The Real Numbers: How Many Members Does Your Salon Actually Need?

You don't need a hundred members to make salon memberships worth your while. Heck, you may not even need 20. No rhetoric today, no messing about. Let's talk about the real numbers, shall we? 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 Wise Owl Wisdom in my first podcast of 2026. A very happy new year to you. Looking back, how was 2025? We've been wrapping up in my group coaching program, Salon Spark. And I have to say, I've been hugely impressed with the results that some of my members have been getting. And I'm not just blowing smoke up their arses, darling. They've done some incredible work, smashed some really ambitious targets, and all this in the face of a year where actually a lot of people have really struggled. 2025 was not an easy year. So if you've managed to survive, if you're managing to thrive, then first of all, take a big pat on the back from your uncle Phil. And now, of course, it's time to look forward. And I'm hoping that salon memberships are going to be a big part of your strategy for 2026. But one of the things that stops salon owners from launching is they start getting overwhelmed by the numbers. They think they need hundreds and hundreds of members to make it work. Or worse still, they launch without a target or a plan and just kind of hope. And both approaches will fail. Ultimately, I reckon, ultimately, I reckon by the end of this episode, I can convince you that you need fewer members than you think. But we do, of course, need to make sure that they are the right members. So let's break it down step by step. Let's do the maths that actually matters, shall we? And the first is to look at the gap that you want memberships to fill. What's the gap between your quietest month's revenue and all the costs that you've got to pay out, your fixed costs, the rent, the rates, the utilities, the stuff that doesn't change month by month? Because that will be a really good place to start with a target for your salon memberships. So if your fixed costs are, say, 8,000 and your quietest months, you do 6,000, there's a 2,000 gap. Let's plug it with memberships. And then we need to look at what you're charging for your membership. And if you're charging, say, £50 a month for your membership, well, that means we're going to need 40 members.

40 members is going to fill your gap. The thing is, not everybody stays forever. So we need to plan in for a few members to drop out during the year. Now, don't get me wrong. We don't need to over-egg the pudding on this. I promise you the number of members that cancel during the year, if you're selling to the right members, is extremely low. In fact, some years we lose no members at all in the 12 months that my guys sign up for. But if we plan for, say, 5% to 10% of your members to be either dropping out or not renewing, you might need somewhere closer to those 45 members rather than just the 40 in order to maintain filling that gap. So what I'm trying to explain to you is you don't need hundreds of members. We're talking about 40 to 45 members. Most salons will start to see a benefit between 20 to 40 members. We don't need hundreds, and we certainly only need really good members. But if we can get between 20 and 40 good members, we are halfway there. Now, it might be that actually you don't need even that many members. Now, why would that be, Uncle Phil? Why would I only need a handful of members? Well, it depends why you want your membership in the first place. Let me explain. If you want your memberships to smooth out the peaks and troughs, to plug the gap in those fixed costs, then yes, we need a certain number of members, and it's probably going to be a sizable number. But there are other benefits to memberships. And one of the benefits that I'm always banging on about, Uncle Phil, not this again, it's an amazing way to stand out as something a bit different in a crowded marketplace. Now, if all you want from your memberships is to stand out in a crowded marketplace, it doesn't matter if you only have five to ten members signing up. We just want something new to talk about in our marketing. And more is not always better, especially, and you know I love, unlimited memberships. Firstly, because I think they are the easiest to sell. Secondly, because I think they stand out the most away from packages and bundles. But if you sign up too many members, you're going to start to struggle to deliver. And I've seen salons cap the number of unlimited memberships because their columns are already fairly full. It's not a problem, but we've got to make sure that we're bearing in mind the capacity that we've got available when we're selling our memberships. So actually, most of my membership clients will have a tiered or a hybrid approach.

