We build a lot of membership websites, and sometimes after many years, those businesses come to an end because the people running them move on to something new, or if it’s an association, they can’t find the fresh blood to carry the mantle anymore. A recent example is our client Woodcarving Workshops where the driving forces behind the business, Chris Pye and Carrie Camann, decided to retire.

But you can’t just decide to retire one day and walk away from a membership site which has tens of thousands of members. And even if you do, wouldn’t it feel like a crying shame to just delete a whole load of video tutorials you’d created over years and years?

So we started discussions with Chris and Carrie a couple of years ago about the best way to approach things and weighed up lots of options around how they could keep their years of work online. In the end, they opted for YouTube, as the least resource intensive option for them with no ongoing costs. Anyone who’s run a membership businesses knows that there’s a lot of customer support that comes with it, and after a decade or so of that, Chris and Carrie wanted to sit back, put their feet up and just hopefully have some money from ads trickling in. Obviously there was a lot of work for them to get all their hundreds of videos onto YouTube, and we helped advise them on how to embargo them so they get posted regularly for years to come, but now that time consuming part is done, they can sit back and know that Woodcarving Workshops lives on whilst they travel the world!

For the website though, we had to build a strategy about how to close things down and when. They knew when they wanted to cease trading, so we knew that a year before that we needed to stop people being able to sign up for new annual memberships. And we had to take into account people giving gifts of membership, which had a window to be redeemed, along with people still needing to be able to log in to view their subscription and use their membership up until Chris and Carrie’s closing date – at which point people needed to stop automatically renewing and be blocked from logging into the site.

We wrote a schedule of work with exact timeframes, and would regularly go to the site to do whatever was required, ensuring that things like 2 month offers could be utilised right up until the last minute to get as much revenue as possible for the company.

The final step was to turn the site into a neat brochure site, advising people where they can still go to see the videos, and urging them to subscribe on YouTube (rather than just visit) so that Woodcarving Workshops can continue to thrive on that platform.

If you’ve got an established busy business that you need a hand winding down, or just some strategy to help you plan your exit, please do get in touch.