Somebody put a number on the screen in Calgary that I’d been avoiding.

From July 2024 through May 2025, 35 percent of every new satellite and companion club created in North America came out of a single person’s calendar.

Mine.

People heard that and applauded. I heard it and thought about how fragile it is.

I’d been on 1,143 calls since the first of July. That isn’t a movement. It’s a bottleneck with good intentions.

Anything that depends on one person isn’t a strategy. It’s a single point of failure with a nice story attached.

Why a Team Instead of a Longer Calendar

The North American Club Creation Team launched at that convention, and it exists for exactly one reason.

We didn’t appoint it. We interviewed for it.

This work needs a specific set of skills, and they aren’t the same at every stage. Step one needs somebody who can inspire. Step two needs somebody who can sit across from a skeptical board and answer an objection without making anyone feel accused. Step three needs somebody who’ll dot every i.

So we took the people who fit the step.

The commitment we made was 250 new clubs in two years. I’ll say here what I said there. If all we manage is 250, they should find somebody else to do this.

Seventy Miles, Each Way, for Seven Years

There’s a story from Calgary I’ve repeated in every room since.

A district governor in Northern Virginia was at her club’s Christmas Eve party when one of her members told her he couldn’t keep doing it.

He’d retired to a lake community seventy miles away. He’d been driving back and forth every week. For seven years.

He didn’t want to leave his club. There just wasn’t a club where he now lived.

She looked around that party and told him to go find two movers and shakers in his new community.

Weeks later they turned in an application for 55 members. Two of them were transfers, people who’d retired away from their clubs and were about to be lost entirely.

We didn’t recruit 55 strangers. We refused to lose two Rotarians, and 55 people came along with them.

Retention Is Club Creation

Another club in that session was days from turning in its charter.

Instead of letting it die, they matched it with a strong club nearby. It’s now a companion of a neighboring Rotary club, and the nine members who’d already decided this wasn’t the right fit anymore are still Rotarians.

Nine members isn’t a rounding error. Nine members is a club.

And every time we hold onto one, we’re keeping a service footprint in a community that would otherwise have quietly lost it.

The Least Glamorous Thing We Did

We built an app.

It walks a club through the same four steps in the same order, whoever they get. It tells district leadership when a club moves forward. It sends membership applications from a phone. It fills out the Rotary International paperwork.

It’s free.

It exists so that the answer to “who’s going to do this?” is never again “the one guy in North Carolina.”