Ruth Poundwhite [00:00:00]:
Recurring revenue is often seen as the holy grail for online business owners. Steady income, less launch stress, more freedom. But let’s be real, it’s not always as easy as it sounds. So in this episode I am joined by my brilliant mastermind as we share real talk about what’s actually working for us and what isn’t in 2025. Welcome to the Soulful Sales show where we talk about believing in the value of your offers, giving, getting them in front of your right people and selling more of what you do in your unique way. Hi and welcome back to another episode of the Soulful Sales Show. I am very excited to bring you another juicy panel discussion with me and my Mastermind buddies. This discussion features Destiny Cop, Kate Cordsmeyer, Sage Grayson, Faith Mariah, Liz Stapleton, and Monica Froze.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:00:52]:
And we’re talking about all things recurring revenue. There’s a lot of talk in this discussion about memberships, but it’s not all just about memberships, FYI. And I also wanted to give you a heads up that we are doing these panel discussions. By the way, they are pitch free. We’re just getting together because it’s super fun and it’s a great way for us to reach different people. But there’s no pitch and we’re doing another one on 25 September. All about traffic, especially generating traffic to your offers without social media. You can add that to your calendar from Ruth poundwhite.com/forward/traffic school.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:01:28]:
There’s no opt in required. Just add it to your calendar and join us. Like it’s super, super fun. Anyway, back to today’s podcast episode. I love this topic. As you know, I have a membership, the Soulful Sales Society, which is actually by the way, on a 40 off discount for annual members right now until the 17th of September. So go to RuthPoundWright.com SSS to read more about that and sign up. Very, very juicy discount.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:01:54]:
Much bigger than I normally offer. Anyway, I have my membership. I love my membership, but it has definitely been a whole thing, a whole learning curve, shall we say? And before that, you know, I was always looking to stack different offers and payment plans to create that more sustainable, predictable recurring revenue. And that’s the kind of stuff we talk about in this panel. So we talk about starting a membership with a small audience, whether low ticket memberships are a must for us these days, how to design and run a membership that fits your energy and capacity, how to retain members and reduce churn. We talk about get it done weeks. And like I said, it’s not all just about memberships. We talk about payment plans, encouraging different payment plans and stacking our income in a way that is more predictable as well.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:02:43]:
So I hope that you enjoy this panel discussion. I hope you’ll join us for the traffic school on the 25th of September as well. Remember, that’s@ruthpoundvite.com traffic school. And if you want support with your memberships or your offers and designing them in a way to bring recurring revenue, that is absolutely what I can help you with inside the Soulful Sales Society. So go to ruthpoundwhite.com forward/sss. Have a read about it. Join before the 17th of September and you can get that discount. Anyway, I will leave you now with our really fun panel and hopefully I’ll see you at another one in the future.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:03:20]:
Oh, one more thing. Go to the show Notes for everyone’s links. Like it’s just too much to read it all out here. But yes, all of the people featured in the panel well worth a follow as well.

Dr Destini Copp [00:03:31]:
All right, I think we’re ready to get started here. But I think what I would like to do first is to give the panelists a chance to very quickly introduce yourself. Sage, you are right there on my screen. You’re the next person, so why don’t you you begin there.

Sage Grayson [00:03:47]:
Hey there. I’m Sage Grayson and you can find me@sage grayson.com I’m so excited to be here to talk about recurring reven with you. I have been coaching for gosh, more than 15 years now. I’m a former book editor turned Life and business coach and I like to call my followers the Life Editors. So if you like tiny little edits and tiny little tweaks, you will like my stuff. And I’ve got lots of great tips for you for getting recurring revenue even with low priced memberships. So glad to be here.

Dr Destini Copp [00:04:17]:
Thank you Sage. Liz, you are next on my screen.

Liz Stapleton [00:04:21]:
Yeah, no, super excited to be here with everyone. It’s always a great conversation. I’m Liz Staples. If we haven’t met Before, I run ElizabethStepson.com where I teach you the legal side of running an online business. And I also run the annual Blogger Breakthrough Summit and a couple other summons under Blogger Breakthrough where we’re focused on streamlining so that you can earn more in less time. And I talk about recurring revenue not just from memberships but also from low price payment plans and how those can add to your recurring revenue line too.

Dr Destini Copp [00:04:47]:
Thank you Liz. Faith, you’re next on my screen.

Faith Mariah [00:04:50]:
Sure, I’m Faith Mariah. I do a combination of mindset and simple business strategy to help people build to six figures. Right now I’m really obsessed with events. So if you go to faith mariavets.com we’re always recruiting for something.

Dr Destini Copp [00:05:06]:
Monica, hello.

Monica Froese [00:05:09]:
Oh, well, I run two brands, Empowered Business and the Empowered Shop. And I teach content creators how to create digital products and then eventually open open a digital product shop. Once you have enough digital products, you need a central place to send people. So that’s what I teach. And I have kind of a different type of membership. Mine’s a support membership. So it kind of overlays everything in my business, which is a little bit of a different structure. So I’m happy to talk about that today.

Dr Destini Copp [00:05:38]:
Ruth, you’re next.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:05:41]:
Hi everyone. I’m really happy to be here with my lovely mastermind. I am a business and self belief coach. I have a couple of memberships at the moment that I have been running for about two years. I have been, I have had memberships since way, way back. I’ve gone back and forth between lower ticket, higher ticket, all of the things. But what I do right now is the Soulful Sales Society. So yeah, really excited for this conversation.

Dr Destini Copp [00:06:15]:
Kate, you’re next.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:06:17]:
Hey everybody, I’m Kate Cordmeier and I have been calling myself an accidental membership owner. I now have like four memberships. I don’t know how it happened, but once it did, I was like, wow, recurring revenue is the best. Why didn’t I think of this sooner? So I’m excited to chat today about all things membership, recurring revenue, subscription models.

Faith Mariah [00:06:43]:
Yeah.

Dr Destini Copp [00:06:44]:
So everybody on here has tons of experience with recurring revenue. I’m your host, Dr. Destiny Kopp and super excited to be here. I actually have four memberships that I run also two in my personal brand and two in my B2C brand. Super excited to jump into this topic. Like I said, if you have questions and you’re here live, we’re going to give priority to your questions. But I’m going to go ahead and kick it off because we did get some questions that came through. We got a lot of questions, I should say that came through and I’m going to pick one of them.

Dr Destini Copp [00:07:16]:
We’re going to get started and then I’ll start looking at your questions. And I think this one, I really love this one. It came in and the question is selling membership seems to be very much tied to numbers, meaning having a large audience enough to sell to. So how do you even start if you are, you know, have a Small audience and you’re just trying to get started.

