The strategy memo
This is the argument behind the public pages. It stays in this room, because the moment prospects hear how the sorting works, they answer for the room they want instead of the life they have.
Revenue used to be a decent proxy for complexity: you couldn't get to $1M without employees, operations, and infrastructure. Today a solopreneur can clear $1M with software and outsourcing, while a $700K shop carries 15 employees, inventory, and payroll. For qualification purposes, revenue still matters, but it no longer tells us what kind of entrepreneurial life someone is living or whether the room will fit them. That is the vetting insight, and it stays on our side of the table.
Matt's frame: create viability, navigate complexity, lead at scale. Three different problems, three different curricula, three different rooms. Mixing them is why Catalyst attendance sags after the early sessions and why a mixed forum frustrates both the firefighter and the scaler. The public pages present this as belonging ("there's a room for you"); internally it is segmentation.
Raising the EO threshold is only defensible when the room below it is genuinely worth being in. Bridge as it stands reads as purgatory: forum, mentor, invitations, and a feeling of not-yet. The rebuild makes it a membership people choose, including people who never intend to scale. "Do you love what you're doing and love not having a boss? We have a community for you." When that room is real, the threshold conversation becomes data instead of hand-wringing. Its name is the Catalyst Collective, the Collective for short: an ongoing membership, by invitation, with continual access to an entrepreneurial community and the resources to help, whatever a member's growth targets and strategy. It is the evolution of Bridge, not a rename: Bridge was a stop on the way to EO with a clock running, and the Collective is a membership in its own right. If a reader comes away thinking we added bullets to Bridge and changed the sign, the copy has failed. Its events are its own, described as monthly access to learning and social events, never as EO Nashville's member calendar. Possible future benefits on the table: subsidized software to help members run their businesses, and discounted or subsidized consulting engagements.
The fit finder weighs team size, systems, dependence, and the questions someone would bring to a peer group. Revenue appears once at low weight. Prospects experience it as "no wrong answers." We experience it as stage data walking in the door, and a gentle way to route someone toward Catalyst or Intro Nashville without anyone hearing "you don't qualify."
This memo, the survey, the video script until produced, anything with member counts or threshold numbers, and every vetting instrument. The offering page and fit finder are the only pieces a prospect should ever see. If a link needs to travel outside leadership, it's one of those two.
1. The middle membership is the Catalyst Collective, an ongoing membership by invitation; does council hold to the name and the tagline? 2. Same-stage rooms or mixed rooms for it? 3. What does it cost, and what is the first programming investment? 4. When the survey goes out, who sends it and to whom first?