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Welcome to Make More Money without Selling Your Soul with me Polly Lavarello, evergreen marketing expert. This podcast is for you if you are an online entrepreneur who is looking to simplify their business to scale.  On this podcast you can expect to hear regular talk about wealth, about selling and about wellbeing. Because I believe these three core fundamental things are pivotal to your growth moving forward.

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Hello and welcome to make more money without selling your soul with myself Polly Lavarello, evergreen marketing expert and cushy business pioneer.

Today we’re talking about why I shut down my membership. Now, if you have been in my world for say the last 12 months, you may be questioning what membership Ollie, I don’t remember you running a membership? Well, this is all very true, I did not run a membership in the last year I ran it in 2021. From I think it was January, till sometime around the summer. I think it lasted for about six months in total. And I loved it. I love the people in it. I love the experience of doing it. But there were real obvious issues with running it. And beyond that, I mean, I’m sharing it from my experience. But I’m also sharing it from the experience of having run Facebook ads to funnels for memberships, where I had for warned. My clients of the issues that are around building and scaling and memberships are not really building it’s more about maintaining, and scaling memberships. And then a final really solid piece of advice that so many people just really underestimate when it comes to both memberships and Masterminds actually. Okay, so here are the three things that you really need to know about memberships. So off the back of my own experience, one of the things I will say but this is the same for anyone is that the maintenance of a membership takes as much if not more energy than high ticket group programmes or even masterminds. In fact, I’d say things like masterminds take up less energy. Why is this? It’s because essentially, because memberships are so easy for people to leave with minimal If not no notice, the goal to retain people is high.

Now the issue is because they’ve invested a relatively small sum of money. And because memberships tend to be a kind of pick a mix of take what you need when you want it. The issue that comes around this is that with that lack of accountability, with that lack of communal goal, which kind of cements people’s experiences together, people can be very take your or leave with a membership. And if they are to leave with a membership, if they just don’t show up to it, if they don’t get what they need from it, it’s going to be one of the first things that they drop as an expense. Because they’ll be like, well, it’s not a bad membership, but I’m not using it. So I’m going to let it go. So because of this, there can be a real strong emphasis on the need to feel like you need to be bringing in new guest experts all the time, which obviously comes with its own expense, you need to be thinking of new challenges all the time to keep people engaged, you want to have regular touch points where people are able to ask any questions they have, the list kind of goes on. And of course, there’s always that question around the price point in terms of what’s too little so that it’s not worth your time and energy and what’s too high so that people no longer see it as an easy or no brainer investment.

So that is reason number one, they are high maintenance memberships are super high maintenance. But you’re probably thinking, and surely it’ll be easier to sell. Surely on my list of I don’t know, to 500 to 1000 people on my mailing list. Surely out of all of them. If I were to sell a 47 pound offer, I’d sell easily 100. Right. Well, one thing I can tell you is that I have now supported so many different funnels, and like I say so many different types of offers, including memberships. And the one thing that all these funnels have in common is that their conversion rates have been incredibly similar. Whether it’s a 1111 pound offer, whether it’s a 37 pound offer, the conversion rates really, really similar. I’d find it fascinating that nearly every time I was supporting a live launch in 2020 and 2021 There was this kind of routine of always ensuring that there was a high ticket offer followed by the kind of down sell so as soon as cart had closed for the high ticket offer, which was 1000 pounds plus usually 3000 to 5000 spread across a few months. They would then down sell with like a no brainer, I don’t know 197 offer that still spoke to the area of transformation that the main office spoke to so that you still got some kind of transformation, but without the high ticket investment. And every time I ever like supported clients with this, they would always be surprised they’d always assume that they’d potentially get two to three times the number of say Sales, because it was really low ticket, right.

But they wouldn’t, they probably get a similar number, if not less lower number of sales with their lower ticket offer, predominantly because they’d put so much effort into selling that high ticket offer, that by the time it came to their down sell, they just kind of assumed it would sell itself. And actually, unless you’ve got really good energy behind a low ticket offer, they don’t tend to sell that well, unless you’re willing to kind of talk about them and get excited about them. Most people will just kind of see it as a consolation prize and not be interested. So there are huge, like misunderstandings around low ticket offers and particularly memberships. Okay, so that’s one piece of the puzzle like one, they’re really high maintenance two, just because they’re cheap doesn’t make them any easier to sell. So where does that leave you? Well, it takes you on to Reason number three, why don’t like memberships? And that is the fact that to be able to consistently scale and invite new people into your membership, or what do you need to do my friends lists build, which you need to do for any kind of offering, right? If you have an evergreen offer, I’m in exactly the same boat, I’m building my list, week to week, month to month because ultimately, if you want to be selling the same offer all the time, you need to be bringing new people into your world all the time. That is a no brainer. Now the issue is it costs money to bring new people into your world. Okay, so if you already have a really strong following a membership can be a fantastic idea. Okay, if you have like 40,000 people following you on Instagram mailing list of 20,000, then introducing something like a membership with a really strong launch behind it can actually be really powerful. Because I’m assuming at this stage where you’ve got that kind of following and that kind of size mailing list, that you will also have a team that’ll be able to support you with ensuring that a lot of the day to day maintenance of your membership can be performed by your team members so that you can be just the kind of brains behind it and the face to it.

