[0:00] Music.
[0:13] I'm so excited for this episode that I have for you today. I have a lot to say about memberships. Before you totally tune me out though, because you're probably like, ew, memberships, ugh, that sounds hard. You were probably like me and you probably heard horror stories. You've probably heard people talk about how, oh, it's great that they make so much money, but there's so much work, so be really careful. That was me. But now I have a membership in air quotes. I've only started calling it a membership in the last several months, and I'll share more about why. But I have a membership now, and I really love it. And it requires none of the headaches that everyone's talking about. And I started to get so many questions from ladies asking, how have you created your program, The Greenhouse?
[0:59] And how can I do the same thing? So I'm definitely going to share some of my thoughts with you today. And I want to share with you the 10 common membership headaches that you've probably heard or adopted or heard people talk about or, you know, have stuck in your brain for whatever reason that have sort of made you X out the possibility of having a membership in your mind if you're like me. Because I always thought like, oh, but I just love coaching. I love just having like private clients in a room and I like group coaching,
[1:27] but like I don't think I could do a membership because those just require way too much. So I have 10 of these common myths that I'm just going to bust one by one for you today. And I'm going to show you an alternative way to create or design your membership so that it doesn't create the headache that it could, you know, that some memberships do have very genuinely. And I know people personally who have memberships like this that are challenging and have unique challenges, but there are ways that you can intentionally design your membership to avoid all of them.
[1:57] And that's what I've done sort of by accident. And I'll show you more about that in just a minute too, but let's just start, let's just start busting through these. So first I've already mentioned this myth. Number one is that memberships are high maintenance, that they require a ton of work and upkeep. And if you've been in a membership before, you may have observed this, that the membership drops a ton of new content updates. There's lots of member engagement happening on lots of community management. There's a lot of tech to manage. There's lots of platforms You may have observed different retention strategies that membership owners are working on, so many different administrative tasks, right?
[2:35] And it's like, that could be a complete business all on its own. That could be your entire business model having a membership.
[2:43] But if you're like me, that's not the business model that I want to have, at least right now. And so here's what's actually true. You get to decide how technical your program is. You can decide what platforms you use. You can decide what kind of content people get access to. You can make it as simple as you want. And I would say make it as simple as possible. So for my program right now, The Greenhouse, it includes, I go live once per week, Thursdays are greenhouse days. So every Thursday at 11 a.m. my time, I go live for either a monthly live teaching that I do once a month. The rest of the weeks of the month, I rotate between open slash hot seat coaching, which looks like all the ladies in The Greenhouse come live. They get to opt in for a few minutes of live teaching support that the rest of the group gets to observe. And sometimes I'll do hot seat coaching where I'll call some people out unexpectedly, which is always so fun. And then the other weeks I'll also do content audits, content workshops, where people can either bring content they've shared previously or ask for help getting clarity on their content going forward. And I can even like audit past posts, reels, and content in real time. So that's the bulk of what the greenhouse is in addition to the core content that ladies get access to.
[4:03] Now I'll share more about this in just a minute. When I first sold the greenhouse, that core content didn't exist. I've been creating it over the last nine months with the monthly live teachings that I've been creating. So like I said, each month I go live once per month and that teaching gets recorded and added to what I call the course home base. So inside the greenhouse, there is actual content that is designed for ladies to be able to watch, to learn, and to walk through the steps of how to create Instagram content for coaches and service providers that helps you make money, that helps you sell your programs, that helps you create digital scalable offers in addition to your private coaching or private service offers, whatever that looks like. So the actual truth is you get to decide how lightweight or how high maintenance it really is. and you have a lot of options. And this is one of my favorite things to play with because we can get really creative and have so much fun with this. I was just chatting with one of the girls in the launch crew. She wants to create an email marketing membership. And so we talked about so many different ideas for ways that she could audit content for ladies in her program, her potential future program with ideas like.
