In this behind the scenes look and membership site walkthrough, we’re talking to business expert Brett Gilliland of Elite Entrepreneurs.
His business and methodology has helped numerous entrepreneurs grow from $1M to $10M in revenue by following the proven strategies they share. These methods are the same ones that Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) followed on their growth journey.
In fact, while Elite Entrepreneurs got its official start as a standalone company in 2018, the Elite Forum was born inside of Infusionsoft (now Keap) in December of 2011. As things grew, it was decided it needed to be its own company and that’s how it exists today.
Elite Entrepreneurs has exclusive rights to all of the learning/content, processes and tools Infusionsoft used to grow to $10M+ complete with real-life examples from Infusionsoft’s journey that business owners can leverage as they work to scale their businesses. In essence, they packaged up 10,000 hours of mastery in business building so you can accelerate your growth without having to learn the entire path on your own.
It’s not unusual for people in the Elite program to double or triple their revenue just by going through and implementing the methods taught.
Elite was created because the need for business owners to get help was only growing. You might even be able to relate to this – A business owner gets worn out and they’re trying to keep growing but not seeing any results.
This usually happens right around the one million dollar mark. At that point, it’s almost like you hit a wall that you can’t scale past. Brett explains in this video why that is. Simply, the things that got you to the first million won’t work to get you to 10 million.
You can’t be the superhero entrepreneur anymore, you need to learn how to manage a team of people who will continue to drive your growth engine.
Brett shares a whole wealth of information, insights, and even gives us a behind the scenes look at how his team has structured their years of content (an absolute massive library), to keep things organized and simple for their members to find each resource.
If you want to learn more about Elite Entrepreneurs, visit GrowWithElite.com. We also occasionally promote some of their no-cost, live trainings if you’re on our mailing list.
Important Lessons & Highlights Shared In This Video
How do you get people to consume the content? (8:30)
Elite Entrepreneurs focuses primarily on serving “busy business owners” and they realize this. That’s why they enroll multiple team members from the business in the training. This way the business owner isn’t the only one with access.
What are the requirements to join one of the programs? (15:00)
At the beginning, they struggled to get people committed to the program. They needed to do this because the busy owners who were enrolled in their program would get swept away with their work and forget about the training. Realizing they’re paying for something they’re not using, they would cancel.
The way they’ve changed this is by getting the business owners to commit to 12 months. Brett makes it clear they’re not about locking people into contracts, but it’s more about committing the time to go through everything and engage with Elite that’s important versus the money.
They’re actually doing a ‘personal commitment contract’ which has nothing to do with the money, but makes people going through the program realize it’s an ongoing growth and development system – not a one and done ordeal.
Brett Shares a Unique Way to Get Customer Feedback to Make Relevant Content (21:00)
Elite created a customer advisory board with 10-15 of their top members. They asked them, “What are you struggling with and what do you need help with right now?”
They meet once a quarter to see where their actual paying customers need help and then they make the content surrounding it.
You could easily implement something like this in your business with some of your existing customers/members. Find the top members in your business and invite them to be part of the advisory board. Have a quarterly meeting with them to get real feedback and ideas. What you’ll find is if you get a diverse enough board, it will mimic the makeup of your entire business and all the members you have.
What membership levels does Elite have? (25:00)
We regularly get asked about how people structure their membership sites and levels. Here are the Elite levels that Brett shared with us. The interesting thing here is that they have something for both the lower end all the way up to the top level.
They didn’t start with all these levels, but as they saw different people needing
Elite Ignition ($3000 one-time cost) – Foundational experience where the method is taught. Membership site is supplemental for resources and the home for all the content from the live training.
Elite Access (monthly investment) – DIY version of the Elite methodology. This exists because Elite is designed to help businesses that are already doing $1MM in revenue. Elite Access exists to serve those businesses who haven’t made it to that point yet.
Elite Momentum (higher monthly investment) – Ongoing membership used to provide access to over 7 years of monthly training, a huge vault of resources, and information about upcoming calls.
Elite Mastermind (highest monthly investment) – Invite only program with the highest level of resources and coaching from Brett and the Elite team.
How do you organize all of this content? Brett explains a tactic to make possessing a massive library feasible (31:16)
Elite regularly records all their live events and trainings. This doesn’t even include all the documents and templates they provide. The result was an overwhelming experience for people first accessing the membership site.
What they did to solve this was create pages around specific topics (Hiring, Onboarding, Etc.) that have links and downloads to all the resources around that topic.
This helps keep things organized and allows their members to find what they’re looking for without having to search through their massive library.
Having tons of content and resources is great – you just want to make sure you’re making it simple for your members to find what they need easily.
Not only focused on selling content via the membership site – it’s just one aspect (36:00)
The membership site is only one aspect of the business. They realized their members need more help and assistance than what the membership site itself can provide.
That’s why they do regularly scheduled calls (once per week right now).
They also have the Facebook group and peer group calls so members can help each other. This works for both accountability and to get best practices, advice, and strategy from each other.
Your site may not support a model exactly like this or it may not even need additional support and training. The site itself may be sufficient, but Brett makes the point that if your content is more long term (a practice or something that builds habit) having additional support and ways to engage with your members will only strengthen their chances of success.
What is the main thing someone needs to be focused on BEFORE and AFTER the million dollar mark? (44:48)
Brett says that before the million dollar mark, the focus has to be on how to get and keep customers. Primarily with the ‘doer hat’ on. How do I sell? How do I fulfill? You’re figuring all these things out until you reach a steady point where you reach that million dollar mark.
