For five years, nothing multiplied. Groups started, some grew, a few closed, but no group in his region ever produced a second group on its own.
"I kept thinking the problem was recruitment," he told us. "If I could just find better leaders, better hosts, it would click. It took embarrassingly long to realize the problem wasn't who I was recruiting. It was what I was asking them to do."
The shift came from a single conversation with a host who admitted she didn't feel qualified to start a second group because she'd never actually watched anyone else do it from the very beginning.
"We'd been training people to lead a group that already existed. We'd never trained anyone to start one from nothing," he said. "So we built that in — every host now watches someone else launch a brand new group before they're asked to try it themselves."
Eleven groups multiplied in the following season. He's careful not to call it a formula. "It's not that we found the trick. It's that we finally noticed what we'd been skipping."
