e178 That Time I Closed A Profitable Membership
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[00:00:00] Welcome, welcome to Rewild Your Business. I am your host, Gill Moakes, and thank you so much for joining me again, or if you've just stumbled upon me. I'm so glad you have because this is the podcast where you get a nice weekly dose of entrepreneurial real talk. I dunno about you, but I'm getting a little bit.
Weary at the moment of the sound, the same crap that's out there. Since chat GPT came into our lives, it's really starting to annoy me. That is not to say that I don't use chat. GPTI absolutely do. I probably use it every day for something, but I don't use it to write. Copy. I don't use it to write stuff for me.
I use it for brainstorming and for just like exploring ideas or getting [00:01:00] opinions or getting it to ask me some really good questions to help me process something that I'm thinking about. And I think that is such a great use of AI technology. What it's doing to content creation is so sad. It's so sad. It is making everything feel so sound the same.
The good news is that if you are someone who is really intent on creating, really authentic, your voice, your. Point of view your thought leadership. If you are someone intent on creating content that showcases that and doing it your way and allowing it to be a little bit messy and a little bit unpolished, but at least it's real.
You are gonna stand out. You are gonna be able to stand out now more than ever because people are bucking that. People want [00:02:00] the easy, they want the. Quick sentence into chat GPT and pull out from it an entire 1500 word blog post and, and slap that up there, right? People who are lazy want that so you can stand out if you choose to.
Right now, this is not the topic that this podcast episode is about, however, just got me thinking. So what is this episode about? Well, it's about that time very recently that I closed my membership, the collective, because it just wasn't working for me. It was a profitable offer. It was something that I put a lot of heart and soul into building out and creating, and I really thought it was something I wanted, and it turned out it wasn't.
And so I thought it would be really important to kind of share this [00:03:00] story with you in this episode and to really own that It's okay to change our minds. It's okay to discontinue something that we no longer wanna continue. It's absolutely okay.
Stop doing something. Even if from the outside people can't understand our decision or people perhaps question that decision, it's. All of that is okay. And so I wanted to talk you through my decision to close the collective today, and also just talk you through exactly what's coming in place of it and what my business model looks like for the moment, for moving forward, because it's always open to change, of course.
So in this episode, I wanna talk you through everything that brought me to the decision and how I[00:04:00]
role. Having sovereignty in my business and making courageous decisions. So let's dive into this one. Welcome to Rewild Your Business, the podcast for women doing the work, their soul intended. I'm Gill Moakes. I'm an international business coach, and I'm a guide for women doing the work that matters.
Rewilding your business means cutting away what doesn't belong to allow, what does to thrive. Finding simplicity in your work. And it's about bringing the whole of who you are to the table. Whether you are building something new or finding your way back to what really matters to you. I'm so glad you're here.
Okay, so first of all, how did the collective come about? So for those who dunno, the collective was my low ticket membership offer. I launched it back in, I wanna say April or May. It was against [00:05:00] the backdrop of already having a couple of established offers in my business. So my one-to-one coaching and the Coaching Business Academy.
Coaching Business Academy is my 18 week business accelerator program for coaches who wanna start signing up more of the right clients and. I felt right you wrongly that I wanted a lower ticket offer that made working with me more accessible to people who weren't ready to sign up for the academy or for private coaching.
I also think I did what. Advise people or coach people around not doing, which is really listening to the noise and overriding my own intuition. And I think I did that a bit with the collective. So I listened to the story that I needed to be leveraging my time more. I needed to be having passive [00:06:00] income in my business.
I needed income that was more of a build it once and then keep selling it kind of model. The problem was that with the collective, I didn't really create that. What I did do was I created something incredibly valuable. It was packed full of amazing content, but it also was a bit complex. Actually, one of the first mistakes was, I think I put too much.
So there were weekly calls. There were master classes, there was the sanctuary space, there was coworking session. There was. All these different moving parts, which whilst they didn't ask for me to show up more than once a week for calls, it did mean that the admin behind the scenes was quite cumbersome.
Bit clunky. I didn't like that, but [00:07:00] overriding. I wasn't what I wanted it to be and wasn't a good fit for my business model was that I realized the joy for me in working with my clients, whether that is. Via my private coaching, or whether it's the students who come through the Coaching Business Academy, is that I get to know these women really well.
I get to do immersive work with them. I get to know their businesses. I get to be able to give them really bespoke advice because I get to know them and their businesses. And I realized that with the collective, it wasn't the same. I wasn't getting to know the members in the same way, and it wasn't satisfying for me.