Then you realize “I built this thing around me primarily.” and now you change your focus on how to go from “doer to leader”. How to actually set a vision, build a team that can execute on that vision, and build a business framework to scale and grow.
Video Transcript
[00:03.950] – Micah Mitchell
Hey, everybody, it’s Micah Mitchell with Memberium, and I have with me, Brett Gilliland of Elite Entrepreneurs. Hey, Brett, thank you so much for joining us.
[00:11.690] – Brett Gilliland
Yeah. Thrilled to be here. Thanks for having me, Micah. Yeah.
[00:15.770] – Micah Mitchell
I’m excited to jump into it. And we haven’t caught up very much yet, which is perfect because I think some of the things I wanted to discuss with you are going to be useful for our audience. But to get started….
[00:28.790] – Micah Mitchell
My experience with Brett, for those of you who don’t know, elite entrepreneurs is in his company has been really interesting. I’ve known him for a long time, but recently I was at a live event, and a bunch of people kept standing up in the audience and giving these incredible testimonials about your company to the point where I think they started to realize, like, wow, this seems weird. And one of them is like, I swear, I’m not paid to be here, but we grew from this point to this point, working with these guys and the system works.
[00:59.270] – Micah Mitchell
It’s so good. So I’m excited to talk to you because I think you guys really have what it takes. And I’ve seen I know what the material is because I’ve been around it a little. I’m not great at it yet, which is why I’m going to continue with your program. But I’ve met a lot of people who have gotten great results from your program, so thank you so much for joining us. Can you tell us a little bit about your business and kind of who you serve and what you do to introduce those of you who don’t know about it yet?
[01:27.050] – Brett Gilliland
Yeah, sure. Thanks. I appreciate the opportunity. I like to start with a little framing. So all of us who are listening to this, all of us are business owners, right? I would guess most of your audience are business owners. And what happens as our business grows is we encountered this new stage, and we grow our business to a certain point. And then we hit a little bump in the road until we figure out what it takes to get to that next stage of the journey. And then we go through that stage, and then we had another the next little bump.
[02:07.370] – Brett Gilliland
I’m calling them little bumps, which sounds like a silly way to talk about them, but they’re often ceilings. They’re like walls or barriers, and they happen on the one s and threes of revenue. So as you’re growing, you start up zero to 100,000. Is that solopreneur stage? You’re basically just creating a job for yourself. And then you figure out how to manage your time and maybe get enough leads to start to grow from $100,000 to $300,000. And the pattern I’m going to describe to you happens on the ones and threes of revenue.
[02:38.450] – Brett Gilliland
So 100,000 to 300,000, 300,000 to a million, 1 million to 3 million, three to ten. And so on, every time you triple, there’s a new stage. Well, what we saw was this pattern where business owners, entrepreneurs would figure out the stage they were in. And then they would try to just go harder, doing the things that got them to that place, and they would just wear out. It’s kind of like riding a multi speed bicycle that has gears and starting out in a low gear, and it’s comfortable.
[03:11.930] – Brett Gilliland
And then you want to go more. You want to get more output from that bike. So you pedal harder. And really, until you shift to the next gear, you just start wearing yourself out. And we’ve seen a lot of business owners do that around a million dollar Mark. So as a long set up, our business helps the seven figure business owners go from one to three million to ten. Those two shifts are what we specialize in. And we just have a lot of fun helping them figure out all the business building work that they have to do if they want to keep growing past that million dollar Mark.
[03:48.290] – Micah Mitchell
Yeah, it’s amazing. And I have experienced it myself. So when I hear you say those things, it’s like I can feel and I’m sure other people can feel some of those pain points at those stages. Or if anybody’s been stuck somewhere, I feel like that’s kind of what you guys do. You get people unstuck because they kind of find themselves at a stage and then don’t know what to do. If they did, they probably keep going. Right?
[04:09.530] – Brett Gilliland
Exactly. They would keep going. What the pain looks like is the business owner wears out or they get tired of basically trying to get this thing to go further and not seeing the results. They’re trying all of their proven methods that got them there, right. They learned marketing, they learned to sell, and they learned how to get consistent customer acquisition. And they learn how to fulfill at a higher level when you have more customers or clients coming in. But they get around that million dollar Mark. It’s pretty tricky how it happens, but right around that million dollar Mark, they often get stuck.
[04:49.790] – Brett Gilliland
Sometimes they’re able to pedal harder and push that gear a little further, maybe to 2 million. Very rare occasions. They get to 3 million. But they often get stuck somewhere in there. And it’s really because the things this is a little cliche, but it’s true. The things that got them to that point aren’t sufficient to get them to where they want to go. And we have to go from doing and being the superhuman entrepreneur to now leading a growing team of people. How do I actually set a vision and build the team and organize the work and have balance, strategy and execution?
[05:28.250] – Brett Gilliland
There’s just more stuff that happens as you get bigger, a little more complex. And we just have a whole system for how you can organize that and make it happen. Got you.
[05:39.470] – Micah Mitchell
So how do you deliver your service. And I guess I’m asking this because I know there can be coaching and consulting. There can be one on one and things like that. But you also have your membership site. So how do you think about how your company delivers your service? How do different ways of talking to people or distributing content come into it?
