171: Using Skool to streamline business, build community, generate leads and scale revenue with Brenda Rigney
How one Gen X entrepreneur is using the platform Skool to build a profitable community (and why you should pay attention)
I just did something a little scary… I recorded my first real-time interview for the podcast. And I'm so glad I did, because my conversation with Brenda Rigney opened my eyes to what's possible when you stop following everyone else's playbook and start building a business that actually works for your life.
Brenda and I have known each other for about 5 years now, and I've watched her evolve her business in some pretty fascinating ways.
And what I see her doing on the platform Skool inspired our conversation.
From corporate COO to aligned entrepreneur
Brenda spent 27 years in corporate operations, working with brands like Gap, and multimillion-dollar restaurant chains. She was the person CEOs sent wherever they needed problems solved - HR, IT, operations, international expansion. If it was complicated and nobody else wanted to touch it, Brenda figured it out.
But like so many of us in midlife, everything started hitting at once. The divorce. Perimenopause symptoms that nobody was talking about. Traveling 3-4 weeks a month while her daughters were hitting their teen years. The realization that she couldn't do this for another 20 years.
"Things that would normally just roll off my back were starting to really, really tax me and annoy me," she told me. "I was like, there's gotta be something different."
The irony is she grew up in an entrepreneurial family. Her parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents were all entrepreneurs. She worked for entrepreneurs her entire career. But she'd never been one herself.
After taking a gap year to get her life sorted, she launched her business helping other midlife women make the same transition - either leaving corporate or redesigning the businesses they'd already built that weren't feeling aligned anymore.
The Skool experiment that changed everything
Here's where things get really interesting.
Brenda had been running a traditional membership community, but her members were constantly frustrated. They couldn't find content, couldn't connect with each other, couldn't locate replay sessions. The platform wasn't intuitive, and people were leaving.
Then her mentor announced she was moving her entire community to Skool and invited everyone to come along. Brenda decided to test it out with a 14-day free trial.
"I literally moved my community over in four days," she said. "I had it for free for 14 days, built it in that time, and had 96% of my community move over."
But here's what really caught my attention - Brenda isn't just using Skool as a membership platform. She's using it to host bundles and summits in ways I haven't seen anyone else do.
The bundle strategy that's generating thousands of leads
Most bundles and summits happen on landing pages with complicated tech stacks - affiliate trackers, email automation, multiple platform integrations. Brenda decided to test running everything inside a Skool community instead.
Her June summit brought in about 1,100 people, which is solid. But her October AI summit? That brought in 4,600 people in three weeks.
"When you talk about everything that's real and true in the world, it just went out the window when I did this October summit," she laughed.
The difference wasn't just in the numbers. In traditional summits, speakers might see 200-300 downloads of their freebies. Brenda's speakers were getting 800 downloads. People weren't just consuming content and leaving - they were staying and building real relationships.
"There's real people on Skool that I engage with every single day," she told me. "I can put a post on Skool today, same post on Instagram tomorrow. The School post will get me 75 comments and 500 likes. The Instagram one gets two comments, two likes."
Why this matters for your business
What Brenda is doing challenges some of the conventional wisdom about building an online business.
She's proven you can:
Build a profitable community without charging premium prices (her main community is still very affordable)
Generate significant revenue without posting constantly on social media
Create genuine engagement and relationships at scale
Run lead generation events that actually convert
Her approach also addresses something I've been thinking about a lot lately - the exhaustion of trying to keep up with every platform and algorithm change. Brenda spends her first hour every day engaging in Skool communities, not scrolling Instagram or trying to crack the latest TikTok trend.
"I'm just tired of putting all this energy and work into navigating the algorithm," she said. "On Skool, I can just be myself and show up for my audience."
The Black Friday bundle you need to check out
Right now through December 2nd, Brenda is running her "Solve the Case of Your 2026 Breakthrough" bundle. It features over 100 women contributors covering everything from business and marketing to health, wellness, spirituality, and even watercolor painting.
I'm contributing the on-demand recording of my recent paid workshop "Master Your High-Ticket Message" - normally $75, but you can access it free through the bundle along with all the other incredible resources.
But here's what I find most interesting about this bundle - it's not just a lead generation exercise.
People are staying, engaging, building relationships, and buying additional offers.
Brenda mentioned she posted a $12 offer the other night and sold five of them by morning, making $500 while she slept.
That's the kind of business spaciousness we're all trying to create, isn't it?
What you can learn from Brenda's approach
Even if you're not ready to move to Skool or start hosting bundles, there are some key principles from Brenda's approach that apply to any business:
Stop following other people's frameworks.
Brenda helps her clients get back to knowing themselves - what a good day looks like, what success means to them, what kind of business they actually want to wake up to every day.
Focus on where your people actually are.
Instead of trying to be everywhere, Brenda identified where she gets the best engagement and doubled down there.
Create systems that work without you.
Her community and bundles generate revenue even when she's spending 10 weeks in Europe (which she did this summer).
Remember you already know what you're doing.
After decades of business experience, you don't need to start from scratch or doubt your expertise just because you're building something new.
The bigger picture
What Brenda is doing represents something I see more and more successful midlife entrepreneurs embracing - the willingness to zig when everyone else is zagging. To test things that feel aligned instead of following the latest guru's formula.
Her success on Skool isn't just about the platform itself. It's about knowing her audience deeply, creating genuine value, and building systems that support the kind of life and business she actually wants.
"I wanted to create more of an evergreen business for myself," she told me. "I wanted to see if there was a revenue stream I could develop where I didn't necessarily need to be in my business giving high-touch service all the time."