[5:14] You know, go live in a group session and do group audits. She could have ladies submit an email to her. Let's just say like the first week of the month is audit week and everyone gets to submit an email and a few of them get randomly selected. She audits them and then sends out the audits in a Google Docs so that everyone can see it, right? So if you don't even want to go live, there's things we can do to get around going live too. I do think it's valuable. I think if you can and even a little bit like to, I think it's valuable for you to get experience as a leader in your community and also for ladies to get FaceTime with you. And ideally one day they're going to want to hire you to work with you privately. Right. And so we'll talk more about that in just a minute too, but basically it can be high maintenance or it can be super simple.
[5:57] Myth number two, you have to drop new content constantly. I've been in a membership like that before where she dropped like a new template every month or a new, like she made like this full magazine, which was beautiful and amazing. And I read it didn't always have a ton of value, but I was like, this is a ton of work. She's creating this every month. So for me, I only drop new content once per month in the greenhouse and it's a live teaching. So here's the, I think the biggest myth that I think would be useful to break your brain on a little bit is that you probably think that the content is what will make people come and what will keep people staying.
[6:35] What's actually true though, is that what will keep people, people may come for the content. They might buy for access to the content, but what will keep them staying is the community. It's access to the other people inside the group. And so I think that's useful for you to know so that you don't put too much emphasis or weight on the importance of creating new content because that's not the thing that's going to keep people staying. Is it valuable? Is it useful? Yes. Does it increase the perceived value of the program? Yes. Does it make people want to stay longer? I think this is usually what people think is that, oh, the more material I pour into this program, the longer it takes people to go through it. So therefore, the longer they stay, that's not always the case. I think that less is more. What will keep people staying is the community. And you get to decide what touch points you provide to give them access to the community. But I think the touch point of having a community is non-negotiable. I think it should be required and it should be like the core that you design
[7:31] your entire membership around. Myth number three. I've heard this before that you have to plan to commit to at least three years before you can even plan on your membership being profitable.
[7:42] Which is hilarious thinking about it now because my membership was profitable from the first sale that I made because it has zero overhead or very little overhead, I should say, because I do have a little bit of support now. But this is the fear that I want to break, that you have to decide what membership you want and you have to pick it from day one and then you're gonna be selling it for the rest of your life. That was the exact mindset that kept me so scared from having one. So I think that the reason why we hear this message perpetuated is that there are a lot of giant memberships that start with Giant overhead. They have big teams. They have big ad budgets. They have complicated tech Yours and mine won't have that and so that means it gets to be instantly profitable So you don't have to wait and you don't have to commit to this for any amount of time that you don't want to now asterisk here because I think.
[8:36] The model of your membership might change this a little bit. So let me give you an example. If you sell your membership as a monthly membership, that is a lifetime membership, you are kind of committing yourself for a really long time to this program. And I've heard a lot of people, this happens frequently. So like this has no judgment with it, but start a membership, sell it as a month-to-month membership, a monthly membership, and decide they don't want it and end up discontinuing it and they have to like send out an email to everyone letting them know that the membership is discontinuing. And that's totally cool. I'm going to give you another option in a little bit so you can totally avoid all of that. But I can see why a lot of us feel this pressure of like, I have to know exactly what my membership is and it has to work perfectly. And then I just have to keep doing it for the rest of forever. And that feels like so much pressure. It feels paralyzing.
[9:26] So here's what's actually true instead. You can test versions before you commit for the long haul. You can run a beta version before you decide to even make it or call it a membership This is actually what I did with the greenhouse. Let me kind of walk you back this time last year I actually launched a beta program that was also called the greenhouse Some of you listening may have been in it But it was a two-month program that was just to support business owners during the holidays To help you make sales without losing your mind during the busiest months of the year And so I actually did call it the greenhouse, but it was just a two-month group coaching program and when I launched that beta.
