Before anything else, preparation is the key to success.
—Alexander Graham Bell
I have a confession to make: I am a recovering idealist.
When I was a long-haired (believe it or not), leather-jacket-clad eighteen-year-old, I drove to nearby Northampton to nervously join my first community meeting. It was focused on a technology that I had become interested in and took place at the home of a nice chap who set up the group.
That evening was eye-opening for me (in a good way). I saw the power of people having a shared passion, but one integrated into a global community focused on having a real impact. It unlocked in my mind the real potential of people.
Enthusiasm in the human condition can also be a risk though. It is tempting to fall into the creepy abyss many self-help authors descend into in which they believe anything is possible despite the realities and constraints in the world. While our ambition should be bold and brave, it should also be grounded in realism. We need to understand what success can realistically look like. This is what this chapter is all about.
RISKY BUSINESS
Let’s cut through the BS. Communities are risky. Any initiative that involves people working together is risky. When you glue people, platforms, and processes together, all manner of things can go wrong.
Your community may be boring and uninteresting. You may struggle to get people interested and involved. The community may produce uninteresting results or barely any results at all. People may get into arguments and spats. Your infrastructure and technology may be absent, broken, or unreliable. You may have political issues to wrangle with between different teams, people, and ideas.
Risk is a spectrum with two extremes. One side views the world as a place full of risk, and all they do is seek to avoid or react to it. The other sees a world full of potential and opportunity and seek to harness and grow it.
We can’t be either of these people; we have to be both. We need to understand the risks, be motivated by the opportunities, and have a clear sense of what we can accomplish within this cocktail. We accomplish this in four ways:
1. Assess and understand the value we want to produce.
2. Put a clear plan in place to accomplish that value.
3. Know what we need to measure and measure it effectively.
4. Set reasonable expectations on what success looks like based on our measurements, and adjust our strategy where needed.
The Einsteins among you will have noticed we have already focused on numbers 1 and 2, and now we need to zone our radars in on numbers 3 and 4. Let’s start with one of the most misunderstood and error-prone elements of not just communities but businesses and management in general: measuring effectively.
IF IT ISN’T UNAMBIGUOUSLY MEASURABLE, IT DOESN’T EXIST
I want you to do one of the following: Grab a piece of paper, book into a tattoo parlor, or hire an airplane and memorialize this by word, ink, or giant flapping banner: “If it isn’t unambiguously measurable, it doesn’t exist.”
Every team I work with understands the importance of measuring and assessing work, but many are unable to measure their work unambiguously with the goal of using that data to drive changes and success. I see a lot of goals like:
• “Improve the website.”
• “Build customer growth this year.”
• “Speed up our customer onboarding process.”
• “Make the sales process more efficient.”
These are all ambiguous, and ambiguity is both subjective and risky. Subjectivity isn’t usually a problem when everything is going well, but when the results are looking grim, people will zone in on the “improve,” “growth,” “speed up,” and “more efficient” and claim their understanding was radically different. Excuses, excuses, excuses.
We are not in the business of excuses. You didn’t buy this book to do just OK. You bought this book to kick ass. The only way we kick ass is with clarity of strategy, execution, and lessons learned.
From a strategic perspective, we have already focused extensively on clarity. We have shaped our Community Mission Statement, the value we want to drive, our Big Rocks, and our Quarterly Delivery Plan. As we execute, we need to measure your work and performance with purpose. To do this well, I suggest you follow my Four Rules for Measuring Effectively.
Rule 1: Test Critical Dimensions
Projects and initiatives are the major areas of investment for businesses. Critical dimensions are the key areas in which you measure your effectiveness in delivering projects and initiatives.
These critical dimensions are present in every product, service, and community. In a car they can include speed, safety, comfort, and storage capacity. In a computer they can include performance, stability, storage, and connectivity. In a community there are seven primary critical dimensions that I see in most cases (not in any priority order):
1. Growth. How many people are joining your community? How is the growth changing over different time periods?
2. Retention. Of those people who join the community, how many are sticking around and participating?
3. Community ↔ Community Engagement. How are people collaborating together? Are they engaging and working together?
4. Company ↔ Community Engagement. How effectively are your staff engaging with the community?
5. Delivery. Is the community delivering results within that audience persona? For example, are Support personas answering questions, are Developers producing code, and are Content Creators producing useful content? Is the community delivering value in your campaigns and initiatives?
