Episode 15: My Personal 2024 Reflections (& 5 Questions To Ask if You Have a Membership)
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EPISODE DESCRIPTION & RESOURCES:
In this episode of The Membership-Driven Business Podcast, we're getting personal with a year-end reflection and exploring 5 essential questions every membership owner should ask themselves heading into the new year.
We're talking about:
🔹 What to do if traditional year-end planning feels overwhelming to you right now
🔹 How to identify which season your membership is really in (and why this matters more than you think)
🔹 The power of building business assets that work for you year after year
🔹 Why the struggle you're facing might actually be pointing you in the right direction
🔹 How one decisive change can create a positive ripple effect across your entire business
Episode highlights:
🔸 The hidden value of consolidation and recovery seasons in your business
🔸 Why your membership is meant to change (and how to embrace this evolution)
🔸 How to identify your most valuable assets from the past year… and more!
Links and Resources:
🌱 NEW 🌱 Mini-VIP Day for Membership Owners: themissingink.co/irresistible
Contact Natalie: themissingink.co/connect
See how you can work with Natalie: themissingink.co/services
Follow on Social Media:
Instagram: instagram.com/natalietaylor.co
Threads: threads.net/@natalietaylor.co
Facebook: facebook.com/natalietaylor.co
PREFER TO READ? HERE’S THE TRANSCRIPT:
I don’t know about you, but I’m at a point where the idea of intensively planning my year or doing a big review feels completely unappealing. I don’t want to do it. Keep that workbook away from me!
And I say this as a person who LOVES to dream big and plot out plans and envision what’s possible — thinking about the future comes really naturally to me — but please, do not give me another worksheet or workbook to review my year. It’s too much pressure. I don’t have the answers. I’m tired. I’ve lived enough to know that not every year is going to be my Best Year Ever and I’m OK with that.
Maybe you feel a little bit of this too…? Like you want to be intentional about your year ahead but you know the answers aren’t waiting for you in a workbook with 106 questions and 26 sections and… you just want to get to work without overplanning or overthinking?
If so, I think you’ll like today’s episode. It’s a little more personal than I normally do, which feels appropriate given that we’re in a new year and also, I’m celebrating a mini-milestone for the podcast — we’re at 15 episodes now, and hey, you’ve got to take your wins where you can get them.
I’ll share a little bit about what happened for me in 2024, what my takeaways were, and 5 specific questions you can ask yourself to reflect on your membership in the year ahead.
You don’t need to sit down with a pen and paper for this, unless you want to. Maybe just pop me in your earbuds, take a walk, do something around the house you’ve been putting off, and see if anything comes up while you listen. We’re keeping it low pressure for this one.
THE REFLECTION
So, what did happen with me this year? (I’m so glad you asked.)
Let’s work backwards: it’s the first week of January and I’m officially back at my desk after 3 weeks off. My time off did not exactly go as I had hoped it would.
It started on a high — my fiance and I celebrated our anniversary, we had an amazing weekend away eating lots of great food, went to see Cirque du Soleil… and then he got sick, which means he missed out on Christmas with our families. Then I got sick on the night of Christmas, which put me out of commission right through to the new year.
Of course I was still able to use this time productively, and by productively I mean watching four entire seasons of a TV show while barely leaving the couch. (Slow Horses on Apple TV, in case you’re curious. Highly recommend it.)
It felt a bit like the universe’s way of keeping me humble after what was, for the most part, a pretty successful year for me. And — for the first year in probably ever — I don’t mean success in terms of the money I made. In fact this was a relatively subdued year for me in terms of revenue, which, looking back, I now know was required for me to make the changes I’ll tell you about in this episode.
THE SHIFT
So 2024 was a big year for me, in that I completely changed up my service model and who I work with. Until 2023, I worked with membership owners and also people who didn’t have a membership, but taught courses, group programs, masterminds… and I provided a mix of consulting and done-for-you copywriting services to help those people have better launches and grow their sales.
As 2023 came to a close, I felt that it was time for a change of pace. I also wanted to get really specific who I am best positioned to help at this stage of my business and as a professional, going on 8 years of doing this work. I was ready to lean into the kinds of businesses I loved helping the most. It was time to embrace my role as a strategist and let go of all the “doing” I’d been doing for clients.
