How to Create an Esthetician Membership That Generates Recurring Revenue with Paige Vandy

If you’ve ever wondered how to create a membership that actually works, this episode is for you.

Most estheticians think memberships are simply monthly facial plans, but memberships can become a powerful way to create recurring revenue, build stronger client loyalty, and reduce the pressure of relying only on appointments.

In this episode, Kari Jo Patterson sits down with membership expert Paige to discuss how to build a thriving membership community, improve member retention, create an onboarding experience that keeps people engaged, and avoid the biggest mistakes business owners make when launching memberships.

Whether you’re considering a treatment membership or looking to build an educational community, these principles can help you create predictable monthly income and grow beyond the treatment room.

In this episode you’ll learn:

• Why community matters more than content
• How to launch a membership before it’s finished
• The biggest onboarding mistakes that cause cancellations
• How to improve member retention
• Whether you should offer monthly or annual memberships
• How recurring revenue creates a more stable esthetician business

Today’s episode is sponsored by GlossGenius

Earn more and get your time back with GlossGenius—the all-in-one platform built for beauty and wellness professionals. From scheduling and payments to marketing, staff management, and client follow-up, GlossGenius helps you simplify your business so you can focus on your clients.

Use code KARIJO for 50% off your first two months of a Premium Plan.

🔗 glossgenius.com/estheticianpodcast

Connect with Paige Vandy

🌐 Website: paigevandy.com

📸 Instagram: @themembershipmuse

▶️ YouTube: @themembershipmuse

💻 Million Dollar Memberships Club: paigevandy.com/million-dollar-memberships-club

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All-in-one scheduling, payments, forms & client management for estheticians.

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Transcript

Why Memberships Fail Early

Kari Jo 0:07

Welcome to the Esthetician Podcast, the podcast for aestheticians who are tired of working nonstop, feeling stuck in their business. Hey, I'm Kari Jo and I'm an esthetician of 20 years. I built and I sold my aesthetics company after learning the business side that nobody ever teaches us. And each week we are going to figure out what is actually happening in your business and what to fix first and how to build a business that actually is going to give you more freedom, more profit, and most importantly, more peace. So let's get into today's episode. Welcome back to the esthetician podcast. Okay, so today's episode is going to be a little bit different than what we normally cover. See, when most estheticians hear the word membership, we immediately start thinking monthly treatment plans. But what I want you to hear is a very different perspective. See, I am the type of person that I love to learn from everyone. And maybe then I can think of doing things a little bit differently, which might help me in my businesses. So today I am bringing on Paige. Paige has built multiple online membership businesses. And while her business isn't specifically in aesthetics, the principles behind her recurring revenue and building a community, onboarding members, creating a predictable income, it applies to every single business owner. So what I want you to do is as you're listening today, I don't want you to think, how can I copy her business? Instead, I want you to ask how could these ideas apply to my business? I think you're gonna walk away with some really interesting ideas.

Paige’s Path From HR To Online

Kari Jo 2:00

Paige, thanks for coming on. Hi, thank you for having me.

Paige Vandy 2:04

I'm so excited to be here.

Kari Jo 2:06

Yeah. So tell us just how did you get into memberships and yeah, you know what?