[06:00.890] – Brett Gilliland
Yeah. It’s a great question. I suppose the reason that I’m here is because there’s a very important role that member plays. Actually, our membership site plays in making all of this accessible to people. So we start out with our program. We have a foundational experience called Elite Ignition, and Elite Ignition is where we teach our full method. Well, there’s a lot of content, a lot of examples. And so we have a place on our membership site for Elite Ignition content to sit right. If people want to get that content that’s sitting on our membership site, we deliver that in a group or cohort sort of experience, and we have coaching and things that supplements it.
[06:47.810] – Brett Gilliland
But the membership site becomes an important place for resources, for examples, for a place to house all of the content that we delivered at the most recent event. So the membership site is an important piece to a comprehensive support thing that we’ve created for these businesses. After they go through our foundational program, we’ve got an ongoing membership called Elite Momentum, and the membership site plays an even more important role at that point. So we use it to communicate, keep people current on our upcoming events. We use it to house all of our content and our examples.
[07:31.010] – Brett Gilliland
We have almost eight years now. I know it’s more than seven years worth of it’s just seven years worth of monthly trainings that we’ve recorded every month. We add another recording to that resource, if you will, for our members. So we do a lot of things with the membership site, but it’s primarily to house content for our members to keep them up to date on the things we have coming up for them and how we can best support them. Got you.
[08:01.970] – Micah Mitchell
I’m guessing correct me if I’m wrong, but you’re not typically just trying to sell content online, right? It’s more of a that’s right.
[08:09.590] – Brett Gilliland
That’s right. We don’t use the membership site in an online content. I don’t know why I used the word pure with that. We’re not using it in a pure way where it’s just a standalone site. It’s really part of a larger support strategy for us. So it’s one piece in a multifaceted approach to support our members in their growth.
[08:33.590] – Micah Mitchell
Got you. I actually like that a lot and want to dive more into that because so many people we talked to, they really are trying to hit a home run with their membership site, and they’re not developing maybe some of the other aspects of their business as they could be, and they still have a great business people do amazing things. I’ve just thought more and more that it’s better as a strategic piece to a whole. And that’s what you guys are really doing. How do you let’s say, get people to go in and consume the content because these are typically higher level entrepreneurs and probably time is an issue.
[09:11.510] – Micah Mitchell
So how do you look at that?
[09:13.970] – Brett Gilliland
Yeah. It’s a very observant question. A lot of our members are very busy business owners. One of the things that’s different about how we approach this audience is that we acknowledge and recognize that we’re dealing with busy business owners, and we try to invite them to bring their right hand person along or a key leader in their business so that access to the resources isn’t like the business owners, the gatekeeper to all the goodies. You can’t go to the cookie jar without mom pulling it off the fridge.
[09:55.310] – Brett Gilliland
And we don’t want to do that for our members. So we try to get others involved in the businesses that we serve so that it’s not hidden behind one user on the membership site. So we have other leaders in that business who have access to the resources. And that’s been a key for us to have success in getting usage out of the membership site, because I’m guessing you asked the question because you’ve seen software membership site. It’s only as good as people use, right. Like they’re not using it.
[10:28.430] – Brett Gilliland
They’re not accessing. If they’re not getting value out of it, they don’t want to stick around. And so we all have the challenge of getting people to use it. One of the ways is we involve other team members. Another way we do it is we make it to where some of the information that they want. They can find it in their email, but they can always find it on the membership site. It’s like a go to place for things we have coming up. So if it were just a repository of content from the past, it wouldn’t be quite as effective.
[11:03.590] – Brett Gilliland
But it’s not only a repository of great content where they can go and get help, but it’s also a place for them to see announcements or upcoming events and things that are looking forward. So we use it that way also got you.
[11:19.190] – Micah Mitchell
Yeah. That makes sense. And I think I might be your worst case scenario where I was a client of yours, and I didn’t quite understand all the things that were included in my membership level. So I know you have a lot of different membership levels, and the reason I say I’m the worst case is I don’t always read my emails or pay attention. Right.
[11:40.070] – Micah Mitchell
There’s probably more people like me out there. So how do you work to break through that? And especially when you’re dealing with a team, make sure you’re communicating across that team. Because I know a lot of people who are working B to B they probably do have a similar one person purchased the product. Another might use it. Whether that’s the owner who purchased it for someone else or, however, it’s working. What are some effective ways to communicate to a team rather than just like one user? Yeah.
[12:13.070] – Brett Gilliland
I wish I had a great answer for that, Micah. What I would say is in most cases, we enroll more than one team member from the start. Right. So it’s not just the business owner. Like I said earlier, there are partners or there’s a business owner and a key team member, or sometimes even a whole leadership team that we’re taking through the process from the start. So we try to enroll more than just one that has been really key for us. And then on the communication front, we’ve created a Facebook group for our alumni.
[12:51.390] – Brett Gilliland
Anybody who’s been through our foundational program can have access to this Facebook group, and we’re posting things on social. So just like anything where you’re trying to communicate and get in front of people in this really noisy world of ours, we’re using email. We’re using social. We’re using our membership site. If somebody attends one of our coaching calls that I do group coaching calls three times a month where we’re just in front of our members, helping them with their challenges. So I’m bringing up things that are happening.
[13:24.570] – Brett Gilliland
I’m pointing them to the membership site. So it’s just an ongoing communication thing that we’re doing to try to win that battle. And even then, sometimes in your own experience, not all the communication was going to you that would have helped you see everything that was available. Sometimes we do hand to hand combat where we’re calling and networking and doing all the things that we all try to do to get our message heard. Yeah.