[10:07] That was called the greenhouse. I had no plans in my brain for any future versions of what this program would turn into. I had no plans of creating a membership. I was still in like hard pass membership land. Right. So when I sold, after I sold that two month program though, what I learned is that I love teaching. I love teaching live. And so after that program ended in January, I was like, you know, what would be really cool is if I could do that same thing, but for six months, charge a little bit less so that I can get more people in so more people can have access to my teachings. But what was most important to me is that I wanted to be able to talk about whatever the heck I wanted to talk about. I didn't want to feel constrained to any certain topic. Obviously, it was going to be in the business marketing niche, but I wanted to be able to talk about motherhood and being a present mom. I wanted to be able to talk about money and money mindset. And I wanted to be able to talk about marketing and messaging and all the things you always hear me talk about. But that's how the greenhouse started. It started first as a two-month group coaching program. And then it started, I guess, the second beta version, which was different, but still called the greenhouse. The second version was a six-month group coaching program.
[11:20] And it was at the end of that six-month program that I was like, wait, I really love this. I guess I was actually three months in, but I relaunched another six-month round. So ladies joined at that point. So I'm saying this to show you that you don't have to decide today and you don't have to commit for the next three years. You don't have to make a decision. You can just sell it as a limited term, three-month program, six-month program, whatever, while you test this out. And I would say test it for you first so that you make sure that you really, really love it before you go put your heart and soul into it. Because I know for me, When I get bored, that's when my programs die. And so it's like, for me, this has to be fun and exciting for me. This has to be nourishing for my soul. And obviously, I hope that it's nourishing for the souls of the women who are participating as well. But in order for me to be able to commit to this for the long term, I have to know for sure that I love the arrangement of it, the design of the program. And I want to be super intentional designing it for me first. So if I don't like creating a giant, beautifully designed magazine to drop to my group every month, I'm not going to do that. What I know that I love is I love teaching and I love open coaching and I love auditing people's content. So that's what I designed my program to be around. And you have that kind of freedom to make those kinds of decisions for you first too.
[12:49] Myth number four, and this is related to what we just talked about, but you have to have a big team if you want to have a membership. Well, let me tell you, my team up until the last couple of months has been me, myself, and I. I just hired a VA a month ago for the first time. And what she's doing is helping me upload the greenhouse call recordings. And she's scheduling all of the greenhouse call reminder emails, mostly because I'm lazy. And also it just was taking a ton of time. And I know that I want to spend my time creating new programs and creating new content and welcoming new people into the greenhouse and doing all the marketing. And so all of that was a no brainer for me to outsource. But now my team is me and my amazing VA Jessalyn. And so I just want to show you that you can start this super scrappy and it can be small and simple and you can pour gasoline on the fire later after you have proof of concept and after you know what you love.
[13:44] Myth number five, churn will become your new problem. Now, this will actually be true if you design your membership to sell it as a month to month program, meaning where people commit and they can cancel any time, which sounds like it should be a great business model, right? Well, it's challenging. And you probably heard people talk about this. I don't think I could sell a membership that way just because of churn. And I really like what I started doing by accident, which was that I sold this group as a six-month experience. And so ladies, when they joined or committed to staying for six months, And i'm very clear about that term on the sales page and all of that And so I don't get cancellations. I don't get people reaching out to say hey I'd like to cancel my subscription like you would if you sell it as a month-to-month commitment program. So.
[14:36] If I was choosing for you, I would choose for you to not do that just because that's a lot of pressure. I think you can absolutely mindset. I think there's so much personal inner growth and healing we can all do so that we don't get frazzled when you get a cancellation request, but you can just avoid that problem by selling as a longer term commitment. You could sell it as a nine month program. You could sell it as a 12 month program. You get to decide. But something that I really liked about that as well is that when I sell it that way, it draws in a different person. It draws in the person who's like sold on this program, is super excited to be in it for six months. Instead of bringing in a person who's like one foot in, one foot out, I'm going to just like, I'm just going to see what's around in here. I'm just going to binge watch a bunch of content and then cancel in a month, right? And I'm not saying that every person in every single membership is doing that, but I've really enjoyed the comfort and confidence and consistency of knowing that when ladies join, they're here for me. They're with me. And then when at the end of their six months, they get an offer for me to rejoin again as an alumni at a lower rate, they get access to an alumni only coaching call. So there's a little bit of a smaller groups. They get higher proximity to me. And so that's super fun for me too. I love it. And then ladies who love the community and want to stay have a way to, and it's like a super easy yes, because it's even cheaper than what they've been expecting or what they've been paying for the last few months.