Faith Mariah [00:07:44]:
I have some ideas because I coach people on this all the time. Where are my mastermind friends at? Y’ all probably know what I’m gonna say, what I tell people to do. I think it depends on the price point, right? Because you could have a membership that’s $10,000 a month and you don’t need that volume. So any low ticket offer, whether it’s a reoccurring or a one off, you’re gonna need more volume to make the same amount of money. And so what I like to tell people to do if they wanna have a lower ticket membership, is to sketch out what kind of outcome you want to get for people in that membership and then either make workshops related to that that we can sell while you’re building your list and then we can eventually put those workshops into the membership. So you’re kind of building out your portal and having things to sell and we’re building your list and once you get the volume there, then we can launch that membership. So that’s one thing I tell people to do if they have a small list.

Dr Destini Copp [00:08:44]:
Anyone else want to jump in there, I’ll jump in.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:08:49]:
So it really, it depends on your market as well. So way back in the very like in when was it probably like 2010, 2011, I used to have a few memberships then. I did not have a large audience whatsoever. Now I know this was a long time ago and things change and all of this, but I think the principle still remains. So number one, I had a really good, like very targeted niche. It was different to what I do now. So it does depend what you do. Secondly, I had a lot of success with a community of affiliates and we would promote each other’s stuff and actually that really got the ball rolling for me.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:09:29]:
Again, it depends like who you know and, and what your niche is and all of this stuff. But I just wanted to like put it out there that there are different ways of growing than just your own audience. I mean, there’s also ads and people have loads of success with like lower ticket memberships. Like Evelyn Vice is someone that a lot of us look up to as a membership owner. She has like a lower ticket membership, she runs ads to it and then upgrades people to like a higher tier. So there’s like loads of different ways to do it that don’t all rely on your pre existing audience and it can actually grow your audience as you go.

Liz Stapleton [00:10:03]:
Yeah, I was gonna say collaboration. Right. Whether it’s with affiliates, whether it’s just with other people in your niche that are kind of offering different offers. Right. But it’s complimen. One of the best ways I sold my membership was off the back end of a summit I hosted. Right. And so I had lots of people promoting the summit and obviously summits are a lot of work.

Liz Stapleton [00:10:21]:
I wouldn’t say start there, don’t start there, but you know, do a freebie exchange, do a co host a workshop. Do you know, there’s lots of kind of less intense ways to collaborate with someone and be able to both grow your list and potentially sell your membership as well.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:10:39]:
I just will add one quick thing to that too. To say that you might have a small list now, but you don’t have to stay at a small list. And I find that a lot of people stay with a small list because they stay in creation mode. And you keep trying to improve your membership and do all these things for the membership, but you don’t have anybody to actually sell it to and nobody knows you exist yet. So using a lot of these strategies that were just shared here, collaborations, affiliates, ads, there are so many ways to grow your list and you know, bundles, summits, there’s. The options are endless. So I would say honestly have a membership, have something to sell or have any offer to sell, but I would focus your time more on growing an audience before I would spend too much time tinkering with your offers.

Dr Destini Copp [00:11:37]:
All right, I want to move into this next question here. And first of all, I think those were some really, really good advice there. This one says adopting a coaching business in the age of AI. Would you say a lower cost membership is a must have for coaches moving forward in why or why not? Would that be the case?

Kate Kordsmeier [00:12:07]:
Yeah, go ahead, Monica.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:12:08]:
Okay.

Monica Froese [00:12:10]:
Okay. Honestly, I feel like low ticket and high ticket memberships can work and it really does go back to your market and who you’re and who you’re selling to and where they’re at in their business. Now my model is a little different and so, and people kind of laugh because I actually don’t care about retention, which is funny because I actually incentivize people to come and go as they please. And that is a very not common way of looking at it. But what happened for me was I have a lot of different ways you can work with me in my business. You can be in my self study courses and there’s like two major ones and then I have 130 products in my shop and so I cover a variety of different topics and so I can’t be in 10 different places. That stretches me too thin. So I position my membership as come and go as you please.

Monica Froese [00:13:02]:
When you need support from me, when you need support from my team, when you want to ask questions, when you want to get on Zoom like this with me, it’s $39 a month, cancel anytime. So I even tell people when they buy my courses, I’m like, if you’re not going to start for three months, you don’t have to get the support now. Come into the support group when you’re ready. And surprisingly, even though I don’t care about retention, it’s almost that not caring about it that keeps people around. I actually have very low churn. Even though I incentivize, I’m like, go ahead, leave when you want. But they stick around because I have very engaged calls if I get people on Zoom with me. So this is like, I think part of it is understanding your secret, like your secret power.

Monica Froese [00:13:39]:
And I know when I get people on Zoom with me, they love it, they love talking to me. So they stick around. They just don’t leave. And I tell them they can. So that’s how I approach it.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:13:52]:
I’m just reading the chat here, Katie saying so many coaches telling me not to launch membership. So I keep putting off, I mean, I would definitely like there are obviously pros and cons to all these different business models and sometimes maybe a course is better or one time thing, whatever, but I think that is there’s definitely no right or wrong and you don’t have to have one and you don’t, you shouldn’t be the, whatever the opposite of that is that. I can’t formulate that sentence right now. But what I’m thinking is. So Susan, the chat said the age of AI means you need to amp up the human in your membership, regardless of price point. I definitely agree with that. And just to let you all in on some of these, some of the conversations we’ve had behind the scenes in our Mastermind, we are often talking about the fact that, and this goes for our low ticket memberships, you can have a membership with content that already exists. You don’t have to create anything new.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:14:46]:
And all we do is show up and do like a live Q A every month. Now, that’s not the only way of running a membership. It’s one way of running a membership. But if you could think of it that way and think like, do, is there something I already have? And can I just shop and connect with my people even just once A month in a Q A. It’s a really low hanging fruit, like a really low hanging fruit offer. And this conversation comes up with a lot of us in the Mastermind and we. And, and when it is a very low ticket one, that’s often the kind of price point that. So for example, I have a.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:15:19]:
One of my memberships is $7. There’s not a lot of stuff that will just sell without me doing offers on, without me actually talking about it that much. But the seven dollar membership will. That’s one of the offers that will. And it feels like there are always times when we question like should I have this? Like do I still want it? And then we’re like hang on a minute, we’re getting to connect with our people by doing this whatever one off live session every month, recurring live session every month. And the content in the membership is already done. It just feels like a. Like why wouldn’t you.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:15:51]:
Now obviously this is not true for absolutely everyone and I’m not saying you should. I don’t think that. I don’t believe in that. I don’t subscribe to that. But it is something to consider in terms of like what’s your low hanging fruit version? And for me it’s a great way to get people in and then the opportunity there to connect on that human level, which is definitely important in the age of AI, through that kind of monthly support that I offer people.

Liz Stapleton [00:16:18]:
Someone in the comments just said I think there’s a lot of work in the back end of a membership. And I think playing off of just what Rue said, it really is up to you how much back end work there is. So a membership that I’m kind of retiring, kind of sitting around, it’s still. People are still in, it is a membership. So like every year I run the summit. All the content just goes in there and they have access as long as they pay. Right? That’s. I’m putting work in once a year and I’m already putting that work in anyways, just you know, hitting copy paste basically to get it inside the membership.

