Dr. James Maskell

I am ready to launch. Great to be with you guys. Thanks for having me.

Dr. James Maskell

It’s a great question. I want to stop by thinking what a community is and what the difference between marketing and creating communities is.

You could be marketing your business to get new people through the door. But I think the difference between doing marketing and creating communities is that in creating communities, you introduce your clients to each other or you introduce other people that are interested in your brand and your followers to each other. That’s a big part of it.

One of the people that lead my thinking on this is a guy called Charles Eisenstein, and he has a beautiful quote for what community is. He says, “Community is a group of people bounded together by gifts and stories.”

Dr. James Maskell

So if you’re a marketer or if you’re a business or if you’re building a brand, you’re likely telling a story, and other people are resonating with that story. And then, creating communities, you have to facilitate the giving of gifts.

If you go back a couple of hundred years, when we had a different type of economy, a group of people is living near each other. They would be a community because if I give you something and you pay me for it, that’s the end of our interaction. I’ve given you something, you paid for it, and we’re good. We’re even.

Whereas in times gone by, there would be systems where I would just give you something because I know that if I’m generous, then everyone’s generous. Then, you’ll receive more than you give. That’s the basis of a community.

If you think about your business, gifts, and stories, you want to tell your stories, and you want to give gifts. And the internet has arrived to be able to give much more scalable gifts. You can give gifts to much more people at a very little cost, and those gifts can still be very meaningful.

That’s the way that I like to think about creating communities, and our whole organization was built on creating communities.

Dr. James Maskell

First of all, there’s a huge problem particularly in industrialized economies and particularly in America. People are lonely, and that’s a huge driving force of disease and dysfunction in our society right now.

We’ve moved from community-based living to living in individualized homes. You source everything that you need from random strangers. The Uber driver who picks me up and the Rinse guy comes to pick up my laundry.

The fabric of society as far as the community has fallen away in the last 50 years. And so, people are looking now to replace that through the brands and companies they interact with.

Whatever kind of business you run, if you look at the most successful companies and brands now, they’re looking at how we creating communities. How do we have people feel like this is a place where they can be and stay? And that’s important whether you’re marketing and bringing people into your business or it’s the light culture within your organization.

How do you want the team to feel? How do you get the most out of a team?

Community with brands and companies has come up to replace the lack of community that we have in society, and so, I feel that those brands that embrace community have grown exponentially particularly the last five years.

And so, I see is a huge theme emerging for the future of business.

Dr. James Maskell

I would just tell you the story of how our organization started.

We have begun a show called the Functional Forum about three years ago. It started off as a community of doctors who practice functional medicine in New York. For those of you unfamiliar, functional medicine is a new operating system for medicine that is designed around lifestyle disease.

If you get hit by a truck, you want the doctor to take care of you because they’ve got the skills you need, the drugs and the surgery. If you get Type two diabetes from eating McDonald’s every day for ten years, the doctor can’t reverse that for you. They can help you manage your blood sugar with drugs, but they can’t get you back to the point of health with the typical tools of drugs and surgery.

And so, for diseases that are lifestyle driven which are by far the biggest expenditure in the medical system and worldwide, you need a new operating system, and that is functional medicine.

Three years ago, we built this functional medicine. Meetup group in New York and it started off just as a New York meetup group, but then, we begun to stream the show and within two years, we had 200 meetup groups around the world. All doctors are getting together in local communities to watch the live stream show from New York.

What we saw is that we were able to grow our list in an exponential way by empowering members of our community to creating communities for them. We were using online content to create offline communities.

Dr. James Maskell

I think one of the most powerful things any company can do is if you look at the people that follow your brand or follow your business, more than likely, they share a lot of similarities with the other people that come to your brand and use it.

And so, one of the best things you can do as an entrepreneur is to introduce them to each other.

If you now are starting to make real world connections between people who think about the same stories, it could be a great gift to introduce people to each other.

I feel that this combination of online and offline is a powerful tool for any brand and any business.

If you’re an entirely offline business, you can think about how can you turn your brick and water business into a place where people want to come. People want to come more regularly.

I can give you some examples of our doctors who have run something like a walking club or a running club from their doctor’s offices. We learned that from Lululemon. Lululemon does that.