6. Attendance. How well attended are your in-person events, online webinars, campaigns, and other initiatives?
7. Efficiency. How efficient are your various processes such as your onboarding, collaboration processes, conflict resolution, and other elements?
As an example, if one of your Big Rocks is to build a thriving online support community, you should track how many people join (growth), the quality of their support (community ↔ community engagement), how long they stick around the community (retention), and how effective your support persona on-ramp is (efficiency). This will keep you on the right track.
Use these dimensions as the core of how you track performance, but don’t be afraid of adding more dimensions if you don’t have another way to track your work objectively. Be careful though: if you ask humans to accomplish certain numbers, often their singular focus becomes those numbers, even at the expense of the spirit of the work. This makes picking which critical dimensions to address even more important: ensure they provide a holistic picture that can’t be artificially gamed.
Rule 2: Measure Both Action and Validation
Many moons ago I joined an early online forum. I signed up and was given a “n00b” badge (nerd slang for someone who is a “newbie”). The next badge up (“curious”), required me to post two hundred messages to the forum. The one after that (“regular”) required me to post another five hundred posts. This was common in forums and sadly is to this day in some corners of the Internet.
As you can imagine, this system was easily abused. People would often respond in the minimal socially accepted way to get their post count up. It was common to see responses to discussions with little more than “I agree,” “LOL,” or “ :-).” These responses added nothing to the discussion or the community; they decreased signal and increased noise.
The problem here was that the forum measured only the action of posting something. What it didn’t measure was the validation of that thing: whether the action is any good or not. While not always the case, many actions have a companion validation that can, even in a loose sense, help determine whether the action is any good or not. For example:
• A user can sign up for a service (action) and then sign-in and do something (validation).
• An answer to a question can be posted (action) and then selected as the answer (validation).
• A piece of code submitted (action) can be peer reviewed and merged in (validation).
• An event that is delivered (action) can get a positive review from an attendee (validation).
As a general rule, tracking the action is a great way to measure engagement and delivery. Tracking the validation is a great way to measure the quality of that engagement. Focus on tracking both where you can.
Rule 3: A Matter of “Yes” or “No”
Cast your mind back to chapter 5, and this baby should look familiar to you:
This is where we track the specific pieces of work that deliver the goals in our Big Rocks. The most important information to track here is your KPIs. There are countless books and seminars on how to produce effective KPIs, but I am going to boil this down into something very simple. When you ask the question “Did we accomplish this,” it should be answerable with a clear “yes” or “no,” and not a “maybe.”
This is all about listing specific, measurable KPIs. “One thousand community members signed up within a year” can get a yes/no answer. So can “Support on-ramp is completed on average within two hours.”
On the other hand, “Build solid community growth” and “Deliver efficient support on-ramp” are ripe for darts with “maybe” written on the side to be lobbed at them. Be specific. Be measurable. Demand that every KPI has a “yes” or “no” answer. “Maybe” is a cop-out, and you are better than that. Keep thinking of new KPIs until you can weed out any and all “maybes.”
I have noticed consistently with clients that when there are clearly measurable KPIs, their teams perform better. Most people need concrete goals. Make sure you get your KPIs right.
Rule 4: Limit What You Measure
Fasten your seatbelts, I am going into rant mode.
One of the flaws in the human condition is to focus on the appearance of doing something well. People buy fast cars and expensive clothes to appear successful. Bureaucrats add layers of process to appear responsible. Similarly, people completely overdo metrics to appear that they have their finger on the pulse of their community strategy. This is a waste of time, energy, and money.
I can’t tell you how many companies I have worked with who take the approach of one dashboard to rule them all. They are of the view that we may need to measure something in the future, so we need to measure every conceivable thing.
There isn’t anything inherently wrong with tracking lots of data, if—and this is a big if—you stay focused on converting that data into actionable outcomes. If you have five hundred graphs in your dashboard, you have five hundred things to get distracted by, and at least five hundred conversations to have. Those graphs will not all map to your critical dimensions, and most won’t map to your Big Rocks. Throw them out.
Our solution here once again is simplicity and a simple formula:
Big Rocks + Key Critical Dimensions = KPIs
If you have five Big Rocks and you are tracking two to three critical dimensions in each, those are the things you need to measure. Obviously don’t be too anal about this; you may need to track other things, but stay focused on which items are ultimately delivering value to your Big Rocks.
