WHY I DECIDED TO CLOSE MY SIX FIGURE MEMBERSHIP

Today I want to discuss the decision and the factors that contributed to this quite major decision for the Own Your Hustle company.

So settle in and as always, I vow to be very open, transparent with you throughout this process. And isn't that just entrepreneurship at times, we'll be sailing through the creation of new products and ideation, and really diving into beautiful times in our businesses where we can create download, drop in, bring the thing to life. Other times we are really being asked to take a step back and to decide what parts of our business no longer feels completely aligned.

For the greater part of my business to this date, there hasn't necessarily been a really major financial decision that I've made such as closing down a six figure product it's always been more energetic which is arguably also highly linked to financials or changing a niche, deciding to draw certain boundaries or deciding not to work with certain people pricing.

So all of it is the energetic side of things and certainly also the operational side, but now it's a very tangible thing where we have a product - The Own Your Hustle Membership - that is consistently bringing in this beautiful baseline of income every single month. But it came to a point where it was time to close off this chapter as it came to a very natural ending and opening up to some new, exciting, adventurous possibilities.

This membership journey of mine in particular has had a big three year arc. In my first year of this membership, it really was all about building and creating and changing things up. I actually changed the title a few times for my membership. I started off with it being called Licensed to Hustle and after that it had another iteration and then another iteration and we finally landed on Own Your Hustle: The Membership. But even back then, if I think about it, I was never really completely crystal clear on how this membership would actually evolve. But I knew that it would take on a life of its own and trusted the universe to bring me the most aligned members and to bring me ideas and inspiration for a membership and a platform like this that was definitely needed.

For any of you who are considering starting a membership or are growing a membership, I'm sure you're under no illusion that it is a lot of work.

There is a lot of time involved with creating every single month, keeping your members engaged, cultivating conversation, bringing in that level of inspiration and also transformation. And this was the part if I were to really put my finger on it, it was the transformation piece that felt quite frustrating for me at times, and also frustrating in terms of tuning into what my members truly needed and wanted in order to gain this real understanding of what it took to grow an early stage business.

The Own Your Hustle Membership was really created to help individuals step into their longer term businesses. So whether that meant leaving their nine to five and really diving into business for the first time or really growing the roots of their business so they had a strong foundation, they had something that felt really, really good, so they could continue to go on and scale. So for the better part of my membership, I'd always spoken about the transformation being that you could learn how to grow and cultivate $5,000 months in your business through all of the workshops, all of the masterclasses that I had put together, including workbooks, including live Q&A every single month, including Q&A threads that me and my co-coaches would jump into. And then from time to time also having some guest experts come in to help with this transformation.

So, coming back to this first year, this sort of changing and flipping and switching and creating was really all about finding the groove and finding the vibration of what also felt really good for both Michael and I to create for our members.

In the second year, we started to really invest into the growth and connecting deeply with our members.

So the growth of our members and really understanding what they needed. And what I'm most proud of with this membership, it's going to make me cry because like I said, at the start, it's not an easy decision to not only close down a product and if you want to commoditize it, you can, but there are human beings in this membership that I truly and deeply care for and that I love so much, from the bottom of my heart. I've really seen them grow because my members have been so loyal. They've been in the membership since License to Hustle days, year after year, they're just renewing and renewing. And you know, they jump into this community as though they really truly are connected with one another.

A lot of them have gone into collaborate with each other and really know each other, even though we're based all over the world. At the same time, I've got a huge community based here in Australia here in Melbourne so I always see pictures of my members catching up and meeting up with one another. Obviously not currently in these times, but certainly pre coronavirus. That just brought so much joy into my life.

During this time of investing into the growth of my members, every single month I would show up asking them - What do you want to hear from me? What do we want to learn this month? I'm going to create this bespoke masterclass made just for you. Other times I would have a really strong, intuitive pull towards making a class that they really needed, but it was one of those situations where they didn't know that they needed it until they found out that they needed it type of thing.

