45. The Secrets Of Building Successful Communities With Maruxa Murphy

by | Feb 8, 2021 | Podcast

LACO 45 | Building Successful Communities

👋 Welcome Maruxa! 1:27
☕ Maruxa built her coffee business Perky Perky – and more than 100 other communities – with the help of community. 2:18
🏢 Maruxa’s Life After Corporate story. 5:06
🤸 Creating a lifestyle-based business and bringing it online. 7:24
🦗 The best communities are reflections of the leadership of that community. 12:28
🚩 The difference between audience and community. 16:11
🌟 It really does not matter which platform you use, but it does matter how you use that platform to deepen your relationship with the community. 18:16
😉 Wisdom, Interconnect, Nudge and K posts are part of the ‘Win-win WINK’ model of creating posts for your community. 21:45
🌞 Working with communities is about changing lives and creating more impact. 26:54
👂 Continuity in the community and models of creating community within Clubhouse. 29:57
💎 Five different profit paths for five types of community groups: engaging, professional, evangelize, endorsed and educate. 34:55

Join and learn with Maruxa:

CreateSellImpact.com | CSI Facebook Group

Connect with Maruxa:

Perky Perky | LinkedIn | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook

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Listen to the podcast here:

The Secrets Of Building Successful Communities With Maruxa Murphy

Welcome to another episode of the show. If you are reading for the first time, welcome home. It’s here that you get the unvarnished truth about what it takes to succeed as an entrepreneur once you make that leap from your cushy corporate job to hanging out your shingle and starting your own coaching consulting or services-based business. I am super excited to share one of my secret resources, one of my colleagues in the entrepreneurial community who’s an expert at community building. We’re talking about the Secrets of Building Successful Communities with Maruxa Murphy. Welcome to the show, Maruxa.

Deb, thank you so much for having me. I am so thrilled to be here with you. We got to nerd out on my favorite topics. I’m here. I’m all yours.

I can’t wait to nerd out with you. We start a little bit late. We had some audio difficulties so I grab some lunch. They’re not a sponsor of my show but I want to shout out how much I appreciate Daily Harvest. You can get these organic vegetable bowls that are perfect lunchtime snacks, especially good for entrepreneurs on the run who are catching a meal and 15-minute or 30-minute breaks in between meetings. I want to shout out to Daily Harvest. As I was eating my vegetable bowl, I was thinking I needed a cup of Perky Perky Coffee. Maruxa, why don’t you tell us a little bit about you and your business?

Thank you so much, Deb. My heart is for community. Everything I do is about community. It’s about creating opportunities for people to connect. I do that in a variety of different ways. One of them is through our coffee company called Perky Perky Coffee. I’ve had the pleasure of growing that company from an idea since 2016. Community to me was how the company was founded. We built that company through crowdsourcing ideas on what roast we should start with, what should we name our first roast and can you help me choose a logo? It was a part of how the community came together to build a brand. We ended up selling over 1,000 bags of coffee in our first month.

In 2019, we were featured at the United Nations for Women Entrepreneurs Day as one of the Top-10 Women-Owned Brands to be on the lookout for in 2020. When that happened, I think my dream and this vision I had of building a brand around community came to life for me. We’re being touted and shared with some of the world’s leaders. That was a humbling experience and a powerful one for me. I also have a consulting practice where I am teaching and developing brands. Helping brands develop their community and their culture. That starts from within.

All of us are here for this exact time in history to make a shift and to make a change.

It starts from the individual within who is the visionary of the company and onward into who else the company serves. I’ve had a consultancy since 2009 and we’ve custom-built over 100 communities through this time. I’ve been in the work of communities both face-to-face and online since 1998. It’s been quite some time of being on this journey. I’m thrilled to jump in and get nerdy with you.

I can’t wait to start the conversation about communities, what’s working and a bunch of questions I have for you. First, how did you start? What was the beginning of this idea? I know you spent some time in higher ed for a while. What is your life after corporate story? What was your journey to entrepreneurship? How did you land on community building as a passion?

