How to Use a Membership to Change the Direction of Your Salon (Without Losing Your Best Clients)

Falling out of love with the work that built your business is not a sign that you're failing. It means that you're evolving and changing. And today, I'm going to show you exactly how to use memberships to make that transition without losing the clients you actually want to keep. All on Build Your Salon Hello, hello, hello, my salon friends. Phil Jackson here, your queen of salons, coming all over the internet with another dose of my Wise Owl Wisdom. How on earth are you? Achingly well, I hope. How's March panning out for you? Gosh, I'm hoping that that little bit of warm weather that we had at the end of last week has prompted all of your clients to suddenly start looking at their hairy bits and figure out that they want to be a little bit more tanned and a little bit more blonde and they're all booking like crazy and making fun. Some good, good money for you. Now, every week, twice a week, I ask you to send in your questions or reach out, let me know how you're doing. And most of the time, if I'm really honest, it's crickets. I don't get very much in the way of feedback at all, which is a bit sad for your poor old uncle Phil, my darlings. It's a bit like shouting into a big dark hole and not really knowing if anyone's listening. I know they are because I've got the stats that Spotify give me. But, yeah, sometimes it's nice to hear from you. And this week, I actually got a question that we can use on the Build Your Salon podcast. I'm here and happy to help because, of course, we're talking about my favourite, favourite topic of all time, which is salon memberships. And I get that the specifics of this question might not apply to all of you. Use your translation head. You can make this work for whatever's going on in your business too. So I got a message this week from a beauty business owner. I'm going to read you the whole question. It says, Hi, Phil. I've got a question I thought you could possibly answer. I've always been heavily nail focused with treatments. However, I have started falling out of love with it and wanting to specialise more in skin and other treatments I offer. I've tried a membership before, but it was too confusing for my clients where it wasn't specific enough. Where I'd like to cut down on doing nails but don't want to lose my absolute favourite long term clients, I've had the thought of creating a membership for my nail clients only. Not only is this going to help me drop a few clients to make space for my more profitable and enjoyable treatments, but the recurring revenue at the start of the month, of course, will also be helpful.

I have three other nail technicians employed within my salon, meaning clients that don't want to pay for a membership can stay within the salon and go to one of them instead. Win-win. So they're asking what I think about it. And honestly, what a joy. Oh, by the way, this comes from Summer, who I have actually met. The salon is, oh gosh, I've forgotten the name of the salon. How rude of me. I think it's called Flourish. Flourish Beauty and Academy over in Devizes. I have a limerick around Devizes, but it's very, very rude. And perhaps if you reach out by email and let me know what's going on in your salon, I'll share with you my Devizes and limerick. I'm making myself smile. It's that funny. And I have actually met Summer because Devizes is very close to me. So we went over and had a coffee one day in a very lovely bakery. Anyway, what do I think? I think it's a brilliant idea. And here is exactly why it's going to work. So the instinct is absolutely right. And what Summer has very cleverly done is not just thought about the revenue side. She's thought about the relationship side as well. And that's pretty rare with salon owners. Most salon owners who want to change direction, they panic and either do nothing and stay stuck or they go a bit cold turkey with it and they lose the clients that they've built their business on, they've built their relationships with. And what she's found is a third path through memberships and memberships are the bridge that makes this a success. It means that she gets to honour those long-term relationships while creating a natural way to reshape her column and reshape the relationship. Now, having those three nail techs in the salon as well will also help make this work. But it doesn't have to be the only reason this works. I've seen people do this even if they're working on their own. I've seen solopreneurs who, for example, are doing too much massage and they enjoy doing massage. They want to maintain their regular clients that they've built their business off, but they're knackered. And let's face it, massage can be really, really hard work. And the membership is a really useful way of restricting the number of particular services that we have in a column. And in Summer's case, what she's doing is making space for more profitable stuff. It means that they, but in her case, the clients who don't want a membership have that soft landing. No one's feeling abandoned. It's a genuinely elegant solution. Now, nail memberships are a little bit tough because the profit margin on nails is very, very tight.