Memberships have always been really special offers for me to work with. Over the years, some of my biggest client wins have been with memberships — and I think there’s so much scope for what we can do with them, and the potential they create within a business (that’s what this whole podcast is about, after all).
So I got serious about working exclusively with membership owners, began developing services just for them, and changed my entire position and message to speak to those people — people I had already been working with behind the scenes since 2017 — so I could attract them into my world through my marketing and eventually, this podcast and my blog, which I launched this past year.
All of this sounds great in theory. I made a decision, I made a change, got more specific, and now I’m working in a way I love: yay!
Sure, that’s the 15 word summary, but the reality of how my year looked and felt was so different.
THE SEASON
And that brings me to the first question I want to ask you, which is: looking back, do you know which season your membership was in over the last year?
It can be really hard to know when you’re in it, but sometimes when you’re out of the woods and looking back, the answer is so clear.
I was kind of in denial about this, but I spent pretty much the entire first half of 2024 in consolidation and recovery mode. I was building a foundation. I was trying things out. I was doing a lot of stuff but there wasn’t a lot to show for it on the surface.
We can often write this off and say well, you must have just been wasting time. But I wasn’t. I was still working with clients, I was designing new offerings, I was rolling out some initial experiments with my marketing and positioning and seeing what “sticked”... and yet it all felt SO SLOW. Like, infuriatingly slow.
I was extra annoyed about this because I kind of had an ego about it — I’m not new to business, I know what I’m doing, I’m really experienced, this is my 8th year of doing this thing — I should have this all figured out.
But sometimes you really do get sent back to the drawing board and I wish I had seen that as an invitation to use the skills and experience I have to figure it out, instead of seeing it as a slight on my worth, which I absolutely did get stuck in and felt the frustration of.
One of the things I notice regularly with my clients who have a membership is that we don’t pay attention to the season we’re in or even acknowledge that we’re going to go through them.
Not every month of the year — heck, not every year itself — is going to be a season of growth. There’s just so much messaging that says if we’re not growing we’re dying, if we’re not growing we’re doing something wrong, and the answers are just one decision or one new way of doing things away. This is such an unfair way to think and I’ve seen it hurt me, in my own business, and it’s hurt my clients too.
Look back and take stock: what kind of season were you in this year? Was the first half different to the second half?
When it comes to memberships, you might spend the first couple of years in what I call the “build” phase — where you’re not just building members and revenue, you’re also building the offer itself by adding new content, new classes, and creating a body of work for people to move through inside your membership.
Inevitably there comes a time where get tired of building and adding new content inside the membership, and this is where people begin to feel a lot of resistance — because they’re not just trying to grow the membership, they’re also having to add content to it all the time, and it’s like spinning two neverending plates at once.
Lots of people come to me when they’re in this stage and feeling like they’re ready to change something about how they sell their membership, how they deliver it, or even both.
How would you characterize the year? Were you building? Were you experimenting? Did you simplify or streamline? Did you hunker down and do more of what worked? Was this a season where you focused on other things in your business, other offers, and let the membership hum along… or did you really focus on this offer?
Did you spend more time thinking about how you deliver the membership, maybe you made some adjustments to member experience and onboarding… or did you spend more time experimenting with ways to sell it?
Maybe you had a couple of distinct seasons this year. Maybe you felt like you tried to do a lot of things, and it’s all kind of messy… and that’s OK too. But if you could sum up 2024 as a season of something for your membership, what would it be? This can help you get some closure on the year and recognize what you actually spent your time and energy on, and what the fruits of it were.
I feel that my year was divided up into two seasons. Like I mentioned earlier, the first season was almost like a hibernation for me. I had to go slower because I was building up my capacity again after a really huge period of work and big projects. I was making really big changes to my services and positioning. I was working “under the hood”... tilling the soil.
And then in the second half of 2024, things began to click into place for me.
I released a new Mini-VIP Day called Irresistible Offer, which you’ve probably heard about in previous episodes. I sold 11 of them, which gave me some great momentum in the second half of the year.