Paige Vandy 2:13

It's so funny. I used to work in oil field industry. Like 2014, I was in the oil field industry. I went to school for business, so I had no idea what I wanted to do. And I landed this field administrator, which went into like an HR kind of position job. And at that time, I was really into health and fitness. That's just what I loved. I started even like a secret Instagram account and I hid it from everyone. I never showed my face. It was just like I loved it so much. And I would just kind of do that on the side. Anyways, I'd be at my desk in this HR job and just like on the bodybuilding.com website and just like looking at things like that. And it became where people in my office would just naturally come to me and be like, oh, can I see you're eating this way at lunch all the time, and you're never going out to the restaurants or the fast food places or eating how everyone else is. Like they just saw this health side of me. And I had I started getting people asking me to help them with their meal planning and all of this kind of stuff. And then I was working with an online coach, and back then, like 2014, that was pretty uncommon to work with an online coach. It was still very new. So a lot of people were like, what the heck? And so I kind of just started falling into the space. I was like, hey, people are asking me to do this stuff. My literal passion, it's all that I'm doing. Why don't I go get certified to be a trainer? Which was kind of a silly idea at the time because I had my foot in the door at this oil field company. And I'm not sure if you're very familiar with oil field, but they pay really well, or they did at least at the time. So it's kind of like a silly thing to do, technically. But I did. I went and got my personal training certification. And then I jumped right into online training from that. And I didn't even do like the in-person personal training route. I just went online because that was who I was personally working with. And I loved that I felt like I could be more involved in my people's lives by doing online because I didn't have to actually have them come sit in a studio with me for three minutes or an hour. And then like I have no idea what they're doing in the meantime. It was kind of just like this holistic way of working with people at the way I wanted to, but then also working with a lot of people at the same time and not having to like burn myself out doing the in-person thing. The oil field company ended up doing a bunch of layoffs. So I was like, wow, that actually worked out in my favor. Um, and I went that route. And so I started as obviously a health and business coach. And I started that in 2017, technically, like that's when I actually pulled the trigger, started the business. And then 20, at the end of 2018, 2019, I was sitting down one day and I'm like, okay, I'm working with these people one-on-one. It's good because I only have to really do Zoom calls, whatever. But I want there to be more here. I want to work with, I want to be able to work with more people. I want them to be in a community. The one thing that I was really finding from my people was that they could have benefited so much more from having people around them with the same goal, but they were still really lonely in their journey. Like they just had their husband who laid on the couch all day eating potato chips. And so they were in this journey with me, but it was like, I don't want to be the one holding this. Like, I don't want to, I want them to have other people. And so one day I used to do something all the time in the beginning of my business. I committed to what I called soul writing for 10 minutes every single day. And one day I sat down to do this soul writing, and um I honestly wrote for probably like an hour. It just like all these thoughts started coming out of like how I could design this better, how I could have them come into this program space and have actual modules of the things that I was constantly repeating myself with, anyways. Like I was constantly asked, answering the same questions over and over again. And I'm like, if you just knew this stuff by the time you got on this one-on-one call with me, we could actually personalize this call a little bit better and get you further. But I'm just answering these questions that I know you need to know, but like, there's a better way to give you this so that you can use your time more wisely with me. So I came up with this way that, or this idea that I was going to put all of this information that I was constantly not only being asked, but what I would want people to know about this specific result.

The First Membership Pre-Sale

Paige Vandy 6:55

So, like things to do with their fitness and their nutrition and mindset and just all these things that I think were really important to put in there. And then I wanted them to be able to come in and be able to be in a group and a community with other people who were working towards the same goal that they were working towards. I wanted us to be able to get on calls together, not just one-on-one, and be able to still get support, but be able to like hear and see yours themselves and other people's stories and what other people were asking and all the things. But that's what I did. And I made it instantly. I started selling it before it was even ready. I started selling it when it was just the name and saying that, okay, this is what's coming. It's not ready, but you can get a pre-sale at a really good price. And I'll tell you when it's ready. And I had people buy it. And that was how I built my very first membership. It was a health membership. I had other business owners be like, How are you doing this? I loved the health stuff, but I really started to like having these business conversations more. And I found that so many people were leaving money on the table because they weren't turning their programs into something like this. They were just like doing the one-on-one thing. So then I yeah, quickly moved into not quickly, but eventually moved into business coaching and started memberships for business coaching. And right now I'm building my fourth membership.

Kari Jo 8:14

Wow. I I was dying when you're like, and the husband's a couch potato. And it's so hard when your husband is not on the same exact journey. And so I get why you need that community. And what is also really interesting is like you talked a lot about building that community, which I relate to so much because when I opened my business, I started a membership, but I just kind of almost thought that my membership would sell itself because it was a membership. Do you know what I mean? And so I just I opened it, it fell so flat, it didn't work. I didn't build the community around it. And so what makes a good membership? Like, how do you build that good membership?

