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If you missed the last SITREP click here.

PREFACE

The engagement has been way down inside the tribe lately and it’s primarily due to our temporarily low member count. We lost a lot over the last couple of years due to the pandemic as well as a mistake I made that I have already shed clarity on numerous times so I am not going to do that again. Please check out the last SITREP for more info on that. It’s no secret that we have barely survived this pandemic as a business and I explained why in the last report. Most of you all know my wife and I have built all of this with nothing and no outside help or investment partners. Just personal funds and hard ass work for over a decade. So when this happened, it made things very difficult for us to keep going, but we did, and we have survived thus far. We’re not in the clear yet and have a lot of things to improve on.

At the beginning of this year, I decided to pull back a little bit to focus on key income-producing activities that were not a part of this business, as most of you know this isn’t the only business I run. Along with this decision to pull focus, I also recommitted to the fitness regiment that my trainer Eddie and I developed before he passed away. I have spent the vast majority of this year focused on consulting, training, and thinking. I have been in my head a lot trying to plan our next few years for MASK and what I want that to look like. With the current political and social climates we are living in, I wanted to spend a lot of extra time focusing and planning this year to ensure I make the right moves over the coming years. We just don’t know what they are going to look like and while we pray they don’t, we are trying to prepare for them to get worse. This means I want to make sure our overall approach, products, programs, and branding align with everything I envision. I still have some tough decisions to make but I have a pretty good heading and a lot of things to get started on for the next season of business. We are planning a lot of good changes and improvements to everything we do. I will explain them in more detail below.

CHANGES TO MEMBERSHIP

This is a big one. Every couple of years we make changes but this one will be one of the biggest we have done and in my opinion, the best, as it will allow us the ability to serve our members better than we ever have before. Membership is already great, affordable, and loaded with perks. We want to take it to another level and get more hands-on with our members while providing more membership options, a clear path for advancement, more perks, and better programs. We can’t accomplish this without some critical changes to our membership structure. A lot of this is still to be determined over the next 2 months, so I can’t reveal much yet, but I can say a few things.

  1.  We will be discontinuing our Lifetime Membership option. It is a possibility we bring it back seasonally during a sale or something very special, but it is going away as an anytime option. We will be replacing it with a brand new monthly membership level with a completely different perk set and price than our current monthly (Delta) membership. So moving forward, we are going to have 2 monthly options, and 1 annual option with the Lifetime option only being offered exclusively to existing members under special events and conditions.
  2. Before we make these changes, we will be offering a “last call” chance for any existing members to take advantage of our lifetime membership option + exclusive perks at a heavy discount as a way to say thank you for sticking with us through these tough times, and some of you since our inception. Trust me, it will be a deal you will not want to pass up and will never be offered to anyone again.
  3. We are debating a transition to an application process versus an on-demand signup process. We want our Tribe to feel more exclusive. We also want to ensure we are attracting the right members. People who take preparedness as seriously as we do. We are not positive if we will be making this transition or not because we have a lot to think about. This decision would also affect our Vanguard Affiliate program in a few ways so we are taking time to weigh the decision and proceed in a way that benefits us and our affiliates. We may split test it for a while, we may only require the application for certain membership plans, or we might not do it at all. We will keep you guys informed on the direction once we know for sure.
  4. If we decide to change anything to a plan that you are currently subscribed to, don’t worry. You will be grandfathered and nothing will change so long as you keep the account active. If canceled, you might not get to come back under the same plan.

CHANGES TO PROGRAMS

As you all know we have a handful of great programs such as WASP, Vanguard, the Guest Contributor Team, and our monthly Mission Training Calendar, etc. Every few years we try to do a big overhaul and refresh everything we do. From our website design to our products and programs. I am happy to say that we are pretty happy with things as they are when it comes to the front end and user experience on our site so we will not be spending as many resources on that this year. There are a few things we will be improving, but overall, our focus will be directed toward our programs and training courses. Here are a few things to look forward to.

