Episode 1: Why I'll never start from zero again

Episode 1: Why I'll never start from zero again 

Every month, whatever you earned last month stops counting. This month you're starting again from scratch - finding the next client, the next sale, the next bit of income to keep things moving. 

Most small business owners have been doing this for so long it just feels normal. It isn't normal. And it doesn't have to be. 

In this first episode, Claire talks about what starting from zero every month actually costs you - not just financially, but mentally - and how recurring income through a membership changes that. She shares the story of how her marketing agency collapsed in 2010, how she rebuilt from scratch with a two-year-old at home, and the specific moment - £200 already in her account before she'd done a single thing that month - when she understood what had really changed. 

She also covers: 

• What your meaningful monthly number is and how to find it
• The maths of how many members you actually need at different price points
• Why most people think memberships are harder to start than they are
• The Light Touch Method - the four principles behind everything she teaches

If you've ever looked at your bank account on the first of the month and felt that familiar lurch - this episode is for you.
 
Download the free membership calculator here to work ou

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:11

Hello and welcome to the membership podcast. I'm Claire Mitchell. I'm going to start with something that I think is going to resonate with you really quickly. And it's this. Every month your income resets. Whatever you earned last month, that's gone. That only counted for last month. This month you're starting again from zero and you've got to go and find more. And if you've been running a business for any length of time, that probably just feels normal. Like that's what running a business is. But it doesn't have to be like that. Because there is a way of building your business so that money comes in before you've done a single thing that month, before you've sent an email, run a session, made a phone call, anything. It's already there. And it's a lot more achievable than you might think. That's what this podcast is about: building recurring income, specifically through memberships, in a light-touch way that works around your busy life. And that's what I'm going to teach you here. And today I want to start with the why. Why recurring income matters and what difference it really makes. So I want you to think about what starting from zero every month actually costs you because it's not just about the money, is it? Think about the first of the month. You look at what came in last month, the workshops, the clients, the sessions, whatever that looks like for you. And it's there, it happened. Maybe it was a great month, but the thing is, it's gone. That counted for last month. This month you're starting again. This month you need to go and find more. And that creates worry and anxiety, and that lurks underneath everything else that you do. It's there when you're pricing something and you think about going just a bit lower to make sure that somebody buys it, even though you know that the lower price doesn't reflect what it's actually worth. It's there when a client cancels and suddenly the whole month looks completely different to how it did yesterday. It's there on a Sunday night when you're supposed to be resting, but you're actually mentally writing an email in your head because there's a quiet week coming up, and quiet weeks feel scary. And I think lots of us have been in that state for so long that we've just stopped noticing it. It just feels like running a business. It feels like normal. But it doesn't have to be normal. This doesn't have to be how it feels. The other thing it costs you is time. Think about how much of your working week is spent not doing your actual work, not doing the thing that you're brilliant at, the thing that people actually pay you for. But finding the next client, writing the next promotion, having that next sales conversation, for loads of small business owners, that takes hours every month. And it's just what happens when you have to keep selling to keep the income coming in. If you stop selling, the income stops. So you can never quite stop, which means you can never fully be focused on the work that you love to do. But recurring income changes that. Not completely, you still need to market, you still need to grow. But when your baseline is covered, something about your business shifts. You're not selling because you're desperate, you're selling to grow and make a profit, and that's completely different. Anyway, let me tell you about how I ended up here and why. Because I didn't come to memberships with a plan to do that, I kind of fell into them. In 2010, I had a marketing agency. I built it up over a few years, I had clients and staff. I had the thing that looks like success from the outside. But then over what felt like a very short period of time, but was probably about 12 months of things slowly getting worse, my biggest client went bust, took us with them, and my agency collapsed. I'm not going to go into all the details, that's a whole other story. But the short version is this the agency model meant that my income depended entirely on keeping clients. If the clients went, the income went with them. There was no backup. And when things went wrong, everything went wrong at once. So I found myself at 39 with a two-year-old starting from scratch. And I had to decide what I was going to do next. Now the easy option would have been just to go back out and rebuild the agency. It was what I knew, it was familiar. And honestly, I did a bit of kind of consultancy work for a while because I needed money and I needed it fast. But I knew that I did not want to build something again where one bad client or one wobble could undo everything. I'd had enough of that. It was too fragile. So from 2013, I started doing things differently. I started creating and selling digital products, courses, guides, resources, workshops, teaching marketing and online business to small business owners. And this was better. The income didn't disappear when a client left because there was no single client. I had lots of buyers, and if one didn't come back, it didn't really make a difference. But it was still launch dependent. Money came in in chunks around a launch, around a promotion, around an email campaign. But in between those chunks, it could get really quiet. I was still really starting from zero every month. I just had different ways of making the money. But the membership was what changed that. And there was a specific moment when I really understood what had shifted. It was about three months into running my first membership, which was tiny and simple. 20 people paying£10 a month. Yeah, don't do that with your pricing, by the way. I'll cover that in another episode. But it was just a couple of hours of work for me each month, and people were staying and paying. And I sat down one day to plan the following month. And it's something I'd always dreaded because I was like, oh, where's it going to come from? You can't predict it. So how can you plan for it? But that time I sat down and I knew, I knew I had 200 pounds coming in before I'd planned anything, before I'd sold anything, before I'd written a single email. It was just there, 200 pounds in the numbers, already accounted for. And it sounds like such a small thing when I talk about it, but that feeling was just like relief. 