Low Effort Recurring Revenue with Burnout-free memberships - Sandra De Freitas

In this session, Sandra De Freitas shares how to create low-effort, high-impact memberships that generate recurring revenue without burning you out.

Website: http://sandradefreitas.com

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[00:00:00]:
Hey there. I'm Sandra De Freitas, creator of the Burnout Free Memberships framework. And today I want to show you how to build a membership that pays you every month without running you into the ground. This is all about recurring revenue with less stress, less hustle, and a lot more freedom. Are you ready? All right, let's go. All right, let's be real. Most membership owners are doing too much weekly lives, new content every single month, being, always being on and being active in their communities. I mean, I know this very well.

[00:00:34]:
I was active in a community that I was helping out with 24. And while I absolutely loved it and loved the people, eventually it burnt me out somehow. Most of these membership owners are wondering why they're exhausted and why their members are ghosting them. Does this sound familiar? They're burnt out, bored, and they have zero freedom. This is the membership owners. The actual members are a little bored and probably burnt out themselves. So what if it could be easier? What if your membership ran more like a slow cooker? So you set it up once you're checking in occasionally and it's serving your members and income goals without burning you out. So you run it on a rhythm that works for you.

[00:01:17]:
And in fact, I tell my clients what they could do if is every quarter, create their content for the next three months, schedule it out, and if they did this four times a year, they all they would have to do is come in and check on their membership. Now, you want to keep your members happy and engaged and we'll talk about this in a minute. And you're going to be generating recurring revenue without draining you out. Hi, I'm Sandra and I've been helping entrepreneurs launch and grow memberships since 2005. My clients call me the launch mom, and they called me the membership unicorn. And it's probably because I'm part strategy, part tech wizard and part coach. And I created the Burnout Free Memberships frameworks to help people like you simplify and scale your memberships without turning them into energy vampires. So let's jump into the big myth.

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There's a myth in the membership world that says more content equals more value. Fire hose them. It'll definitely make your membership worth more. More access to you means more results. Be available all the time. Don't leave your computer, don't put your phone on airplane mode. Just go, go, go and hustle. Yeah, add more hustle, because that means people are going to want to stay with you longer.

[00:02:37]:
And honestly, it's a recipe for burnout and not successful burnout free memberships are built on alignment, not overwhelm. And you know what happens to these memberships? They eventually close because they just can't handle the amount of time, energy and stress this is creating them because they didn't design or redesign their membership in a way that's coming from alignment. In fact, I see a lot of membership owners come to me and say, this is the membership I want to create. What do you think? And I often cut out sometimes half of the things that they are going to promise in that membership. It is way better to deliver what you promise and surprise with a few other things than to say you're going to deliver a ton of things and then never deliver all of them on time or never deliver all of them at all. So let's talk about the burnout free formula. Here's what makes a burnout free membership. There are four core shifts that change everything.

[00:03:41]:
So first is the offer alignment, then the delivery design, then the tech that supports you and the retention without the grind. And we're going to walk through each one of these. So let's start with offer alignment. So in offer alignment, you're going to make sure that what you promise is something you actually want to deliver every single month. It's something that you actually can deliver every single month. And when I say your promise has to match your energy and your capacity, there's more to this. I want you to dig in deeper. For instance, for me to write something, it actually causes me more, it drains me of more energy and it create it.

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I need more energy to write something. But if I were to stand in front of a crowd without a speech, I could totally do that. It energizes me. Do you see the difference? You don't have. I'm not saying you have to be like me. You might be the complete opposite, or there's something else. But do you see what I'm saying? One is draining me, taking away energy, and one is adding energy. So if you love to build planners and templates and scripts, awesome.

