Where to Start with Salon Memberships (Without Overwhelming Yourself)

You're working so many hours every week, carrying out service, doing the books, ordering supplies, figuring out your marketing. You are grinding. But when I look at your bank account, it's kind of embarrassing, and some of you are making less than minimum wage. You're keeping your business alive with personal savings and the bank of a hubby. Today, I'm breaking down a better way. Salon memberships without overwhelming yourself, because you don't need another complicated system to manage. You need something simple that actually works. Let's get into it, shall we? Hello, hello, hello, my salon friends. Phil Jackson here, your queen of salons, coming all over the airwaves with another dose of wise owl wisdom. How on earth are you? Achingly well, I hope. I'm a year older. I know you wouldn't know it to look at me, would you, darlings? But that's why this is an audio only podcast. And yeah, it's a wonderful time to sort of reassess how your life's going, how the year's going, how your goals are delivering. And I am getting back to my roots a little bit. I've decided that perhaps your Uncle Phil's tried to do too many things brilliantly over the last few years. And one of the core pillars of my coaching has been recurring income, getting salon memberships in place, because I just think it should be part of everybody's business. And more and more people are agreeing with me, more and more software building it in. So finally, after 10 years of banging the same old bloody drum, darlings, your Uncle Phil is finally getting through. So that's what today is all about. But I want to really make sure that this isn't something that turns into a huge, overwhelming task for you. It's got to be simple. And we are stealing, without any apology, content directly from my Memberships Made Easy program. I'm sponsoring my own podcast episode, darlings, because frankly, it's my show and I can do as I bloody well please. But I'm going to tell you a little bit more about Memberships Made Easy shortly. But for now, we're going to dive into where people go wrong with salon memberships at the very start. And what we can do in a more, in a better way, in a smarter way to make sure that your membership absolutely flies. And I'll tell you where people go wrong is, well, actually, the first thing I want to make sure is that you're not building memberships on shaky prices. So I'm going to assume that you've done your pricing review in the last few months and that we are profitably pricing our services. Because if you try and build a membership over the top of shaky pricing, what you're basically doing is putting a magnifying glass over those prices.

You're going to make the problem worse by bringing in recurring income. And I know about a third of salon owners struggle with turning a decent profit. I know a third of you are struggling to predict your monthly revenue. So let's make sure that pricing isn't the reason. I'm assuming that that's stable and sorted. If it is, brilliant, we can move on with our memberships. But where people go wrong is they decide what the membership is going to look like before they've figured out who the hell is going to buy the damn thing. And that's all back to front. So the first thing that I teach in Memberships Made Easy is to figure out what you want from your membership program. Because there are lots and lots of benefits. There's lots of reasons why you might want a membership program. Maybe it's because you want that predictability of income. Maybe you don't want to be starting every month at zero. Maybe you want to cover, like me, your fixed costs every month with membership income. Or maybe it's not about the income at all for you. Maybe you're operating, as let's face it, darlings, most of us are these days. Maybe you're operating in a very crowded marketplace. And that means that we've got to find ways to stand out. And what people have been relying on for too many years is using pricing to stand out. They've been using discounting or crazy offers to get people through the door. And that's not going to cut the mustard anymore. Our margins are way too tight. So perhaps we need membership so that we can stand out in a really positive way. This still isn't the norm, at least not at the moment. So you get to stand out with your customers. You get to really get to grips with how your customers want to spend. They are getting everything on memberships these days. Maybe they're getting a veg box delivered. Heck, you can even get your razor blades stuffed through your letterbox once a month now. There are so many things that we're used to having subscriptions for. And yet the salon industry is woefully behind the times. And it doesn't need to be that way because your Uncle Phil's here to help you with it. Or maybe it's not to do with the money. Maybe it's not to do with the predictability. Maybe it's not to do with the marketing. Maybe it's because we've got a price sensitive clientele. Now, I'm not a big fan of letting the tail wag the dog, darlings. This is your business, yours to steer. And I don't believe that we should be trying to build a membership and build a salon business,