[16:00] Another huge side bonus is that this is another term that you will hear when you start to dive into the membership world, this term, lifetime value, the lifetime value of a customer. And basically that's the average of the number of months that someone spends in your membership. So you can say, oh, if our program's $99 a month and people on average save for three months, their lifetime value on average is $300-ish. And so if you're selling instead a six-month program that's $99 a month. Now your lifetime value of one customer who joins is $600, which is double. So basically the difference is that you'll still have churn in a six-month program. It will just be on a scheduled date where everyone's churning at the same time, which has also helped a lot with just the backend management. I don't have to keep track of who's been in for how long and who has access, whose access needs to be removed.
[16:53] It's just like everybody's either in or everybody's either out. It makes it super easy. The next myth that memberships require a ton of complicated tech. They require big fancy funnels and Facebook ads and multiple platforms. Here's what's true. Really all you need is a Zoom account and a way to send out emails with Zoom links. That's the bulk of what is in the greenhouse at least. I also host my membership in Kajabi.
[17:21] And so it's super easy for me to just put call recordings in Kajabi. If I create any new fun workbooks or templates or freebies that I publish to my audience or even paid programs that I want to give to the greenhouse for free, I just dump them all inside my little Kajabi course. It's so easy and so beautiful. By the way, let me know if you want a link. I have a link for you to get 30 days of Kajabi for free. Kajabi is a little bit more expensive than some of the other platforms, but it includes all of the tech that you're going to need in one place, including your emails. So that was the biggest selling point for me because I didn't want to have my course on this platform and then send my emails from this platform and have to build connections. So they talk to each other. I really like having everything in one place.
[18:03] You'll also need a checkout page where you can collect people's payments and where, you know, your payment system, whatever you use, needs to be able to collect recurring payments. That would be useful. But really, that is the bare minimum that you need.
[18:16] You don't need fancy tech. You can keep this so simple. The next myth, if I wanted to have a membership, I would have to have a huge audience to sell to first. And I understand why our brains go here. We think larger audience equals more visibility equals higher chances of more people joining.
[18:33] Here's the truth. I don't know if you're keeping track, but right now I have 600 followers on Instagram and my email list is about 900 people. And it's, I think at its max, my email list has been like 1200. And people are always like kind of shocked when they hear that because they probably expect me to have a bigger email list than that. Those numbers will change in the near future. But at least for right now, I just want to show you an example to break your brain, to show you that the pattern that your brain might think that you have to have a bajillion followers in order to have a profitable, not even profitable, right? Because this membership has basically zero costs. A membership that brings you recurring monthly revenue that either replaces or at least makes you the same amount as if you sold one private client and takes the same amount of time as serving one private client. That would be my goal for you at a minimum. But my audience is not huge. And my membership is making four figures per month right now. There will be a day when it makes five figures per month and multiple five figures per month. So here's my take. I don't think you need to have a huge audience, but big asterisk, I do think that you need to have strong authority in your content because we need the ladies who are in your audience to be paying attention to you. We need them to not just be like casually scrolling past or, you know, you've dropped so far in their algorithm, they never even see your stuff anymore. We need you to call their attention to yourself.
[20:01] And this is just an interesting side note, but I think we put a lot of pressure on our audiences because we are always saying like, I just want my audience to engage with us. I want my views higher. I want more followers. But sometimes what we actually need to do, we put that pressure on our audiences. It's their job and it's on them to engage with us. But the solution to that problem is actually you. Standing up and standing out in your content. And so I think the desire to have more engagement is a good desire. I'm not saying it's a bad thing and you should ditch it. But the ball is 100% in our court as the content creators. It's our job. And it would be so easy for us to say that it's our audience's fault that our engagement sucks. It's the algorithm's fault that our engagement sucks. But I actually think, we need to take ownership of what's happening with our engagement. Because if it's low, it's probably just because you need to be more interesting. You need to tell us more stories about what you've created so you can go, oh, this is different. Oh, she's done something really cool that makes me interested, that captures my attention. We need to brag more.
