Every year, the same conversation happened at renewal time. Members who had been enthusiastic joiners — who had attended events, made connections, praised the community — quietly didn't renew. When the team followed up, the feedback was never hostile. It was worse than that. It was polite. "We got what we needed from it."
The founder had heard the internal explanation so many times it had started to sound true: the product needed work, the events needed to be better, the value proposition needed sharpening. Except the events were selling out. The feedback scores were strong. New members were joining at a healthy rate.
The churn wasn't a signal that things were broken. It was a signal that the model had a ceiling nobody was naming out loud and that no amount of better marketing content was going to fix it.
Rather than keep adjusting tactics, the leadership team brought in independent eyes and committed to acting on whatever the evidence showed, even if it was uncomfortable.
The exit feedback pointed in one direction: members were leaving for other network groups that suited them better. The logical response was to improve the network — better events, better curation, better competitor analysis. The team had been trying exactly that.
The diagnostic work pointed somewhere different. The members who left weren't lying — but they weren't giving the real reason either, because they probably didn't know it themselves. The issue wasn't that a competitor's network was better. It was that any network, however good, has a natural ceiling. Year one, a new member attended events, met the right people, made useful connections. By year two, they'd met everyone worth meeting. The reason to renew had quietly expired — and no amount of network improvement was going to change that, because the product was working exactly as designed.
The leadership team sat with that finding. It would have been easy to push back, to ask for more data, to commission another piece of research. Instead, they made the harder call: if the model has a ceiling, build something that doesn't.
While the structural question was being addressed, a second problem came into focus. Every event was being treated as a one-off. Promoted reactively. No consistent thread between what went out on social, what went in the email, and what appeared on the website. Sponsors were renewing on goodwill rather than evidence — because nobody had ever shown them the numbers.
The team built a different operating model: campaigns planned in advance, audience-segmented so that independent consultants and corporate partners received messaging built for their specific situation, and a post-event reporting framework that gave sponsors something concrete to take back to their own boards.
The result was not just better results — it was a team that stopped spending its energy reacting to the next event and started spending it building the next stage of the business.
The question that had haunted every renewal conversation — what do I actually get from staying? — needed a real answer, not a better articulation of the existing one.
They launched a consulting service built on the very network they had spent years assembling: access to 150+ senior practitioners who could deliver real projects, provide interim expertise, and solve the problems members had come to the network to discuss in the first place. Not introductions. Outcomes.
For corporate partners, the calculus changed entirely. They weren't sponsoring a series of events. They were embedded in a professional community that could staff their next regulatory project, their next digital transformation, their next leadership gap.
Renewal stopped being a question of whether the membership was worth it. It became a question of whether they could afford not to renew.
Erica really helped shape the business strategy, driven the development of our brand across the marketplace and led on our many different product development initiatives. She has used her deep knowledge of the theory and practice of marketing to transform the brand and the overall business to great effect. She is a terrific sounding board for my business strategy thinking. Founder and CEO