200 pounds I didn't have to find. And from that point, everything I've built has been built around protecting and growing that recurring income. Because once you've felt that certainty, not just for your bank account, but for your headspace, knowing that stuff is already covered, stuff is already coming in, you don't need to find it. Once you've felt that, you don't want to go back. So let's talk numbers. When I ask somebody what they think a membership is, they usually describe something big, loads of members, weekly lives, a massive content library that they add to every month, maybe a team helping them run it, and then they compare that to where they are now, which is usually a small audience, hardly any time to work on it, no team, and they think, oh, I'd like it, but it's not for me, not yet. But that version of a membership, that big clunky one, is one version of a membership. It's not the only version of a membership, and it's absolutely not where you start. So let me give you some numbers. And as I go through these, I want you to think about a specific figure, and that is the amount that if it landed in your bank account on the first of every month before you'd done anything that month that would actually change how you feel about your business. We'll call it your meaningful monthly number. That might be a thousand pounds, it might be two thousand pounds, five hundred pounds, who knows? I'm going to use a thousand pounds because for a lot of the women I work with, that's the first milestone that really means something and changes things. But you just swap out your own number, the maths works the same either way. So£1,000. To earn£1,000 a month, at£25 a month per member, you need£40 members. At£47 a month, you need£22 members. At£97 a month, and yes, there are loads of memberships charging that, you need just£11 members. 11 people, 11 real human beings paying you£97 a month. That's a thousand pounds of recurring income every single month before you've done anything. When I teach this, I usually start with£25 a month as a sweet spot, and you need 40 members. And I know you might be thinking about 40 members and thinking, oh, that sounds like a lot. 40 people at£25. But let me ask you something. You've been in your field for quite a few years, yeah? You've got clients, customers, people who follow you, people who've bought from you, people who've come to your workshops or read your stuff. So if you sat down and wrote a list of everyone you can think of who knows you and who has the problem that you solve, how many names would be on that list? Because for most people who've been in business for more than a year or two, it's a lot more than 40. The members are usually already there. They're just waiting to be asked. So, what does a thousand pounds a month actually change? What does it actually do for you and your business? Well, for some people it covers the mortgage or the rent. Maybe some food shopping too. And that's a brilliant feeling. For some people, it covers the business overheads, things like software or the insurance or the accountant. And when those are covered first with recurring income, then every pound that you earn from then on for that month is profit rather than just covering costs. For some people, it's about being able to take time off without panicking. Because if you take time off now, then your income probably drops because you're not actively working. But if you had a thousand pounds in recurring income every month, then that means that you can take time off and it costs you a lot less because the membership keeps going while you're off. The money keeps coming in. And then for a lot of women that I work with, the biggest thing is just being able to plan, to sit down at the start of the year and know with certainty what's going to be coming in every month before you've sold anything else. And planning when you know what's coming in is a completely different experience. I can tell you this from planning when you're just hoping for the best. So now I want to tell you about the philosophy behind everything that I teach because it matters and it's not what you'll hear everywhere else. Most people that teach memberships talk about more, more content, more sessions, more of everything, more showing up. The idea is that the more you put in, the better the membership will be, that more equals value, and I completely disagree with that because I've seen what happens when you just stuff your membership full of more, more, more, and that tends to be burnout and resentment and a membership that the person running it has started to dread. So instead, I use my light touch method, which is built around four things. Your membership needs to be simple, not complicated, not in its structure or its tech or its content, just really simple. Less is more. Scalable so it can grow without you having to do more work the more members you get. So whether you have one member or ten or a hundred or a thousand, the amount of work is roughly the same. It's scalable. It needs to be sustainable, in other words, it's designed to suit you and designed so it can be run for years without you having a breakdown or burnout. And then low maintenance so it fits around your life, real life with real demands. And what that looks like is different for everyone. For some people, that's a monthly call and a community, like a Facebook group or a WhatsApp group, and maybe a couple of hours of their time in the whole month. For other people, it might be a content library or a vault that they add to when they've actually got something worth adding, not on some forced monthly schedule. For other people, it might just be an email, something that they write and send to their paid subscribers, but there's no platform to run, no community to look after. For at least one of my clients, it looks like two monthly Zoom calls, and that's it. That's all our members want. And she gets paid$47 a month. So the format is secondary. The point is that it has to work for you, not just for your members over the long term. You always design your membership to suit you. Because the only membership that builds that recurring income that we're talking about is one that you can actually keep going month after month. A membership that runs for six months but then exhausts you might have made a bit of money in the process, but it left you burned out. That's no good. So let's talk about this podcast. This podcast is for women who run small businesses, service businesses, knowledge or coaching businesses, creative businesses, businesses with classes. And it's for women who are good at what they do and experienced at it. Women who are earning good money but it's not consistent money. Women who are fed up with that income roller coaster. And it's especially for women in their 40s, 50s or 60s who've built up real knowledge and experience over years, and they want to use it in a way that doesn't mean working more hours. Women who are thinking about the next 10 or 15 years and they want it to feel different from the last 10. So if that's you, you're in the right place. And before we finish today, I want to give you one thing to do, and that is to go to the show notes and download my membership calculator. It's free, takes about two minutes, and you can play with different prep price points for your membership, and it'll show you exactly how many members you'd need at each price to hit that meaningful monthly number that you came up with. And then when you look at the numbers, ask yourself do I know this many people who have the problem that I solve? And it might be 40 people or 20 or six. The thing is that most people who find this number they realize it's much more achievable than they thought. And that they know more of the right people than they realised. And often that's when it starts feeling like something that you could actually do now. The links in the show notes, go and use it today. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this useful, please subscribe wherever you're listening. It just means that new episodes arrive without you having to think about it. And if you know somebody who needs to hear this, somebody who's been wanting to get off that income roller coaster for ages but hasn't quite found the way yet, then please share it with them. I'm Claire Mitchell, thank you for being here, I'll see you next time.