So let's say they want, I don't know, a hundred members. They might have, say, 50 of them on a basic tier where we have more like a subscription model where you get a certain number of services per month for X amount. And then we might have a second tier or a VIP tier, which is priced higher with unlimited number of memberships available. So we can mix and match in that hybrid approach to suit your capacity. It's not about how many members you have. It's about how much recurring revenue they generate. That's the bit that's going to make a difference in your business. So I'm going to say as a very rough rule of thumb, if you're a solo, so let's say you're working on your own as a beauty therapist or a hairdresser, how many members would you need to make a difference? I'm going to say probably as few as 10 to 15 members can actually make a big difference to smoothing out your income, making you feel a bit less vulnerable, stopping you start from zero month after month after month. Once we get to the stage where we've got a team and we're looking at, say, a team of three or four, you're probably looking at between 30 and 50 members, which would pull in, I don't know, somewhere between three and five thousand, maybe even more. And that starts to cover those overhead gaps and starts to add a profit buffer as well. If you're a bigger salon and you've got seven chairs or seven treatment rooms, you might want to start targeting 70 plus members. But it really does depend on what you want memberships to deliver. It depends on the target that you have for the income that you're trying to generate. But the reality check is these aren't huge numbers. You've got hundreds of active clients already. We're just looking for between 10 and 20 percent of them to move on to a different method of spend. That's it. So what I suggest you do and what I teach in Salon Memberships Made Easy is we reverse engineer our strategy. So we start with what you want to generate. Then we start to work backwards. Now, when we are starting to plan for our memberships, let's say we've got a monthly overhead gap of 2000. Well, there's a number of ways that we could divide that up. You could sell 10 memberships at £200 each. You could sell 100 memberships at £20 each and everywhere in between. Heck, you could even sell one membership for £2,000, which, you know, in my head, it's a lot easier to find one customer who's going to spend a huge amount of money than it is to find 100 customers

who are going to spend a smaller amount. But somewhere in there will be a number that makes you smile, that feels realistic to you. So maybe £70 a month feels realistic or £100 a month. That will tell you how many members you need. Then add in that buffer so that 5 to 10 percent to allow for people to drop out and get replaced. And then suddenly you've got your launch target. Now, quick fire warnings. First of all, you've got to build in that buffer. Launching with a target of two or three members is not going to move the needle on your business. We need a certain number to make the admin worth it. We need a certain number to replace anybody who drops out. If you've only got three members and one cancels, that's going to hurt a lot. It's going to pinch. You're going to feel that. Second mistake that I see people making is not planning for their capacity. Look at the utilisation that you've got available. Maybe you want to start steering people with your membership. So maybe you've got a membership which is only available with certain team members to help build their columns when we've already got other columns that are filled to capacity. So understand your capacity. Understand your utilisation before you launch. Mistake number three, you've got to have a growth plan. It's not just about a launch strategy. It's not just about getting it out into the marketplace. In fact, selling those first few memberships, if you do as you're told and do a nice job like your Uncle Phil teaches you, that's actually relatively easy. It's how we grow to those bigger numbers is more of a challenge. So we need a strategy in the medium to longer term. So there you have it. You probably only need, I don't know, 20 to 40 good members to transform your salon in 2026. You certainly don't need hundreds. You just need the right people paying you every single month. If you want some help building this, then maybe head over to queenofmemberships.com where you can see my Salon Memberships Made Easy training. It's the tried and tested. It's the first programme that I created maybe as much as a decade ago now. It's been through lots of iterations. It's been polished. It's refined. It's the simplest way to get you from just dreaming about memberships to getting them out in front of your customers. I would love to be helping you on your journey. I have helped hundreds of people on this journey over the years. I'm going to put that link in the show notes, but it's queenofmemberships.com. If you found this episode helpful, please share with another salon owner. I've got to grow this podcast in 2026. It's my New Year's resolution. Maybe share with a salon owner who you know has been putting off memberships because the numbers felt overwhelming to them too.

If you would like to reach out with any questions on this, please email me. My email address scrolling at the bottom of the screen, phil at buildyoursalon.com. You know I love hearing from my salon owner friends anyway. Also reach out if you'd like to be interviewed on a future episode of the Build Your Salon podcast. I've done quite a few of these on my own now. I could do with a chat with somebody. Your uncle Phil gets lonely, you know. Just a few short days until I'm coming all over the airwaves with another dose of my wise hour wisdom. And until next week, take care.