In this episode, I share all about why structuring your Membership in the right way is integral to your enjoyment – and profitability – when running your Membership.
Click on the video above to watch, on the Podcast below to listen, or scroll down to read the transcript 🙂
Hi, welcome along to this very first episode of the Recurring Revenue Rocks show. My name is Laura Jeffrey, and it’s great to have you here. So in this episode, we’re going to be talking all about how to structure your membership so that you can maximize your profits. This episode is sponsored by Magnetize Your Membership Pro, which I’ll be telling you more about at the end of the episode.
So let’s dive into this. There are a couple of different areas that I want to talk to you about when it comes to structuring your membership for maximum profit. So the first thing I wanna talk to you about is how you’re actually structuring your membership. Are you structuring it in the best way for you? Are you structuring it in a way that supports your values and the way you are as a person and as a business owner.
And secondly, I want to talk to you about kind of the level that you’re niching actually with your membership. So these are two kind of quite, quite separate topics, but underneath this topic of kind of making sure that you’re making maximum rent revenue from your membership. So first of all, let’s have a look at how you’re structuring your membership. So for a lot of people,
when you set up your membership at first, as I did with one of my earlier memberships, you set up kind of assuming that you have to do it on a model where you are charging a small amount per person, and you’re going to have to get a lot of members in, in order to meet your income goals. So I wanted to, first of all, just share with you that that is not the only way to run a membership. So for me personally, like my story, if you like, is that I actually, I started a couple of Netflix style memberships and it took me a few months to realize that actually for me, as a business owner and as an individual, the Netflix style actually wasn’t ideal for me.
I really wanted to grow my business with a more premium model. So what we find is with memberships and from working with dozens and dozens and dozens of business owners for me, I see that they, these kind of memberships, they fall into two camps. So as I’ve mentioned already, you get your Netflix style memberships going out to the masses, charging a smaller amount per person in order for them to access the membership.
But then you also get premium memberships as well. So with a premium membership, you are charging more per person per month, and they’re getting a higher level of access to you as the membership founder. So with the Netflix style memberships, your obviously not able to go out to every person and look after them on a one-to-one basis, because that simply wouldn’t make sense in this business model.
But when you’re going much higher kind of prices per month with a premium model membership, you can give more of you as, as a, as a business owner, as a membership founder. So what I really want you to have a think about today is have you set up your membership in a way in a structure that feels good to you? Does it feel good to you now?
And I want you to be really, really honest about this, because you can change this. Like for me, I had actually set up one of my own memberships as a Netflix style membership. My goal was to enroll probably like, I think my aim was 400 people in the first year, something like that, but as more and more people were enrolling, I actually realized that for me personally, I wanted to go for a more premium offerings. So I could work with fewer people, but charge more. So either way is absolutely fine. So really get clear with yourself and get honest and ask yourself the question. Have I set up my membership in a way that feels really good to me? Can I look after my members in the way that is most beneficial for them and most beneficial for me as a business owner?
How have I set it up in a way that is conducive to that? Is it conducive to my values? Is it conducive to my personality traits?
So say for me, I’m an introvert. I’m a massive introvert. I love people. I love working with people. I love working with people in my membership. I love working with people one-to-one, but at the bottom of all that I am an introvert.
So I need a lot of time to myself, away from my computer screen away from the zoom calls where I can just recharge. Whereas some people are more extrovert. You want to be out talking to people all the time. Really have a think about what you’re like as a person and whatever way that is. You’ve got to celebrate that and be confident that you are utilizing those kind of those positive things about you in whatever way you’re setting your membership up.
So for me, that meant going down a premium route. So I worked with fewer people at a higher price point happy days. Absolutely love it for so many of my clients. They’ve got big, big visions, big, big goals about, you know, helping so many people, so many people that they want to impact hundreds or thousands of people with their membership.
And that is amazing, but I just want you to really have a good thing, which company you sit in. Would you rather reach your money goals by working with less people and charging more, or do you really, really want to go out to the masses or you on a mission to impact hundreds or thousands of people? So say for me personally, my goal this year is to work with 100 coaches and specialists to help them to make more money from their memberships. And that’s really clear for me. It’s like, okay, cool. So my, my goal this year is 100 people for you. What is your goal? What’s realistic for you? Like what feels like a bit of a stretch, but also feels really good to you.
