with 950 members, a 100% renewal rate, and 10 to 20 active conversations happening every week—driven by members, not just Tom. He grew it using three marketing channels. One of them converts at 10%.

This episode is proof that you don't need a complicated strategy. You need clarity, the right platform, and the discipline to keep it simple.

In this episode:

• How Tom achieved a 100% renewal rate in year one and the community experience that made it possible
• Why he shifted from course sales to team-based membership pricing—and why that one decision changed his revenue model
• Why choosing Circle over Slack wasn't just a preference—it was make or break

The conversation doesn't stop here—join the discussion and ask the guest your own question at community.circle.so/c/behind-the-build

Behind the Build is a candid conversation series with the people behind thriving communities. Most communities look polished from the outside—this show goes inside. Each episode, we sit down with a community business founder and dig into a specific win: the real numbers, the honest decisions, and the messy middle that made it happen. No theory. No highlight reel. Just the actual story.

Hosted by the Circle community—where community builders come to build, grow, and connect.

New to Circle? Visit circle.so to learn more.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Welcome to Behind the Build, the series where Circle creators share their biggest breakthroughs and what it really takes to build a thriving community business. My name is Mathilde. I am the head of community here at Circle. And today I'm joined by Tom O'Reilly, the founder of Internal Audit Collective. Hi, Tom. Welcome to Behind the Build, and thank you so much for accepting our invite.

SPEAKER_01 0:22

Yeah, absolutely. I'm super excited to be meeting with you and chatting with the Circle community.

SPEAKER_00 0:28

Amazing. Well, Tom, I've been looking forward to this conversation ever since we first connected. You were telling me that you're approaching your one-year anniversary since the launch of your community. So put it with a milestone. And I know that you've done a lot in a short time frame. So you've built, just for context, you've built a highly engaged community for internal auditors. And you have also built a sustainable business on top of that community, a membership business. So really excited to hear to learn from you today and to kind of uh figure out your lessons learned and your path into that milestone. So let's dive straight into it. Can you introduce yourself and tell us a bit about uh your community, what it is and the people that you serve?

SPEAKER_01 1:10

Absolutely. Um, so my name is Tom O'Reilly. I'm the founder of the Internal Audit Collective. Uh, the collective is an online community and training organization for internal audit and Sarbanes Oxley compliance uh professionals, whether they're practitioners andor leaders. Um a little bit about my professional background or baseball card, if you will, uh lifelong in internal audit. Um, I came up through the ranks in internal audit to leading a team. Uh in 2017, I took a slight bit of a career pivot where I went to go work for uh a SaaS company serving the internal audit industry. And so uh I was a first of 30 employee there. And I was there for seven and a half years. The company was called Audit Board. And why that's relevant to today's conversation is if anything, is just because during my time, I had the opportunity to meet over a thousand different internal audit and SOX teams, from teams of one or two people all the way up to the Fortune 5 and Fortune 10 companies of the world. And what I found during all those meetings and conversations and relationships is that no matter the organization size or the internal audit department size or what industry that they're in, so many uh internal audit professionals suffered from very same similar pain points. And those that did uh internal audit well also had a lot of shared commonalities. Um, two of which were one, they always had uh an expanded kind of network that they could always just pick up the phone and contact those individuals to ask questions. And then two, um, they always had a kind of a prioritized list of improvement areas that they're just always looking to continue to improve. So so after my seven and a half years at um the SaaS organization, I thought I could also have a big impact in our organization by building a community of like-minded uh audit professionals to be able to do the same thing that all those high performers were doing. So that's when I started the Internal Audit Collective.

SPEAKER_00 3:09

I love that. I love hearing people's origin stories or community's origin stories. And I love how yours is so deeply tied to your own personal experience and your experience in the field. Um, can you tell us briefly about the moment you decided to jump into building this community? I mean, you talked a bit about the problems that you wanted to solve and the sort of success you you were trying to emulate, but personally, like what went through through your mind at this stage for leaving a stats organization you've been at for seven and a half years to take, take the leap and become a community founder.