Liz Stapleton [00:16:49]:
And so it’s really not a lot of work at all for that membership. My other membership which I just changed models on is a monthly drop. And so there is some work, but it’s once a month as opposed to like constantly having something show up every month, every week or something. So it’s up to you to design it in a way that isn’t that meets the kind of level of work you’re willing to do.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:17:12]:
I’ll add to that too. I was going to say something really similar Liz, that yes, it can be whatever you want and that I would encourage everyone to get creative with what, like why something is a membership versus just a one off course or something. And like my $9 a month membership, this is the only membership I set out to create intentionally. And that one is, I think of it more as paid lead gen. It’s very similar to what Ruth said. We’re like, I literally haven’t promoted it since I launched it two years ago. And you know, we have over 100 members in there. And yes, people come and go but I think the only work that it is for me is I host one call a and that’s it.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:17:55]:
Like they have course content in the portal that does not change, it doesn’t get updated because it’s not like super something that would be out of date. Of course if something was out of date I would update it. But I think people sometimes think that they have to do these monthly content drops or they have to like a membership has to look like this. And I would just say no, it can truly look like whatever you want as long as the value is clear to somebody why they would continue to pay to stay in there versus paying once. And you know, you’re not having to deliver anything on an ongoing basis. And so some of the other memberships that I have sort of accidentally come into have been more of my support style memberships where now I’m not actually teaching them anything, I’m just offering weekly calls. I have one membership called the Room that is literally just four calls a month, one call each week. And for a while that was all we did in it.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:18:51]:
It was just if you want group coaching, you want a community, it’s a map mastermind without the, you know, heavy price tag. This is a great place to do it. I think Monica’s has a membership that’s quite similar. It’s just support. This is how if you want access to me, this is where you come and get it. And you can be in any of my programs or none of my programs and I’m just here to answer questions. And then I have some other ones that are just different formats of support. Like we have an email coaching membership where they get one on one email access.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:19:22]:
To me we have a voxer coaching membership. And so I don’t think of those quite like memberships but in the recurring revenue they’re subscription model type businesses so or type offers rather. So I just get creative with what it could be. It doesn’t have to look any, any certain way.

Sage Grayson [00:19:41]:
I just want to jump in. I know we got to go to another question too, but I love what everybody has been saying. I really agree with figuring out what you can do what, what your capacity is for your membership too. And in addition to being aware of your energy levels, I also like to meet my clients where they’re at too. So I have an email membership where you get a one minute tip every week through email. There’s no live coaching to it and all of these are old blog posts or pulled directly from my courses. And at the end of every one minute email it says PS this came from such and such course. So I’m getting digital product sales by people signing up and paying for that membership.

Sage Grayson [00:20:24]:
So that’s totally through email. There’s no live component to it. And then I’ve also got my weekly accountability calls where like Monica was saying, find out where you shine and do it. And when I get people on Zoom calls, they want to stay because that’s where I’m a really good coach. I’m my best, I’m my best coachy self when I’m on Zoom. So I have the capacity to do both of those too. But like really look at what do you have time for? What resources do you already have? What can you pull from and put together with little effort? And I really like having those two memberships because when my calls are sometimes hard for people to show up to because I’m on the west coast. So I like having like an email membership that if they can’t make it to a call, they can still get tips every week from me.

Monica Froese [00:21:09]:
One thing to that point too, like I, I definitely shine when I am off the cuff and like I think I say the best things when I’m. When someone throws a question at me and I think about it in real time and I repurpose a lot of those calls into I have a private podcast feed I’ll put it on. I actually just published one on my public podcast feed because it was so great about my new email strategy and it was so off the cuff and like a lot of good things came out of my brain. So I repurposed it into a podcast episode. So wherever you like how you shine and people want to connect to you the most is a great way to start to think about what you want to put in your membership.

Dr Destini Copp [00:21:49]:
The other thing I wanted to touch upon, and I think Kate, you might have mentioned it, or Ruth, I can’t remember, is the get it done weeks and can you talk a little bit more about how you have structured those and how your maybe your model or your membership has evolved and why you added them.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:22:08]:
Yes. So Get It Done weeks. I learned about this concept from Elizabeth Goddard, but I really kind of made it my own and encourage everybody to do the same thing. Speaking of like age of AI and people wanting more human elements, I think they want things that like AI can’t hold, actually hold your hand through this. They can’t. You know, there’s lots of things that can’t co work with you. It can’t give you that human element. So I decided I had been running Get It Done weeks as like standalone offers for about six months in 2024 and then I decided to move it inside my membership because my membership is like accountability.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:22:51]:
It is this community element, it’s coaching. And so it felt like this is a natural thing. Like people are coming here because they’re trying to get, like move forward and take action on what they’re learning and this is where we could do that. And so I’ve really created mine to be more like we pick one topic that we’re all going to work on together. I give them a checklist of what we’re going to go through and what they need to do. And then we have live calls for Q&As for tech demos, for screen sharing, co working training during that week that we give them prompts throughout the week of like make sure you’ve done XYZ from the checklist and. And then there’s prizes at the end. So if you actually get it done, then you can win.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:23:35]:
We call it KK Credit so you can get credit. In our business, everybody who gets it done gets that. We give away things like free software tools. We also get you promoted on our email list and in our blog posts. So it’s free visibility for everybody who’s going through the Get It Done week. And I would say this has been one of the best things I’ve ever done for my business. Now I’m like 14, I think I’m at this August. I think I’m hosting my 15th one and it has been so much fun.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:24:07]:
And I swear I never get better testimonials than I do from hosting Get It Done weeks because people are so excited that they were able to get so much done in one week. Like more than I’ve done in the last six months is the kind of things that I often hear. And it’s just such a win, win, win all around. So adding that to my Membership also helped me improve retention and get new members coming in every month without having to do like a big launch. I basically just send three to five emails the week before I get it done week saying, hey, we’re doing get it done week next week. This is the topic, come join us in the membership. And we’ve gotten anywhere from 20 to 50 new members a month just from doing this strategy.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:24:52]:
I just want to add here, if you heard Kate reel off all things included in the get it done week, mine are much simpler than that. And I, I’m, I don’t do loads of live calls. I often will do like a kickoff call, but not necessarily. Sometimes it’s based on a training that’s already there. You’re just drawing people’s attention to it. And even if you are not doing the calls, even if you’re just sending one email at the start and one email and reminding them the deadline or doing that in a post or whatever, it motivates people. It really does motivate people. And I know that we’re going to talk about recurring revenue, not just memberships, but in the case of a membership where people are paying month to month, they are.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:25:34]:
I think this was something that I heard Evelyn Vice talk about and it’s really interesting way of thinking about it. It can be a bit scary, but it’s also powerful. People are making that decision every single month whether to keep paying you for your offer. And I think that one of the hardest parts of having a membership and also, you know, being in a membership is helping people actually use it in a way that is helpful to them. A lot of the time they don’t have to do the get it done week. Like there are other ways to make the most of it. But I think that putting it on the table is a very, very helpful way to get people engaging. Really, really important for that.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:26:11]:
And yeah, like Kate says, really, really great way of soft launching it regularly. And I think what we have, what we have found is sometimes when you have a, a membership it’s different to like a, a standalone course and sometimes you feel like there’s more to talk about. So then sometimes when you launch it, you feel like you’re kind of watering it down a bit because you’re trying to talk about all the things when you’re promoting it from the perspective of like I ever get it done week starting next week, you launch it based on that thing. The content is based on that topic. And I think it really narrows it down in a very powerful way for the messaging I’ve certainly found that so really, really helpful in that clarity of how you’re talking about your membership as well as giving people a time sensitive reason to join as well.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:26:59]:
Destiny, you should share about how you have created your own version of this with a live workshop model that’s a little different than Get It Done week, but quite similar in a lot of ways too.

