Memberships: Your February Funk Solution

Take a look at next week's diary. Are you still seeing gaps? That's the problem. You're hoping clients will rebook, hoping they'll spend enough, hoping that March is going to be better, and hope is not a great business model. Today we're going to look at the opposite of hope. We're going to look at memberships. Memberships for predictable income, loyal clients, and better cash flow. Hello, hello, hello, my salon friends. Phil Jackson here, your queen of salons, coming all over the internet with a big dose of my wise owl wisdom. How on earth are you? Achingly well, I hope. Here we are on February the 20th, nearly in March. Can feel the day is getting a bit longer, though the weather here has been gloomy and your uncle Phil's had a cold all week. So this episode is just a little bit late in the day on the 20th. I was waiting for all the drugs to kick in, my darling. So bear with me, wish me luck, and I'll see you at the end. So how's February been for you? Hearing some good, strong results as we get towards the end of the month from my coaching group. How is it in your salon? Are you hitting those goals that you set yourself back in January, or are we struggling a bit and looking at some white space? If you haven't got memberships in place, well, I think that could really help because it stops you starting every single month at zero. What we do when we've got memberships is take a bit of the control back into our hands. Rather than the clients choosing whether to come back, whether to spend, whether to prioritise their salon visits, we're swapping all that out for some consistency. We're looking for commitment. We're looking for a way that you can deliver value and everybody wins. So what exactly are memberships? Let's go back to 101. Well, essentially, in my mind, there are two types of memberships. There are memberships which are like a gym membership where you pay a certain amount and you get unlimited access to a service or a set of services. And that works really well for most of the hair services and a few of the beauty bits. Things like waxing work really well on an unlimited membership, but you wouldn't necessarily want that for something like a massage membership because, well, essentially, there's no limit to how much massage someone could have. They're going to be thrilled to bits and blissed up to the eyeballs. You're going to be knackered and poor. So what we have in that instance instead of a membership is a subscription and a subscription is where people pay a certain amount every month and they get defined benefits month on month as well.

So think of it like a magazine subscription where you pay a certain amount and you know what's going to land on the doorstep every month. Membership is good for unlimited services, easy to sell, lots of hair services. Subscription is for the rest of the beauty services and definitely for all of your holistic and aesthetic services. We don't want unlimited access to Botox, however tempting that may sound. Importantly, though, the way that I teach memberships, neither option is a discount. This isn't about being cheaper. It's about value. It's about consistency and it's about convenience. So, for example, on the hair side, we could have a blow dry club where people pay a certain amount and they can come in for as many blow dries as they want to. Or perhaps on the beauty side, we might have a monthly facial club where somebody pays a certain amount, say, I don't know, £90 a month and they get a luxury facial once a month. Or perhaps we look at some kind of product club. Now, I don't mix the two together, usually because your salon membership clients are the easiest to upsell to. So, I don't include retail in my memberships, but lots do. I love it when people prove me wrong. When you prove me wrong, it means that I'm still learning. So, please go out there, put products in your memberships, let your Uncle Phil know how it goes for you. So, what are the benefits to you? We can see lots of benefits for our customers. What's the benefits to you as the business owner? Well, the first thing is we've got some predictability and this is the bit that you're struggling with in February. This is what beats the February funk. It's having a little bit of guaranteed income before you even open the door. You get 20 members spending £50 a month. Suddenly, we're taking the edge of some of those peaks and troughs in your takings. Now, in my own business, we've got our memberships to the stage where we cover all of our fixed costs. So, my rent, my business rates, the fixed part of our wages, all covered by membership income. It takes some of the pressure off. It means it's easier for you to plan financially. You know when it's safe to invest in your business, when it's okay to grow your team, when you can invest in that training. You can breathe just a little bit easier, maybe even sleep a little easier at night. But if it number two is our membership customers tend to be most loyal. Firstly, they're the most organised. They're the ones that will book up six months of appointments as soon as they take out their membership. But also, they're not going to ghost you in February. They've committed. They're coming. And the retention on membership clients is even higher than you would expect from your regulars.

