Deliver More Value With a Custom Homework and Feedback System: SOLCORE Fitness Case Study Memberium

[00:00] Micah: Hey, everybody, welcome to another Membarium case study. This one is going to be a little bit different. Familiar face, George Diaz, one of our agency partners, longtime friend of mine. George, how you doing, buddy?

[00:12] George: Doing well, doing well, Michael. Thanks for having me.

[00:14] Micah: Yeah, man, thanks for coming on. I'm excited because George is going to show us Membarium Connected to Active campaign. Most of the time, we are looking at Membarium Connected to Keep. In this case, it is User who moved from Membarium for Keep, and George is helping him move to Membarium from Active campaign, or I guess has helped him move. But the membership side itself is pretty interesting, kind of a little bit of an unconventional use case, or maybe more conventional, because this guy, Akemba Su, has a training business, like private training, you know, working out, things like that. And he's moved some of his content into his membership site, which, like I said, was connected to Keep, now Active campaign. And George, in a moment here, I'd love to have you share your screen, but it sounds like he's kind of interacting both with people in person at his facility, private sessions and group sessions, as well as people who are only online. So that's really interesting, right? And we'll talk about the kind of the check-in process that they have and things like that. But the other pretty interesting thing, it sounds like, is the homework assignment. So we'll get into all of that. But like I said, welcome, George Diaz of Larry Jacob Internet Marketing. What is the name of Akemba's site? What's the brand?

[01:35] George: It's called SoulCore Fitness. S-O-L, like the sun, SoulCore Fitness.

[01:41] Micah: Cool, cool, cool. So, like I said, Akemba Su is the owner. George Diaz here is our partner. George, what do you have to show us today? What do you find interesting about this site?

[01:53] George: Well, you know, what's interesting is he's got a website. They're using Membarium with LearnDash because he's got a program, and it's a pretty extensive program. It's not just, hey, do arms today and do legs another day. He runs people through a program. He was originally, and this is going way back, doing this private lessons and then group lessons, but he expanded it into an online version. So he's got some customers, you know, that never come to his New Mexico location. And he assigns them, as he goes through the class, they can assign themselves homework, but he also has the ability to assign them homework if they've been in contact with him. And they're asking, hey, I'm having trouble with this. He can come and say, oh, you need to get these homework assignments. And by assigning them tags in ActiveCampaign, certain exercise sets show up on their homework page.

[02:50] Micah: Nice. So you mentioned Membarium, LearnDash, ActiveCampaign is some of his tech stack. Is there anything else major that he's using to create this experience, would you say?

[03:03] George: No, he had been using PlusThis, but we moved the PlusThis features into some forms inside of ActiveCampaign so that he could manage them without having to have an additional piece of software.

[03:15] Micah: Yeah, and I think you mentioned one of those features is checking in, like they check in maybe through an ActiveCampaign web form.

[03:21] George: Cool. Yeah, he's got an iPad that he has in his gym for the people that are either private or they take the group classes, and he checks them in. And by checking them in, it reduces their sessions because they buy the sessions in blocks of 1, 4, 9, or 13.

[03:40] Micah: Okay. So it sounds like ActiveCampaign is kind of his training management system because I'm guessing it's the ActiveCampaign timers that are canceling those sessions out, managing what's happening, right? So the inputs are going into ActiveCampaign.

[03:57] George: And it's doing its magic. And then the user is getting things that appear to them in the membership site, as well as when they go into the facility.

[04:05] Micah: Akemba's got information on them and can adjust their account, right? Very cool. One question that comes to mind, and I don't know if you've asked him this or not, but being a kind of gym owner, why wouldn't he use something off the shelf for maybe little trainers like him? I'm guessing there's something like that. Do you know kind of what he's going for that's custom? Is it the training portal?

[04:32] George: Yeah, I think the thing that he wanted a course that people could be used to, he could use to teach people. I mean, I'm not intimately familiar with the kind of software that a lot of these gyms use, but most of them are more concerned with charging people, have they paid their dues, and not into the exact content of what they teach people. And he's got a really elaborate, I mean, you go into LearnDash, and it's not just, here's a video, do it. It's, I mean, I'll be showing you, I mean, it's paragraphs of stuff. You know, he's teaching them a way of doing his training. And then the homeworks are kind of going back to, hey, you need to do the homework from lesson 1.5, because that's probably a weak spot that he wants you to work on.

