It takes more to build a community than just pressing “create a group” on Facebook. You have to really bridge these connections that you make then you can start a community. For Maruxa Murphy, creating communities is like second nature. She is a community architect and CEO of Create Sell Impact. Join your host Susie Carder as she talks to Maruxa on how to create a strong community. With the events of COVID, online groups are the in-thing now. Learn how to manage one and find the right opportunities for success.
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Why Building A Community Is More Than Just Clicking “Create Group” On Facebook With Maruxa Murphy
I am excited about our next guest. She is one of my students, as well as I’m one of her clients, Maruxa Murphy. She is known as the Community Maven. Why? It’s because she helps us monetize and grow our Facebook groups and other online communities. She has a gift and a talent to turn online communities into 6 and 7-figure revenue streams. She’s a community architect and instigator of hundreds of changemakers and communities all over the world.
She blends people, purpose and profit into one another. She has been the advisor on nonprofits, startups, impact changemaker communities, and organizations to grow their experiences and build long-term and short-term cultures and brands. She has helped dozens of brands turn their communities from flailing to fierce in just a few months and onwards. Please welcome my guest, Maruxa Murphy.
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I am with one of my clients and I am one of her clients. This is a love connection. We all have this thing that we all have and have to manage, and none of us know how to manage it. It’s how we monetize our Facebook groups and other online communities. Maruxa, welcome to the show. I can’t wait for you to drop your diamonds because this is one of those things that we all know we need and nobody knows how to do it.
I love you and I am so glad to be here. Thank you for having me. I’m so grateful to be here with you.
I’m so grateful you’re here. Talk about who you serve, and then I want you to share your badass list. What I love about my community of the women that I’ve accumulated, because I feel like I’m accumulating women all over the world, is they do have a heart for the client. It’s not just about money and monetizing, so tell everybody who you serve and what your magic is.
I serve the rebels, the innovators and the people that know that there is something that needs to be served in this world in a powerful way and they’re finally ready to say, “I’m going to do that.” Some of my clients now include Jaiya and Ian. They are from The Erotic Blueprint. They launched a Netflix show called Sex, Love & Goop with Gwyneth Paltrow, and that’s one of our clients too. Susie Carder is one of the amazing clients that I love. Also, we’re helping design in the travel industry, an incredible model that has never been done in designing partnerships with local communities and the resorts, and then having a virtual piece to that too. It’s so much fun to design in that way.
I look for companies that are ready to not only talk about the great message that they have but do something in a fun way to bring those people together in the community, and then to create additional 6 and 7-figure revenue streams on the back end of designing out these communities. I think that’s where my magic is. John Howard, a marriage and family therapist. He’s one of my clients and about to launch one of his books. We’re designing this community around his book and he said, “Your magic, I’m seeing that it’s not just, ‘Kumbaya, let’s all hold hands and build a community together.’”
There’s a science and processes to it. There’s data that we look at, and then we design with the art in mind and then the essence of the visionary and the brand experience that we’re building in, so art, science, and essence is how we design out these communities. That makes every one of them super unique, even though we’re following proven systems and processes in the process.
That’s why I fell in love with you. On our first call, she was bringing out this whole dashboard. I’m like, “I have a girl crush. She’s got a dashboard and spreadsheets.” We just make stuff up in business, and when you have the analytics behind it, you could really see why am I doing what I’m doing, which then makes me want to do it more. What do you think is the biggest mistake we make in managing groups?
To grow fast, you should slow down.
A hundred percent the biggest one is that we hit that button ‘Create a Group’ because someone told us that we should have a Facebook group or we should have a community. If you’re reading and you’ve done that, you’re not alone. This is where 98% of us have started with communities and building out a community for our programs or to drive potential prospects into what we’re building with services or our products. What I would encourage instead of doing that is to realize that the pathway to building a community has to start with the starting line.
