How Wake Up Warrior builds social value and onboards people 10 x faster with Workplace
We sat down with the Wake Up Warrior team to learn how Workplace bots and automation have enabled them to scale rapidly and build social value.
Everyone at Wake Up Warrior has a story. Whether it's one about success, adversity, or challenges in business or at home, Wake Up Warrior is where they turn to take charge of how the rest of their story will be written.
Founded in 2012, Wake Up Warrior is a global movement that empowers men to achieve success, balance, and happiness in four key areas of their life – physically, spiritually, in family, and in business.
Wake Up Warrior does this by offering their members a variety of programs, events and bespoke materials centred around this holistic approach. Examples include experiential events, business leadership seminars, fitness and health programmes, life coaching sessions and motivational podcasts.
"We need to bring our members together and have an efficient way to communicate to thousands of people at the same time. Workplace let us do that."
Wake Up Warrior founder Garrett J. White is not your typical CEO. A former endurance athlete and PE teacher, at the age of 24 Garrett found himself in a place he never expected to be: divorced and recovering from a two-year battle with cancer.
After making a full recovery, the next chapter of Garrett's life catapulted him into the world of business and fast money. By the age of 28, he had established three highly successful mortgage brokerages in Utah, and had become a self-made millionaire.
Not long after, the US housing bubble burst, hitting his businesses hard. After a long period of self-reflection, Garrett decided to start a business that would have a positive impact on the world – starting with men like himself who had experienced the highest of highs and lowest of lows that life has to offer.
And that's how Wake Up Warrior got started.
Workplace has allowed Wake Up Warrior's band of brothers to make a positive impact on a global scale. It's given people a place to connect and share stories.
Through bots and automation, it's allowed the organisation to scale rapidly while still making the community feel close-knit. For the leadership team, it's increased member engagement and made onboarding ten times faster.
"Workplace as a platform allows our teams to focus so much more energy and resources on the way in which we teach the doctrine of the Warrior's Way. How we innovate what is possible through the digital experience that is so familiar to so many, and help serve and transform the lives of our clients and their families." says Garrett J. White, founder and CEO of Wake Up Warrior.
Creating meaningful communities
Unlike traditional companies that use Workplace to talk shop, the conversations that take place at Wake Up Warrior are personal. And they are a vital part of building positive social value.
Members post in Workplace Groups about all aspects of their lives – physical, emotional, spiritual – as well as their progress in Wake Up Warrior's programmes.
Workplace has become a safe place for people: members who have faced struggles similar to their peers comment on these posts with advice, words of support and inspiring stories about how they've overcome adversity.
These conversations allow men to go into the world feeling better about their place in it and to pay this positivity forward into their business, home, and community at large.
"Workplace is like spontaneous combustion. It creates instant bonds between total strangers."
Of the Workplace effect at Wake Up Warrior, COO Cullen Talley says, "Workplace is like spontaneous combustion. It creates instant bonds between total strangers.
People immediately feel comfortable talking about things they can't talk about with their wives, families, or on other mainstream social media."
Garrett may be the reason people join Wake Up Warrior, but they stay for their community of brothers on Workplace.
"Workplace is half of what we offer to our clients. We've created a global community with Workplace where we share wins, fails and everything in between."
"Workplace is half of what we offer to our clients. We've created a global community with Workplace where we share wins, fails and everything in between."
"We need to bring our members together and have an efficient way to communicate to thousands of people at the same time. Workplace let us do that."
A mobile-first solution
As a mobile-first platform, Workplace is able to support Wake Up Warrior's mission to bring members from all walks of life together and deliver a truly connected experience. Of the organisation's 2,500 members and employees, 94% of people use the Workplace app.
"For our members, the Workplace app literally becomes the number one app in their life."
Cullen explains, "For our members, the Workplace app literally becomes the number one app in their life. It becomes something they are constantly connected to in terms of content, connection and community. It's a critical piece of infrastructure for us."
Director of Innovation Gus Van Dender is open about the fact that they've walked away from a lot of tools and apps in the past. Part of what has made Workplace stick is that it's an intuitive app that people feel comfortable using it right away, with virtually no training.
Not long after Workplace was rolled out, the leadership team noticed that the collaboration they saw on Workplace was starting to spill over into real life.
People were meeting up after work and on weekends to continue conversations that started on Workplace.
"Everything we started on Workplace is overflowing into real life with people meeting up face-to-face," Cullen says. "Total strangers who have never met feel like they already know each other because they've chatted on Workplace Chat and seen each other's profile pictures and personalities through Workplace."
For Wake Up Warrior, Workplace has increased internal engagement by 80%.
Wake Up Warrior is growing at a rapid rate.
In December 2017, they had 300 members. In June of this year, they reached the 1,000 member mark.
Just last month, Gus on-boarded 2,000 members. New members have the opportunity to trial Wake Up Warrior for thirty days, so naturally, there will be some fluctuation with these numbers.
"Without Workplace bots, we literally couldn't do what we are doing."
Workplace has allowed Gus and his small team to onboard thousands of new members, without the heavy lifting.
As Cullen puts it, "Without Workplace bots, we literally couldn't do what we're doing. With the rate at which we are growing and where we're aiming to be in twelve months, we would have to hire a lot of people to do the manual labour if it was not for Workplace."
Workplace bots have brought automation into the mix for Wake Up Warrior. In collaboration with The Bot Platform, Gus has successfully built over fifteen bots on Workplace that save the team hundreds of man-hours each month. Their top three bots are:
- A content creation bot. This bot delivers personalised content to all members via Workplace Chat, including voice messages, video, inspirational messages from Garrett and podcast recommendations.
- A bot that schedules training. Each week, Gus hosts a live training session with twelve members joining the call, using live video. Instead of having to go back and forth with each one to arrange a time, this bot automates the process. An invitation with a link to book training is automatically sent to selected members, and the link navigates them to a Calendly page showing all available training spots for the month ahead. People book themselves into the available training sessions, and Gus is notified once the process is complete. Gus shares, "Within five minutes, the whole month of training is scheduled. We can onboard people ten times faster now with Workplace."
- An event offer bot. At events for all members, the leadership team promotes limited-edition offers on discounted coaching and training programmes. During the event, a bot is used to send the offer to participants via Workplace Chat as it's being promoted on stage. This has increased member participation in offers by 40%.
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What's next for Wake Up Warrior?
Warrior Women. After a recent pilot event in August, the Wake Up Warrior team is eagerly preparing to launch a new set of programmes and events that will motivate, inspire and empower women. Watch this space.