SPEAKER_01 3:39

Yeah. Well, actually, I would say the the inspiration came from uh a community that I was actually participating in uh from a sales perspective. Uh so uh when I was, you know, as I mentioned earlier, I was a lifelong internal auditor, but I actually wound up when I was in uh the SaaS company, I was actually a salesperson. And then as I transitioned from sales individual to a sales manager, I realized that I couldn't do it all by myself. And so I joined a community, a sales community. Um, and they were using more of a Slack channel to kind of help people um communicate with each other. But I did find there was a significant amount of value um in making it very easy for um like-minded professionals to communicate with each other very simply. And so um being in the internal audit industry for long as long as I have, I realized there was nothing in this industry at all to kind of fill that need. And so I thought I'd be, I was well suited to, to kind of to to to help our industry in that way by filling that need. So that's what kind of made me push um to start the internal audit collective.

SPEAKER_00 4:44

I love that. And that was a bit over a year ago, right, that you started your journey.

SPEAKER_01 4:49

It was about it was about two and a half years ago when I joined the the the um the sales community. And then within like three months of being part of that community, I was like, oh, we need this for internal audit. Like we need this more than ever for internal audit.

SPEAKER_00 5:05

I love that. I feel like it's oftentimes uh a path into founding a community, being part of a great community yourself and seeing the value and seeing the opportunity there. So um tell us what is your core offering today? How do you members get value out of the internal audit collective?

SPEAKER_01 5:23

Yeah. Um, well, to start, I think it helped by framing a little bit about what internal auditors do. So uh internal auditors are kind of think of them as uh free consultants um within a public company or within a large private company where they can provide some independent feedback on how their organization manages its most important risks, how it achieves its ultimate goals and objectives, and how processes are managed. Um there's a big misnomer about internal audit, and that we're always out there to we're like the police officers and we're trying to capture um people and find out what they did wrong. Um and and why this is why I'm mentioning this is because a lot of internal auditors within companies have this kind of reaction to the people that they're working with. And so, you know, the the importance of the community is the fact that what we try to do within the collective is, you know, very simply we we want to provide a safe space where people can ask questions and others to provide perspectives. There's a lot of shared, you know, um, like I said earlier, pain points and shared questions uh in regards to um what good looks like in our industry. Um, but I I think even at a deeper level, what we do is extremely hard. And I think because when we're working with new people within our organizations, just because we are internal audit, a lot of people will try to keep us at arm's length. And so um navigating not only kind of the the technical detail of what we're trying to do, but also uh, you know, uh identifying a way to communicate our value um to people who may not want us immediately. Um, there's there is a there's a power in being able to kind of gather all those perspectives from from others in our in our industry.

SPEAKER_00 7:11

Super interesting. I and thank you for breaking down what is an internal auditor. I definitely needed that uh that context.

SPEAKER_01 7:17

I'm not sure if anyone wants it, but um there is there uh there for the tip of the iceberg.

SPEAKER_00 7:22

I love this. And we'll we'll we'll walk through your community in in a minute and you'll show us uh a little bit about how your members are actually getting some of that value in in practice. Um but first I'd love to hear a bit about your revenue, revenue milestones. Can you give us a sense of of um the scale of your business about a year post-launch?

SPEAKER_01 7:43

Sure. So yeah, we we officially kicked off, opened up the community, and we also offered our first training course both uh January 21st of 2025. Um we're almost a full year in, and we have um just about 825 members. Um and it's a split of probably about 25% were students of a training program. And then 75% of that number were just people who just join the collective. Um, anyone who signs up for any training course that the collective, the the intro audit collective uh offers also gets one year's access to the collective. So um, and there's no you have to be, you you will be a member. So we run a lot of our uh courses through um the the community, but um we just want the the power of being able to have a diverse set and uh and a high number of people in our community only adds to its value. So we give everyone that access. Um in 2025, uh we achieved uh overachieved on our initial revenue target. We have we had north of $500,000 in sales, but like I said, was a mix between numbers and and training programs. And we're still finalizing our 2026 number, but um it'll be higher than that. Um we're we're gonna be a little bit aggressive. Um and the good the good news is that so far we started selling um membership access three months before the community opened. And um we are still at a hundred percent renewal rate. So everyone who signed up from November to January uh you know 15th uh in 2025, um, they've all re-upped their membership. So wow, that's impressive.