[00:04:51]:
If you like to write out full, detailed novels that will help your membership, go for it. But if you also don't like those and you prefer to do videos of your screen, amazing. Or if you prefer doing videos of your face, go for it. But see where your energy is, like, excited and where the rest of you might be, like, thinking, no, not this, not this. I. I don't even want to put it on my to do list, because if I put it on my to do list, I'm gonna have to look at it and eventually do it. Now, how you spot these is when you see this task on your to do list, do you smile or do you say, okay, what else is on my list? How can I procrastinate? Do something else that I that instead of doing this thing. And that's how I am with writing copy.

[00:05:44]:
And you might feel that about copy, you might feel that about creating videos, about creating slides, you name it. So those are things you definitely don't want to add to your offer. So you want to make sure that what you're going to offer, the promise that you're making to your members is something that you're able to sustain, to deliver, and it has a clear outcome or transformation. This is very important. A lot of people create memberships, but they don't think about, okay, the people on the other side want to know, like, if I'm in this membership, what are you promising that I can do? What are you promising of my outcome? If I join a running membership, do you promise that I'm going to be able to run a half marathon in the next six months? Awesome. That's what I want. I want to make sure I do that in six months. So that's why I might join that membership.

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So one tip that you could do is what is something you can repeat every single month that you can create? Is it a template every month that you're going to create? Is it a planner you're going to create? Is it a bunch of swipe files that you could create? What is the thing that you can create every single month? Next, we have our delivery design. The best memberships aren't the busiest, they are the clear. Clearest. That's funny, that I skipped that word was messing me up. The best memberships aren't the busiest, they're the clearest. There we go. All right, so we're going to try low effort formats like monthly themes. It makes it really easy for you to map out your content.

[00:07:09]:
When you have a theme for each month, as opposed to sitting at your blank screen saying, okay, I need to create something, what am I going to create? But if you know you're going to create something on, let's say email marketing for that month, then you know what email marketing you need to do. Or maybe it's something even more detailed than email marketing. But when you have these themes and that theme of the month might be A, B and C, then your deliverables are going to be matched to A, B and C. That makes it really easy for you to create the Content Next, your members are going to love a library of past trainings. Or maybe you have Q&As that you've recorded and you can put those in the membership. You don't have to go live every week to create a transformation, but what you could do is you could offer things like check ins. A check in could easily be just a post in your community. It could be an email form that you have your for your members fill in every single month or once a week just to check in to see where they are and you get those reports and you can report back.

[00:08:13]:
You have. You can also do office hours where you're on Zoom for an hour and whoever comes in, you'll help. You could do that too. Or if you don't like that, you could do Voxer where you could have boxer hours with your members so they can come in, ask you questions on Voxer and you can answer them. Now just be aware that if you have a membership of like a thousand people, that Voxer hours may not work with just one person. You might have to add team members or limit it to a higher level tier. Okay, we also have silency coaching. So silency coaching is when, let's say I'm running a coaching program or I'm doing a Q and A, the higher tier people can ask me questions, but the people in the lower tier and like they're paying less per month, they get to observe but they can't ask questions.

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So you don't have to be live every week. Please do not be live every week. Don't do that to yourself. Next is tech that works for you. Now some of you may hate tech, I love tech most of the time, but you have to get tech for your membership. That's going to work for you. Why is this so important if it's hard for you to use, if it's you struggle with it. If you have to pay someone, a special expert who's been certified and has like a thousand hours in working in this particular platform, that's going to get expensive for you.

[00:09:38]:
Not only that, it's going to. You're going to be on their schedule. So if you need something updated or change, you have to wait for them to be able to do it. You, if you want to do it yourself, that's great. Or if you have a team member that does it, awesome. But that team member has got to love it because there is nothing like trying to log into a platform that you just know you're going to struggle with. And it's that you've got that same energy of like, where you see it on your to do list and you're just like, nope, what's next? I don't want you logging into a platform and feeling that way. So burnout free tech can be very simple.