[13:55.830] – Micah Mitchell
You said a couple of things there. First of all, when you talked about enrolling the team earlier, getting other team members on board early. I had an interesting experience with you guys recently where I was trying to re enroll in a program. And it was interesting that Stephanie on your team came back and said, Well, here’s what we’d like. We’d like this type of commitment in order to be in at this price, which is great because it really made me think.
[14:22.230] – Micah Mitchell
Okay. I need to be ready to go in and consume the content. And I think the issue the first time was I had not logged into the membership site. Or at least I wasn’t in the habit of logging in, which is totally my issue. So I’m saying I’m the worst case, but it’s my fault, right? So I’m the bad client who it’s difficult to get through to. But I think what you did there and having there be a little bit of a bar to entry to get a different level of commitment, for example, out of me for that was really smart.
[14:54.310] – Micah Mitchell
Can you talk a little bit about what are some of the requirements for the different program levels so that you’re making sure you’re delivering to a certain type of client who wants to be there and wants information. What are some of your requirements?
[15:08.590] – Brett Gilliland
Yeah, well, that came as a hard earned lesson, because just like a lot of businesses that have a monthly membership, right with your product, I could pay a certain amount monthly, or I could choose to pay for the year and get a discount. There’s an incentive for me to pay up front, but now I’m committed for the full year because I paid that. So we’re not a software product, but we are a recurring membership payment kind of business. So what are the principles involved? You got to get people committed.
[15:52.130] – Brett Gilliland
We didn’t ever want to be a contract kind of business. I don’t want to lock people in outside their will where they just don’t really want it, but they’re stuck. I never want to do that. I want it to be based on value or delivering, but we went too far the other way where we said, hey, you don’t have to make any kind of commitment. It’s just month to month. And what we found was busy business owners like yourself who just get swept away in the current off doing their thing.
[16:22.050] – Brett Gilliland
And it doesn’t take more than a couple of months of paying for something that you’re not using regularly for you to question, why am I doing this? We’re trying to increase the personal commitment that members have coming in to their own success, not commitment to us, commitment to their own success. And so we’re actually creating this quarter as part of our quarterly priorities. It’s not a purchase contract, but it’s like a personal commitment kind of contract that we’re going to write up and design so that people coming in can go.
[17:01.790] – Brett Gilliland
Am I really ready for this? Because nobody does this business scaling work that we teach in a month or three months or six months. Right. This is usually a twelve to 18 month endeavor to get real value. And by the way, it’s not uncommon for people to double or even triple with us in their business, their revenue in 1824 months. That’s pretty cool, but it’s not a one and done type of thing. It’s ongoing growth and development, and it just takes time. And so we’re trying to get better at helping people see that upfront and make the commitment to themselves, and we can incentivize them to do that a little bit from a financial standpoint on the front end.
[17:50.690] – Brett Gilliland
We’re happy to do that because we know it’s going to yield better results for them, which means a longer term customer for us probably means opportunities for referrals and other purchases down the road. That’s just better for everyone. That was a long winded answer, but hopefully there’s something there that some of your listeners can learn from.
[18:13.910] – Micah Mitchell
I think it’s so valuable. Like you said, you learned it the hard way. Most people don’t really do that, and they might do a little bit of a take away like, oh, well, if you don’t buy it by this time, it might not be available or a different price. But the actual getting them to commit, like you’re saying to their own success is I think what a lot more people could take advantage of and some do it. Well, when somebody comes into a membership site, helping them create their goals and different things like that is a tactic.
[18:45.230] – Micah Mitchell
But I think your overall approach is really valuable. And again, seeing people actually get up and say, hey, it’s difficult. It takes a while. But I just trusted the process. And they were saying stuff like, I doubled or tripled or more in several of those cases their revenue. And it’s interesting, I think, to be in your shoes and see that value and then see the other person questioning, should I really commit to this? And it’s like, well, I mean, what else are you going to do?
[19:15.830] – Micah Mitchell
But you have to break through all the other people who have told them they’re going to help them double or triple or whatever in two months with no effort versus you’re saying, yeah, you’re going to put an effort you’re going to put in time. But it’s a real result. One of the things that I think was an email that came to me from Stephanie about re enrollment as well that I thought was interesting. She said, what you guys are doing or teaching is a practice. It’s not something that you learn.
[19:45.050] – Micah Mitchell
And then, you know, it’s more of a practice and ongoing continuous improvement sort of thing. And. These are such simple things. But I guess I’ve been out of the game for a while. And so a lot of these little nuances make me think there’s probably so many businesses who do think of their content as I’m going to sell you this, you’re going to download it into your brain transaction done, but probably more likely for everyone listening. It really is more like what Brett’s doing, where the person needs to repeat, refresh kind of Hone in what you’re teaching them over time. Let’s say somebody’s in it for a long time and they are getting results.
[20:25.550] – Micah Mitchell
But maybe the content is just boring, right? Because it’s kind of the same thing over and over, or at least in the different categories. It’s the same message until it gets into their head.
[20:36.470] – Micah Mitchell
What do you guys do? Seven years or six years or whatever of monthly webinars. Where is all this content coming from? Or are you presenting things in different ways?
[20:46.790] – Brett Gilliland
Yeah, that’s a great question. And I hope this helps somebody, because again, maybe we just kind of stumbled on this. The idea of getting customer input is not new at all, but maybe the way we implemented that idea will be useful to somebody. So about a year and a half ago, it was actually right around COVID. COVID invited us all to take a hard look at a lot of things we were doing, right. And you realized, as a business owner, I got to ensure that we are hyper relevant, way more relevant than I ever felt like I needed to be.