How do you get more people who like running gear? Do they like tight yoga pants? Get them to a running club and meet at Lululemon.

So if you’re brick and water, how do you use the internet to get more people to come to your community? And then, if you have an online business, how can you match people up who are in different local areas to connect in person about whatever your brand is?

I think those are already powerful tools in growing a list, growing a business, growing a customer base.

Building community is an easy way to give people transformational and remarkable experiences with your brand.

Dr. James Maskell

I think one of the things we’re learning is we don’t want to control everything the whole time. One of the most valuable things we ever did Luis, was at the beginning of our organization, we got all of our core team together and brought out our core values as what to we stood of value as an organization.

One of the things was decentralized decision-making. We don’t want to be in charge of everything necessarily. We’d like to see decentralized decision making as a principle.

Dr. James Maskell

One of the things that we’re starting to do which is starting to unleash the potential of these communities is rather than doing everything exactly what we say “Show up at this meetup group and sit in in front of the TV for an hour and a half while you watch our show.”

As these communities grow, and once they hit a certain critical mass to be able to say, “Hey. Get your group together. Sit in a circle, and find out what do you want from this community. What would make this work for you?” So then, the community becomes about the people in the community and not necessarily about the power structure that helped in creating communities.

I think that’s something that we’re moving towards in 2017 because what we realize is we don’t want to control everything. Ultimately, I think that’s part of the old story like how much can you manage and organize yourself, and have under your control. I believe that part of this new story whether it be at medicine or politics, or a business is handing that control back to the individual user.

To have longevity, don’t pretend to know what the people need and deliver it to them. You get them to get back in control of how the community serves its members.

Dr. James Maskell

As I said before, I think the number one thing is to introduce people who share the same story to each other.

Imagine this kind of things. You have a mother whose child has just been diagnosed with autism. So they’re in coming to the pediatric practice, the shock, and trying to come to terms with the fact that this is going to be a lot harder parents than they expected. They’re not prepared for this or otherwise.

Now, imagine if that doctor can introduce that parent to another mother of a child with autism whose been living with that disease for ten years. Now, you have information transfer happening from one to the other.

The mother whose child has just diagnosed gets a ton of value from that interaction because she is being told how do you get them to take their medicine, how do you get them to go to the bathroom, what can you do with diet to help to improve function and all of these kinds of things. That is all being delivered.

Then, she’s getting a lot of value. The other mother is obtaining a lot of value because now, all the pain and suffering that she’s been through for the last ten years of having to deal with her child is now being validated and used to help someone else. That’s incredibly validating for them. Overall, now, both are learning the best practices.

What you do is you find yourself in a position, if you can facilitate that, you’re adding value to everyone. There’s value added overall, the patients getting value, the one mother is getting value, the other mother is getting value, and there’s no money being exchanged at all.

Dr. James Maskell

That mother with a newly diagnosed child will never leave your pediatric practice because you did something. You went out of the way to create a remarkable experience that was free for them, and that kind of opportunity I think is available for all sorts of businesses.

If people share a particular story or starting to interact with your company and your brand, the other people that interact with your business and brand can help to reaffirm your choices and can help you to be part of a bigger organization.

Dr. James Maskell

Absolutely. Yeah. I think being generous with introductions is an excellent adjunct to what I was saying earlier. That was me.

The last year of my book, we crowdsourced that and we had a fantastic launch. With that, we had 50,000 downloads in the first five days, and people see the Functional Forum grow. We grew to be the biggest conference within just a couple of years with this innovative combination of streaming and meetup groups.

For years, before anyone saw this, I was doing exactly that. I was going to conferences, meeting people, finding out who was who, making introductions of people that I talked, solving people’s problems.

The other day, I heard someone said, “When people are looking to find a business, people say just follow your passion.” And he was like, “I don’t think that’s a good idea.” And he said, “I believe you need to find the pain.”

Dr. James Maskell

If you’re coming across people and you’re asking right questions of them, you know what their pain is.

Dr. James Maskell

If you have a network of individuals that you’ve met, putting those two people together is always a good fit, and it always ends up benefiting you.

If people are making key connections that solve one of their problems within the network you created, they always remember you positively for that.

I think that’s a great point and I would highly recommend that to everyone.