She's done exactly that. And she's shown it's possible to do it while staying aligned with your values and serving your community authentically.
If you want to experience what Brenda's built, I highly recommend checking out her Black Friday bundle.
Plus, you'll get access to my high-ticket messaging workshop for free, along with resources from over 100 other incredible women.
Not a bad way to set yourself up for a breakthrough 2026.
Additional Resources
Get access to the Aligned AF 2026 Breakthrough Bundle (including my Master Your High-Ticket Message workshop): https://www.skool.com/aligned-af-camp/about?ref=5e0354c078584362a305f7c9460f9d37
Connect with Brenda Rigney:
Listen to the X Podcast: https://www.brendarigney.com/podcast
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/itsbrendarigney
Skool: https://www.skool.com/aligned-af-community/about
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[00:00:51] Hello and welcome back to the EL Communication Podcast. This week I'm trying something totally new and scary. If you've listened to the podcast for any length of time, you'll know that this is a solo podcast. You generally only get me talking at you. There are a few episodes I've recorded asynchronously using Voxer, which is a voice note app where I ask my guests questions.
[00:01:17] They reply in voice notes. Then we piece together the voice notes into an episode. But today I'm putting my big girl podcasting panties on and bringing you an episode where I interview a guest in real time. So please bear with my stumbles and podcasting faux pa, and I'd also love to know what you thought of this.
[00:01:38] Interview style episode, and would you like to hear more episodes like this? So please reach out and share your thoughts on this. But here's why I wanted to interview today's guest, Brenda Ney. She's using the platform school in a very unique way to generate leads, build community, and produce some pretty.
[00:01:57] Remarkable revenue. [00:02:00] Brenda's hosting a bundle of resources that you can access for free for Black Friday. It's called Solve the Case of Your 2026 Breakthrough. It's a free school based bundle and community experience featuring over a hundred women leaders. Coaches and creators, and at the time of recording this, there are already over 2000 women hanging out inside of this community waiting for the bundle to open.
[00:02:26] The resources, speakers, and fireside chats you can access when you're in the bundle will help you enter 2026 more aligned. In your values and what you really want for your life. There are sessions on business and marketing, health and wellness, hobbies, caregiving, relationships, human design, spirituality, and so much more.
[00:02:50] There's a lot going on in there. I'm an invited guest. I'm providing access to my recent paid workshop. Master your high ticket message, which is valued at 75 bucks to help you attract and win premium clients. When you join the bundle, which is free, you'll get a promo code that takes $75 off, so you can access this powerful, powerful training for Xero De Niro.
[00:03:17] So, and you also get to access all the other incredible resources in the bundle as well. I'll drop the link in the show notes so that you can immediately go and access the bundle on school. And I'm telling you, do not sleep on this. Brenda is using school in a very creative and lucrative way, and you'll be able to experience that when you're inside.
[00:03:36] And now stick around to hear more about the genius ways Brenda's using school to grow her coaching business. Please enjoy.
[00:03:46] . I am so excited for you to meet my guest Brenda Rig. Me, Brenda and I go way back, like I think probably about five years now almost.
[00:03:55] We've known each other in the online space. Uh, Brenda [00:04:00] had spent 27 years working in multimillion dollar brands with multimillion dollar CEOs, hustling her way up the corporate ladder, but after an earth shattering divorce. Uh, she decided to go her own way and I'm sure there's lots of other things that led to this decision, which she'll probably share, uh, to start her own business.
[00:04:22] And like me, Brenda loves working with women in midlife who've been made that transition, that leap from corporate or nonprofit to self-employment entrepreneurship. She's coached hundreds of women in their. Forties, fifties and older to help them also launch their own businesses. She works with midlife women, business owners and emerging entrepreneurs to help them bring in 10. Kay months doing what they love in one-on-one and group coaching experiences, and we can all agree that the world needs more of these kind of brilliant voices. So Brenda, thank you so much for joining me on the Ill Communication Podcast.
[00:05:03] Thanks Kim. Uh, earth shattering divorce. I think I need to change that in my bio so many moons ago now that I'm like, uh, I survived. We survived. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's funny how like the wound gets smaller the further, uh, in distance you get. Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I think as a solo parent, well not solo parent, but single parent, um.
[00:05:23] You know, I see where my girls are at now. You know, they're, uh, back then they were probably, when I even wrote my bio, was like, you know, they were teenagers. Now they're emerging adults. They're living on their own, you know, they're pursuing their life. Like things worked out okay. It's, yeah. Yeah. That's good.
[00:05:38] Yeah. There was a happy ending. Yeah. And so, Bernard, one of the reasons why I wanted to bring you onto my podcast is because you are doing something very unique, uh, that I'm not seeing a lot of people in my circle. Doing, which is using a certain platform called school, which we'll get into that eventually, but that's really why I wanted to have you on today, is to explore why you [00:06:00] decided to go in on school, how you're using it.
[00:06:02] 'cause I see you using it in some very unique ways. But I'd love if we could just sort of back up, because we serve the same audience. My listeners are also midlife entrepreneurs, service providers. I'd love for you to just share a little bit about some of those multimillion dollar brands that you worked with.
[00:06:16] What were you doing with them and what led you on. To this midlife entrepreneurial journey. Yeah. Thank you. And thanks again for your audience too, for listening today. Uh, so I have, as you mentioned, like 27 years. S probably going into more like into 30 years experience working for big corporate brands.