[05:22] Micah: Interesting. Okay, so I think you made the right distinction there, where these gym softwares are about like billing and access, and his is about individual management, almost like you need this.

[05:33] George: It's more like, you know, if I'm, you know, we build a lot of these, you know, somebody's teaching leadership courses to managers and other people are teaching, you know, here's some tennis classes.

[05:43] Micah: It's more about the teaching and less about how do I run a gym practice or a physical training practice. That makes sense. And that's, I think, really what most membership site and course owners have is some sort of like intellectual property or methodology or whatever. Why don't you put it up on screen? And let's, let's start looking at this site. While you're pulling it up, I'll kind of tell people this to me when I saw it as another example of something that is working and delivering value. It's not like they spent years and years and years on the design of the back end. This front side of the site looks great and everything, but when we go into the membership site, it's just straightforward, simple, and easy. So go ahead, George. What do you want to show us?

[06:26] George: So I'm going to log in as a member who has part of his, you know, is signed up for their program. And so, you know, you show up here. He has some recordings that people who are in the program will get. This is a test account, so it hasn't been around long enough to get the archives of things that have happened. But if I go into here, you can see this is, you know, his, his contact, his content. So if I go into three now, we just went into LearnDash focus mode. And you can see this is someone, and I purposely pushed this along so that it would open up more of these. But you can see he starts off with this, and there is, you know, there's one of those.

[07:09] Micah: But if I go into some of, like, the first pillar here, there's a video, but there's also a lot of content that goes with it.

[07:16] George: So as I kind of click through here, he's got, you know, like you're saying, intellectual property, but there's plenty of it. These are some of the shorter ones. Some of them go on for quite a while because he's really teaching them a lot of stuff. Now, getting to, like, the homework assignments that we spoke about, he doesn't have those right away, so I purposely pushed through the course. So this one here is the first one where there is this idea of the homework. And if you go through here, you see I can come up and add this video to my homework. So it's almost like my favorites. And this one here then also has all of these.

[07:55] Micah: Now, this one here is some homework that's already been assigned to them.

[08:01] George: So I'm just, this is one, and there's another one that isn't on this page. If I open up the homework page, so this is the one that was from that other page. This is one that I manually selected earlier.

[08:12] Micah: So this, opteratus internus.

[08:18] George: And by the way, this has been a challenge vocabulary-wise for me.

[08:23] Micah: So great for learning your body parts.

[08:27] George: But if I come up and I go add this one to my homework, what that does is it's using one of the memberium tags, shortcodes, to add a tag to their contact record. So now I can go over here to the homework.

[08:41] Micah: So what George just said, just for the clarity of the listener, is I believe it's putting a tag into ActiveCampaign. And then it's reading that tag out of ActiveCampaign and now showing this extra thing, right?

[08:52] George: Right. So before there was only two lessons. Now there's three. So it's using, I'd have to open it up to remember which tag it is.

[08:59] Micah: But it's mem.

[09:00] George: I think it's link. It's not because there's no action sets in keep. It's a different, it's the equivalent of the mem action link. So I think it's mem automation link. And that's me getting geeky and stuff on the short code memes.

[09:16] Micah: I love it. And real quick note on the geekiness. What he means is in the transition from keep to ActiveCampaign, they don't have like a one-to-one lineup of all of their features. And so he's, you know, an action set in keep is in automation in ActiveCampaign. And I think keep might even call them automations now on the surface.

[09:34] George: Interestingly enough, I started calling them automations in ActiveCampaign. And in the last three months, they've renamed campaigns to automations in keep.

[09:44] Micah: Yeah, exactly.

[09:46] George: So as you can see, clicking on that button added it to the homework. And now, you know, we just tell them, hey, it's already added. So don't try to add it again. And, you know, I can go to the next lesson. So we're using Medbarium enrollment with LearnDash to get them into this course.

[10:05] Micah: And now we're using 100 plus tags to turn on a bunch of homework assignments that are scattered throughout the LearnDash. That's really cool. I think for people who are just getting started building out their intellectual property, this is a concept. Like you said, he has like 137 or something of these. But once you build something, like let's say a PDF or a piece of homework, a video, and then you assign a tag to it. Now that tag unlocks it for people. It's just a matter of, oh, the more IP I build, the more of these tags I have, the more value I can give someone just by applying tags with this type of automation. The other thing I want to point out is I believe everything we're seeing on the screen, like visually under the header in the menu, is LearnDash, right? You didn't really edit.