Paige Vandy 9:00

Yeah. First thing first is the first year is hell within most members of if they don't understand how to actually cultivate a community within that community and create a culture. Well, and I work, I know that because I work with a lot of them. I work with a lot of people who have massive audiences and they can get people into any offer, but they struggle with the community aspect once people are actually in the offer. Um, so that's kind of just the first thing is knowing that that first year of building your membership, even like first two years, it's really, really about cult like being so intentional to cultivate a community within that. Um, and so it's to get people into the membership, you are going to be the biggest cheerleader for that membership in like the first year and really making sure that when people get into the membership, they're connecting with each other. That's the biggest thing, is like your membership doesn't need more content. It

Community Over More Content

Paige Vandy 9:55

doesn't need more calls from you or more support from you. It literally is just about connecting other people to each other. And I think that's something a lot of people struggle with right off the bat because we're so used to building audiences, right? Um, but when it comes to memberships, you really want to do the opposite, you want to get people to connect with each other and you kind of want to take yourself out of it more and more. That's the goal, is like get you out of there. And you can still be in there, but the goal is to get you kind of just more so steering the ship and getting people connecting with each other so they feel like it's their community. You don't want people to feel like they're in your audience within your membership, if that makes sense.

Kari Jo 10:34

Yes, I love that. So, how do you build that community where people are involved?

Paige Vandy 10:41

The golden question. It's uh it takes time. I'm still trying to really establish community in it. So it doesn't matter how long you've been in the space, how much you know about it. It's like really, it just takes time to build it. But some tips that I have, and something that we're really doubling down on, even with this community, is trying to get members to again think of it as their community. So one thing I like to do is I like to have roles inside of my community. This is something I've never really heard anyone teach, but I find it works really well. And it blew up my last memberships completely, is having roles inside of your membership. So people again take initiative to feel like it's their membership. So, for example, community roles, like I have community members volunteer to host or be the welcoming committee, having people actually take on roles inside and volunteer kind of gets people just really involved with each other, wanting to grow it, wanting to get other people in it. So that's a huge thing. It's just getting really involved. And then like just really making sure that if you're gonna focus on anything in the beginning, it's really making sure that you're focusing on that first experience and getting people like actually paired with other people and actually getting people into the community. So I always say like the first four to eight hours of getting people into a membership community is the make or break because if they have a really good experience and they get connected with someone right away and they feel like they know what they need to do, they see their path, they can actually see what they're gonna work on inside of the membership. That can make such a big difference for people wanting to stay in it rather than just like kind of seeing it, seeing the content and being like, oh, this isn't necessarily right for me. That's the first thing I would say is if you're gonna focus on anything, it's really just getting that new member experience really dialed, making sure that as soon as someone comes in, like within the first 48 hours at least, you're connecting them with another member, whether that's you doing it or a community manager. You're just trying to get them connected to someone in the community so that they feel like they're part of it. And then that's going to help with the retention, right? And that's the biggest thing is your membership's never going to grow if you have that leaky bucket, people coming in and then people leaving. So making sure that you are really putting a solid effort in that first experience because that's gonna trickle into those people staying, right? If you can catch them in the beginning, that's gonna really get them wanting to stay in.

Kari Jo 13:12

Yeah, I love that so much. Focusing on that first 24 to 48 hours is like so

Roles That Make Members Participate

Kari Jo 13:20

key. And I can see why that is so valuable. And you suggested roles, which is really brilliant. I love that because I mean, I think everybody wants, I think everyone in life wants to make an impact. And so when you give them a role, it's like giving them an opportunity to make an impact too. And so I thought that was genius. How is there any other ways that you would uh recommend for creating like a stronger membership experience?

