Belong

Kevin Micalizzi: Welcome to Belong. More than a year ago, I discovered Fractionals United, a rapidly growing community of professionals in fractional roles. I recently had the chance to sit down with Karina Mikhli, the founder of Fractionals United, to dig in with her on how she brought this community to life and how she's addressing the challenges of rapid growth.

I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I have.

Introduction and Welcome
---

Kevin Micalizzi: Karina, thank you for joining me today.

Karina Mikhli: My pleasure.

Kevin Micalizzi: I've been excited to talk to you about Fractionals United for a while now. I joined the community, gosh, probably almost a year ago. I think it was early when it was still a Slack channel. What I'd love to do first is, fractional is a word that, Is very clear for some people and others still have no idea what it is.

So to, to kind of set the context, would you explain your perspective on fractional?

Karina Mikhli: Yeah, I just want to quickly say we're still a Slack channel. So that hasn't changed. Cause you said like when you joined a year ago when it was just a Slack channel.

Kevin Micalizzi: Yeah, you have a lot of other resources now.

Karina Mikhli: Got it. Yeah. Yeah. But we are, we will always stay in Slack. I don't like the other community tools out there and we're in Slack anyhow for our work. So, you know.

Kevin Micalizzi: Right.

Karina Mikhli: I feel it's like I've stopped joining communities that are not in Slack. So, to answer your question.

Defining Fractional Roles
---

Karina Mikhli: So fractional versus consulting versus interim, I think are the most confusing parts of, you know, where people get hung up. And it's not that one is better than the other, they're just different, right? A consultant is project based. Even if it's a long term project, you're not part of the team, you don't have people reporting to you, you're not embedded. You are hired to do X, long X takes, and then you move on. An interim can be part time or full time, but an interim is a gap, you know, you're, you're filling in a gap, right? Either someone's on mat leave or, you know, they realize they need, to fill a role and they need more time. And they just need someone in there, you know, warm bodied, keeping things moving to like figure out who they want long term. Fractional is neither of that. Fractional is a part time embedded senior leader, which means that, first of all, it's a senior leader because, the reason you can do this fractionally is you're not doing all the work. You're leading, you're strategizing, you have resources executing on your strategy. Second, you're embedded, so you're part of the team, you are part of the leadership team. You are on the org chart, you have a job description, you can represent the company, you can, you know, you have people reporting to you. And you're meant to be long term. Sometimes they decide they need full time, and you may or may not stay or you find, you know, your full time replacement and move on. Sometimes, like it's happened with me, you put everything in place, you know, they don't need you anymore, you move on, whatever it is. But it is, it is not like you come in and there is an end date. You are intended to be a fully embedded part time senior leader. There's actually a, he's actually now a founder, so I don't think he's doing this anymore, but there was a fractional C he's still in the community, so there is a fractional COO member who used to only take on two, startups, two clients, and his team didn't even know he was fractional.

Kevin Micalizzi: Oh, wow.

Karina Mikhli: Yeah, you know, he had a calendar, you know, they could, they could find an available slot on the calendar that, you know, coordinated with like that time block, right?

Like whether he did one client AM, the other client PM, I don't know how he did it, but you can make yourself available or not on the calendar and with Slack and everything else. It's like, you know, in his case, like I, I have more than two at a time, so they kind of need to know. But if you're only doing two at a time, like, yeah, you know, just find a slot on my calendar.

Kevin Micalizzi: Right. that's fantastic. Just just the way you balance that kind of work.

The Rise of Fractional Work
---

Kevin Micalizzi: I know the rise of Fractional has been pretty, pretty recent, I'd say post pandemic, is really when it, when it's taken off, right?

Karina Mikhli: It's funny, there's a member who's doing a dissertation on factional and, she actually was at the New York / New Jersey holiday meetup last night. And we were talking about this cause I, I challenged her to figure out when the term started being used. So she told me she thinks it's 2017. She's still digging into the data. I'm like, okay, so if it was who and when in what context and she's like, I'll get back to you on that I'm like, okay.

