 I'm also currently a board member for the FTA and do a little bit of consulting for spas and float centers. I decided to talk about memberships because during COVID we all faced a lot of challenges and memberships are the thing that helped us survive COVID but also gave us a base point to jump off of and in 2020 we had our most successful year and we really really focused on memberships and that was the key to us being incredibly successful this last year. So I didn't want to just stand up here and talk at you guys I wanted to offer the thing that I felt was most important and could be most impactful for your businesses. So this isn't the end all be all about memberships I've got 20 minutes and I feel like I could talk about it for four hours so I'm going to breeze through the first few slides to give a basis but try and drill down into some bullet points. I'm also going to be doing a talk with Gloria Morris a round table with the FTA next month so if you haven't signed up for your FTA membership do that and we'll have a much lengthier conversation about memberships there. The first thing is I'd ask y'all to have an open mind about some of these concepts when I start talking about selling memberships and some of these words y'all get a little squirmy with some of the business stuff so you're not serving anyone you're not serving your clients you're not serving your employees if you're not around to grow and thrive and improve your business and I think memberships are the best way to do that. The first thing about memberships is you have to start out with an excellent business if you're not doing what you do well then it's going to be really hard to get people back in. So first off if you're opening a float center invest in the things that are important. Invest in soundproofing, invest in materials that will last and also invest in good people if you can find folks that already float my experience is that those are going to be the best people to represent your business and then if you have the opportunity add some variety into your float center. I love a dedicated float center but if you can add in infrared sauna massage other modalities I think that's a recipe for success. I talked about that a little bit last year maximizing your revenue generating space those type of things and then get feedback from your clients if you're not seeing growth then there's something that's not working. Talk to your clients find out what it is that's not working. So the first part of selling a membership is planning seeds early on so before clients even get into the tank your intros there's lots of conversations about that the only thing I'm going to say is when you've got new people coming in get a feel for where they are find out if they're anxious or nervous about their float and then find out also if they're a Joe Rogan fan and they're like way too amped up about their float we need to bring them all back into center and say just enjoy the experience the first time just take it in for what it is and don't have any expectations about that what that's going to be and remind them that one float is not going to cure what it is you're here for so if you've spent the last year and a half building up stress and anxiety we can't necessarily sometimes we can we all know that but we can't necessarily cure you and one float so remind them before they're at the desk and you're asking them for money remind them that it's going to take for a lot of clients it's going to take two or three float sessions before you start to see the longer term or the more impactful benefits the first float I tell people have fun with the first float it's a cool experience it's fun it feels awesome so just enjoy that next when they get out of their their float session I think it's important to check in we try not to ask people how was your float that's asking them to quantify a thing that is difficult to do and so we just check in and we say how are you feeling we want to make sure that they had a good experience nothing went wrong they didn't well they're gonna get salt in their eyes the first time that seems to give him but check in with them see how everything's going encourage them to hang out and just kind of take in that experience I think it's a great idea to have a space where people can relax in your center and I believe that the more time people spend in your space the more value that has for them personally so we've got a lounge but we also when we expanded we had these meditation nooks it's really cool I actually saw a client sleep in there for two hours and I loved it because that's what they needed so I love that so again when I start talking about selling memberships we should probably change our framework with that it's it's not really that you're selling it if you believe in what you're doing so I think we can all agree that floating can have a huge impact in everyone's life anybody if you believe that floating more regularly is going to have a greater impact the studies have shown that we know that when people float more often they get more out of their life and those benefits last longer outside of the float and then if they continue that process regularly that's going to have an even greater impact so don't think of it and tell your crew don't think of it as selling a membership think of it as you're helping clients save money in the process of floating more regularly so that's really the key here is to get away from that mindset you don't you don't have to be a sleazy salesperson you don't have to be pushy but it's really important that we talk to every single client about membership so that's the next key so you you planted the seed before the float you checked in with the math words if they're feel good about their experience then you have to ask for the membership and I think it's a numbers game you have to ask every single time that is if you're going to take away anything from this that's really the thing is the numbers game first-time floaters ask them if they want a membership someone that's been there 10 times and still hasn't signed up you still ask them because it's the best way that you can help your clients so just to give you an example of what we would say at the front desk I have employees now so I try and be an example so basically I asked them you know we've already checked in we know they had a good float experience and then I say do you plan on coming back and if they say yes they've just agreed that they plan on coming back to your center the next thing you ask is well it would normally be whatever your retail price is for us it would be $69 for your 60 minute float today I can save you a few bucks we have a membership there's no contract and the credits roll over and I basically try and keep it as simple that engage where they're at with that how they're feeling some people are like sure some folks need a few more details so sometimes I'll go