If you imagine or you can write this down, the mantra that I make sure every one of my clients recognizes and knows is to slow down to grow fast. If we take some slow down time at the beginning of building out your community, your online group, your Facebook group, think clearly about why are you doing this in the first place. What is the energy of the vibe that you want to bring into that community? What values do you have, and what is the value of that community to the people that are going to be a part of that? You’re going to be in a much better position to design that community intentionally than just hitting create a group.
You’re like, “We should put a picture of my logo here and then put some content up.” That’s often where we start, but we don’t have to do that. Being in many years in developing communities and creating online groups like Facebook group and have built over 100 communities that created 6 and 7-figure revenue streams for my clients, it really is about slowing down to grow fast. I highly suggest that each of us focuses in our communities that way, or if you’re in the community and you’ve already hit the create group and you’ve already started, take a minute, pause, backtrack a minute and build it in a way that feels aligned for you instead.
I feel like you’re busting me because that’s what we did. When I came to you, I was transparent. You said, “What was your goal for that group?” “I don’t know. They said I needed it,” and you were like, “We should be making money.” I want you to hear that little caveat because she said 6 and 7-figure revenue streams from your private Facebook groups. That changed my thinking of it. It was a big to-do before and now, it’s how do we serve and monetize the group in a whole new way, which is beautiful. What made you get into the community building? How did you start this piece of the business?
There are two parts to it. Number one, it’s been a part of my life’s journey since birth. My mom is 1 of 11 kids, my dad is 1 of 6. I was raised by a village of people because my mom and dad worked a lot. I’m the second oldest of the 39 grandkids, just on my mom’s side, so I never knew what a small family was like. I always knew what it was like to be around a ton of people but I guess one of my roles in the family if you will, was to bring the people together.
I caught on that my grandmother was that person that gathered us together, and she taught me so much honestly, about inviting all of us into a space in the midst of our differences. I have some really crazy family members but even in that, we’re all unconditionally loved and welcomed. I grew up in that space, so I thought that everybody had that same experience. Naive Maruxa goes to college and is like, “Everyone loves everyone.” I was in this land of positivity and everything is pretty good. Not that everything was, but I thought at that point was.
I got to college and I realized quickly on day one that it was not how the world worked. I made a commitment at that point to look at, “How do we create and bridge connection in the midst of our differences? How do we choose love and forgiveness first?” I started to build these into how I would show up as a leader on campus. I ended up creating some cool programs there. I turned that into my first career, which was in Leadership and Identity Development as the Director of Multicultural Affairs for the university, doing it in a way that was building our next generation of leaders.
I then moved all of that and went online in 2009 after I had my first daughter. At that point I said, “My daughter Maya needed to have a mom that wasn’t working 100 hours a week.” I was in this dream career that I had, so I wanted to create this intention, “What can I do online that allows me to be more in control of my time?” It naturally led to designing out communities for companies, authors, speakers or coaches that really wanted to talk to more people but didn’t know how to bring them together.
Over that time, I started to stumble into building another community, and then another. I was like, “There’s a pattern here.” The pandemic hit and I started to recognize that we as a world did not know how to be in space and time virtually. I had at that point over 100 one-to-one clients where I designed their communities for them, “What if I could teach this?”
COVID helped me reconnect to, “What are my systems, my processes, and how do I take everything that’s been custom-designed from my brain and put them into processes that more people can benefit from?” Soon after that, you and I met and you were like, “What are these processes?” We started to bring that into your community. That’s where it started and how it’s evolved. Those are the clients that we serve.
What I love is you just monetize your natural gift. I think as entrepreneurs, we forget to find the need and fill the need. The need that fills you with purpose, with joy, and that thing I’m passionate about. Find that thing that people are always asking your opinion about and then let’s monetize that, which is what you did from an early age, “I’m good at this thing called building community. I’m good at bringing cultures or crazy people and fun people together.” I love that you brought up the pandemic because it has either shut people down or forced people to grow because of isolation. What’s been your secret sauce during the pandemic to keep you in action and growing?
