Brenda R

Hey, Brenda. So nice to have you back on the show. I had you on the show before. Have us? Or were you just part of my summit?

I think part of the summit, yeah.

Yeah, part of my summit.

Yeah. But thank you so much. It's great to have. It's cool. It's great to be back, but it's also great to be here in your podcast. I know.

And we've been on. I've been on your summit, and you've been in mine, and now the podcast. And it feels like it's hard to keep up now where we've been with each other.

Yeah. Plus, I don't know, it's like, it seems like every, like, couple of weeks, we're on email or texting about something. So, like, even before we press record on this, and I just, like, jumped in. I was just, like, right in there. Versus, like, oh, hi, how are you? Like, some formal introduction. Like, it's kind of like, oh, well, this. Let's just talk about, like, what's going on.

Let's take a moment to catch up, will we?

Yeah, exactly.

No, it's so great talking to you. I'm really excited about our conversation today because I participated in. I was a speaker at your summit, and. Was it October?

Yeah, October. Early October.

Yeah. And it was amazing. And we'll talk all about that in a moment. But I just. I'm really excited to have this conversation with you about this, which we'll get into in a moment. But before we get started, I would love for you to take a moment and introduce yourself. Just, like, who are you? Help and, you know, what you do and all that good stuff.

Yeah. Standard elevator. Okay, so. Hi, everyone. I'm Brenda Rigney. I live on the ancestral lands of the Sanamo people, otherwise known as Vancouver island in Western Canada. I am what I call a midlife business coach. So I am midlife, and I work with midlife women in their business.

Either at that stage where they're maybe leaving their corporate job, like I did seven years ago, and wanting to build this beautiful entrepreneurial dream that they've been sitting with and not too sure where to. Where to start, or the other place that I've been like, really spending a lot of time is with midlife women that have launched that dream business. But it doesn't feel so dreamy right now. It's feeling, like, really, like, hard to operate. It feels really, like, kind of burdensome. Like, the freedom that we wanted to create in our business isn't there. We're stuck in all these, like, Systems and tech stack and you know, trying to like get into new audiences and network and seller offers and it's just not feeling smooth and easy and not that business is ever easy, but it's just we dreamed up something and it's not necessarily living up to that dream. So I love to help women like reset figure out like, okay, what exactly did you want? Where did it get misguided a bit and then let's get you back on track.

And that could be around offers again, it could be around tech. So my background is operations, sales, marketing. I had that in my corporate career. I was a COO before I left to start my own business. And so that's who I love to work with and spend time doing.

Amazing. I love it. And I, I shout out to you because you've done just that. You left the corporate world and you created a business that allows you to live the lifestyle that you want to live. And I know that part of that in the summer of 2025. And I'm saying that because I don't want to say last summer in case someone's listening to this in like a year from now. Right, but you just spent the summer traveling in Europe.

Like yeah, we took off and yeah, we, we decided to live in Europe for 10 weeks. So we being my partner Scott, his 15 year old daughter, and then we have five kids between us. So then the invitation was to our other like sort of four adult children. Hey, like what? You know, between school because some of them are in university, some of them are working, you know, do you want to come for a week, two weeks, meet us? We decided to focus in on two countries, France for a month and then Spain for a month. And we did do a little bit of like, you know, dancing around. Like we'd fly into Paris, stay in Paris for like four or five days. And then we went to a rural region outside of Bordeaux and we rented a house there for like three weeks, three and a half weeks, an old farmhouse. And then we just do like day trips in our car and go see a castle over here, go to a cute little medieval town over there.

But it was super fun and, and just kind of getting into like the local vibe. Like going to different markets in the summertime is really great in France. And then we kind of did the same thing in Spain. We like went to Madrid for a week and did like city life. And then we still kind of stay in the city, but we went to Seville, so smaller city. And in the summertime, in August it's super hot. It's like in Canadian, like, well, celsius, it's like 44 degrees during the day, so most people aren't really doing anything at all the day, but at night it's like the city is just like thriving. Like, you know, you just go to the city square and we had a flat that was just like two or three blocks away from like the main city square beside the big cathedral.

And you just sit by the fountain and like, people watch and like, talk to people, engage. Like, everyone's international and it's super fun and drink sangria and like, just, you know, have a really, you know, great evening. But again, that was like super chill. And so it was just a really fun time to be able to go over there. Plus, it also for me was because, again, creating this freedom business was I wanted to kind of challenge myself around still working. Like, I wasn't like fully on vacation during those 10 weeks. There were a couple of weeks in there. They were like, okay, I'm not working.

It's lots of trains and planes and trying to get from A to B. So it didn't make sense to have client calls. But. But the rest of the time I was working, so. But it was perfect because most of my clients were in North America. So I could go do fun stuff during the day and then when it was really hot in the late afternoon, go back to our flat, air conditioning, cool off, go talk to some clients for a couple hours, and then go out at night and have a really great night. So it was a really fun schedule.