Dr Destini Copp [00:27:09]:
Yeah, it really is similar. So we do the live workshop and I do promote it like you can come to this live workshop or you can get it for free, or you can get it for free inside of the membership or you can pay for it separately. So I do give them that option generally not every single month and then we get it done in that live workshop so we actually have a working session there. I have been inspired though I’m doing things a little bit differently in August where in some of the, some of the workshops that I’m doing, I’m giving them prizes for actually getting it done. So they’re submitting their work and I’m going to be review it and they get it done. They get a surprise, you know, kind of a price for doing that. So I do think that that’s an incentive for people to actually get the work done. But the reason why I love this model is exactly what you said, Ruth.

Dr Destini Copp [00:28:00]:
It gives me something to talk about, not only in my newsletter, in my emails, in my podcast, so I can highlight that content every week, so every month. So it’s like fresh content am you know, giving to my audience. And Sage, you do them too, right?

Sage Grayson [00:28:20]:
Yeah, mine’s very similar to what others have said too. What I like to do is give a free course that goes along with whatever topic or project we’re trying to get done that week. So everyone can watch the course too and then come with me, come to me with their questions. We have a kickoff call, a co working call the free course. And like, like Kate does, we do a five day checklist so everyone knows what to do each day. And mine are not just business focused because I don’t have a niche. So we kind of do a little bit of everything. And one of my most popular get it Done weeks was Manifest that money challenge.

Sage Grayson [00:28:57]:
So and we, and in the week they manifested over a hundred thousand dollars, which I thought was pretty amazing. Granted one person got a new job, so that was a big one. But I think you can have fun with your get it Done weeks. It doesn’t always have to be like we’re going to make a new course or we’re going to like, do this, like, business thing. It could be about how to organize your to do list or how to set up a notion template or something that can help you with your business, but it also can help you with your life, too.

Dr Destini Copp [00:29:27]:
Okay. What I’d like to do is go back to the comment that we had, and I want to go explore recurring revenue that’s just, that’s beyond membership. So I’d love to hear your thoughts on that and some examples that you have in your business.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:29:45]:
That one.

Dr Destini Copp [00:29:46]:
Go ahead, Sage.

Liz Stapleton [00:29:47]:
Oh, yeah.

Sage Grayson [00:29:47]:
So I have an everything offer, which is all of my digital courses, all my past ones and all my future ones in one big bundle. It’s called my Life Editor Academy. And before I, I, I would just sell it, like at one price, just one payment. Please give me my money. And it was not selling for a long time. And then I did a payment plan, and I’m so glad that I did because they still legally have to pay all the payments. But I’m meeting them where they’re at and I’m making it easy for them to pay it off and to digest the information. They don’t feel like, well, I have to go through all of it because I just spend a million dollars on it.

Sage Grayson [00:30:24]:
So I count payment plans as recurring revenue, too. And I’m always adding new things in there, too. And I’m always asking them, like, what do you want to see next? What can I help you with? I have little things sprinkled throughout while they’re in the membership, asking them, like, oh, what course are you going to do next? Or how can I help you? So I think everyone who has, like, a really big offer, if it’s like a passive income thing, that might be the easiest thing that you can break into multiple payments and meet them where they’re at, let them say yes. I mean, do you want the sale or not? I wanted the sales. So I’m very grateful that I did break down my big offer into multiple payments.

Faith Mariah [00:31:04]:
Yeah, I wanted to say too, I feel like I’m always the voice of, like, I’ve seen a lot of people burn out on memberships, especially beginner people. And it’s like this idea of, like, reoccurring revenue, like, it just like, comes into your bank account every month. But I think I really like the model. If you’re a beginner of building something like a course and then putting payment plans, if you want reoccurring revenue, because you don’t have, unless you’re like Monica and you don’t care about retention but if you do care about retention, you have to market to the people that are already in there every month to stay. You have to market and go get new leads every month. You have to like market to grow your membership. And there’s just a lot of, of stuff that has to be done. I think it’s an awesome business model.

Faith Mariah [00:31:48]:
I love my memberships. I’ve made a lot of money off of memberships, but I’m always like, there are different ways to do it. So I think if you’re kind of like, man, I would like reoccurring revenue, but I don’t know if I want to do ongoing support all the time. Right. Because the other thing with memberships, I think that burns people out is you have to do them like rain or shine. Like I’ve had to do them like after people have passed away and when I’m saying sick and like all these different things in life. And I think that’s fine. But I do think it’s something to consider.

Faith Mariah [00:32:19]:
I think people don’t think about that when they start memberships because they’re like, oh, it’s going to be reoccurring revenue. And it’s like, yeah, you have to, to work every month. But I like, if you’re like thinking about, man, I would like to have reoccurring revenue, but I don’t know that it’s sustainable for me to do a membership right now with everything going on in my life. I think the option Sage is talking about of doing the payment plans is a great way to do that. And we’ve done that in my business where we would sell different courses every month and I would do three month or six month payment plans and those payment plans stack up. So then when you start the month, you already have a couple thousand coming in before you’ve done sales and you’re not having the membership of like having to show up and all that thing. And again, I show up in my membership all the time and I love it and I think it’s really, really great. But I do like to be that voice on the other side when we’re having these conversations just because I’ve seen so many people burn out.

Monica Froese [00:33:11]:
So devil’s advocate a little bit here. My MBA finance is going to come out on this one. So I have always very heavily incentivized pay in full when I launch. I heavily incentivize it because at the end of the day, the most administrative work I feel we have is failed payments when. And you can automate a lot of this, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not it. Those apps can get to be 15 deep when you think about all the different places they need to be stripped from in a membership or even a course. Like if someone’s failing on payments, you can’t have ongoing access to the content. And then if you layer on like private podcast feeds and it can get very robust your membership back end.