So really that is the first part of this. I want you to think about how you’ve structured your membership and you can change it. So say for me, when I moved over from the Netflix style across to a premium style, it was great because I already had so much amazing content that I’d created for my Netflix style membership that I could then tweak and make even better,
you know, structure it slightly differently, change it up a little bit, change how I was delivering it. And I turned it into a premium membership. So that was absolutely fine. And likewise, you can go the other way as well. So if you’ve started up a premium membership and you’re charging quite a high amount to work with you on a month to month basis in that premium membership,
and it’s not serving you and you’re like, no, I want to work with more people. I need to have more impact in like to more people. That’s absolutely cool as well. You can, you can change it. They’re always doing that. So that is the first thing to have a think about. And it is, it’s kind of quite a soul-searching thing because you’ve really got to be this isn’t about what other people want.
So say for me in my industry, I’m like working with amazing people who are setting up memberships, but also looking at my peers in the industry, who’ve set up amazing memberships. You know, it can be very easy to kind of start thinking, oh, but that they’re doing this, you know, they’re, they’re, they’re set up this membership that has got 5,000 people in it,
but for me, that doesn’t work. It really doesn’t work. So for me, my core values of freedom and also having worked for myself since 2012, I’ve done the thing where I brought on team members and all that kind of thing. It doesn’t, it doesn’t actually work for me. It doesn’t, it doesn’t feel that great. So I know that I need to grow my business in a way that allows me a whole ton of freedom and a whole time,ton of time away from my desk. And in a way that means that I don’t have to have a massive team. Like I don’t have to have a full-time employed team because I don’t want that. So some of my members do, and that’s amazing. It’s like, you’ve really got to know what works for you and the way that you want scale.
So the second thing that I wanted to talk to you about is how defined you are in terms of your niche, what you are helping people with with your membership. So this is such a fascinating one. And what you tend to find is, so with memberships, the more niched down you are in terms of what you do to help people like how you help them solve a problem,
or how you help them to, to make their lives better. The more kind of defined you are in what result you help people get the more you can charge. And especially when it is a valuable outcome for them. So I was listening to an amazing training the other day.
So I have got a, what was called the awesome marketing planner. And it’s created by a lady called Claire Mitchell who runs a business called the goals,
mean business, fantastic business that she runs there. She’s an incredibly clever lady. I think she’s been in the marketing world for a really long time, like 20 years of experience. She’s a very clever lady. And I was watching one of her. She does this kind of marketing planner track training portal when you buy one of her planners. And I was going through this portal and watching some of her trainings.
They’re absolutely awesome. And in one of them, she was talking about these Xing and it really, I want to share it with you because it’s such a, a brilliantly put way of describing why niching works so well. And this is so appropriate to memberships as well. So I wanted to share it with you. So Claire Mitchell, in this training,
she was basically saying that as business owners, generally speaking, it’s much, much easier to resonate with people and to get people to work with you and see the value in working with you. If you really, what, what you’re saying, would he clicks with a certain person? And the example that she used, which I absolutely loved was that if you’re setting up as a,
a dog training company, like you help people to train their dogs, right? You could go out with your business and say to people, I helped train dogs. This was her example. It’s awesome. I helped train dogs. So that’s mega generic in a really busy crowded market. Like what’s your USP? How do you stand out amongst all the other businesses who are also saying we help you to train your dog?
So what she said in this example that I absolutely loved was instead of saying, I help you train your dog, choose a niche, choose, choose an area which is really, really specific. And then the people out there who have that specific need feel that you’re talking to them, you’re talking to their soul. You’re talking to the problem that they’re struggling with.
And the example that Claire Mitchell gave was, you know, instead of saying, I help you to train your dog. You say, I help you train your rescue dog. So you have decided to, rehome a dog, like a dog who’s had, you don’t know what’s happened in his life previously, but you’re giving me a home. Cause you’re an amazing person.
And you want to give, give a dog, a new life, a new home, but it needs training. So if you go out there with that message, how compelling is that? How strong is that compared to I help you train your dog? And the same thing goes for memberships. That’s why I wanted to share that example with you because it’s so,
so true. People want to feel, heard. People want to feel like you really get their problem. So, and that you understand their specific situation. And that is when people are more likely to be kind of inclined to pay you to be a part of your membership because they feel like you actually get their problem. So say for me, I want to share this example because it’s such a good one.
So when I first started out teaching memberships, I was actually mega broad. So I’d called my business hot passive income. And it was all about making passive income online because that’s what I was used to doing. I’d set up my own businesses online. That’s, we’re selling thousands of services online from products and services that I’d created from scratch in my own mind,
brought to life, taken to market and sold thousands of units of, so I was like, I’ve got some, I’ve got a talent for this. You know, I want to teach other people how to do that too. Because the number of people who said to me, you know, I want to know how to make passive income and I’ll be like,
right. Tell me what you got. Tell me what ideas you’ve got and we can work out a plan, how you can take it to market because that’s one of my special talents is like helping people to package up what they’ve got and make it, make it saleable and very commercial like that. So when I was first setting up hot passive income, I was kind of helping any business owner,
any business owner at all to make passive income that’s massively general. And it was good. I was making some money, but it felt like a slog. Like it felt hard to get people to resonate with what I was saying, because it was so broad. Yes. I could help all business owners to set up passive income streams. Like that’s what I’m great at,
but it didn’t resonate with anyone because I was saying business owners, passive income. It wasn’t, it wasn’t specific enough for anyone. So yeah, that’s me. So I moved over to specializing in working with coaches and specialists.