  1. The Mission Calendar – If you have paid attention you will know that my vision for the mission training process has always been to gamify it inside of our own app. Along with that, we plan to create an interactive, dynamic graph that changes as you change. I will be calling it the “Primal Method VectorGraph.” This vision is a long way off and will be very expensive to develop but we will get there. I don’t plan to stay where we are though. I like to operate in stepping stones and the next stepping stone we are jumping to concerning the mission training calendar is going to dramatically change the way participation works. Social media is always evolving and the methods we have traditionally used to track participation are now ineffective. We are currently building out a brand new database that will allow us to do a lot of awesome new things with this program. We will be able to have an official leaderboard and have experience points associated with each mission, tutorials and help files, and so much more. With this database, how you participate will change. You will no longer simply be posting on social media with a hashtag. There will be a little bit more involved but it’s all good things that will make this program way more effective and fun for all members. Starting this month and for the next few months, while we finish building this out, we will no longer be doing a rewards package the same way we have been due to engagement being so low with this program at the moment. We will be doing way more and better rewards packages and prizes when the new system is finished. So keep an eye out for more updates on this! It’s going to be a great change to what I believe is our coolest program. We also haven’t enhanced this program at all since it was created. So it’s about damn time.
  2. Operation: Optimize – I know I have teased new curriculum updates and I still intend on it. I just decided to put a solid amount of personal testing behind some of the new systems and strategies. Testing this sort of stuff isn’t something that is done over the short term. It’s very data-driven and I like to make sure the data looks good over years and not just months. I am getting close. The updates and brand new bonus lessons will for sure roll out in the first half of 2022. In the meantime, in preparation for the new year, now is a great time to go through the course again to get you back in the right mindset for next year! Don’t let improper systems and mindsets hold you back. I promise if you implement these things with discipline your entire situation will change for the better, regardless if it’s already going well or not. 2022 is going to be a big year for us. I hope you make it one too. If you’re not a student of Operation: Optimize tap here to learn more.
  3. Primal Method – Layer 2 Training – As you all know, Eddie passed away last year. He was our dedicated Tribe trainer. We had many plans for training courses and programs for fitness and layer 2. I have been spending a lot of time getting to know a couple of new trainers and experts in fitness/health. I plan to broaden our approach to this layer and not lock in with 1 particular person alone. With this being said. Discussions and plans are still going down. As soon as we solidify some partnerships we will begin developing training resources for Layer 2.
  4. Alliance Program – Our alliance program in its current state is not fulfilling our goals for it. We want to do better and we know we can. We have some very awesome new alliance partner membership options rolling out in 2022, including a free plan. Our objective with this program is simple. We want to help businesses in our industry grow while providing benefits to our members. We try to source gear for our monthly rewards packages and prizes for giveaways and other contests from our allies as much as possible. This helps us subsidize the cost of giving away so much free gear. Along with that we require discount codes from all of our partners and pass those discounts over to you, our members. Over time we plan to have the biggest list of discounts to tactical gear and preparedness businesses on the planet. So many discounts that you could save enough money with to subsidize your tribe membership itself. The changes we have planned to the program will give us the ability to flood our alliance program with new businesses to partner with.
  5. Vanguard Growth Tactics – More new curriculum will be added to this free course to help those of you on our Vanguard Affiliate Program get better results.
  6. The Primal Method Book – We now have the capabilities to print Hardcovers. These will be launching very soon on Amazon and I am super stoked about it. I hope to see all of you grab a hardcover. This will give you an incentive to pass along your paperback to someone else as a recruitment tool.

There are many more new things and plans we have that I can’t share just yet, but I hope these things get you guys excited. I know I am excited to go back into grind mode very soon and create all of this stuff for you all. We are 10 years in the making and I still have a fire bigger than the day we started. We have no blueprint to follow. We are truly the only business of our kind doing the things we are doing. There are some similarities, but none that are quite like us. I take pride in knowing that we are pioneering a new path and way of life for people that want to become prepared. If you’re a member of our tribe, I hope you take pride in it too because we aren’t accomplishing any of these things without you all believing in them. So, thank you.

– Ian “Primal” Talbert

Owner/Operator

OUR OPERATIONS RADAR

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Primal

Author Primal

Owner of MASK Tactical & The Warrior Tribe.

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