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EP55: Completely Rethinking Community w/ Bunker Labs

Episode Summary

Todd Connor who is Founder and CEO at Bunker Labs. Bunker Labs is a chapter-based organization that helps military veterans start and grow businesses. In today’s interview with Todd, we will talk about the strategy behind different types of events, metrics for community growth and adapting your in-person events during COVID-19.

Episode Notes

Todd Connor who is Founder and CEO at Bunker Labs. Bunker Labs is a chapter-based organization that helps military veterans start and grow businesses. In today’s interview with Todd, we will talk about the strategy behind different types of events, metrics for community growth and adapting your in-person events during COVID-19.

Who is this episode for?

Non-profit, Scaling, In-person communities

Key Takeaway

There are 3 schools of thought for organizations running C2C events in local cities all over. First school of thought is to wait it out, the second is to just switch to virtual and third is to take a step back and completely rethink the strategy. Instead of just putting your event on a zoom call can you change the activities and content of the event that works better remotely? For instance, you could have larger more interest-based events since anyone can join.

Episode Transcription

Derek Anderson:
In 2010, I co-founded a company called Startup Grind with one goal, inspiring, educating, and connecting every entrepreneur on the planet. Today, Startup Grind is now in 125 countries and has millions of members. Along the way, I found the most powerful marketing tool of all time, customer to customer marketing. C2C marketing empowers your greatest ambassadors, your customers, to evangelize your brand and grow your community.

Derek Anderson:
This is a podcast we wish we'd had when we start building our community a decade ago. Each episode, we talked to the brightest minds and companies on the planet to learn how they build their community and empower their customers. I'm your host, Derek Anderson, and this is the C2C Podcast.

Derek Anderson:
I'm excited to have our next guest, Todd Connor, who is the founder and CEO at Bunker Labs. Bunker Labs is a chapter based organization that helps military veterans start and grow their businesses. Today we talk about strategies behind different kinds of events, metrics for community growth, adapting your in person events during COVID-19, and just generally how to be a leader in the midst of a crisis. Take a listen.

Derek Anderson:
Todd, tell us what Bunker Labs is and what your role is there.

Todd Connor:
Bunker Labs is a organization, nonprofit that helps military veterans and military spouses start and grow businesses. And we are a chapter based organization in about 30 cities across the country that we started about six years ago.

Derek Anderson:
So I have never served in the military. And so I'm curious to know how did your military experience contribute to your community leadership style?

Todd Connor:
So I was in the Navy, I did it after college, it was brief, it was four years, but I think had a profound impact on everything I believe about leadership, people, community. Fundamentally at its root, what I know to be true from having served with people in the military from very different environments for me, which is you cannot assess talent in a resume, or based on a zip code or how somebody addresses. Talent is something that is innate I think just throughout all people. And if given the right environment, people can step up and perform. And I saw people perform in the military every single day.

Todd Connor:
So when you seen that evidence, you have a real humility about your own accomplishments and an appreciation and understanding that under recognized under opportunity to communities deserve the same thing. And I think the militaries as well as other communities are a manifestation of that.

Derek Anderson:
You have a number of different types of events, Bunker Connect, Bunker Bruise, CEOCircle. Can you share what those are and how they all sort of tie in to your overall strategy?

Todd Connor:
We're trying to help people start businesses, and unraveling how you do that, if you want to be thoughtful about it, is actually really hard. It's simple if you just want to say, well it's like they all need a 12 week class on how to start a business. That's a clean mental model for all of us. And I think that actually is probably where, as an industry of entrepreneurship support organizations, where we all started at some point. And then you quickly realize, that doesn't move the needle for what people need. That assumes that there's an education gap for a content or a knowledge gap.

Todd Connor:
And what you realize is, the real barriers when you take it down to the human level, if I'm a guy trying to open up an auto body shop in Michigan City, Indiana, knowledge can only take me so far. At some point I've got to know a local lender who can help me understand whether or not I need to get a loan and how to do that and what good terms are. I need to know a local real estate broker who can help me find a good auto body shop at a good rate. I need to know people that can work for me or help me find people to work for me. I need to know someone to help me open up the shop, and market and how to market.