The shift came in 2008 when I was about to have my first daughter. She had a mom at that time before she met me. I was working 100-hour weeks working at a college. I was working 100-hour weeks with pleasure because I loved what I did. What I did for a living was invest back into the people at the college I worked with and worked for. I was the Director of Multicultural Affairs for Rollins College in Florida. I and a few other colleagues helped shift the curriculum at that college at that time to something pretty innovative, which was inviting our students to understand that who they are matters. We’re all here for this exact time in history to make a shift and a change. I was inviting them through their identity, their leadership skills, and engaging with the community to find that within themselves.

While I was working 100-hours, I knew I loved what I did but I wanted to be more present with my children. Not have to sleep on the couch that was in my office every night, and date nights with my husband were at student events. Our first four years of marriage was literally date nights at student events. I knew I needed to make a shift. I made this intention in 2008 that my next career had to be something where I was able to put my first priority to be with my daughter and from there, create a career around that. That was my intention.

It was also the era of, “eBooks are a thing. Share your expertise with an eBook and make millions of dollars.” I bought that idea like, “Maybe if I create an eBook, I can make millions of dollars.” It doesn’t happen that way. That idea of saying, “Maybe I can create a lifestyle-based business,” spoke to me. I made that intention to figure out how do I bring my background in leadership community development and identity work into the online space, into being more like life on my terms. When you put those intentions out there into the world, things start to show up.

My husband took an opportunity in Houston, Texas because he was out of work too. We have a whole story about losing everything in 2008, 2009. We ended up moving from Florida to Texas. We moved to Houston first. He had an opportunity with one of his mentors in marketing to run a company called Telesummit events. Telesummit events so happened to be the first of its kind. In essence, we’re doing virtual events but it was through telephone and we didn’t see each other. It’s a podcast but back then, podcasts weren’t a thing either.

There was no Zoom so there’s no video.

LACO 45 | Building Successful Communities

Building Successful Communities: Developing a brand’s community and culture starts from within the individual who is the visionary of the company and onward into who else the company serves.

 

We were the first in the market in business development and personal development to take a stand for bringing the conference home to you. We build up the HTML websites and do all the backend to make these events happen, which are so much easier to do now. They needed a voice. They needed somebody to be on the front end speaking to all these bestselling authors, speakers and trainers. Deb, I ended up doing that over 22 summits, which meant over 600 speakers in a span of two and a half years. That was for me like getting a PhD because I fell in love with the fact that I was able to use my gifts, my talents, my masters in counseling, and start to infuse these interviews with depth based on my questioning, the way in which I would share questions or ask questions. That helped me come alive in that work.

I want to highlight to our audience that once you find a passion, a purpose, a place that you can apply your skills, and you find a gap in the market, the amazing part about this journey is you’re creating something out of nothing, something that didn’t exist before. That’s what’s so valuable. I don’t know about you, but I get off on control of that. I’m in control of my destiny and my time. When I left the corporate world, it was about spending more time with my son. I didn’t want to be an absent mom. I wanted friends that I didn’t work with and all of that to have that fuller and richer life, and then to take your skills and make a difference in other people’s lives. That’s a beautiful thing. I didn’t even know you were part of that early Telesummit phase because it used to be that every other week there was a Telesummit that someone was running.

It was before every other week that people were running them that we were creating Telesummit events. They started to see the impact we were making that they were like, “Maybe we can do this ourselves.” We took that idea that David, who’s my husband’s mentor, had and turned it into a $2.5 million company. For me, it was like, “There’s something to this.” It was at that point that I started to realize, “How do I bring this passion that I have for community and developing the person behind the brand but also the brand experience?”

If you were to relabel the word community into another word, it’s how people are experiencing your brand, how often and how long do they want to stay to be a part of it? You think about the companies that have beautiful communities or beautiful tribes. Their people never leave. In fact, it’s that that I want to encourage because once you have a community that feels so good to you, your customer acquisition costs go way down.

Once you have a community that feels good to you, your customer acquisition costs go way down.

Let’s talk about the secrets of a successful community. I’m sure we’ve all been part of Facebook groups that have flopped. LinkedIn moved away from groups altogether. They’re still there but they don’t do anything and are not engaging. What are some of the secrets that make a community engage and make it so that there’s such a vibe that people never want to leave?