Monica Froese [00:33:52]:
So I’ve always been, I’m big on cash flow, like managing my cash flow. So if I get it, if I have a launch and I heavily incentivize pay in full and I have a big uptick in the business, I’m not turning around and just going to spend it because I got it. Because I, I think that the payment plans and recurring revenue give people a lot of business owners this like, level of comfort. But I listened to a podcast the other day where they were poo pooing on payment plans like big time. And they were pretty much like, no, no, give me the cash up front. I don’t want to have to chase you for your payment plans. And guess what? I just know how to manage my cash on the back end really well. I fall into that bucket more than anything.

Monica Froese [00:34:29]:
And it’s probably why I have such a chill attitude about retention in my membership. Just another way of looking at it too.

Liz Stapleton [00:34:36]:
And I totally agree with that because yeah, the back end and people failed payments, that’s definitely a thing. That’s a giant pain. That being said, I offered a low price payment plan on one of my summits and increased my sales by 30% like year over year. So like you gotta kind of figure out what you’re comfortable with, how much are you willing to chase people? Or if you’re just gonna be like, let it go, discontinue access, I’m done. You know, I have very few chargebacks like ever. Maybe a couple a year, if that. So, you know, it’s a matter of kind of making sure you’re very upfront, setting expectations and going in and just making sure that you’ve automated all that you can because, you know, and I actually do need to improve my like failed payment follow up process. But overall, like, if I’m seeing that much of an increase, it’s worth it to at least occasionally offer payment plans.

Liz Stapleton [00:35:32]:
I’ve done that before too, where it’s like, hey, I’m bringing back the extended payment plan for something and I’ll see a bump in sales, you know, so it just kind of depends, you know.

Dr Destini Copp [00:35:41]:
I just wanted to say when I do my launch on my memberships or I have people coming in. My goal is to as much as I can get people on the annual plan and my goal is 50 or more. You know, I was told to shoot between like 40 and 60%. It’s generally landed around 53% and that has definitely helped me out, no doubt about it. And I do what I do to encourage that is to offer really, really juicy bonuses for that annual plan. But you know, I still have people coming in on the monthly and that’s perfectly fine. That’s why I offer it, just to be able to serve them also. But annual plan is really what I shoot for there.

Monica Froese [00:36:22]:
I also saw a big entrepreneur in our space totally do away with self payment plans and move exclusively to if you want a payment plan you have to use afterpay or Klarna is very accessible to us now with stripe. And while I don’t think I’m to the point where I’m going to do that, to Kate’s point in the comments, we are not a bank. And like I just did a I delivered a four hour workshop last week and I allowed a payment plan. I didn’t charge a premium price for it. The payment plan was equal to paying in full. And guess what, I got a failed payment for it today and that content was already delivered. So that’s the other thing. I mean now I have to go through and every workshop I do, I don’t always set up the back end of failed payments, strip them out of things.

Monica Froese [00:37:02]:
So I had to send it to my VA and be like, can you make sure they don’t have access to this now because the payment failed. So I believe in accessibility too. I try to make things accessible. But I think we can also think outside the box now with all these options popping up for why do we have to be the ones that finance it? As the business owner, why can’t it be like, okay, you can use a third party system like Klarna or Afterpay. So that’s another thing to look at too because they get the benefit of the payment plan and as a business, business owner you’re getting the payment up front.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:37:31]:
I’m so glad you said that Monica, because that’s what I was gonna say is that I have experimented. I know this is maybe even now we’re going off on a tangent of payment plans rather than recurring revenue. But it is interesting because yeah, I, when I have had higher ticket items, I’m talking like $5,000 or more. I’ve often partnered with Funding partners, which is a little different than like a payment plan like after afterpay or Klarna or whatever some of the other ones are. And a lot of my clients took that option especially when I was posting like $10,000 masterminds I had the bulk of my people would use that and they would get much better interest rates and deals with funding partners. I also use now that I don’t sell high ticket like that. Elective is the name of a company that I use and for a while I hosted all of my payment plans through them because they handle follow up on failed payments for you at no cost. And so it didn’t cost me anything more to offer that.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:38:36]:
But what I found was that a lot of my customers weren’t choosing that option because they have to fill out a form, you know, and they have to give their personal details and information. I think people are hesitant to do that. So now I literally have on my checkout which there’s probably pros and cons to this too. But you can pay in full and save 20%. You can do my in house payment plan which is a 20% premium on the price you can use after pay Klarna affirm any of those choices. I have a link at the bottom that’s also like we also offer funding through Elective so people can choose that. And I make sales with all of those different forms every single day. Like there’s people use all of the different options and so this isn’t really about recurring revenue but it definitely is about payment plans and that there is a benefit to getting.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:39:31]:
Like Monica said, I get paid in full for those those options. Now I have to pay a higher fee. I think you Pay usually like 5 to 10% to use those services versus.

Monica Froese [00:39:45]:
You know, consider if the payment plans are failing and you can’t recover that.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:39:49]:
Exactly.

Monica Froese [00:39:49]:
It’s all a man.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:39:50]:
I think it all ends up kind of out in the wash. Yeah, I.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:39:56]:
Think these conversations super important. Like obviously we’ve gone on a payment plan tangent but super important when you’re considering recurring revenue. I just wanted to add one other thought and because we’ve talked about memberships, we talked about like course payment plans. One thing that really changed things for me earlier on in this business when I did a lot of one to one coaching work work was to charge what I actually wanted to charge which was a big deal, you know, because we’re talking about one to one. This is not a low ticket thing. And getting clients in six month contract made a huge difference. So it’s not like ongoing forever recurring revenue but it made a huge difference in stacking it like when I could would have different clients starting at different times, stacking up those one to one payments made a huge difference. I just wanted to give that a little shout out because obviously everyone here has got a different business model and sometimes just the difference in, you know, bumping that price up a bit if you’ve been thinking about doing it, especially if it’s one to one, your time is precious and limited.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:41:00]:
Made a huge difference for me at that stage of my business.

Dr Destini Copp [00:41:07]:
All right, any other comments on recurring revenue before we move on?

Kate Kordsmeier [00:41:12]:
I have a follow up question in the chat here from Suze that I just wanted to answer real quick but I’ll say I use Kartra for my checkouts. ThriveCart also offers this. I feel like most people are probably with. I think everyone here is either with those two or Kajabi. I don’t, I think Kajabi offers buy now, pay later options now. But so this, most of this is all just done through my checkout software. So if you just go to a checkout page, I think if it’s like a above a certain price, although I’m not actually even sure if there’s a like limit you have to hit, it will just give you the choice to say do you want to pay with these? So that’s, I think that’s part of why it doesn’t feel overwhelming for people because it’s just like when you’re checking out@sephora.com, it asks you like split this into three payments of $33 and you’re like I guess I could do that. And so yeah, so I think that has really helped because it’s so integrated now versus and you know, on my checkout pages I only offer payment plans for something that’s like over $500.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:42:16]:
I really haven’t offered payment plans for things that are like $70 or you know, less than a hundred. I definitely wouldn’t offer a payment plan for but to each their own. I’m sure that some people have and it’s worked well for them. So yeah, so then I just have a checkout. You just choose just pay in full or and it will say like pay in full and save 20% and get these juicy bonuses or payment plan and you don’t get any of that but you get a more accessible, you know, payment option. So that’s just kind of how I set mine up.

