Succeeding with a Small Niche with Lisa Leander

Behind The Membership with Callie Willows

Our guest on this penultimate episode of season five of Behind The Membership is Lisa Leander, founder of Women in Business Education.

Lisa’s story is a very interesting one. What started off as a planned side hustle targeting a very specific niche audience (possibly the smallest we’ve ever seen with only a few hundred people in the world in the market), quickly resulted in Lisa quitting her job and managing the membership full-time due to the pandemic.

During this episode, she shares what life is like as a membership owner. How she’s tapping into her 10 years of experience as a Director of a membership organization to build the business as quickly and efficiently as possible, why she made the decision to invest in building a team from the very beginning and how Lisa’s personalized approach to recruiting new members has a 50% to 70% conversion rate.

She also talks about why she only delivers live content to her members, how her site is structured to cater for different segments of her members to give them a specialized peer experience and her plans to grow her niche further later this year.

About Lisa

Lisa Leander is an international development and management expert with eighteen years experience managing higher education initiatives in 22 different countries. In addition to leading WiBE, she currently is a Senior Advisor to the Global Business School Network where she previously spent a decade working to improve management and entrepreneurship education globally. During the day you might find her consulting for U.S. multinational companies navigating complex market opportunities in the Middle East, creating complex art creations with her two daughters or attempting to train a high energy German Shepherd.

Key Quotes

“It's been really a tough year for anyone in business or launching a business trying to balance your family and your priorities.”

“You can start out scrappy and build towards something great. You don't have to have all the pieces.”

Providing quality content, providing quality discussions, delighting your current members, all helps get the word out.

Connect with Lisa:

Women in Business Education

LinkedIn

Twitter