[21:22.550] – Brett Gilliland
We might have always had a good product or a good service with great outcomes. But relevance was like the name of the game. If it didn’t matter to people during that really difficult time, then it just wasn’t going to be on somebody’s radar to be involved with us. So we learned that relevance was way up there in our list of figuring out what we needed to do, who we needed to be. And so we created a customer advisory board. We said, hey, here’s eight or ten of our very best customers.
[21:52.190] – Brett Gilliland
We called them the Elite Customer Advisory Board. And we said, we don’t want to crank out content every month just to make ourselves feel good. We want to put stuff together that’s really relevant to you right now. What are you guys struggling with? What do you want to hear about? And so every quarter now, for the last year and a half, we’ve been asking our customers in this customer advisory board. We’ll tee it up. We won’t start with a blank canvas. We’ll say, hey, we’re thinking based on working with all of you here’s what would be important?
[22:25.610] – Brett Gilliland
What do you think? Right? And they’ll say, oh, yeah, you’re spot on with that one, or you’re way off with that one or here’s another one. You didn’t even bring up that we would really like right now. And so we’re asking our users. In essence, we’re saying, users, what do you want to see? And they’re telling us. So I think any good product manager out there, and I’m not a good product manager, but any good product manager out there would say, Go talk to your customer, figure out what the user experience needs to be for them to get what they need and then go make those changes, go make it happen.
[22:59.690] – Brett Gilliland
We’ve really done a lot of that recently.
[23:03.710] – Micah Mitchell
Got you. Like you said, it’s not a new concept, but I would guess most people do not have a customer advisory board. I don’t I feel like.
[23:14.270] – Brett Gilliland
Oh, and you could, right. I mean, you have all these great customers. Why not grab your most? And it’s not just your most loyal ones. Sometimes it’s the ones who are most vocal. Like, we have some that are just loyal and they’re like family almost to us. But that’s not the full group. Some of them are just the most vocal. And when we deliver an event or a training, and this person in particular that I’m thinking about says, you know what? I’m going to give you some feedback.
[23:42.230] – Brett Gilliland
And here’s what I noticed that wasn’t great or I thought this was good, but this could be better. And if you have a few of those and I’m not talking about the squeaky wheel customers that nobody likes to deal with, I’m talking about very thoughtful customers who are willing to tell you their mind to tell you where you’re not doing. Well. That has been hugely valuable to us. And so we get some of those customers. We get a mix of new customers, a mix of old customers.
[24:11.810] – Brett Gilliland
And for sure, we want these types that are willing to speak up when they see something that they don’t think is good.
[24:19.010] – Micah Mitchell
I love it. Some of these questions might be selfish just for me. I think it is helpful to everybody, for sure. And the little nuances like you’re saying, new and old customers. And somebody vocal very helpful.
[24:31.850] – Brett Gilliland
I’m sure there are some people in your mind that are just kind of you’re thinking of your own customers going, yeah, this person, this person.
[24:39.350] – Micah Mitchell
Yeah. Exactly. Tell me. And maybe for those who aren’t yet familiar with your whole framework, you did mention at the beginning, the ones and the threes maybe could you show us your membership site and maybe just kind of explain, like, okay, well, somebody who is at this level of business, we can’t help. And here’s how we just choose whether or not we can help them and nicely tell them or somebody at this level, they should buy this program. So how do your program split up across different. We’ll call it revenue levels of businesses out there.
[25:15.470] – Brett Gilliland
Okay. Fantastic. I will do that. So hitting share. Now let me know if you can see my membership site. Okay. Can you see that, Micah?
[25:25.790] – Micah Mitchell
Yes. It looks good. Go ahead.
[25:27.530] – Brett Gilliland
Okay. Is my audio okay still?
[25:29.210] – Micah Mitchell
It is. Yeah.
[25:33.230] – Brett Gilliland
Wonderful. Okay. So this is the view that our customers, our members would see. This header up here is just my membership site login or my WordPress login, so you probably wouldn’t see that. But.
[25:50.690] – Brett Gilliland
I talked a little bit earlier about Elite Ignition, that’s our foundational event and Elite Ignition replaced Elite Forum. So before the Pandemic, Elite Forum was a two day intensive experience, like a boot camp style type of thing where we shared all of our content in two days and people paid ten grand for it. And it was an investment and time and money, and it was a big jolt of energy and content. The Pandemic invited us to pivot on that and rethink the way we delivered that. So now we deliver it in a session called Elite Ignition.
[26:29.810] – Brett Gilliland
Now, Elite Ignition is a $3,000 price point. It’s not ten days a lot easier to get started with us. In fact, you can sign up for $299 on our website to attend Elite Ignition, and then you finish paying for it if you like what you’re experiencing. Anyway, the reason I mention that is we don’t have an Elite Ignition tab because it’s not an ongoing membership. It’s just a one month experience where they come to a two hour Zoom meeting once a week for four weeks, and then between Zoom calls, we have a 1 hour coaching session with them individually.
[27:09.650] – Brett Gilliland
So it’s group teaching individual coaching for that course of a month when they’re done with that. If they sign up for Elite Momentum, then they get access to all of these things. So we have our program details that talk about it before I go there, though, I mentioned we have announcements like upcoming events, and for some reason, our September event, which was last month, is still up here. So that shouldn’t say September should say November. But then we have a momentum event coming up in November, and we have a mastermind event that happened a couple of weeks ago, so this has to be updated, but all of our upcoming stuff gets put here.