[10:48] George: No, no, we're using the standard focus mode template. We didn't do it.

[10:54] Micah: This right here is a theme template so that we could control the top of here. Gotcha.

[11:01] George: Now, something that might be interesting, I could show what that, you know, what that homework page looks like just to give an idea that that might be interesting to review. Yeah, I think so. So I'm going to log out as this test account, and now I'm going to log in as the administrator.

[11:18] Micah: And this is using Elementor as the, you know, the content management system.

[11:23] George: So if I go now to the homework page again, so I would go.

[11:28] Micah: Kind of what George is saying, for those of you listening and watching, is as a logged in user, a real, or in this case, a test user, he only has access based on the tags. But as an administrator, once he goes in as that, the admin basically gets everything. So you can see all the homework.

[11:44] George: I'm the admin, so he has access to all of this homework, which wouldn't be very helpful as homework to the people. But if I now go and edit this, this is pretty involved how we're using Elementor in here, because we've got to keep the line, the intersection from showing up. And then if the tag gets applied, it gets showed.

[12:10] Micah: And then that connects it to a pop-up that gives you that homework.

[12:15] George: And then we have to coordinate the remove button, which removes the homework from the homework page. And I think because we're using, you know, a Zoom, it's a little slow and refreshing these screens.

[12:30] Micah: Yeah, no worries.

[12:31] George: There it is. There it is. So, you know, as you can see, each one of these is made up of a two-column section.

[12:39] Micah: But this one here is protected using Membarium.

[12:44] George: So this tag is the homework tag that would have been applied somewhere else. So that's what keeps this from becoming visible if it's not assigned. Now, once you're here, this here is, you know, we're using a pop-up to show the video. And then this here is nothing more than a shortcode. So there's the Memautomation link, and this one has a minus sign so that it removes the tag.

[13:11] Micah: Yeah, George, will you do me a favor and zoom in on that little left-hand corner box? Just like Command Plus or Control Plus or whatever.

[13:19] George: Very close. There we go.

[13:21] Micah: Yeah, a couple more times for us. So what George is basically saying is this little, you know, the square bracket where it says Mem underscore Automation link. And then on the next line, tag ID equals, in this case, negative 108 means remove 108. So it's saying, hey, use Membarium to run an automation through this link to remove tag 108 and then redirect them back to, in this case, it looks like current URL, same page. So this I just wanted to point out because it's a little bit down in the weeds, but it's pretty straightforward once you understand, okay.

[13:52] George: Yeah, you know, it's one of those shortcodes that you don't use very frequently.

[13:59] Micah: But it's really good to know that Membarium has all these little widgets that you may not think you need, but then the day you need them, it's real handy to have them.

[14:10] George: And then here we do a Memsync at the top here. And I probably shouldn't have done that. Yeah. A Memsync here because the URL, the shortcode here does return, it redirects to the same page. And we need to force a reload of the tags so that the next time it refreshes, it doesn't show the one that we just removed.

[14:35] Micah: Yeah. Will you scroll back up to that code up there? And this is actually another, just to the top of this page, just above the words, my homework and the body itself.

[14:46] George: Yeah. Oh, I'm sorry. Okay. You're looking up here.

[14:47] Micah: Yeah, you're good. So these, you can see anything that starts with Mem, that's Membarium, but that's what George is saying. It's saying the first thing this page does is resync the contact. And then if you look over further, it's saying, hey, you know, if they're an admin, do this. If they're not an admin, then if they have this tag, you know, blah, blah, blah. So it basically, you know, constructs these things for him. But then I'm guessing, George, as you went forward in the future with each of these 137 links, you're probably just like cloning the one before and then editing a few variables, right?

[15:16] George: Yeah. It's very, as a matter of fact, because we had to translate the site from the keep shortcodes to the active campaign, I did like the first 10. And then I recorded some videos because I did want to make sure that Akemba could manage it. He wanted to be able to manage this by himself without having to hire a virtual assistant. And he did the rest of them. So, you know, once you kind of see how it's done, it's just copy, paste, copy, paste, copy, paste 137 times.