So the reason I did that is because coaches and specialists already have something which they can teach. So that made it easy for me to help them to package up what they do in a way where they could teach other people what they do and go out to the masses to do that online.
So I started off by doing that with courses and memberships, but why actually found was that for me, people were asking me a lot of questions about memberships because I’d run my own and I’d had a lot of success with that. It came very naturally to me to, to, to help people to sell their memberships. And funnily enough, I actually spent the whole of my twenties working as an event manager and I worked in three different membership bodies.
So it seemed kind of like quite a natural thing for me to go into teaching that in my own business. So when we actually made that scary choice to kind of niche down and it does feel scary, it’s kind of like, oh, all the people that I can’t help, you’ve got to think about, you know, all of the, so many people out there who can help once you do niche down.
So for me, when I made that decision to focus on helping coaches and specialists to make recurring revenue from memberships, I tripled my income in one year. So that is the power of what happens when you’re actually like calling out what you stand for, who your best place to work with. And that you can really kind of define what the outcome is going to be.
So say for me now I work with a membership owners. People who’ve already started their memberships and who want to make at least five K per month from those memberships. So those are the type of business owners that I help. Now. That’s so clear. Isn’t that? So, so clear. So yes, I can help people who want to make 20 K a month from their memberships.
I can help people who want to make 2k a month from their memberships, but I have called out a very specific group of people who have already got memberships running and who now wants to make a minimum of 5k per month from those memberships that’s mega clear. So that speaks to the exact type of people that I really enjoy working with people who’ve already set up their memberships.
They’ve already done that legwork and now they just want to grow it that’s mega specific. So I want you to think with your memberships, how specific are you being, if you want to maximize your profitability and you don’t want it to be a slog when you’re selling your membership places, you want it to be like quite an easy thing. So I always say this actually,
and I’ve found this because I have set up businesses which have sold thousands of units. And I have been selling courses, membership service services offers since 2012. I have seen very clearly firsthand that when something begins to sell, it will, it will catch and it will, it will sell like nobody’s business once you get the right thing, but you can spend so much time trying to figure out it’s just like,
oh, but why is my thing not selling is probably cause you’re not being specific enough about what you’re actually providing people with with your service, with your membership. And once you actually get something that catches people’s attention for every hundred people that you’re going out to, you’re going to start noticing that you get a certain percentage that are converting with you. And it’s just the way it is.
It’s something that I’ve seen happen over and over again in my own businesses. And it’s a beautiful thing. See, it shows you like, there’s no point like what’s that phrase like flogging a dead horse. Is it like, you know, when you’re like trying again and again, and again, sell the same thing and it’s just not selling. There’s a reason for that is because it’s not resonating with people and like don’t waste your time.
Definitely give it a good shot. But if you’ve got out to a hundred people, 200 people and no one’s bought it, there’s a reason for that. People vote with their feet and you will see the per a hundred people. You’re going to start getting five people, 10 people, 15 people enrolling on your membership because it is resonating with them. And they are clearly seeing a reason why they should invest with you.
So really have a think about that. Or you being clear enough with who you can help and what result you can get them. So if you want to charge less, that’s absolutely fine. You can be quite generic. That’s absolutely cool. But you will need to go out to more people. The more specific you are, the more you can charge.
And you know, you, you may find that it’s a lot easier to sell places. Once you are calling out specifically who those people are, who are the best fit for your membership. So that is it for today’s recurring revenue rocks episode. I hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as I have sharing it with you. And if you want to find out more about the magnetize,
your membership pro package, which I have, where I work with membership owners who have already got their memberships up and running, maybe you’re bringing in up to a grand a month, something like that. You’ve got your first few members in, but you’re just not finding it that easy to sell places. And you want to blow things up in a really big way and start making at least five K per month from your membership.
Have a look at recurring revenue, rocks.com, go to the top menu and check out the McIntosh, your membership pro tab, click on that. And you can have a good old read through how I can help you to get your membership, creating a consistent 5k plus months in your business, and also how you can apply it to come and take part in that program with me.
All right. So enjoy the rest of your day. And I can’t wait to see you for another episode of the recurring revenue box show on Monday next week.