023: Building iconic hospitality brands: Soho House, The Birley Clubs, Caprice Holdings

Welcome to the Stonza, a show about hospitality and fashion from an investor's perspective. I'm your host Nadine Cho, and I'll be sharing stories of unique people creating their own paths. Thanks for tuning in, and enjoy the show! Based on a data set of over 150 private members' clubs, the average transaction value spent on food and beverage is $295. If you work in hospitality, knowing the preferences of your repeat guest and members is absolutely essential to building a successful brand, down to knowing how they like their staycooked or if they prefer still or sparkling. People Vine is the leading hospitality CRM software, and allows you to get to know your guest and members on an intimate level, so you can create positive moments that ultimately make the brand. So I normally pay while my interviews, but this episode has been made available to the public thanks to people Vine. If you work in hospitality, you can book a free demo to see why the best operators use their software. I will leave a link in the show notes. Now back to the episode. Today's guest is Jamie Karing, founder of Seven Gauge Consultancy, through which he advises hospitality entrepreneurs and real-state owners on brand creation and community building. Prior to his consulting career, Jamie was the CMO of So House, the commercial director at Caprice Holdings, which is the holding company behind restaurant brands, such as the Ivy, Lyca Priest, and Sexy Fish, and the commercial director at The Burley Clubs, which owns club brands such as Annabelle's and Mark's. Prior to hospitality, Jamie had a 15-year career in music and entertainment at MTV and VH1. Jamie started at So House in 2008 when there wasn't a marketing team, and during his tenure helped shape it into the global category-defining lifestyle brand that it is today. This was my longest interview to date, and I definitely could have continued the interview. We went in depth on Jamie's knowledge and insights coming from both of his lives in entertainment and hospitality, and especially focused on strategy for launching and scaling hospitality businesses, as well as the psychology of members clubs. He truly understands how to build an enduring hospitality brand that is a reference for other emerging brands, and I know anyone listening to this episode will learn a lot from Jamie's experience. If you enjoyed this episode, do me a favor and share with friends or colleagues who would find this episode helpful. Now let's begin. Hello Jamie, welcome to The Stanza. I am so, so, so excited to have you on today. You have so much incredible experience that I'm really excited to share with my audience today. I'm excited to be here. Thank you very much for having me on your block. I'm excited about the conversation we're going to have. So, prior to hospitality, you were in entertainment for over a decade. Did you have any insights about music and culture that you found applicable to your career in hospitality? I worked music for about 15 years, mostly for MTV, and MTV's a great training ground. It's full of young people. At the time, it was very sort of pushing the envelope and the cutting edge of kind of needs culture and media. I learned a huge amount when I worked there about marketing and communications and PR and sponsorship and audience engagement and events and all those sorts of things. I think probably a couple of my key takeaways where MTV was great at teaching me how to put on a show. I feel like a lot of hospitality companies aren't always brilliant at putting on a show. They're great at service, they're great at product, but you've got to think about the run of show and, you know, the journey and, you know, the experience from start to finish. I think also I learned how to deal with high maintenance people. My job was talent, dealing with the artists and artists and their surrounding teams are quite high maintenance and quite awkward and quite difficult, quite challenging. So, it's good to have that VIP celebrity kind of experience too. And so, you made quite a mark on So House. Tell us the story of how you met Nick Jones, how you got started at So House and tell us more about the beginnings of your time there. I felt that by 2008 that MTV was sort of had taken a different direction from the company that I felt I joined in the 90s. It was becoming much more sort of shock TV based and it was sort of had become a kind of attention-seeking portal for critics would say gutter television, you know, more probably fairer commentators would probably say that it really drilled into what teenagers were kind of interested in at that time and that means it's sort of ditching all the music and music culture. So, I felt like I needed a next chapter of my career and I heard that Nick Jones is getting to hire a commercial director and I was lucky enough to get a meeting with him. So, I had this very memorable lunch where we sort of got to know each other and compared our skill sets and he said well what do you think you're good at and I sort of outlined my experience and my background and what I thought my skills were and he said well I don't know any of that stuff. But what I do know is these things and the things that he listed were all things that I didn't really have any experience of or very little experience of. So, we felt like our skill sets were more complimentary and he decided to give me an opportunity to start as Serra House's new commercial director. So, I hit the ground running I guess at Serra House and initially it was the product of a kind of very personality driven company. You know, Nick was really the center of everything but it was sort of approaching a phase in the expansion and sort of evolution of the company where it had to professionalize and it had to add layers and add resource and add process and systems and I guess I arrived at the right time to hit the ground running and that start walking almost. And when you joined Serra House, there wasn't a real marketing operation. It sounded like because Nick Jones was more of like the structuring guy. He was doing a lot of the real estate, a lot of the more like business operation stuff but not as much of the marketing stuff. Is that correct? Yeah, I mean Nick was very, was all of that product, you know, at the end of the day. And you know, it's a great adage about marketing which is nothing ruins an average product quicker than great marketing. Right? If your product's not right and you shouldn't be telling people about it, right? So, here's was, you know, is the, you know, are the sofas company and all the receptionist's nice and is the food great and, you know, is the community like inspiring and it's got to all be excellent, right? But I feel like at the time in the late 