Paige Vandy 13:52

So the first thing that I would say is you just want to make sure your people aren't confused that clarity is like number one. Member experience is something that you're constantly refining and revising and looking at. And like even yesterday we sent out quarterly surveys. We send out quarterly surveys every single quarter to our members so that they can actually tell us what are you loving? What are you not loving? Is anything feeling tricky, resistant, whatever? And then obviously we also like to incentivize them for doing it. We do a giveaway and all the things for people who actually end up doing the surveys. Um, so that's like one thing is just really making sure that the they're you're talking to your members, but also making sure they are so clear on how they actually work through your membership. Like if it's content-based, if you have something that they learn inside of the membership, obviously you're probably going to have videos or courses or resources or something like that. You can't just take all of that stuff. Like I see a lot of people go from doing one-on-one services and almost like brain dump their brain into their Google Drive, and then they just put that into a resource hub or like a library inside of their membership. And all the information is there, but then their members are like, How the hell do I use this? Like, where do I start? So it's really important that even if your membership has everything in it, you have some sort of clear pathway for your members to take. It's basically like, what does your journey inside of this membership look like? Really identifying what is the result of your membership and what is the journey in between? How do they get from point A to point Z? So coming up, if you have any sort of like framework that they have to go through, if you have steps or levels or anything like that, like having something so that your members just know what their path is.

Kari Jo 15:48

One question I hear all the time is Carrie, should I switch my software? And my answer is probably something that you're not expecting. Don't switch just because everybody on Facebook says that you should. Switch because your current system isn't

Clarity And A Simple Success Path

Kari Jo 16:05

able to keep up where where your business is going. Something that no one tells you is the better that your business actually does, the more time it actually takes to run it. It all ends up meaning more hours that you spend on scheduling, follow-ups, and administration unless you have the right partner to do the work for you. And it's one of the reasons why so many aestheticians are moving to Gloss Genius. It's intelligent system handles scheduling, staff management, marketing, client follow-ups, all automatically working in the background to fill your calendar, grow your revenue, and keep clients coming back. Listen, more than 120,000 beauty and wellness businesses already trust Gloss Genius. If you're ready to see if it's the right fit for you, head on over to glossgenius.com and use code Kari Jo for 50% off your first two months of a premium plan. Now let's jump back to the episode. So at the very beginning, you said how you started selling your membership before you even launched it. How do you launch a really good membership?

Paige Vandy 17:21

Oh. So, first it's you yourself knowing exactly what's going to be coming into this membership. When I sold it before it was ready, I knew exactly what was coming. So the whole outline was planned. I knew exactly who it was for, what it was going to help them do. It was all things that I had already been doing. It was just needing to actually be built into the membership. So the first thing is I knew those key things. And people don't really care what's inside of a membership. They more so care what is it going to do for them. Right. So it's really important that you identify that and you're very, very clear on that. The second thing is making sure that your content, and if you are to do something like this, like if you were to launch a membership and it's not ready yet, your content has to be so aimed to exactly what that result is of your membership, that membership that's coming up in the future, what is the result? Your content needs to be already prepping people to see themselves in that and want that. So you need to really be making sure that you are calling out where your people are. So, like, are you working an aesthetician job and you are fully booked out right now and you are starting to get resentful because you started this because you love it, but now you're finding that to make actually good money, you are booking yourself back to back with appointments. Like that's the kind of

Software Reality Check And Sponsor

Paige Vandy 18:45

stuff, right? So you're kind of already showing people where they are, and then you're creating content around that. And then you're starting to slowly introduce your membership and what's coming. And personally, for me, I if someone comes to me and they don't have a membership already, I love to do a pre-sell. I think it's just the best way to do it. It really also helps you refine your message. Like if you're starting to sell something, you're not really seeing people coming in. It's like, why? We can really look into that. But also, it's proof of concept. People are already telling you they want this thing and you're actually getting paid to make it because you're getting people on a pre-sell and they start on a specific date. Like you know, you're already making money for this thing. There's already that proof of concept. Um, and they also you can use those people who are going to come into this membership to also spread the word for it. Now that they're in, share with your friends. Here's a referral code, like all the things. So it's you can start creating a world around your membership before it's even born, technically. And that's one of the biggest things. Like we have four pillars that I teach inside my membership. The what the fourth one is building a world. That's huge. You have to not just be a brand, you have to build a world, something people, like I was saying before, want to be a part of. So really taking that concept and that idea that you're aiming for with this membership, and how can you start implementing that before it's even ready?