My number one secret sauce that’s been keeping me in action is you and the community that we have. As you mentioned in the beginning, I am one of your clients. There was a point where you were like, “Where is Maruxa? You are hiding.” There are moments in any of our businesses where things get hard, and my MO is to be on and to be that beam of hope, and light to those who are around me, which is how I’m wired, but that also means the shadow of that is if I’m not in a place of feeling inspired, I can easily hide. You have been such a gift to me.
You and the team say, “How are you doing? How’s it going? Where are you? What’s up? I see you. You think you’re hiding, but you’re not. You don’t hide very well.” That has been a massive support. Honestly, I think COVID time has been not just a pandemic of COVID but it has been at the pandemic of isolation for so many of us. Therefore, depression, anxiety, substance abuse, all of that has gone massively in numbers. That’s what I’m here to combat against because we don’t need to be in that hiding spot.
I love that you said your shadow side because that is leadership, business. That other side always pops up and go, “Who’s coaching me out of that?” The program you’re in is Our Global Leadership, so we are all leaders. If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, it’s a duck. I’m like, “She is being a duck but doesn’t know we’re ducks too.” You were the eagle and then I go, “I see you.” That’s the power of a really good community, which is why I love what we do. We call you the Community Maven because you’re a master at that.
When things get rough, try to be a beam of hope to those who are around you.
With that, you’re having your own biggest business challenges. Some people call them failure. Some people call them challenges. I call them a cosmic boot because the cosmic boot has me seeing hate going through, but on the other side, I learn so much. What has been your biggest failure or your biggest challenge, and then what you’ve learned from it as an entrepreneur?
I love that you’re bringing this here to the show because I wish I knew that more people were going through this in my own journey of entrepreneurship. I think it’s a two-fold. One, I have such a hard time sometimes saying, “This is not working,” and letting team members go that aren’t supporting the growth of the company because I see the best in everybody. That’s a strength of mine. The shadow is I don’t ever want anyone to feel bad that I see something that’s not great about them for the growth of our company, in that case.
There was a situation where I was holding on very tightly to a couple of team members that were draining us financially, emotionally and energetically. That was a big lesson for me, which also then tied into how I was showing up on the sales process. How many leads do we need to have come in on a regular basis to then make sure that you have sales on our consistent basis? When those two things were in a dance with one another, I found myself in this place of like, “What do I do with this? How do I grow and move forward?”
I think a big part of it was a conversation you and I had about this. You called it out and said, “This needs to be cut out,” but it did. It took me a couple of months to finally say, “I need to do this. I have to wear my big girl pants and do the thing.” The big lesson is I don’t have to wait so long until that happens. I have to trust instinct, my intuition, and make that choice so we can move beyond that and correct our movement at that point.
I see that as one of the biggest challenges entrepreneurs have. We hire fast and fire slow, and it’s the reverse. You want to hire slow and fire fast. It’s because we’re servant leaders, it’s like, “I don’t want to hurt their feelings. They’ll get it. Maybe it’s me. I need to train them.” There is that part. I use the CAT system, Clarity, Accountability and Training. If I was clear on my expectation, I held you accountable and I trained you, then it’s not my issue. It’s yours but if I answered no to any of those, “Was I clear?” No. “Did I hold them accountable?” No. “Did I train them?” No, then it’s my responsibility.
It taught me to have this discernment to go, “This isn’t us or our culture. This is you and we’re having the same conversation over and over again.” What I was sharing with you and what entrepreneurs need to know is you will outgrow your team faster than they will outgrow you because we are hard-chargers. We have big goals. We’re playing and risk, and the normal person doesn’t risk as we risk. We’re cookie and designed crazy like that. We risk and go, “I’m going to put it all on the table and see what happens.”
The average person needs safety, security and belonging. We need that but that’s not our primary motivation. Our primary motivation is service growth, gamechanger and revolutionize. The Community Maven is a declaration. It’s not a job title. I’m a system’s girl because I am creating, so I’ll just go to that camp method. It’s them, not me. That’s always hard, and I’m proud of you for letting them go. As a result of that, you’ve closed some huge accounts.