Todd Connor:
So we really anchored on this thesis of, we knew that we wanted to help people start businesses, but we weren't prescriptive about how to do that. We tried a bunch of different things, including the 12 week class, and really came back to this idea that it's about network access that people that start businesses, part of why Silicon Valley is so effective is because of the network density that exists there. And so the challenge, the structural challenge for the military community is that they don't have the same network access as their civilian counterparts. And so if we want to solve that, then you've got to do it through building relationships, especially with civilian sectors.

Todd Connor:
So our programming model is tons of events. You know, we have the workspace that we work, we have partnerships with Google, we have happy hours once a month in all of these cities. We hosted 14,000 people in person last year at events. So it's a huge cornerstone of what we believe to be true, which is that people need to meet each other and then be in relationship, and that you actually need those relationships to be local and they need to be diverse. That if you have a local diverse network, that is a huge accelerant of the business that you want to start.

Derek Anderson:
Okay. We're both in person C2C people. So, it's April 15th and with the current crisis, I mean the whole thing changes every 24 hours. With where we're at as of right now, I would love to hear how you all are reacting and adjusting, the good and the bad of things you're figuring out or testing. I guess my first real question is, we still need to meet people. So can that be done, can community be built at 70%, 80% as you can in person virtually, or 50%? or I mean, how much of what you've been doing in person can still be solved in the current climate?

Todd Connor:
Yeah, COVID knocked all of us off of our game, especially for those of us that are in the business of large events, which we are. And we have a national summit that we canceled. We have canceled 40 events over the course of two and a half months. So I just want to acknowledge it and say it was a giant change and plan.

Todd Connor:
But here's my philosophy on sort of leadership, but also strategy in a moment like this, which is number one, you got to be an optimist. So you look at the situation and you say, how do you take advantage of it for what it is? And maybe you can't, but I think that has to be a question that you look at and assess.

Todd Connor:
I believe secondly, that the worlds organizations sort of fall into three camps. I think the first camp is people that are treating this as a pause and we just got to hunker down and survive. And then we'll get past the pause and then we'll just resume business as usual. I think that's flawed thinking. I don't know that you're going to be on the other side of this when this lands, if that's your philosophy. Although I understand it frankly. And I think when this all first started happening, we were probably in the first camp like, "Well is this just like a week? Or what are we talking about here?" I mean all of us were sort of in a place of trying to understand.

Derek Anderson:
Yeah, you don't want to overreact too quickly.

Todd Connor:
Yeah, you don't want to overreact too quickly. So I think to be in a pause posture is appropriate for a moment, until you understand what the environment is.

Todd Connor:
The second camp is, let's continue the way that we were doing things, but sort of flip it to a virtual model, right? So the question that you asked Derek, is how much of can you take what you were doing in person and just sort of translate that into a virtual model? And I think those are good questions to ask and we've done a lot of that.

Todd Connor:
But I think the more productive place is the third bucket, which is kind of strip away the programmatic model according to the new environment and re-assess the impact that you're trying to have and come up with new strategies accordingly. So I think that's where we're at today and we have some answers as to how to do that, but it's not fully baked. But I'll tell you, our philosophy is not just, "Hey, we plan to do a networking event with 120 people on April 20th." How do we do a virtual networking event for 120 people on April 20th? We're thinking of it very differently.

Todd Connor:
And I think that you can uniquely do things through Zoom, leveraging technology in the virtual environment that you actually couldn't do in person. I think that if we're strategic about this, we can do more skills based network assignments in ways that, if I'm just at a networking event with 120 people, I can't be that precision driven. But if I'm doing a networking event in a virtual environment with 2000 people, I might be able to find the one other person that owns a bed and breakfast that serves a wedding venue, just like the one that I own.

Todd Connor:
So I think if you have that philosophy, then you can sort of begin to see how technology might be an asset, how engaging virtually can be an asset. I think having relationships is still going to matter. So that is not going away. But how you do that, I think has obviously changed for now.

Derek Anderson:
I think it's a really great way to think about it and have this sort of, are you paused, are you flipping just doing everything virtual or are you rethinking the strategy? And we sort of go through different phases of being in different buckets and sometimes, you might jump back to a pause or you might jump in to different places. And I certainly have the problem personally sometimes, I'm pretty consistent and I'm sort of even keel most of the time. And so, except when I'm coaching little league baseball. But that gets it so actually like I'm ... and I'm very stable. I'm not a reactionary person.

