TL;DR Version:
It’s been a hot minute since I wrote a blog post this long, so here’s a handy-dandy guide to what’s inside:
Great, sustainable communities are built on seven specific systems: Onboarding, Connection + Communication, Norms + Rituals, Identity, Moderation/Agency/Ownership, Scaled Resourcing, and Value Exchange.
Stories shared:
- Why FoCo Comic Con and a coffee shop in the basement of a bar are functionally identical communities.
- Being invited to give a 5-minute talk led to an event with $605K of annual economic impact.
- Why Ace Hardware makes onboarding a privilege.
- How different Systems Business Coaches are approaching their own communities.
What does a coffee shop in a bar basement have in common with a Comic Con?
Chances are the spaces you love to gather in and people that you love to gather with have many things in common, even if they look wildly different on the surface.
Back in the day, Harbinger Coffee Shop was a simple coffee cart located in the basement of the Drunken Monkey (so called because the bar featured swings that looked out over Old Town. Harbinger was real insider-baseball coffee and it tasted divine. I only found out about it because somebody had told my buddy Bill, who thought it was funny… until he visited.
“Nick,” he said, later that week, “Have you been to the hidden coffee spot in the bar basement?”
Not being one to pass up what sounds like the start of a career in espionage, I eagerly accepted the invitation. Down the staircase into a surprisingly posh and well-hidden underground office park, there stood a coffee cart and a barista who was chatting up his lone patron – his voice echoing off the not-quite-cramped corners. A small table with a striped umbrella sat unoccupied nearby.
The barista finished with his customer and then turned to ask Bill and I if we’d ever visited before. We told him no (a slight lie on Bill’s part, but this was part of the onboarding ritual).
“Well,” this fine mustachioed fellow intoned, “You’re about to learn a whole hell of a lot about coffee in the span of 5 minutes.”
He asked us whether we liked light or dark roast. From there he began the most sensuously attentive pour-over coffee brewing ritual I’d ever seen.
If you’re a fan of Avatar: The Last Airbender, this man was the 20-something Uncle Iroh of coffee. He fussed over the temperature of the water, gently swirling the first pour around the fresh coffee beans he’d ground mere seconds earlier. “You can’t drown it. You have to ease out the flavors; you blast the oils off the coffee and you get hot water and oily coffee. Gentle. A little at a time.”
He sets a timer and pours about half the cup in there. As the coffee brews he gives a lengthy explanation about the crema (the foam on top of the coffee) and how if you gently agitate the coffee grounds after they’ve had a moment to warm up, you boost the richness of the brew. He let that ruminate for a moment as the timer ticked down, all the while sharing the story about the origin of these particular coffee beans and the farmer and the land and the care of cultivation and after a moment he carefully spiraled the remainder of the water around the edges of the conical brewer – explaining that you couldn’t rush the process.
He elevates the coffee to demonstrate the pour and aerate the coffee. Allowing the cup to steam provocatively, he encouraged me to pick it up for a first sip. As instructed, I take a deep breath of the brew first before indulging in a blisteringly hot but blissful first sip. It was truly a magnificent cup of coffee. Bill and I stayed for a bit as he repeated this ritual with identical rigor for each new customer.
Fast forward a few years to the last few moments before the doors open at FoCo Comic Con. The 501st have set up full displays with screen-accurate Storm Troopers standing guard, there are droids beeping and booping, and just around the bend is the USS Tiburon and Starfleet crew evaluating their ship’s transporter pad.
The first family walks in. The kids’ eyes go wide as they fully pause in front of our Stormtrooper friends. After a brief face-off, the Stormtroopers soften, kneel, and offer fist-bumps. The kids return the gesture. Standing nearby it would be easy to miss that the kids’ mom has the same expression of wonder-joy for this otherworldly scene. Everybody has their moment of awe before the family remembers there’s a “thing to do” and they go grab their badges.
Later that day – walking through the corridors – another little kiddo in full Spiderman suit, sans the mask follows closely behind his dad. My own costume is Peter B Parker (aka dadbod Spiderman from Into the Spiderverse).
“Hey Spiderman! You having fun today?” I ask as I stop and offer a fistbump. The kiddo gingerly returns it. I go flying backwards and the kid grins from ear to ear.
That’s part of the ritual. You walk into FoCo Comic Con: you’re no longer in the Fort Collins Senior Center. You’re on Tatooine with Stormtroopers and droids. You’re on the transporter pad of the USS Tiburon surrounded by Starfleet crew.
A little kid isn’t dressed as Spiderman, they ARE Spiderman.