let's face it, around very price sensitive customers. But there are bits of society, bits of our economy that are a bit worried about what they're spending at the moment. And there is nothing worse than hearing one of your regulars tell you that they're going to be spinning their appointment out just a little bit longer next time. You know, if they've been coming to you every six weeks for a colour and cut, and then they say something like, actually, I might try and push it to eight weeks at the moment. Things are a little bit tight. Well, that's the same. You know, if all of your clients went from six weeks to eight weeks, that's the same as losing a third of your clientele. That's going to hit you really hard across the year. So we can use memberships to insulate our customers. Because if you think about it logically, my love, if you come into my salon every six weeks or seven weeks or eight weeks, by definition, you have a month where you're spending a lot with me and then a month where you're spending nothing. There are some people who will sign up to a membership just to have that predictability of income. We don't need to worry about discounting. And darlings, we are not building a discount club here. But we don't need to worry about discounting because they just want to know what they're spending every single month. They don't want any nasty surprises when it comes to paying at your reception desk. Or is there something else? Perhaps we need to go to the other end of the market. Maybe you want to build something very exclusive, something very VIP. Perhaps we want an excuse to offer access to certain services, to certain team members, to certain time slots, to certain benefits. And memberships are a great way of steering our customers towards or away from different bits of the price card. I've seen memberships built around, for example, the apprenticeship team. So it's a great way of getting your apprentices to see the same people regularly. When we're doing our qualifications, we see lots of models, but we don't really see the same people again and again and again because we get that task signed off in our books and then move on to something else. So memberships are a great way of encouraging people to come back and see those same people again and again. So they get used to the journey of a client rather than just a one-off observation. Or I've seen the opposite. I've seen salon owners say that actually, unless you are a salon membership client, you can't see the salon owner. And then they get to restrict the number of people that are booking into their columns, freeing up time for those marketing activities, freeing up time to work on the business.

Heck, maybe even freeing up time to take an extra day off. Doesn't that sound wonderful? So we need to get really clear around why we want the membership, because the way that we would build something that's all about predictability of spend is going to feel very different and be built in a very different way to something that's all about those VIP benefits. And I'm taking extreme examples, but you can see that before we've even decided what services we need built in. We need to have that goal in mind. More on this after this short message. Are you ready for some predictable in your salon business? Do you want to know the secret to steady salon income? I'm Phil Jackson, your queen of salons, your undisputed queen of salon memberships. And I've helped hundreds of salon owners just like you turn their businesses from a very spiky takings graph into something much more steady and predictable. My Memberships Made Easy program will help you stop chasing new clients and wasting your time on social media, turning your existing clients into more profitable raving fans who support your business even in the quiet times. My proven membership framework gives you everything you need. Ready to use membership templates, pricing strategies that actually work, even scripts for selling your memberships by email and in person. The program's backed by my signature 90-day no-quibble guarantee. Take the program, take the bonus coaching call I'm including, and if you're not ready to launch your memberships program at the end, I will coach you myself until you are. If you're ready to offer your clients something truly exceptional, ready to build that predictable stream of Salon Income. Head to queenofmemberships.com forward slash podcast for a very exclusive rate on my best selling program. Head to queenofmemberships.com forward slash podcast. Let's get started, shall we? Once we've decided what we want our membership to look like, it's then a lot easier to jump into step two, which is figuring out who the membership is going to be for. So it's a bit like deciding what the goal for your membership is going to be first, then figuring out the clients who are best placed to help you achieve that goal. So if you've decided that you want to build something very high end, very VIP, by definition,

very premium as far as pricing is concerned, some of your clients just aren't going to fit for that. And the golden rule of Salon Memberships is that memberships are never meant to be for everyone. If you try and build a membership which is for everybody, you're going to end up with something very bland, something very generic, something actually really rather unpopular and something very difficult to market. So by getting a really tight idea about who the membership is going to be for, it makes the marketing so much easier. So where everybody goes wrong with Salon Memberships and what makes it very overwhelming is they say something like, I want to build a membership around facials or I want to build a membership around colour. Then they try and shoehorn a few of their clients into some membership, which they've just kind of cobbled together on a cost plus basis. Whereas you're not going to do that. You're going to be a lot smarter. You're going to use Memberships Made Easy and my programme to approach this from the right direction. So first of all, we've decided what we want our membership to achieve. Then we decide who is going to help us achieve those goals most easily. Then we build a membership they're going to find irresistible. So it may be that actually that facial membership is a really bad idea. It's not going to appeal to people. It's not going to tap in to the urges and the desires and the needs that they have that are going to help us sell the membership. We want to build something popular. Now, what I want you to do is imagine your clientele stood in a row. OK, they're on a continuum that runs from number one to number 10. At number one, we have those clients who very rarely come in. There's very little loyalty. Perhaps they only come in when someone's bought them a voucher or when you run some last minute availability on your WhatsApp group. Or maybe if they've won a competition and we're not likely to see them again, they've got very low levels of loyalty. They're probably going to other salons in between visits. Perhaps they're very price sensitive. Then at number 10, you have your absolute diehard, I would crawl over coals to get to the salon customers. They're the first ones that were back in after COVID lockdown was lifted. They're the ones that will pay whatever it takes to make sure they get those slots at the times that they want to. They take all the retail. They take all the upsells. Well, here's where people make some fundamental errors with their salon memberships.