I also had two big legacy clients with multi-million dollar memberships lock in for some exciting consulting-slash-retainer work with me, and at the same time, people began reaching out to me about the podcast, finding me through the podcast, and booking my services as a result of bingeing the episodes and deciding they wanted to work with me.
So in the second half of 2024 I got to reap the rewards of the work I had put in the first half of the year, and also — I just found that I had more energy and was able to take more action. I did not have much bandwidth in the first half of the year, but I needed that rest, and I’m glad I got to have it.
So I’m curious about how you’d characterize the seasons across the past year for you, and your membership.
THE STRUGGLE
The second thing I’d love you to reflect on after you think about seasons… is the struggle. Every year there is something new we struggle with, a habit we need to break or build, a limit we encounter, or a wall we keep bumping up against. When we’re in it, all we want is the solution.
For me, I spent a lot of time feeling unsure about how I wanted my services to change, the specific offers I wanted to put out into the world, and the best way to fill those offers. Looking back, I can be grateful for the time I spent in 2024 experimenting with this, but in the moment, I can tell you that I hated it and I did not enjoy it at all. Very dramatic.
Like I mentioned earlier, I resented not having the answers and I absolutely made it mean that something was wrong with me, and I wish I hadn’t done this to myself.
So I want you to look back at what was a struggle for you this year with your membership:
What felt hard?
What didn’t you enjoy?
Where did you feel the most resistance?
Where was the uncertainty?
What took more of your time than you wanted it to?
These are all just clues. Don’t make them mean something about you or your membership.
Just try to look at them as objectively as you can and notice what it tells you about where you might need some support this year, where you might need to adjust how you spend your time, and maybe what you want to be doing more of, or less of.
Was there something that you struggled with and ultimately came out on the other side? This was the case for me with my offers. I’m going into 2025 with a new offer suite, all of which is up on my website and explained on my services page. This was a huge win for me given how much time I spent behind the scenes trying to figure this out. It’s so easy for me to see the path for my clients, but it’s always difficult to do for yourself. Funny how that works.
One of the things I’m getting to be OK with is knowing that my services will likely keep changing and evolving in the year ahead, and that doesn’t mean something is wrong — it just means that as I keep doing what I do and working in this hyper-specialized way, I’ll keep learning about the best way to support my clients and how to support myself while I’m doing this work.
The same is true for your membership, too. I say all the time that a membership is like a swiss-army knife offer — they’re shapeshifters — because we’re always adding to them, so they’re always changing. Your membership is supposed to change, the way you sell it will change, the way you deliver it will change and this is all just part of the process and not at all a sign that something is wrong with you.
So get used to change, get used to a little struggle, and the sooner you can accept that as part of getting where you want to go instead of an obstacle to it, the sooner you’ll stop creating unnecessary pain for yourself. We don’t have to like it, but we can accept it, and it always makes us smarter and stronger.
(... Am I a stoic now?) I think I just inadvertently backed into an argument for why The Obstacle is The Way, but my point still stands.
So what did you struggle through?
What did you overcome?
What did that teach you about yourself?
These are all clues for where to spend your time and energy in the year ahead — where to lean in, where to get support, and what you might need to minimize.
THE ASSETS
My good friend Stephanie Hayes is the Asset Queen (a title I have given to her, which she probably hates). She believes that when businesses build assets, they become more valuable — and that this creates a pathway to doing what you want with the business, instead of always working in the business with little to show for it.
It’s because of Stephanie that I spend time each week working on assets in my business. My podcast is an asset. The sales pages I use to sell my offers are assets. The processes in my business — they’re assets. These are just a few.
But running a business, especially a membership business, can feel like you’re running on a treadmill. You’re always creating new content — content for social media, marketing content — and you’re creating content inside the membership — new classes, new courses, new resources… and it can feel relentless.
But when you think in terms of assets, the work becomes worth it — and it also changes the way you work and what you choose to create. If you think about 2024 — what are the assets you created? What are you proud of? And what did you enjoy?
Knowing your answers to this is important because first of all it will help you celebrate, and second, it will help you know where to spend more of your time in the year ahead.
