How “Scalable.co” Serves Higher End Members…

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In part 2 of the Memberium case study, Richard Lindner (Co-founder of DM) and Taylor Nelson (all-around genius, possible Jedi) discuss Scalable.co where they’ve customized the site to create a unique experience for their members to evaluate their business and compare that with team member evaluations to drive alignment and clarity.

Scalable.co assists entrepreneurs in developing operating systems that allow them to scale their businesses properly. Scalable.co, which was officially launched in the fourth quarter of 2020, offers programs to help you grow, systemize, and scale.

In this second part of the case study, you will learn more about the various Scalable frameworks that help entrepreneurs determine which initiatives to focus on to grow their business & keep their team aligned.

Here are some of the key points covered in the video:

•  The 7-level Masterclass – the quickest way to go from a struggling start-up to a profitable business.
•  Scalability Score and Scale Constraints
•  Sales Profit Value (SPV) – Transferable Value

 

Important Lessons & Highlights Shared In This Video

 

[00:01:03] Is scalable an outgrowth of Digital Marketer or does it have its separate customer acquisition system?

Richard Linder explains how Scalable.co‘s acquisition system is unique and distinct from Digital Marketer. Scalable is heavy on assessments and less on the coming in on specific lead magnet, buy something small and ascend rather, it’s more on assessment to consult. 

[00:03:08] Richard discusses Level 7 Masterclass, a framework proven to work to guide entrepreneurs on how you should scale your business, how you leverage your wealth and your knowledge and considers this to be the Customer Value Journey of Scalable

We have seven levels of scale. A framework that we walk entrepreneurs through to figure out how you go from that proof of concept idea up into this level of going through the five exits of an entrepreneur and no longer a startup founder or an entrepreneurial operator but rather an entrepreneurial investor. How to leverage not only wealth that has come from the business but also the knowledge and network to enable others and grow wealth and portfolio.

The seven levels are kind of where everything maps back to scalable. This is the Customer Value Journey for Scalable. For Digital Marketer, It’s the simplicity of that as a roadmap and the overarching framework for Scalable.

[00:04:10] Richard goes on to say that the majority of the journey begins with the Scalability score, which identifies the eight scale constraints.

Most of the journey starts with our scalability. The scalability score identifies the eight scale constraints and gives you a score, an opportunity score on each one that goes seamlessly into one of our strategy sessions, which is how people would usually either join one of the live cohort-based accelerators for our scalable operating system or if they qualify joined founders, board, or founders, board X.

[00:04:43] Taylor displays the Scalability Scores, and Richard discusses them further.

It’s a cool integration with the score app as well as Keap and also pulling this through with Memberium shortcodes that pull the key contact fields. These are all custom fields that are set up inside of Keap, and it’s pulling these so the same results show on the thank you page of the actual assessment and re-show them here for that user. And this is inside of a member’s account.

[00:08:10] Taylor showed the group accounts and the importance of obtaining the scalability scores of the Founder/CEO/Owner as well as the Key Team Members 

Umbrella account was set up in two ways and this is all using custom fields. You can see the score. You can view the progress. It was really important not only to get the primary account holder, the founder, and the CEO scalability score. As part of clarity, it is important to have the scalability scores of the key team members as well.

Founders Board allows you to add up to 7 key team members and one of the things done in onboarding and through account management is to get those team members to take the assessment. Those then are all linked in the primary account so each team member can see their assessment.

The primary account holder can see everyone’s assessment and that’s when breakthroughs happen. As a founder, everybody in the team understands exactly what we’re doing. The direction, business model, and product line are very clear. 

[00:10:04] Richard describes how scalable.co became a diagnostic and prescriptive tool not just for them or account managers but customers as well.

Having the assessment, having it as an individual, and being able to see the difference, the progression, and change is a great way to self-report growth.

Seeing it as a team is a way to allow us to be more prescriptive and to drive people to training or conversations or tools, whether it’s communications or capital or strategy that’s lacking. It becomes a diagnostic and prescriptive tool for us, our account managers, and frankly, our customers to use.