The week after, I closed my largest account. It was a three-year contract.
One of your highest six-figure accounts, I want to boast about you because you’d be shy and you don’t say that. The degree of your integrity is the degree of your alignment. You are so out of integrity with the value system that you couldn’t close, and then once you got integrity with it, it was like, “What happened?”
It was this huge account that was changing their industry. Right after that, the next hour, I closed the second-largest children’s book publishing company. We closed a Netflix special, then we close another media company. I was like, “Is this real?” I had to sit with that too from a leadership perspective like, “Am I willing to not self-sabotage anymore?”
I saw that this firing slow was a self-sabotage move because I didn’t know if I was going to be ready to take on these opportunities. I had to sit with that like, “What if more of these types of clients have been wanting to work with me for the last 3 or 4 months? What did I miss out on by not making a more powerful yes or a more powerful no initially, to see the numbers go?”
There are some diamonds in that one right there. If you can be remembered for anything, what do you want to be remembered for?
I’d love to be remembered by my children as a woman and a mother who never gave into her fear but kept charging beyond to see what else is possible, to see that there’s more than often what meets the eye, and to lead from this place of bravery that defies expectations. I want to be known for that. That sounds fun.
I love that you bring your family into it because a lot of times, we feel torn and we have to choose. What I learned early on was that it was about the quality of time with my children, not the quantity of time, and then make sure that every time I had with them, it was quality. Fast forward of that decision of who my daughters are, they are these amazing and brave women that inspire me. They’re like, “Mom, we’re this way because we watched you.” I’m like, “I know but I wasn’t that way that young.” When I look back I go, “It worked.”
You don’t know as a mom or a parent. You’re like, “Is this working? Are they going to be in therapy forever because I wasn’t there at every baseball game, soccer game, basketball game, whatever game they had?” I love the bold declaration that we can have it the way we want it and not sacrifice. I was born in a generation that you couldn’t bring home the bacon and fry it up in a pan that will let you forget your man. That was a little mantra.
I go, “I don’t want to have to fry it up in the pan every night. I want to be with my kids,” but not all the time. I wasn’t that kind of mom. My kids’ babysitter said, “Susie, there are two types of women in the world. Women like you who love to work, and women like me who love to care and provide. You give me life and I give you life.”
What a great reframe too. That’s important to pay attention to. There is that mom guilt for sure, so I appreciate what you shared. There is that mom’s guilt of like, “I have to go into this other business trip but my babies I know are going to miss me,” but when I’m there, I’m fully alive in my work. I feel like I am on fire as the woman that I am. My hope is exactly that my children get to see that this is how they can be as well. They can be on fire with the work that they do, whether it’s staying home and being present with the nurturing, the caregiving or it’s going forward and building a company or something in between.
I see that holistic success for you because you are a loving mom. I love watching your TikToks. I was finally following you on Instagram to just see you as a mom because I know you as a businesswoman, and to see you as mom, wife, and loving on your husband, and you guys are still together. I think the world needs to see us like that as well. Same with men because I love when men edify their wives, women, girlfriends or whatever they are versus the stereotype of whatever people say. That makes my heart so happy when your man honors you and their family. It’s like, “I want that. That can happen.”
It’s a work in progress. They have to choose to break some out of some stereotype stuff as well. I feel really lucky and grateful in that way that he’s willing to do the hard work to see that his wife loves to build businesses.
The harder you work, the luckier you get. That’s how it works. What’s one question you wish I would have asked you? It could be about community building and about what you do.
That’s a hard one. The first one that came to mind was, why does everybody need Susie Carder in their lives?
How would you answer that?
Whenever I have anybody that comes into my life that’s looking for someone who can catapult their mindset and their systems, and the way in which they’re looking at business or what lens they’re coming in to look at business, I think of you 100% of the time. You and I met in a different way through a referral as a client, but then I got to go to your event and I got to spend time at one of your three-day events back in February of 2020. I was in awe of how you held space for every single person in that experience.