Kari Jo 20:11

Yeah, I love that. So, how do you make the offer really clear and not confusing? Cause I feel like sometimes we get really good into it for offers, and then people are like, what is it that you're actually?

Paige Vandy 20:29

Yeah. So it's really simple. You just have to identify for yourself what is who is this offer for? And what is this going to like? Who do we bring together? I bring together business owners, I bring together aestheticians, I bring together fitness coaches, whatever. Who are you bringing together in this membership? And what is that result, that transformation, I should say, that you are helping them achieve inside of that? When it comes to memberships, the easiest way to sell it is having a clear transformation. So it's like, here's the point A, here's the point B. I'm gonna help you go from this to this. So that's the biggest transform. I'm gonna help you go from overworked, booked out, one-on-one services to packaging up all of your expertise and bringing in monthly recurring revenue on an online model, something like that. So it's like you're always you're really coming up with that

How To Launch With A Pre-Sell

Paige Vandy 21:25

because that's what people can identify to. They don't really care about hearing all the calls your membership has or the modules or how you get them the results. They just care, is this for me? And what is this going to help me achieve via that trans that transition?

Kari Jo 21:43

Yes. Well, so how do you avoid on or avoid do you have people that come in and I mean, do you have like a limit for how long they have to stay in? So you don't get like the one time transaction that you What I'm saying?

Paige Vandy 22:01

Yeah, like if you have content in there, you mean, and you don't just like get people coming in. Yeah.

Kari Jo 22:08

Yes.

Paige Vandy 22:09

Yes. So definitely with memberships, you're going to, especially if you have a low ticket, like this is the other thing, too, by the way. You don't have to just have a low ticket, low offer kind of membership. I had a membership that was $2,000 a month. And I also have a membership that's $147 a month. So like there's a range. But if you're going to have a membership that you have all this content and you really want to protect it and you don't want to get those people who come in at like $97 a month, download all your stuff and then leave, you definitely can do different, like you can have different boundaries around your rent membership. You can have where if they choose a payment plan option, like a monthly option, then there's a commitment period. Or there's like a slow release of content that you have inside of your membership. Personally, for me, if I'm going to just build a membership for the first time and I'm doing a pre-sale, I'm not pre-selling monthly memberships. I'm only pre-selling annuals. And then that way they're in for the year and they get all the content released at once. If you're deaf, if you're trying to grow and build your membership, definitely try and do an annual pricing and like offer a really good incentive of why people would want to join, whether it's like a big chunk of maybe they get a couple months free if they do annual, maybe they get access to something faster that monthly members don't. Yeah, there's definitely different ways to go about that.

Kari Jo 23:32

So I see a lot of memberships starting off, and they normally have like three different ones. Do you recommend starting with like three different memberships? Or what do you recommend?

Paige Vandy 23:46

Do you mean three different memberships, or do you mean three different tiers within the same membership?

Kari Jo 23:52

Three different tiers of memberships.

Paige Vandy 23:54

Do you think you can start with all three? It depends on who you are. If it is such a like it makes or breaks your membership, you have to have different tiers, then go for it, but make sure that it is so clear and there's

Pricing Boundaries And Annual Options

Paige Vandy 24:10

a very obvious difference in what each membership is for. For example, maybe you have like, I don't know, very beginner people and like very, very advanced people, and they're two separate tiers. But if you are starting out and your main goal is to just bring people into community, help them with something, and it's not a very clear, like you're you're kind of teetering back and forth on if you should have a tier or not. My advice is always just go no, because you can add tiers in later, but you it's harder to take them away. And that's kind of like general advice with anything with memberships. If you're ever just trying to think of stuff to put in there, just to put in there, always start with the bare minimum. Always start with the lower price than you think because it's so much easier to increase and add than it is to take away, send out emails to all your members, have some of them cancel because of it. Yes.

Kari Jo 25:06

Yeah. That is so valuable. So we're coming up to a close, and I want to know what would you say are the biggest mistakes that you see when people are starting their memberships?