So, we see membership client retention way up in the 90s. 95% to 100% is not unusual because they're not shopping around. They're not drifting to your competitors. February gaps, not from your members. And finally, it gives us a positive way to stand out in a very crowded marketplace because much as I firmly believe that every single salon business in the land needs some kind of reliable membership income, it's still fairly unusual. So, if you want a way to stand out against your competitors, if you want to be the first in your town to get memberships in place, if you want something that you can rave about in your marketing that doesn't make it look like you're discounting, well, I think memberships are the way to go. So, how do we get started? Well, I mean, step number one could be to throw a little bit of cash in the direction of your Uncle Phil. Head over to queenofmemberships.com and get my memberships made easy training. That would be an excellent first step. But let's assume you want to do it the free way. Well, where would you start? Well, I would start with one service. Now, this is where lots and lots of people go wrong. Firstly, they choose a service that isn't particularly popular and then wonder why the membership doesn't sell either. This is not time to try and get a perm club together, for example. And you hair guys are brilliant at building unpopular memberships. So, keep it on the popular, popular services. The other thing that people do when they're choosing their services is they choose stuff which isn't hugely profitable. I'm assuming that your pricing is right on this service. If the pricing is wrong, what you're going to do with a membership is put a magnifying glass over the problem. You're going to turn it into a bigger problem than you had before. Now, the final thing I want to say about choosing your service is you want something that has an open end to it. I wouldn't put a membership together around something that has an end date. So, for example, apart from a little bit of maintenance, most of your laser hair removal clients ultimately won't need your services anymore. So, I don't think that's a great candidate for memberships. We want memberships to be ongoing, taking the peaks and troughs away from your turnover across years into the future, not just a few months here and there.

Equally, I don't particularly like very short-term membership. So, all of my membership is 12 months. Six months works really well as well. If you're struggling to sell a year, sometimes six months is a bit easier. If you take it down to three months where you're not doing much of that smoothing on your takings across a quarter, I think that's more like a package or a bundle of services rather than a membership. We're going to offer it to your existing clients first. Don't try and launch a membership to a cold audience. That's like joining a gym that you've never visited. You're going to get lots of people dropping out of your membership, lots of disappointment, and you're going to be disappointed with the results too. But don't target your most profitable customers. They're already profitable. They're already loyal. They're already crawling over hot coals to come in and spend money with you. In my mind, there's a continuum that runs from number one to number ten. On number one, we have your disloyal clients that only come in when you run an offer or they only come in when someone buys them a voucher. They're going to lots of salons in between and there's very little loyalty. Number ten is your best die-hard customers. Don't target either end of that. It would take so much effort to turn a number one into a loyal customer. And a number ten, as I've already said, is already profitable. This is for your sevens and eights. It's for targeting those customers who are good clients but could be amazing clients or you could get much better results for if they would just be a little bit more consistent and a little bit more frequent. Step number three, make joining really, really easy. I like direct debits. I like recurring card transactions, manual payments. No, forget it. But also, throw in there a couple of times a year, perhaps around Black Friday, maybe around Mother's Day, the option to buy a year of membership or six months of memberships. Because some memberships are really good gifts. Now, I would not necessarily, I mean, you might want to buy your mum six months of laser hair removal, but six months of luxury facials or six months of back and shoulder massage could be a really lovely gift and brilliant for your cash flow too. Then we need to deliver consistent results. These are going to turn into your best clients. Treat them that way. Make sure they feel valued. Throw in some extras, some bonuses, some things that make it feel like they're part of something special. A few things to avoid. Do not turn this into a discount club. Don't overcomplicate it with lots and lots of tiers, lots and lots of memberships. You're going to make it really, really difficult. But when you're choosing what to put in a membership, bear in mind that people are interested in different things. So if you've got, let's say you're going to put together a membership in a beauty salon and you've decided you're going to include facials, and then lots of people will say, oh, I know, we'll put nails in as well as a bonus.

Problem is, you've got some clients that are interested in facials, some that are interested in nails. The crossover between the two is smaller. So every time you include a new service, you actually reduce the attraction of that membership because you're building in benefits that people don't necessarily want. Don't launch it in an unlimited way where you've got so many memberships available. Just dip a toe. Just sell 10 memberships for your Uncle Phil and let me know how that feels. It gives you a chance to test the waters a little bit, but it also gives people a reason to sign up now. Because memberships are always available, it's very hard to get people to sign up this month instead of next month. But if you can say you only had 10 memberships available and six of them have already sold, well, suddenly we've got a reason to take some action. So that bit of scarcity helps things sell a lot more easily. Memberships aren't going to fill your entire diary overnight, but set yourself a target. Maybe 10, 15% of your revenue within the next three months. Just take some of those peaks and troughs away from your turnover and let me know how that feels. So there we have it. What do you think? Have you got memberships in place in your salon? I'm desperate to do some coaching with somebody who wants to go all in. I'm looking for a salon who wants to go all in on memberships, memberships only. I've never done it and I'm desperate, desperate after 10 years of teaching memberships. Come on, guys. If there's anyone out there who wants to take the plunge, I would love to help you on your journey. I'd love to help you on your journey anyway. That web address again, Phil, that web address again is queenofmemberships.com. If you'd like to reach out and let me know how you're getting on, my email address scrolling at the bottom of the screen, phil at buildyoursalon.com. I'd also like to be talking to you about your memberships journey. Why not reach out and become a guest on a future episode of the Build Your Salon podcast? I'd love to be sharing your story with my gorgeous Build Your Salon listeners. Just a few short days until I'm coming all over the internet again. And until then, take care.