So 55 masterclasses is what I ended up creating more than a hundred hours put into not just delivering the masterclasses, but scoping it out, editing it, creating workbooks, creating the front tiles, uploading it into Kartra, updating it when it needed updating and promoting the masterclasses itself. Over 100 hours minimum has been deeply invested into the growth of my members. We covered all sorts of topics that we wanted to, everything that would help my clients get to their first $5,000 a month and beyond.

In the third year, which is where we are now, it really did come to a bit of a crossroads.

There was definitely some level of indication that I was already maxing out with the content that I could create. I mean, 55 hours to get to $5,000 months. You think to yourself, if you can't do it off that, then we need to do private coaching. Or that perhaps is another modality that you can really gain that transformation. But it started to feel in 2020, like I was almost running out of ideas and inspiration, or I was just recycling old masterclasses or updating old masterclasses and uplifting the training, which is always beneficial and it's always great ... But I found that there was this greater desire that was underlying it all.

This was of course blending the desire of spirituality and business and this was a really huge missing component in my membership.

Truthfully, when I started this three years ago, I was all strategy. I was all hustle. I was all operational and thinking about what I needed to do and push and create and churn out and be in the grind in order to have my desires come to life since then Own Your Hustle has taken on such a different definition of the phrase.

Owning your hustle to me is all about that flow, finding the right strategy for you and owning it through the spiritual tools and the spiritual practice that you have - which grounds us into really scaling out purpose led and authentically grown businesses.

The spiritual component in the Own Your Hustle Membership was maybe 3-4 masterclasses out of the 55. I don't know why I never felt fully comfortable making spiritual content for this membership group. It's not like they weren't open to it. It's certainly not as though my current members, aren't moving across to another product, which I'll talk to you guys all about which is coming up in on the 1st of October.

Now that I think back, it really was an energetic split that I had in my mind of the membership being all about strategy and everything else having spiritual goodness sort of swirled through it. And it wasn't just for me, I didn't feel good to also tack spirituality at the end of the membership, almost like - oh, I'm just going to attach it onto the modules and it's just going to be a new arm of the membership that I'm going to build out for the rest of this year.

I know this to be true now it deserved its own space. Spirituality in business, linking that to the strategy - required its own platform.

It certainly wasn't just a guest appearance or something I would talk about from time to time. The calling for me was so strong that I needed a place to create freely and to have that outlet of spirituality in business.

So I created the course Richuals in Bu$iness.

This was such an amazing, amazing course. The response was absolutely overwhelming. We had in the end, just under 100 people register for Richuals in Bu$iness. Every single time I went live, there were 30-50 people on the live-stream itself, depending on what time I went live. The completion rate as well in the backend of how many people watch the live-streams, did the workbooks, did the meditations - it's the highest completion rate that I've seen in a very long time in my courses outside of my masterminds, of course.

This was just an incredible sign from the universe. What the pure data was saying to me around this is what your audience are really hungry for. It's time.

The Own Your Hustle Membership was naturally beginning to slow down. What I mean by this in essence was I stopped promoting it. I stopped sharing that the membership was open. It actually always had this open door strategy to it. I didn't really feel aligned to the open/close, like the real sort of Stu McLaren model, I wanted it to just be open and readily available for my clients to join at any time also because the membership was not a key income stream for us. It was a beautiful one, but it wasn't a key one.

If you do have a membership and you want it to be your key form or at least one of your primary platforms of how you deliver, there's so many merits in the open/close, and I did a podcast episode with my Own Your Hustle Inner Circle client Kate MacDonald about memberships and she's such a queen of launching in particular low ticket programs like a membership itself. So I'll link the podcast episode below if you want to have a listen to that as well.

But anyway - I just stopped promoting it. I didn't stop serving my members. That was definitely always on, my members will testify to when I show up, it's so full of energy, I'm answering Q&A questions, I'm in the membership every single day, checking the Facebook group, but I just didn't feel it was time to really exponentially grow the membership.

I was actually talking to a lot of my girlfriends in business about this shout out to Erica Kramer, Taylor Ray, Erin May Henry. And I was just saying to each and every one of them as well as my friend and coach Lindsey Schroeder - What do I do with this membership What do I actually do with it?

