Getting two girls buckled into car seats is not exactly a boardroom. But that’s where I did some of my hardest thinking about a decision that had been sitting on my chest for weeks.

Sunsetting. That’s the word I’ve been using so I don’t have to feel bad about the fact that I’m shutting a piece of my marketing down. It’s gentler. It doesn’t change what it means.

If you’ve been around Stratos for a while, you know the Stratos Social Media Club is close to my heart. It exists because so many small business owners have come to us over the years and just couldn’t afford our agency prices. (Agency prices start at $1,000 a month minimum. I get it. Not everybody is in a place to spend that, and they shouldn’t be shut out of good marketing because of it.)

Here’s the deal: a couple of years ago, we made the call to separate the Club’s marketing from our Stratos agency marketing entirely. The audiences felt different enough to warrant their own lane, so we built it out. Its own social channels. Its own email list. Its own ads. I’d handed all of that off to someone else to grow, and they really hadn’t done much with it. About six months ago, we turned everything on its head and started pouring real dollars and real time into marketing it ourselves. It was a genuinely good push. It just wasn’t doing what I wanted it to do.

So I sat down with the numbers. Every client who’d joined the Club this past year, except one, had come in through our Stratos agency marketing. Only that one came through the Club’s own marketing. And when I added up what we’d spent marketing the Club specifically, it was $9,000. For that one client.

I felt so conflicted running those numbers. The math was telling me one story. My heart was telling me another. I love serving these small business owners. That part was never in question.

I ran a few more numbers before I let myself panic. The templates themselves, the actual product, were paying for themselves. Breaking even, at worst, on what we were getting from the clients already in the program. So the Club wasn’t the problem. The $9,000 in marketing that wasn’t bringing anyone in… that was the problem.

Why This Isn’t a Failing Program

Here’s the part I want to be really clear about, because I don’t want this to read as “the Club is failing.” It isn’t. That same agency marketing that wasn’t bringing people into the Club directly is bringing plenty of people into Stratos itself, client after client. We have revenue. We have momentum. We tried a real marketing push for the Club and it didn’t work, so we’re doing what we already know works: growing through our agency’s tried and true client development, and letting the Club keep catching the small business owners who find us there but aren’t ready for full agency pricing yet.

So I decided: what if we just shut off the Club’s marketing? Keep the program. Keep growing it and sustaining it, just not through a $9,000 line item that wasn’t earning its keep.

I had to really sit with whether that made me a failure. Business is one giant experiment. Sometimes the experiment works out exactly the way you hoped. Sometimes it reveals something else entirely. My giant marketing experiment for the Club revealed this: I don’t have to market it this way. I can keep growing it, keep sustaining it for the small business owners who need it, without spending a ton of money trying to force it.

If you’re facing a decision like this in your own business, here’s what I’d tell you: listen to your heart. Listen to the numbers. But remember, all of it, every bit of it, is one giant experiment. You can try something and have it not work. Then you can try something else and have it work beautifully. You got this.

P.S. If you’ve been wondering whether the Club is still around: it is, and it’s working incredibly well for the small business owners in it. If full agency pricing isn’t in the cards for you right now but you still want your social media actually handled (with the holidays coming up, that might be the best gift you give yourself this year), that door is open.

P.P.S. If you’re sitting with your own “what’s next” in marketing and want a second opinion, let me know. Ads, social, email, and websites are our lane. If what you need is outside of that, I’ll point you toward someone who specializes in it.