into some of the other perks but again the critical part is asking everyone and making sure that you're not missing an opportunity there if you have a crew so this is for folks that have employees that are working the front desk even if it's one person again you have to be the example you have to lead by example by showing that you're talking to all your guests about memberships and we I firmly believe in incentives if you've got employees and you're asking them to do something outside of their regular duties I think incentives are a great way to do that and this is where I've heard feedback that folks are really worried about their float facilitators being too pushy we've been doing this for two years I haven't I haven't had one client come back and say hey that person was being too pushy they kept asking me about the membership it's just not in the nature like you you find people that believe in what you do and when we launched this program I had a crew that was amazing people that were incredibly dedicated in what we do they believed in our facility but the day after we started providing incentives they sold more memberships that's always going to be the case this is still a job people are still there to make money so I look at it as this is a great way that I can increase their income and I can pay my employees more but it's a win-win situation you can also incentivize other areas that you want to improve we also give our employees our front desk folks they get incentives for five-star reviews I don't believe in paying clients or incentivizing clients to give us good reviews I believe in making sure that my crew is asking for that review when we have a client that had a good experience we don't push too hard on the ones that you know their ear plug fell out or something like that but so we've also got let's hear we're at 4.9 stars with 325 reviews on Google and it's based on that on that model and then lastly we also create an environment where we kind of gamify the idea of promoting membership so we also have a contest each month who sells the most memberships and no like I said this makes some of y'all uncomfortable but the reality is we do a first second and third place and when people are close and I keep them updated on that they they do they put in more effort and again if you're looking at memberships as a way that you can grow your business these are some of the tools that that you can use so speaking to the the structure there's a ton of different ways to structure memberships and we don't really have time to go through all the different ways some things to consider though is you want to bring value and flexibility I think flexibility really helps take away that nervousness that clients have when you say membership I'm a firm believer that you shouldn't have contracts worry less about the way people can take advantage and worry more about how you can bring people in to float more often and so adding flexibility and different ways that people different perks that people can use to use those credits is a good way to keep people on so when we look at pricing structure and perks I think of pricing is the way that you increase your sales so I think that there needs to be a big enough differential so if you're talking about your retail price to your membership price you need to make that gap big enough that it's going to motivate people to sign up for a membership but you also want to make sure that that's a win-win if you're pricing it too low where your center is not profiting that's obviously not good but you need to have a big enough incentive there for clients to be motivated to sign up for the membership and then the perks the things that you decide to offer with that is what retains members so in other words the number one reason that people get rid of their membership is because they have too many credits we've been polling our members for a long time and I've talked to other float centers this is pretty much universally true they're like we've got I've got six credits stored up I want to cancel my membership so get really creative with the ways that they can use those member credits for us some examples of that is the credits roll over for up to six months we recently put a time limit on that we used to say universally and that was catching up to us so we grandfathered in the folks that had had the old style of membership and the new ones were putting six months while you have your membership three months after you cancel nobody's complained we didn't slow down so this is really important from a bookkeeping standpoint but also just preventing that those credits from stacking up and nobody really complained about the idea that okay well I've got six credits they're gonna start to roll off it's more of a motivation for them to get in and use it and I want people to use our member credits you're definitely gonna have people that won't use all of those credits and in some ways that's good for business I guess you'd say I think it's better if we have people coming in and floating and using those credits and enjoying that experience I really push any time we have a holiday or a season where people are giving gifts I really encourage clients to switch a member credit over to a gift card so Christmas we sent out a special email just to our members saying hey let's swap those let's swap those member credits into gift cards and now they're bringing in clients for you so that's a huge opportunity we do a ton of those around Christmas but we also do promotions for Mother's Day Father's Day and just in general if we're checking out a client we notice they have a lot of credits we're like hey is there anyone you would like to give a gift to for a birthday or just we've even had people donate floats so there's a lot of different ways where you can help them use those credits so they're just not sitting there and making them feel like they're wasting their money we allow guests to share memberships sometimes we have couples that just do one membership and they share it back and forth I don't really mind that we allow guests to buy additional floats with their at the membership price so that's an opportunity where it's a perk it we maybe we could sell an extra membership but it's a way that we can bring more people on and keep them longer going back to structure again there's a ton of different ways you can set up your memberships I'm a fan of having one float per month and then you can buy additional floats at that same price I've seen some models where you can have two or four floats a month if that's working for you keep doing it whatever you're doing if you're if you feel like your success will continue that in my mind when you sign up someone for four floats a month their intention in the beginning is that they're going to float once a week it's very rare that people maintain that and so very quickly they're going to have a lot of credits