[15:48] Micah: Yeah. No, I love actually that you made him some videos to train him to manage that himself, because I know that's a concern for people when they do something custom is, I'm going to have to, I'm going to be reliant, you know, on a high price specialist, essentially. But yeah, I mean, all these things there, some people do themselves, but I think what you're doing here for Akemba is such a great service where it's like, okay, the more complex things, he doesn't really need to go into the depth to know, like, he's never going to do it again. You can do that. But the things that he will do again, yeah, train him, right?

[16:22] George: Because he'll be adding, like, he, since he was going to make this change anyway, he went and did some renaming of some of them, so that the names were more consistent. And then, for example, he wanted to be able to add these titles. These titles are really only for him, because he wants to be able to search very quickly on this page and get to the homework assignment that he wants to sign to people. So this one here is actually turned off. So we created a tag that's never used, do not display. And then this only displays if that tag is applied. So it never gets applied, but if I'm logged in as the administrator, I see it. So it just helps him, you know, just kind of go down the page and go, oh, here's where all the GPS ones live.

[17:12] Micah: And here's where the, oh, that was a test heading that he never removed.

[17:17] George: So I'm going to leave it there because he's probably surprised if I remove it. And he's got a couple more of these titles that he'll be adding as he kind of gets farther along with these.

[17:28] Micah: Let me ask you a question. What is a piece of homework? Is it going to be a video again? It's similar to a lesson, just a different video?

[17:36] George: It's basically the video part of a specific lesson. If I go back to the front, so when I click on here, it's a pop-up with a video in it.

[17:47] Micah: Okay.

[17:47] George: So these are a bunch of Elementor pop-up templates.

[17:52] Micah: Okay. So when he has somebody, let's say, come to his facility, I think you said in New Mexico, and he realizes, oh, they're doing, you know, this or that wrong, or they need this or that help. My guess is he's, when they leave or maybe while they're still there, he's going and like filling out a form on their behalf, or is he going and applying the tags directly? Do you know?

[18:16] George: He's creating an entry for them in the site. For example, people who don't live in New Mexico would be using that Eloha course, but there is a homework-only membership.

[18:29] Micah: So if I'm a private member and I go to his New Mexico facility, you know, they're working on stuff,

[18:37] George: and, you know, they're saying, I got a pain in my shoulder. I'm just making that one up. So he goes, you know, now that you mentioned that, I'm going to give you access to my library, and I'm going to give you some homework so that you can go in and do those exercises. So he'll come up, assign them that membership. That membership makes them a membership on the site using the Membarium Make Pass line. It sends them their credentials. Now they can log in, and their version of the site only shows the homework. They don't have access to the dashboard. And then, so that's a way for them to go home, and in between the private sessions or in between the group sessions, they can go in and, you know, follow up on, hey, over the weekend, every day you ought to be doing this one.

[19:25] Micah: Gotcha. This is interesting. So do you know what he sells some of the content for? And kind of my question is more around, you know, over time, how much IP value has he been able to build up? So that if somebody does contact him, or like, let's say somebody loves him, they're working with him in New Mexico, but then they move away, right? What can he offer them instead of just, hey, sorry, we can't do business anymore?

[19:52] George: In which case he would put them into the, you know, the, I always forget the name. I think it's the ELDOA course. And ELDOA, the Empowered Body course.

[20:02] Micah: So this one does run you through it.

[20:07] George: And, you know, I haven't gone into his detailed program that carefully, but it is fairly standalone.

[20:15] Micah: Like, he puts you through stuff, and then here's what you should be doing for this week

[20:20] George: and that week.

[20:21] Micah: You know, so it's a little more repetitive at some point. Okay.

[20:26] George: So correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like most of the conversation so far, we've been talking about the course in a way that is supplemental to the user at the gym.

[20:37] Micah: But what you just mentioned, this Empowered Body thing, that's really more of the online-only route. Because the homework that we had been talking about the whole time is almost prescriptive, where Akemba is saying, hey, since I know you or whatever, go do these things. But the Empowered Body is like, hey, I don't know you, so generally speaking, follow this path. Is that right?