Oftentimes what people tend to do and the biggest mistake in building a community is they create a group before they’ve thought about what their group is. I’m talking specifically around Facebook groups or LinkedIn groups in that case. It’s like, “We’ll create a community. We’ll buy the platform. Let’s see if it’s off of Facebook. We’ll do that.” They opened the doors of their community and its crickets. Nobody is talking, nobody is engaging, and there’s nothing happening. What I do when someone decides to work with us is we go through a process of first going within.

I believe that the best communities are reflections of the leadership of that community. The vision of that community has got to be so spelled out. Not just vision but also values. They have to be so spelled out that when people are coming to that community, it’s exuding that vision and those values. That is where we have to start. I always encourage, if someone’s interested in building community to first take a couple of steps back. Think about, what is the vision for this thing? Community is a big deal and it is a commitment. Let’s be honest. I don’t like to sugarcoat that. It’s a commitment because these are people with heartbeats, names and families. You’re giving them an opportunity to be a part of something that you’re developing and designing.

It’s important to take yourself seriously when you’re building community. Facebook group is used to be the third wheel. Let’s say you get all these clients and you always add a bonus Facebook group on the back. That’s not the case anymore. We don’t want them to be the third wheel. That community is a big part of why people continue to stay and want to stay on as either a client, a referral or an affiliate partner of yours ongoing.

You made such a great point there. I hope our audiences are taking notes because it’s a reflection of what you want the community to be. It’s so true. There must be some statistic out there that says 90 some odd percent of the Facebook groups that are in existence now are not very active. There are those that are pay-for-play and different types of models. As you were talking, I was reflecting on why did I create the Life After Corporate Facebook group. I created it because I wanted to have a dialogue with my audience because the show is a one-way platform. How could we have more of a conversation and get to know each other?

Clubhouse then came on the scene and I’m like, “This is not asynchronous. This is not me doing a Facebook live, getting some comments in the feed and trying to respond to those. This is real-time and it is so engaging.” How do you see communities evolving? Is there still life on Facebook? Should we still be thinking about building Facebook communities? What are some of the disruptors that you’re seeing on the horizon?

Before we go into that conversation, I like to always preface these conversations with some dictionary work here. This is so important to recognize as you’re building community. There’s a big difference between an audience and a community. Oftentimes, we’re not paying attention to this. An audience is exactly what you were saying. Right now we are having a two-way conversation but we’re having a one-way conversation with an audience. There are people that are reading. It’s unilaterally directed conversation to a group of people that don’t have the opportunity to share their thoughts, share their opinions or engage in the conversation.

A community though is a 2-way, 3-way, 5-way, 10-way conversation that’s oftentimes contained in some container, whether it’s a Facebook group, a LinkedIn group, on MightyNetworks or whatever platform it is. You think of it as your home. You’re bringing your people into your home so you can have this gorgeous party that you get to host. That’s how I want us to invite ourselves into what is possible with community because truly, it’s not about necessarily the platform as it is the intention behind the work that you’re about to put in.

I’m wondering if you read the book by Priya Parker, The Art of Gathering. Have you heard of that?

I’ve heard of it but I haven’t read that yet.

I started it. One of the things she says is that who you gather around the table, thinking about a community as your home, and who you’re inviting to the dinner party is as important as how you direct the conversation and the interaction. I didn’t want to interrupt your train of thought. I know you were going somewhere else but I want to reflect that that was a great point that you made.

LACO 45 | Building Successful Communities

Building Successful Communities: If you relabel the word “community” into another word, it is how people are experiencing your brand and how often and how long they want to be a part of it.

 

This is the third time I’ve heard her name so that’s a sign from the universe that that is the book that I need to be reading. Thank you for that. I love reading. When we have an understanding of audience versus community, then we can go onto the platform. Let’s say Clubhouse. For those who haven’t yet gone on there, it’s incredible.