All of them had really different opinions on what to do, but effectively deep, deep, deep down inside, it felt like it was coming to a natural end. I was looking for some new answers, more of what I wanted to hear that felt into alignment. And isn't this always the case? Don't you think? You always have the answers, you always have the answers.

If right now you're in a stage where you're looking for validation, you're looking for the signs and you're looking for the answers:

1. Just put your hand right now on your heart.
2. Take a big deep breath in as Adrienne would say from Yoga with Adrienne, (I freaking love that woman). She always say, take a deep breath in full of love and exhale all of your love. I think I'm saying it wrong, but it's like breathe in love and exhale love, breath in love and exhale love.

From that place you will find so much clarity because with love comes gratitude with gratitude comes immense clarity.

So the answer I was looking for was it's time to close the membership and it's time for a natural new beginning.

It feels so good and it feels so incredibly rewarding to say that this chapter has closed in our business with a lot of love and a lot of deep gratification and appreciation for our members for making the community space what it is. I will always, always cherish this part of my business and how much I love you guys. And I know it's not the end because a lot of you said that you'll continue on in the new form, but it feels like it kind of takes me back in reminiscence (is that a word?) of where it all began and where it all started and having it as my first recurring income baby and product in my business that I was so fucking proud of and growing it to the point where we've had hundreds and hundreds of members come in and out of this membership and the incredible feedback that's also come from it as well.

But I do want to spend some time talking about the learnings that I've taken away from this experience and playing around with the name of course being one of them, testing the pricing too. I went from $33 to $55 to $97. And then I did a $47 promo in the first month and you would click over to $97 after that. And I always backed my pricing. In fact, a lot of my clients, my members who came in at different price points have always said, 'Wow, there is so much value in what you have to offer'. And the higher pricing for me, it was actually the most successful. Successful in sort of a pure analytical perspective - those that paid the higher amount stayed the longest. How interesting is that? I certainly had members who came in at $33 three years ago, and they're still paying $33 today and they've stayed and they've really been such a huge part of the community. But those that came in at $97 mostly stayed for over one year and I also had a lot of pay in full's who just bought the yearly membership or lifetime membership and things like that. So we definitely had a lot of different iterations to pricing.

One thing I found in the learning component was with the $47 promotion that I did, where you got the first month at $47 as a trial, and then you would move on to $97. It did for the most part, and I will say this with a lot of clarity, for the most part there was a limiting mentality to those who consumed at that level. It was almost a 'I need to do all of the masterclasses. I need to do all 55 masterclasses within one month and suck it all in and stop the membership so that I didn't have to pay the $97. And I'm going to get as much value as I can for $47. Then I'm going to just disconnect and I'm not going to pay anything more and I feel like I've gotten the most of it'.

That to me just felt fundamentally misaligned to the type of ideal client that I wanted to attract work with nurture take to a further level and I also noticed that those that came in at the trial price didn't connect in with the community. This was always a really big telltale sign for me that those who were in it more so to suck up the information like a sponge, they were craving the knowledge because obviously to them, it was about 'If I have the knowledge, I can make $5,000 months'.

But for those of us that have dive deeper into entrepreneurship, you will know that the knowledge is one aspect, the community and the accountability and the connection aspect to your purpose, your mission, your values, and your vision is what creates long lasting change in your business. It is also what creates the income desires that you have.

So in this particular case, in the membership, it was $5,000 months. So those that stuck around in the membership saw greater results and saw so much more change with their businesses. Often hitting $5,000 months, I would get DM's saying 'I did it. I hit my first $5,000 month! Ruby, thank you so much for your help!' or saying things like 'I'm so close. I'm so close. I'm getting there with every single month. Thank you so much for that masterclass, it really helped refresh my memory, but what also helped me was knowing that others were on the same journey'.

So in closing the membership a factor that both Michael and I debated about was that this product was bringing in six figures into our business annually. Should we close it? Should we modify it? Should we evolve it? But all the answers that were outside of closing, it just didn't feel right.

