I explore the nuances of designing effective memberships for tutors, emphasizing sustainability, retention, and alignment with student needs. I share insights from my experience running The Tutor's Mastermind and offers practical advice for creating long-lasting, valuable memberships.

Takeaways

• Memberships should be designed for the long term, not just as a recurring payment.

• A true membership leans on independent learning and community, not just tutor-led sessions.

• Pricing lower than courses can lead to overwork and reduced profitability.

• Retention is driven by design, not just content, and should be a primary focus.

• Listening to feedback and evolving your membership over time is crucial for success.

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👋🏽 Hello! I'm Sumantha McMahon, and I've supported over 100 tutors and education business owners.

As a teacher 'dropout' turned professional tutor, combined with my 20+ years as a business owner, I'm in it with you! Yes, I'm qualified too :-)

My training leans on tried-and-tested methods that are completely tailored to our niche.

Work with me to breathe life into YOUR definition of success:

#1 Bespoke 1:1 Mentoring

High-touch 6-month programme for tutors who want to make their business more lucrative, in a sustainable way for the future, while protecting the impact they make.

#2 The Tutors' Mastermind

The leading membership for tutors that combines tailored training (live and recorded), a community of like-minded business owners and exclusive discounts.

This podcast is recorded using Riverside. Sign up for your account here (free plan available)

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Sometimes, I share links to resources and apps that I recommend. They are all based on my experience - if I don't love them, I don't recommend them. In some cases, I earn a small commission for my recommendation, at no cost to you.

© 2024 Sumantha McMahon

Tutors are increasingly going in the membership direction for their students, and I totally get it. Recurring income is very attractive. You know roughly what's coming in each month, and you're not starting from zero, let's say, every September or every time you have a new cohort. But here's also what I keep seeing: a membership gets priced like a membership because that's what gives you the recurring income. But then it gets delivered like normal tuition because that's what we know how to do.

So the recurring income arrives, but you end up working more hours for actually less money than you were before. So today I'm going to go through what has to be true about how you design a membership to make that income really worthwhile. Now, if we haven't met yet, I'm Samantha and I help tutors earn more sustainably and think about options for their future, which mostly means helping people design a business on purpose rather than.

Just letting it grow by accident. And that's the frame for this episode. A membership is a design decision about your life before it's ever really about revenue.

If you get that right, then it can be one of the best things you build. I know this because I run the tutor's mastermind and I have done for a number of years, and I really love it. But if you get it wrong, it becomes one of the heaviest things in your business because unlike a block of lessons, it kind of never ends.

So the first thing we need to look at is how there is a difference between membership and monthly paid tuition, where you know parents are paying you monthly on repeat, because this is the first place that things go wrong, and it's almost always a bit of a definition problem rather than a delivery problem. Plenty of tutors already take payment monthly, a standing order, the same amount each month, and it spreads the cost for families.

And it smooths your income. And that's a payment arrangement. It's a really good one, and I recommend it to many people. But it isn't a membership.

A membership is a different animal and it has three things baked into it. The first is that it's built for the long term. There's no natural endpoint as such, not typically. So a block of 10 sessions ends, a term ends. A membership just keeps going, like until someone decides to stop it, which means

That it has to be sustainable for you across months and years, not just across, let's say, a busy half term. The second is that a membership leans on typically independent learning far more than tutor-led learning. That's kind of the whole mechanism. The value sits in the access, the resources, the environment and the community with your input woven through rather than it being the entire thing or that central point.

And the third one, and this is the one that catches people out the most, is that memberships are conventionally priced lower than, let's say, a course or weekly lessons. That's what people expect when they hear the word. So if you take that lower price and then fill it with your own live hours, your marking, your feedback, your presence in the room every single week, you've actually built something that costs you the same as tuition and pays you less.

Now I know I'm talking about terminology a lot here, but

It matters because of what other people already associate with the word membership. You can absolutely still follow the model, but if you're going to call it a membership, then it should be delivered like one too, because that's what people will expect. Now, I want to be careful here because I'm not saying don't include yourself in a membership. You should be in there. What I'm saying is that the amount of you inside a membership.

Should be a deliberate decision made with sustainability as your main consideration, rather than something that just accumulates because it felt generous at the time. So ask yourself a simple question when you're sketching it out. If a hundred students joined tomorrow, what would your week look like? If the honest answer is that it would break you, then what you've designed is tuition with a subscription button on it.

Now, if you're finding this interesting and it's already making you think differently about something, about memberships, then do follow or subscribe wherever you are listening or watching so that the next episode finds you.

So the next point is thinking about who this is actually for. So when we think about who it's actually for, everything I was saying earlier is related to independent learning. That's one of the main facets of a membership traditionally, and it's the assumption that the whole model rests on.

So the next question has to be whether the students that you actually work with are suitable for that style of learning. Because a membership works beautifully for a learner who will open the resource without being asked, who will have a go at the practice paper, let's say on a Tuesday evening because they want to, or because they've got that discipline. A student who comes to the live session with a question already formed, let's say, that learner does exist.