If you know about the best coffee in the City, and it exists in a basement of a bar that you can take people to, you are contractually fuckin’ obligated to tell people about it.
The things that make these communities the same? Systems.
Systems to build communities are how I went from a broke, starving college grad building WordPress websites for $350 to the Executive Director of Howdy Neighbor Events managing 3 of Fort Collins’ largest events that annually drive $1M in local economic impact. Fort Collins Comic Con alone generates between $390K and $500K in local economic impact every time we run it.
I didn’t have a roadmap. If you’d told me I’d be running Fort Collins Comic Con next week alongside a team of FoCo’s most talented and generous geeks, I’d have rolled my eyes. I had a lot of luck and I had a lot of very generous mentors willing to help me figure it out and walk with me.
Let’s start at the beginning…
When I was a baby entrepreneur, I spent a lot of time hunting for that first client and doing what most small business owners do: posting on social media. Did it work? Hell no. It was a system but it wasn’t working for me, mostly because I had no reputation, I was young and brash, and I wasn’t being talked about in my community. I’d done a lot of fun work at CSU during my time on the college radio station, I’d done my stint as the worlds. worst. programmer. And I’d stressed my body out to the point that it nearly quit and killed me before realizing I needed to make a change.
One of the smarter things I did was sign up to speak at Ignite Fort Collins. Ignite’s a series of speedy presentations – 20 slides, 15 seconds per slide, 5 minute talks. The talk I pitched at the time was wildly self-serving and self-promotional. I didn’t know any better – but the folks who’d become my mentors DID and reached out directly and suggested a slightly different path.
I gave the modified talk, doing pretty well:
Here’s where the systems of a community kicked in – though I didn’t recognize it at the time.
Narratively, what happened next was based entirely on systems:
- Onboarding: the organizers – including Ron, Ava, Larry, Viveka, and Laurie – those folks who’d become my mentors, saw something in me beyond a hungry newbie entrepreneur. They saw my value and gave me an opportunity to participate.
- Connection + Communication: The helped provide bumper lanes – shared what to expect, who to talk to, who to connect with. They facilitated the introductions between myself and the larger community.
- Norms + Rituals: They helped articulate the norms of what Ignite Fort Collins looked like, I did well during my talk, and Laurie became my first client (I still have the first dollar she paid me framed in my office) – she walked me through how to write agreements and how to set expectations. She was patient when I missed deadlines because I’d overpromised and showed me how to fix it.
- Identity: I was allowed to borrow their brand to establish credibility, first as an Ignite Speaker, and then as a subcontractor for Laurie’s business. I was invited to connect and share what I knew so I could establish my own value and my own identity. There was value in being an “Ignite Speaker”. I had videos of my talks I could leverage and share. It was a platform that I could use to elevate my best ideas.
- Moderation/Agency/Ownership: After a time, I was invited to become a regular volunteer for Ignite Fort Collins and had a say in who could speak. On the business side, in helping Ron and Laurie, I had a ton of freedom to articulate strategies and pick my own clients, Laurie benefitted as my business grew. Ron referred me out regularly for projects that were too “small fry” for him to take on, but ones he knew I could learn from. Between her and Ron, they saw me not as a competitor on the rise, but as a colleague who they could help.
- Scaled Resourcing: After proving I had something to share, Ron foot the bill for my first MeetUp Group ($72 at the time). It was between that and groceries, and Ron helped me avoid that choice. I ran the Fort Collins Digital Gunslingers after that, and because of Ron’s trust, our $1-per-person social media classes created nearly 4,000 meals in the community through our donations to the Food Bank and I became well-known for my social media marketing prowess. That first-hand experience running a class and providing value for local entrepreneurs served me well when I volunteered for Fort Collins Startup Week and again when we rebranded as Founded in FoCo.
- Value Exchange: I leveraged my knowledge to help take work off Ron and Laurie as a volunteer for Ignite Fort Collins and the community at large. I stepped in to speak for Laurie when she wasn’t able to do a talk at the Workforce Symposium. I landed Fort Collins Brewery and the Poudre Libraries as a client because of it.
These seven systems are shared across every community I’ve ever built or been a part of. No successful community can survive without them. Let’s talk about what they mean for your business, especially if you’re trying to build a community from scratch.
Community System #1: Onboarding
Becoming a customer of a business is an active choice. It requires resources, time, and commitment to change a habit or not accept the status quo. Treating someone buying from you as if it’s “just another day” is a quick path to failure.
- Good businesses bring in new customers.
