Think building a membership means adding 80 hours a month to your workload? Think again. In this episode, I’m sharing how I created passive income for my coaching practice with the Establish Yourself® Action Club—a highly profitable yet low-lift membership for coaches and consultants that brought in five figures with under 40 members last year.

🎯 You’ll Discover:

• How to structure live group sessions to fit your lifestyle
• Why ditching social media may actually boost member satisfaction
• The role of systems, tools, and team support in scaling seamlessly
• A unique marketing strategy that creates urgency without extra effort

📝 Next Steps Mentioned:

• Learn more about the Establish Yourself® Action Club ( https://www.greateststorycreative.com/actionclub )
• Connect with Annie on LinkedIn + mention your favorite Muppet! ( https://www.linkedin.com/in/anniefranceschi/ )

Memberships are all the rage. I mean, who wouldn't love the idea of adding more scalable income to your coaching or consulting practice?

But would you love to add another 15 to 20 hours a week? That's 80 hours a month to run and manage that community? Would that be worth your time if you had a small audience of a hundred people or less. Probably not. But hang on. I only spent 46 hours running my community, including marketing, for all of last year. And I made five figures with less than 40 members. So how do I do it differently and profitably? Find out how I strategically built my low lift membership in today's episode.

  Welcome to the Establish Yourself® Podcast, your guide to elevating your brand, offers, and systems as a coach, consultant, or service provider. I'm Annie Franceschi of Greatest Story Creative®. I'm a brand strategist, author, former Disney storyteller, and forever Muppet fan. If you're ready for next level success, we'll get clear on your brand, Package Your process, and streamline your systems so you can land quality clients, boost profit, and make time for big dreams in your business and beyond. If you're ready for less confusion and more magic, it's time to establish yourself.

When I was launching my book, Establish Yourself, I wanted to shift to having a more scalable option. At the time, I was teaching a free training called Branding with Annie and I was doing it monthly. And it was great. I called it a consistency container. It was my way of sharing my expertise with the world, but I knew I wanted to go to that next step of having a community, but I didn't want it to take over my life. And as I shared with you, some of the statistics as it can take about 80 hours a month of your time or contractor's time or a mix of both. It was kind of exhausting, right?

I wanted to create a membership, but I really didn't want to spend 80 hours a month on it. Okay. Like, especially not the social media aspect. That was one of the reasons I had put off doing anything sort of like a membership or pay community was I did not want to live on Facebook and I did not want to manage a conversation 24/ 7/ 365.

I mean, I take December off. That's not going to work for me. So I figured out how to make it work for me. And I'm gonna share with you some of the strategies that I use. So if you are interested in having what I would call a low lift membership- an easy, a simple membership that does not require that much time.

It provides a ton of value to my ideal clients. It's an affordable way for me to work with folks. It has brought me, you know, close to $40,000 in revenue since starting it. I've hovered around 40 members, and I still have 16 of the founding members from when the book came out.

So. You know, while I teach my clients how to build smart, confident offers like this, I want to give you five key strategies that I have used personally to make action club success. So whether or not I help you, I want you to consider what you could apply if you were thinking of building some sort of a scalable offer, a scalable membership.

The first thing I think is really important: I set the live sessions per my interest and per my schedule. So one of the reasons I thought for years, I couldn't do a membership was like, well, I don't want to be available all the time. Yeah, that's one of my big boundaries and systems in my business.

I take December off. I have no meetings on certain days, that sort of thing. So I said, well, let me test something. The thing is based on the book and in the first couple of pages of Establish Yourself I talk about how I take December off. Well, If you join Action Club, you will see that I offer 11 sessions a year.

So it's monthly, except for December. And everybody knows why. Right. So if you have a boundary like that, it's okay to put it in. I also only offer one live session per month. That's what works for me. I price the membership accordingly. The second thing I did, which feels really good, there is no Facebook page and no social media component to action club. I felt strongly that having a Facebook page or some sort of community page was way more work than it was worth. When I was developing this, I was part of a $300 a month business networking group. And I found that even in that group, there was next to no engagement. People spending that kind of money-

they still weren't really using the page. I was asking questions and nobody was replying. It was just stressful. And I like did not want to have to manage that or pay my virtual assistant to manage that. It just felt heavy. I've gotten questions over time.

Like, Hey, you know, should we create a community, et cetera? But when I've actually interviewed people in action club, how do you feel about this? Are you okay with the fact that it is a monthly zoom call and access to my vault of tools and templates? And, yes, I actually really like that- it is not a social media thing that I don't have to log in anywhere.