We went down all the pathways of - Do we change the pricing? Do we change the model? Do we change how much access someone gets on the $47 trial? Do we make it compulsory for them to join the Facebook group and if they don't then can we effectively cut off their membership? All the possible aspects that we could have gone down we went down and we had all the butcher's paper up and sticky notes everywhere.

But all paths led to it coming to a natural end.

It's sorta felt like doing everything you could to fix a relationship that fundamentally didn't have any big problems, but there just wasn't that spark anymore. There wasn't that level of inspiration.

Have you ever been in a relationship like that where - it's not nothing's wrong with it, but you've just naturally felt a chapter's closing? That's what it felt like with the membership!

Another factor that really played a huge part in NOT closing it down was as mentioned earlier, our members are loyal as fuck. We had members stay for three plus years. I love these guys so much and it was just a really heartbreaking decision. I also held a lot of guilt around it of - If I close this membership, am I also closing off a lifeline for my members? Am I closing off a level of support? And of course we know that's completely untrue.

There's so much out there so much that I offer and it's not like I'm saying, there's nothing else I have to offer you guys. There's always a continuation. The Richuals in Bu$iness, part of things really felt like it was in flow. Spirituality and connection to higher self and teaching how that links to your funnels, how that links to your nurture sequence, how that links to your Facebook ads, how that links to your personal brand, all of that linking the spiritual element to what we do in business felt so good. It felt so inflow. I could definitely feel my energy shift from the pure 100% strategic work to helping my clients better understand that the spiritual practice is the foundation of having successful strategies.

So the next step from here was to really take aligned action and I swiftly communicated this with my members. As soon as I energetically decided it was coming to an end. We spent a couple of weekends ago going through everybody's membership, everybody was on a slightly different package or price point, some people came in at $33, $97 and Michael and I made this big data spreadsheet of how we would communicate to each and every one of them. And it was very personalized. Every single email I had written personally to our 120 members. I wanted to really give that time and that energy that love and imparting my gratefulness and my thankfulness for each and every one of them.

That might not be totally viable for those of you that have much bigger memberships than me, but I wrote to 120 members and there was a part of me that sort of thought - Am I overdoing it? Do you really have to do this? But it felt good. It felt abundant to do it this way. I also went ahead and communicated with the Facebook group and really made sure that we had a response from every single person and made an effort to follow up, to follow through to make sure that nobody had any key questions about closing off the membership. And that is so important.

I don't know if you're anything like me (maybe it's the Sagittarius in me) where I can just sort of energetically go, okay, we're done here. Bye bye. See you later. And I can quite swiftly in my centaur energy just prance off with my half horse body into the sunset and be like, I'm onto something new!!!! Instead, close it off with intention. That is something that I've really brought into my practice. And I'm very grateful for my emotional side, my Pisces moon, that's all about the heart and the caring and the true connection at spirit level to each and every one of these beings.

So thank you for a beautiful era and a beautiful season. Everybody that's been in the membership and I just really want to extend out my deep, deep, deep gratefulness for trusting me as your membership coach and your mentor and someone who truly cares for your business.

So, next evolution. Next evolution. This was something that once again I was so unsure of and I had zero strategy and no intention at the start of it all.

When I had launched Richuals in Bu$iness, it truly was a 33 day course that I wanted to put out there to give everyone a spiritual boost and a injection of authentic truth and a connection to the divine, finding that lifeline to spirit and really listening to what intuition meant in business. Even using the angel numbers, 33, all of that just really felt so good. And on the last day of the course, I had my coach as a special guest, Lindsay Schroeder from Arizona, come in and do an EFT tapping with me. For those of you that don't know EFT tapping is such a powerful tool to release and to move energy through your body, to mostly step into a new version of you or move through some limiting beliefs.