Yeah, I know. I was following you on Instagram and I was like, oh, I want to be there too.

But yeah, it was a bit of a test around, like, the digital nomad lifestyle. Like, I don't think I would ever go full digital noma. Like, we love being in Western Canada. And like, I'm a west coast girl. I grew up in Vancouver, so being in this climate zone just fits my body to like, you know, being in 44 degree weather in Spain in August, like, it was fun to be there, but I. I don't think I could live there all the time. And we have dogs and, you know, we still kind of want a home base.

Dogs.

Yeah, yeah, Vancouver's nice.

Like, where you live is nice.

So, yeah, it's a great place. Like, people love it there. Right. So, you know, but I think as we get older, like, we're both in our late 50s is. Yeah, we, like, we want to downsize. We want to have like a lot more freedom, less overhead, you know, Fixing fences and all that sort of stuff which is going on right now.

No kidding. Awesome. Okay, well, enough about that. Enough about life. But, you know, the possibilities. I want to talk about how you. How and you know, why and kind of like behind the scenes of hosting a summit on school. Because being part of your summit and it being in school was the first time I experienced that.

And it was all around just really, truly awesome. So well organized. It was cool. It was, you know, people were participating and excited. There was a lot of engagement. And it was actually like, it felt. It was such a vibe. And I'm like, ooh, I have.

Like, we have to talk about that. And it's funny because as we are speaking right now, as we're recording this, you're actually hosting a bundle in school this week.

Yeah.

Which is also super cool. So now we can actually say that you've hosted a summit and a bundle in school. So.

Yeah.

So, but let me ask you first, why did you, like, what made you think to do it in school? Right.

Yeah. So, well, let's just even kind of back up to this time last year in. So we're in the end of year 20, 2025, but around this time last year in 2024, I went to my community that is on school, my paid community of midlife women business owners. And up, like throughout the whole year in 2024, we had talked about building our list, nurturing our audiences, converting more sales through email and email marketing and. And, you know, doing freebies and funnels, those type of things and, you know, ways to generate leads. Obviously ads could be one, jumping on podcasts, co, you know, co hosting mastermin and summits and bundles. You and I got connected. I was doing summits and bundles off of school with other hosts like yourself and seeing, wow, like, I'm getting like 200 people in a day, you know, downloading my freebie and that's great.

And then nurturing them through my email sequence, seeing some conversions. Great, I get that formula. And so I put it out to my membership saying instead of us, like, just talking about list building again in 2025, what if we actually did some summits and bundles and created those? So we started off 2025 doing summits and bundles like everybody else does. Landing page off of school, and those were good. And, you know, I was also teaching my members, like, how to be a great bundle contributor and like, what is it? What does it mean when someone downloads your stuff and how do you create a freebie sequence and all these other things? So it was a bit of a learning for everybody going through it and also myself. And then, you know, I was like, in the middle, we did a spring summit, and it went really well. But I was like, gosh, there's a lot of stuff, like, behind the scenes, as you know, Julie, like, putting together everyone's, like, profiles and putting their images up on landing pages. I was outsourcing a lot of it to my va, So I was also looking at the cost of doing that.

I was like, whoa, this is expensive. I know you. We've talked about this before. You do a lot of that heavy lifting yourself. And I didn't know if I wanted to take that on, you know, like, to cut expenses and take that all on myself and, like, be able to, like, do all the web design work and landing page work around it. But I was also building out my school community, and I just was just like, it's so easy to just build courses on school to create a tile, like an image and have everything in there. And I was doing it already for, say, guest mentors that were coming in. Like, you were a guest mentor in my community.

And I thought I was, you know, put up a tile and create a classroom. And I'm just like, okay, what if I did this for like, 50 people? And we just called it a bundle? And so I set up a separate community. I didn't want to do it in my main paid community membership. Yeah. And so I set up a separate one. And the beauty with school is if people aren't familiar with the school platform, it's a membership first community platform. And now they've added on courses and all this great data analytics. And you can do live streaming now, so you don't have to use Zoom or Streamyard.

So it's really cost effective. And if you want all the bells and whistles, it's $99 a month. And then if you want, I'd say 85% of the bells and whistles, it's $9 a month. You can open up what's called a hobby plan. And so I thought, well, you know, I could do this really affordably because between landing pages and email tech and all that sort of stuff, it was just like, why not try it out in school? So that's where we made the shift. We did our first one, our first summit in June, and it was just kind of a little bit lower profile. It was just the members in my community that were speakers and contributing to it. And then, you know, that was good.

We brought in about 1900 people.

And.

I felt really good about that. And we did ads, and there was sponsorship, and it was, like, setting up the format. But then I was like, okay, I want to like, go really big with this. And so I talked to one of my mentors, Evelyn Weiss, who some people may know. She's like, the membership queen. And Evelyn has done really well on school and so. And really good with running ads. And so I went to her and I said, like, how big do you think we can make this on school? And she's like, I think we can make it really big.