With the majority of new clients, I suggest they only track a few critical dimensions. We are better focusing on five metrics than fifty. This keeps you focused, simplifies your discussions, and ensures your batting average is going up as you execute this work.
DON’T JUST GET ON THE SAME PAGE—STAY ON IT
Life pro tip: all great work needs a strong, dependable foundation. This applies to constructing buildings, designing high-quality products, or building communities.
This is why we have built a strong foundation using the tools we have already discussed such as our Community Mission Statement, Community Engagement Models, Community Value Statement, Big Rocks, Community Participation Framework, and Quarterly Delivery Plan.
When you combine these with clear maturity models and a cadence-based workflow, they help clarify what success is and how you can measure it. Confused? Don’t be. All will (hopefully) be clear soon.
There are three key areas in which you need to track success:
1. Productive Participation. At the center of a strong community are productive, happy, community members. We have already defined our Community Value Proposition and Audience Personas. How do we ensure our target personas are accomplishing that value?
2. Getting S#!t Done (Delivery and Execution). We have already broken our Community Value Proposition down into our Big Rocks and then started pulling together our Quarterly Delivery Plan. How do we ensure our strategy is working well and getting delivered?
3. Organizational “Oomph.” Finally, the success of your community will be directly related to how well you bake community strategy and engagement skills into your organization. It is essential we track this organizational skills development.
Let’s dig into each of these key areas.
Defining Success 1: Productive Participation
One organization I worked with wanted to build a community of authors who would contribute to their shared service. Like many companies, they had already taken a shot at building a community and their results were fairly average.
“What do you want to see these authors accomplish when they join the community?” I asked while sipping down my morning coffee. My answer was met with a stony silence. They knew they wanted them to produce content, but they didn’t know what to expect in the stages between “no content” and “lots of content.”
This is why we developed our Audience Personas back in chapter 4. It gives us a clear idea of the type of participation we want to see. But how do we know if we are serving those audience personas well?
To help with this you can use my Community Persona Maturity Model shown in figure 6.1:
Fig. 6.1: Community Persona Maturity Model
For those of you new to maturity models, they provide a simple way of defining what success should look like at a given time. They are a common tool used by overpaid plastic-haired business consultants, and sadly many of them are so generic that they are useless. This Community Persona Maturity Model is what a maturity model should look like (if I do say so myself).
Here’s the key point to remember: maturity models show you the framework of what to measure, but you need to fill in the details yourself. If you are expecting me to be able to precisely tell you what you should expect with a given persona for your specific community, you will be sorely disappointed. The only way to accomplish that is to hire me. Communities are just not that generic and cookie-cutter. Instead, an effective maturity model provides an overlay to look at your community through the right dimensions. You will need to fill in the details yourself based on your context, expectations, and aspirations.
Here’s how it works. Along the bottom axis you can see the phases from our Community Participation Framework back in chapter 5. It includes the Casual, Regular, and Core segments, but it also includes Onboarding, as this is a critical component of assessing success. For each segment we define what success should look like. This is measured using a few different dimensions.
Individual Value. What is the measurable value that this persona should deliver for themselves? As an example, for a Support persona in our onboarding segment, this could be “Posted a question to the community and received an answer that solved the problem.”
Community Value. What is the measurable value that this person has brought to the community? Again, for a Support persona in the onboarding segment this could be “Answered a question in the community that solved the problem for a member.”
Peer Value. What is the measurable value that the person has provided to help their fellow community members? For any persona in the Regular phase this could include “Delivering one-on-one mentoring to at least five different community members.” This could also include training, providing community leadership, or producing documentation to help others succeed.
Leadership Value. What is the measurable value the person has given in providing leadership in the community? For any persona in the Core phase, this could include: “Representing a board seat in a community governance council for a one-year term.”
Those of you who continue to be eagle-eyed may have noticed an emphasis on measurable in the above examples. In case our earlier discussion of the Four Rules for Measuring Effectively didn’t hit home, go and read it again. Now, to be fair, you can also cut yourself some slack here: these don’t need to be as finitely measurable as KPIs, but it should be clear whether they have been achieved or not.
You may notice on the Community Persona Maturity Model that some of the above dimensions appear on some of the columns but not others. This is because the way in which we assess these different community phases (Onboarding, Casual, Regulars, Core) will differ depending on the phase.