SPEAKER_00 9:30

I just want to take a moment to say 100% renewal is uh something that a lot of uh community founders uh are are aspire aspiring to get.

SPEAKER_01 9:38

So we're not uh I'm sure it's not gonna be there the entire time, um, or it won't be that number the entire time, but uh we're like we like where the the direction's going so far.

SPEAKER_00 9:48

For sure. It's a good target uh to to keep. So those 825 members, they're all paid members essentially. Some of them have purchased a course or training program, and others have purchased a membership. Is that is that right? That's right.

SPEAKER_01 10:00

Yeah. We actually we handed out a few people, uh a few free memberships to what I call friends and family to help provide some testimonials to kick off um the collective. But uh everyone who did that is transitioned over to a paid membership so far as well.

SPEAKER_00 10:15

Got it. Super helpful. And and was there anything in the early days, so same time last year, when you were about to launch the community, anything that helped you lend your first sales, whether that's those are sales for the training programs or sales for the membership, anything that in hindsight you feel that that was the right decision.

SPEAKER_01 10:34

Yeah, for me, um, so to your earlier question, when I when you asked, like, when was I thinking about starting the collective? Uh, it was probably about a year, year and a half uh before the collective actually started. And so um when I was part of that community, I knew that this is what I was gonna do. And so I knew I needed to kind of build uh more awareness of who I was as a as a as an internal auditor and former internal audit leader. And so uh I was very active on LinkedIn. Uh, I would post between, you know, one to two times a day for about a year to a year and a half, where I just kind of talked about all things internal audit, Sarbay and Zoxley, career management and leadership. And and I think that because even though I was working for a SaaS uh vendor, I wasn't talking about the technology. I was just talking about kind of my perspective as an auditor and and lessons learned. Uh, I found that um, you know, a lot of people were interested in that. So I had a lot of engagement, um, I had a number of followers. And then when I started announcing that I was moving this over, uh, I just think there was just a numbers game. Uh, you know, almost 40,000 LinkedIn connections. And so a lot of people just said, yeah, for the cost benefit, um, it just made sense for them to take a flyer for, you know, at the time, uh $420 was our annual membership fee. Um it was a it was a low-risk investment for people to join.

SPEAKER_00 11:55

That's super interesting. And I feel like it's really an amazing strategy these days to build a presence on LinkedIn, not just a presence, an authentic presence. You you mentioning sharing your own about your own journey, uh, you know, in a world where I think people are saturated with social media, uh, kind of signals and and um and everything left and right. I think just really rebuilding um an authentic presence on one chosen platform can be really effective. And that sounds like it was for you.

SPEAKER_01 12:22

It was.

SPEAKER_00 12:23

Um awesome. And and uh we'll talk a bit more about your growth strategy uh uh afterwards. But now I'd love for you, Tom, if you could just uh show us what your community looks like in practice. So if you could just share your screen and and walk us through them some of the main ways that your your paid members are are getting value.