build up and they're going to feel they're going to lose that value so they're going to drop off I'm more focused on how do we keep people and continue to build memberships because your attrition is just as important as your sales and so I look every month at how many memberships do we lose you're always going to have folks dropping off but if you can reduce that rate of attrition it's just as important as selling new memberships so I like the one a month they can buy extra credit so if they do end up coming four times in a month then they get that same price but it can help reduce that attrition so a few of the goals and final bullet points make sure that your membership is mutually beneficial again if this is a way to create a stronger bond between you and the client but it has to make sense for your bottom line so you need to really understand your financials what is it what is your cost per flow what are your monthly expenses and make sure that it makes sense for the business but also you have to have that pricing right where people are going to be motivated enough to to sign up for the membership and some of some of the other ways that you can frame memberships is you're bringing in clients that understand how everything operates we've got members that come in they're like give me my earplugs they go back to the room they jump in they know exactly what to do and if they're all business they come and go and we hardly have to you know they don't even need to check out before they leave because they know how to they have a credit that is really efficient compared to first timers we spend a lot of time with them sometimes five ten fifteen minutes making sure that they're comfortable going through that process working with them afterwards we've got some members that hang out longer but in general it's much more efficient to have clients coming in more frequently than a constant stream of new clients i looked at some of our stats recently 75 of the people that came into our center last month were return clients so so i've heard figures in the 10 range and that's really expensive way to do business it is not sustainable if you can't get that return client ratio up then it's going to be really hard it's going to be really difficult to maintain your business it's expensive for marketing we've spent a lot of money and lately we've been pushing we've been lowering that amount more and more because a higher percentage of our revenue is coming from memberships and we just don't have to bring in new clients nearly as much um everyone so i'll look at the schedule and um almost the entire day is full of members i'm like well i don't know if we even need anyone here they know what to do um i'm just kidding um let's see here long time long-term clients see greater benefit as we spoke to earlier if they're coming in more often they're floating frequency frequently um i still have a member that was one of our very first client so he's had a membership for five years it's part of their lifestyle they're not going anywhere it doesn't matter who shows up in town nobody's taken by members like they're part of our family and um covid's been very difficult because there's people that we're just seeing back in that we haven't seen in a year and it's like a reunion so building that bond between you and the client where they become family is always a great business model and again increasing efficiency and not maximizing revenue uh per transaction this isn't about how much money you can get per transaction again uh check out my talk from last year and i talk about maximizing revenue in your space you can use retail you can use alternate other services there's a lot of ways where you can increase that ticket price per client this is about efficiency this isn't about maximizing the amount of money that you can bring in um per sale and then don't focus too much about people gaming the system i like the idea of starting out really flexible bringing people in and then if you see ways that people are kind of taking advantage you can always rein those in we've increased price we've um like i said we've shortened the time frame they can use credits we've done other things and and kind of home to that but start out flexible so that you can retain members and and kind of go from there um again i'll be speaking uh on a round table with the fta please sign up for the fta i think that they are doing amazing things and um as a member you can go back and see some of the round table events that we've done uh we bring in leaders from the industry to talk about the important things that can help grow your business so next month we're going to spend a lot more time on this i promise somebody that i would talk for four hours about memberships so if i have to talk for four hours about memberships i will this is a huge topic and there's a lot of different ways that you can structure things and we can look at individual cases but the main thing to take away is um it's a really important way to to build your business we're at six hundred and 34 members i checked while i was sitting in there and uh that was after when we reopened we were shut down for two months after covid we reopened and we still had 200 members so these are folks that knew we were closed for two months and i literally got emails saying i'm supporting your business i know i can't come in and use it so for times like that it was really critical helping us get through but that was our jumping off point and we've grown to that number since then i also have some really really amazing team members um our manager kindle will sell 40 memberships in a month i never came close to that so i can't take all of the credit for our success um but we've got other team members that they train and everybody pitches in so there's months where we sell over 100 memberships and it's just continuing to grow this last year has been a really big eye opener so i wanted to encourage all with that i'm an open book if if anyone needs anything feel free to send me an email um my email is there hit us up on social i probably won't respond as close as quickly there but um i'm happy to help any way i can and speak to other um other folks in the industry when you need help before we opened and still while i've been here every single talk that i've uh been to i've i've taken away a gem of knowledge so nobody in this room is above learning uh from anyone else there's always something you can take away so let's continue to grow together let's build this industry i think there's another wave of floating coming uh covid is gonna it's either gonna stick around or a view behind us it doesn't really matter people are really focused on their wellness and taking care of their health themselves that's what we're seeing a lot of conversations about and this is the absolute best tool to do that so thank you all so much i love you guys and i'm here if you need me