[27:50.930] – Brett Gilliland
We have a little business health assessment for our members to check in on how their business is doing. They just want to go and see the assessment. We’ve got a little video around it and we’ve got some questions here to help them. All of those monthly webinars I told you about their monthly trainings. Those are housed here. So there’s some general information, including, how do you get to our podcast? Well, we have a podcast and you can access it from the site here, blog posts and then way down here at the bottom if they want to join our Elite Forum Alumni Facebook page.
[28:26.990] – Brett Gilliland
So anybody who’s been through our foundational program can go join that Facebook page and have a few hundred people there that they can interact with on any topics that are relevant to the seven figure growth journey. So all of this content that we share via this site is really for the million dollar plus journey. Now, if they’re not in a million yet, they’ve been to our website, which is growwithelite.com. If they’ve been to our website and they think I really like what they have. I like their content, but I’m not in a million dollars yet.
[29:04.970] – Brett Gilliland
How can I get started? We have a program called Elite Access, which is not meant to be a down sell per se. It’s really meant to be a starter for those who aren’t ready for our real thing. So Lead Access is kind of a do it yourself version of our material, so no live training. There is some group coaching opportunities so they can consume the content and go to implement it. Then if they have challenges, they can go to one of the group coaching sessions. So there’s a little timeline in there recommendation for how to get started and how to move through it.
[29:41.750] – Brett Gilliland
They can access the content and then they can go to group coaching calls twice a month to get help. So this would be our not at a million yet, but can see the value of what we teach and they want to get started on that journey. This is what they would do. And so they could buy a monthly membership to lead Access. Once they do that, though, they’re going to want to move up into once they get to a million, though, they’re going to want to come to Elite Ignition and then join Elite Momentum, which is our ongoing program.
[30:14.990] – Brett Gilliland
So because they can’t see you. Micah, I’m looking at my screen and not you. I can’t see body language. I can’t see if you want to ask a question. Do you want to interject with anything?
[30:25.370] – Micah Mitchell
At this point, I was totally fidgeting and losing attention. I guess what I would wonder is when somebody’s coming in, if you have, for example, my team, I’ve got multiple people on the team Besides me who log in. Do they get different things in here? How does that work?
[30:48.150] – Brett Gilliland
Yeah. So the permissions are all based on the membership level for the business. So if you become an Elite Momentum member, your login would be available to anybody on your team to come in here and consume all the Elite Momentum stuff for your team. I don’t know if we want to get into. I don’t think it matters so much of what our specific content is, but I would like to point out a few things that I think will help some of the member customers and how they think about this.
[31:24.870] – Brett Gilliland
So one of our problems, we have so much content that it’s hard to access for our members. All the stuff that we have. So what we did was start to put together resource pages, and I think this is a cool strategy. So resource pages like the Elite Hiring Gauntlet, you see that one in particular, got a tab level spot for it. But there are other ones, like onboarding resources for when you go to hire somebody or performance and development resources. So we found that if we were to theme and organize content based on member needs, like, I’m going to hire somebody.
[32:03.270] – Brett Gilliland
I need some help with hiring. Then they go to the Elite Hiring Gauntlet and they find on that page a little bit of intro about what might be there, how to make the most of this hiring training. And then there’s a little video to help with that. And then here are all the resources mindset. Here’s the execution around the hiring. Here’s some bonus material. Right. So before we created that they could find all this stuff on our membership site, but it might have been harder to find.
[32:34.170] – Brett Gilliland
And so anything you can do to organize the content in ways that your customers are thinking about it or will be searching for it. And maybe all of your other users are way more advanced than we were because we just organized them by here’s all our trading videos, and you can go there.
[32:52.170]
Right.
[32:52.770] – Brett Gilliland
And here’s all our past events, and you can go there. Well, nobody wants to comb through a bunch of past stuff, even though it’s valuable, but they would search for topics, and so they might go, I need something for onboarding my new hires. What resources do you have for that? So I don’t know if that’s useful, but that was a good usage boost for us was to make these very subject oriented thing, subject oriented pages that would help our members get more access to this stuff.
[33:25.410] – Micah Mitchell
This is way useful. I think you guys are. Well, you’ve been around several years with this. So you’re a very mature membership site where you’ve, I think, been through the initial stage, and that is, I think, where most people start is, oh, here’s a training library, like, they just kind of pile things in because they don’t have very much stuff. It’s not hard to find things in there, but where you have so much stuff over so long, I think this is a really great tip that is probably overlooked.
[33:53.250] – Micah Mitchell
Like I said, just how are they searching for it? What is their use case and then organizing the content into those sections to make it more useful? It’s simple, but so great.
[34:04.950] – Brett Gilliland
And there’s some things that we could learn from you and your product team. I’m sure your support team. But we had to do things like put Elite Hiring Gauntlet and the Elite fault up here because we sold some things that came. These came as bonuses, but it was hidden and not hidden. It’s included here in Elite Momentum. But we couldn’t give those users access to all this stuff. They weren’t buying Elite Momentum. They were buying something else where they got access to the hiring gauntlet, or they got access to the Elite Vault, which is our seven years of training videos.