[00:18:24] Richard and Taylor shows how the Tools and Trainings have been classified

Tools and training don’t follow the same search categories. There’s SPV or Sales Profit Value. Bankable profits, Leverage sales, and transferable Value. These are the categories that training falls into. There is also the actual category and search by topic or type of training. There are the courses, on-demand, accelerators that are typically cohort-based. 

 

Full Video Transcript

 

[00:00:00] Micah Mitchell: Welcome back to part 2 of the Digital Marketer case study, where we get to see their second site, scalable.co. In case you missed part one of the case study, where we look at digitalmarketer.com, you can find that link under this video. But right now you’re about to see some really cool membership functionality that they built to serve a higher-end user. And these guys have the smarts and the resources to do almost whatever they want, so pay attention to what they chose to do for their membership site. Hope you enjoy the video.

[00:00:33] Micah Mitchell: Let’s jump over to Scalable if you’re ready and I’ll explain my experience first, but maybe then, Richard, you can elaborate on this a little bit, So I was, you know, taking courses and doing things and buying courses for my team and even for other people, sometimes when they needed stuff from Digital Marketer and from my memory, I basically got an email about the event itself, the Scalable impact lives and went to that and then there, they were basically saying, Hey, you can join this founder’s board. So I did that. And so my question is Scalable an outgrowth of Digital Marketer or does it have its own separate customer acquisition system?

[00:01:13] Richard Lindner: Yes and yes. So, you know, we like to, we like to be one, you know, kind of one step removed if we’re gonna go into another market. We like to have a bit of competitive advantage and be able to at least tap the database that we have, right? This isn’t far enough removed to believe that, you know, we don’t have founders and people like yourself that are on the Digital Marketer list, that there are times where you needed to put on your marketing hat and that’s what growth looked like, you know, it was our natural journey. So, it does, Scalable was stood up by Digital Marketer, right? The first place we went to launch it, especially for proof of concept was the Digital Marketer list. I think we officially launched the Scalable kind of Q4 of 2020. Right. So that was kinda the official beta launch, of the scalable.  

Now, I mean, scalable has got its own. All of our companies are on their own PNLs, we have a mix of a dedicated team and shared resources, from accounting and HR, overall like growth and we have a specialized growth team, and then we have our, you know, our tech Rev-ops basically. So scalable is acquisition model, is its own, it’s very different than Digital Marketer. You know, we’re, about to release one of three books. That’ll be a big deal. Scalable is pretty heavy on assessments. So less of the, come in on specific lead magnet buy something small, ascend, it’s more assessment to consult, right? Again, keeping with that, you know, the higher price point, it takes a very different sales membership. Now we still do have, some, one funnel that is a little lower on the purchase price. 

At scalable, you can see here, our level seven masterclass. We have seven levels of scale. It’s kind of a framework that we walk, entrepreneurs through to figure out how you go from kind of that proof of concept idea up into this, you know, I’ve now kind of gone through the five exits of an entrepreneur and I’m no longer a startup founder, I’m no longer an entrepreneurial operator. I’m an entrepreneurial investor. So how do I leverage not only my wealth that has, you know, come from my business but also my knowledge and my network to enable others and grow my wealth, grow my portfolio. So the seven levels is kind of where everything maps back to at Scalable and, really we wanna make sure that is kind of the CVJ, right? If you think of the customer value journey for Digital Marketer, the simplicity of that as a roadmap, and the overarching framework, we have that for Scalable. 

So we wanted to bring that down, in accessibility reduced friction. So we have our seven levels report and that goes into the seven-level masterclass, which is a direct purchase online, but really for Scalable, most of the journey starts with our scalability score, right? Our scalability score identifies the eight scale constraints and gives you a score, an opportunity score on each one. And that really goes seamlessly into one of our strategy sessions which is how people would usually either join one of our live cohort-based accelerators, for our scalable operating system. Or, if they qualify joined founders, board, or founders board X. 

[00:04:41] Micah Mitchell: Gotcha.

[00:04:43] Richard Lindner: Taylor, can you show the scalability score?

[00:04:45] Taylor Nelson: Yes

[00:04:46] Richard Lindner: Cause that’s a really cool integration that we have, with score app, but we’ve also pulled it in through Keap and Infusionsoft and then pulled it in and we’re displaying it through I think we’re pulling it in through, I don’t know, look at me about to say have a technical explanation. 