Let’s say Deb and I were having this conversation on Clubhouse. You could then join us in the conversation, have a conversation with us about community and whatever that looks like. One of the things I enjoy is utilizing that platform to recognize who is still on there. It’s not yet my community that’s on there. It’s still an audience and followership because we’re still the ones who are pushing the event forward saying, “I’m going to be at this room. Come hear me,” and that kind of thing. It’s still an audience but we now have opportunities to use that platform and build deeper relationships faster because of two things. The human voice and the auditory experience of us connecting are so incredibly powerful, more powerful than most of us realize. Secondly, having an interactive experience is incredible. They still are part of your following or your audience.

We have an opportunity to utilize our tools like Instagram or Twitter, and then direct them into other opportunities with us, and continue to deepen that relationship with us. Maybe it’s going from Clubhouse to offering a free gift to anybody that’s interested by DM-ing you on Instagram, inviting them into a free gift and then inviting them into your Facebook group. From the Facebook group, you have to know the next step. What is an opportunity for them to continue to develop that relationship with you? What kinds of posts and engaging experiences can you put on there to utilize that group as the way in which you’re deepening that community and that relationship with those people? It is still very much relevant. Communities on your own platform are very relevant as well. It’s recognizing how do we intentionally use these platforms to then deepen relationships overall.

At least in my mind, I wasn’t making the connection. Clubhouse made the connection for me to Instagram that here we’re having an asynchronous conversation on Clubhouse. I did a Clubhouse room, my second one on Pricing and Packaging Your Services. We had about seven people in the room. It was great and highly interactive. I didn’t tell people how to get my free pricing calculator. I was so happy that we had such an engaging conversation but I could see it. The podcast and creating a community around the podcast would be a great idea. What are your thoughts on some of the best practices? What are you seeing that people are doing that is creating a high level of engagement where people don’t want to leave?

We’re busy women. Anybody that’s leaving the corporate world is probably side hustling and also working a corporate job. We’re busy individuals. One of the things I like to do as I start to build up community is to create systems so that I do the things that work. One of the things that work well is to make sure that your community and your group, let’s say it’s a Facebook group, is consistently sharing information. My team and I, when we looked at the kinds of posts that tend to take off and create more engagement, we created a ten-day content cycle model. We call it the Win-win WINK. Each of those letters stands for a type of post. W in Win stands for Wisdom. These are wisdom posts. These are posts where you get to share your expertise and something that they would be caring about.

The best communities are reflections of their leadership.

For example, I have a Facebook group that’s called Grow & Monetize Your Groups. With that, my W posts are all about how to develop XYZ in community. How do you get sales from your clients when you’re growing a community? How do you continue to create engagement? Whatever it is that people ask me about, those are the kinds of posts and videos I post on my W days. Then I have I. I stand for Interconnect. Interconnect are the things that help you connect humanly outside of being the expert in your industry to your people. One of the top I post I’ve had was when I shared a photo of my husband and me when we went on a date. I said, “This is our first date after COVID. It feels so good to be outside.” People couldn’t get enough of it.

People like to see inside your personal life. I found that too.

Here’s why. We’re tired of the conversations where there are so many people that are doing sleight of hand stuff online. Since 2009, our new era of the Wild, Wild West is being online and trying to see who’s legit and who’s not legit. When people get to see you behind the business, they feel more connected because they are like, “She’s like me. I can relate to her.” Those types of posts are what I call the interconnect posts. Then you have the Nudge post. Nudge or N posts are about inviting them to the conversation, inviting them to share, and inviting their expertise to shine. When you do that, you’re giving them space to use their voice, feel seen and heard in the community, which are two out of my four sacred guidelines to the growing community.

Then the K, which you find in Win-win WINK only comes on the tenth day of the month but these are our direct sales posts. These are posts that are like, “We have a free guide on the Win-win WINK content prompts. Get it here.” It’s a link to our Win-win WINK content prompts, for example. We only do that every tenth day because we want to make sure that we’re focused on the relationship. What we’ve learned is the more we’re focused on the relationship, the more people want to buy when we put something out there to offer.