I gave everyone a really transparent look into what some of my limiting beliefs were at this point in time and what I felt deserving of, but at the same time, didn't feel deserving of. And as we were tapping into my limiting beliefs, what came through so loud and clear was this is not the end for Richuals in Bu$iness. This is just the beginning. And I heard the voice and I thought, what the hell is that about? This is literally our last call. I don't understand what that message is. I just sort of parked it and then I heard it again, 'Say it out loud that you'll do an additional live-stream and that this is not the end'. So I listened to higher self and I said it on the live-stream, ' I'm going to do an additional Q&A in the Facebook group. This is not the end. And I'm not quite sure why I'm saying this, but I'm saying this'.

I used those exact words and everybody in the group was like, yes! This is not the end. Then as we closed off the 33 days, I sat down with a really big piece of paper. I love my A1 sheets of paper and took out my four year old son's crayons and started to just write. And what I wrote was:

The Richuals in Bu$iness Membership is here made for the coach and service-based entrepreneur consultant, ready to embrace a deepest spiritual practice in their business to scale out and to help more in the world from an authentic code and from a heart centered place.

From here, I looked at this sheet of paper and I just thought, where did that come from? I am literally closing off the Own Your Hustle Membership. Why are you asking me to open another membership? Are you serious? And yet at the same time, it flowed from this Blue Indigo to be very exact.

Indigo crayon, which for those of you that are into chakras and color therapy, you will know Indigo represents the third eye. It represents seeing without seeing, it represents diving into the divine.

And I knew that as I was writing this out, it was exactly the place that I was meant to be at.

So my loves, The Richuals in Bu$iness Membership is opening as of the 1st of October, 2020. It is a brand new space where we can embrace where we are at in business right now, and seamlessly with grace and with flow and with ease, bring in our spiritual practice from all walks of life and being able to consolidate everything that we've learned from a spiritual perspective, a strategy point of view, sharing with one another in a deep community over a longer period of time to just fucking level up from this space.

It's such a beautiful community. I can already see it where I'll dive in, I'll be sharing a lot from my space around what strategies are working for me as I'm growing my business, but also the downloading just like I have with Richuals in Bu$iness of how I receive messages from the divine, how I'm journaling, what crystals I'm using my journey with, yoga, essential oils, EFT, listening to my highest self tapping into my clairvoyancy, looking into the psychic world, bringing in amazing guests who can also share their modalities of oracle cards and meditation with the world and having a beautiful spiritual playground where we can really pick up some different tools and different playful toys that feels really good for our strategies and diving more into that really authentic way of being in our businesses and owning our hustle from this place.

I am also so pleased to announce that I will be having on board three co-coaches inside of their Richuals and Bu$iness membership:

1. My husband and my co-founder, Michael, who is such a powerhouse when it comes to strategy. He delivers from such a knowing from that solar plexus energy of internal authority and helping you do the same.
2. My personal coach, mentor and, I often joke, my spiritual shaman Lindsay Schroeder of Our and Are who's there to really fluff me up before I go live or up level and do something big in my business. I'm so excited. Lindsay is going to come in and co-coach with me and deliver some really big, hard hitting changes that come from the inside out, from your soul into your spirit and into your very being.
3. Yashica Lind from Yashica's Intuition. She is my personal natal chart reader, astrologer, and also a personal mastery coach who can really help us draw from the energetics of what has already been written in the stars for us, but also executing freewill through personal mastery and delivering that power throughout business.

So if you are ready for this next level and Richuals in Bu$iness is calling to you, I am so excited to welcome you my love! The link is here and below and it is at such an affordable and beautiful price point and I asked for your commitment over a longer period of time in this membership, because I am not available for those of you that are only wanting short term transformation. This is deep set, deep rooted change that we can make that will help us invite all of the abundance, all of the income flow, all of the right align clients, all of that energy management, so that we can continue to build and build and build on what is such a big part of the change and the healing that this world is waiting for.

I am really truly airing this from such a beautiful place of flow and this is me writing truly from such a place of deep in and knowing that this is not only the next evolution for my business, it is also the next evolution for yours.

So I shall see you on the inside of The Richuals in Bu$iness Membership. I am excited. I have giddy. I have butterflies in my belly. My intuition is saying, this is going to be such an incredible, huge space that we're holding for one another. So come and join. I love you all so much and remember that you can absolutely own your hustle.

xxx

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