Because technically, Brenda, like, you know, she does a lot of work with owners. She's actually now managing the whole ad budget for school itself. Like, she's now, like, working on the school team, running all their ads. And she's like, no one's really doing summits and bundles on school. Like, some people have done it, but they've gotten maybe, like, 200 people or 300 people from it. But you're getting in, like, the thousands. And I think we could go bigger with it. So I spent a little bit of time with her in the summer, ideating on it, thinking about what that topic would be for our next summit.

And then that's when we came up with the AI summit that you were a part of. And, yeah, we just went full force with it. We brought in 4,600 people in the span of three weeks. Like you said, it was pretty energizing. It was three days, intense speakers, bundle gifts. Yeah, it was really exhilarating.

I know. And like, four, six hundred people. Like, that's. That's, like. I just want to say, like, it's. It's because summits are so popular now. Right. So, like, we've seen a decrease.

I've seen a decrease in signups over the last couple of years. Right. Like, people are just more intentional of their time now and intentional about what summits they join. Because we get busy, right?

Yeah, very busy.

Yeah. Yeah. So 4600. To me, that's amazing. Like, that's insane numbers. And that's also a testament to you. And hosting a summit in school. And also, like, probably, you know, it probably has the speaker that you chose for your summit think have an effect on that end result, too.

Like, what do you think contributed to getting to that 4600 number? Because that's, like, an amazing conversion. Right?

Yeah, well, and. And to look at it like, we had probably. What was it? I think, like, so we brought in 4,600 people, but we had close to 9,900 people checking out our summit. And so our conversion rate at the highest point in the summit, I think, like by day two was like 57%. Yeah. So, like, pretty strong numbers that way. Now that the summit's done and the community is running, it's more like around 15 to 20% week over week. So it feels really good.

And those are sort of good numbers from a metric standpoint on a school community. So I think factors that contributed to it, first of all, it was on school. So school right now is growing rapidly. They want to bring in, like, their vision and like, their strategic objectives are to bring in 1 billion users and 1 million community hosts. They basically want to put Facebook groups to shame. And like, that's not too hard to do.

But so many of us, like, so many. Everybody I talk to are, I know.

Facebook groups have tried so hard.

The structure of them, I don't know.

Well, the reality is, is that they're not going to do anything with Facebook groups. Like, they're not going to add more tech to it. They're not going to, like, change it. They're not going to make it better. And for most community hosts, you can't even find your members, and members can't even find the groups. So, you know, I think the school's objective is like, hey, we're just going to. We're going to replace Facebook as far as Facebook groups are concerned. So that's their objective.

And then with that, with free communities on school, they're driving 40% of their traffic of total school to free communities. And a paid community probably gets about 2 to 3% of free traffic. So right away, if you have a free community that you're running and definitely do your summit on school for free, if that's what you want to do, because you'll get 40% of their traffic. And so that's also a win, win. Even if you're not even running ads, you're going to get 40% of their traffic. And when you got Evelyn Weiss on running ads for school, you gotta know there's like, good people coming there.

Yeah.

The other thing I think was the topic so, you know, the audience was course creators. School community hosts online business owners, personal brands that wanted to obviously use AI for their business to help streamline their business. But we also wanted to put a little agitation in there about being relevant in your business. Like, if you are not bringing AI tools into your business for your client offers, like sometime between 2025 and 2026, as a course creator, you know, online service provider, you might run into some risks with your business around relevancy. Because even if your clients are saying, oh, I'm not looking for AI solutions, no, they are, because it's like it's everywhere in our life. Like, we can't get away from it. They're at the grocery store, dry cleaners. Like, it's everywhere.

I know. And you just. Until you start using it, you don't know what you don't know.

Exactly. And so if you as a business owner aren't getting proactive around that, you know, so that was the agitation, that was the rub. Because some people are like, well, my clients aren't even asking for it. I'm like, well, that's because they. They're not asking you because you don't have anything, but if you had it, they probably asked for it. And also when they do want it and you don't have it, they're going to go somebody else that does have it. So we wanted to create that little agitation. So that brought people in for sure.

Because people are like, how do I monetize it? How do I operationalize this? Like, yeah, I'm feeling like the. And. And not that we wanted to make people feel bad if they were feeling stressed about their business, but we wanted to have a solution and that was it. Like, we wanted to pose ourselves as being the solution. So I think that's also really important. The topic that you have with your summits is what is that? Like, agitation, trending topic. Yes, but really like the underbelly of, like, what people feel nervous about or. And then you.

You can relieve that for them. And then the other thing was, I think the speakers like you mentioned, so, you know, Evelyn and I worked together and she was great and mentoring me around this, like, you know, really getting it to balloon up in school. Because she also had all the behind the scenes of what was going on in school and where I should position myself. She also knew fabulous people that had large school communities that I didn't necessarily have connection with. And she was like, okay, I'm going to go talk to this person, this person, this person. So once we got kind of her first, like seven to 10 people, like, we made a list of like 20 people that we wanted and we landed like the first seven to 10. Then we could go out to the other people and say, oh, and by the way, we got Evelyn, we got Jamie, we got this person, we got this person. And then it was like, boom, they all signed up.