[00:06:33] Like the Gap when it was coming up into Canada, um, before even Gap Kids, banana Republic, old Navy, like all of those brands even existed under the Gap banner and started really early in my retail operations days, helping them expand across Canada and then bringing the new brands up and then also into international divisions, uh, across the company worked at Auria.
[00:06:54] Um, many people know that before they had e-commerce and were kind of in every international area and help them expand more into the US oral's restaurants, which is also a Canadian brand based in Vancouver, um, restaurant premium casual dining, expanding into the us. So I helped them do that. Yeah. And are, are you, were you like a business strategist or marketing strategist?
[00:07:15] Like what were you actually doing with these brands? Like always operational roles. I would take on hr, it, um, corporate operations. I would go where the CEO needed me to go. Um, I would do a lot of strategizing working with people. Uh, if we needed to get, you know, Canadians to work in the US for a short period of time to like get, get the brand established.
[00:07:34] Like we figured out those like loopholes through immigration, whatever it was like I was just kind of. Like there to really help in those roles. But officially, yeah, COO was my last job in corporate. And uh, yeah. And I'd have sales, marketing, it, hr, pretty much like kind of every department Wow. That people didn't wanna do.
[00:07:52] And like a good girl, you did them all and probably did them brilliantly. All but I mean, primarily it was like customer experience and employee experience. Like [00:08:00] those are the two banners in which I operate under, and it was like if the customer was happy, it was because our employees were happy and I wanted to make sure that those two things were there.
[00:08:07] There were other people smart enough, like brilliant enough, like taking care of making sure we had cash flow and all those other things. But if those two primary things were working in companies and I was like happy and usually the CEO is pretty happy, so, okay. Cool. And so then how did you go from working with all these amazing brands to now being self-employed?
[00:08:29] Yeah. Well, I mean it was that sort of epicenter I was going through. I don't know, midlife, perimenopause, didn't know it. Um, my personal life was kind of imploding with my divorce and I was traveling three, four weeks out of a month and my girls were just getting into sort of those early teen years and so not great at home.
[00:08:50] Work was really challenging and I don't know, I was experiencing brain talk, brain fog. Mm-hmm. Uh, insomnia, like all those early day like, um. Uh, perimenopause symptoms, but nobody really knowing what they were and my doctor just saying, oh, just, you know, take this, take that, you know, ad hoc solutions.
[00:09:07] Realizing now it's like, oh no, I was in early day perimenopause and things that would normally like just roll off my back were starting to really, really tax me and annoy me like all the time that I was just like, okay, there's gotta be a better way. And to say that I'm gonna just sit here doing this for another 20 years like this.
[00:09:24] 'cause I was thinking, okay, I'm 48. You know, another like 20, 15, 20 years until retirement. I was like, no, there's gotta be something different. Mm-hmm. And you know, the irony of all of it is I grew, grew up in an entrepreneurial family. My parents, my grandparents, my great-grandparents were all entrepreneurs.
[00:09:40] Huh. Um, early day settlers in Canada, they all started their own businesses. I worked for entrepreneurs, yet I was not an entrepreneur. So it was just kind of like, okay, now's my time. I first initially took a gap year. I'd never taken a gap year. Like, you know, between university or anything like that and working, this was my time to take a gap year.
[00:09:58] So I took a year off, [00:10:00] got things settled with a divorce, moved, got the kids settled, and then started thinking about, okay, how do I, how do I launch my business? And what does this look like? And so tell, tell us about your business today. What do you do? So I work with midlife women, uh, women that specifically are either leaving their corporate job, their day job again, the job that they sort of grew up doing and thought that they would probably be doing until retirement.
[00:10:23] So similar story, if this resonates with you, like I'm definitely someone that we should connect in with. And then also women that have maybe gone that journey made the transition to entrepreneurship a year or two, maybe even five years into their business, and it's not feeling the way they thought it would be.
[00:10:39] They thought they'd have more freedom, more flexibility in their time, and they're feeling they're working even more hours and kind of anchored in something that they built that doesn't feel like them. So, you know, for me it's always been problem solving, taking something that we thought was gonna be great and making it better.
[00:10:55] I'm always like sort of that good to great, like we've got some great foundations in place. We don't need to throw it all out, but we need to make sure that it's aligned with what we want. So I love working with women in that space, um, in online businesses. But I also work with like brick and mortar product-based businesses as long, uh, as well as service-based businesses.
[00:11:13] Great. You mentioned a key word there. And you've been alluding to it the whole time, but like that word of alignment. Mm-hmm. Making aligned decisions, making sure that this vision for this business that we have is aligned, or that the business we have is aligned with the vision that we had for ourselves and the reasons why we left corporate.
[00:11:31] That's your, basically, your whole brand is aligned af and do you wanna just tell us what your offers are? Like how do you actually support women? Yeah, well, I mean, part of it is getting aligned with our vision, values and goals. So many of the women that I work with may have done that work in early days when they were starting.
[00:11:47] Maybe they went to a treat, they did some exercises around mindfulness, and they got connected to their body and their thoughts, you know, in a weekend. Episode, but then how did they build their business around that? And what I've often found, and I [00:12:00] went into the same pathway myself, where it's like I was following someone else's framework, following some guru, you know, who made it really big in the online space.
[00:12:09] And doubting myself, right? Doubting what, you know, the last like 25, 30 years of business have taught me, thinking that I needed to start from scratch and toss that all out and listen to someone else's framework and try and follow it step by step. When really, and this is what I help my, uh, women business owners with, is get back to knowing yourself, right?