It doesn’t mean that we’re not selling consistently. We’re selling through our stories, W posts, I posts but we’re doing it with gentle love and gentle nudges. When people reach out, we have a process and encourage a process of saying, “I’m seeing that we’re connecting. I’d love to get to know you further. Can we set up a time to connect?” We do that through DMs. From there, one of my team members and I will do twenty-minute calls to see if they are interested in furthering the relationship around the topic and then offering one of our programs if that feels appropriate or referring them to somebody that we know in the industry that would be able to serve them well. That’s one simple thing. That’s one part of our process.

It’s one simple thing that was a complete mic drop moment. I hope everyone was taking notes because that was also a lesson in authentic selling while creating community and delivering value. It was a great point.

I’m so glad. My goal and vision are to see thousands of brands leaning in open-hearted and saying, “Let’s do this. Let’s build this. Let’s change lives.” The work that I do is about changing lives. It’s about creating more impact. That’s the work of communities in and of itself. Where I nerd out these days is developing a system on what kind of a community we should be building based on what our goals and vision are. I’ve come up with five proven profit paths that I’m excited about.

Imagine if you’re going into the planned community and you see these five model homes. That’s how it is. You have your model home and based on what it is that you’re trying to accomplish with your community, you choose one of those model homes. From there, we get to decorate and design it to add the flavor of you, to make it fit your personality, your style and move it forward that way. Where I’m nerding out next is in that space. It’s like, “Look at all these gorgeous homes that we’ve been building and these beautiful humans that live in them.”

I love your visual imagery and it gets me excited. I know we’ve had the conversation a couple of times but I’m like, “I want to work with Maruxa to create this continuity in the community, this continuity between discovering the conversation on the show. Maybe joining the Facebook group or following on Instagram and joining in the conversation.” What turns me on is having a two-way conversation, meeting people in real life. Webinars do that to a certain extent because at the end of my webinars, I always open up the Live Room because I want to meet the people who have been posting and chatting. It is all about connection. It’s all about being seen and heard and validated. Your audience wants that too.

I’m so glad you called out the smoke and mirrors, the people who are not really building community. They’re building their own brand. It’s almost like people will post on social media and all they post are pictures of themselves. It’s what I call narcissistic marketing. You don’t build a community around narcissistic marketing. I think what you said was, what’s next in community? What’s next is creating frameworks around your goals and objectives. Is there anyone out there that you think is doing it well? Is there anything that you see on the frontier that is a breakthrough around community?

There’s so much. I’m paying attention to Clubhouse in particular as a platform because they have rooms that we can all create, but then they have Clubhouses like the actual clubs. It’s going to be interesting to dissect and understand how we can utilize those well. Is there a possibility for community to show up? Do we want to still keep them on Facebook groups or LinkedIn groups? That’s what I’m paying attention to also and thinking, “They’re doing something well. Here’s what they’re doing well. Here’s something we can all take and bring into our communities as we’re developing.”

With Clubhouse, the only way you can get on up to this point is through an invite. You have to be invited in or you have to wait for someone to let you in. I always believed that my communities need to be inclusive of others, a variety of beliefs, gender, racial experiences and religion. With that being said, the point of community is to have a container. There are going to be people that are going to be kept out and allowed in. If we were to talk even longer, I could show you how to do that well, make it work and the power of doing that. With Clubhouse, part of what they’re doing is they’re making it so that the people that come onto the platform in essence are only invited because the person that’s inviting them or letting somebody else in on has similar values to the person that they’re letting in.

You don’t want to have somebody that you think is a shyster on the platform because they can use their voice and shyst away. That will happen. As a community grows and if you’re building your own community, how can you create that space? Some communities that I get to help design and build started their community on the front end with ten people, but it’s their communities that are only able to have new members as the new members are referring business. It’s the members in the community that will pinpoint other people outside of the community that they think need to be in this community. That’s one potential model that you can take. What’s powerful about that, especially for paid communities, is that there’s already distrust. There’s an innate trust from both sides.

Let’s say I’m the person on the outside being invited in. The person that invites me in, I already respect. They’re saying that I should be here because this is a room for the people like me. I’m already bought in at that point. I have a little bit more interest in understanding why I should be bought in for this. The person that’s on the side of the sales side of it is like, “If Stephanie said Maruxa needs to be here and we love Stephanie, then we would love Maruxa already.”