Kevin Micalizzi: Wow. So, so incredibly recent, what, what brought you to build Fractionals United?

Building Fractionals United
---

Karina Mikhli: I've been doing this kind of work now for about like nine years and I also do workflow consulting so back in I'm trying to think of the years. I think it was 2020. Yeah, that sounds right. It feels right. I don't know. Blur's day, like years are so hard for me nowadays. Like anytime someone asks me a year, I literally have to stop and like coordinate with like COVID and everything, because like I've lost track of years. I think it was 2020. I got this workflow client. Happened to mention in passing that I do fractional COO work. She started referring to me the next week as her COO. No discussion. I was like, ok sure, I like working with you. I'll give you more hours. Let's do this. And long story short, I actually ended up going full time with a team for about a year. And you know, it happens, right? You know, I'm not the only fractional that goes in and out, depending on, on the situation. When I came back to fractional on the end of 2023, it was, you know, I had put the people in systems in place and they no longer really needed me and I was too expensive and yada, yada.

So we parted ways. I, at that point, it had been two years since I had last looked for fractional work. I came back Upwork was no longer viable. It's, it's crap, you know. Back in the day I used to, it was a numbers game, but I was able to get like high level, well paid fractional assignments on there. Now, forget about it. So when I realized that no longer was viable and I'm an ops person, so biz dev and networking is hard. And I'm like, okay, where's my community? Like I had joined some really great online, operations communities during COVID. So I knew the power of online community and I didn't want to have to figure it out on my own or, you know, just, I just wanted my people, like I wanted to know how people were doing this because it had been two years, what works, what doesn't work, et cetera. I started, I had that realization January 7th, 2023. That's a date I will never forget. It was a Saturday. That evening I was Googling, trying to find my fractional people. And I couldn't really find a community for the sake of community. I found a few things that were like, pseudo communities on the other side of paid programs or paid something.

But no, like, community first. And so I looked up at my husband. I'm like, is this the thing I do? I don't know. Let's see if there's interest. Well, literally that evening in like half an hour, I put up a free Slack, simple landing page, and just messaged, a couple of communities and put it up on LinkedIn being like, if I do this, anyone interested? And over 50 people said, yes, please.

Kevin Micalizzi: Wow.

Karina Mikhli: So I kept doing it and now we're over 13, 000 members.

Kevin Micalizzi: And that's in..

Karina Mikhli: Less than two years.

Kevin Micalizzi: Wow, just under two years. Yeah. That's phenomenal growth.

Karina Mikhli: Yeah. I was at the right place at the right time. It didn't exist. Um, and I wasn't the only one feeling, I guess, lonely. Because fractional is this weird hybrid where we're embedded, but we're not full time employees, so we don't really hang with the full time employees, right? Or, and also it's, it's remote and it's like, we're the leadership team.

So it's just like, it's this weird thing, right? And we have to juggle our own business and our own pipeline and other clients. So it's, we needed a community of other fractionals going through similar things that we can like learn from, connect, collaborate, refer work to each other, whatever, you know, and I wasn't the only one feeling the need.

So here we are.

Challenges and Community Engagement
---

Kevin Micalizzi: Building a community like that, though, is a huge lift. I mean, there's so much work to be done. It's challenging. I think in all cases, because there may be excitement, people may sign up,

Karina Mikhli: Yeah.

Kevin Micalizzi: but that doesn't mean they engage. And one thing I've noticed in Fractionals United is people are engaging very consistently.

How, how did you kind of set things up so this wasn't a huge, we'll call it time sink for you, but you were still able to bring those benefits that you wanted.

Karina Mikhli: Well, so first off, how do you define time sink? Because it does take time.

Kevin Micalizzi: I could be wrong, but I don't think it's become your full time job. Right. Which is pretty impressive, like for, for a company of a company, it's pretty impressive for a community of that size.

Karina Mikhli: Right.