[20:58] George: Right. And the idea of homework is made, you know, they're made aware of that, so that if they're going through this on their own and they get to here, for example, I'll find it. So they get to here, then they, hey, I like this,

[21:15] Micah: or this is something that caters to my needs.

[21:19] George: So I can add homework for myself. And then I have that homework page for me to see things that I've kind of pointed out to myself. So the same thing that uses to assign homework, people can use it to favorite or add homework to their queue.

[21:37] Micah: It's really cool. I can imagine being a client of this site because I've got, you know, some injuries and things like that. And so it just makes total sense to have a professional point out some things, but then you also add some and you don't lose track of them.

[21:52] George: Because otherwise I know for myself, you know, you go to physical therapy or whatever,

[21:55] Micah: they tell you what to do and then you go home and it's like, yeah, you're not going to do that again. Right. And you're going to go next time and be like, no, I didn't do it. Pretty much.

[22:02] George: Well, and one thing that's very common, like you see, there's a lot of content. This goes on for quite a while. So if there was something you did two months ago, I mean, good luck. I mean, finding it is like finding a new little haystack. So it's good to be able to say, I'm going to throw this into my homework pile. And that's stuff that I want to make sure I can easily get. It's just like favoriting content.

[22:27] Micah: Yeah, I also think of this use case when you're saying he's assigning homework in the gym. It's almost like here's the DIY stuff. Here's the do-it-yourself stuff. You know, you have access to that on the side, but come to class, right? Show up in class. Really cool. One of the kind of interesting things you said at the beginning, I don't think we've mentioned, is the payment system sounds like it's really somewhat manual because he has this physical location. They're just kind of coming in and paying him and then he's unlocking things. So he's not worried about the e-commerce automation necessarily. Is that right? Yes.

[23:03] George: Yeah. And what he's done is people will go to his site and they will purchase stuff. They can purchase access to his Empowered Body course. And then he gets notified. He just gives a manual access. So he's kind of manually running some things. Keep has the e-commerce feature. So before he used to have that. And as he moved over to ActiveCampaign, he says, I'm going to do it manually for a while, see how it goes. And if we have to go and add a WooCommerce or something, that would be something he'd be adding later.

[23:38] Micah: So out of curiosity, if they do pay on the site, what are they paying through? Is it like PayPal or something?

[23:47] George: PayPal or Stripe, I think.

[23:49] Micah: Okay. So he's keeping it really simply saying, tags give content. You come to my gym, I give you tags. Or you pay me through PayPal and I get that PayPal money and I go give you a tag.

[24:00] George: So a little bit of intervention on his part, but probably pretty easy and only in cases where he's getting money.

[24:07] Micah: So I'm sure he's not sad about that.

[24:11] George: Does he do, so these are just kind of questions popping up right now. Does he do any, let's say, live events?

[24:23] Micah: Does he do events other places? Does he do webinars? Does that stuff mix into this?

[24:28] George: He does record other content. That's more to attract people. Although he, for some of his private members, he also gives them access. And then there's like a library of archived content that they can reference. And I think one of the things that he will do is he'll come up and say, you know, if you go back to February's presentation, you'll see more about that. So he uses it as a way to, you know, complement his consulting, so to say, with his clients.

[25:04] Micah: Gotcha. Interesting. The classes that he's doing, are they recorded or streamed? Like when he does a class, is he doing any of that?

[25:12] George: Yeah, they would be live when he does them the first time.

[25:15] Micah: Interesting. Okay. It's, to me, it's so fun because, well, you and I both have watched this membership stuff come along. And, you know, this was, I think, the promise initially of this whole concept of membership of like, oh, hey, you know, stuff, record it, distribute it, make money, right? Keep it simple. But there's this pit between here and there of technology that some people kind of get lost in, unfortunately.

[25:43] George: Well, and technology is one thing, too. But just because you can teach something in person doesn't mean you can make an audience for that same content online. And I've seen people do this hybrid approach where, you know, they were teaching in a, you know, in a gym environment. Now they're attracting another audience. And it's not like I'm going to record all my stuff now. I'm going to put it online and sell it. So it's more of, hey, like I had another gym client and he moved from California to Florida. And he wasn't going to be with those people. Hey, how do we stay in your program?

[26:25] Micah: And so he is remotely teaching some of those folks.