And then I could go to those people and say, who else do you know, oh, well, you got to get this person. You got to get this person. And then I also brought in the people that I know, so it was great because it was like Evelyn's got this massive community and a massive community on school, and she knows other really great community hosts that are in the AI field. So between her reaching out and then me backing it up with other people that I knew, it was. It was incredible. Like, we went from initially like 20 speakers to 50, and then we had like upwards of like 85 people applying, which is good because people always drop off, the dates don't work, you know, last minute. It's not a fit, that type of thing. So we ended up, you know, going from like 85 down to about like 60, 64, 65 speakers.

Amazing. That's awesome. Yeah, I love it. And like, if you're listening to this and you're like, oh, my God, like, I don't know, people like that or whatever don't, like, don't let that intimidate you from, from hosting a summit, especially, like, maybe trying out school. But like, you know, like, like Brenda's been in. You're in her mastermind or something like that, Right?

I was in Evelyn's mastermind. So I knew, like, that was the thing. Like, I just need like one person. And then it snowballed into all these. Exactly.

So sometimes it only takes one person and sometimes it's a word of mouth. Like, hey, do you know anybody who would be part of. Who would love to be part of my event? And if your event is relevant to. You never know. Like, I said this to someone yesterday. I said, you got to ask the people who you think will say no anyway, because you don't. You never know. Maybe they have on their agenda for 20, 26, let's say that they want to be part of more summits.

So like, like, those are like, fun, because me too. Like, like, that's the thing. Brenda and I, we've grown our businesses to a place where we, we do collaborations all the time. We're in summits, we do our own. And so we've met a lot of incredible people. So our just our circle of people we know who might want to be part of our summits is just a little bit larger than maybe you're listening and you're thinking, oh, you don't know the people yet, but you will, right?

You will. You will for sure.

Yeah.

And also, don't let the, the topic intimidate you, because up until I did the AI summit, like, yes, I was using a lot of AI tools, like, every day in my business. But I wouldn't necessarily have said, oh, I'm an AI, like, X expert. Well, I'm definitely an expert after that, because I. This is. I. I think this is a direct quote from you, Julie, is that when you run a summit or a bundle, you immediately catapult your personal brand into that expertise of whatever the topic. You know, the main banner of that bundle or summit is. So, you know, again, thinking about me as a business owner and my relevancy with my audience or the audience that I want to tap into.

Yeah. Like, I want to be relevant. And so by hosting a summit on the topic of AI, now people are coming to me all the time saying, what about this? What about this? And again, I don't have to have the answer. I can be like, oh, Julia's the expert in that. Or you should reach out to Bri, because she is like, you know, but now I have this, like, new network of people that are experts that just interconnect me with other people. And at the end of the day, people are grateful. They're like, thanks for putting me in touch with Bri, or, thanks for putting me in touch with Julie. And now I get my problem solved.

But at the end of the day, it's like, well, Brenda, help me solve my problem. So that's the beauty, I think, of summits and bundles. I remember you giving me that little. That little, I think, quote maybe a year ago, and I was like, oh, yeah, it does definitely propel your personal brand. And so now, you know, I've changed that on a lot of my profiles, saying, like, AI strategist.

Awesome. I love it. I was gonna say, like, so in terms of tech stack, like, what you need?

Email service provider, and no, you don't even need that. Like, it's so, so easy with school. And that's the thing, like, just with school in general, because, you know, I've grown up like you. We talked about my. My past, like, from operations, you know, coming into solopreneurship. And I was like, holy cow. There's a lot of stuff as a solopreneur in the online business space that you have to acquire. And I used to run it teams, and we used to build all that sort of stuff.

And I was like, this is really expensive for a small business owner. But I made the investments. I, you know, integrated everything. I built it all. It's great. The lovely thing about school is that it's all built in house. You don't need to have a separate affiliate platform, They've got an affiliate program. It's so easy.

There's the link. I don't have to like create separate profiles for people. It's just all built in. So if I want to run a summit with affiliates and I want to give them a 20% payout or a 50% payout, it's just literally toggle button, go. And it's super easy. If I want to do email collection to go into my CRM, I can do that. But they will. School will collect all of it.

So what I've been saying, even to my clients, my members in my community is like. Because they're like, well, I'd love to do your summit, but I don't have a CRM built out and I don't have all the email stuff. Don't worry about that right now. You can have your freebie on school and school will still collect all the email information so that one day, if you want to now connect it to your CRM, you can just like download that all into your CRM at that time. So you don't even need to. But if you want to send emails out to your membership, you can do that through school. And actually my, my emails that go out through school get way more open rates than they do off of convert. Get where I host my email marketing.

Yeah, sorry, yeah, yeah. So I mean like anything that you think that you have to plug into school, you technically don't.