Derek Anderson:
So it's not that I don't move quickly or try to get to the front of the line, but I'm just not somebody that like overreacts a lot. And so I think this has been an adjustment at least for me, is the first sort of month is sort of like, "I'm just going to wait and I'm not going to overreact." But now I was that person and now I think I've sort of moved through these different phases of business creation or strategy or whatever it is, I think to the point of, I think I'm where you're saying you are, which is you've got to rethink everything. Everything's on the table. No idea's bad, and it may change next week, so be prepared for that.

Derek Anderson:
I guess as somebody that's leading this organization for yourself, how do you come to terms with being able to mentally make those shifts and then get your team or maybe if I'm in a bigger company, get the other stakeholders to engage and to continue to work with me to shift this strategy as more data becomes available. How do you handle that?

Todd Connor:
It's a great question and we've addressed it, thought about it a lot and have addressed it specifically. I think number one, I believe that ... and this is probably true of most startups, but I think it's certainly true in this environment. Violent execution towards a 80% solution is better than waiting for a 100% solution. So I believe that aggressive action that is acknowledging the environment, is going to be not just a better posture than pausing or waiting for perfect information to make better decisions. So I think the speed of decision making has to be ... we're going to engineer around speed, I think is one philosophy. And not every organization is going to choose that. I don't know if that's right for every organization, but I believe it's right for us is to engineer around speed, so we're acting quickly.

Todd Connor:
And an example of this is just, we really recognize we have a tagline at Bunker Labs, which is inspire, equip and connect. So we started to see things as a leadership team. I think you talked about moving through the three phases. I think actually going from pause, you could skip the second step, which is sort of turn to virtual and just go from pause and then go straight to the third, which is violent execution towards the new strategy that you think is more responsive to the moment.

Todd Connor:
That's probably where we were. We sat for a few weeks just observing what's going on. And then kind of quickly realized that where you see business as usual taking place, it's sort of, it's tone deaf to what's going on. So over-communicating is I think critical in a crisis like this. We are doing all staff calls every couple of days to really talk through and help them mentally process where we were getting ourselves, which is ... And where we landed simply was, "Hey, we've always been an organization that believes in inspiring equipping and connecting." Inspiring right now is telling inspiring stories of, look at a military veteran who came back after deployment and started a business, is tone deaf to the economic devastation that's being felt.

Todd Connor:
Connecting, which is the third pillar of our strategy, is really driven to in person events, and that's really not really happening in the same way, but equipping is so key right now. So we really had to have a mental shift to say everything we do right now has to be about equip. It's not really about inspire. It's not really about connect. Those are pillars that we've always had, but we're turning the volume on those down. We're turning the volume on equip up. What does that look like? We're like, everyone needs to understand how to apply for the stimulus package. We serve small business owners. If we don't understand that, then we're not relevant to them in this crisis.

Todd Connor:
And so yeah. So we had to sort of mentally think about it, talk about it, verbalize it. And then at one point, our marketing team came up with a new kind of internal communication strategy. I was like, "No, no, it's not about new strategy. We have the existing language inspire, equip, connect. We're focusing on equip." And now everyone I think in the organization sort of has that mental model.

Todd Connor:
But you have to be really intentional about helping people get there, because they don't understand that we had to literally say, the world is a totally different place. We know that two months ago this is what mattered, this is what was on the scorecard. But today it's just different and that's okay, but let's get there together. And we had to kind of mentally take time to do that as an organization.

Derek Anderson:
Yeah. And ultimately, your goal is to serve your community members. And so if your community members really need something else than a bunch of in person events right now, which they clearly do, then serve those needs right at this moment and be smart and adjust and doing the best way you can. And I mean I think that can be hard. It's scary, right? You're used to this other way of thinking and now you have to walk through doors that you've never walked through before and you don't understand what's on the other side. But if you're close to your community, you should be able to see and find out or ask them what they need and hopefully your community program's designed to serve your community, adjust accordingly.

Todd Connor:
I think it's such an important point though, Derek, because it's easy, because you're nervous about the health of your own organization, it's easy to turn inward in these moments. But if you're a mission driven organization, if you're a nonprofit organization, I don't think if you're a for profit organization, if you have a customer set, the right posture's to sort of I think turn towards your customers.