So, originally, for the first three months, it was all me doing everything and learning. I had never done community, I had never founded or run a community before, right? I had been part of some really good ones, and I picked those community managers' brains a lot in the beginning and they were very, supportive and giving of their time. And I had some really great communities as, as templates, right, for what I wanted and didn't want. But, I would say that for the first six to nine months, it did take most of my time. Because I was learning so much and setting up so much, and a lot of the automation and team that are in place now weren't them, right? And on the flip side, it also, I think in some ways saved my sanity. Cause I am not cut out to be doing nothing and just looking for work. And I would have slowly lost my mind if I didn't have something like, that I felt I was contributing or building, you know, to focus on. So I was happy to have something, a project to sink my teeth in and to learn while I was trying to find clients and work and whatnot. I did realize, quickly, like I think Tammy joined us at the three month mark because I did realize that we were growing quickly enough that it was very quickly going to become unsustainable.

And since I had chosen to make this a free community, it's not like it could pay for my time and I could stop doing other things. So I decided to take on the burden and hire someone part time. Like other work was like, you know, I had other work, so it was funding it, but I decided to do that. And since then we are now a small but mighty community of four. Everyone is part time. On the community side, Tammy is the community manager and I, and we have Ray as the community assistant. And then I brought on, I guess at the six-seven month mark, I brought on Will to be the head of partnership because I'm not a salesperson, and I realized that a way for me to monetize would be through sponsorship.

And I wasn't the best person to do that, like,

Kevin Micalizzi: Right.

Karina Mikhli: So he handles that side of the business and it's, you know, commission based and he has someone reporting to him. That gets paid out of the commissions as well. So we've managed to make it work.

Automation and Management
---

Karina Mikhli: I have built a lot of automations on the backend that makes moderation easy, that makes a lot of the things easy, but it still requires time.

I am at the point where I'm no longer dealing with people coming in, Tammy and Ray handle that. And they had to teach me to like keep my hands, my mitts off of their areas.

Kevin Micalizzi: But that's a beautiful thing for you because it frees you up to, to continue working more strategically on, on where it's going. I'm super curious, you mentioned there were communities you loved and you were able to get some mentoring from those folks. What were your favorite communities that you, you kind of used as your, as your guiding light?

Karina Mikhli: Operations Nation is a also a large, Slack community. I spoke to their community manager Becky, who's amazing. I'm no longer part of this community, but I was part of, my gosh, I forget what it, it was a biz ops network. and I spoke to their community manager. At some point I had to leave a bunch of communities because I just spend so much time in mine and I wasn't engaging. So the ones that were, especially the ones that were not free and not cheap, I had to become really more, strategic on where I spent

Kevin Micalizzi: Right.

Karina Mikhli: my money on communities, because if I don't have. If I don't have the time to engage, it's a waste of time. So I left a couple of communities that it's not about the community.

They're great. And they're run well. They aren't just what I need right now. I also joined, Rosie world.

Kevin Micalizzi: Okay,

Karina Mikhli: Rosie is a name that kept coming up. She's like a known name. It's a community for community managers and she's like a known name in that space. And it's great to have a community of community managers I can ask for advice. So I do try to engage there or, or go there when I have questions, and need guidance.

Kevin Micalizzi: Yeah. And I think it's challenging, not just, you know, how many, paid communities are you in, but even just how many communities can you carve out the time to truly engage with?

Karina Mikhli: Not many.

Kevin Micalizzi: I find myself in the same position periodically. I just, I have to start scaling back and saying, okay, you know, I haven't been in that one in a few months, maybe I don't need to, to keep tracking that one and, and participating. So, yeah. Wow. That's, that's awesome. And it's awesome that you had such great examples. I know starting this podcast and focusing on belonging, you know, I did a whole series of, of kind of prep calls and a lot of them were community managers and every last one of them just so open to helping to sharing.

I, I think it's part of that community mindset.

Karina Mikhli: Yeah.

Kevin Micalizzi: It really is.

Karina Mikhli: Yeah. Community is like no other business. Honestly, you know, it's, if you think about it, it truly is about the people, right? And, and it's people connecting. It's the relationships. So it makes sense that people who are into community are about people. Hopefully, hopefully, hopefully.