So this was something [00:08:00] that I should have known because this is something I teach and that is that. We create offers based on what we know about our ideal clients. And our ideal clients are those people that we love to work with because their values are aligned with our own. To know that we need to know on a deep level what our own values are, and I do.
I know what my values are, and one of my values, for example, is meaningful connection. Really creating meaningful connections with the people I work with, with my team, with my peers, with the people that I have on my podcast. I value meaningful connection, so I should have realized that actually a very light touch membership where I wasn't getting to build those deeper relationships was not gonna be satisfying for me.
The clue was [00:09:00] there, but I overrode it and I listened to the noise about scaling and passive income, and the things that some of the noise were, was shouting at me that I needed. The truth was, I didn't need that. That's not the way that I needed to scale my business Now. That's not to say that there wasn't a place in my business model for a lower ticket offer, and actually that is where the monthly workshops now come in.
But the way that I'm structuring those is a 90 minute deep dive workshop. So straight away in that intimate workshop, I'm getting to know people. Already. And then what I'm doing is tacking on to that workshop each month, a seven day popup WhatsApp group where we can stay working together and getting to know each other for a week [00:10:00] afterwards.
So even though it's a low ticket offer. I feel like I still get that hit of connection that I need. I want from my business, from every interaction with every client, no matter how I work with them, I wanna build more of a connection. And as soon as I had that realization, you know, when you like can't unsee something.
As soon as I realized this about the collective and the reason it wasn't resonating with me, it wasn't working for me in the way I thought it would. As soon as I saw that I couldn't unsee it. And I am not someone who can carry on doing something halfheartedly. I'm just not. Anyone who's been in my world for a long time will know that I am good at making decisions because I have a non-negotiable that everything has to feel good, it [00:11:00] has to feel aligned, it has feel right for me.
And so. I made the decision that the collective was not right for me and I needed to close it. Now, what came up for me? What did I have to deal with when I had that thought? Things like, oh my God, what are people gonna think? Because they're gonna see that I've changed my mind about something and. That triggered all that old story that I've had from childhood about being a flimflam.
I've told this story before a few times, I'm sure about how my mom used say, oh God, you're such a flimm slammer. You never see things through. You're always changing your mind about things. I've always been the person with 101 hobbies. I've always been the person who you know know sooner. Do they start one thing than they wanna start something else as well.
I'm multi-passionate. It's who I am. I'm never gonna change. Now, one of the reasons I'm never gonna change is because I don't dislike that about myself. It allows me to be [00:12:00] experimental and it allows me to try new things. And if I don't. Like it. If it doesn't resonate with me the way I thought it would, I'm okay about stopping.
I'm okay about not doing it anymore. I'm okay about changing my mind and I'm okay about doing that publicly too. I'm absolutely okay with. Recording this episode of the podcast and saying, here's what happened. I didn't really enjoy running that membership. It's actually the second membership I've ever created.
I did another one of a female founder society a few years ago, and I didn't really enjoy that either, and I didn't learn from it, so I kind of repeated a mistake, which is really annoying, but that's the truth. I repeated a mistake that I should have learned from the first time. I have a much clearer idea now of why it was a mistake because of that misaligned value, but that's what happened, and I'm okay with saying it [00:13:00] was an experiment that went wrong.
I didn't enjoy it, and so I made the decision to close it. So that was one of the thoughts that came up was, oh gosh, I'm gonna have to. You know, change my mind. What are people gonna think? Because we always, I don't care who you're, everyone in business will have that internal dialogue of what will other people think if I make this decision, and what will they think if I make that decision?
Okay, so I could have said, actually, you know what, I'm gonna keep going with it because I don't want people to think of me as someone who FFLs, or I don't want people to think of me as someone who tried something and it failed. Don't get me wrong, the collective was a profitable offer. Actually, it probably wasn't.
When I think about how much time I invested in building it out, it probably wasn't that profitable because I spent a lot of time on it. So you have to take into [00:14:00] account whenever you build something your own time is worth money. So being really radically transparent about it, it probably wasn't profitable.
It would've been had. I kept it going for longer, but it being profitable was not my success. Marker. Number one, it wasn't actually why I started it. I, I didn't start it solely as a revenue stream. Yes, I wanted a scalable offer with passive income, but I did genuinely start it thinking it would be a really useful thing for people.
I wouldn't have started it if I didn't believe that, and I think it was, don't get me wrong, I had some amazing feedback. So was it a failure? Yes, I would say it was for me. Would other people have classed it as a failure? I don't think so. I think a lot of people would've classed it as a successful offer, but for me it was a failed experiment because I didn't enjoy it and it didn't [00:15:00] feel aligned for me.