Plenty of you work with them, I certainly do.

But a lot of tutors also work with the opposite. Learners who are disengaged or anxious or who have had a rough time at school and need someone in the room with them to make any of that happen. And that's often the most valuable work there is for them. And frequently it's why families come to you rather than buying a subscription to something online. If that's your student, a membership in the traditional shape probably isn't the right build.

And I want to say that really clearly because there is a version of this model that could work, but we don't want to fall into letting the attractiveness of recurring income or a trend trump whether it's actually suitable for your students. Because then it won't bring you recurring income anyway. It simply won't sell if that alignment isn't there.

Now it might be that the format changes rather than the idea being dropped.

Maybe the membership is for parents rather than students, giving them the tools and the confidence to support the work at home.

Maybe it's a resource library that sits alongside your tuition work rather than replacing it. Maybe it's for a specific slice of your students, the independent ones, while everyone else stays on lessons. All of those are still memberships, but you're just being creative about how you design it and where you place it to make sure that it's really suitable.

For the subject you teach, the students you teach, and who you want to help. And that's the bit that's really worth considering. So I'm not saying that memberships don't work, they absolutely do. I'm living proof of that with the tutor's mastermind. It's more whether this membership model works for your particular students with how you've designed it and how you're delivering it. And of course, you need to come into the picture as well. Is it sustainable for you? And

Is it enjoyable for you? If you're going to do something long-term, it needs to be something that you're liking and enjoying. Otherwise, you're not going to feel motivated to carry on.

Right, so I want to talk about something I call the suffering tax, which sits underneath most of the mistakes people make when it comes to memberships. If you haven't heard me talk about it before, the suffering tax is the belief a lot of us were raised with that reward has to be earned through, let's say, exhaustion. Work hard now, allow yourself to enjoy it later when you retire.

Most of us carry it into our businesses, which is probably the one place we really need to decouple that belief from how we work because it just ends up showing up in ways that don't serve us. And it definitely often shows up in memberships. So, for example, you set the price lower because that's what happens with a membership. But then you almost immediately feel like you have to justify that price. This often happens when something is new.

And I'll tell you in a moment how I made this mistake myself. Now, the reality is that you feel like you have to justify it to other people, but really you're kind of justifying it to yourself because it's unfamiliar.

So if you so then you add a live lesson and then you add feedback onto the work, and then someone messages you on a Sunday and you answer because you know they're paying you every single month, and it feels wrong not to.

Then you might add a second live session because you really want them to feel like it's worth the money. And that's how it creeps. That lower price becomes the reason you overwork, because of the nature of the model, because it's that recurring payment. So the very thing that was meant to make your income more predictable has done exactly that, but it's made your weeks a lot heavier. I've watched tutors do this, and we've had to untangle it together.

And I've done versions of it myself. And it comes from a good place every single time. You care about the people paying and you want them to feel well served.

I did exactly this with the tutor's mastermind, and I'm going to talk very shortly about how it evolved over time, but also how I started it and why that was a problem. But overgiving isn't the same as delivering value. Your price should reflect what the thing is worth.

And what it's designed to do, not how depleted you are by the end of the month. A membership that runs well, that people love, that doesn't cost you your evenings, is not you getting away with something. It's a sign that you designed it properly. You're allowed to work less, you're allowed to find it easy. And there's a practical version of this too. If you're going to price a membership at membership level, then the design has to earn its keep without you in the room constantly.

And that means the resources have to be good. It means the onboarding has to be good. So people know what to do with it. It means the environment has to be worth being in. Those things take work up front and then they hold.

Now there's one more thing I want to get to, and I think this piece will be the thing that people haven't thought about the most when they start building. It's the thing that decides whether any of this actually works. And I'll come to it now.

Because everything else depends on it.

Now, with a membership, you were probably drawn to it because of that recurring income. Perfectly reasonable, but that income only recurs if people stay, which means retention isn't a nice extra you think about later. It is the model. Everything about how you design a membership should be judged against whether it makes people want to still be in there eight months later. And retention comes from design far more than it comes from content.

I want to tell you how the tutor's mastermind has changed over the years because it's the clearest example I have, and it took me a long time to get it right. When I started, I ran two live sessions a month, plus loads of little extras in the community.

Now, the tutors, the founding members, loved them. They really did. They gave me such amazing feedback. But the feedback on the sessions themselves were great, but they also fed something else back, which was that it was too much.

They didn't have the time or the headspace to action all of everything I was talking about. So they'd come to a training feeling fired up, and then the next one would arrive before they've really done anything with the first one. So I changed it. Based on their feedback, I actually reduced it to one live session and one implementation session, which was designed for co-working and accountability. And that was much better. It gave people somewhere to do the work rather than just collect learning.

And this worked for a really long time, a number of years. It gave people enough support, but also enough space. But there was something underlying that kept coming back to me, which was that people couldn't always make the live sessions, and then they would struggle to catch up.