But actually, what we've got the freedom of in this case is actually we want to price some of those clients out. We want to be pushing them to other team members or out of the column as far as nail services are concerned. So where's she gone wrong in the past? She said a previous membership failed because it was too vague. I think that's exactly what lots of people get wrong. Memberships need to be super specific, tied down to one service or one group of services. And we're going to make sure that this one isn't. So three things to having a treatment-specific membership. We need absolute clarity on what's included. And an nail membership is really easy to define. And what we're going to do is I would limit it by the number of services that people can have. So you say you're going to come in and have X amount per month. We pick one structure and we stick to it. So there's no confusion, which is probably why we weren't getting many sign-ups on previous memberships as well. And we need to be able to describe our memberships. The acid test is we need to be able to describe our memberships in one sentence. If it's more than one sentence, it's too complicated. Now, the nice thing this time is we don't need to head to a bargain basement discount membership. That's not what this is about. We can have a price that actually reflects the relationship. This is going to be her best clients. And no membership, or at least the way that I teach memberships, no membership is for bargain hunters. It has to make sense price-wise. It has to make sense financially, but this is for her favourite long-term clients and we can price it accordingly. So maybe a little discount on the regular price is fine. But honestly, I'd be increasing those prices and bringing the membership in at the same time. What we don't want to do is be going past 10%, 15% loyalty reward. Because beyond that, it's going to feel like we're undervaluing this actual VIP priority membership. They're getting access to a particular team member. They get access to summer that the rest of the column isn't going to get. And that has a premium feel to it. And that's how I would be pitching this membership. It would be my VIP nail club. Honestly, I'd be allowing other people in the salon to start getting a VIP nail club together as well. I think it's a really useful way of helping get that average built up. Now, we need a transition timeline. So this needs to happen over a period of weeks, maybe a couple of months. It doesn't have to be something that we announce for six months' time. But I would restrict the number of memberships you've got available. Make sure your favourite clients hear about it first and give them a reason to join. Maybe we're going to lock in price. We've got that continued access to summer. And we've got the clear alternative if they prefer. Give the membership a natural launch window. I think probably four weeks is enough to get this together.

Six weeks maximum, and then get your founder members in and locked in. Now, the bit that we're going to have to be really careful about is making sure that you're strong. Because if they haven't signed up for the membership, you're going to have to be really tough and really, really firm with the boundaries around who they can book those services in. Don't be swayed. Don't be persuaded. Now, the risk is that the membership ends up being a bit of a reason to stay stuck rather than a bridge out of this. And we don't want that. What we don't want to do is not actively fill that freed up space with the treatments that you want to do. You said you want to pivot to skin. This is a story I hear an awful, awful lot. So we've got to make sure that at the same time as we're launching the membership, we're filling that space with those skin consultations, making sure that we've got those new treatment offers being developed, making sure that your skin menu is good to go as well. Otherwise, we're going to start panicking and making sure that we've got some white space, which is not where anyone wants to be. So in a nutshell, Summer, to answer your question directly, yes, it's a thumping idea. Perfect use case for salon memberships. You've already done the hard thinking. You've already persuaded yourself that it's a good idea. Now you just need to build that membership properly. Make sure it ticks the boxes and does what you need it to do. If you would like some help building a salon membership that actually works, whether it's a transition membership like this one or a salon membership program for any of your services, Memberships Made Easy is the name of the program that I've put together. I literally wrote the book on this. In fact, I've just written a second book on this, which will be out sometime during the summer. But you can find the Memberships Made Easy program over at queenofmemberships.com. I'm also going to put the link in the show notes. If you've got a question you'd like me to answer on the podcast, drop me a message. I clearly read them and I'm panting to hear from you about what's going on in your business. What are you using memberships for? How has it helped you build a more stable, successful salon business? I'd love to be sharing your story with my Build Your Salon audience. Maybe you'd like to jump on, perhaps even, oh, this would be a good one, a nice little follow-up, wouldn't it? Why don't we make sure that this is a success summer and then come on and let me interview you about the journey and let's share your story with my Build Your Salon podcast audience. They're gorgeous. You're going to love them. Just a few short days until I'm coming all over the airwaves again with another dose of my Wise Owl wisdom. And until we speak again, take care.