[34:43.750] – Brett Gilliland
If we got really creative and kept offering new things, this approach to making it accessible to people probably isn’t the best practice, but that’s the reason that we have kind of a mix between program levels. Elite Access, Elite Form, Elite Momentum, Elite Mastermind with membership levels. And then we have these two resources in particular at that same level because we didn’t know how else to give access to them without giving membership access to other things. So we’re still novices that way. But that’s why you see sort of the cluttered navigation menu like that.
[35:23.890] – Micah Mitchell
Well, it’s good. You’re human.
[35:25.870] – Micah Mitchell
I think probably anybody’s site, some other expert is going to come in and be like, oh, you can do this and this and this. And once you think about it, it’s like, oh, yeah, I should do that. It’s pretty obvious. One question I have for you. Well, there’s a couple, but one is it seems like as you’re talking about the programs, there are a lot of calls included. So do you feel like as a business, you guys are doing a ton of calls, or have you done something to make that more efficient.
[35:54.170] – Micah Mitchell
How does that work for you guys?
[35:56.210] – Brett Gilliland
Yeah. So as a membership driven business, right? Our business is a membership driven thing. The membership site is one aspect to the strategy for how we serve those members like you talked about earlier, that’s really clear for us. Our business is not this site. This site supports what we’re doing for our members, and we know that our members need a little bit more help than just a site. I do a group coaching call three times a month and a training call once a month. So Tuesdays at 02:00 p.m..
[36:33.950] – Brett Gilliland
Eastern, you always know where to find me. Four weeks. If there’s a fifth Tuesday, I take it off. But the first four Tuesdays of the month, I’m either doing a group coaching call or a training call, one training a month and three group coaching calls. So that’s my way of saying members, you have access to me, don’t go it alone, don’t suffer in silence. Come get help. And so we do that. We also have peer groups. So we say, hey, members, you have value just in connecting with one another.
[37:03.830] – Brett Gilliland
Why would you always have to come to us to find out what time it is? You guys can tell each other what time it is, too to use Jim Collins Build the clock analogy. You don’t want to be the time teller all the time. So, yes, I make myself available four times a month, once a week for our members. But the other times, we still want them engaging, and we want them getting help that they need so they can get that through the Facebook group. They can post a question there and anybody in the community can answer and they can do it.
[37:33.350] – Brett Gilliland
We facilitate a peer group call once a month. So, Micah, when you’re part of elite momentum, you get paired up with six or eight or ten other business owners. And once a month, you guys get on a call together and you’re accountable to each other, and you have access to each other for best practices and questions all around this elite material. Right.
[37:59.210] – Brett Gilliland
So we’re trying to supplement and it’s really not supplementing the membership site. Again, the membership site is one piece for us. We do training, we’re pretty heavy on training, and then the membership site supplements, and we do these group coaching calls and the peer groups so that our members get all the support they need with the material. And.
[38:23.450] – Brett Gilliland
I know there are some membership sites out there that are standalone, and they do a great business. But I think any membership or any content that is more longer term in nature where it’s not a more simple thing to grasp and we’re just one and done more transactional with it. But if it’s an ongoing thing that they need to be growing and learning and implementing over time, I don’t think the membership site is a good standalone thing. I think you have to supplement with other ways to help your members.
[38:55.970] – Micah Mitchell
Yeah, for sure. And I know from experiencing it with you guys that you’re on all fronts, including also personal calls. It’s like, hey, if you need to schedule your own one on one, go ahead. And it’s really impressive that you offer that level of service in all these different ways. Some of your content, I’m guessing, comes from live events, not just Webinars, but do you record the interactions in person as well?
[39:21.050] – Brett Gilliland
Yeah. So in our live events, if you’re Elite Momentum member. So you asked a good question a long time ago. I didn’t answer it clearly. Elite Access is for people who just want to do it themselves. They just want membership site with opportunity for some group coaching questions twice a month. So two of those three group coaching calls I talked about our Elite Access members can come to those. So do it yourself, mostly. But still, some acknowledgement that they might get stuck. So come get some group coaching, then Elite Momentum is for our members who are in the one to 3 million range.
[39:56.810] – Brett Gilliland
It’s really one to 10 million. But once they’re at 3,000,003 to ten, then they’re eligible to join our Elite Mastermind group. So that’s how we ascend people, right? That’s a common thing in a membership site. And then we have events. If you’re an Elite Mastermind member, you get access to everything to the left in our membership site. If you’re an Elite Momentum member, you get access to everything to the left. If you’re an Elite Access member, you just get Elite Access. And if you get these other bonuses by signing up for something that we have, then you can get access to these two things as well.
[40:33.170] – Brett Gilliland
But forum Momentum mastermind, these are all things that are additive at higher levels of membership. And the event happens for our Momentum members and our mastermind members. Okay. So because Mastermind members get access to Elite Momentum, everything, I’m just going to show it to you here. But the event content for Elite Momentum is all captured here. The most recent event was an event in August where we talked about leadership development. So every year we have four themed events. In February, we do customer acquisition and customer success in May, we do higher lead and fire to division in August.
[41:14.810] – Brett Gilliland
We do leadership development in November. We do strategic and financial planning and execution. And you can see for the past seven years, we have those events here. If you expand that, you’ll see the agenda, you’ll see the recorded sessions for each one of those. So today, if somebody signed up for Elite Momentum, they would have seven years worth of our events to go through and mine for gold if they want it. Now, you know as well as I do membership sites that have all this overwhelming amounts of content never actually fully get consumed.