[00:05:03] Taylor Nelson: We’re actually pulling this through with shortcodes again, Memberium shortcodes that pull the Keap contact fields. So these are all custom fields we have set up inside of Keap, and it’s pulling these from here so we can get the same results that they get on the thank you page of the actual assessment and re-show them here for that user.

[00:05:20] Richard Lindner: And this is inside of a member’s account. And we can also show a record. We encourage all of our members, all of our clients to retake this score every quarter, right? Because we believe that this is kind of like, you know, a golf game for you golfers out there, like you never, just finally I’m good at everything, right? If you’re a golfer, you know, like putting chipping, you know, driving whatever.  

There’s always something that you need to work on, kind of here where we focus and we get clarity up. Maybe demand goes down or we focus on demand, and clarity went down because no one really understands why we changed. So, we encouraged our members to retake this every quarter as part of their quarterly sprint planning, their strategic planning to figure out not only what initiatives they need to focus on growing their company, but what initiative they need to focus on, internal communication, right.

And Taylor was able to code something. using, I believe magic or wizardry. You guys may call it code. I’m pretty sure it’s wizardry, to where he’s got a record of all and, you can click through of your previous scores and kind of show that progression. 

[00:06:30] Micah Mitchell: I was gonna say based on his profile picture, I would guess he was using the force.

[00:06:35] Richard Lindner: Yeah.

[00:06:36] Taylor Nelson: To be honest, I forgot this was my test profile picture. So I guess I’ll delete it here right now.

[00:06:43] Micah Mitchell: So I have a question, a little bit technical and nerdy, but if you say you’re storing this in custom fields, how do you show a history? Cuz isn’t the custom field overwritten. 

[00:06:52] Taylor Nelson: It is, so what we do is I’m actually using Zapier for it. So we have this here and this is obviously like the progression of scores. But, so all I’m doing is Zapier there so when they submit it, I’m taking that this string of results that, and they’re all separated by commas, and then just depending on the new ones after. And then, and here I’m using JavaScript just to say paper for each comma, make a new line.

And then when you get to like the delineator, then you go to the next one and the next one, but it’s all pulling from the same custom field. So it’s just a big text area. It contains all of these numbers. And then we, we put it in place like this.

[00:07:28] Micah Mitchell: Very cool, gotcha.

[00:07:30] Richard Lindner: So that’s how I would’ve done it too.

[00:07:33] Micah Mitchell: Yeah, I know that’s what you are about to say.

No, this is really cool because, you know, you talk about how the two are different. And, I know you’ve got like quizzing and stuff after people take courses on the DM site, but it’s almost like on the DM site, you already know what the issues and the solutions are and they just have to partake. Whereas over here, it’s a bit more complex. Businesses are all a bit different, right? So you said this is the same text stack, a lot of the same stuff. And I think Taylor, you wanted to show the group accounts over here.

[00:08:10] Taylor Nelson: Oh yes. So on this site, we’re using the Buddyboss theme. It’s just out of the box. It works great with LearnDash and then Memberium, works with that as well, obviously. But here, so I can show you the umbrella account. So we have this kind set of two ways. So again, this is all using custom fields and I think I have it open another browser. I’ll show you a minute. How pulls these over, but it’s great cause you can see their score, you can view their progress. I actually don’t think that one has any progress. Let me try this one. 

[00:08:41] Richard Lindner: Yeah, for us, it was really important not only to get the primary account holder, the founder, the CEO, you know, that person’s scalability score. But for us, we want to make sure as part of clarity that we have the key team members.

So when you join founders board, you get up to seven key team members that you can add to this. And one of the things we do in onboarding and, and through account management is get those team members to take the assessment. And then we link them all in the primary account. So each team member can see their assessment.

The primary account holder can see everyone’s assessment. And now that’s when breakthroughs happen, right? As a founder, if I’m like, no, no, everybody on our team understands exactly what we’re doing. It’s very clear where we’re going. It’s very clear of our business model. It’s very clear of our product line, total clarity.

