This is a blog post initially sent to the EAT membership as an email on 1/29/2019. In it, you will learn about what's changing and our strategy moving forward:

Wayne and I have decided to make major changes to The EAT Community to maximize our chances of success in the future, and ultimately to serve you better.

First and foremost, we wanted to let you know that these changes will not affect your membership, your courses, or in the case of our Elite & PRO members, you will still have everything that you have paid for.

You will still be able to access all of the historical content going back the last three years on topics from ecological aquaculture, permaculture, agroforestry, sustainable livestock nutrition, and much more.

Effective this week we will be shutting down our live and replay sessions on GoToWebinar in favor of offering more replay sessions freely available on the website www.eatcommunity.com.

The reasons for doing this are threefold:

1. Making the site more usable for you.
2. Time & Attention.
3. Money

Making The Site More Usable For You

Over the last year we have asked you for feedback via email, blog comments, and this form.

We have aggregated hundreds of very thoughtful pieces of feedback for features that all of you would like to see on The EAT Community.

Part of our decision is to reduce the complexity on our site, which is currently powered by a dozen different services, and reducing that to 1-2. This will make the site cleaner for you and much less complicated to manage for our team.

Our goal in the next month will be to host some of our best webinars on our home page www.eatcommunity.com so that you can have 24-hour access instead of having to log in to GoToWebinar at a specific time of the day.

We hope that these evergreen webinars will help us to attract more traffic to the site, and make the experience better for you.

Mark & Areeb have done a great job running webinars, scheduling interviews and answering customer service inquiries.

We have more guest speakers in the pipeline than we can interview, and more great content to turn into high quality content than we can sift through.

Given these facts -- why then hasn’t The EAT Community continued to grow in revenues and profits?

Time & Attention

Wayne and I have two businesses that are taking off like rocket ships, in the areas of environmental consulting and building an investment partnership.

Those two businesses have been growing so fast that we are having trouble keeping up, and the rate of growth is accelerating.

We have hundreds of pieces of feedback from our users, dozens of guest speakers who want to do an interview or teach a course, and partnerships in the works with other environmental or ecologically-based organizations.

All of these opportunities are good, but they take time and deep focus in quantities that we just do not have.

We have to focus on the businesses that are doing the best financially in order to maximize our long-term chances of success.

There’s also an opportunity cost of allocating money, too. Which leads me to our next point...

Money, Money, Money!

To date, our revenues cover expenses, and have for the last year, but they have not afforded us the profits to invest in staff to take the site to the next level.

Hence we are faced with the classic chicken and the egg problem of requiring more cash to scale, but not having the increased scale to bring in more cash. We have tried to do this through bootstrapping, but simply have not had the time to invest.

By reducing the complexity on the site, automating the content, and reducing the overhead, we will be in a solid financial position for the future which will allow us to:

1. Find another entrepreneur who wants to run EAT as a startup.
2. Come back in full force to do it ourselves.

Please let us know if you might be the entrepreneur who would like to run the site on a day to day basis. This might just be the opportunity that you have been looking for and now have found!

We Are Deeply Grateful For You

We have a subscriber base north of 24,000 people and we consistently get good engagement on our weekly emails.

Whenever we make the call for help, guest blog posts, speakers, or feedback on how to make The EAT Community better, you have answered the call, and for that we are deeply grateful.

We hope that by reducing our overhead, automating everything, and being laser focused on our other interests, that we will be able to gather the financial resources, connections, and technical talent needed to make this into the truly world class community that we have dreamed of building.

We will be largely putting EAT on autopilot for the next 6 months so that we can focus on our other business activities.

Until then, we will retain your subscriber info and send you updates periodically, as we have something very important to say, and if we're hosting a new webinar series.

Making the decision to change things is hard, and we hope that you will stay with us on this journey.

Wishing you prosperity, happiness and good fortune in 2019,

-Chris, Wayne, Mark, and Areeb

PS - We will stay in touch, and want to hear any thoughts or feedback that you have through this process.