SPEAKER_01 12:39

All right. Well, welcome to the Internal Audit Collective. Um so what you're seeing is what everyone here is familiar with. It's uh our great circle application. Um, and for us, it's it's basically managing and facilitating um access to a conversation that's taking place across our entire industry. So uh we you know have anywhere between 10 and 30 new conversations that take place uh on a weekly basis. Uh and similar to I imagine most circle communities where people will come in, uh ask a question, others will provide their own uh perspectives. But most importantly, anybody and everybody could always keep a better pulse on what's happening within our industry. Um usually for us, when someone will ask a question, um, they'll have anywhere between you know three and you know, 15 or so responses that occur between one to two hours to one to two days. Um and what I one of the features I love about the best about Circle is that when I'm reading someone's um response, like let's say Emily had a really great response, she just hit the nail on the head. I can click on her profile and I can learn a little bit more about her. So um, you know, we capture a ton of information about not only the individual and the company that they work for, but the level that they are, their team size, their company size, uh, information about applications that they may use on the day-to-day basis. Uh, what I also love is you can actually see what everybody has posted about in the past and what's they what they've commented on. Uh, I imagine this is probably similar with most people, most B2B professionals is definitely um applicable to internal auditors, where that their business network is usually composed of people that they've either worked with before or where they're physically located. And now what Circle allows for for me to do and offer to my community is to break down that barrier. And now they can just have a better chance of communicating with people who are more like them and have more shared similar if shared and similar interests. And this is the way that they find this is through their a little bit of their the member of directory and their that research. Um so the a lot of the the the value that we provide is just by giving access to people to engage and and participate and follow along in the discussion. But another area that um helps facilitate these introductions and networking opportunity opportunities are our community events. So uh what these community events are they're not, they're not like webinars where you you know you show up, you turn your camera off, you're eating lunch, you answer some polling questions, and then you get a CPE credit. We have some of those as well. But what our um community events are are kind of round table active discussions, like we have one, I'm sure most industries are talking about AI right now. So we have a meeting tomorrow where we'll have uh anywhere we have 80 people registered, we'll probably have 50 to 60 people show up. And they're just gonna be sharing perspectives and asking questions on how others are providing governance over their organization's use of AI. Um, what's what helps drive our attendance is the fact that uh and uh this has been commented on so many times where if Alexandra she would she would RSDP because she could see all the other people who are RSDP'd as well. And she's like, Oh yeah, I want to meet this person, so she'll just be RSVP'd and and join. So um it's uh it's a it's a great feature and uh and and uh just by holding, you know, we hold anywhere between eight and 15 community events on a monthly basis um across different topics that are relevant to our audience and for different uh and for different levels. Um so those are the two big areas. We do have a couple of dedicated spaces that we offer. We had more, but we found that there was just better by centralizing it just to pick two or three big themes. Um, so that's been working well for us. Uh, we do have a library of different templates. We just started collecting um one of our most popular uh library channels, so to speak, is our generative AI prompt library. Um so we have just members saying, here's what I've used. Um, and we've actually have a because we're good auditors, we have a QA process to make sure that there's a um a quality review being done. And then, you know, as you can see, there's a lot of people, a lot of people liking it, but more and more people are coming in and just copying and pasting um the different prompts um to that that they can implement into their own methodology immediately. Um I love that.

SPEAKER_00 17:11

And that's a post space that members can just go go to and pose their prompt to, right? It's completely crap.

SPEAKER_01 17:18

Uh and then what's great is other people, and it's not happening. Well, you can even see here, other people can say, hey, I've used this prompt. Here's what's worked for me, or thank you, or if they have questions, they can put all this information in the comments as well. So what's what's great about this, what I'm so excited as a community manager is it's not just getting the information from one person, but it's like how do you iterate and refine it so it becomes uh an industry standard because of all the feedback that was gained by the people who are using it.

SPEAKER_00 17:49

I love that. I think that's spot on, and that really speaks to the value of a community like yours. It's not just one too many conversations, you know, expert sharing insights. It's about uh the feedback loop and the flywheel that's uh taking place between members. And so a member share a resource, other members share feedback on how this resource lended or improved a resource, even then that collective knowledge base um gets stronger as a result. So a lot of 1,000%. Awesome. Is there anything else uh that you want to show us in terms of like main ways your members are getting value, or maybe uh core parts of your offering uh in your membership today?

SPEAKER_01 18:29

No, I've I think we're just getting started from a year in. Uh when I started, you know, I didn't know anything about managing a community and didn't know any a lot about running a business. I'm still learning on that. But what I found is that when we we lead with trying to provide practical information that that provides assets or perspectives where people who are actually doing the work are are kind of saying, here's what's worked for me and here and here's what hasn't, as opposed to kind of finding different quote unquote thought leaders who are kind of talking about what should be done and motherhood and apple pie. I think that that's where we've kind of differentiated ourselves. It's like everyone who joins is that they're they're they're happy because they're like, holy Moses, I have this problem too. And the information and the feedback that was provided, I took it and it worked. And so um, I my my job is to go find, you know, more people to add to the collective that are open to sharing those um how-to guidance and and what's worked for them and what you know, even being transparent and vulnerable on what didn't work for them. And it's only going to kind of make everyone's value from the collective in even better. So that's what I'm focused on in 2026.