They either try to build a membership for those number one clients, those that have got very little loyalty. It ain't going to work, honey. At the end of the day, if they've got a shitty relationship with your salon and loyalty, they're not going to commit to spending the same amount every month and making sure that they keep up regular visits to get the most out of their membership. It's just not going to work. So let's not waste our time trying to get loyalty out of somebody who doesn't want to offer it. Equally, though, what we don't want to do is build a membership for our number 10 clients. They're already profitable. They're already loyal. They're already coming in regularly, taking the upsells, taking the retail. What we don't want to do is just change the way that they pay us. That's not getting us any further ahead at all. Where I want you to focus your membership when we're looking for that ideal membership customer, I want you to look at your number sevens and your number eights. The good client who could be a great client. The one that we just need to see a little bit more frequently for them to turn into an absolute goldmine for our business. Any time you've got a customer on your beauty bed and you say, do you know what? We could just get better results if you would come in just that bit more frequently for your facial perfect membership client. Any time you get somebody coming in for a hair color and you think, oh, gosh, I wish you'd been in two weeks before. This is really quite ropey looking color. Now, perfect membership client. Any time you hear a customer say that they're going to put themselves first, they're going to prioritize their salon visits. They're really going to take self-care seriously. And then by March, those New Year's resolutions have gone by the wayside and they're struggling to find time to come in. Life's got in the way. Work's got in the way. Children have got in the way. Other commitments are interfering with the promise they made themselves. Perfect membership clients because the membership is going to help keep them on track, stay disciplined, stay regular, get those better results. So it's not about conning people out of more money, getting them to spend more. It's about them getting actually more from your salon over time in a perfect win-win situation. So here's what I want you to do. I want you to figure out what memberships could contribute to your business and put a number on that. How many memberships do you want to sell? How much do you want to retain? How much do you want to make in retainer income? Would a thousand pounds a month make you feel better about your business, make you feel more

stable, make you feel like you're not starting from zero? Or does it need to be more than that? And there's no right or wrong answer for this. It's your personal goal. I have coached and mentored people who just want to stand out in a crowded marketplace. They don't need to sell a huge number of memberships. They just want to make a big noise about the memberships they do have. But equally, I've coached people who want 50% of their income on retainer because they are fed up with lying awake at night wondering about how they're going to cover their costs every month and everything in between. Put a number on it. Now, once you put a number on it, I think this is where things get really interesting. Let's say you want a thousand pounds a month in retainer income. Well, there's a few ways you could approach that. You could sell 100 memberships at £10 each. It's going to be a lot of work trying to find a membership for £10. It's going to be a lot of work trying to get 100 people to sign up for it. You could have 10 memberships at £100 each. And that suddenly feels a lot less work to me in my own business. Or maybe we're just looking for one customer to sign up for £1,000 a month. Well, what would that look like? And everything in between is possible too. But one of those numbers will resonate with you. One of them will start getting those creative juices flowing, my darlings, and get you on the path to something truly exciting in your business. Then figure out who's got £100 a month to spend. Who's got £1,000 a month to spend on hair or beauty services? Once you've got that person in mind, then put something together that's an absolute no-brainer. Now, you've already got the details of my Memberships Made Easy programme. You need to head to queenofmemberships.com. Don't forget forward slash podcast because that gets you the very, very, very, very, very best rate on what is already an absolute steal of a programme, even if I say so myself. And what's more, we've just built in AI fill, which means 24-7 support. You can jump on and have a chat with my AI robot. It's been trained on all of the modules. It's got all of the handouts. It can answer all of your membership questions too. And even the stupid questions you can ask, and it's not going to get fed up like I would when you ask the same question five times. So AI fill is built into Memberships Made Easy. I can't wait to listen back and hear what you are building. I can't wait to hear about the success that you're getting with memberships. And also, this is going to get an awful lot easier. We've got some software companies that are releasing memberships as a feature. I'm not going to mention them because they haven't sponsored the podcast.

But it will be built into my memberships training. There's always a module on my latest recommendations, which I update a couple of times a year. So reach out and let me know what you've built. I'd love to hear from you. Also reach out if you would like to appear as a guest on a future episode of the Build Your Salon podcast. I have run out of guests for 2025, so I've got guest slots available. I'm going to be back either way in just seven days when I'm coming over the airwaves again. And until then, my darlings, please take care. Sit down and see what's going on with the queen of salons. Hair, beauty, and more successful tips for business owners. All on Build Your Salon.