For Onboarding we want to stick to our original stated goal in chapter 5 of helping them to deliver a single piece of value for themselves and the community. As such, you should be measuring a single accomplishment within that particular persona.
For example, for an Engineering persona this could be:
Individual Value: Fixed a bug or added a feature that the member needed.
Community Value: Made a code contribution to improve the product that was accepted.
For Casual we want to measure meaningful-yet-casual participation. This is often small and transitory. It could be answering a question, fixing an issue, or providing a small piece of content.
For example, for a Support persona this could be:
Individual Value: Answered a single question that has been accepted by the asker with an appreciative reply.
Community Value: Solved a problem faced by a community member.
Peer Value: Provided limited mentoring to a single community member.
For Regulars, this is often similar to Casual contributions, but they provide more consistent and sustainable contribution, and they often work on larger and more comprehensive pieces of work (because they have more proven faith in the community).
For example, for an Engineering persona this could be:
Individual Value: Resolving bugs and adding features on a monthly basis that serve their needs.
Community Value: Consistent monthly contributions of code to the shared project.
Peer Value: Providing code review and technical input on other people’s contributions (thus improving overall quality).
Finally, for Core, we build on Regulars, but with an added focus on consistent participation, increased responsibility, mentoring, and leadership capabilities.
For example, for an Author persona this could be:
Individual Value: Consistent monthly articles published for an extended period of time (eight or more months).
Community Value: Consistent monthly contribution of content and education that is highly rated by members.
Peer Value: Consistent monthly feedback on other people’s written work in the form of editing and mentoring.
Leadership Value: Has measurably optimized the overall writing and submission process, supporting resources, and how content is published and consumed. Has also helped the company in other areas of community strategy, problem-solving, and support.
More Persona Success Examples
Need more examples? No problem. Head to https://www.jonobacon.com and select Resources.
Defining Success 2: Getting S#!t Done
The very best companies I work with can have the greatest plan in the world, but some members of their teams will struggle to stay on top of it. They will also struggle to know when is the right time and circumstances to make sensible adjustments to the plan. This is just human nature when working on new initiatives with already busy lives.
The solution to this is cadence-based cycles. This is something we used at Canonical for Ubuntu, and it worked well. Various other companies and projects use a similar approach. It looks like figure 6.2:
Fig. 6.2: Cadence-Based Community Cycle
What you can see here is a timeline broken into months and weeks. Each cycle is two quarters, six months. You can see each month numbered 1–6, and on either side I included the last month of the previous cycle and first month of the following cycle (those are shown in gray).
We created our Big Rocks back in chapter 3 that outline the value we want to produce for the next year. This year is comprised of two six-month cycles, each of which delivers half the work in our Big Rocks. Now, based on figure 6.3, let’s cover what happens in each six-month cycle.
Before our cycle begins, in the month before, we perform our Cycle Planning. This is where we plan what work we want to deliver for the next two quarters (which combine to form the full six-month cycle).
This is when we map out our Quarterly Delivery Plan from chapter 5. Based on your Big Rocks, fill out what you want to accomplish in these next two quarters, complete with KPIs and the other items.
Each week we need to stay on track in delivering the work mapped out in this quarterly plan. To do this, coordinate a weekly call with everyone who is listed in the Owner column in the Quarterly Delivery Plan. This is where you ensure everyone is up to date, discuss any problems, ensure everyone is able to keep moving forward, resolve any items that are blocked, and keep making forward progress.
At the end of the first quarter, you perform a quarterly review. Remember, you are half-way through your cycle, but you want to ensure that the plans you have in place for the second half of the cycle (the next quarter) still make sense.
Review the items in your Quarterly Delivery Plan, and take a good, hard look. Are your Big Rocks delivering the value you hoped so far? If not, tweak the individual items based on what you have learned. Refine any KPIs, owners, or assignments. The goal here is to make relatively minor refinements: we are still focused on delivering our Big Rocks. We just want to optimize them and ensure that our plan still makes sense and we are making the most out of our available teams and resources.
At the end of the first cycle, do a thorough review of everything so far. This review should be a broader meeting with key stakeholders, other departments, or even certain board members and investors. The goal is to ensure we are still making the right strategic bets and not blindly sticking to a plan.
Ask critical questions including, but not limited to:
• Are you making progress on your Big Rocks? If not, why?