In my business, my two biggest assets were my podcast (and my blog, which is an extension of my podcast) and my new service offerings. I have 3 new service offerings, all of which I had to build a marketing assets for (primarily a sales page on my website) plus back-end processes to support my delivery of those services.
All of this has helped me clarify my approach, put a name to how I work and how I position it, build my authority, and when it comes to the podcast, help me with the “discovery” and “nurture” phase of my marketing process. These assets were huge for me and they will continue working for me in 2025.
So what assets did you create for your membership in 2024?
What were the classes you created? What did you make for members?
This is one of those times where it might be really useful to put aside 30 minutes in your calendar this week to make a list of everything you made for your members this year. The resources, the classes, the events. I’m sure you made a lot. It’s important to look back on that but it’s just as important to look at… what was your favorite?
I’m sure there’s 1 or 2 things you did inside your membership this year that stand out.
Did you love a certain topic?
Was there a specific class you taught that members loved?
Was there one where you just know that you knocked it out of the park?
Pay attention to that. What does that say about what you want to do more of — not just to cater better to members, but to cater to your own interests? We need to be creating things that we love and are proud of. Your past year is full of clues about what that might be for you.
For me, I’ve especially loved the episodes of the podcast where I get to dig into ideas like behavior change and how we can actually help our members take action. Episode 7 of the podcast is one of my favorites. It’s also because of the podcast that I developed concepts like the member engagement cycle, which is something I dig into in episode 7 as well.
When I talk to clients about these ideas, I see it shift so much for them — and it’s become a core part of how I work and how I support people. It’s unique to me. That’s an asset I’m really proud of.
So how about you?
Did you create a new framework in 2024?
A favorite class?
What about in your marketing for your membership — did you work on refining your sales page?
Did you find a new way of launching or selling that is repeatable and works well for you?
Those are assets too.
(And by the way, if you want 2025 to be the year where you turn your sales page into an asset that sells for you again and again, of course the Mini-VIP Day is the perfect way for us to do that together.
I’ll put the link in the show notes below so you can check out the details.)
THE SCHEDULE
Moving on, I’m curious: how would you say you spent your time this year? This was one of the biggest changes for me. For years, I have known that I haven’t been taking care of myself in the way I wanted to, and of course I beat myself up for this.
I decided that in 2024 I was going to get serious about not just how I work — but how I live. I know this sounds cheesy but I really did reach a point where I wasn’t willing to sacrifice my wellbeing for my business goals anymore. This meant I had to learn a bunch of new habits and ways of operating; things that I had never really done before that seemed so basic, but I had always struggled with.
I started playing pickleball, and now I play three times a week and truly love it. I’m a person who goes for walks now, instead of spending all day at my desk. I eat breakfast! (As a non-breakfast eater for the first 32 years of my life, this has been a revelation).
I’m not sharing this because I think it’s good or bad. I’m sharing it because it’s a key feature of how I spent my time this year. It has been a big deal for me, but I get that not everyone has the resources, ability or the desire to focus on their health.
For me, making these changes required that I take my foot off the gas on my business. I didn’t get to “have it all”. But looking back, I wouldn’t change a thing. I feel more vibrant than ever, and I learned that I can get enjoyment and satisfaction from things outside of my business (what a shocker).
What did you spend your time on this year? Are you happy with how much time you spent working in your business — and specifically, are you happy with how much time you spent working on your membership? Many people come to me because while they love their membership, they want to recalibrate how they’re spending their time.
When you spent time working on your membership, what were you working on? Are you happy about it? What do you wish you had spent more time on, less time on? In your membership, in your business… in your life? What’s your wish for the year ahead?
One thing this past year has taught me is that we absolutely get to make a choice about where and how we spend our time.
The process of getting there always takes longer than we think, and sometimes we need to make compromises, or give something up in order to get what we want. This can be scary, hard… and sometimes we need support to make these changes. I certainly did.
But those changes won’t happen unless you get decisive about what you want. How you spent your time this past year, again, can be a clue. Are you happy with how your time went? Does the way you’re spending your time align with what you value?