Kevin Micalizzi: Yeah.

Karina Mikhli: Community has become a buzzword. There are, there are a lot of people who are building community, but they're not. It's like, it's their influences, you know, their and it's their followers. That's not community. Like community is a two, to me, community is a two way thing, right? It's not just absorbing content and liking someone. There's a place to engage. It's, it's give and take, it's no one sided.

Kevin Micalizzi: Agreed. Agreed. Yeah. And I think with the Slack community and, and just the way you've structured it as it's grown, it's clear where I can go contribute, depending on my area of focus or what I'm interested in. I think one of my fears with like this kind of professional community is always, you know, is it just going to be, you know, a hundred people a day saying, "hey, look at the amazing work I do, You need to help me find something."

And, and I don't see that in your community and Fractionals United. I see it in some of the others that I'm in. You know, you get the Slack DMS, just pitching something and it's like that, that's not why I'm here. You know, that I'm not here to be sold to. I'm here to participate.

Karina Mikhli: Yeah, we early on, I think from the beginning I knew I needed a promote channel and we very stringently, enforce and moderate, like even, even, like today somebody posted something in, we have a channel called Shared Learns, so we can, you know, share what we've learned, good and bad. And his post was great, but then he linked to his newsletter and is like, if you want to hear the rest, you know, go there. I moderated it. Like we have, I wish I had done this from day one. I didn't think about this until like maybe nine months or a year into it. And it's like, Oh my God, it would have saved so much time. So for every. there are custom emojis that if I or Tammy or Ray and only the three of us apply, depending on which channel we apply, it'll send a message to the person who posted it with a copy of their content so that they could easily repost it.

Because the message explains why this is the wrong place, where it should go, and gives them the content to easily copy and paste, and then it deletes the original.

Kevin Micalizzi: Wow.

Karina Mikhli: Yeah, and this is all automated. It's just triggered by different emoji, you know, so there is an emoji that is called promote. So if we apply it anywhere, the message will say, you know, we don't allow anything promotional here, please, you know, repost it and promote. So he came back and he challenged, he's like, this wasn't, you know, is it any content? Cause this isn't really promotional. And I'm like, it's any link sending people to your content or your anything, you know,

Kevin Micalizzi: Right.

Karina Mikhli: Because it's a fine line, but you know what, like once I... It's really interesting, there are times, there are times I'm like, seriously? Like, I, something is borderline and I let go. And then somebody jumps in right after and does a little bit worse. And then I'm like, okay, great. Now I have to just like, moderate the two of you because everybody's gonna look at that and try to push.

It's like children, you know, constantly pushing boundaries. Like, seriously?

Kevin Micalizzi: Right. Well, I think that happens in a lot of communities because the people posting around you, you know, especially online communities, you're using that as your guide. You know, you're really learning from, from the folks around you.

Karina Mikhli: Yeah.

Kevin Micalizzi: I've noticed that with tone and, and other aspects of it as well.

Sorry, what were you going to say?

Karina Mikhli: The biggest challenge is like, we have like a lovely onboarding doc that explains all the guidelines and we keep it up to date and we have new member welcomes and on the top of every channel it explains the topic, but people don't read. It's very sad.

Kevin Micalizzi: Right.

Karina Mikhli: Tammy keeps coming, you know, she stopped now, but she kept complaining to me She's like aren't leaders supposed to be readers?

Kevin Micalizzi: It depends on what and when, you know,

Karina Mikhli: Yeah. Yeah,

Kevin Micalizzi: most people don't read the manual and probably never will.

Karina Mikhli: I know. I just don't know how to make them, yeah, so we just moderate and hope they learn and if you know, occasionally there have been people who haven't learned so then I step in and be like hey, please pay attention. If you keep doing this, I'm going to have to ask you to leave.

Kevin Micalizzi: Right.

Karina Mikhli: That happens very infrequently.

I think I have had to kick out maybe three people in the entire time.

Kevin Micalizzi: Oh, wow.