And you don't need all the fancy bells and whistles.

Like you don't even need a website because you, because they haven't. They have an about page and that's where they convert people too. So when I said earlier that they will send you 40% of their traffic if you have a free it's to your about page, which is just a mini landing page. You can add videos, you can add client testimonials. You know, again, it kind of strips out this whole myth that you need to have a sales page that's like, you know, 50 pages long, like this toilet paper roll of content. It's like, no, here's why you need to join my community. Keep it simple. People are here for membership community, like know that that's the first priority and then whatever else you're going to give them in that experience.

So yes, you can add on all those bells and whistles afterwards, but if you wanted to just set it up today and run a summit on school, you don't need to have the tech stack.

Do you think you should have A, a goal of like, like wanting to start up community. Like say like for me for example, okay, I don't have school.

Yeah.

I mean I'm on, I'm in your community and all that. But like, okay, like I want to host my summit in school and I set it up. I host a summit in school. Like what do you do after with that? Like, do you just.

Yeah, I mean, like, do you.

Should you have a goal of like, you know, building community post summit or you don't.

So that's, I think that's the differentiator for everyone listening because I think summits and bundles that are not on school or any type of community platform, it's an, it's an event, it's a one time event and those people go into your email list and then you nurture them through your email list and hopefully you convert like what, 3, 5, 10% of them. The beauty of being on school is already there in community and the way school's platform is set up, it's a natural nurturing system. Way better than any email marketing. And I know this like kills me because I teach everybody about email marketing. I love email marketing, but honestly it's like, it's re. Like I had like this epiphany during the summit where I'm like, this is way better than email marketing because I am talking to complete strangers right now and they're telling me about what kind of dog they have and you know, what their business is all about and what their worries are for 20, 26 and whether or not they like AI or Donna. Like I'm like saying so much about them that I would never get that. Like I put out email messages every day sometimes and I'll ask people, you know, tell me what your favorite color is and nobody gets back to me.

I can put a message on my school community right now saying tell me what your favorite color is and I'll get like 200 responses.

It's almost like you're sitting in a room with a bunch of people having a cup of coffee. It really is like that.

Yes. And when you get that volume of people, whether or not, and you know, here's the context too, like you may want to run a summit next year and not get 4,000 people into your community. You might just want 200. Great. Get into communication, get into community with people like 200 of them. The reality is even though I have a community now with 4600 people in them, I would say like 20 to 30% of them are engaged all the time. Some are moderately engaged and some are not engaged at all. And that's okay.

And the people that are super engaged are the leaders. They'll stand out. They're going to be my next summit speakers. Like Julie, like you're engaged in the community. You're in there commenting, posting. It makes sense that you will be another summit speaker for us in February because you're actively engaged in the community. Yes. I think the key thing is that it is a one time event.

But then you have to think what happens after the event. If you just want to run it like an event, you can do that. But you'll probably find all those people will eventually leave, they'll bounce, they'll go someplace else, they'll drift away and it'll just be harder to get them back into it. Or you think, yeah, it's an event and then immediately following it's now a community and what do I need to do? So maybe you need to run a challenge, showing up there weekly in workshops or a Q and A. I mean it depends on what your community or your summit has been about. Maybe yours is more about mindfulness and health and wellness. So maybe there's tips that you give to people. The cool thing with school though is that they've got that all built in.

They've got leaderboards, they've got courses that you can lock or unlock based off of people's engagement. So if you get up to level four, this unlocks for you. And maybe it's like three videos on how to do morning stretches or something. Or you know, better protein recipes. If you're, you know, a nutritionist, you can make it really cool and fun and you can also monetize it right there.

Yes, I know. Like you made like you made money from your summit. Right. And then not to mention the monies that's going to keep coming in from people joining your membership and working with you in different ways. I mean that's on going that just like when you host a summit that just keeps on giving, right? It's the gift that keeps on giving almost. But you made money. You made like what was it, like $12,000.

Yeah, so in that community specifically I made $13,000. And so that was from sponsorship money as well as like I mentioned to you before we press record, one of the contributors wanted to run a live and launch their school community in that live session. So we did it and we use my affiliate link to her community while we were talking. And I'm like, she's talking about YouTube and like everything that she offers her people in her community. I'm in the chat sharing my affiliate link. People are signing up. I made $500 during her call in affiliate sales, you know, just by like adding her link in there. And, you know, and then she made her money as far as the community and she's been able to continue to grow it.

So, yeah, I mean, that was the beauty of it. Not ever. Not all of my speakers are contributors in that summit had school communities, but some of them afterwards were like, I'm getting on school and I want to be in your next bundle and next summit. Just because I think, you know, one of the things that you notice is that when people are on the school platform, they will go to other communities and they will shop around. And there's so many different types of communities. Like, there's perennial gardening. There's like AI, there's, you know, nutrition, there's calligraphy. Like the.