SPEAKER_00 19:43

You were talking about uh the importance of members in your community and driving the value, right? And you showed us that amazing prompt library and other areas, like events where members are really coming to participate, not just to be, you know, passive listeners. Um, I'm curious to know how you've uh helped market this value proposition to to the outsider world. Because obviously your community now is one year old, you have tons of you know uh wins and testimonials. Um I'd love for you to walk us through any any learnings that you've got on marketing your community's value proposition.

SPEAKER_01 20:21

Um yeah, absolutely. I have um two channels on how I create awareness about the internal audit collective. Actually, I have three channels. The first is through, as I mentioned earlier, through posting on LinkedIn. So uh I've continued to post um uh unfortunately it's not as as often as I'd like, but um probably five or six times a week, uh, both on my LinkedIn personal page and I also have a LinkedIn company page for the Internal Audit Collective. Um so I I try to remain as active as possible on that. Uh I also have uh a newsletter that goes out on a weekly basis. Um and so uh I write uh kind of a long form how-to article on anything that's internal audit related. Um, and a lot of the times I'm using the perspectives, if not um highlighting the lessons learned from people who are in the collective that we discussed during our roundtable events or that being discussed through a community chat. Um, so even though I'm writing it, it's not necessarily about me, it's about people who are in our industry and how, you know, and I'm trying to do my best on highlighting those people as innovators and leaders within our industry. Um, so I've been doing that for over a year as well. And then through that newsletter from time to time, I'll also highlight, well, every newsletter has, you know, um opportunities for me to promote different aspects of the Internal Audit Collective, whether it's through, you know, joining as a member or taking one of our courses or just you know, referencing free webinars that we offer the content that we publish. Um and then we also will send some sales emails from time to time from that as well.

SPEAKER_00 22:00

Very interesting. So LinkedIn keeps being a primary channel for you, the newsletter as well, and it's fed with the community's content value conversations. I'm curious to hear a bit more about that. Um, are you doing any sort of hard sells in there? Do you have, you know, like join the membership or or is it pretty much in the background? So a lot of people have, you know, have those thoughts. I want to, you know, use leverage my newsletter better, um, but they're not sure how to strike the balance between educating and selling. So, do you have any thoughts on that? Or have you experimented at all with with different approaches?

SPEAKER_01 22:36

Yeah, um, I mean, I I think it's a lot of trial and error. Um, and I think it's also um it kind of comes in waves. So sometimes when I'm feeling more creative, I'll I'll you know produce more um content that goes out to um, you know, the masses. We have about 10,000 subscribers to our newsletter right now. Um, but then sometimes I I just want to get in front of people and and and talk to other peers and and show them the collective. And I think there's a value in just when, you know, when I'm on LinkedIn talking about it, um, that that helps. But then when, you know, maybe it's because we're a bunch of internal auditors, we have to trust but verify. And so giving the uh an opportunity for our audience to actually see the collective, um, that that's where it kind of makes it real. And then when they see all the people who are in it, that you know, for a large part, they may recognize a few people and then it just kind of de-risks everything for them. So um, I haven't figured that out that that cycle yet. If circle has some guidance on that, I'd love to hear it. Um, but I think for everyone, it's a little bit different.

SPEAKER_00 23:37

It's all trial and error. And this is also why we're doing this episode. So we can crowdsource the the knowledge of the circle community with its tens of thousands of members. So we'll definitely pull a uh call out in the in the episode for anyone who who's figured out kind of like newsletter sales and funnels and that sort of thing. Uh I love by the way that you're really just uh living and breathing uh the your members and your audience, right? Trust and verify and you're applying, and I'm sure you're speaking the language so perfectly that a lot of what you do resonates really well with them in terms of community marketing. So you're definitely uh in a good place already.

