#19—Robbie Kellman Baxter: Transitioning to a Membership Economy

Robbie Kellman Baxter is a consultant, author and speaker. She is also the author of The Membership Economy and The Forever Transaction, and hosts the podcast Subscription Stories. Robbie has more than 20 years of experience providing strategic business advice to major organizations, including Netflix, Fitbit, Microsoft and Consumer Reports and has worked in or consulted to clients in more than twenty industries. She has been focused on subscription and growth strategies for the past decade and coined the popular business term “Membership Economy," which is now being used by organizations and journalists around the country and beyond. 

Robbie has been featured in the Wall Street Journal and on CNN. She earned her MBA from the Stanford GSB, and graduated with honors from Harvard College.

In this podcast she shares:

• Why you should consider evolving your business model from a transaction-based one into a membership-based one
• What she learned from working with Netflix and other member-based companies across a range of industries
• Why evolving into a membership model is not just about changing your pricing structure, but requires you also looking at making three others sets of changes

__________________________________________________________________________________________

"You have to think about the impact on the products that you offer, the processes that you use internally, the metrics that you educate your leadership and your board to focus on all of that needs to change as well. If you're [moving toward a membership model], it's not as simple as taking the products you have and slapping a subscription price on it."

-Robbie Baxter

__________________________________________________________________________________________

Episode Timeline:

00:00—Introducing Robbie Baxter + The topic of today’s episode

2:00—If you really know me, you know that...

2:31—What is your definition of strategy?

4:31—What got you interested in strategy?

5:51—What are you most well-known for?

7:53—Can you paint a picture for us of how a business could become a membership economy business?

11:43— What is the key lesson or takeaway from your work?

13:09—How do you align your metrics, business processes and products to a membership economy model?

14:30—Can you be both transactional and subscription, or do you have to choose between two worlds?

15:54—Of all the strategic advice that you've gotten, what has been most impactful?

17:04—Where can people connect with you and what are you working on now?

__________________________________________________________________________________________

Additional Resources:

Subscription Stories podcast: https://robbiekellmanbaxter.com/podcast-2/

Personal website: https://robbiekellmanbaxter.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robbiekellmanbaxter/

Thank you to our executive producer Zach Ness, our producer Nazanin Homayoun Jam and our editor James Pearce. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow, download, and subscribe. I’m your host, Kaihan Krippendorff—thank you for listening.

Follow us at outthinker.com/podcast