Dom: This is from Lucy Meadway, who is one of our PBIC members. Lucy's just got her book...  The Happy Healthy Guinea Pig Guide Book. I told you we have all kinds of people inside the PBIC. Don't we?

And Lucy is a little critter expert. She is little critter Lucy, no less.

So Lucy's got this book and what's going to happen is for her, the book is going to lead people onto a membership for people who love little critters and they want to know more about them and all this kind of thing.

And Lucy knows loads about that. She's an expert on that. So this is a good question from Lucy. She says, "How do you start an additional one-to-many service when it is only really profitable with a certain amount of clients. Example, my Guinea pig membership that I'll be starting next year. For example, how did you start the PBIC with a small number at the start and make it worthwhile until it built up?" 

So, it's kind of the same answer to both questions really. So when you're launching any kind of membership, really, the pre-sale element is really important.

So a lot of dog trainers make the mistake of they want to launch an online membership, but they don't really have a big tribe of people who are mega interested in what it is that they want to sell.

And I'm not saying you don't have lots of happy clients, but that's a difference. And when you're going to launch a membership, people are going to join a community and get regular doses of content from you.

You really got to have a clear offering for them, and you got to warm them up sufficiently before you launch your membership. So we would call that pre-sale.

Usually it's going to involve building a list. Building an email list.

So don't come and tell me that you have 5,000 Facebook followers or 10,000 Instagram friends, yeah, or 50,000 Twitter people. I couldn't give a shit about that.  When the rubber meets the road and you're trying to sell something, you won't give a shit about that either, because you are going to want to have an email list then.

So we're definitely going to want to have some kind of an email list where we built up a relationship with people, we've taken them through a know-like-trust process, we've demonstrated our expertise, we've got them used to getting nuggets from us.

We've been entertaining. We've been educational. We've got a tribe.

Now with Lucy, her book will help her to build this email list because she's got freebies in the book that people have to go and sign up to online.

This is very similar to what I did with the PBIC. So I started, I did a Grow Your Pet Business Fast seminar, a live one. Somebody hosted me doing that.

At the same time as that, I wrote my 33 Ideas emails, which a lot of people still come through now.

And then I've got people on the email list. I warm them up. I launched a programme, the Grow Your Pet Business Fast, Profit Kickstarter Programme.

And then on the back of that, I sold at a big event, my bootcamp, and I launched the PBIC membership at the same time. And that's essentially how we do it.

You got to have a reliable way of introducing yourself to people, making them feel like they're in expert hands, and then warming them up and tempting them with more. Then you can move onto your pre-sale.

So for Lucy, I probably recommend that she sells some kind of programme in the new year, first of all. She could do a challenge to get people in. She could put a bit of money behind some adverts.

She could just promote the book and then trip people into a webinar or something on the back of that. So a lot of people might be getting little critters over Christmas. Could be a good idea for her to do some kind of new critter, new year, new start survival guides.

Lucy could do a webinar for that and she could sell a programme at the end of it. And then get testimonials from the programme she delivers.

Lucy can get good delivering an online programme as well, and then that would eventually move people into the membership.

And again, we do a bit of pre-sell and stuff for the membership too. So I hope that was useful for anybody who was thinking of launching a membership.