Firing slow can be a self-sabotaging move if you miss out on big opportunities.
You genuinely care about everybody that’s in that room and you made sure that the systems to run the event were so that you could be present with everybody in there. For those who’ve never been to a Susie event, there were 100 or 200 people there. The fact that you could hold that space, and have a team that holds space alongside you was so beautiful to watch and inspiring to me. I think for those who want to create more impact in the world with our gifts and our talents, it’s a no-brainer to me to work with Susie. That was the question that I’m glad to answer.
What I love is that event was virtual, so we weren’t even live. That’s a huge system. I’m a great speaker, which I learned systematically, to be able to move a room but that was virtual. Creating communities in your Facebook group, you can make that kind of impact and not be physically in front of people. That’s what will attract them to meet you.
I was like, “What do we do with this group?” It was a simple little group. I’m like, “You can’t do them in a Facebook group.” Of course, we’ve had them before, and you’re like, “We can. What you do at your events is the same thing we’re doing in this group.” It was such a mind blow and such an opportunity, so I love that. We have a girl crush on each other. I just want to say that out loud but for good reason. It’s to help each other produce results, which is amazing. I want you to have a girl crush on her as well. You have a free gift for us, right?
I do.
I love this gift. This is one of my favorite gifts because I like the ‘it.’ I don’t want the idea about it. I don’t want you to go tell me I need to do it. Give me the it. What is the it that you’re giving us? You are going to have a girl crush as well.
I love that you call it the ‘it.’ Philosophy and theory are great but when you’re at a point in building a Facebook group and you’d say to yourself, “I’m going to do it. I have the vision. I have all of that,” and then you go to write your first words in your group and you’re like, “What?” Your eyes glaze over and you have no idea what to write. My free gift is to solve that for you, so you don’t have to think about that so hard anymore.
In fact, I give you not just 300, what I call content prompts, so you know what to write in there. I also give you a short training but training that will help you see how to use this win-win process in a very systematic way to design out your content. Even if you are not necessarily at your computer every single day in your group, you can have content going out on your behalf. I teach you that process in this free gift.
It’s such a juicy process. Thank you so much. People can find you on Facebook and Instagram. Is it under that or is it in Create Sell Impact?
I’m the only Maruxa Murphy out there that I know of, so feel free to look that up, but you can also join our Facebook group. It’s a free group to join and it’s where we talk about how to create profitable Facebook groups. You can look that up @Grow&MonetizeYourGroups on Facebook, but if you go to my profile, I’ll have a link there as well to that group.
Thank you so much. Thank you for your generosity and time, and generosity and spirit, and the love that you bring to work in play. I appreciate who you are as a businesswoman, as a mom, and as a beautiful wife, and I so appreciate doing business together. I love and adore you.
I appreciate you so much. Thank you for having me.
Important Links
- Maruxa Murphy
- The Erotic Blueprint
- Instagram – Maruxa Murphy
- Facebook – Maruxa Murphy
- @Grow&MonetizeYourGroups – Facebook
- https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/maruxamurphy/
- http://createsellimpact.com/contentprompts
About Maruxa Murphy
Maruxa Murphy is the “The Community Maven” and known to turn online communities into 6- and 7-figure revenue streams. She is the Community Architect and Instigator for 100s of changemaker communities in a way that blends the good of people, purpose and profit into one another. Maruxa is on the advisory teams for non-profits, start ups, impact and changemaker communities and organizations to grow their experiences and build the long and short term culture builds.
She’s helped dozens of brands turn their communities from flailing to fierce from just a few months and onward. In addition to running her Community Architecture and Culture Building Consultancy, she is also the founder of Perky Perky Coffee, which invites their customers to rise up from the first cup of coffee and onwards throughout the day.
Her “uniqueness” brought Perky Perky to the United Nations 2019 and served Perky Perky coffee to over 400 transformational world and business leaders. The United Nations on Women’s Entrepreneur Day identified Perky Perky as one of 10 women-owned brands to be on the watch out for in 2020.