[21:07] We need to show more of the results that we're creating. I really like this phrase, show, don't tell. You can tell people about results you're creating too. That's not bad. But I think if you can, show them the tangibles. If you can show them the results that you're creating, show them the results that your clients are getting from your work with them. That's how you get people's attention and that's how you get them engaging with you. So we need the ladies in your audience to know that you are the go-to. This is more important than the number in your following. And this is also completely unquantifiable. So I realized the challenge of that, but what would be more cool than for you to have a giant following would be for you to have a small following of ladies who are obsessed with you, of ladies who are hanging on every word you say, of ladies who are watching you and observing you because they're like, I want to create what she's created. I want her business. So I'm watching her every move and I'm paying attention. The number of times I get messages saying like, hey, just so you know, I copied you a little bit on this piece of content. And they'll say like, don't be mad at me. I just am testing this out with my audience. And I'm like, please copy me. Everything that I create is designed to be imitated, replicated, duplicated. All of you forever and evermore have permission to copy whatever you want for my content.
[22:24] But we have to show the people in your audience that you are the go-to girl. You are the go-to fitness coach or recipe girl or brand designer or social media manager or whatever you're up to. You have to stand up and stand out in a way that they start listening to you. That's way more important and will affect your launches and your sales way more
[22:45] than the size of your audience. That's what I want you to laser focus on. The next myth is that if you create a membership that's low ticket, it will make it harder for you to sign high ticket private clients or that it will take away your sales from your other program.
[22:58] Here's what I would say, actually. I think if you are first, if you're struggling to sign private clients right now or you want more of them, I think that people having access to your content in a membership will make it easier for you to sign private clients. Because when they're in a Zoom room with you, when they're consuming your live trainings that you create, they're watching you coach other ladies, they're going to go, I would love to work with her more closely than this. I would love to get her eyeballs on my business or on my whatever, whatever your niche is. And I would love to do it in a private room where I can be super vulnerable because I might not want to be vulnerable in a group like this. My take is that having a place where people can take the first step to work with you more closely will make it always easier to sign high ticket private clients where they can get a little taste, a little sampling of the experience. They can experience what it's like to be coached by you. It will make selling your private client spots so much easier. The second thing that I want to say is that your high ticket private clients are not concerned about the price point. So they're not going to be like, oh, I'm trying to decide if I should join the membership or if I should work with her privately. But the private offer is just so much more.
[24:07] That's not how she's assessing this decision. She's assessing this decision from how closely she wants proximity to you, what kind of touch points she wants, what kind of support she wants, that's what she's looking at when she's making this decision. It's not, should I get the $99 per month offer or the $1,000 a month offer?
[24:26] She's not shopping it out that way. So you can take comfort in creating a low ticket offer that that will be a place where the people who are shopping out between the two offers can come and get value and they can love it and they can stay there until they become ready to move into a private client experience. But for the person who's ready for private coaching, a membership is not going to take away. It's not going to detract from her interest in working with you privately. You could throw in access to your membership for all of your private clients just for fun, and they'd probably love it. And they get to hang out with you way more often, which I'm sure they would not say no to as a fun little aside. I think you could actually position your membership to create more value for your private clients, which is super fun.
[25:12] Okay, the last, what am I on? I don't even know. The last few myths that I have that I want to share, I think are actually true. So I want you to pay attention to these because I think they're worth you having in your brain before you go to the effort of creating your low maintenance membership.
[25:27] So I guess if I'm calling these myths, they're actually true. They're not really myths. So here's what I think is true. One, that you should know your niche. And it's okay if you don't know exactly what it is right now. I think you can sort of use the beta group that you launch to help you figure that out. But I do think it's important to have a compelling promise for your membership. And I think it's important to have a compelling person that your program is designed for. I don't want you to go create a membership about how to have more self-love, about how to have more confidence. That's for any woman, right? I want, because again, what people are buying access to is the community. They want to know that the other people in your membership are like them. They want to hang out with other people like them. And so I think it is important for you to have at least an idea of a niche and you can change it later if you want to, right? We talked about this, but I think, I do think you need to make a decision about a more specific group or type of person that you want your membership to serve, I promise it will make it so much easier to sell.