- Great businesses make it an experience that is impossible to forget – and something that must be shared.
I wrote a while back about how Home Depot doesn’t have sidewalks. Setting aside that Home Depot is my personal hell (I’ll spare you the 20-minute-long diatribe, you’re welcome), everything about walking into a Home Depot is a miserable experience. You’re there because something broke, needs fixing, or because you didn’t have the thing you needed to build something. I will fully admit that many folks also feel this same despondency when thinking about building a website… to each their own.
To find a thing in Home Depot is a Tolkein-esque quest into the dark abyss of human soul, a test of your determination down to your very marrow to find the exact thing you came in for which the website says they have. May the odds be ever in your favor, for many who have wandered those vaulted halls with the same quest have never returned. I have never once left Home Depot with fewer problems than I came in with.
Compare and contrast to Ace Hardware. You walk in to any Ace Hardware anywhere in the country and are almost immediately greeted with: “Can we help you find something today?” They don’t just point you to the thing, they walk you right to it. If they don’t have the answer, they immediately connect to another Ace Hardware worker who does.
You bring a problem into Ace Hardware and it gets fucking solved.
Community System #2: Connection + Communication
Communication builds connection. Connection builds communication. It’s a loop.
Treating your customers as if they are an island unto themselves is folly. Inviting them into the community that your customers sustain by continuing to be customers is a fast path to profitability.
Sure, you can just buy a game at Haunted Game Cafe. But you get so much more value as a customer if you stay to play the game there FIRST.
Or as fellow Systems Business Coach Sophia alluded to in her post in this Field Notes series: “People originally walked through the door because they wanted to learn to dance, but they stayed for more than that. Thursday night became part of their week because it wasn’t just a beginner ballroom dance class; it was an hour of connection they didn’t get anywhere else in their lives. It was laughing, bonding, playing, doing something daunting (dancing, hello!), and looking silly together. The relationships they built within that community meant a lot to them because the class provided a safe and trusting space to step outside of their comfort zones.“
- Good businesses communicate consistently and provide opportunities for connection.
- Great businesses leverage every communication consistently to create connections.
Community System #3: Norms + Rituals
Each community comes along with a series of norms and rituals – namely things that happen when you walk in, things that happen when you leave, hidden menu items, secret insider jokes, special funny parts of the email to check, Seth Godin’s purple dot.
Anthony from Maplenomics shared an excellent point about how two people could walk into the same room, same event, and have two completely different outcomes. Understanding why is the difference between “accidental community” driven by unintentional happenings and “purposeful community” driven by systems.
Norms and rituals matter A LOT.
- Good businesses understand how norms and rituals of their spaces, places, products, and services impact their business.
- Great businesses work to form their own norms, establish rituals, and to empower their own communities to co-create them. They create systems to curate those norms and resource them so they can take hold.
Community System #4: Identity
Identity is more than just “I go here, I shop here, I work here, I live here, I play here.” Identity is: I am of this community.
How you build that is partly norms and rituals, but a healthy component of it is in the onboarding work and the subsequent work to maintain momentum. I recently had coffee with a fantastic community coordinator who leveled up their career from handling 1,500-ish “characters” (folks in their network) with a few hundred to thousands dollars of relationships managed to around 15… and managing multi-million dollar relationships there. They said they missed the impact of the smaller networking and appreciated the challenge of the “you’re never offline with a multi-million dollar project” aspect.
In both cases: onboarding is important, but the follow-through and the momentum carrying is JUST as vital.
The flip-side of this is also true: Founded in FoCo has worked for many years to build a welcoming space for all sorts of entrepreneurs, but I’d be lying if I said we had perfectly sorted out how to invite in the Latino business community. We’ve tried many things: Spanish mixer hours, Spanish-only panels, inviting and highlighting (not spotlighting) key Latino business owners in our community, partnering with the Latino Chamber of Commerce. And yet…
The secret to successful identity is that not only is it a place that your customers want to go, it’s a place they feel like they belong, and it takes a lot of work.
- Good businesses understand that identity is critical to recurring purchases as well as referrals.
- Great businesses develop the systems needed to curate additional identities, support aspirational identities, and build bridges between new and old members of the community.
Community System #5: Moderation/Agency/Ownership
Alongside identity, providing ownership over the community and self-governance for those inside is critical. I was chatting with an attendee – a new mom – at Founded in FoCo who shared the off-hand observation, “If I can line up childcare for tomorrow, I’ll be back.”