We’ll never be perfect, but with a few nudges, you can get going in the right direction. You have more options than you think.
THE DECISIONS
This feels like a great place to wrap up the podcast, and in a way it’s full circle. My 2024 was defined by a decision that created a massive ripple effect in my business and across my entire life.
I made the decision to shift how I work and get hyper-specific on who I do this work for. I decided that I was going to be a person who took care of myself. And then I fought for that decision and stood behind it, week after week, month after month.
Some weeks I didn’t do a very good job of it. Some months, I felt like nothing was happening. I experienced doubt, I questioned myself, I celebrated some massive wins and also some big rejections. It was not picture perfect. But 2024 has been the single most momentous year in my business, in terms of the action I’ve taken, the choices I’ve made, and how I showed up.
It’s changed how I see myself, and in turn, it’s changed how others see me, as well.
So I’m going into 2025 feeling really proud of myself. It all began with a decision. I had no idea at the time how big of an impact it would have on me. But I can say that one decision snowballed into something massive. Snowball is actually my word for the year in 2025 because I have so much evidence now that one small thing can create a cascade in every area of my life, and I want to carry that attitude with me in 2025.
In past years, I haven’t been decisive. I’ve set goals, I’ve made plans, I’ve planned projects and set revenue goals, but I somehow thought I was going to get there by just doing more of the same or adding something new on top of what I was already doing. Really, I needed to be decisive.
I needed to get real about what I didn’t want anymore and what I actually wanted. And not the surface stuff like revenue or material things, both of which I love and know is so important — but what is it worth if we’re not happy, if we’re working in a way that isn’t exciting or fulfilling or good for us?
I encourage you to be decisive about this. I was so scared to make the decision to change my business. But I stuck with it and it has changed me. You might have a sense already about where you need to get more decisive. Or maybe you need to unpack this with someone, or just sit with it yourself. There’s no hurry. I had to sit with it for a long time before I was ready, but when I was ready, I got support, got decisive and I spent all year bringing my decisions to life.
If you want to make a decision about your membership, how you work in it, and what this offer really needs to look and feel like for you, then I encourage you to reach out and chat with me about how I can support you through this process. Again, I’ll put the information in the show notes below about how you can get in touch with me and what it could look like to work together.
Maybe there’s a decision you need to make in some other part of your life and business. You probably already have a sense of what it is. But I encourage you to be decisive about it, be clear about the change you need to make, and then get help from someone who can help you navigate the change and keep you honest about, because you absolutely will get distracted, you’ll conveniently forget about it, and it's so easy to fall back into old habits.
But, one decision can change so much.
Have you been putting it off? Have you told yourself it’s not possible? Maybe it’s time to think again.
Decide what you want from your membership, from your business, and from your life in 2025. It might just be one sentence. It might be a few paragraphs. But let that be your compass.
So, what am I deciding for 2025?
If 2024 was a year of building, then 2025 will be a year of momentum. I know that I will get even more traction with my visibility as year goes on, and the podcast grows — and what matters to me is that I stay focused on my own wellbeing, my own capacity, and pace myself (instead of rushing to get a result or taking on more than I should, which always means my wellbeing takes a hit).
In 2025 I’m focused on building, in a measured and steady way, without putting my wellness on the line to do it. This is my compass. The plans, the decisions, the actions… they all stem from this. In fact, they can change entirely, as long as this core stays stable and true for me.
I also want to:
Try a new cafe with my fiance and our dog Willow, each month
Play pickleball at least twice per week
Start each day with breakfast (for me, this moves the needle — how about you)?
Walk before I start work in the morning
Decorate our home
I’d love to know what your answer is too. I always enjoy hearing what you think about these episodes, so feel free to reach out if you found it helpful and tell me what stuck out for you. I wish you a successful 2025, whatever that might look like for you.
If you feel overwhelmed about the year ahead, just take it one week at a time and don’t put the pressure on yourself to figure it all out in the first week of January, or even by the end of January. The “figuring it out” never really stops, so we might as well find a way to enjoy it.
If you want someone with you to help you figure it out and make a plan, you know how to find me.
Thanks for being here with me, and I’ll see you in the next episode.
