How to pause ⏸️

Hey friends,

When you’re building a community business, especially one based on recurring revenue and a regular influx of members, taking an extended pause from it all feels scary and impossible.

For the last 4 months, I’ve been on a break from 3 things I had been doing regularly (including this newsletter). Here’s the story of why and how I did it and what has come out of it.

The Community Pause

The BACB community has been around for 3+ years and a lot has changed within that time: how communities work is different now from pandemic times when we started, the content has evolved, and the people and the structure of how we help them are different. Through all of our eras, the community was feeling a bit Frankensteined… we started as a cohort-based course, then turned it into an evergreen course within the community, then into a membership.

When things started feeling overwhelming earlier this year, I realized I had been doing what I advise everyone to NOT do. I added new structures without stopping anything else and was now running 3-4 business models at one time. 😬

As a result, the community wasn’t reaching its potential. We were doing a lot and none of it felt quite right.

I used to think that my only options with the community were to either continue down the path or completely shut it down. Neither of those options was right in this case. I knew I wasn’t done with the community, just needed a little breathing room. We had members who were still getting value from the content and who I wanted to stay in touch with for a long time. Kicking everyone out altogether didn’t seem like the right thing. But I also knew continuing it as is wasn’t sustainable.

So instead of inviting new people into the community in June, we decided to pause it. We canceled all the subscriptions and paused new applications for the summer.

Here’s the email and post we sent about it to members of the community:

We have some news to share about the BACB community’s summer plans.

For the next few months, we are pausing the community to fully develop the services side of friendly nooks.

Taking a break has been a hard decision. I love this community and am proud of what we’ve built so far.

Here are the factors that went into it:

- Growing a 1:1 services business and a membership community requires different everything: leadership is different, marketing efforts are different, hiring is different. So when they’re not connected, it’s like running 2 different businesses.

- This year, we’ve committed to expansion and making a big impact with our work. We won’t reach our growth goals by having many different products. We want to work on perfecting fewer offers.

- This community and course have helped lots of people so far. And still, our more hands-on strategy and implementation services, for now, have a clearer product-market fit. We get glowing reviews, regular referrals, and a higher profit margin.

There’s a huge opportunity to build something really special and transformational that combines the two experiences we’ve been able to bring to life — hands-on services and a scalable community model. And we need a pause to let that new vision emerge.

In the past, I’ve chosen to roll right into the next idea or offer and in hindsight, I wish we would have taken more pauses in the last few years! So that’s what we’re doing.

For now, we plan to (mostly) take a break from growing and developing this community over the summer. That means the Circle platform will be on pause for July, August, and September. All recurring payments have been canceled indefinitely. If it’s relevant to you, we’ll be in touch with details about your account.

Here’s what will happen with the community starting on July 1st:

- You’ll still have access to the course and all the content.

- You’ll be able to DM people and comment on the content.

- You won’t be able to post or interact in the Circle CONNECT spaces.

- We will host one monthly office hours event to catch up and help with your fall launch plans. That’s the only event we’ll be hosting.

- You won’t be charged a membership fee to continue being a member.

We’re not sure what will result from this, but we’re excited to see how things evolve.

After September, we’ll be in touch with more info about our plans and whether we’re continuing the pause.

If you have any questions, concerns, or ideas, I’d love to hear from you. Please send me a message.

Thank you as always for your support as we continue to figure out this friendly nook ♥️

The Marketing Pause

The second pause in the business wasn’t as intentional.

We get most of our new members from 3 places → referrals, guest events, and posting on LinkedIn.

Once the community was paused, the idea was to continue marketing activities. But in pause mode, I found that I just didn’t have a lot of interesting things to say! I would brainstorm new ideas that didn’t really feel like a good representation of Friendly Nooks. I would try to recycle old stuff that did well, but it didn’t feel right either.

I was also half ass working on launching the YouTube channel. That also wasn’t coming together.

It was taking way too much of my time and energy to try to have something to say and it just was not flowing. It was clear that whatever ideas I had needed some incubation time.

So I just stopped posting on LinkedIn, pitching guest partnerships, and posting YouTube videos (I hadn’t started anyway).

It’s too early to tell how big of a negative effect this had on the business overall. New clients were still finding us via referrals, but I could see those slowing down over time if we continued to be nowhere to be found on the internet.

The Newsletter Pause

I also stopped writing this newsletter.

This was also not intentional at first. I had been planning on continuing writing it every other Wednesday from July - September. And then, similar to the marketing content, it just didn’t feel right.

As someone who is always behind on reading emails, I never want to send one that doesn’t feel valuable to the people reading it. So sending emails with content I wasn’t proud of just to clog up your inbox during the summer didn’t feel like the right thing.

I didn’t expect to go so long without emailing you something new, but here we are!

3 Pause Lessons

Those were all the things I wasn’t doing during the pauses. Here’s what I learned from the things I was doing.

Want over should

This podcast episode with Joe Hudson has been helping me make lots of decisions. I’ve listened to it like a dozen times. Taking a pause has helped me start to figure out what I WANT to do and what are the things that I’ve been doing because I SHOULD. As a result my work is slowly feeling so much more aligned. I plan to restart a lot of the actions I’ve paused (starting with this email!). The difference is that they feel way less like homework and a lot more joyful. It has reminded me how much I love my work and showed me that it’s possible to be successful without feeling constantly overwhelmed.

The ROI of focus

Part of the reason for the community pause was to focus more on the services side of Friendly Nooks. We were starting to get a lot more inquiries and needed to work on our systems and build more capacity. Focusing more on solving problems for clients has helped us get better, raise prices, and bring more consistent results. Despite doing way less things, the business is now doing better and growing every quarter. Focus is a lesson I’ve had to learn more than once. This time around I'm focused on how much pleasure comes from working towards mastery of one thing at a time, instead of doing everything just okay.

Putting yourself in the right place (literally)

Not doing live community events during the pause made me more free to move around and explore working from other locations. What I’ve realized is that I’m craving more time outside of the busyness of the city.

In the the last few years, the most productive, creative and restorative weeks for me have been when I take time away from home. I’ve lived in Brooklyn for a long time. I have nothing bad to say about it. I live down the street from good friends, a short walk from great food from like 25 different cuisines, and a quick train ride from pretty much anything anyone might want to do with their time. It’s great.

Yet, it feels like the parts of myself that I like the most tend to come out when I’m in a slower place. So I’m exploring what that feels like by trying out different locations and will likely move out of NYC sometime in 2025.

What’s Next

It’s feeling really good to slowly get back into writing, and soon making videos and hosting events again. With all the exploring, certainty is something I’m learning to let go of, so here’s what I think we’ll be doing in the next few months:

I’ll be writing this newsletter every Wednesday again. For next week, I’m writing a post about how to program your community like a TV channel. I’m excited about how it’s coming together!
I’m working on making new videos on YouTube (for real this time!). It’s been fun to learn a new medium and I’m looking forward to experimenting and getting a little weird there before the end of the year.
We’re doing an update of our self-paced course and probably a Black Friday launch thing with a bunch of bonuses.
We’re considering a community relaunch in early 2025. I have ideas of how it could work together with the services part of the business, slowly merging the 2 into one thing (trying to remember the focus lesson).

That's what I've been doing and thinking about. What have you been up to? Would love to hear from you. Hit reply!

Friendly Nooks helps people get paid for the work of bringing more connection to the world. We do that by helping community founders build profitable businesses that are engines for connection and belonging. To learn more about our work, check out our website → friendlynooks.com ✨

Friendly Nooks