SPEAKER_01 24:12

I would say um two other things that could be of relevance is um uh the first is I've been uh a bit more thoughtful or strategic on reaching out to others in our industry and trying to do, you know, co-market or do a webinar with them. Um I don't charge any money to do that. Um it just gives me the opportunity to to to to be in front of someone else's audience. Uh and that's that's actually helped me getting some pretty big spikes of followers. And then I can see, you know, at any point in time as my newsletter, um my newsletter growth grows, continues to grow, we're about 10% of that is usually the eight to 10% are our actual members. So I'm less concerned about getting net new members into the collective. If I focus more on just getting new newsletter subscribers, then it's less of a hard sell. It just happens people organically will sign up. Um, and then the last thing I'll say, speaking of organically, is just or when we started out, a lot of internal out leaders joined the collective because they just they felt like this is something they could uh benefit from and it was easy for them to justify the budget. Um, our highest method of growth in our first year was having with the the the leaders were in the collective very like, I can't attend all these events, everything in here is really good. Let me bring more of my team members in. So we're focusing on 2026 on uh as opposed to trying to just um high individual the benefits of individual memberships, we're now making very focused efforts on you know having team memberships um and coming from from people who are part of a collective as opposed to net new uh net new members.

SPEAKER_00 25:55

Makes a lot of sense. Before we talk a bit about the future and and uh and it seems like you have already a full plan and goals uh uh in place for for this year. Um I'd love to hear a bit more about maybe any other lessons that you have for the folks watching. So maybe one question or one way to put it would be to ask you, you know, if you if you could rewind and go back in time, same time last year, you were literally a few weeks away from from launching a community or launching your membership on Circle. Um, what would you say to the Tom from one year one year ago? Any piece of advice or um mindsets, tip, anything you want to say to to him?

SPEAKER_01 26:36

Yes. Um I would say first, just from managing a community in general, um, be prepared for ups and downs. I think it's just part of it. Um but I also think that um for me, uh anyway, I'm my own worst critic. So um when I think that engagement is low, or I think that we may not have um done something as good as we could, um, I'm usually the harshest. And most people and the collective don't necessarily feel that way. Um, and the same point when I think something went really well or something really great, most people also don't have share the same highs as I do on those things. So just kind of being um managing, managing your mindset and emotions is is um is probably something for every business leader, but especially one that's in front of a lot of uh other people as the community manager is is of is of importance.

SPEAKER_00 27:30

Yeah. I'm smiling because that rings true with me in particular. And that's something I try to remind my team of as well, to try and dissociate the your your emotions and your experience of something, whether that's an event or the launch of a program with how it's been received, because our own emotions don't necessarily are not necessarily good indicators of how something actually landed. And there will always be a lot of members you've impacted uh and who've got a lot of value out of an event or a program, regardless of your own kind of like self uh critics of perfect perfectionism. And so that's a really good reminder to uh and something to keep in mind. Um, because also building a community business so close to the heart of what you've done in your career um definitely is um it opens yourself up for even more perfectionisms. I I can only imagine.

SPEAKER_01 28:18

Yeah, it does indeed.

SPEAKER_00 28:22

Got it. So let's talk a bit about what's next. I mean, um, as you head into year two of your community business, what are your main goals and and where do you see your your business going um in the next uh 12 months?

SPEAKER_01 28:34

Yeah, so um the first goal is uh in 2025, it was proven that the more, the more people we have contributing to a conversation, the just the higher quality and the more value that comes of it, the more solutions that are presented to the individual user. So as I think about you know, come out kind of my job as a community manager, there's two things that I'm doing to just continue to up level, up, up-level that. The first is how can I get uh a broader base of our community members to actively engage within within our community? Um, I haven't done the specific um uh engagement statistics, but I imagine um just like in any other community, there's 20% of the people in the internal audit collective, they're probably producing 80% of the content and the and the engagement. And so, how can I get that 20% to be 40% or 50%? Um, so I'm focused on, you know, having more one-on-one conversations with our members to kind of encourage them to do it, to make it safer for some people who are not leaders, but who are at lower levels, who are earlier in their career, to feel open and to feel like they're not intimidated by sharing a perspective in in front of so many accomplished and experienced professionals. So that's the first one of the first parts. And then the second part is just by growing the number of uh members in the collective. Um, in the past, I was really focused on um getting more people into our courses um because those were a little bit of a higher ticket item than our membership fee. But the more I think about it is that there's actually a higher ROI when leaders have more of their team members just in the collective to help them self-serve themselves as well. And when I have more people in the collective, um, and if the the someone's gonna spend $2,000, whether it be on setting one person for one course or five people into the collective, if five people um stay in the come in the collective, there's five people that will re-up next year as opposed to just one. So there's a um a benefit financially as well for for us as a community. So um we're focused on off leaning into um more team member pricing options uh and incentives. Um we have a uh a free trial, so we're promoting that um a little bit more to say, hey, look, there's nothing that prevents anyone from coming in and doing a free trial. Um, and then more partnership opportunities with others to um see if we can have them and their community come join the internal collection.