[41:52.490] – Brett Gilliland
But the day that you have a specific question about a specific topic. You can go to our I’m going to find this. I promise.
[42:08.550] – Brett Gilliland
All docs, and we have a way to search for all the documents that we have in our membership site so you can search up here hiring and anything that has the word hiring in it is going to come up here all of our resources. Now. We’re not as sophisticated as pulling in all of our event content into that search, but you can go through the if it fits under the theme Higher Lead and Fire to the Vision. It wouldn’t take long to click through each year and just click through the Higher Lead and fire to the Vision event and scan through the topics and speakers and see if what you need is there got you.
[42:51.150] – Micah Mitchell
It’s amazing. I like the layout here with the years going most recent on the left and past on the right and the way those popped down. It’s a really cool way to actually fit a lot of content into a page a lot of years, but make it not seem overwhelming, not seem watered down because it’s not all being presented at once. I like that.
[43:15.610] – Micah Mitchell
I think you’ve shown a lot. I think it’s really cool. And I guess I just want to ask, are there any other things about your membership site that you want to share before I come to kind of a final two part question?
[43:31.450] – Brett Gilliland
I have team members that manage this stuff. I’m not an expert in executing it. I’ve already said it a couple of times. I’ll just reiterate question yourself on whether or not your membership site is actually a standalone thing. If it’s a standalone thing and you can grow a great business that you’re happy with as a standalone thing. Awesome.
[43:55.810] – Brett Gilliland
But for us in our type of business, it makes a ton of sense as an important one, important facet to our overall strategy for delivering value to our members, and they find it to be an important piece to the overall picture. But it wouldn’t be a standalone piece for our members. And I think the more we try to outsource supporting people through membership site, the more we’re going to find churn problems, less than very satisfied clients, fewer referrals, all the things that we don’t want. We’ll probably find that if we just rely too heavily on a membership site to deliver value for us.
[44:40.690] – Micah Mitchell
Yeah, I think that’s total gospel making it part of an overall strategy makes so much more sense. So final question for you, and then we’ll talk a little bit after that. But I want you to kind of oversimplify this, and I know you can because you’ve been around these different growth models where there’s all these different stages, but to over simplify it. What is the main thing somebody needs to be focused on before and then after the million dollar Mark to oversimplify it.
[45:11.770] – Brett Gilliland
The journey from zero to a million is all about figuring out how to get and keep customers. Okay, you might be like, isn’t that the journey the whole way? No. How do I get and keep customers primarily with a Doer hat on as a founder, as the entrepreneur, as a business owner, how do I get leads consistently? How do I sell? How do I fulfill on our product or service that we just sold in a way that’s consistent and the quality levels where it needs to be.
[45:42.910] – Brett Gilliland
All of that is to lead up to the point where I’ve now got a steady operation. I’ve got a legitimate thing and I break into that million dollar Mark and I celebrate having done it. And then I realize, oh, I built this thing around me primarily, and to oversimplify it, the one to 10 million journey is all about figuring out how to go from doer to leader from superhuman entrepreneur. Throw it on my back. Will it forward? Figure it out to set a vision, build a team that can execute on that vision and build the systems and processes the business building work that will allow us to scale, to get and serve even more customers.
[46:24.190] – Brett Gilliland
At first, we’re trying to figure out how to get and serve customers, period. Then we’re trying to figure out how to do that at scale, and it’s a different game. As long as your business requires you to build the team to scale. If you’re an information product only a membership site only, and you got two or three people and you can grow that thing to two or 3 million and you have a lifestyle business, then everything I said, you can just ignore. But if your business requires you to grow the team to keep growing, keep going.
[46:55.270] – Brett Gilliland
Then everything I said applies directly to you.
[46:59.470] – Micah Mitchell
I knew you’d have a great answer, but that was beautiful. And I would say even those people who have a good lifestyle membership site business, it would be wise of them to add other dimensions to it, because that can come and go. We’ve both seen over the years if it is only a membership site and that for whatever reason goes out of fashion, you don’t have those other things, right? So I think very strategic and wise. Brett, thank you so much for joining us. So tell us the name of your website again.
[47:26.350] – Micah Mitchell
It’s growwithelite.com, right?
[47:28.570] – Brett Gilliland
GrowWithElite. Yeah, our business is elite entrepreneurs, but that’s a horrible URL. So we just went with GrowWithElite Perfect.
[47:37.810] – Micah Mitchell
And we’ll include some links out of the video, but I would encourage everybody. I’m a client of theirs. I’ve been a client in the past and just go in and check it out. Even if you’re not at that million dollar Mark, it might be good to check out some of the basics or to see what you can find from them, because I think it is still applicable I mean, at least for me, we were doing at the level we could a lot of the things you teach even before a million.
[48:01.870] – Micah Mitchell
It was still useful. So it’s not like it’s not useful until a million.
[48:06.010] – Brett Gilliland
It’s totally relevant at any stage, but the challenges from zero to one. It’s all about figuring out how to get the customer sales. It’s marketing. It’s fulfillment. Those things take center stage, and I acknowledge it. But all the stuff we teach absolutely useful and will help you pre 1 million. But it becomes the barrier. After a million, it becomes a barrier to continue growth. Wonderful.
[48:30.490] – Micah Mitchell
Well, thank you so much, Brett. I really appreciate it. And everybody out there go to GrowWithElite.Com to check these guys out.
[48:37.630] – Brett Gilliland
Thanks, Micah. It was a pleasure. Thanks.