[00:10:13]:
You can get an all in one or an almost all in one is more of my favorite. Member Vault is great. The only thing that you need alongside Member Vault is an email marketing system like Kit and a system like PayPal or Stripe to help you collect the money. But you could run your sales pages from there. You can run so many other things from there. I love Member Vault. And your tech is going to automate onboarding and reminders and engagement. So you're going to need that because the more you can automate, the better for you.

[00:10:45]:
Of course you want to add some personal touches, but that is helpful. And then the other thing is you Want to add GPTs to your toolkit so you can delegate content, ideas, onboarding, even support prompts without lifting a finger. Now, I like to also create GPTs for my programs because they will help my members save time and energy as well. So. So the last one is retention without the grind. Now, retention doesn't come from more stuff. It comes from more connection. And that comes from things like helping them create easy wins.

 [00:11:19]:
So instead of piling on content, focus on more personal touches like welcome messages, maybe a milestone shout out like, here are the people that have been here for 90 days. Maybe you do surprise bonuses. I love doing this for my members. It absolutely delights them. And I gotta say, it really helps with retention because no one ever wants to leave because they don't want to lose out on some of the bonuses. All right, next, let's look at a quick case study. So I knew someone, she had a weekly coaching membership. Every week she would coach, coach live, right? And.

[00:11:57]:
And then it was hard for her to say, oh, the hours up. So she would keep going. Now, new weekly content is what she was creating and putting out there as well. And then she was constantly live supporting people. So we changed this up. She had a coaching library, a monthly hot seat. And this provided more profit and less work. So a library of all of her coaching from before, a library of other tools, templates, scripts, you name it, that would help her members.

[00:12:23]:
And she was able to profit less, more and work less because now she's working less than 15 days a month because she's not coaching every single week. She's not creating all the stuff, live stuff every single week. Okay? And this actually doubled her retention. So what will you do next? So here's your burnout free action plan number one. You want to audit your membership. What is draining you right now? When you look at your membership, go look at your sales page. What about this drains you? What about this says, oh, I'd rather wash the dishes or, or do laundry? What are those things? And if you don't have a membership yet, make a list of the things that I've talked about that you for sure don't want to do. That you can see how it would drain you, that it's not aligned with your personality or your values.

 [00:13:19]:
Or perhaps you have chronic pain, like chronic migraines, where you are not going to be able to go live at all. So what asynchronous pieces can you add instead? Then I want you to choose a delivery model that fits your life. What will be the pieces that you would deliver? What is the format that you will deliver that fits your life? Like if I said to you, create 12 of these right now, what would that thing be like? I love creating templates and planners and workbooks and I can create those pretty easily. I could probably sit down one day and create 12 of them and then I'm done for the year. What I do tell my clients is to create 12 weeks of content at one shot if you can. And if you do that, you only have to do this four times a year. How awesome is that? So choose a delivery model that fits your life and that you could easily create the content and it might be fun for you to create the content and therefore you're going to love your membership as opposed to not love your membership. All right? And then I want you to create a plan.

[00:14:23]:
So a 90 day engagement plan. Rhythm with boundaries. So you're gonna create something that you love, that you could definitely put into place. And you're going to engage with your members because the more that you engage and have fun with them and enjoy them and help them create those wins and celebrate them and surprise, bonus them, the better it is for you and your members and your retention as well. All right, so burnout free memberships are possible. You can grow recurring revenue without grinding. You can simply, you can simplify without sacrificing value. And you can build a business that gives you space, sanity and scale.

[00:15:06]:
You can love your membership again, burnout is optional. Revenue is renewable. Let's make it happen. So would you like some help with this? Because I have a free resource for you. I want you to download the burnout free membership blueprint. It's eight steps to build sustainable, scalable membership without burning out. You can grab that at Sandra DeFreitas Burnout Free Blueprint and go in there and watch the video and get the workbook and you can start building the burnout free membership of your dreams and start creating that recurring revenue that you've wanted. Thank you so much for watching everyone.

[00:15:44]:
I'll see you again soon.