Faith Mariah [00:42:50]:
I’ll just throw in oh yeah, go.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:42:52]:
Ahead Faith, I’ll put this in the chat.

Faith Mariah [00:42:54]:
I was just going to throw in really quick. I’m like a little outlier, I think, in this, I don’t know realm, but we’ve always offered interest free payment plans and I offer a lot of extended payment plans. I don’t feel like we have that many failed payments and we have a really good process for it. So I just feel like it doesn’t cost me that much and I love it. Like, so I think sometimes, like, sometimes you can make decisions in your business just because you think it’s cool. Like, I think it’s dope. Like, we offer interest free payment plans and no one else does. So if you think it’s like, sometimes you can like.

Faith Mariah [00:43:31]:
Monica, I don’t, I don’t want to like step on the mba, but sometimes you could, should look at the numbers. Right? Look at the things. But sometimes you could just do things in your business because you want to.

Monica Froese [00:43:40]:
You know that that’s, that’s totally fair. I, I blame my dad. He’s a CPA and he just has drilled this stuff into me.

Liz Stapleton [00:43:49]:
I do like industry. I, maybe I do a couple bucks more like extra stripe fee. Like, I’ll do like a couple bucks more on the like. So it’s overall, it’s maybe like three or four dollars more than the full pay in full just because it then accounts for the like extra stripe fee I’m doing for the payments.

Faith Mariah [00:44:04]:
Yeah. Do I eat some money on that? Probably, you know, sure. But I just think like my excitement for it and the fun of it probably makes up for that. Maybe. I don’t know.

Monica Froese [00:44:14]:
Now I, I don’t, I actually don’t charge a premium on my payment plans, oddly enough, even though. But I, but like Destiny, I heavily incentivize paying full when I’m launching.

Faith Mariah [00:44:25]:
So do I. So I’m always looking at your bottom line. Well, you guys know that because we talk about this every week. But I’m always like, what’s going to change the bottom line at the end of the year? I don’t really look at monthly, to be honest. I look at like the last 12 months and that’s where my focus is now. When my business was starting, that wasn’t the case. Right. So there were months where I was like, I need cash, like to come in like this month.

Faith Mariah [00:44:50]:
And sometimes when that’s the case. Right. You might consider your, that into your sales strategy a little different in.

Dr Destini Copp [00:44:58]:
All right. Speaking of doing things maybe a little bit out of the normal, I want to Talk about the question that we have about Evergreen versus Open Closed cart on memberships. And I have very strong opinions on this. So I’m going to go ahead and just start and then we can have a discussion on it because there’s definitely different ways to do that. And I know that there’s some very, you know, high influencers in our industries that really teach the, you know, open closed cartoon. I made a decision to basically to keep my memberships open because number one, it gives me that workshop and that content to talk about and promote every single month. And my thought process was there. People are just on different places in their business journey.

Dr Destini Copp [00:45:44]:
You know, at some point something I’m going to be talking about is probably going to catch their eye. And actually I’m actually okay if they kind of come and go. I’m kind of like Monica, like I do incent that, you know, annual, even the lifetime pass. But if they, you know, for whatever reason, if I can help them that month, I want to help them that month. So that’s kind of the philosophy that I have taken. And you know, I, like I said, I know this is a little bit controversial topic so I’m going to just throw it out there and you guys talk about what you’re doing.

Sage Grayson [00:46:20]:
Oh, I just want to quickly say I completely agree with that. When someone needs help, they need it now. So I want to be the one that’s available for them the moment that they need me. So yeah, both of my memberships, my, my email membership and my weekly accountability calls and the Progress party open all the time because I don’t know when someone’s going to need help. I don’t know when someone’s not going to be able to pay their rent. And they need strategies now. And I just think like meeting them where they’re at, I’m allowing them to say yes when they’re ready, whenever.

Liz Stapleton [00:46:53]:
I also just can’t be bothered to do no. Like that’s too much work. Like I’m too lazy to do that. Like I obviously do certain marketing pushes, you know, I’ll launch something off the back end of a summit or something. But open all the time. Just because I initially, when I started my membership like four or five years ago now, whatever it was open, close, I can’t be bothered. It’s too much work.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:47:18]:
What I want to add to this is I know that loads of you, like even if your membership is open all the time, you’re doing things like the get it done weeks, right? So there are reasons for people to Join now that are not just it’s open now and it’s closed tomorrow. And one reason is I’m doing to get it done. We and, and Destiny say all. Everyone is regularly doing things like Destiny’s doing these workshops on a reg basis. You’re not just sitting back and having your membership there on your website and expecting people to join. Because I don’t think that is the way it works for most of us. Sadly, yes, if you’ve got like backend funnels, but also showing up and, and connecting with your audience and giving people a reason to join. Even if it’s not that the doors are closing, I do think that that’s a really important element and everyone here is doing that.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:48:09]:
So just to be clear. And I do close my membership doors, by the way, but I actually do think, especially since I’ve been doing these get it done week promos monthly for I think I’m on like the fourth or fifth month now. I think that that makes a bigger difference than me saying the doors are going to close. I think that me showing up and saying we have a get it done week starting and you know, I’ve been offering a trial as well. I mean, we can talk about trials. That would be a whole other conversation as well. But I think that that’s making a bigger difference than me just closing the doors. So it is important to think about what’s the reason beyond whether doors are open or closed that people would join.

Faith Mariah [00:48:47]:
Now I’ll say too, like, we do a launch model, so mine is not open all the time. And I, I love that. I’ve tried it Evergreen and for me, I hated it. I just. And it’s not because it’s. I mean anything can work, right? But I think it’s just kind of personally what feels better to you? To me, when it’s open all the time, it like feels like in the back of my brain I’m like, oh, I should be promoting it, I should be selling it all the time. Like that thought just lives back there and it leaks my energy all the time. Whereas when I launch it’s like I can focus, I could do sales, I can put all my energy on that, I can close it up.

Faith Mariah [00:49:21]:
And then I don’t have that like, oh, I should be talking about it all the time kind of thing. And so that has worked really well for me, just like energy wise, I think, and the way my, my brain kind of functions. And I also love launching. So that model has just always worked really well for me.

Monica Froese [00:49:41]:
So I obviously keep Mine open because it’s meant to be a support membership. So I want you to come and go as you please. But the other thing is it allows me to have that as a call to action everywhere. So like every, at the end of every podcast episode, I direct you to my membership if you want to, if you want to get to know what it’s like to work with me. And it’s really low stakes. So that has helped me. The other thing is I used to my business always operated on a live launch model and it does to a degree still because of cash injections are important. But what I used to do is I would close the doors and I stopped doing that.