But if you are in the earliest stages of building your business, and you’re reliant on recurring revenue coming from your membership, and you’re reliant on building it up to large numbers, if, for example, your membership is 47 pounds a month, and you need 200 people in there for it to feel like worthwhile revenue, like say you want your 10k months, for example, and you want 200 people in there, and you’ve got, let’s say 10 to 15 people you’ve gotten there organically, you’re gonna need to kind of grow your list to bring in other people into that membership. Now, it really depends what niche you’re in. If you’re in the business niche, then leads tend to be significantly more expensive. So if you’re a business mentor, like myself, leads tend to be five pound plus, at least, if you’re talking to the kind of wellbeing space, depending on which area you’re in, it can be significantly cheaper, like one pound 50, sometimes even less, as well. So there are some kind of variations in terms of what it looks like. But ultimately, generally speaking, I’m yet to meet anyone who’s managed to crack the code around being able to profitably grow their membership, using ads in a way that works for them just based on a membership alone.

If you have like, you know whole office suite behind that in regards to having kind of high ticket offer and a mastermind, then it can potentially work. But that’s a lot of things to be juggling if you are in the early stages of growing your business, which is why I believe if you’re on the first three years of business, like I say, unless you are someone who’s come into the online business space from a place of being a kind of online personality that everyone knows about and wants to buy from and work with. There are a few exceptions, as always, to every rule. But generally speaking, I have had a handful of discovery calls this year, with people who were massively burnt out from the experience of running a membership. And it was heartbreaking, they were just like, I’m not earning very much money. I’m putting so much time and effort into this. There’s so much incredible knowledge inside these modules that people just simply aren’t even taking the time to do. All they seem to want to do is actually get access to me on the live calls and never actually spend any of the time going through any of the amazing content I share within the actual membership. And you know, it was just heartbreaking. And they built a big enough membership that it felt challenging to walk away. And at the same time, they recognise that there was very little time left available for them to put into the more profitable areas of their business that can make it work. I mean, ultimately, having a successful membership early on in your business is kind of akin to getting to the stage where you’re fully booked one to one, like yay, amazing how good to have all those things. And at the same time, you reached the stage where you’re like, oh my gosh, I got into online business to have time freedom to be able to be flexible, to be able to work from wherever I want.

And actually I’ve built this monster of a business model that is really challenging to maintain, which for me to maintain it. In the case of a membership, you’re going to require a team members and various other people to help it feel manageable. And by the time you’ve paid all of them the profit margins are negligible. So that is one of my massive bugbears from memberships. And like you say one to one One can similarly create similar problems, where when you’re to fully booked with your one to ones again, it leaves minimal space to manoeuvre because essentially, the only truly scalable element of your business is a high ticket group programme, which is why, of course, you can learn how to build one with me. Anyway, if

you ever curious about learning more about that there is always a link in the show notes where you can learn more about what it is to essentially create your own high ticket offer and scale it evergreen. So you can learn more about that below. Anyway, so that was it. That’s my kind of lowdown on memberships, they are high maintenance to look after number one, they are not any easier to sell because they’re low ticket number two. And number three, they’re massively challenging to scale. So if you’ve gone into it with a, Oh, it’s okay, I only have 20 people in here right now. And it’s not making me very much money. But it’ll all be okay, when I get to 200. Do do the maths please, around what it’s going to take you to get to 200 it may well be crack the Facebook ads kind of code, and somehow bring in really cheap leads who are also incredibly hot and convert really fast.

Like I say every rule is meant to be broken. If you’ve cracked that code, then ride into the sunset with it. But otherwise, if you will, like most people I’ve kind of spoken to who’ve come to me on their knees crying. Now they’re not quite that not that bad. But you know, coming to me saying please show me another way to scale my coaching business because this one is not working for me, then these are all three things to bear in mind, okay? Because ultimately, your expertise is really valuable. And how you share that expertise makes all the difference to your client experience, and the transformation that they receive on the other side. And therefore how bigger brand advocate that they become. You deserve to have a spacious, cushy, joyous business where your clients rave about the incredible results they have with you, and where you’re able to take time out to look after yourself to be with your friends to do nice things to travel when you want to travel. And it’s a very cumbersome business model having a membership. Like I say there are always exceptions to the rule. But generally speaking, this is what I’ve seen across the board. So do take those three points into mind when you’re thinking about how to scale your coaching business. And like I say, I recommend the high ticket model. And if you want to learn more about it, you can click the link in the show notes which will take you to an on demand training which breaks down the mass and the roadmap to scaling a high ticket offer. Cool well I really enjoy sharing that with you today. And next week I’m gonna be talking about the magic of in person events and how you’ll know when you are ready to host your own in person event. So if you’ve been curious if you’ve been playing with the idea of bringing people into your world for real then I will be talking about the magic of that next week. Look forward to seeing you then.