Karina Mikhli: That's not

Kevin Micalizzi: Yeah. Yeah. It's like you're attracting the right people, people with the right mindset for the community.

Karina Mikhli: Yeah. We do have lurkers to your point. Like there are, you know, we've realized that people come and go, right? Like they get busy. They stop engaging. They have a moment or they lose a client. They come back. It's fine. You know, Tammy and I have decided that it's fine. We're not like I don't, as long as the overall community is engaged and supportive, I'm happy.

You're happy to lurk. You're happy to engage at the level, you know, it's kind of a la carte. You can use, you can engage at the level you need now and we'll be there for when you need more or less.

Kevin Micalizzi: Right. Yeah. I always feel like, you know, maybe 20% of the participants will be active at any given point, and probably even just like one percent are the super active, heavily engaged. And then the other 80 percent are potentially like, you know, in and out or they, they are just lurkers. I do that in some communities.

There's great information there. I just, I don't, like even, with the fractionals united, I don't feel like I have A lot to offer for some of those channels, so I won't say anything, but I will absolutely read the discussions that are going on because I can learn from that.

Karina Mikhli: Yeah. And that's fine.

Kevin Micalizzi: Yeah,

Karina Mikhli: I have no problem with that, you know. And then again, like I don't come from the, I am not a community. I was not a community leader, right? Like this is my first time. So I think the advantage of doing something, um, or, or having a different perspective is like. I don't know what the benchmarks are, I don't really care.

Kevin Micalizzi: right.

Karina Mikhli: As long as it's doing what I want it to do. And I, and, and like, I very protect, you know, the vibe and make sure it's supportive, inclusive, all of that. I, I don't like, I look at the numbers, but I'm like, whatever, you know, I'm not going to worry about it.

Kevin Micalizzi: Right, right. I mean, as long as you're getting what you need out of it and the community members are, then it's successful. Yeah.

Karina Mikhli: Absolutely.

Kevin Micalizzi: So I'm super curious. Like your, your mighty team of four has a lot they're doing. What other ways have you tried to automate it, but like still ensure that you have that authentic personal connection?

Karina Mikhli: We do, we do have an onboarding sequence that is automated, um, but it's personalized messages and we review it every once in a while. We have lots of events, you know, and we, you mentioned like other resources. So the Coda resource hub has evolved. It started out as just a member directory. Cause Slack is wonderful for, for messaging, but it's not everything.

Kevin Micalizzi: Right.

Karina Mikhli: And members were, in the early days were like, you know. love to have some way to see who's in here and find them easily. And I'm like, I happen to be a Coda maker. So I'm like, okay, that's easy enough. Here's the form, submit your information and you will get access. And I actually even automated that once you submit the form within an hour, you get an automated invite to Coda. it started out as that, but then I realized there's all these other resources and things, and now it's like this whole thing, including, we upload all educational content to YouTube and then share it there with an AI summary as well. So you can, you know, read a one sentence summary or a longer AI summary and then decide if you want to commit to like watching like The 45 minute lunch and learn or whatever. And I'm always and I'm always trying to think of other ways you know to provide value and help, you know. I don't want to try to be everything For everyone, like we doubled down on community. We are not a recruiter or matchmaker, never will be. I'd rather partner with like others, like Fractional Jobs and, you know, frack and various other partners that are in our partnership directory and more sponsors than try to be everything for everyone.

Kevin Micalizzi: Right. Right. Which makes sense. I mean, focus on what you need to do for your community and supplement it with others who Who can help round that experience out. One thing I found fascinating when I joined is, I know in some communities, community managers have to do a lot of prompting in the early days.

And, and I feel like, I don't know if it was just like bottled up emotions, but I feel like the conversations happened organically, very quickly. I didn't see you having to prompt the community and say, okay, let's talk about, you know, this aspect of fractional work. And then people jump in, people have been very consistent in starting their own discussions or contributing to, to others.

Karina Mikhli: So one of the, the community I mentioned, the biz ops network, David is the, I'm, I'm blanking on his name. Like I kind of see it in my mind's eye, but I'm going to butcher it. So I'm not even going to try. if you're listening, David, thank you. Sorry, I don't remember your last name fully. Um, but one of the, one of the things he told me, I think it was him.