[26:30] George: He records a lot of his workouts. I mean, he's just got this massive library of workouts of different types. And, you know, then he'll say, OK, I'm going to once a week or once a month give you a training schedule. And the training schedule is a cherry picking of videos from his library. So, you know, you can turn on, you know, do it in your garage or in your backyard or, you know, without him having to be there.

[26:58] Micah: I like that idea a lot. So he was he was just kind of recording what he did. And then once that became a library of enough movements, now he can just build little menus out of those.

[27:08] George: Yeah. And he was out like on Venice Beach and in different places because he lived in Southern California. And he'd be out there with people. And for some reason, he was recording stuff way before I remember people thinking to record stuff. And then that became this massive library of content.

[27:29] Micah: Interesting. My brain goes to AI with some of these things, people like that who, let's say, they've been recording forever and it was maybe disorganized or too much or overwhelming. You put a little AI layer over that. Oh, hey, what are you struggling with? What do you need? Right. Oh, I need this and that. OK, here's the five links that seem most relevant to that. Right. If he goes back and maybe keywords. So. It's a cool time to. Be in the space, I think, because the tech has matured where it's easy now, but then also the AI piece where it's like, oh, you can really deliver something cool if you put some of these things together. Is there anything else about this site that you think is is cool or the way you guys implemented it, you know, moving from keep to active campaign?

[28:12] George: I mean, he he has a regist a registration systems for his private and for his group lessons so people can buy them in blocks. So I buy one to one, three, one, four, nine or 13. And I'm not sure why those numbers are the ones. Yeah.

[28:30] Micah: But they literally can go and and then say, this guy paid me for nine.

[28:35] George: So I'm going to, you know, use an automation and a form inside of active campaign that changes their number from whatever it is to that plus 13, that plus nine. And then every time he checks in, I think what he does is he just takes people's names at the door. And then after the class, he goes into here and he assigns everybody a check in private or group. And that will reduce one. And as they get to three or four, you know, it's like, hey, you've only got four to go. You know, it's getting close to time to renew.

[29:09] Micah: Tell me how many you want to renew for when they hit 90 days.

[29:13] George: If they haven't used them, it'll spring, you know, a timer goes off and there's a countdown to it. Hey, if you know, these are use it or lose it. If you don't use them, you know, they go away to kind of encourage them to come in before they lose them and then to try to upsell them to another block for for another period of time.

[29:34] Micah: Very cool.

[29:35] George: Well, what.

[29:37] Micah: If you know the answer to this question, what does he have planned for the future? Like what are the some of the next steps or the if he could wave a magic wand kind of things? What might be added?

[29:48] George: I just don't know. We've been like really busy switching him over to active campaign. You know, it's interesting. I have access to so much content. And like I have I play guitar and we built a 500 lesson guitar course for a guy in Sweden. And, you know, I told him, hey, do you mind if I mess with you? He goes, yeah, I mess with that. I want to see what you think. And it was so far above my. He was teaching you how to do some like unbelievable stuff. And it's like, you know, this is pretty cool. I play at church a little bit.

[30:24] Micah: So but, you know, people have these libraries.

[30:29] George: Some of them are really impressive. So, you know, how do you get those into the hands of the people that really need and want?

[30:37] Micah: Yeah, I know we didn't get into much sales and marketing. We mentioned that he does some things to generate some business.

[30:44] George: But the delivery side of this really, I think, is is the fascinating part, the part that we play more into. And I want to say these are the kind of things that just about anybody can do because it's this site. You know, I've gone through the more complicated part of it. And once you see it, it's not that complicated. But it's very easy to create one course on a site, give people access to content, you know, showcase your expertise. Some people build this content mainly to get people to hire them to do it one on one because they have a high ticket item. And it works either way. But that site, before we came along, they had a really nice designer. So they had the site already built. Once that's up, expanding this to do the next thing is not, you know, this isn't a $20,000 solution by any means.

[31:44] Micah: Yeah, it's intriguing to me that he's using ActiveCampaign as almost his business management system. You know, kind of he's kind of like hijacking it, not necessarily from its intended purpose, but not in an exactly traditional way.

[32:00] George: I'm trying to think of what's maybe a lesson people can take from this.

