Transcript: Did you know that Thriveal is a community? You probably knew that. Thriveal has been building community for over a decade. That’s a long time. And it was wild to see 2020, that was the year of community building. Now that’s something Julie and I watch. We watch communities that are being built. We’re interested in what people think about community. So our antenna are up about watching for community. And I don’t know if you knew it, but the year of 2020 was a lot of people joining a lot of communities. And we saw people joining free communities, centering just in small groups around various topics. All kinds of communities were being built in 2020.

Well, Thriveal’s been on that journey for over a decade. It doesn’t mean we’re the best community in the world, but we have an interest and some thoughts and opinions about community building. And one thing about our community is that it is not a free community. We are not free. And what that means is there is a barrier to get in, and we recognize the value of that barrier. In fact, when we put a price on a community, we’re saying, “Our community is of such value, you do need to pay to get in.” And that means we’re not right for everybody. Some people are like, “I don’t know that. I don’t believe you.” Or, “I don’t need to pay for a free community,” and that’s fine. But by putting a price on a community, we are really making a statement about what we believe our value is. And we believe the Thriveal community is very strong. Julie and I love to lead this community. Jon Lokhorst, our coach, loves to lead this community. Our team, Mariela, Amy, Lauren, all these people involved in seeing the mission and efforts of Thriveal move forward, we all care about this community, and we’re devoted to the value of these people and the education that they get.

And then of course, Julie and I are always in tune to building, writing, creating new educational programs for accounting firm entrepreneurs. So it’s a big deal. That’s why we put a price on it. Because we believe there’s so much internal. We’re even having some … We do classes on a quarterly basis for our members to teach them and engage them. So we really think there’s a lot of value, and a price is our statement to the world. Hey, if you want to come in here, we’re valuable. It doesn’t mean you’ll agree, it just means it’s what we believe is true. So that’s one thing about our community, it is valuable. That’s why it has a price. Which it doesn’t mean free communities don’t have value. That’s not what we’re saying. We’re just saying ours is so deeply defined with value, we have to price the community for people to join. So that’s a really differentiator for communities, and we’ve been doing that for years.

Another thing is that our community is centered around education. Thriveal is centered around really a language. If you come into Thriveal, you have to seep and soak in a lot of the community conversations, because you’ll learn a lot of people are speaking a certain language. And it’s not necessarily that we plan that, it’s that we teach certain things in Thriveal. We teach methodologies, we teach ways to operate and work and grow your firm. And so a lot of people come through our programs, the Incubator, the Future Firm Groups, Deeper Weekend, and then they come into this community having known really some of the beliefs we have about how do you run firms in effective and efficient and profitable ways. And so you’ll find this language.

So our community, when you’re invited into our community, it’s centered around a common sense of learning. There’s some kind of sense of we all understand the same things we’re talking about. And man, that drives such a tribal language and knowledge through the community. People really start to get embedded into how they can challenge each other better. It becomes more of an intimate community where they’re speaking to each other in a language that we all truly understand. And it’s all because we center the community around some education and learning. And so that’s a really important part of what our community is all about.

Now, if it’s centered around some community learning and education, it makes Julie and I are deeply embedded in teaching this community. We think about it, we read, we write, we research. Learning and teaching, we put graphs together. We build tests and assessments and curriculum, all these things. That’s what Julie and I do for a living is build these things to teach and help firm entrepreneurs grow. And so all of the community is centered around this learning.

So that’s just a couple of things around a community as we’re looking back at 2020, and we see all that this year brought, community was a huge part of this year. And so we wanted to give a little refresher as to why we’re different and why it’s valuable. So we put a price on it. In how this language is adopted in this community, centered around a lot of learning and methodologies and teaching. So we welcome you to think about coming into our community. A lot of people are coming in to be led and to grow and to understand that being with Thriveal members, just having them wash their thoughts and ideas over you, is what makes you a better firm owner. So we welcome you to our community in 2021 if we’re right for you, and if you believe some of these core principles of our community. We want to help you grow too, and we want to care for you, and we want to be with you in 2021, because we have a lot of care and learning and hope to give, and we hope you’ll come join us if you need those things.

So, thanks so much. Hope you had a good 2020. Here’s to a better 2021. Take care. We’ll see you.