Challenge: A century-old business leadership organization with stalled membership, declining event attendance, and a model built around in-person access that no longer fit how modern executives engaged
Outcome: Membership doubled to 3,500 individuals and nearly 300 corporate members; corporate partnerships grew 80%; NPS jumped from -5 to +50; 100% corporate member retention in the first year
The Situation
The Executives’ Club of Chicago has been at the center of Chicago’s business community for more than a century. Its programming has featured presidents, prime ministers, and the most consequential business leaders of every generation. Its membership rolls have read like a who’s who of Chicago’s corporate and civic leadership.
By the time Dr. Margaret Mueller joined as CEO in 2019, the Club was facing a challenge familiar to many legacy associations: the model that had built it was no longer serving the community it was meant to lead. Membership growth had stalled. Event attendance was slipping. The energy that had once made the Exec Club a must-belong institution was fading.
The Club’s traditional model — centered on exclusive, high-production in-person events — had been built for a world where physical presence was the only way to access world-class speakers and peer networks. That world was changing before COVID. Then COVID arrived, and it changed overnight.
Mueller, who had a background in market research and brand strategy rather than traditional association management, recognized immediately that the pandemic wasn’t just an operational crisis. It was a strategic inflection point. She engaged Sequence Consulting to help her understand what members truly valued, what the Club’s right to win was in a changed environment, and how to rebuild around it.
What We Found
Sequence’s work began with member research — understanding not what members said they valued, but what actually drove their engagement, loyalty, and willingness to pay.
The central finding was both simple and profound:
The Club’s greatest asset wasn’t its events. It was its community.
Members didn’t value the Exec Club primarily for the speakers it booked or the venues it used. They valued it for who else was in the room — the peer relationships, the leadership community, the sense of belonging to something that mattered in Chicago’s business life. The event was the occasion. The community was the product.
The existing model had this backwards. It treated the event as the core offering and the community as a byproduct. That meant the value was episodic — it existed when you attended an event and disappeared when you left. It also meant that anything that prevented attendance — a busy schedule, a travel conflict, a pandemic — severed the relationship entirely.
A second finding sharpened the diagnosis: the model was one-size-fits-all in a world that demanded flexibility. A single membership tier with a single event-centered value proposition couldn’t serve the full spectrum of what executives needed — from early-career leaders building networks to senior executives seeking peer counsel to corporations wanting to develop their leadership pipelines. The Club was leaving significant membership and revenue on the table by treating everyone the same.
The Approach
Working with Mueller and the Exec Club team — and in collaboration with creative partner Energy BBDO — Sequence designed a transformation built around a clarified purpose and a fundamentally restructured membership model.
1. Lean into purpose, not product. The strategic reframe that drove everything else: the Executives’ Club’s purpose wasn’t to produce events. It was to connect, develop, and grow best-in-class leaders. Events were one vehicle for that purpose. A community platform, peer groups, content, and digital engagement were others. Once the purpose was clear, the full range of ways to deliver on it became available.
This reframe proved its value immediately — and dramatically — when COVID hit.
Rather than retreating or going dark, Mueller made a bold decision: the Club would open all of its programming to the entire business community, free of charge. Within days of the lockdown, the Exec Club had pivoted to virtual events, securing the former head of the Illinois Department of Public Health as a speaker to provide guidance to panicking business leaders. Coffee and Connects — held four mornings a week with HR, finance, employment, and coaching experts — became a lifeline for Chicago’s business community.
The risk was real. Free programming could devalue the membership proposition entirely. Instead, it did the opposite. As Mueller described it: “It became a sampling strategy. People loved what they sampled and became members.”
The pandemic, which destroyed many associations’ event revenue and membership bases, became the Exec Club’s most powerful recruitment engine — because the organization had been clear enough about its purpose to lean into it when the pressure was highest.
2. Restructure the membership model around real needs. Sequence helped design a tiered membership architecture that replaced the one-size-fits-all approach with options genuinely tailored to different member needs:
Corporate memberships offered leadership development, event access, and dedicated support for organizations wanting to invest in their executive pipelines. Individual memberships were enhanced with curated peer groups, networking, and online learning communities. A non-resident membership tier was introduced after the pandemic — giving executives outside Chicago access to virtual programming, with in-person event access available at non-member rates when they visited. This extended the Club’s reach beyond its geographic base for the first time.