SPEAKER_00 31:07

Super clear. So three main goals, if I if I heard you correctly, more engagement, more meaningful engagement from your existing members, more members, and also kind of like going towards a team-based kind of um sales model that helps you get more of those members who will drive the value uh involved. Do you have any specific goals in mind for like the number of members or how much you want the community to grow, or is it something you're still um figuring out?

SPEAKER_01 31:34

Uh I have uh um my realistic target is to get to you know 2100 members by this time next year. Um my pie in the sky number is 2500. Um but um I really will be it will be focused on how well um me and Priscilla are membership uh operations leader, the job that we do by serving our community. And so, you know, when I do think about, okay, I have an hour to spend, should I go call somebody or or do a newsletter, or is there something I could do better for the the to serve the broader community? What I've found is when I invest my team on the on the time on the ladder, um, it's easier to kind of get those, the, the goals from a number, the the number of new numbers I'm trying to achieve.

SPEAKER_00 32:23

Got it. So we'll definitely uh reconnect before uh next year for sure, but we'll we'll follow your growth very closely. And uh I know you have some exciting plans uh ahead. Um, Tom, we're nearing the end of the conversation. I have plenty of other things to ask and uh plenty of other topics that we could go into, but I will let the QA uh kind of take care of that. So we'll continue the conversation async when this episode um releases to the community. Do you have any final thoughts, parting advice for anyone out there who is early in the journey, whether they're building a membership community or specifically a membership, a professional network like yours?

SPEAKER_01 33:00

Yeah, uh the first thing I would say is, and this is unprompted, I promise, but um, I've had so much positive feedback from my members based off of the application of the circle in particular and how intuitive it is and feels and all the features of functionality. It really is um a positive that I had no appreciation of when I was um a member. So that would when I sorry, when I was a founding the company, um it was a very big thing for me to say, should I do a Slack channel or should I use uh a purpose-built application for a community? If I went with the Slack channel, it probably would have failed. Uh I'm just being very candid, or it would have been a significant amount of level of significant um amount of extra work for me to do. So um, and again, this is not you didn't ask me to to kind of give this kind of testimony or sponsorship, but um circle is um really um a game changer for for my community and the internal audit collective. Um and then the I would say the second thing is is that um I had no I didn't appreciate how much fun uh I would have or the sense of purpose for being able to serve so many people um who I have a very shared interest with, um, and kind of just managing, but I think community, especially in the in this, in the age of AI, where it's gonna be very easy for uh um product companies to say we need to use more technology and not necessarily more people to help solve problems. I think this uh now more than ever, community is important to help the people who are working in this type of environment. So I'm very bullish on just managing a community in general, um, but specifically the internal audit collective in 2026 and beyond.

SPEAKER_00 34:45

I love that. This is so inspiring because obviously community is more needed than never, you know, uh, and so than ever, not never. Uh and I love that what you said about Circle. Thank you so much, by the way. I think every time we hear a great testimonial like yours, uh, you know, this makes uh the team's day. And so uh I know they will uh enjoy watching this episode. And um uh Tom, thank you so much for for taking us behind the build today. I'm really excited about your journey. I will I will be following from the sidelines, um, and uh we'll catch up in the circle community. So thanks again, Tom.

SPEAKER_01 35:20

Thank you.