The most useful thing that happened at our Singapore session had nothing to do with Companion Clubs.

A club president in Charlotte did something almost nobody does. Before launching anything, he hosted two focus group breakfasts at his office and brought in fifteen or twenty people from his community who were not Rotarians.

Then he asked them what they thought of Rotary.

Two answers came back.

I can’t make every Tuesday at noon. And fifteen hundred dollars a year is too much.

That’s it. That’s the whole mystery.

Every club is running a membership strategy built on a schedule and a price their own community has already ruled out. Most of us have never once sat down and asked.

His club launched with 31 charter members. Twenty-nine dollars a month. Service, social and networking, with networking deliberately in lowercase. It meets at a brewery on the third Wednesday, and every meeting is open to anyone.

That’s not a clever recruitment strategy. That’s a club that listened.

Numbers Two Through Twenty

I get asked about dues more than anything else.

I keep a running list of the top twenty objections I hear. Number one is money. Numbers two through twenty are also money, they’re just wearing a costume.

So here’s the only guidance I give. Make it an even amount and offer it monthly. Twenty dollars a month. Twenty-five dollars a month.

People think in subscriptions now. A club that asks for one check in June isn’t asking for a payment. It’s asking for a decision.

And take the meal out of the number. My friend Chris Jones says it better than I do: Rotary isn’t expensive, food is expensive. What’s left when you remove the lunch is the part that actually makes somebody a Rotarian.

Don’t schedule people out of Rotary. Don’t price people out of Rotary.

What It Looks Like a District Later

The Rotary Club of Pittsburgh is the twentieth club in the world. It once had over 300 members. It was down to about 85, meeting Wednesdays at lunch in a downtown hotel, at a moment in history when almost nobody travels downtown for lunch anymore.

They chartered an Impact Club with twelve members. It grew.

That story repeated across District 7305 in the space of about two years. One club went first, a second followed, then a third, then clubs that had been watching quietly from the sidelines.

Not one of those clubs changed what it loves. Nobody gave up a meeting, a speaker, or a tradition.

They stopped requiring that everyone experience Rotary the way they do.

The Part That Actually Scales

I’m not a better recruiter than the people in those rooms. I want to be clear about that, because it matters to anyone reading this and wondering whether they could do it.

What we have is a process.

A process is the difference between a good idea from a convention and a chartered club in your district. Without one, everybody drives home energized, walks into their club, says we have to do this, and then looks around the room to see who’s going to do it.

Nobody is. That’s how it’s always gone.

So we do it with you. That’s the whole model.