KREW Community #1: Making our Meetings for Entrepreneurs Scalable

This article is part of the Work in Progress series, in which I discuss my projects in their “unfinished” state. Learn from my fuckups and successes in real-time or become part of my journey by sharing your own experiences and advice. This is the first entry in the KREW Community series.

Background 💡 

⭐ What is KREW? KREW offers unique experiences that connect entrepreneurs on a personal level to help them grow their business. Rather than exchanging business cards, we believe in building relationships that last.

🚀 Where do we want to go? To build a global community, with local KREWs in every major city around the world. 

📍 Where are we at? We are currently optimising the monthly meeting format for our first and only local KREW in The Hague, in order to get ready to scale up to multiple cities in the next phase. 

Our latest experiment: Date Night ❤️

Date Night was the theme of our meeting on the 24th of February. We chose it because of Valentine’s of course, but instead of taking the theme literally, we decided to focus on relationships in business instead. 

So we discussed things like finding a co-founder, or how to deal with clients that don’t follow through, how to talk to potential clients when you don’t speak the language well, how to set up agreements between founders… and much more. 

For an impression of the meeting, check out the pictures below 👇

As you can probably tell, we had a great time. There was a really good mix of connecting in meaningful ways, learning from each other and having fun – just like a KREW Meeting should be. 

Going into this meeting, there were several new elements we introduced and wanted to test:

✅ Name cards for all the attendees
✅ A returning member as the meeting host; not someone from the core team
✅ A goal sharing ceremony with writing and sharing goals until the end of Q1
✅ The Cheer Chief role, who ends the meeting with a cheer

Here’s how it went.

What we learned 🚀💪

After every KREW Meeting, we evaluate every element from beginning to end. This includes all the newly introduced elements in terms of the program, physical items and roles.

We thought it was amazing to see the progress we made over the past few months. Just a few meetings ago, this entire meeting format was still new for us. Now, we were able to organise a great meeting where (almost) everything flowed like clockwork. Everybody loved it and all the first-time guests expressed the desire to come back. We’re getting somewhere!

In terms of the newly introduced elements, we liked having name cards because it created a sense of unity for everyone who was there. Josuël did an incredible job as a first-time host with very few instructions beyond our templates and Ali ended the night with both an elevating and heartwarming speech.

Besides all the elements that did work, there were at least two elements of the meeting that still need work:

🤔 The Masterminds. We have 30-minute masterminds every session, where attendees can bring in their challenges in relation to a specific topic. But, because 30 minutes is only a short amount of time, it’s often hard to guide these conversations in a good way. This makes the outcome (and value) of the masterminds unpredictable at best.

🤔 Goal Sharing. We like the idea of letting each member share their quarterly KREW goal, because this inspires discussion and collaboration between KREW Members. But when everybody writes their goal down and then shares it with the group, it’s hard to really remember what everyone said. So I’d like to find a better way of sharing goals in the community to inspire our members to ask for help or offer support. 

If you have ideas on how we can improve on any of these elements of the meeting, be sure to let me know. KREW is a community that has been built by and for entrepreneurs from the very start, so I’d love to continue that trend. Let’s build the most epic meeting for entrepreneurs in the world!

If you want to share your experience or suggestions, you can:

🙏 Reach out to me on LinkedIn
🙏 Send me an email by replying to my Sunday newsletter

Also: thanks a lot for reading! 

To be honest, it feels a little weird for me to write about something that I’m still figuring out, but it’s also nice to show you the journey as it’s happening. And besides, aren’t we all still “figuring it out”? 

I look forward to getting out of my comfort zone a little and doing more of these articles in the near future. At the very least, you can expect the results of the next meeting in about one month. Stay tuned!