Todd Connor:
But that's hard to do when people are worried about like, "Are we okay? How is our financial runway? How's our health? How are we going to work as a virtual organization?" So you need to allow some time for that, but you also got to quickly move the conversation back to the customers. And I think when this all hit, you saw a lot of email campaigns that were like, "Here's what our organization is doing in response to COVID."

Todd Connor:
And I was very clear, I was like, "I don't want to send a newsletter like that, because that's about us." Our customers aren't wondering like, "What are you doing?" Our customers are worried about their own health and safety, financial and otherwise. So what we needed to do is just turn the newsletters on for them to say, "Look at what the community is doing and look at what the community is struggling with."

Todd Connor:
But whoever's going to be closest to the customers in this moment is going to, again, I think be on the other side of the curve. But the temptation is to sort of be inward focused and try to just tell stories about here's what we're doing, but customers aren't concerned about what you're doing. They want to know how you can sort of help them in this moment and meet their needs. And so I think again, we're trying to be on the right side of that, but it's hard to get right.

Derek Anderson:
It's so hard and how can you not worry about yourself, or your aunt, or your this person, or your family member, or your grandmother or whoever. I mean, everybody as has been stated many, many times ever uniquely with this, it's not a tsunami in Japan, right? It is a tsunami in every city, in every country of the world at one time.

Derek Anderson:
And so, I found myself with last few weeks, forcing myself, writing it down, putting it on a to do list, like go help someone else, go do something for someone. Because if not, I just get sucked into my own issues and my own problems, which are vast and not anywhere near as vast as many other people.

Derek Anderson:
And as we kind of wrap up here, if you have any tips for people to just get motivated and to get out and do this, it's daunting. How do you get the motivation and the inspiration to get up and attack these things every single day and try to make change day in and day out and in the midst of all these other issues that are going around? What do you do personally?

Todd Connor:
Well, I mean it's a struggle. We also have a newborn baby that we adopted in February. So this was actually supposed to be a season where I was on maternity leave until early May.

Derek Anderson:
Oh my gosh.

Todd Connor:
And so we're home, like everybody, we've got an aging parent, so there's a lot that is living in background from me and I think for everyone. So I think the opportunity in this moment is that we can operate with grace for humanity and for each other and a little bit more compassion. We've seen everybody's living rooms now, that's a gift. So I think it is hard to show up and I think it's okay when you can't. I think there's just got to be grace and forgiveness for each other.

Todd Connor:
And then I think beyond that, I'd say there's two things that are motivating for me; three things. One is just being in a daily routine I think is important. Get up, shower. I haven't always done that, but I think the longer this goes on, that's important; creating strong daily rituals is for me, part of the formula.

Todd Connor:
I think the second is trying to be a service. So service to others is sort of the antidote for our own kind of insular pain and suffering. And so to the extent that we can turn outward, I think that's a good thing to do. And fortunately, I feel like at Bunker Labs, I'm like, what a great place to do that. We serve small business owners, so my gosh, this is like the moment we've been training for in theory, so let's show up for the moment.

Todd Connor:
And then I think the third thing is, and I'd be lying if I didn't admit this, is, and I think this is true, especially for the military community. There's a sense of excitement, not universally, not ignoring what is hard about this, not ignoring the health toll of a real virus that is taking lives, not ignoring the devastation economically, so honoring and acknowledging all that. But also, the military community is a community that has been through war, literally.

Todd Connor:
And so there is an understanding of hardship of the community that is forged in hardship, and that you get to the other side of it and that there's opportunity on the other side of it. And so I'm seeing tons of chatter across our network about, "Hey, if work from home is the new normal, what does that mean for local economies? And I'm thinking about getting into franchising. And what about this? And collaborate on this." And there's a ton of creativity that's a foot. And people that are excited and thinking about what's on the other side of this curve, because they recognize that whoever moves fast, that there will be something.

Todd Connor:
And so I have optimism about the future as well. As hard as this is, we will also look back and say, like they did through the Great Depression, "We lived through this." And we know that we don't know whether it's six months from now, 12 months, three years, 10 years, but that opportunities will emerge because we're redefining how we work and interact with each other. And so I think if you're an entrepreneur, which you are, Derek and I am, that you can't help but begin to think about what possibilities could be.

Derek Anderson:
Thank you so much for listening. If you liked the show, please leave a review wherever you listen to this. If you'd like to see more about how to create your own event community, go to bevylabs.com/pod. That's B-E-V-Y-L-A-B-S.com/pod.