The top community right now in school. I think the second or the third top community in school are these two women out of Australia that run a calligraphy community.

Cool.

You know, and like, that's cool. Like, like they're the top, like, like out of. In the top five communities. So it's not all business and making money and like bro marketing type communities. Like, there's all different types of interests in there.

That's awesome. So, like, once your summit was finished, you just kept on nurturing the people. And I mean, I know you're in there every day and your content is just like, it's just a such a great place to continue the conversation. Right?

Yeah. So for me, it's like, it's still gonna be like the AI one that we've created is it's still gonna be like this summit community that's gonna be like the big reward or the big freebie that people get is every two to three months, we'll have another summit. So our next one's gonna be in February of 2026. And then we'll do another one, probably like early summer or something like that, and get another one in the fall. So three times a year we'll have a summit. So people. It'll just bring in like this influx of people.

And you sent them into that same community on school, right?

Yep, exactly.

Yeah. Which, if you're listening to this, Brenda's summit is at. What are the dates again? I forget.

In February, it's 9th, 10th and 11th.

9Th, 10th and 11TH. So make sure you sign up for that because literally it is one of the best summits that I'VE participated in and I've been at like, it's so full of awesome information and I know that it's not going to be any different than the last one you hosted. It's going to be incredible. So make sure you sign up for that. The link will be in the show notes. But also not just that. You'll get to see it in action. What we're actually talking about today, which is the awesome part.

Well, and so that was the other thing is because people were like, hey, I never even thought about running a summit. I run summits and bundles, you know, but like I had never done it or I was over summons and bundles and now I'm going to continue to do yours. I'm thinking about launching mine. How did you do it? So that was one of the things that right after the summit we put a workshop in place. I took everybody through a debrief on all the things that I did. So that was a way that we could monetize that too. We ended up selling it for $27 and I'm going to continue to do that. So after every bundle now or summit, I'm just going to do a bundle debrief or a summit debrief and people can sign up for it and they can get the behind the scenes on what we did.

So there's like different ways that you can monetize it. It doesn't necessarily mean like low ticket, limited time offer things. I've got, you know, packages in there for $100, et cetera. But the other thing that we are able to monetize is because I have a paid community on school for women business owners is I would have some one off limited time offer or low ticket offers over in the AI Summit. But then I would bundle it up into my paid membership and say, okay, so you can buy this one off here for $27 or $97 or I'm just going to give that all to you if you sign up as an annual member in my paid community. So over in the AI summit I made $12,000, but over in my paid community I made another $11,000 or sorry, 13 and 11. So it was pretty crazy. Like that was going on.

That's awesome. And this happened like when within, like in, within 30 days. Really?

Yeah. Like, I mean the 13,000 was kind of like leading up to the summit and then the summit because it was sponsorship dollars and then like affiliate dollars that came in. And then the three weeks sort of following the summit, it was, it was all these people coming into my online day of community, my paid community. Yeah, yeah, it was a pretty good month. Just off of one event. One event.

Your VIP was. Talk about your vip, because I know.

You had one, your vip, like an all access pass. Yeah, yeah, it was just an all access pass. And again, we kind of threw it together. You know, people are just like, well, what happens when the semi closes? Are we going to get access to all these speakers? And I was like, yeah, okay, great. And so the nice thing about that is that you've got the content already on school, and it's just literally drag, drop, drag, drop the bait based off of, like, how the platform is set up. So it was really easy to put together. I slapped a $9 price tag on it. People were like, oh, you should have charged more.

I'm like, okay, I know. Like, thank you everyone for your advice.

$9. But $12,000 later, like, yeah, exactly.

Like, you know, out of $9 out of a community, that's like 4, 600. You know, we, we covered, like, we sold enough to like, do that. But the bundle that we're running right now, we just launched it. Like, as soon as we launched the bundle, we had the all access pass in there, same price, $9. And people are scooping it up.

So I love it. I love it. And so, so I noticed that your. Your bundle has a different name from the summit. And it's. So now you've got, like, right now, as we speak, you've got what, 3, 500 people sign up for this bundle now?

Yeah. So that's another free community that we have on school. We wanted to keep it separate.

Yeah.

So, like. Yeah, and the reason why is because we want to be able to run them kind of like, well, one is at live. So, for example, like, when the AI Summit was live, I was collecting speakers and contributors for the aligned AF camp, the bundle that's running right now. And now that the bundle is running live, I'm collecting speakers for the AI Summit in February. So I could run these two things. Things concurrently and have two sites up and be collecting also members and speakers and just seeing how it all fits logistically. Because my intention really going into 2026 is to probably run well, definitely three bundles and three summits, but it could be four bundles and four summits.

You'll see what, how, how it goes. Yeah. So what's your intention with the two groups now? Because, like, people are probably listening to this going, well, what should. You're going to have two groups, Brenda. Yeah, I know the AI is like, Full on. You're in there every day. You're sharing good stuff in there. It's really educational, it's, it's actionable.