Now there wasn't anything I was willing to do about that immediately because I was aware that there were lots of topics we still needed to cover. And so I wanted to deliver in-depth live training in there. All of them are recorded for replay. But over

But over five years of running the Mastermind, it reached a point where the training library was really vast. I mean, I have well over a hundred videos in there. And so the mastermind became ready for another evolution. And this one was about creating space for people. So I don't do live training every single month now. I still deliver some live sessions, but it's more about come to me with support so I can help people with anything, rather than forcing them into a topic.

Sometimes I'll create something really bespoke based on a theme using the resources that already exist. Sometimes I will deliver live training because that topic needs to be talked about and there isn't good enough training in the library about it yet.

And we have other things going on that are really designed to support people. I have momentum sessions that people can book onto every month so they can figure out how to best use the mastermind for their goals. Remember me telling you earlier?

And membership is basically all about retention. We also have a great community. But this happened over time. It happened over about five, six years, however long the mastermind's been running for. It's happened after over 200 tutors have been through the mastermind. And it would have been great if I'd had this from day one, but I couldn't because I didn't have that vast training library to be able to do that, to be able to make that space.

So retention is really important, but how you do it can evolve over time based on the situation you're in. Now that I have the training library and I'm therefore not designing training every single month, that has released my time and my headspace to focus on delivering other things that support tutors better.

They now have direct access to me in a way that they didn't before. We're doing a live CEO day, a whole day to focus on our business, and we're doing that in person.

And this means that it's actually much more of a mastermind than it was at the beginning. Now there's one thing in that story I'd pull out for you, and it's about listening. All of those changes came from feedback, not from doing what individual pe individual people asked. If I acted on every single preference, I'd have changed direction every quarter and the thing would have have no shape at all. What I listened for was the patterns, the same notes coming from different people over time. That's the signal.

One person telling you they'd like more live sessions is just a preference. Six people telling you in different words that they haven't got the time is a design problem. And I just want to highlight the point I mentioned earlier again. The design I have now would not have worked in year one because the library didn't exist.

So if you're starting a membership, don't try and build the mature version straight away. Build the version that works now, listen for the patterns and let it evolve as things accumulate.

Memberships aren't designed ones. They're designed and then redesigned, and that's not a sign anything went wrong.

Now the word itself is also quite important. This is my last one, and it's a little shorter, but it matters more than people expect. The word membership carries a psychological weight that weekly lessons don't. When a family signs up for a term of lessons, there is a natural endpoint. Everybody knows where it is.

There's a moment where you both decide whether to carry on, and that decision feels very normal. Memberships don't have those signals. Instead, it signals ongoing, no obvious break, join whenever, leave whenever. That's the part of the appeal for the person joining. Generally speaking, I mean, nowadays you have memberships where people, you know, they make you subscribe for six months or 12 months or whatever. But if we just go with that traditional where it's pay monthly cancel any time, then

That's kind of the psychology, that's the association of it. So that's the mentality of the person joining. And it's part of the risk for you because a decision with no natural moment attached to it can be made at any time. You know, on any Tuesday for any reason, someone could leave. So your language has to do very deliberate work. If you want people to think in terms of a school year, say so and build the rhythm to match. If there is a natural point where you'd want people to recommit,

Create one and name it. If you want it to feel like you're belonging to something rather than subscribing to something, then the words you use in your onboarding, your emails, your live sessions, they all need to carry that. None of this is about locking people in, it's about being clear what the thing is so that people join understanding it and they stay because it suits them.

Now I'm going to finish on why this topic matters to me and why I've even decided to make this episode.

through this lens. It comes down to why I'm so passionate about making sure that as many of us as possible are designing a business that's there to support us rather than being a slave to our businesses. At the end of 2023, I was preparing for a final round of fertility treatment. And for the first time I was forced to look properly at how I was working. I was often on Zoom for eight hours a day. I'd always known it wasn't sustainable, but I never had that

That reason, that impetus, the urgency to do anything about it. So I rebuilt my one-to-one work into and I changed it to a three-month programme that was structured around what my life needed while still giving my clients a great experience. That was the first intentional thing that I actually ever built, really. And it's where designing on purpose started for me. That's the lens I'd want you to bring to this.

A membership isn't primarily a revenue question.

It's a question about what you want your weeks to look like in two years' time and whether the thing you're building will still fit you then. Because you'll be living inside whatever you design. Recurring income is only worth having if the life attached to it is one that you would choose. If any of this has landed, the tutor's mastermind right now is open this week if you're listening at the time of me releasing this. And it's for tutors who want direction, a community while they work on their business.

If they want to be surrounded by people who really get it. Doors close at the end of the week and everything you need is on the website. So if you want to head over there to check it out, it's www.tutorsmastermind.com and the link is in the show notes. Thank you so much for staying with me to the end of this one, and I will see you on Wednesday for the PS episode.