Part of how Clubhouse has worked, where it’s come from, and the reason it’s so successful is partly because of that model. We can start to potentially use that in our own communities as well. The other thing that is working well is giving people a voice. People are yearning for connection. We’re yearning not just to be on stage to be onstage, but to be seen.

Have you gone live in the Messenger room in my Facebook group when new people join? It was an idea that I had that if you’re joining me for the first time and we don’t know each other, let’s get to know each other. I can go live every week in the Messenger room and people can hop in. We can see and introduce each other and have a chat about anything. What about monetizing your community? A lot of people talk about paid memberships. What have you seen work? When does it make sense to have a paid community versus a free community?

Building a community is not about the platform as it is the intention behind the work you’re about to put in.

It goes back to the five different profit paths that I mentioned. It goes back to intention and going back to the conversation on that, there are some types of groups what I call an engaged group. An engaged group is all about coming together around an interest. These are great for hobbyists, specifically, those with an illness, let’s say if there were support groups. I created the Awesome Moms Network, for example. It’s a group of moms that live in Austin, Texas who are trying to figure out how to mom in Texas. That’s an interest engage and what I call an engaged community. Those are free.

The professional group that I’ve created Grow & Monetize Your Groups is an engaged community because we’re talking about growing and monetizing. The profit path there is to invite individuals to programs. We do that through some of our funnel content, the content that we bring on the front end to help lead them into whether or not they’re a yes or no on whatever the offers are. As long as it’s through their funnel content. We connect our content that’s in the group to our text marketing process, into our email process to be able to then love on them and help them make a decision whether or not they want to be part of what we have to offer. You can use free groups in that circumstance but you have to make it intentionally built in such a way that it goes into that offer on the backend.

You have what I call the excite communities. Excite communities are communities that are short term. They’re oftentimes seen as a pop-up group, meaning the pop-up challenge. Let’s say that’s a 5-day challenge or a 30-day challenge. It’s something that pops up, and then once the challenge is over, we archive that group. The beauty of those groups is rather typically free or low-cost to join on the front end of a challenge, they get a lot of people excited about a thing to create a small but mighty win. When we invite them into creating that small but mighty win, they want more after that. We have a high level of conversion from these challenges into paid programs, whether it’s coaching programs, services or even upgrading software from these types of challenges and these excite groups.

You have what I call evangelize groups. Evangelize groups are the groups that are made up of your current clients that adore you. They can’t get enough of you. The goal of these communities is to invite them to be beta testers for new versions of your product or upcoming products that you’ve never released before. In turn, they maybe get it for a discount or for free. They are there to promote it like crazy. They promote you. They love you because they want others to have the transformation that they’ve had working with you. They want those people to know what you’re about. How do we build that to lead to sales is we invite them and train them to be able to go and speak on our behalf in a way that invites more people into the sales process with us.

Oftentimes I’ll build an evangelize group for current clients like for a brand’s current clients, as well as an engaged group for the folks on the front end to acquire them as potential leads and sales. One of the two other groups is an endorsed community. Endorse are made for influencers. Influencers who don’t have their own type of product that want to position themselves, influence and make money through that. They can use their community as a way to introduce the community to products that are not theirs. As you mentioned with Daily Harvest, you’re an influencer because you have this show and you have a following. Daily Harvest could become a sponsor or an advertiser and as part of your community build. If someone’s a pure endorsed community, they’re utilizing sponsorships, advertising, referral and affiliate sales to develop their profit path with their community.

Finally, educate. Educate is made for those who are creating products and services that may need extra training. These are often paid programs that have a community alongside them. If you’re in the software space, this is where you are connecting with your customers like a customer support network. You realize that this group is super important for them to be able to get it, to be successful with the stuff that they’re learning from you. In that case, we invite them to be a part of that community and being nourished in that community so that they’re empowered to be one day an evangelist of your brand. Those are the five different profit paths. I hope that answered the question of how you can use these different types of groups intentionally to build more financial gain in your company.

I loved every part of our conversation. Thank you for your generosity in dropping so many gems. I could geek out with you all day long. We’ll have to schedule some time to do that. Meanwhile, if people who are reading want to learn more about how to work with you or how to engage with you and your communities, how can they find you?

