Originally published in March 2024, when I announced that I would be closing the Confident ELT Freelancer Collective later that year.
Having a successful membership is the dream for a lot of people. And there’s a lot to be said for it in business terms. First and foremost, of course, there’s the recurring income. Notice that I do NOT say passive income. More on that later!
When I made the decision to close my membership, the Confident ELT Freelancer Collective, it was bringing in about £1,800 a month in a pretty reliable way. My ‘churn’, to use the industry term, or the number of people leaving each month, was actually very low, and more than half the members had been there since the beginning, two years earlier.
It was also a great way of serving people who weren’t planning to join my group programme, Designed to Flourish. Some were very early on in their businesses and didn’t feel ready to make that kind of investment. Others already had things set up pretty well, or ran different kinds of freelance businesses, such as writers and editors working for ELT publishers.
The membership was deliberately affordable, with £175 giving people lifetime access to my self-study foundational course, the Roadmap, plus six months in the Collective.
So, recurring income, loyal members, a reasonably accessible price point, and people getting value from what I was offering. Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?
Why on earth would I decide to close it?
Why I decided to close my membership
It certainly wasn’t because I’d got fed up with the people in it. There were some amazing members, and those who were actively involved constantly delighted me with the progress they were making.
One member had joined the previous November after moving back to Europe and starting her business from scratch. She seemed to be posting about a new client almost every week! (I told her she probably needed to put her prices up ;))
Another had taken a while to warm up to the idea of being active on social media and was genuinely shocked when being a little more visible on LinkedIn brought her two new clients, her first ever through social media.
So, people were getting results, and I loved seeing that happen.
However, I was also becoming increasingly aware of something else. The biggest and most consistent results were generally coming from members who had also been through Designed to Flourish.
And I don’t think that was a coincidence.
There are an awful lot of moving parts that need to come together to build a successful freelance business. You need to identify the right niche, which is a LOT more than simply deciding to teach IELTS or work with IT professionals. You need to develop an offer that helps those particular clients get results, while also being financially viable and sustainable for you.
Then there’s working out what your potential clients need to hear, how to communicate the value of what you do, where to find those people and how to develop a marketing and sales strategy that actually works for your particular business.
And, crucially, you need to put all of those pieces together.
A self-study course can give you information, frameworks and exercises to work through. Group coaching can also help people make progress and get unstuck. But there are limits to how much individual attention you can provide in a relatively low-cost membership, especially when everyone’s business is different.
There was also the issue of price and commitment. I’ve noticed, both in my own behaviour and in working with clients, that when we pay relatively little for something, it’s surprisingly easy to deprioritise it. I’ve certainly done this myself plenty of times! You sign up for a low-cost course or membership because it sounds really useful, but because you haven’t invested very much, there’s no great urgency to actually do anything with it. Before you know it, months have gone by and you’ve barely scratched the surface.
When you’ve made a more substantial investment, there’s generally a lot more skin in the game. You’re much more likely to make time for the work, show up to sessions and actually implement what you’re learning. Of course, there are exceptions in both directions, and paying more doesn’t guarantee results. But I do think the level of investment can make a significant difference to how seriously people prioritise the process.
And so, although there were exceptions, I was beginning to feel that I wasn’t serving everyone in the membership as well as I could, or as well as some of them actually needed.
That was an uncomfortable realisation, because one of the main reasons I’d started the Collective was to make business support accessible to people who couldn’t afford my more intensive programme.
But wanting to help everyone isn’t necessarily the best basis for deciding what to offer.
The other main reason for my decision
And that brings me to the second big reason for closing the membership.
I needed to know when to draw the line and stop spreading myself way too thin.
I constantly teach this stuff to my clients, and then allow my own people-pleasing tendencies to stop me following my own advice. Sound familiar?!
At the time, there were around 150 people in the membership. And while I genuinely enjoyed running it, there was an enormous amount of work involved.
There were all the small but sometimes urgent questions to deal with, responding to people in the Facebook group, finding guest speakers, planning and delivering training and coaching sessions, and organising mini challenges.
Individually, none of those things necessarily seemed like a huge amount of work. But together they added up to a LOT.
And because I cared about the members and wanted them to have a good experience, it was very easy to find myself spending more and more time on the Collective.
Ever since I’d started it, my work-life balance had more or less gone out of the window.
Passive income it was not.
This is something I think gets overlooked when people talk about memberships as a brilliant business model. Yes, there’s the attraction of knowing that a certain amount of money will be coming in each month. And yes, once you’ve created the core resources, you may not need to keep developing new training all the time.
But if you’re offering a genuine community, ongoing support and access to your expertise, that comes with expectations and responsibilities. And the more successful the membership becomes, the greater those demands can be.
Of course, you can design a membership differently, with fewer live sessions, more self-study resources or tighter boundaries around support. But you need to think very carefully about what you’re promising, how much time it will take to deliver, and whether the income justifies that commitment.
In my case, I decided that I needed to pull back and focus on the parts of my business where I felt I could make the biggest difference.
That meant putting more of my time and energy into Designed to Flourish, developing other training and resources, and continuing to grow my YouTube channel.
It also meant accepting that I couldn’t keep offering everything to everyone.
And that was probably the hardest part.
Sometimes a successful offer is still the wrong offer
I think there’s a tendency in business to assume that if something is working, you should keep doing it. Particularly if it’s bringing in reliable income and your clients are happy.
And, of course, you shouldn’t abandon a successful offer on a whim.
But there are other things to consider beyond the revenue it generates.
How much time does it take to deliver? How much energy does it demand? Does it support the other parts of your business, or is it constantly competing with them for your attention? Are you able to give clients the kind of support they really need? And, perhaps most importantly, is this something you actually want to keep doing?
Looking back, I could see that I’d created something valuable, but that it wasn’t necessarily the best model for me or for the people I most wanted to help.
That didn’t make the membership a failure. Far from it. It had served a purpose, helped lots of people and taught me an enormous amount about what my clients needed.
But it was time to do things differently.
Why I wanted to share this
I believe in being transparent about the decisions I make in my business, including the ones that involve changing my mind.
There’s so much business advice out there that makes building a successful business sound like a journey from A to Z, with each step taking you neatly closer to your final destination.
In my experience, it’s much more like going from A to E, then back to C, perhaps taking a detour through H before realising that what you actually want is somewhere else entirely.
And that’s fine.
As you gain experience, you learn more about your clients, what they need, what you enjoy and what you want your business to look like. Sometimes that means developing a new offer. Sometimes it means changing something that isn’t working. And sometimes it means letting go of something that’s working perfectly well, because it no longer fits with your priorities.
Closing the Collective wasn’t an easy decision, and I certainly didn’t take it lightly. But ultimately, I felt it was the right thing to do.
And perhaps that’s the question we should be asking ourselves more often when we’re making decisions about our businesses. Not simply, ‘Is this working?’ but also, ‘Is this still what I want to be doing?’
Is your business model still working for you?
If you’re questioning whether your current services, pricing or business model are really giving you the income and lifestyle you want, you might find my Business Strategy and Growth Resource Centre useful.
I’ve brought together articles, videos and practical advice to help freelance language professionals make more intentional decisions about their businesses, explore different ways of working and build something that’s sustainable for the long term.