We held a funeral for our company.

There was a casket, a eulogy and plenty of laughs. But underneath the theatrics was something we took very seriously. After almost 20 years, we were burying Your Marketing Co.

Not because YMC was failing. We had great clients, a talented team, and a business I was incredibly proud of. We've never had a "bad year" where goals weren't met, which is pretty remarkable for a small business. We could have updated the logo, redesigned the website and kept doing what we had always done.

That would have been easier.

But for years, we’ve been telling credit unions that the world around them is changing too quickly to keep protecting the way things have always been done. We’ve challenged leaders to rethink technology, lending, member experience, culture, operations and marketing. Eventually, we had to point that same question at ourselves.

If we were going to ask credit unions to change, we had better be willing to go first.

So we killed YMC.

And the reasons why have a lot to do with where we believe the credit union movement is headed next.

The Numbers Aren’t Bad. That’s What Makes Them Dangerous.

At the end of 2025, federally insured credit unions served nearly 145 million members and held more than $2.4 trillion in assets. Membership grew by another 2.4 million people.

Those are good numbers.

But underneath them is a very different story. More than half of individual credit unions lost members during that same year. The median credit union shrank. Another 168 federally insured credit unions disappeared.

The movement is growing, but a lot of credit unions aren't.

That distinction matters because decline rarely happens all at once. More often, relevance disappears one transaction at a time.

A member doesn't dramatically break up with their credit union. They download Venmo because that's how their friends send money. They use Cash App for something else. They finance a purchase through Klarna because it was right there at checkout. Their next car gets financed at the dealership because it was easy. Maybe they try SoFi because the experience feels simple and intuitive.

Their credit union account stays open. We still count them as a member.

But somewhere along the way, the credit union stopped being their financial relationship and became one of their financial relationships.

That's a much bigger threat than losing an account.

It's losing relevance.

Consumers Aren’t Choosing Technology. They’re Choosing Easy.

The rise of fintech is usually framed as a technology story. I think that's a mistake.

Consumers didn't fall in love with payment technology. They liked being able to send someone $40 without thinking about it. They didn't wake up wanting another financial provider. They found someone who made a financial problem easier to solve.

That matters because the people using these products look suspiciously like the people credit unions were created to serve.

Look at Buy Now, Pay Later. A significant number of consumers use it because they say it is the only way they can afford the purchase. Underneath the technology is someone trying to stretch a paycheck, someone who needs flexibility or someone worried that a traditional lender might say no.

That isn't a fintech problem.

That's a credit union opportunity.

The credit union movement was built around giving people a better financial option. We know how to listen. We know how to look beyond a credit score. We know how to help someone buy a first car, rebuild after a mistake or navigate a difficult financial season.

Our problem isn't that fintech has a better mission.

It's that sometimes fintech has built an easier doorway to the help people need.

And a better mission doesn't automatically create a better experience.

That's How We Outgrew “Marketing”

This realization changed our company because we kept seeing the same thing with our clients.

A credit union would come to us wanting more loans, so naturally we'd talk about marketing. Then we'd dig deeper and discover that marketing wasn't actually the problem.

Maybe the campaign generated applications, but follow-up was too slow. Maybe people started opening accounts but abandoned the process. Maybe the credit union wanted younger members while its experience had been designed around the people already there. Maybe the brand promised flexibility while the policies communicated rigidity.

You can make a better ad.

You can redesign the website.

You can spend more money on digital.

None of that fixes the actual problem.

Eventually, our conversations changed. We started talking as much about research, operations, technology, culture, data and member experience as we did about campaigns and creative. Not because we wanted to become a company that did more stuff, but because we wanted to solve the problem that was actually getting in the way of growth.

That's when we realized our own name had become a constraint.

Your Marketing Co. defined the solution before we had even diagnosed the problem.

We couldn't tell credit unions to challenge their assumptions while protecting ours.

So we stopped.

Protect the Mission. Question Almost Everything Else.

I believe this is the challenge facing credit unions now.

Our industry has a remarkable history, and there is plenty worth protecting. The cooperative structure is worth protecting. Local decision-making is worth protecting. Human relationships are worth protecting. The belief that financial services should improve people's lives is absolutely worth protecting.

But we have to stop confusing why we exist with how we've always operated.

A branch isn't the mission. An underwriting rule isn't the mission. A core system isn't the mission. A committee isn't the mission. A seven-step account-opening process that nobody remembers creating isn't the mission.

Those are tools.

If a tool no longer helps us fulfill the mission, our loyalty should be to the mission, not the tool.

That doesn't mean credit unions need to become fintechs. In fact, I think the opportunity is to become much better credit unions. Use technology to remove the mindless friction so people have more time for meaningful conversations. Use data to understand what members need before blasting them with another product offer. Make the simple things ridiculously easy and the difficult things remarkably human.

That's a credit union experience worth fighting for.

Why So Much Good

That's why YMC is gone.

Marketing still matters enormously, but it doesn't exist in isolation. Marketing is downstream from strategy. Strategy depends on research. Growth is affected by operations. Technology shapes experience. Culture determines whether the brand promise is actually delivered.

The member doesn't experience those things as separate departments.

They just experience the credit union.

So Much Good is the company we've built around that reality.

We want to help credit unions solve the problems that actually stand between them and growth, even when the answer isn't another campaign. We want to understand what's really happening, challenge assumptions, find the bottlenecks, improve the experience and create strategies that result in measurable growth.

Because the stakes are bigger than marketing.

We believe credit unions can do an extraordinary amount of good. We want more people to find an institution willing to listen before judging them. More families escaping predatory financial products. More first-time borrowers getting a chance. More communities keeping locally rooted financial institutions. And fewer credit unions disappearing because they realized too late that the world had changed.

That's the “good” we're talking about.

YMC had a hell of a run, and I'm incredibly proud of what we built. But the best way to honor the past isn't always to preserve it. Sometimes it's to take everything it taught you and build what needs to come next.

Credit unions should understand that better than anyone.

This movement was created by people who looked at the financial system around them and decided there had to be a better way. They challenged convention. They built something different. They refused to accept the status quo.

Maybe that's the tradition we need to protect most.

Because the greatest threat to the credit union movement isn't change. It's becoming so committed to preserving the credit union of yesterday that we fail to build the credit union people need tomorrow.

We believed that strongly enough to change ourselves first.

YMC is dead.

Now let's go do So Much Good.