It was either him. Or, I also spoke to the founder of a large rev ops community who also gave me some really great advice. Somebody, somebody, one of them, one of them told me that in the early days, you do have to handhold. And I did, you probably joined after that. But for the

Kevin Micalizzi: Oh, got it.

Karina Mikhli: for the first, I don't know, I think even after Tammy joined, so probably somewhere in the first six months, probably somewhere in the three to six months, there was a switch and he warned me.

He told me, he's like, there will be a day that you show up and you realize your baby is walking on its own.

Kevin Micalizzi: I love it.

Karina Mikhli: And I remember the day I'm like, I was like busy with some client work, was going to check in and start. And I'm like, all these great conversations were happening. I'm like, Oh my God, baby is grown up.

Kevin Micalizzi: And I feel like once that precedent is set

Karina Mikhli: Yes.

Kevin Micalizzi: and people see that others are getting values out of the responses, they're more willing to ask.

Karina Mikhli: Yes.

Kevin Micalizzi: I've noticed that happening.

Karina Mikhli: Yeah. But the flip side is you have to protect it, right? Like if I had allowed spam or, you know, other things, then it would have, it would have very quickly devolved. And like once, honestly, once you go there, it's hard to recover.

Kevin Micalizzi: Right.

Karina Mikhli: That's why we're so diligent and so strict about it. And like, I remind people, like I'm doing it, like when I, I still do the new member welcomes and when I walk everyone through the onboarding and explain the guidelines and why we moderate, like I remind them that I'm doing this for all of you, I'm doing this to protect what I've built.

And so everybody feels it's safe and inclusive and you know what goes in every channel. Because everything has a place and then you can decide where you want to pay attention and where you don't.

Kevin Micalizzi: Yeah. I love it. So you've had this insane growth. You haven't even reached the two year mark.

Future Goals and Sustainability
---

Kevin Micalizzi: In your mind, what's next for the community?

Karina Mikhli: So 2023's focus or goal. I'm, I'm big on like one, the one thing, right? Like I don't do complicated KPI frameworks. I believe in having one overarching goal and you know, my goal for 2023 was growth. My goal for 2024 was, getting FrUN to a self sustaining place, which it is. It's not, quite, hit the a hundred percent of self recur, so we get small donate recurring donations, and I was hoping that that would get us to a hundred percent of the current recurring costs.

We're at 96%, which is pretty close. And there have been a lot of one offs that bridge the gap. So I'm considering it a success, even though it wasn't quite the way I wanted it. so I've actually been thinking about this cause it's that time of the year, right, like, um, to come up with my goal for 2025. And I decided that I want us to get to where I can afford the next strategic hire, which will be a part time ops manager. I'm still doing, I like to build, but I don't like to maintain, you know, and there's been some Zapier hiccups in the last month that have spent, I've spent hours fixing. You know, or people or, or stripe issues or things that I still, you know, handle, cause some of it, I delegate to Ray, but other others has to be me.

And, you know, that's not his skillset. So I would like to have a part time ops manager that I can just hand off that kind of maintenance. Like, what Tammy does for the community, she can own for the business side of things, the backend. But that would obviously increase the recurring expenses.

So either need more consistent sponsorship dollars or to get another client so that I can afford that. But that is that is what I'm aiming for sometime in 2025.

Kevin Micalizzi: Awesome. And, and I know you, you've got, or through the community, people are scheduling events all over the country around the world. Any other programs like that, that you're looking at as well, or is it, is it kind of, you have the pieces you want and it's a matter of like continuing to grow that.

Karina Mikhli: I don't know, like, I think most of the pieces are in place. We, we may, we may play around with or test like a sponsored mastermind to see if people would want that kind of programming. I've, I have tried twice to like put forth the idea of masterminds or accountability groups, and there wasn't enough interest for me to build it. So if it happens, it'll probably be external where we get a rev share or something. Because again, like it needs to, for me to build something, there are a lot of things I can do, but it needs to make sense. And that means that. It needs to add more value and, be aligned with what I want to do, you know, not be burdensome. And also, you know, in a community of 13,000, like if only 100 raise their hand, that's not a reason to do it.

