30 October 2026

Why Haven't You Started a Salon Membership Yet?

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Show Notes

Starting a salon membership can change your business, if you do it right. You’ll learn how to build a loyal, profitable customer base that supports your salon long term.

KEY TAKEAWAYS
Don’t blame the idea
Just because one salon owner failed with memberships doesn’t mean it won’t work for you. Phil Jackson says that failure is often about how it was run, not the idea itself. She’s never worked with the critic she mentions, so their experience doesn’t prove memberships don’t work.

Avoid the discount trap
Treat memberships like a premium service, not a discount club. Phil says her clients never undercharge or give too much away. Instead, they build value and see higher spending, more upsells, and better tips from membership clients.

Memberships bring real profit
In her own salon and the ones she coaches, membership clients bring in the most money. They come more often, buy more retail, and tip more than any other customer group. This proves well-run memberships are not a loss but a gain.

Loyalty to your brand, not just staff
Memberships build loyalty to your salon, not just to one stylist or therapist. When team members leave, members stay because they trust the brand. This keeps your income steady even with staff changes.

Use recurring income to cover bills
At the start of each month, membership payments cover rent, bills, and other fixed costs. Phil says this gives her peace of mind, especially when clients cut back during tough times.

Fix problems, don’t quit
Phil had her own early mistakes, like a membership that gave unlimited free retail. She admits it was a mess, but she didn’t quit. She refined it, made it better, and now it works.

Free guide to avoid common mistakes
Get a free cheat sheet called Your Salon Membership is Dead Before It Launches. It’s a quick five-minute read on queenofsalons.com. It shows you the exact pitfalls to avoid so you don’t make the same errors.

CONCLUSION
Phil Jackson proves that starting a salon membership can be a game changer when done with the right mindset and support through Build Your Salon. If you’re ready to grow your business, visit buildyoursalon.com and start building your future today.