It's really good stuff. And not to mention the community vibe and that everybody craves nowadays. But what about the, the bundle group? Like what are you gonna do with that one? Is it gonna.

When the bundle's done?

Yeah, yeah.

Well, we're gonna actually launch next week. A challenge. So it's just going to be like a self, a self led engagement challenge. We'll just have things that lock, unlock after different levels and people will get rewards and tools, et cetera. The beautiful thing. And like one of our speakers actually talked about it yesterday in our fireside chat. Monica froze with AI things that I thought were old or outdated. Like for example, maybe a workshop that I taught last year.

Now I can like, you know, create a workbook with it or a custom GPT. So it's like one of the things that we'll have is this self led challenge around engagement and visibility inside the bundle. So women that are in there will be able to like move up on the leaderboard and it will unlock different things, custom GPTs, workbooks, things that I know everyone is looking for. And we'll just continue to like nurture that audience and then release the dates of our next bundle. So it'll just be kind of like, you know, bundle two. Two months of like nurturing. Next bundle, two months of nurturing. And in the meantime, I'm also converting those people into my paid community.

Right. I mean like at the end of the day this is a business that you're running and you want to continue adding people into your paid community and this is such a good way of doing it.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, and I find too like, I mean one of the women that has been working with me now for the last couple of months as a contributor, you know, she's just signed up for like a mastermind that I'm teaching in 2026 because she's like, you're actually helping me make money. And that's like when I fundamentally like, you know, why am I running these two communities, etc. Well, it's for the women contributors that are in there. Because my personal mission that's tied to like my business strategy is to help women business owners, you know, create thriving businesses. I mean when women business owners get less than 2% of VC funding and that's a stat across North America, it's not just specific to the US or Canada. Like we don't really have a Lot of mentorship and tools available to us to help get started. Men on the other side get like 98% of VC funding.

They get lots of tools, lots of mentorship, lots of availability that way. And so I just want to see like all the contributors that are coming into my summits and bundles making me money or making them money. And then if they want to learn how to do these things, they can come join my mastermind where I will make money.

Exactly.

Yeah.

This is a business we're running, right? Like, let's be honest, you know.

Yeah. But I think, you know, I also can design a business which kind of goes back to like what we started this conversation with. Designing a business that feels fun, that allows for that freedom. I can do this anywhere. And now what I'm realizing more and more with school is that tech stack piece, like it's really shrinking. Like I don't necessarily need to have all the stuff that I used to have to do. Like I literally say to my members every day, if I was starting a business today, I would have school, Instagram and YouTube.

Yeah.

And then, you know, depending if I got to a certain level complexity in my business, then I would think about adding on like website, CRM, etc. But right now, if you're starting a business today on school, like today and you don't have any of this stuff, school, Instagram, YouTube, those, that would be my, my three.

It's really great. Like as I don't have a school community, but as being part of school communities, you're summit. And it's, it's just such a good platform. I love it all around, everything about it, like, it's just so good. And you can, you can decide what notifications you want to turn on and.

Off and how present you want to be.

Yeah, yeah. And it also rewards people for contributing to the community.

Right.

Like based on, you know, you get points and all that stuff. And, and you as a school community host, you can decide like, okay, well maybe they get this when they get to level two or whatever. It makes it more fun.

And then people, it makes it totally fun.

Right.

And again, remember that like everything that I'm putting on there, I actually have created. And you know, I often talk about this with my members in my community because they're just like, my big thing is having a signature offer. Stick to one thing, sell that one thing. But yes, you are a multi talented woman. You know, lots of things, there's lots of things you can give to your clients. The beautiful thing about running like a Summit and then transforming it into a community is that then you can have those things unlock at different levels. People want it, they get it when they need it. And you're not having to like archive all this great stuff that you used to do.

Right. You can use it, repurpose it again with these new community members that you're bringing on.

I love it.

So.

And if you had someone like me, perhaps, like, I'm at the moment, I'm not really interested in, in having a community that might change. But if you were like, well, Julie, just host your summit in school and then, and then what? Like, what would you say to someone like, like, I just want to host it in school because it's cool.

Yeah. Well, here's the thing, is that you can also set up a school community in 14 days for free. So when you join up as a host, you could grab my affiliate link or any other community host affiliate link, and then you get to be able to set up your community for 14 days. It won't take you 14 days to set it up. So you could literally have all your stuff prepped if you wanted and then run your summit for, you know, like over those 14 days somewhere in there. And then you can, you can through an integration through Zapier, have your CRM. So then you get everybody coming into your email and then you can just go away and nurture them in your email. And if you wanted to, you could close down your school community.

So you could do all of that and you can do it for $9 a month.

Can you pause it until the next time you want to host a summit?