Monica Froese [00:50:17]:
Instead I usually incentivize during the launch period. It’s like you get extra bonuses and it’s usually some sort of price savings. And then when the doors close or when the cart, that cart open periods over, I keep the sales page open and I started implementing this thing where you now all the bonuses during the launch, they’re gone. But what I do is I do with convert box, this box that pops up and it says you will only see this once for 30 minutes, which is true. And you can get it at the launch price. And I re. I capture after the closed cart period would have tipped typically been over a lot of revenue that way because there’s still a lot of buzz about, you know, because we just did this like concentrated launch window and I get a lot of sales that come in after like for weeks after because of it. Like people just got around to clicking through the email and they’re like, oh great, I can still get it at this price point for 30 minutes.

Monica Froese [00:51:07]:
So that’s just another way that you.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:51:09]:
Can do do something like that.

Monica Froese [00:51:11]:
Oh, and on my membership page I don’t do it right now because we just switched payment processors. But we used to do the same concept where if you got on the page and it was the first time seeing it, you would save like $10 a month if you sign up within that 30 minutes. That’s another way to do urgency while keeping the cart open.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:51:31]:
I’m just going to jump in here too to go back to the other question that we started with a few minutes ago about recurring revenue because I think we did get off on a payment plan tangent. And I just wanted to suggest a couple other ideas as well for people who are interested in recurring revenue maybe in addition to or beyond memberships and or payment plans for one off products. And I think, you know, my answer is kind of what similar to what I said before about like, I sort of am an accidental membership owner because I have all of these things that are now recurring revenue, but they’re not necessarily memberships, like different kinds of coaching packages and things like that and getting creative with. How could you get people to sign up for something over and over again that you know is something new every month without it being something really draining on you? And one of my offers now is like a documentary style offer. It’s a behind the scenes pass where I’m literally just every day documenting what I’m doing to Try to hit 1k a day in passive product sales income. And so, and without social media. And so people are always asking like, I don’t understand how you’re actually doing this. I go, okay, let me document like a diary of everything that I’m doing.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:52:53]:
And so I’m not teaching, I’m not coaching, I’m not giving them a course. But it is something that I’m like documenting in real time. And that’s been a really great way for me to add recurring revenue and something that doesn’t feel quite like a membership. But it is something where people are paying every month. And of course you can have. You know, I do it as a quarterly pass actually, because when I first started it I was like, I don’t know how long I’m going to want to do this. Maybe I’ll hate it. I’m just going to commit to 90 days.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:53:23]:
And then after 90 days I was.

Monica Froese [00:53:25]:
Like, oh, I love it.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:53:25]:
But we just kept it as a quarterly thing. So yeah, that’s another idea for some recurring revenue.

Dr Destini Copp [00:53:38]:
The other. And I’ll just kind of piggyback on that. Kate, you know, another thing that I do is I have this upsell where people can, you know, go month to month, they can come in, they can go out. It’s just my VIP voxer coaching that I do on Wednesdays and it’s, you know, it’s relatively cheap and they can come in, ask me any questions they want. I do it on Wednesdays, I go in in the morning, I answer questions all day. And that’s another way to get that recurring revenue every single month. That’s not really a membership.

Sage Grayson [00:54:07]:
So one more thing to add that I know a lot of you do affiliate money, so if you use a certain software or something for your business, hype it up. If you love it, why not talk about it? So I love Kajabi. I talk about it all the time and I firmly believe that your business should pay for itself. So Kajabi is expenses somewhat, I guess, but it pays for itself because of how many people I’ve gotten to sign up with my affiliate link. So if there’s something you love for your business, like really low effort, just talk about what you already love, share your affiliate link and get your followers to help you pay for that part of your business.

Monica Froese [00:54:46]:
So I do that and I offer. We call it Monica Money and it’s basically a gift card into our shop. And so I position it like, like, like if you get ThriveCart through my link, we have ThriveCart templates in the shop. We have a ThriveCart training in the shop. So it’s a great way buy through my link. You can use the credit then to get it. There was another thing I wanted to mention. Oh since my doors are open for the membership all the time when I.

Monica Froese [00:55:10]:
I am trying this other concept which is not quite get it done weeks, but I host things called think tanks and actually this worked really well for me in July and I got an $8,000 uptake tick from it, not with recurring revenue but for what I sold on the back end. So I’ll tell you what I did. Basically I hosted a think tank in my membership that was about like let’s brainstorm how to do no a no code app and the different ways that we could add that into your business. And so I, in order to go to the think tank you had to join the membership. And of course that was like a low since I let people come and go as they please. So they signed up to gain the membership when I knew I’d probably retain them anyways. And then I said after. So we did this brainstorming session.

Monica Froese [00:55:49]:
I said I’m actually hosting a four hour live workshop on and I’m going to show you how to do this no code app and lovable. And since you’re part of the membership, you can get it for half off. And then I did a snippet in ConvertKit that went into every single email that was conditional tag that basically said if you’re a member of EBS Pro, every single email I sent you got that promo reminding you you could get into the level workshop for 50% off. So not only did I get people in the membership paying me a recurring fee for the membership and it was an urgency thing because the think tank was happening at a certain date. Then I offered them to then join me for half off into this workshop and I got $8,000 from that workshop so it seemed to work. Plus I added 15 new people to my membership. So win, win.

Dr Destini Copp [00:56:40]:
All right, we are getting really close. We are about to wrap it up. Any last minute questions or anything else that you guys want to cover that we may have missed here today? Sage.

Sage Grayson [00:56:54]:
Oh, keeping people in your membership. I know some of us don’t care about Churn, but I just recently started offering rewards after every month that you stay in the membership. So in my one minute wins email membership, after every month that you’ve stayed in, you get a free course from me. And then for my progress party, after so many months, you get a coaching call with me. So is there a way that you can tell people as soon as they join? So glad you’re here. By the way, if you stick around, I got prizes for you. So make them want to stick around because they want to get the next reward.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:57:30]:
I love that. I just want to share encouragement like having a membership and then maybe this is some other recurring offer that you have can be really challenging. It presents a unique set of mindset challenges when people can cancel things. Sometimes you can get in your head about that as I’ve talked a lot in our Mastermind calls. But on the flip side, it gets you creative like Sage, like you come up with new ideas, you test different things and it’s like, I love running my membership. Yes, there are challenges to it, but I absolutely love it. I love connecting with my members monthly and it’s just my favorite offer and you got to get creative in the way you sell it. So I just wanted to leave you with that.