Paige Vandy 25:20

Biggest mistakes. I would say first thing is no clear success path. That's huge. People just coming in, taking all of their stuff that putting it into a library and just being like, here's our community. That's a huge mistake. So, no success path. You have to really understand how to make that pathway for your members. Bad onboarding is another mistake. Having people come into your membership and maybe sending an email saying, congratulations, start here, and then that's it. You want to at least have like we have a 30, not 60-day new member onboarding process. And that includes different emails. It includes different touch points. It includes my community manager personally going in and messaging them. It includes intakes. It includes just all these different things to make sure that they are fully getting integrated into this membership. And it's like step by step by step. It's not overwhelming to them. So many people will just dump them with the welcome email and all of this stuff to look into. And they're like, holy crap, this is overwhelming. So very strategic onboarding is really important. Okay. Yeah, we'll go with that. Okay. So the third one, and then I'll end it at this one, is I would just say not giving your community the actual attention that it deserves in that first year, like like you were even saying before, is that if you start a community and then you just expect people to come into it and you're not actually really focusing in on their member experience and create in connecting people with other members and just trying to like if you start it and then people come in and then they don't know what

Tiers And Common Membership Mistakes

Paige Vandy 27:05

to do, or they leave and you're not actually in there connecting them with other people or um doing like really solid retention practices, which we have a lot of those, then they just kind of throw the membership and say it, my audience just didn't like it. They said they wanted one-on-one, they aren't meant for memberships. And it's no, it just they weren't given a membership with the proper support. And I think that's the biggest thing. You want people to feel like they have elite, almost one-on-one level support with a membership without giving it to them. Like they should just feel so supported by your systems and your member interaction and how you do things inside of your community that they feel like this $97 membership they're paying for is like an elite $2,000 a month kind of experience. So yeah, I'll end it at that.

Kari Jo 27:52

Yeah, no, I love that. Well, thank you so much for coming on. If my listeners want to reach out and be like, because obviously you've got some great memberships. Oh, I want to know how to do that because I want to serve more people, not just work behind the chair. How can they find you?

Paige Vandy 28:11

Oh, yeah, it's it's such a good thing. Like, and honestly, any industry can do this, even if you are someone doing service-based services, uh, it's anyone can do this. You have so much expertise that you can do this, and people are looking for community everywhere. I will just say this as I know you're trying to wrap it up and I'm just going, but with the age of AI, like information is available anywhere, but one thing that isn't going away is community. People want to be in a community learning these things. They don't just want to be fed all this information and doing it by themselves. So, yeah, memberships are great for everyone. If you want to start your membership, grow an existing membership, I have my membership called Million Dollar Memberships Club, which is where I help, again, all founders, entrepreneurs turn what they know into really highly profitable, scalable online membership models. So you can come check us out there. Um, and I also have my podcast, Million Dollar Memberships Podcast, which is available on all platforms. And I just do a lot of tactical how-to education type of episodes on there.

Kari Jo 29:15

Yes. Well, my biggest takeaway from today's episode is how important the word community is in memberships, because it's yes,

Where To Find Paige And Next Steps

Kari Jo 29:25

it's a membership ship, but what you really are trying to do is build a community and you've got to learn how to do that. So thank you so much for coming on and giving us all your little tips and advice. And I can't thank you enough. Thank you for having me. This is fun. Yes, we'll see you guys next week on another esthetician podcast. Bye, guys. If today's episode hit home for you, the next thing I want you to do is go and download my free esthetician weekly number tracker. Most estheticians are trying to fix everything all at once when really it's usually one number that is quietly breaking the business. One weak number creates the stress that you're going through. Low rebooks, low retail, low client retention, low average ticket. This tracker, it helps you figure out what number is actually hurting your business first. So when you know what to focus on, instead of feeling like you're all over the place, you can start changing your company. You can download it at carryjopatterson.com forward slash start. And remember, you don't need to fix everything at once. You just need to fix the number that is affecting everything else. I'll see you guys next week.