What else did I have to kind of contend with? Oh, the admin around closing an offer like the collective is actually quite cumbersome in itself. 'cause you've gotta suddenly think, okay, what is the right thing to do for all of the people who have signed up? So some people had signed up for a year inside the membership, and of course I wasn't delivering to them a year.
So I had to think about that and think, okay, what is the fair thing to do? And so I thought about it and I thought, I think the fair thing to do is that if people have paid for the whole year, I need to give them some options. So one option is to give them a refund of the unfulfilled portion of their membership.
That felt very fair, but I also thought, well, there is an opportunity here for me to offer other options, which they might actually prefer. The refund [00:16:00] and that I would love them to take advantage of. So it might be offering them some private coaching. It might be offering them a place in the academy. It might be offering them workshops or workshop subscription.
So I made sure that I came up with offers that I thought would be really good value for them and represent for them the kind of unfulfilled portion. And I gave them all the options, including the refund, and most people went for other options, not the refund. And I was so happy with that because it meant to me that people saw the value in working with me and were not angry at the closure of the collective, but absolutely understood my decision.
And for the people who were paying monthly, obviously that was easy because they could [00:17:00] just stop their payments. But again, I gave them the offer of, Hey, but what you might like is to replace what you've had with the collective and have a monthly workshop subscription instead. Or how about joining the academy or is it the right time for private coaching?
So I did use the closure of the collective as an opportunity to talk to people about how I could better serve them. So that felt really good. And one thing I want do wanna share is that a few people. I emailed after I sent out the email announcing that I was closing the collective. A few people emailed me and said, thank you.
Thank you for sharing the thought process behind your decision, Jill, because it's given me permission, it's given me permission to stop something that isn't feeling good for me, or it's given me permission to pivot away from something that, to something that would feel better. And so [00:18:00] I loved that and I'm, I'm so grateful to the people who sent those emails because it was incredibly.
Validating for me to have that level of understanding, it meant that I'd done a good job in communicating with honesty while I was closing the collective, and that was really important to me. Anything you do in business, if you can communicate it with really genuine transparency and authenticity, people will generally understand you won't upset people.
If you communicate with them really openly, I think it's a massive lesson in business and it's something that is really important to me. Open and fair and generous communication will make the difference no matter what decision you have to make, no matter what challenging conversation you have to have.
It's [00:19:00] always gonna be so much easier if you are. And you making the decision or why you're taking the action you taking so. What's coming up instead? Well, I've alluded to everything already and my first monthly workshop is, Ooh. Actually, I think this episode of the podcast is coming out on the 29th. So if today is Monday the 29th of September, the first workshop is tomorrow.
You have probably heard me talk about it. I think I spoke about it last week and the week before. It's called all of You. And it's a workshop where we'll deep dive into the unapologetic art of showing up unedited. So this is a very timely episode to include the advert for that workshop, which is tomorrow because.
Showing up unapologetically in your business, [00:20:00] making difficult decisions, doing it with transparent authenticity. That's all part of bringing all of who you are to the table in your business. And our workshop tomorrow is going to be a real deep dive into where are you at self editing. Where are you not bringing the whole of who you are to your business?
Where are you playing small? Where are you neatening the edges? Of your personality, of who you are, your voice, your point of view, your opinions, where are you editing, all of that, and how is that affecting your business? And we're gonna go into, okay, well if that's true, how can you show up more fully? How can you show up whole for your business and what will happen for your business if you do that?
So if that sounds like something you would love to work. [00:21:00] Everything I've said about the way I like to work in this immersive way. I would love for you to sign up for this workshop. The link is in the show notes, but go to gillmoakes.com/workshops . You can see information about all of you. The workshop that's we're doing tomorrow, it's at 5:00 PM time, which is 12:00 PM which is 9:00 AM Pacific.
We also have this popup WhatsApp group for a week afterwards, so you get lifetime access to the recording of the workshop, but you also get time in this WhatsApp group with me to ask questions to really start implementing what you've learned in the workshop. And I'm gonna be there with you for that week in the WhatsApp group answering all your questions and um, supporting you to do that.
Okay, so I hope you've enjoyed this episode. I really like doing episodes [00:22:00] like this where I'm giving you a real behind the scenes insight into something that I've done in my business or a decision I've made, or a thought process that I wanna share with you. I actually really enjoy doing this. This is real transparency for me, and I love that.
Because that is what is aligned with my values. So of course I love it. It feels good. It's easy to talk about for me. I hope you've enjoyed this episode. If you have, if you could leave me a five star review on Apple Podcast, that would be just beyond amazing, and I'll be so grateful. I will see you again back here.
Same time, same place. Bye.