Faith Mariah [00:58:17]:
I wanted to speak to this question in the chat. It says, how do you handle your membership when life challenges happen? And I feel like I might have planted that seed in people’s heads because I was like, you have to show up all the time. And I just want you to know problems can’t exist without solutions, right? So if you need to step out or you need to take take time away, there’s a way for you to do that and it still be fair and still serve the members and just know like you can always figure out what that looks like, right? And so when I’ve had hard things come up, like I just am very upfront with the community and I’m like, this is what’s going on, this is why I’m stepping back and this is how we’re going to make it up to you, right? And so either you’re going to get extra time with me later or we’re going to give you something else you didn’t pay for or like there’s always a way where it can still be a win for your members and you can take care of yourself. Like those things always can exist.

Monica Froese [00:59:08]:
I think being really upfront and honest about it is the most important because I went through a really wicked two years and it got to the point by the end of last year it was really hard for me to show up and sometimes I ended up having my right hand person go to a few of the coffee chats chats for me. Once I felt like I was back in a better place and could show up again, we added additional coffee chats on with me for a few months. I did a couple of additional like private podcast episodes and people really just appreciated the honesty and upfrontness instead of me just like I guess ghosting don’t ghost show up and tell them why. And I, I think there was only one person that was kind of upset about it and I actually ended up sending her like an 8 minute loom just like I and people just really.

Liz Stapleton [00:59:56]:
Appreciate the authenticity of it communication and setting expectations. Like if you’re not gonna be able to meet whatever you’d promised this month, like explain it, say why and don’t wait until it’s like past the date where they’re like, hey, weren’t we supposed to get something? Because that is just already starting off on the wrong foot. You know, just be open and honest. Sometimes it’s a tech thing, right? Tell them people get that. Like people be human and they’ll remember you’re a human.

Ruth Poundwhite [01:00:23]:
Also, memberships are like living offers like that when you’re running a monthly recurring thing. Like you can change things and sometimes that’s adding things. And sometimes you might realize I don’t have capacity to do this month on month and you might have to take something away. If people are annoyed, they can cancel. That’s the beauty of a membership. And if they’re on an annual plan, you can figure it out.

Kate Kordsmeier [01:00:43]:
I was gonna say the same thing. Ruth is like one of the reasons I love a membership is because I’m full of ideas as our most entreprene. And I’m always wanting to change things up and try new things. And a membership is like great, I can do it. And yeah, if people are like, I don’t like this anymore. They just don’t renew for the next month. And yet there’s solutions for everything. Agree with the boundaries thing too.

Kate Kordsmeier [01:01:07]:
We take the last two weeks of December off in my, in my company. And I also like if there’s. We have weekly calls in my My coaching membership, unless it’s the fifth Friday or fifth Tuesday of the month. And I don’t do calls on. I just like, you get four calls a month. So if there happens to be a fifth Tuesday, we don’t do calls on those days. And I have literally never once had anybody complain about any of it. Even, like, people who still paid the full membership fee even though we didn’t do anything for the last two months of the year, and they’re just like, well, it’s fine.

Kate Kordsmeier [01:01:44]:
I. I have stuff going on too. And. And they could always cancel and come back later or whatever. So I find that a lot of these problems are things we build up in our heads. Like, oh, no, what will people think? Or people will hate me or they’ll be so mad. And most people don’t even notice.

Dr Destini Copp [01:02:02]:
All right, well, I have that. It’s 2:30. I think we all would love to know, are you enjoying these round tables and would you like to continue them? And if so, you know, what topic would you be interested in? Just, you know, email us back. I know that, you know, you’re probably on a lot of different of our email list here, so email us back and let us know. Like, I’m seriously. Oh, we’re getting a lot of. Yes, they love it, so I enjoy it. And I want to thank everybody for taking time out of your busy schedule today.

Dr Destini Copp [01:02:33]:
And thanks to all the panelists here.

Kate Kordsmeier [01:02:36]:
And tell us while you’re all here in the chat, if since everybody’s saying they love it so much, what topics should we cover next? Next, like, last month was AI, this month was recurring revenue. What would you like to see us cover next while you’re all still here? Traffic. Can you be more specific? Like what kind of traffic? Paid traffic, organic traffic, social media, SEO, all of it.

Liz Stapleton [01:03:03]:
Okay.

Kate Kordsmeier [01:03:04]:
Turning leads into sales, engaging your audience. Organic, social, organic. Making more sales.

Monica Froese [01:03:17]:
What about an ads one? I feel like ads is always such a good topic.

Kate Kordsmeier [01:03:22]:
Everyone’s so afraid of ads. Everyone just says, that’s why we should do it.

Sage Grayson [01:03:29]:
Kate, I know you and I have talked about daily sales before.

Liz Stapleton [01:03:31]:
Love to.

Monica Froese [01:03:33]:
Oh, that’s a good one.

Dr Destini Copp [01:03:34]:
That is a good one. I like that topic. Daily sales. Business planning for New Year. Suze, I like that one.

Liz Stapleton [01:03:40]:
That’d be good.

Kate Kordsmeier [01:03:41]:
And I think y’, all, you can see like. And somebody commented. I’m sorry, I can’t remember who it was that. One of the cool things about these roundtables is that we don’t always agree on how to do things. And there’s you know, a million ways to eat an ice cream cone. And so we get to show you some of what’s working for us. And. Oh, that didn’t work for me, but I liked this.

Kate Kordsmeier [01:03:59]:
And so, you know, while Sage and I have been really focused on daily sales the last couple of years, like, Faith is saying, oh, I don’t care about daily sales. I’m looking at the bottom, bottom line of the last 12 months. And so I think there’s different ways we could talk about just, you know, sales in general, maybe even financial tracking or, like, how we set financial goals and metrics and, you know, how we measure them and. And all of that.

Faith Mariah [01:04:23]:
I think the different perspectives, too, is what makes this group so valuable to me. Right. Because it’s easy for us to get, like, in our own little bubbles of how we do things. And I love that we’re all. All successful and that all of us have completely different goals and business models. And I just think it goes to show you get to do it however you want, and that’s what I love about being entrepreneur.

Kate Kordsmeier [01:04:46]:
So everything works. What works for you?

Dr Destini Copp [01:04:50]:
I agree, Sue. So many topics.

Kate Kordsmeier [01:04:53]:
That’s why we need your help, because we’re like, gosh, what do we. What should we talk about? But I kind of like what Monica’s saying. Ads. Because people are afraid of it. And so we can show you that it’s actually not that scary. And the fastest way to grow your email list.

Sage Grayson [01:05:08]:
That means I’m gonna have to get my ad set up before our next panel.

Kate Kordsmeier [01:05:12]:
Perfect.

Dr Destini Copp [01:05:15]:
All right, well, thanks so much and have a great rest of your day, everybody.

Ruth Poundwhite [01:05:20]:
Thank you so much for listening to another episode of Soulful Sales. If you have a moment to rate and review, know that it really does make a difference. And if you’d like to carry on the conversation, then you can connect with me on Instagram at Ruth Pound White. Sign up to my newsletter@ruth poundwhite.com forward/newsletter or my personal favorite, join me inside the low ticket membership@ruthpoundwhite.com membership and keep doing what you’re doing because your work really does matter.