[00:12:29] And what, you know, what is. A good day look like, and I know it sounds really simple, but just like, what is a good day? What is a measure of success for you? What do you want it to be? Also, 'cause maybe it was past, you know, past conditioning, past programming, that we need to kind of, um, soften a bit and then define what you want it to look like and that, you know, what does this business that you wanna wake up to every day loving doing?
[00:12:50] Because I see a lot of women business owners doing the things, like posting three times a day doing all the things that people tell you to do and they're not loving their business and they wanna. Scrap it and start again. And I'm like, no, no, no. We don't need to scrap it, but maybe we need to dial back some things and then, uh, refocus you.
[00:13:06] So some of it is strategy. Mm-hmm. I mean, really at the end of the day, all of it's strategy, but sometimes people get a little like, ugh, they don't like that word. So it is really planning focus. You know, being deliberate, being intentional with what you want, and then saying no to a ton of other things, uh, like a lot of things.
[00:13:24] Yeah. And that's where I'm at, like seven years into my business. It's like I've, I just stripped back now to like, sort of again, what's intentional, what feels good for me. Um, and that all takes it back to this a alignment piece. Mm-hmm. I think what's funny is like we, we have these careers with decades under our belt.
[00:13:42] We know. Uh, we know what the heck we're doing and suddenly when we start our own business, so sometimes we forget that we have two decades of life experience, of business experience. Maybe it's not self business, but we have lots of skills and abilities and [00:14:00] intuition, and somehow we start to doubt that and second guess it as we're following these gurus.
[00:14:05] So I love that you're reminding people that they. They probably have everything they need. They just need to tune into what, what really suits themselves and not posting three times a day on Instagram. Exactly. Yeah. So I mean, I keep, my offers really simple. I have two sort of primary offers. I have a community, um, for women to come in and start working with me.
[00:14:27] And there's tools and there's templates. We've got AI agents that can help them, you know, tackle a lot of the low hanging fruit, um, that they need to do in their business to really show up from a visibility standpoint. 'cause we do. Live online. And so, you know, it is being in that space but not feeling like it's draining you.
[00:14:44] And then the second way is through my mastermind. Mm-hmm. So that's where I work with 10, 20 women max, um, in a really intimate setting where we look at, um, you know, from a proximity to me, just closer proximity, personalized way of helping you design your business, not based off of Brenda's framework, based off of your framework.
[00:15:03] And what you wanted to do. Now, I know like, uh, a few years ago you were really, um, committed to having a very affordable low ticket offer or an entry level offer. Mm-hmm. And I think the price has gone up a little bit on that, on that entry level offer, but it's still very affordable. So can you talk to me?
[00:15:22] Just a little bit about your strategy on pricing, um, because I've recently been, um, repositioning my business and focusing more on high ticket selling and the, the, the bandwidth and spaciousness that premium offers can create. But I think there is a role for that sort of entry level offer, and I'd just love to hear your thinking on it.
[00:15:42] 'cause I know you've been really committed to having something very, uh, affordable or attainable at that front end. Yeah. Well part of it was also accessible too, right? Mm-hmm. I think there's a lot of, I mean, we talk about women business owners, um, you know, they get less than 2% of VC funding. Yeah. So most [00:16:00] women business owners are doing it on their own.
[00:16:01] And I read a Forbes article this morning that as of last year, one in four businesses that are getting started are run by women, and we're doing it completely on our own. So either pulling from our savings. Mm-hmm. So depending on where you are in the world, it's your 401k plan. It's your RSP plan in Canada.
[00:16:16] Um, your. You know, maxing out credit cards to the hilts, like buying these tech systems that everyone is telling you that you need to have, um, and paying hundreds, thousands of dollars, especially if you're residing in Canada like you and I are, where we have to pay all of these things in US dollars compared to Canadian.
[00:16:33] Yes. Like, it's just like, how are women business owners supposed to get these things off the ground? And so yes, I was offering premium services through masterminds. Five, $10,000. And there's for sure women out there that can afford to do that. And it wasn't necessarily a cost resistance, but there's also a handful of women that are wanting to exit corporate now more than ever because the corporate environment does not fit our lifestyle.
[00:16:57] It doesn't fit we're going through in perimenopause. It doesn't fit our lifestyle as far as what our kids are needing if we still have kids at home and their learning, um, abilities and what they need as far as the family environment, most families, let's. Face it. Yes, we'd love to stay together with our spouses, but like 52, 50 4% divorce rate.
[00:17:16] So it just doesn't fit like, you know, the way women work nowadays. I mean, it was fine. Maybe when we were, I don't know, 1950s trying to get into the workplace being assistance and, and we couldn't get our own mortgages for our own houses. 'cause we had to have a, a husband to do that for us, A nice thing to do, you know, whatever.
[00:17:33] Because our husbands were the breadwinners. Mm-hmm. But the reality is, is like. There are women that are making more money than their men, uh, their husbands or, you know, same sex partners. And so I think it's, it, the reality is, is that there are more and more women going into entrepreneurship, but they don't necessarily have this like nest egg that they can fall back on to put all this money into making their business go, the marketing expenses, the tech hiring, like this top-notch coach that's gonna show them everything.
[00:17:59] So I [00:18:00] wanted to do that. Plus I also wanted to get into, um, the membership community space. And a lot of membership communities start at sort of like an entry level price range, and I wanted to see what that looked like because I also wanted to create more of an evergreen business for myself. I wanted to see if there was a pipeline or a revenue stream that I could develop where I didn't necessarily need to be in my business, giving that high touch personalized service that I was doing from premium offers and maybe get into the volume game and have it more evergreen and more automated that I can actually jump on a plane and know that.
