From time to time, James and I become the work experience kids at companies we think are doing interesting things. We spend the day, learning what their team do, and report back to you with some things we hope you can incorporate into your day-to-day.
Today, Electric House: an online publisher, started by two childhood friends – Lee and Adam who you may recognise from our webinar from about two years ago… ahh the old webinar set up!).
Electric House build communities online. But not just communities… but COMMUNITIES. One of the most prominent is On The Tools. A community focused on people in the trade, with over 6 million members across the channels. You are quite likely to have seen their stuff online because they go viral all the time.
And while I’m careful to use the word ‘community’ (a community is not simply social followership) – Lee and Adam have created successful, useful, and vibrant communities time and time again. So, how do they do it? That’s what this piece is all about 🙂
For those short on time, here are my key takeaways:
- Business can and should be fun.
- Community is about taking people with you.
- Educate and take your clients on a journey with you.
Business can and should be fun
There is something I really admire about Adam and Lee. That is when you see them together – they’re almost always bouncing off each other and having fun. It’s magnetic, you can’t help but want to smile too: to be part of it.
And it’s not the kind of ‘mandatory drinks on a Friday’ fun. It’s just people enjoying each other’s company for the sake of actually enjoying it in a genuine and authentic way.
You can see at the beginning of the video at the top of this post to see how they interact with one another. They described themselves as ‘Ant and Dec’ as a joke, but it feels like that kind of double act.
Both Lee and Adam confessed throughout the day we spent with them that they had at various points throughout the growth of the business had moments where they’d lost sight of this sense of fun. When that had been recognised though, they worked to get back to that place, which speaks volumes for how important they think it is to them and their business.
This isn’t a moot point in the context of community building. Electric House is a company approaching 100 people, yet there is an amazing sense of humanity that flows through the company that can so often be lost to process and corporate jargon in other places.
As ‘community’ is the definition of a human experience in action, if they’d built a business in any other way – I feel it would have inevitably failed as people would have recognised an ulterior motive in the activities that Electric House was engaging in. But, precisely because of the very ‘human’ way Lee, Adam, and the team operate – they’re able to walk the tightrope between growing a successful business, which also has a basis in bringing together millions of other people in a genuine way.
Learnable moment: If a community is what you want to build, then you have to recognise it as a human experience first. With this in mind, try to avoid the traps of business culture and instead remember everything else that is true to a human experience: having a laugh, supporting one another, friendship and enjoyment.
Community is about taking people with you and helping make positive change.
This humanity also manifests in other ways.
Adam’s background is ‘in the trade’ – it’s one of the reasons ‘On the Tools’ exists. This has it’s advantages – much like with TMM, Adam at one point was exactly the person he now seeks to help. Great marketing starts with understanding the customer and Adam brings this in abundance.
Having this knowledge is one thing, doing something with it is another. This manifested with a chat with Lee.
Lee was speaking about a new project he was working on” bringing construction folks on a journey through Web3 – an opportunity he saw a lot of potential in. Lee spoke with passion about how tradespeople are often left behind with new technological shifts. He was creating the project with a view of making sure they were included and reaped the benefits.
This reminded me of a couple of the factions of a great community: they’re places where people come together to share an experience (the Adam stuff!) but also get better/happier/more knowledgable than they would be alone (in this case characterised by the chat with Lee). Great communities are not just mirrors of what already exists within a group – they can also provide guidance.
Another example of this in action was when we sat down in a meeting where the Electric House Team were working on a project to bring more women into the construction industry. In this case, in their role as community leaders, On the Tools was acting as a beacon – pointing to areas where some members of the community who had a quieter voice were not getting equal opportunities, bringing them into the conversation.
Learnable moments: A great community mirrors the folks in the community, knowing what they’re already speaking about. Community leaders can also provide guidance and leadership, providing opportunities that those in the community may not have had otherwise through highlighting opportunities or elevating members who would have otherwise not been heard.
Educate and take your clients on a journey with you.
One final reflection, less on the community side of things, was how Electric House also take their clients on a journey with them.
On the day, Electric House had one of their clients in the office for an education day. The whole marketing team was there: it started with a presentation (from yours truly!) before moving into workshops provided by the Electric House team on changing trends (Tik Tok was a big theme of the day).
I thought this was such a lovely way to keep clients in the loop and build a stronger relationship with them. Once again, a fine example of bringing others on the journey with you.
Wrapping up
We loved our time at Electric House with one big reason in mind: business is a bunch of people getting together to do something they deem worthy of doing. If you can bring people together with fun, authenticity, humanity and more: it becomes an experience where others want to come on the journey with you.
Understanding who you want to help is one of the foundational elements of building communities that matter – Adam and Lee have this in buckets – but the real magic comes from using that insight to create something that provides meaning, support, and advancement for those who choose to engage. Electric House know, and embody this in buckets.