“Please come anyway,” I said. “We are all entrepreneurs, many of us are parents, and this is a City venue, so as long as you can wrangle your kiddo if they need attention, you’re absolutely welcome to bring them with you tomorrow. It might even be a boost for your networking.”
Moderation is knowing that new moms who are also entrepreneurs are struggling with the same (often worse!) roadblocks as most of us: that 39% of entrepreneurs feel like they have no one to talk to, 46% struggle with loneliness and isolation, and 80-90% of new moms in particular feel socially isolated. As the event organizer, I’m supposed to just offer a sympathetic nod in that situation? Hell no. It’s going in our emails for 2027’s event: bring your kids if you want/need. Childcare is expensive. Why miss out?
Part of our Volunteer Training System for Howdy Neighbor Events is to actively encourage connections and to find the way to “yes” whenever it makes sense, even if it takes additional resources or time. Our volunteers have agency and ownership over the space to make accommodations or increase accessibility as needed.
As Annia Mercado points out on the Latina Entrepreneur podcast, connections are lost unless purposeful effort is made to “send the elevator back down” and to bridge gaps between where folks are and who should be sitting at the table. If you’re looking around a room and everybody else looks like you, that’s probably not a very healthy community – that’s a monoculture.
- Good businesses understand the impact of purposeful connections and seek them out.
- Great businesses build systems around providing opportunities to identify and guide connections to optimal effect and turn that system over to the community itself to operate.
Community System #6: Scaled Resourcing
It is impossible for an organization to handle all of the resource allocation with the same team that created the original system as the organization scales.
In other words: things get crazy complicated as you grow, unless you make growth and scale a part of the system.
This is why it is so important to have a clear understanding of the input and outputs of any particular community.
Going back to Sophia’s blog post, she explicitly mentions the idea of understanding a need before diving into a community where you may not have a full understanding of the lay of the land before you get involved. And as Ruth Burk puts it in her blog:
“Many founders unintentionally become the center of everything their business does. Customers expect to hear directly from them, employees wait for their decisions and important relationships depend on their personal involvement. While this often feels like responsible leadership, it eventually creates a business that cannot grow beyond the founder’s capacity.”
Fort Collins Comic Con started out as a one-day convention, we fully thought there would only be around 100 of our closest friends there. 1,500 people showed up that first year and from there, we’ve steadily increased in attendance until reaching around 3,200 to 3,500 attendees every year. We had 100 artists that first year. We now have over 150 creatives (which doesn’t sound like a lot but when you have to turn away around half your list each year…)
If you don’t make growth and scale part of the system, you won’t know how to identify pain points when they crop up. You won’t know how to make the changes because you won’t have planned them out in advance.
- Good businesses understand their systems may need updating as the business grows.
- Great businesses purposefully put lines in the sand (tripwires) to denote exactly what the trigger for that is and what will happen next as a result (and, maybe most importantly: how it’ll all get paid for).
Kirsten Jenner, another of our amazing System Business Coach cohort participating in this month’s Field Notes series on community shared that support systems either grow to meet the demands of those participating – or the community fails.
Community System #7: Value Exchange
It is normal and expected that businesses sell things to their communities, but tying in “sell” and “community” sometimes creates hives for small business owners.
The idea of value in a business goes way beyond what’s being sold when community gets involved. Communities that form in-and-around businesses care a lot about what that business does as an extension of its brand, who the business likes to support with sponsorships, for instance. Does the business go the extra mile for its customers? Does it handle customer service with kindness or does it give its customers grief? Does it deliver on its promises?
When forming a community around a business, the idea of value exchange is paramount – because the connections from the community connecting are just ONE of the potential values, the idea of a halo effect of participating vs not (in the style of Realities For Children or the BBB, for instance). Does the business work hard to connect customers who have similar needs? Does it provide wrap-around support and services to go beyond the initial purchase? Does it connect the dots between people who have early questions and the folks who have been-there-done-that-got-the-tshirt?
All 7 Or Just One?
You don’t need to tackle all of these systems at once. But you DO need to address them, eventually, especially if you’ve got a nascent community which is helping to drive some or most of your income. If you’ve got questions, or if you’re struggling with any of those 7 above, it’s a great time to talk to a Systems Business Coach.
What’s A Field Notes Series?
This post is part of the monthly Field Notes series where Systems Business Coaches share their unique insights on a particular topic. This month’s topic is on creating community and how it’s done, and if you liked what I had to write, then you will absolutely love to read the other additions in the series. Next month topic is on the Systems Business Coach ontology, which is just a fancy way of saying how does a Systems Business Coach help make your business meaningfully better? Find out in my next post.