[00:18:32] I made $2,000 today by the time I get off the plane, like I was seeing this in our sort of online space community of women entrepreneurs doing this, and I'm like, I need to figure this out. So for me, it was like a no brainer to launch a community $5 a month. $48 for the year. I mean, it was crazy price. I know you and I had conversations about it.
[00:18:50] Like, what are you doing, Brad? Yeah. But I was like, okay. There's a method to the madness here where, you know, my kids were still at home, they weren't in university, but I could see, okay, in a couple of years, I wanna have this freedom that I talk about in my vision. And I still wanna help women entrepreneurs, but I don't necessarily wanna be.
[00:19:08] You know, feeling like I have to give all of me because someone's paying $5,000 versus dollars. Right. And so was there method to the madness? Like, have you, you were just before we started recording, you told me that you just spent 10 weeks in Europe this summer. So I'm guessing that you have been able to hop on a flight and still generate money.
[00:19:28] Yeah, um, absolutely. Like I, I jump off planes. I, you know, go to the grocery store. There's. Like, well, everyone says Stripe payments, but I have school payments that come through on my phone continuously. Um, and now I'm seeing like innovative ways where I can create offers. Like the other night I was thinking about something, I just posted it this morning and I've sold five of them already and I've made $500.
[00:19:48] So like. Yeah, it like it works. Yeah. You can figure out what that looks like. Um, and we can go into it. There's a few things that you need to do. It's not just like you just come up with it and go for it. [00:20:00] Yeah. You know, I've been working on this now for the last 18 months and now I'm seeing like a pattern and I can see now potential opportunities of, of where my business will be at a year from now.
[00:20:11] I love it. So this is where I'm really excited to talk to you about is, you know, I've seen you evolve your business and try new things over the last many years. Mm-hmm. But most recently, I, I saw you move into school and, uh, you've. Uh, I've seen you stay in school and you've also invited me to be part of a Black Friday bundle that I'm a part of.
[00:20:33] And so it's forced me to come into this community of school and see all of this incredible infrastructure that you've created, seeing all the numbers of people coming into this bundle. Um, and before we talk about the bundle, I just wanna know about why you chose to use school. How did you. How did you decide that that was the platform for you?
[00:20:54] And just walk me through some of that thinking that led you to have your low cost to Mid Midco community on school. Yeah. Um, well, I'll give a call out to Evelyn Vice. So she's like the membership queen. She had her membership portal. Um, so when I was thinking about going into sort of low ticket offers and creating membership communities, I wanted to see who was doing it best out there.
[00:21:18] And Evelyn, you know, has a reputation in the membership community for doing some phenomenal things. And she's been in it now for over eight. Eight years, 10 years. Uh, and she had her membership over on another portal. So when I first started working with her, I can't remember what the platform was, it may even have been her own.
[00:21:33] And then after six months of being with her on that platform, she's like, I'm going to school. I'm gonna try out this school thing. Who's wants to come with me? And she kind of gave everybody this. Immediate entry into it. Like normally, I think I was paying like 39 or $49 a month, and then she's like, I'm gonna drop your membership down to $8.
[00:21:51] Everybody come over today and go to school. And so I did and I was like, this is really cool. And I'd been on it for maybe three, four weeks. She [00:22:00] had an affiliate link to start up my own and I could do it for 14 days. I thought, okay, you know what? I'll try this out. So this was August of 2024. I'll try it out and see if I like it.
[00:22:10] I literally moved my community over that I had on another platform that I was not happy with and my members were not happy with. They were voicing me pretty much every week. We can't find your content. We can't connect with people. This is like, we know you did a live session last week. We can't find the replay anywhere.
[00:22:26] Where do we go? Like, it just wasn't intuitive. They were opting to leave and I knew I had to do something really quickly. Uh, and again, this was all really new for me about, you know, going after the membership community space. And so I decided, you know, this platform is super easy to use. It's really intuitive.
[00:22:43] I love it. I basically rebuilt my community in four days, so I, I had it for free for 14 days with this affiliate link that Evelyn gave me. I built it in 14 days and had 96% of my community move over in that first 14 days. Done. Um, I lost like 4%. People decided not to join. I was like, that's fine, all good.
[00:23:02] Some of 'em have actually come back and like rejoined now. And yeah. And then I've just been like on school, learning the program, learning how to sell in school. I still had my premium offers going on in the background. Um, 'cause I wasn't necessarily, I wouldn't say convinced, but it was just, I didn't see necessarily that transition yet to be able to shut down my premium and go.
[00:23:22] Full on with my membership community and, and so it wasn't until really this time this year that I've started to make more of that shift over there. So it was probably about April, June where I decided to really go after lead generation on school and try different techniques, things that I had been seeing in the online space for years.
[00:23:41] Bundles and summits. Mm-hmm. And so you mentioned our Black Friday bundle. We started off with a spring bundle, and then we moved into a June summit. And then in October this year we had another summit and that, that October summit just blew the top off of everything that I've known. Like when you talk about like everything that's real and true in the world, [00:24:00] like just went out the window when I did this October summit.
[00:24:03] Like we brought in 4,600 people in three weeks. And had you seen other people using school? For hosting those summits and bundles. 'cause normally when you're in a summit, it's either hosted on like a separate webpage and they've got the replays there, or they, you just get emails dripping. But this is like, everything is in this community, like almost like a Facebook group community, but it's in school.