[26:31] Next, that you do need to have something compelling for them to buy access to. So even if when they first join, there is no recorded content for them to get access to, I would even challenge you on that. If you have any past programs that you've recorded, throw that in there and say that's the course content they get access to when they join. If you already have it and you don't have to spend more than five minutes creating it, put it in there. And that's awesome.
[26:55] If you don't have any content like that, then I would message your program to be that what the compelling thing they're buying access to are open coaching calls or access to your brain. You could call it Q&A calls, monthly life support calls, or however often, bimonthly, weekly support calls, check-ins, audits, however you want to call it. But you do need something compelling for them to buy access to and something for them to be excited and incentivized to come to. And then the third thing that I think you do actually need is something sticky for people to stay for. So like I've kind of already brushed over this, but don't overcomplicate this because my greenhouse girls love open coaching. So when in doubt, if you're a coach and you like coaching live in a group format like this, do open coaching. They love it. I pull them all the time and they tell me, they like it either as much as my live teachings or more. So I've actually added in even more life support opportunities into the greenhouse for that reason. And so just know that people love access to your brain. That's what they want to buy. That's what they want to pay for. And if they can get close access to you for a lower rate, that's going to be a super easy sale to them.
[28:08] So in closing, hopefully I've expanded your mind to the possibility of having a membership, even if it brings in, you know, this doesn't have to be a seven-figure membership from the first year, unless you want it to, and that's cool too.
[28:20] But this could be just a few thousand dollars in your monthly revenue, or maybe it's more than that. But I really want you to think about the possibility of having a membership in your core product offers and your offer suite that is not a traditional membership that we think of that's bulky and time-consuming and heavy and has so many administrative tasks for you. I want you to think about the most simple way that you can put yourself in front of a group on a monthly basis, that they would love and crave access to and get value from, that they would pay to come to and pay to stay in. So if this idea is sounding super fun to you, I'm creating a super secret beta group called the Low Maintenance Membership. And so I'm putting together all the details right now. So as you've been listening to this episode and you're like, wait, I would love to have something like this, but all the details about how to go about creating it are feeling a little bit fuzzy right now. Send me a DM or an email. You can send me a DM or an email with the words Low Maintenance and I'll send you back a reply with all the details about this program. I'm creating it kind of quickly because I want to get it started as soon as possible. I know we're heading into the holidays, but I'm not worried about that, honestly, because I know that if you are excited about the possibility of creating a low maintenance membership that you can launch in January or February.
[29:45] Then these next couple of months, even though it is during the holidays, yes, it's like a super lightweight effort to at least create the skeleton and the promise and the messaging of what you want your low maintenance membership to be so that when January hits, you can hit the ground running with amazing content, have a beautiful 30 day launch where you open the doors and welcome people into your beta version of your membership or group coaching program that will possibly one day turn into a membership if you want for the first time. So that's what I want to help you create. So like I said, if that sounds interesting to you, just send me a DM on Instagram and let's chat about it or send me an email, but do it quickly because we're going to be getting this going pretty quickly.
[30:25] So I hope you love this episode. I'm excited to talk more about memberships. Obviously, as you can tell, this is a topic I could talk about for a really long time. So I hope you love this and I hope you guys have an amazing beginning of your November.
[30:39] Additionally, if you have any questions about what a low maintenance membership could possibly look like for you, I would love to help you brainstorm and help get your ideas warmed up and flowing around so that if any of them feel like they're calling to you, you know what to do about it. So I will see you guys next week in the next episode of the Wholehearted Business Podcast. Have an amazing week. Hey, I hope you loved this week's episode. If you did, I know you would love to be a member of my community, The Greenhouse. It's where I teach you how to build an amazing, fruitful life while you build an amazing, fruitful business. It is a movement for women who want to unsubscribe from the traditional success path that says that life has to be a struggle and instead learn how good making more money can get, how fun marketing can be, and how much joy and presence you're capable of feeling as a woman and as a mother. Find out more and join at kaylinpriest.com slash greenhouse. And I'll see you there.
[31:41] Music.