Well, you know, founders kind of suffer from entrepreneurial optimism, I believe. Right. And what’s clear to us, maybe isn’t clearly articulated to the team. This is a place where we can see, like, I may think, I’m a hundred on clarity or I’m 85 on clarity, but I could go down and maybe, literally everybody else on the team is 58.

It’s just such a great, like you said, every business is different, but every team makeup is also different. I may see that everybody’s clarity is 85 or higher, except one. Right? So what story does this tell? I think having the assessment, having it as an individual, being able to see the different, the progression, and the change is a great way to self-report on growth.

Seeing it as a team is a way to allow us to be more prescriptive, right? Allow us to drive people, to trainings or conversations or tools. Whether it’s, you know, communications or capital or, you know, strategy that’s lacking, it becomes a diagnostic and prescriptive tool for us, our account managers and frankly, our customers to use.

So this unique setup has been amazing for us and I believe our customers.

[00:10:41] Micah Mitchell: Yeah, this is so cool because this stuff that you guys are doing in Scalable, where you’re teaching how to scale a business, right, regardless of the industry, it’s, I heard someone describe it once, they’re like, it’s not something that you do, something that you keep doing, it’s more like a practice that happens always. Right. So yeah, having that ongoing assessment and especially the visibility into the team members, because I know for me when I acquired a company recently, my team grew, I kind of grew from the point where I could know and manage and talk to everybody to outside of that.

And that’s when all this stuff becomes paramount. You know, one of my mentors told me, he’s like, look, when you go from like less than 10 to more than 10, it’s not twice as hard, like 10 to 20 people on your team is not twice as hard. It’s at least five times as hard because not everybody sees it the way you do like you’re talking about with clarity.

 And so keeping tabs on this and then being able to go to that specific person and say like, Hey, you know, you have a different score than these other six people. They seem on the same page. How can we catch you up? What questions do you have? Right. This is really powerful. So. You mentioned that a lot of the things on the Scalable site are, somewhat, I forget the words you use, but I’m gonna say diagnostic, you’re trying to actually first figure out what your client needs and then steer them in the right direction.

So my question is based on these things, the scalability score, is this only for the business owner or are you guys doing something based on this?

[00:12:08] Richard Lindner: So I think Taylor you’re highlighting, tools and what we’ve done is we’ve. So these are the, what you see in those eight categories are the scale constraints.

So now we have mapped the tools that we have by scale constraints. So if clarity’s an issue or if demand’s an issue, you can come in here and say, this is an issue. What do I? And the technology will start to sort and say like, Hey, if you’re struggling with clarity, here are the tools that it’s tools and training.

So we’re big on frameworks, right? We’re big on, you know, the clarity compass. If you’re struggling with clarity that one’s kind of a dead on, right? The clarity compass, is the way to go. This is our alignment tool, really making sure that everyone understands kind of that mission, our strategic anchors, our core values, our 12 Q or 3 years target.

And how everything pushes up towards that. So, tying in that assessment to the tools to affect those different things and making sure that the technology on the back end allows for seamless access when you’re there, you know, post-diagnostic, when you know the problem you’re trying to solve, this, you know, the custom categories up here have been, I believe very helpful for our members.

[00:13:23] Micah Mitchell: Yeah. I mean, that’s such a cool tie-in, and then sorting ’em like that. When you say you guys are big on frameworks, which I know you are, how much of that is marketing versus useful, meaning other people have terms for some of these same concepts, why not just use their term versus it seems like you guys come up with new terms and to my mind, your terms actually fit better most of the time.

And so I’m wondering how much of it was, Hey, we just need to be unique in the market. No, this is actually just better.

[00:13:52] Richard Lindner: Yeah, I mean, better different worked for us. Look, we didn’t seek to build Scalable, right? That wasn’t, it was a, we tried to use everyone else’s stuff. Right. It’s so much, it would’ve been preferable.

If we could just take what other people had built and what was available in some of these different systems and deploy it and have success. Now, some things worked, others didn’t, some things worked for a while. Others didn’t. So when, you know, when we, we ran into a ceiling right. And had to, it was, it was obvious like we’ve gotta build something for ourselves. So we default to, building things that are transferable. 