[00:24:27] So yeah. Tell me a little bit more about. That. Yeah. So, no, I think there had some, been some people that had tried some type of summit, but again, maybe more promoting it on school within school communities, but then to your point, hosted on a landing page or another website. So taking people off of school.
[00:24:45] Yeah. And you know, and if you're familiar with bundles and summits in the virtual online space, it's like people will have like a landing page, like you mentioned, they'll have affiliate trackers, um, maybe through like. Flow Desk or Thrive card. Yeah, they'll have like, you know, all these trip wires and things like that set up.
[00:25:01] But again, multiple text. Tech avail, like tech, um, integrations, tech, uh, you know, platforms that you have to, uh, work with. And what I decided to do is I'm gonna test this like puppy out on school and see if we just built a school community for the summit alone. So I already had my existing community, the aligned DF community, and I said I wasn't gonna do it in there.
[00:25:22] I would just open another community on school and devote it to summits. And so we ran our June summit and we had a good turnout. We had like close to 1100 people show up for that and that, you know, in bundle, in summit terms. That's good. That's a good show. Yeah, and we ran ads and you know, all those types of things and it was generally really good.
[00:25:42] And everyone probably saw somewhere between two to 500 downloads in their free. Off of their, um, speaker session. So again, good numbers as far as like what the industry would expect from an event like that. And we kept it as an event. Even though it was on community, we kind of just kept it more like, okay, people are gonna come [00:26:00] in, they're gonna consume and then they're gonna leave.
[00:26:02] But then they actually stayed. Hmm. And then that triggered something for me. It was like, oh, okay, this is actually where like when we talk about nurturing our email lists and you know, converting more sales from people that are following us in our emails and trying to get them to consume our freebies office, social media, and then into our email list.
[00:26:21] Like it was all here happening, right? Real time on the school community platform. So then I was like, okay, I'm gonna develop. A relationship with these guys that came in and encouraged the speakers that had been part of that summit to continue on with that relationship over the summer. Then we flipped it to a new summit in October and grew it from, and some people had dropped off 'cause they didn't really understand.
[00:26:44] They were like, okay, I was just here for a summit. And I'm like, no, no. It's a community you can stick around. And, uh, then we, you know, redid it again for, um, the. October summit that we did that we were just focused on ai and that's where we brought in another 4,600 people. And we'll do it again in February.
[00:27:02] We're gonna have another AI summit in February of 2026. And so all those people are staying right, like our churn or turnover is less than 1%. They're ready for the next one. 'cause they just got so much out of the last one that are like, yep, just. Tell us when and we'll be here. Um, and so we'll grow that when our intention is to take it from sort of 4,600 to 10,000 in the next couple of months, before February.
[00:27:25] That's amazing. And when you said like this October summit, the AI Summit kind of blew all of your predictions outta the water. Mm-hmm. Do you think. Was it the topic? Was it the timing? What, was there any, or was it all of the above? What do you think contributed to the success of that? Yeah. Well, it was definitely the topic.
[00:27:42] Yeah. I think, you know, and like we talked about it from a sense of, yeah, like you need to learn about AI as a small business owner to save you time, money costs. Like there's lots of low hanging fruit and if you can bring in some of these AI systems and hear from these speakers, that's gonna help you out.
[00:27:56] But it was also really sort of like the agitation piece. And you know this [00:28:00] about writing copy is like if you can really kind of like poke the bear a bit with some of your audience in a nice but gentle way, like, and. Kind of maybe pissed off a few people, excuse my language, um, is that's what we wanted to do.
[00:28:13] We wanted to create this agitation around, is your job gonna be relevant a year from now or two years from now from ai? Well, you better find out and you better come to this AI summit and figure that out. Because a lot of people like that is the undercurrent right now in ai, especially in the online space.
[00:28:27] If you're a content creator, if you're a coach, like Will we. You know, be around, is AI gonna replace us? Mm-hmm. And for women business owners, when we have dealt with pay equity gaps and, um, pregnancy, you know, issues and, you know, as far as like time off and getting back to our jobs now perimenopause, to have another thing as an obstacle for us, that we are gonna be replaced.
[00:28:49] Right. When we know that we've had these replacement issues all throughout our career, I wanted to make it just an open conversation for women business owners to come in and like, let's just talk about this. So we had 52 speakers. Um, three were men. The rest were all women. Mm-hmm. Uh, we did open it up to men and women, and all the men that attended were just like, whoa.
[00:29:10] I've never gone to a conference, a summit with like 95% of the speakers being all women. This was incredible. And we had women from all around the world, women of color, like all different backgrounds. Lenses diversity. It was amazing just to be able to talk about this one topic. Um, but it was also just incredible to see like this community that was starting to get formed, right.
[00:29:33] Real time. And that I think is where we've really, uh, redefined what these type of lead gen events look like. People were coming to me saying, I used to do bundles and summits. I swore them, I swore off of them. Yeah. Now I'm totally doing this. I will only do your bundles and soda spread. And I'm like, okay.
[00:29:50] Um, but you know, like they were seeing results, like the speakers were getting like 800 downloads to their freebies versus we used to get like 200, 300. Yeah. Um, they had communities [00:30:00] on school and they were getting like two, 300 people joining their communities. During the summit. So just huge results that way.
[00:30:06] That's, that's really inspiring and, and I'm really glad that I get to kind of dip my toe in it through your Black Friday bundle. So I'd love if you could just like, share with people what the Black Friday bundle is all about and I'll drop the links to it in our show notes so that anyone who's listening wants to come in, check out the school community, check out how you're running the bundle.