• Are your individual initiatives delivering value? If not, why?
• Are you accomplishing your KPIs and other target metrics associated with the work? If not, why?
• Are your community members happy with this work? If not, why?
• How is your team working together? If not well, why?
• Do you need to adjust resourcing or personnel?
• Is this work delivering the value in your Community Value Statement and moving the needle on your Community Mission?
This review should be honest, blunt, and frank about both the successes and the failures. You should come out of it with a set of improvements you want to put in place in the next cycle, both in terms of work and also how the team works together.
Importantly though, celebrate your successes. If you only ever focus on improvements, it can suck the fun out of the work. When you get something right, pour some bubbly, celebrate with your team, and make them feel good.
Now build out the plan for the next cycle, which should be the second half of the time period for your annual Big Rocks. Repeat the same cycle: produce your next two quarters in your Quarterly Delivery Plan, again ensuring that your KPIs all lead toward your Big Rocks.
Refer to the improvements you identified from your cycle review and integrate them into the plan for this forthcoming cycle. This provides a way to directly make improvements every six months.
I have found that time and time again, this cadence-based approach doesn’t just keep everything on track but also builds familiarity with these different milestones. Once you have run the cycle a few times, you and your teams will anticipate when to plan work, have quarterly reviews, stay on track with weekly meetings, and review and optimize each cycle based on how well it went.
Defining Success 3: Organizational “Oomph”
Some organizations new to community strategy just want to learn the hacks to do something that gets results. Real success in building communities is dependent on integrating the skills needed to plan for, grow, engage, and optimize your community experience. To do this you need to not just execute but build new organizational capabilities. This is the focus of our final maturity model.
There are three stages in which an organization develops these new capabilities.
First you incubate new skills. You build an environment with the right mix of resources, education, strategy, and execution that (a) brings in new skills, (b) trains people in them, and (c) supports them as they apply those skills.
Look, you are going to screw up. You will make mistakes, which is fine. Incubation is all about experimentation and discovering what works and what doesn’t. You have to allow this experimentation to thrive in controlled conditions (which is our overall community strategy).
We then focus on intention. You take the lessons learned in the incubation phase and become intentional about them. You produce organizational Standards of Practice, train people in them, and ask people to refine and evolve them. This generates your internal playbook for how to do this work well based on your growing experience.
Finally, you integrate. You take these best practices and solidify them across the organization. Many companies that fail at community strategy do so because they restrict it to a silo. As an example, an entertainment company I worked with had one person who managed their community program. That person effectively ended up becoming an ambassador to the community. Other staff assumed that this Community Director was doing the work and that they could safely forget about the community and get back to their normal day-to-day.
Don’t do this.
Trust me, it is not a winning strategy. The companies that succeed are the ones who integrate community strategy across the business, aligned with product, engineering, marketing, and sales. Your organization, and how it interfaces with the community, should be a clean, well-oiled machine, and this is the last phase in organizational maturity.
We combine these three phases with a targeted set of Areas of Expertise, and we start to see what our maturity model looks like. I call this my Organizational Capabilities Maturity Model, and you can see it in figure 6.3.
Fig. 6.3: Organizational Capabilities Maturity Model
As you can see, there are seven rows, each of which represent an Area of Expertise. Each area spans across our three phases, and it provides an opportunity to specify what we should expect to see for that Area of Expertise in each phase.
For example, with Strategy, you should expect your Incubation period to include organized, structured planning (as we have discussed throughout this book). When you become Intentional though, you should see repeated planning cycles (as we discussed earlier) happening over and over again. Finally, at the Integration phase, you should be evolving your strategic cycles, refining and optimizing them for not just what work we want to do but how we do that work together.
While the criteria I provide in figure 6.4 are what I generally recommend for most communities, be sure to tune this to your specific needs. Book a meeting and ask your team the question: How should we refine Jono’s criteria in his Organizational Community Maturity Model for our specific organizational goals in the next year?
These seven Areas of Expertise are the most critical and common areas I see in organizations I work with across a wide range of communities. Let’s look at each of them:
1. Strategy refers to the organized way in which you convert your Community Value Proposition into a real, living, breathing community. It incorporates much of what we have discussed so far—our Community Mission Statement, Big Rocks, Quarterly Delivery Plans, various maturity models, and how we run and tune these cycles.