They don't have to talk to people in the same way. People still get to interact and meet and connect at our monthly meetings. So there's still that social component, but there is no social media. And, you know, that personally works really well for me and for a business like this because a lot of my clients hate social media and they really struggle with it just in their businesses.

Right. So if it works for your brand and you hate it too, that might be something that could. It could go, but that's, that's something that actually. It was something I was fearing would be a weakness, but by testing it, I learned it was a strength.

The third thing I do: I delegate a lot of the logistics to my virtual assistant team. I use my virtual assistant team to do things like build out the Vault and run meetings for me. Like when I have a meeting once a month, it's on the first Thursday of every month from 12 to one eST- I will have a member of my team there who will help field questions. And then after the meeting, I hang up, they take it, they put up the recording where it's supposed to go in the vault and I don't have to do anything. We love that, right?

Like, We love that. My time is so valuable. It should be used working with clients. I'm happy to pay my virtual assistant to help me do that. And when I create new trainings, I can send them to my VA team . I have figured out a system of where that stuff goes. Right. I figured out my system and they could just follow the system and they can put it in the vault as easy as I can. Great.

Another thing off my plate. So super, super low lift.

The fourth thing I do is that I have a repeatable session, deck and agenda. So I use the same keynote or PowerPoint presentation every single time we have a meeting. It only takes me about 10 minutes to customize per meeting. So I usually am hopping in.

I'm a big procrastinator. You're going to learn that about me. And consistency is my bottom strength on strength finder. But what I usually will do is on a Thursday mornings. I will hop into the deck and I will look and I will put that together and it takes me about 10 minutes because I don't change a lot of it.

A lot of what I do in those meetings is pretty much Q and A based or what we call magic makeover time. So people can bring their Canva documents and I will live make them over, but I don't have to do a lot for that. Keep it really simple. Keep it really fresh. I also come up with an anecdote from my business that month and that helps keep everything really valuable to stay a part of the membership, but it's not a lot of work for me. So I take a beat to think about what has happened to me in the past month that's a teaching example, something I could share behind the scenes, something I'm thinking about, et cetera.

And I just have a placeholder for it. So I don't have to do fancy slides or anything that saves me so much time.

So we had our biggest revenue growth ever. We welcomed 15 members over the course of the year, but especially in that launch window. I do a once a year, one week public launch, which is actually coming up soon. So you can kind of see how I do that and how I approach it.

So if you have been wanting to scale your services, but you are worried about that time to profit ratio, the idea of spending 80 hours a month of time and money in contractors sounds kind of crazy.

You do not have to do that. You can build it on your own terms. If you want to create a membership, think about how you can simplify it. That's a lot of what we talked about today, whether it was setting live sessions on your schedule, dropping the social media of it all. Having someone else handle logistics. Having a repeatable systems, tools, templates, decks, agenda, not promoting it all the time, but picking a specific time or two in the year to promote it.

I think those things would really help you be smart about your time, which is what we are all about on the Establish Yourself® podcast. So if you want to create a smarter, not harder confident offer like this, that is a sweet spot of mine, and you can actually get direct help from me with personalized feedback at our action club meetings. You can also grab my on-demand resources in the Establish Yourself® Action Club Vault

If you are curious about this, you've heard a lot about the membership, maybe you should come check it out for yourself. I am actually doing my once a week cart open, come and join us time this month. So come check out action club. If you are listening to this and you need help taking action, and you want to see how something like this works and come ask me questions about how to create your own.

So if you're curious about that, be sure to check it out in the show notes or go to greatest story creative.com slash action club. I am so excited to see what you are going to build, especially if it's something fun and low lift with a heck of a lot of action. I'll see you there.

   Hey, do you like surprises? Here comes the show's credits, but just like a Marvel movie, stay to the end so you don't miss something fun I put in just for you. Thanks for tuning in to the Establish Yourself® podcast. I'm Annie Franceschi and I want to hear from you. Follow me on LinkedIn. Share your favorite takeaway from today's episode as a comment on my latest post.

Mention your favorite Muppet in your message so I know you're a fan of the show. And for expert branding help, a free consultation and more resources, visit greateststorycreative. com / slash podcast. Now here it is your moment of magic.  

Here's a fun fact. I know every line of dialogue for The Golden Girls. There are seven seasons of that show and I know just about every joke, just about every line, because that was a show I used to watch with my mom. I'm curious if you have a show that you can do that with, and maybe it has a special memory for you, but for me, Better or worse- it's The Golden Girls.