[00:30:27] They can do that. But I'd love for you to just like, tell us about the Black Friday bundle. Yeah, absolutely. So the Black Friday bundle, um, it basically is kicking off right now. So whenever Kim is gonna air this, it's like it's underway, um, until December 2nd. And the gifts that are available in the Black Friday bundle, we have over a hundred contributors, I think like 106.
[00:30:48] It's amazing. Yeah. Yeah, we just like, we don't say no to anybody unless their link doesn't work. Then we say no. Like, like the link has to work. Yeah. To the, the free bundle gift. But we've got, uh, wealth advisors, we've got life coaches, uh, nutritionists, uh, physiotherapists. Um, uh, all different types of, sort of like modalities of healing and spirituality.
[00:31:10] In there, we've got marketing specialists, AI specialists, uh, travel specialists, like lots of artists, creators, watercolor enthusiasts, like all different aspects of life and business for women that wanna get aligned. Around their vision, values, and goals for 2026. So if there's things that are right now not feeling good for you, you're not setting boundaries with your family.
[00:31:31] You know, you wanna get into watercolor, you wanna like take your, you know, kids on a vacation next year and you're just trying to think about how to make it work. From a dollars and cents standpoint, we have. Gifts inside this bundle for you that really tackle all areas of life. And it's, it's more of, of a, you know, wrap up to the year and kickoff to the new year.
[00:31:49] Mm-hmm. So I like doing these type of bundles at this time of year. It's fun. Everyone's like getting ready for like the holidays and seeing families and friends and also reflecting on like what [00:32:00] went well and you know, what their opportunities are. So the buzz is already happening inside the community.
[00:32:05] We've already led in 2000 women already. Um. There's fireside chats all next week. Every day we've got a different fireside chat. We've also got other speakers that are contributing to training sessions that you can download and you can get in your all access pass. Um, so yeah, it's super fun. And we've got Kim there too.
[00:32:23] Yeah. And I, I'm contributing, um, the on-demand recording of a paid workshop that I ran just, uh, about a month and a half ago on master year. High ticket, um, message so you can access that for free. There's a $75 off promo code that you get when you're in the bundle, so if you want, if you wanted to attend that workshop but never did come and join the bundle so you can get access to that, the replays of that and the workbook and everything like that.
[00:32:49] I noticed in the, sorry, I noticed in inside the bundle this week, in fact, you posted a mini offer or said, Hey, if you wanna like. I, I, I don't have it right in front of me, but you basically promoted another offer, like maybe a $12 offer or some other kind of an offer to an additional training mm-hmm.
[00:33:08] Within the bun. Like the bundle hasn't even opened, but you're already selling things in it. So is that working? Yeah, well I'm selling the all access pass. Yes. So for folks that, you know, wanna see all the fireside chats, but maybe it doesn't work with their time zone or their work schedule, um, or who wanna capture the other, um, sponsored speakers that are doing training sessions.
[00:33:27] Um, there's probably, I think collectively over 18, you know, sessions that are going on next week. So if you can't make it, you can get the all access pass for $9. Mm-hmm. And then , we also created a quiz inside the summit. Mm-hmm. And so you can take the quiz for free, but then if you wanna do some more exploratory work on creating your vision, values, and goals for 2026, there's another custom GPT that you can sign up for, as well as a workshop that we're gonna be teaching on December 9th, all around creating your edge in the world of ai.
[00:33:57] Um, and really like productizing your [00:34:00] experience and like going after building a business that you love. Not something that again has been told that you need to do. Right. Or following guru's framework, but like really like taking it from within and building this business for you. So if that's something of interest, yeah.
[00:34:15] We're selling it for like $12. Yeah. That's very cool. So in addition to school, you have a podcast, uh, called the X Podcast. Mm-hmm. Um, what other activities are you doing to market your business, find leads, and sell your offers and services? Well, I am like going bullish on bundles and summits. In school like, like lots of things.
[00:34:35] Like we could talk for days and hours about all the things that I've tried. I mean, but the primary things that I do is, um, I wake up every morning and I go on to school. Wow. And I engage with my communities. I've got three on school and I engage with my community members in there. And then I also am collaborating with other school community.
[00:34:54] Uh, owners in their communities and engage with their members. So that is like my first hour of the day. I'm always on school. And then it's my email list, my YouTube, those are my secondary sort of levels of like where I like to spend my time. And then last but not least is Instagram. So it used to be the other way around.
[00:35:13] Right. I'd be like, pick up in the morning and check out Instagram and you know, be in there. Yeah. And not that it's not important to me, but. There's real people on school that I engage with every single day. I can put a post on school today, same post on Instagram tomorrow, or vice versa. But the school post will get me like 75 comments and 500 likes type of thing.
[00:35:34] And the Instagram one, two comments, two likes, right? And it's just like, okay, you know, like I'm just tired of like putting all this energy and work into navigating the algorithm. Whereas on school, I can just be myself, show up. Show up for my audience. Um, yeah, and it's, it's real, it's like happening and it, I think going back to some of our earlier points, it's monetizing.
[00:35:56] I think that's right. Thing is that I'm not doing, doing [00:36:00] this to hustle and talk about things ad nauseum. I'm actually like trying to make money in my business and it's working, so yeah. Well, I, I'm so fascinated, Brenda, and I'm so happy for your success and I'm, yeah, I'm really watching with curiosity as I go through this experience with you, and I'm really excited to see what happens As we come to a conclusion.