Kevin Micalizzi: Right.

Karina Mikhli: Like, there needs to be at least 300 people for me to consider doing something, you know what I mean? Like, need enough people to be like, yes, and I will pay for this. Please do it.

Kevin Micalizzi: Yeah. So anything about the community, that I haven't asked you about, but you'd really love to share?

Karina Mikhli: Let me think about that. We do, you know, we're not a matchmaker, but we do have these channels and there is a simple form on the site for anyone hiring. So if anyone listening wants access to great fractional talent, you can fill out that form. It's free. There's also a form there for anyone who wants to partner with the community. You know, our sponsors tend to be either services or products that are beneficial to either the fractionals or our clients. Other than that, I don't know. Fractional is the way of the future.

Kevin Micalizzi: I would agree. I would totally agree. And I think I love the fact that you're doing this, like, you know, even the, the partnerships you're doing this to keep the community free for members. Which I think is phenomenal because, especially people trying to get into that space and in the current job market, the current economic climate, like, it's sometimes really hard to, to make that choice to contribute, you know, or subscribe to something without a clear, a clear picture of what that return is.

And I don't know, I feel like the return for so many people I'm seeing on fractional is super high. And I'm assuming those are the ones who are a lot of your recurring donations.

Karina Mikhli: It is challenging, I won't lie. Like my husband is currently looking for work. So we don't have benefits or steady income. And so I've been feeling a lot of pressure and so many people keep telling me like, actually, Like I know I can't name the names. Well, I can name some of the names. There is a smaller fractional community, mostly based in Australia, New Zealand. There go, he just turned flipped and became a paid community. I know of two other free communities that are going to start charging. And one of them, one of them is one I belong to. And I was like asking the, the founder, I'm like, what's going on here?

Like, you know, are you not afraid you're going to lose like so many people? And, and she was like, it's just hard. It's really hard. You know, like they were, they were reliant on grants and other things. And it's just very hard to keep doing what they're doing. And I get it. I don't pay myself right, yet.

I'm hoping I can at some point pay for some of my time. And, it was funny, I was talking to Tammy about like the 2025 goal. And I'm like, so the choices are either like make the 2025 goal to pay myself or to get this ops manager. And she's like, you want the ops manager. I'm like, yeah, yeah. She knows me well. But it is hard and I have felt the pressure and there are days I'm like, why am I doing this? But to your point, I know that there are, you know, There are so many people struggling and out of work and I chose to make it free so that they don't have to make that choice. And, yeah, for what it's, you know, even yesterday was having a conversation with someone and he was giving me suggestions of how I can make it a paid without technically going back on my word and I'm like,

Kevin Micalizzi: Yeah.

Karina Mikhli: doesn't feel right. You know, if someday I think of something new that I am not offering now that adds value, I may charge for that. Right. But my, I have committed that everything that exists there now will remain free. So I, yes, yes. Like people, including my advisors tell me things change. No one's going to think less of you that you have to pay yourself.

But I also feel like if I've committed to it, it needs to matter. Like if my word doesn't matter, I don't know.

Kevin Micalizzi: Yeah. I mean, it's right back to the authenticity that you ask everyone to bring to the community.

Karina Mikhli: Yeah.

Kevin Micalizzi: Yeah,

Karina Mikhli: So we will see.

Conclusion and Final Thoughts
---

Karina Mikhli: At some point, like, I'm really hoping, you know, Will and his team can figure out a way of getting, like, recurring sponsorship revenue so that it, you know, that does everything I need it to do, including eventually pay me some.

Kevin Micalizzi: yeah, yeah, I, I love what you've done with the community and what you're continuing to do. Thank you so much for, for carving out some time to chat about it.

Karina Mikhli: My pleasure. My pleasure. Thank you for asking me.