2. Management refers to how you facilitate and run your community. This incorporates community management, how it is integrated into your organization, team growth, resourcing, and other elements that relate to building and maintaining an effective community management function in your organization.
3. Growth refers to how you build growth and participation in your community. It focuses on discovering and identifying patterns, developing hypotheses for growth, and integrating critical patterns across the community. Growth is very dependent on individual communities and circumstances: this is about adapting our strategy based on what you see in your organization.
4. Engagement refers to how you engage with the community in a personal, predictable, and positive manner (which we will cover in depth in the next chapter). In the earlier phases, specific individuals primarily engage with the community, but you want to build this out across your organization. You also want this to be fun, engaging, and dynamic, not a mind-numbing snooze-fest.
5. Leadership refers to how you lead and run the community. In the earlier stages, you will do much of this directly, but you should grow and integrate community leaders into your strategy. Ultimately, you may want to explore independent governance to provide additional objective leadership that operates in the best interests of the community.
6. Tooling refers to all the tools, infrastructure, and other nuts and bolts that make your community machine purr. In the earlier phases this will probably be its own little community island, but as it becomes more mature, it should be tightly integrated with product and engineering teams. This will ensure the community platforms become a part of your organization’s overall product and experience.
7. Metrics refers to building maturity in how your organization measures your community, its health, as well as how to evolve your strategy based on what you see, measure, and understand. Again, you should get this to a point where community performance is tracked organization-wide and reports up at a senior level as a critical component of how the organization functions.
As with everything in this book, you should consider all of these models, frameworks, and approaches like a recipe in a cookbook. Use it to make your dish, but then adapt to taste. Experiment, try new things, add additional Areas of Expertise, and tune it to fit you.
The Organizational Capabilities Maturity Model is only as effective as it is deeply wired into your organization. If you only put it up on a screen, point enthusiastically with eyebrows raised, and never look at it again, you are wasting everyone’s time. You know who enjoys their time being wasted? No one.
I typically follow five rules for applying this maturity model with most companies:
1. Review at the end of each cycle. At the end of each six-month cycle, review the Organizational Capabilities Maturity Model and assess if there are any shorter-term changes you should make to continue forward progress. This should include the most critical teams involved in the work.
2. Do a full strategy review once a year. At the end of each year, perform an in-depth review of the Organizational Capabilities Maturity Model with your leadership team and key departmental staff. This should be a fundamental meeting designed to identify key gaps that need filling. We will cover more of these key gaps in chapter 10.
3. Gather feedback from all layers of the organization. When you review your progress, be sure to gather feedback from a multitude of different departments. For example, don’t just invite the engineering team to discuss the Tooling area of expertise. Bring key departments in: you will get better input. We want buy-in on this work, but that buy-in needs to be real. Many meetings end with nodding so people can get out of there. Ensure that their agreement is authentic.
4. Emphasize a desire for critical feedback. The biggest risk of using maturity models is that you are uninformed about what is actually happening and therefore unable to optimize how things work. If you are running the community strategy, or are a C-level executive, you are probably already uninformed as some people simply won’t share some things that are happening on the ground. Make criticism unambiguously welcome and reward people for it.
5. Integrate changes in your Quarterly Delivery Plan. As you identify areas of improvements to be made, break them down into specific pieces of work with owners and track them in your Quarterly Delivery Plan.
THE PATH IS UNPREDICTABLE, BUT NOT UNMANAGEABLE
When I was eighteen I left school with a distinctly average set of grades. When I studied my GCSEs (the exams we covered in my core education in England), I averaged out with Cs. I went on to A Levels (the education between school and university), and I got two Ds, an E, and an N. I think an N meant I spelled my name wrong on my damn exam paper.
My journey from there was nonlinear. I discovered the open-source community, started writing articles for magazines, became a casual journalist, then got a job as a consultant based on an article I wrote. From there I built a reputation, joined a hot up-and-coming company, and one thing led to another throughout my career. Not everything in life is a four-step plan.
This chapter provides guardrails to the seemingly windy road of successfully coalescing groups of people together, but be realistic in this journey. Sometimes these models won’t perfectly map neatly to your specific community and you will have to think on your feet.
That is a good thing. Again, the best chefs don’t just follow recipes. They use the recipe to get a head start, but then they experiment and discover their own style and technique. Do the same with these approaches to success. They are a firm foundation, which you can refine and tune to build something truly incredible.