3. Build community infrastructure, not just event infrastructure. Sequence helped design the content and community platforms that made the membership valuable between events — not just at them. This included executive webinars, research reports, and an online knowledge library; Executives’ Exchange, a members-only online forum for peer dialogue and collaboration; and a redesigned digital experience that made the Club accessible to members wherever they were.
4. Rebrand around the new value proposition. Working with Energy BBDO, the Club developed a brand identity that honored its century of history while projecting a modern, forward-looking image — repositioning from “the place where Chicago’s business elite gather” to “the catalyst for leadership growth and meaningful connection.” The brand change reflected and reinforced the strategic shift.
The Result
Membership doubled — growing to 3,500 individual members and nearly 300 corporate members.
Corporate partnerships grew 80%, reflecting a partner community that saw the Club as a significantly more valuable platform than before.
NPS jumped from -5 to +50 in two years — a 55-point swing that reflected not just satisfaction but genuine enthusiasm from members who felt the organization was delivering something meaningful.
100% of corporate members were retained in the first year of the new model.
And critically, all of this happened through COVID — the period that broke most event-dependent associations. The Exec Club didn’t just survive the pandemic. It used it.
These results are independently confirmed by multiple Crain’s Chicago Business reports. When Mueller stepped down in 2025, Crain’s reported that she had “led the organization through the turbulence and uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic while also doubling its membership” and that “membership grew to 3,500 individuals and nearly 300 corporate members and the group saw an 80% increase in corporate partnerships.” When her successor was announced, Crain’s confirmed the same membership and partnership figures. And in its 2024 Who’s Who in Chicago Business feature, Mueller herself described the COVID free-access strategy in her own words: “It became a sampling strategy. People loved what they sampled and became members.”
This is one of the most externally documented membership transformations in Sequence’s portfolio — every major result confirmed independently by one of Chicago’s most credible business publications.
“Our membership doubled in the last three years. Sequence helped us lean into our purpose, restructure our model, and reframe our value proposition to deliver what our members needed most.” — Margaret Mueller, PhD, CEO, Executives’ Club of Chicago
What This Means for Your Association
The Executives’ Club story is about what happens when an association gets clear enough about its purpose to act on it — even under pressure.
Most associations know, at some level, that their real value isn’t the programs they run or the events they produce. It’s the community they convene, the professional identity they confer, the relationships they make possible. But the model is built around the programs and the events, because those are tangible and billable. The community is treated as the output rather than the product.
The Exec Club reframe — from event-centered to community-centered — sounds simple. The execution isn’t. It requires understanding specifically what members value, which member segments have meaningfully different needs, and what organizational capabilities need to be built or rebuilt to deliver a community-centered experience consistently.
It also requires the confidence to lean into purpose when the pressure is highest. When COVID hit and events became impossible, organizations that knew what they were actually for had options. Organizations that had conflated their model with their purpose had very few.
Three questions worth asking about your own association:
If your events disappeared tomorrow, what would members lose that they couldn’t get anywhere else? The honest answer to that question tells you whether you’re selling community or selling event access.
Are you serving your full member spectrum — or a version of it? The Exec Club’s one-size model was leaving early-career leaders, remote executives, and corporate buyers with unmet needs. Tiering the model opened three markets at once.
Are your community assets — peer groups, forums, content, networks — as developed as your event assets? Most associations invest heavily in what happens on stage and underinvest in everything that happens between events. The relationship between those two is usually the key to retention.
The Executives’ Club of Chicago doubled membership not by running better events, but by becoming clearer about what it was fundamentally for — and building a model that delivered on that clarity for every member, in every circumstance, including a global pandemic.
About Sequence Consulting Sequence Consulting works exclusively with professional and trade associations to grow membership, strengthen revenue, and clarify strategy. Founded in 2001 by Chris Vaughan, PhD and Lisa Vaughan, Sequence brings the rigor of Big Strategy consulting to mission-driven organizations. Trusted by 12 of the top 20 U.S. associations.
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