Sure, yeah. You can archive it and then bring it back. You can just pay for the $9 a month community too, to make it super easy, cheap and cheerful and bring people in for those 14 days and then archive it and just let everybody know, you know, like, I'm just going to archive this community. And next year when I run another summit, I'll like, they're already in there. They, they may leave. That's the thing, because I do that too. Like, there's a number of school communities that I'm a part of. And sometimes I'll just go through every quarter I'll be like, just kind of like, well, I subscribe to Apple TV and I'll get rid of that subscription.

I'll get rid of this membership community because there's tons of free ones on there. And I'm like, okay, I don't need to be getting all of them. So you'll see people leave but if you want to just archive it, that's cool. And then you can just nurture those people in your email list and then re invite them back to the community when you open it up again.

But that's the same for Facebook groups. I mean, I just that Facebook groups are just harder to revive anyway.

Yeah. But I mean, the nice thing is, is that then you don't have to worry so much about all the, you know, building out the landing pages and the tech and all that sort of stuff too. So it's really easy to build courses and classroom sessions and speaker profiles in school. Super easy.

It is really, really cool. I love it. Amazing. Well, I mean, I'm sure we could talk about so much more, but there's been such a great conversation. I love it. So tell us what your summit's about and why everybody should sign up.

Yeah, so I gave you the link. It's to our AI Driven Business Summit. It's for course creators, school community hosts, online business owners that again, want to look for simple solutions to help you optimize your business. So how can I, like, save 10 to 20 hours a week, starting to use some of these AI tools that our speakers will be sharing with you, but also thinking about how can I redesign some of my offers? A really good offer that maybe has sold for you, or maybe you're seeing a decline in sales and it needs a little bit of revitalization, like, let's put some AI love on it and see what it generates for you. But there's going to be speakers in there that will teach you how to do that. And then also if you're just like, kind of new to the world of AI, I think for specifically women business owners or women looking to get into entrepreneurship and business, we can productize your experience. You know, if you've been in the business world or teaching or healthcare world, you know, for 20, 30 years, coupled with AI, we can get that monetized for you really quickly. And there's tons of experts inside the summit that will show you how to do that.

There'll be tons of bundle gifts, custom GPTs, prompts, all the things that you want around AI training workshops. There'll be live sessions, recorded sessions. So yeah, it'll be like, fun. And then the community is live right now. So if you just want to, you could sit there and go, okay, I'll just sign up like a week before in February. Or you could just join right now and just be part of the conversation and start connecting with other business owners that are doing similar Work as you.

So that's fun. Have a look around.

Have a look around.

There's things to buy, like, join the conversation. It's really fun, actually. It's a lot of fun. And, you know, there's. Because you make it fun also, like, it's not just about business. There's like, a lot of, like, coffee chats and raw and real.

Oh, yeah. We had our first networking call last week, and that was amazing. We had 75 people show up for that, which was super cool. I mean, like, people are like, what happens if all, like, 4,600 people show up? And I'm like, I don't know. But it was good. Like, 75 people showed up, which was great. We're gonna have, like, a meditation session. Melissa, who's one of our members, she's going to take us through a meditation session in December.

We've got some more networking calls are going to happen in January and February leading up to the summit. So there will be a lot more live sessions, like, leading up, and then, boom, it'll be like three intense days. But, you know, just like, buckle in, have fun.

Yeah. And then you'll continue the conversations ongoing after that, too. So if you're listening to this and it's past February, make sure to join the community anyway, because it's a lot of fun in there. And, you know, it's like I said before, you're just really giving and, you know, you have good information and actionable insights. And, you know, sometimes when AI is down, we can have the conversation about that. What was it? Cloud Fair. Anyway.

Yeah, like, when chat went down, I think last week or something like that, for like, a couple hours, I was like, oh, my God.

I know, I know. I'm like, what am I gonna do? Because I was sitting at my desk ready to, you know, have the chat GPT conversation, which, you know, like. I know, like. Like, what did we do without it? Like, I use it, like, daily now.

I'm like, well, I would go on school. So that's my thing. It's like, if I'm not on chat, I'm on school. Yeah, the two are always running for me. And there's usually always someone on there that can, like, brainstorm around what to do. But, yeah, I invite any of your audience to come in there and just have fun with it. And, yeah, if you are listening to this and February has passed, don't worry, we'll have another summit, like, a couple months later. Yeah.

And you can also get the All Access pass. Right. To get caught up, so.

And Brenda doesn't mess around. She's got good people, good offers and good people.

And there's some really. I mean, like, again, people. Repeats that are coming back, like, Julie's gonna be coming back that I'm, like, thrilled about. And then there's some others because now they've seen it as, Hey, I just created this summit of 4,600 people on school with these people. Do you want to be a part of the next one? Because our goal is to get to 10k, so.

Amazing. Let's do it. Well, thank you so much, Brenda, for being on the show. It's been so great talking to you again and catching up on all the things.

Thank you so much. Thanks for everyone for listening.

You're welcome. And so make sure to just. Just a little reminder the everything we talked about in the show notes. Make sure you sign up for that summit because it's going to be definitely one not to be missed. And if you're listening to this, I will talk to you on the next episode, okay?