[32:07] Micah: I know some people already have sites at varying levels of success or looking to start one. And I'll share what comes to mind for me, but I'm curious your thought too. Looking at this, it really makes me think that someone getting that relationship of, okay, a tag here means access there.

[32:23] George: Like I can deliver value via tags and now I can decide if somebody pays me, how many tags do I give them or bonus them in?

[32:30] Micah: Like you're saying, if they buy something different or so on. And I think that simple idea, especially with somebody in ActiveCampaign, like, oh, a tag equals value I can give to somebody, which I can exchange for whatever, money and things.

[32:42] George: But what do you think is kind of the lesson of this?

[32:46] Micah: I mean, you're the one who's been in it. I've only known about it for an hour.

[32:49] George: You know, most people that use a CRM ActiveCampaign, keep whichever one you're using, get into it because of sales and marketing. You know, I want to create a sales funnel. I don't sell that many CRMs. I usually get involved after people already have that up and now they want to get a membership site.

[33:13] Micah: I think of the CRM as kind of like a remote control for, you know, a drone. So I can do things with my control here that get the drone to do something I want it to do.

[33:28] George: And Membarium and WordPress is the drone. It's the thing I want to control.

[33:32] Micah: And it's so much easier to control it from something like ActiveCampaign or Keep, you know, with Membarium, you know, making the connection.

[33:41] George: So you're not using it with the typical thinking of I've got to create a funnel.

[33:45] Micah: And when someone, you know, opts in, then I got to send them this.

[33:49] George: You're using it as a matter of switches. I'm turning this switch on, which means that homework assignment goes on. I'm doing this. And now people see different things. So it's a different way of seeing a CRM. And that doesn't preclude you from doing all the marketing stuff.

[34:06] Micah: I love that analogy, the remote control.

[34:09] George: We get a lot of people that come to us without Membarium or, you know, the CRM. And it's like we recently worked with a website. And it was a pretty elaborate BuddyBoss LearnDash site that had 104 plugins.

[34:26] Micah: Yeah.

[34:28] George: So, you know, we really recommend under 40 and preferably 20 to 30 max.

[34:33] Micah: And it's because they were trying to do a lot with WordPress only without having the backend CRM to offload so many things.

[34:43] George: You know, everything from how do I control access to how do I send emails? You know, all the stuff that is a no-brainer with the CRM. And it's because they grew up with WordPress and didn't know that there was something else to use.

[34:58] Micah: And that is so interesting. For the non-nerds out there, if you put too many plugins into WordPress, it slows the whole thing down. Even if you have the greatest server, it just doesn't matter. It's too much going on.

[35:10] George: And then every time you upgrade things, you have conflicts. And sometimes you'll get the fun critical error message and your site goes down.

[35:16] Micah: So it's not something we recommend. Love it. I think what George is telling you all is if you're just using WordPress, you have to add a CRM, which he can help you with. And Membarium, if you want to be able to have the CRM remote control of WordPress, right?

[35:31] George: So Membarium is like the Bluetooth or the Wi-Fi or whatever in between.

[35:36] Micah: Well, George, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you so much for sharing. That site is really cool and interesting. I think especially kind of the simplicity, the differences between keep an active campaign. People who want to work with you or just I know you're very generous, you know, with people coming in just with questions and things like that first time. How do they connect with you? What can you do to to help people who are curious about your services? Yeah.

[36:01] George: The best way to reach me is head on over to our website, www.larryjacob.com. And Jacob has no S. So Larry Jacob, there's a big contact us. Our phone number's out there. You can email us. And we offer a free 30-minute call to people. A lot of times we've had people take us up on that and it's kind of like we get them out of like a snag. But most of the people that are calling, they're kind of going, OK, we've taken this as far as we think we ought to be working on this. We need someone to give us a hand.

[36:33] Micah: I love it, man. Well, I can definitely give George my recommendation because, like I said, I've known him forever. He's a friend.

[36:40] George: But more than that, we've, you know, worked together.

[36:43] Micah: We know the same systems, the same people. And he's a good guy. So I can recommend that you go talk to him.

[36:47] George: Mike is the guy that, like, I don't know, 15 years ago said, George, you really ought to learn these membership sites. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he convinced me, you know, here I are 15 years later. I'm doing it full time.

[37:00] Micah: Dude, I love it. Well, thanks again, man. See you later.

[37:03] George: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.