In fact, it’s one of the ways that we look at, our methodology here in scalable, So SPV. By you sales, profit value, are the categories of value in your company, right? How do you increase your sales? How do you, increase your profits, and then how do you increase transferable value? Right. Frameworks are transferable value. So I don’t know if it’s as much marketing as it is kind of a core belief of ours that we need to create transferable value within our own company and within other companies.

So, for us, it’s the difference a guru and a brand, right? Even a personality-driven brand is just the brand itself. That’s transferable value. Like we were intentional when we transitioned from the Ryan Deiss show to digital marketer. Same thing here. We wanna make sure that when we’re creating these frameworks, they’re created because not out of, we want something like that, but it needs to be ours. For whatever reason, we couldn’t get the available things to work for us across the different industries we were in. Therefore we had to make something new and, you know, one thing can only have one name. So we didn’t wanna take something, take a name that someone else had already used. So when we created something new, we gave it a new name.

But I think it does help in differentiation in the market. But unfortunately, it can go the other way too. I believe that we can be seen as jargon-heavy, right? Internal jargon. Once, you know, you feel like you’re on the inside, cuz everyone’s using this lingo, this jargon, this language and SPV and level seven and 12Q and QSP and got it.

Yeah. I know that when, you know, you feel like you’re on the inside when you don’t know what people are talking about, you either feel left out or unintelligent, right? Maybe not as smart. Neither of those are good feelings. So we have to be intentional in marketing, not in the way that, you are intending it.

We’ve gotta make sure that we’re marketing in a way that makes, that clearly, indoctrinates people into our jargon, into our methodology so that we don’t give them those negative feelings unintentionally. Right. So back to the level seven and why would we have a really low and ungated and lower level entry point if really our average purchase price is quite high because we’re talking about mastermind coaching consultant, because we need to indoctrinate people into not only our methodologies but into the jargon, into our naming conventions. Right. 

So we have, I could, it could be a benefit in marketing, it could also be a detriment if you’re not really careful. 

[00:17:16] Micah Mitchell: Yeah, that makes sense cuz you know, some of ’em aren’t immediately obvious what it is, but honestly they’re interesting. They make me curious and like I said, my experience has been, even though I understand a lot of the old school jargon, Some of the ways that you guys phrase things, I guess it just hits different.

I see it differently. I either, you know, see the part of it I should have been seeing. I don’t know quite how to describe it, but I find it useful. And I don’t know if that’s an age thing cuz often a lot of the people talking on this subject are a bit older. Right. They’re kind of like, these wisen business, people who are like, oh, you need strategic planning and all these kinds of things, but your approach seems kind of just, I don’t wanna call it down and dirty cuz it’s not sloppy at all, but it’s just more real, maybe for this time.

So I find it useful and I think a lot of membership site owners could benefit from, you know, coming up with a unique way to bring their content out. But like you said, they gotta be careful to not make it too coded, right?

[00:18:24] Richard Lindner: Right. Yeah, so we’ve done that here with the tools, but also the trainings. So the trainings don’t follow, just the same, search categories, so, if you go over Taylor, I think it’s cool to see here. We, also have, like I said, SPV so, profits, sales, and value. So bankable profits leveraged sales, not just sales, leveraged sales and transferable value. Those are kind of the categories that all of our trainings fall into, but you can also look over here in this scale constraints.

We wanna pull that through what are you trying to stall for? Or, then we can come over to the actual category, and do some searching there, as well, not just by topic, but, you know, by the type of training. So we have, you know, our courses, which, asynchronous you know, on demand, we have our accelerators, which are typically cohort-based, and then we have, our different AMAs or live coaching calls.

[00:19:26] Micah Mitchell: Thanks for watching part 2 of 3. In the third part coming in a few days, you’ll learn about how to transition the value you’ve built in your personal brand, into your business brand. And this will help you scale without your business consuming too much of your time personally, or being too dependent on a single person.

So watch your inbox for part 3 coming soon. And again, if you’re not receiving emails from us, or if you have any other questions, just email support@memberium.com and we’ll get you taken care of. Thanks again.

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