LACO 45 | Building Successful Communities

Building Successful Communities: Creating a community is a big commitment because these are people with heartbeats, names, and families you’re allowing to be part of something you’re developing and designing.

 

There are two wonderful ways where I spent a lot of time nerding out myself. That’s my Facebook group. The group is called Grow & Monetize Your Groups. You can check that out. If they’re interested in learning the Win-win WINK model, I put together 300-plus content prompts for everybody. If you’re like, “I have no idea what to write. Even though I know there are categories, I want Maruxa to tell me what to write,” I have put over 300 prompts that I’ve personally used in the past that have helped create that know, like and trust, and bring more sales in the door into a gorgeous workbook for you. You can find that at CreateSellImpact.com/ContentPrompts. I’d love to serve you with that.

Maruxa, thank you so much.

This was so much fun, Deb. Thank you for having me.

It was such great fun. This was certainly one of the highlights of my week. Thank you. Please join Maruxa on her CreateSellImpact.com/ContentPrompts and Grow & Monetize Your Groups on Facebook. That’s it for now. Until next time. Take care.

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About Maruxa Murphy

Hey there! My name is Maruxa “Muh-roo-shah” 😉 Murphy and I’m the Founder of PerkyPerky.com and a mom of 3 kids, ages 8, 3 and 2 years old. After my love of family, I have 3 major loves in my life: Coffee, Conversation, and Community.

When I was a little girl, I would sit and watch my parents at the breakfast table sip their morning cup of coffee while they talked about the day ahead. I would look at that cup longing to taste just one sip! The most my father would let me do was dip my pinky finger into his cup and taste it. Funny enough, but that is actually one of my favorite memories with my dad. I remember turning 18 and heading to college. I was excited about two things – living on my own and drinking coffee! Ha! I really have a thing for coffee. I love the experience of coffee – holding the cup, breathing in the scent of coffee, and taking that first sip. I call it my Daily Morning Momcation. It takes me from #mombie to #awesome after just a few sips (unless I’ve been up all night with my littles, then I need a few cups!)

One of my most favorite aspects of coffee is what happens around the cup keeps the heart warm. You know what I mean… The Conversation – that moment when you have a cup in your hand, leaning forward across the table to hear your besties most recent drama, dilemma or news. The back and forth, interrupting each other, tears flowing, life-changing conversations, peeing-in-your-pants laughter definitely happens. It’s one of those simple gifts we can have when we hold conversations around our cups of coffee. Absolutely soul giving!

It’s those conversations that ultimately lead to strengthening each other, if we let them. We create communities of love, acceptance and respect that ultimately lift each other up. You know, as a woman who first was into my career, then got married, got pregnant and stayed home and then started a couple companies…I know first-hand that the decisions we make as women are difficult. The transitions leave us feeling different, unsure of ourselves. I remember that feeling when I became a mom for the first time and felt like though I wanted this beautiful baby, I didn’t know who I was anymore. I wasn’t just into my career anymore, I became a whole new person immersed in my new world and trying to figure out motherhood…but I missed my old self too without being able to fully remember who that woman was.

About 5 months after having my daughter, we moved from Florida to Texas, and it wasn’t until then that I realized my community was incredibly important. I needed to hear from women who’d been there and done that before me that it would be OK when my daughter cried and cried and cried. I needed to talk to other entrepreneurial women to share my “crazy” ideas with. I began to build my community, since I didn’t have family near us, and I realized I needed to create my own version of family – built by friends and colleagues that feel as close to my family as can be.

When I came up with the idea for Perky Perky, I knew I wanted to build a lifestyle brand that brought together coffee, conversation and community to one another.. We begin with coffee, lead the conversation around what we can do to remind ourselves of the beautiful, strong, courageous, smart, unique, creative, powerful, brilliance we have within each of us, and build a movement of women that are doing more of what they love in this world!

If we as women who drink amazingly delicious coffee start to recognize the awesome-ness that we are, can you just imagine what we can do when we come together to make the world better because we choose to live lives that matter (because yours absolutely does!)

I’m SO glad you’re here. Drink up. It’s good stuff!