[00:36:21] I just have a few rapid fire questions I just wanna fire off at you, if you're okay with that. Absolutely. I'd love to know, uh, as a fellow Gen Xer, do you have a favorite eighties movie? Oh, for sure. 16 candles. Ah, nice. Yeah. Who's your current favorite band or lifelong favorite band? Um, lifelong, I would say is Pearl Jam.
[00:36:42] Nice. And, uh, we just saw Coldplay in London when we were in Europe for 10 weeks. We, they were playing at Wembley Stadium for like. 10 days or something. And we saw them for one of the days. So it's still Coldplay for sure. Yeah. Were you at the show where they, like the people were outed, the CEO and the No.
[00:37:02] I think that was one of the US shows there during the us earlier in the summer. Yeah. Um, but you know, he was definitely safeguarding himself. Like, he was like, okay, we're gonna play a game, but here's some of the disclaimers. Yeah. That's so funny. Those, if you're having affairs leave now. Yeah. Uh, do you have a favorite book of all time or most influential book or what's on your nightstand right now that you're really enjoying?
[00:37:25] Oh, um, well, like a favorite book has always been Catcher in the Rye. I'm always likes, like, that's always been like an amazing book for me. Um, I would say it's podcasts. Like, I still am a big podcast, podcast fan. Um, I love Kira Swer, um, or Kira Swisher. Kara Swisher, uh, she, you know, rose up as a journalist in the tech boom and she knows everything about tech, but now she really talks about business and government and economy and social structures.
[00:37:54] She also partners in with, um, Paul Galloway, who's a. Uh, what is he? He's a [00:38:00] professor at NYU, um, and an economist, so I love the banter between the two of them. Mm. I'll have to check that one out. Mm-hmm. Do you have a favorite snack or guilty pleasure? Uh, Scott makes. Two loaves of sourdough every Sunday.
[00:38:14] Okay. And like I try and restrain myself, but he keeps on telling me about the medicinal benefits. It's healthy food, it's healthy. I'm like, he's like out of anything that you could eat this week, this is better for your cat. And I'm like, okay. But it is bread. It is bread. Yeah. So, and it's what you put on the bread too, right?
[00:38:32] That really gets you, oh, it's the butter and it's the jam and all this stuff. Yeah. So, but definitely sourdough is our kind of go-to fall snack. Hmm. Yeah. Which small business leader or teacher or coach are you following right now? Um, well, I mentioned Evelyn Weiss, who's like membership queen on school and she's also, the cool thing about Evelyn is that she is now running the school ad campaign for them.
[00:38:57] They've hired her on Oh, really? Yeah. To run all their ads. So I've learned a ton of. You know, a ton of great things from her about membership communities, but also ads. Um, which as a side note has been like a huge driver of the success that we've seen with bundles and summits. Our ads are just like amazing.
[00:39:12] All thanks to her tutelage, but she's also now running it for school. 'cause their objective is to bring in 1 billion users and 1 million community hosts. Hmm. Wow. So she's really driving the traffic and the attraction strategy. Um, so she's definitely at the top of my list. Um. Yeah, I'm gonna stick with that.
[00:39:32] Yeah. Cool. What's your favorite perimenopause or menopause health or skincare practice or product? Oh, you know what I love? Um, I have, I have the rose quartz roller. Yes. And I also have the flat one with like the sort of the. Uh, GU Gua, I think. Yeah. Yeah. Gua. I love using that with like a serum that I like.
[00:39:54] Um, and yeah, that's just sort of like a nice nighttime ritual. Mm-hmm. Um, you know, [00:40:00] just like I'll put the serum on in bed before I go. Um, that's one. And then it's really about food, I think is the big thing. So apart from the sourdough, I'm really conscious of kind of like what I'm eating, but also times of day when I eat it.
[00:40:13] Oh, interesting. Um, 'cause I find like the bloating, the inflammation happens. Later in the day, so I try and, you know, eat, I wouldn't say heavier, but more of those heavier foods earlier in the day. Sure. Yeah. I just got a, I actually had it for years, a rose quartz roller. I finally pulled it out of the box and started using it.
[00:40:32] I'm like, why haven't I been using this before? It's really lovely. It's so amazing every time I use it. Yeah. If money was no object, where would you travel and who would you go with? Uh, well, Scott. I, I would just repeat our summer that we had. Really? Yeah. Like the last weeks of our summer, like our seven week summer, it was amazing because we have five kids between us and there was an opportunity for many of them to come and visit us at different times.
[00:40:57] And so that would be the ideal is that, you know, we go to a place we rent in a place that's big enough. Um, I don't want you there the whole time, but if you wanted to come for a week or two week little intervals and like, come and visit us, that's, yeah. What I would love. Oh, I love that. And if money were no object, how or what would you invest in, in your business and why?
[00:41:17] Oh, um, well, I, this is the investment that I'll be making, um, in the coming weeks is SEO and a IO. I wanna be found on every chat or yes, every AI platform. When people are looking for, um, who runs some of mm-hmm lead generation, midlife business coach, I wanna be found in those spaces. So I'm working, uh, with a provider now to really update my website around that and also to make sure that I'm showing up in those searches.
[00:41:49] Yeah. Excellent. Thank you so much, Brenda. This was, honestly, it's, it's truly fascinating me, the whole school thing, but also some of the very unique ways that you have evolved your business over the [00:42:00] last few years that we've known each other. So I just really wanna thank you for joining me today. Thanks.
[00:42:04] Thanks, Kim. Thanks everyone.
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