Transcript
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Somebody on LinkedIn told me that salon memberships were a terrible idea, and as your queen of salons and queen of memberships, I'm not having that. They're wrong. I'm right. Here's why. Hello, hello, hello, my salon lovelies. Phil Jackson here, your queen of salons, coming all over the internet again with another dose of my Wise Owl Wisdom. How on earth are you? Achingly well, I hope. I had a bit of pushback this week. I was on LinkedIn because, you know, I'm that old now. Now, every now and again, I jump into LinkedIn. It's always lovely because you've got 47 missed notifications because I check LinkedIn literally about once every three months. And I must admit, it's not my favorite place. It's kind of like the boring bit of social media without the thirst traps, and I just don't see the point. If there's no abs to look at, why would you go online at all? And anyway, I was part of a group, and I put a post in there talking about salon memberships. because, as you know, nobody knows more about salon memberships than me, and it's what I know best. And somebody basically tore me a new arsehole, darlings, telling me that salon memberships were a terrible thing and that they were unprofitable and they couldn't possibly work and blah, blah, blah. They tried it. They'd failed. And therefore, I was some kind of satanic figure. Now, I could have let it go. Actually, no, I did. I left the group. I was like, I can't be arsed for this. It was quite a rude post anyway. I felt a bit condescending and far too long in the tooth to be spoken down to, my darlings. But it got me to thinking because I couldn't have been the only person who read that post and read that reply. And I wondered if maybe that kind of feedback was one of the reasons why you still haven't done your salon membership yet. So I'm going to tackle it head on, my love. But the first thing I want to talk about is a little tiny bit of a mindset shift, nothing to do with memberships. But I think there's a big difference between deciding something doesn't work and deciding that you couldn't get it to work. That's not the same thing. So just because this guy had not managed to make memberships work himself in his salon doesn't mean that salon memberships don't work. It just means he didn't get it to work. Hand on my heart. I've never heard of this guy before. I don't know anything about his business. I certainly haven't tried to help him with salon memberships. It's not like he's had my coaching, had my training and then made an informed decision that salon memberships don't work. But let's be really careful when we're making these statements about our business and what works and what doesn't. Is it that it doesn't work or is it just that you don't know how to get it to work? Because that's not the same thing at all. And I think the dangerous thing in that point is to start missing opportunities because you haven't done the proper research or haven't got the proper training or haven't thought about it in the correct way. It's a different kind of claim. So let's be careful before we make those sweeping statements, shall we? The first thing I want to knock down is that memberships are a quick way to over discount, give away value, undercharge, cheapen your brand, and turn your business into an unprofitable machine. That 100% is not the case if you do things properly. The reason that lots of memberships go wrong is that they start to treat memberships as a discount club. I have never seen salon memberships that way. Not in my 150 years of putting memberships together, not in the hundreds of salons. But I've now helped put memberships in place. I'm always saying this is not a discount club. There are discount clubs out there. There are people that will help you set up that kind of thing. I'm not interested in those kinds of memberships. If you're undercharging, giving away too much value, you're not my student. In fact, in my salon and in lots of the salons that I coach, the membership clients are the most profitable. They're putting more money in the till, more frequently, taking more upsells, more retail. Oh, and by the way, tipping more than anybody else in your books. And that's the way that it ought to be. So I don't want you to think that salon memberships are unprofitable. Don't let that be a reason for you not to put them in place. The wonderful thing with salon memberships, and we've been hinting about this for quite a few weeks now on the Build Your Salon podcast, is that it locks in a different level of loyalty. I don't want to say locks. People can cancel memberships. There need to be ways for people to change their minds. So they're not bolted in and they're a customer against their will. That's not what this is about at all. But it does encourage loyalty in a time when loyalty is more important than ever. Also, it encourages brand loyalty, salon loyalty in a way that doesn't necessarily translate to any other marketing pillar. Instead of building loyalty for the particular stylist or the particular therapist, they're building loyalty to your brand and your salon. And what we tend to find is that if team members leave, and they all will one day, we tend to find that your membership customers are more likely to be retained in the business. So why haven't you done it yet? Is it that fear of undercharging? Is it because you don't know how to price it? Is it because you're worried about committing to something which you're not going to be able to fulfill? Is it because you don't know where to start or you don't know how to handle cancellations? Is it because you've had a previous bad experience? And that's a really interesting one. Sometimes people have some problems at the beginning of any project, let alone salon memberships. And yet they use that as an excuse not to continue. They throw the baby out with the bathwater, darlings. They decide that memberships aren't for them just because they've had one hiccup at the beginning. Honestly, 120 years ago when I started doing salon memberships, we were the first. We had no one to copy, no one to follow, and no one who had trodden that path ahead of me. I was literally hacking my way through the weeds with my own machete. And did I get stuff wrong? Oh my God, darling, the cock-ups, the absolute balls-ups that I put in place. I put a membership together where we were giving people unlimited retail as part of their membership. Can you imagine what was going through my mind? I thought they were going to turn up with a bloody Tesco trolley, clear my shelves, and then piss off down the car boot sale on a Sunday and flog the lot. I was so worried. And of course we made a lot of messes. But do you know what? I knew there was something in that. And this is my message for you. Whatever problems you've had at the beginning of your membership journey, there's something in this. Stick with it. Polish it. Refine it. Make it better. Make it easier. Make it simpler. Simple is always the way, by the way. Each of those things is just a solvable objection. It's not your excuse to give up. And that predictable recurring income in a tight economy, how much better are you going to feel knowing that, for example, in my own business, my rent, my business rates, all of my fixed costs, all of my utilities, all covered by memberships at the beginning of every month. How good does that feel when people are tightening their purse strings or coming into the salon with a little bit less frequency? Memberships are one of the few tools built for exactly that. That predictability. No more sweats at night that you're not going to be able to cover your fixed costs. That peace of mind. That decent night's sleep about your business, maybe for the first time in months. But why not reach out and let me know why it is that you haven't done this yet? Not in a guilt trippy kind of way. I am genuinely interested. I would love to know why, after me banging on all this time, why you still haven't done this yet. It's a genuine question. And I'd love to get your answers. My email address scrolling at the bottom of the screen right now. Phil at buildyoursalon.com. If you need a little nudge, if you want a bit of free help, head over to queenofsalons.com. Find the link that says links. And in there is a little cheat sheet. And it's, I quite like it actually. It's called Your Salon Membership is Dead Before It Launches. And basically, it's the pitfalls that I see people falling into. It's a free cheat sheet, five minute read over a cup of tea on a Friday. Why not download it and give it a little once over. It might just be the little nudge that you need to get memberships in place. Just a few short days until I'm coming all over the internet again with another dose of my wise hour wisdom. And until next time, take care.