2000s hospitality companies were rarely marketing driven and marketing led. I feel like they were quite sort of transactional marketing focused rather than trying to create those kind of timeless brands that, you know, drive desire and really invest in marketing, you know, hospitality companies who go to their head office and they'd be some guy in the corner who never slept, who did everything on the marketing front because they didn't really, I don't know them, they didn't focus on investing that much in the marketing side of their business. So, the good thing is that if you look at Nick's background, you know, he started his first hospitality job in catering sales and marketing and hotels and so he understands the value of marketing and the value of brands. Yeah, he had to go and running and restructure the team and put in a lot of marketing process and diligence. So I had to overhaul a lot of the things that were sort of there in vestigial sort of small, small ways and expand columns and content and publishing and the websites and all those things. And I feel like it was really the first time that so I was positioned and communicated like a real brand, you know, and also we needed to have a strategy that was member marketing but also not forget the fact that we needed to seed. I thought of a time seed kind of the right messaging with the public. So even if you were a member of the public that wasn't a member or maybe wasn't even interested in a member, you still want them to know what so how to what I have a reaction when you said so how's. And what were some of the things in terms of branding, what were some of the things that you implemented while the business scaled so that the exclusivity proposition stayed intact. Following on from what I said about hospitality company's not being very marketing-led unless you were a member or a new member and most people just never heard of so perhaps it was a bit invisible, it was super private and bit underground and you were either part of it and you were living it or it just wasn't on your way down. So overhauling various departments I feel like we needed to be able to commercially position the hotel rooms and the event spaces and you know revenue drivers within the business but without the hard sell and the direction was to be more contemporary and introduce more cultural touch points. When I started it was hard to find information about what you could book and how much hotel rooms were and you know if you wanted to do an event it was sort of a foundation with telephone and sort of websites that weren't very good and it was quite reactive it was sort of let's wake up the phone to ring and you know makeable or get some business and so we made it a bit more proactive but we weren't being ultra commercial it was just making the brochure a bit more visible making the you know the options that you had in front of you kind of more more you could search and you could find them you know how much they cost and even doing simple things like that made it more commercially viable without being ultra selling. Yeah I think that's one thing that so-house did really well And I also think it's part of the reason why, as a hospitality brand, there isn't one quite like it. We'll delve into that a little bit more of the interview. But yeah, I think that was the main selling point of So House is the fact that it was commercially viable, but it wasn't all over everywhere, and it wasn't something that was oversold. So I really like that. Yeah, that's true. And part of what made So House a fun place for members is the programming, which you all set a big impact on from your days in entertainment. So tell us more about your philosophy when it comes to creating content and putting together these events for members to engage and also connect with each other. Until 2008, 2009, which is when I started working in the company, and So House experience was centered around food and drinks, and some would say being a bit naughty because it was a private space, and so if people got a bit out of hand or they drank too much from that sort of control, I mean, their space to be is in a private club, I mean, you might get a slap on the wrist, but they were supposed to be fairly permissive, kind of liberal spaces where you could have fun in private, behind closed doors, right? But I felt that a club for creative industries should have experiences rooted in culture and creativity, but also great events that created shared moments for the members. So you can get drunk in your club every night of the week, and they also blend into each other of those nights, great fun, but if you do some incredible panel or salon or performance or something, that might be a bit more memorable. So when I'm consulting for clubs, I always encourage sufficient diversity to offer something to all the members, but also help them learn what success looks like, what how niche does it need to be, running niche events where maybe only four or six members actually show up to them. For those members that come to a niche event, that might be the most impactful event they're doing to them years, because it is so niche, and sometimes operators think that successful events always have done hundreds of members come into them. So celebrating niche events, giving members the opportunity to learn and discover new things, to be inspired, to be challenged, to be entertained, not just parties and theme food nights and things that are kind of politically easy, but not that incredible to do. I think you can always tell when a club has very little vision, or it's just really lazy about its approach to events. I think when events are done well, it can be a major calling card, you know, in some cases, even doubling your recruitment numbers for members. Members tend to bring their friends to events, and if you go with your friends or a club and you participate in an amazing event, you're highly likely to think about what maybe I should be a member, but also it's it, and as I'm sure we'll cover a bit more later, it's a great way of reducing your attrition, and that's not just about attending the event and having the experiences, but it's about seeing the content from those events, reminding you if you didn't go that you could have done, and it's exciting. I think that's such a good point about what success looks like in terms of events programming for a club, because I remember when I was a member at So House, and when I was living in LA, they used to have these events around tarot card reading, and for me, it's like it's so not like something that I would do normally, but it's something that, oh, this is fun and interesting, and that's where I actually met interesting people that I'm still in touch with today, because it's such a niche interest that people necessarily don't talk about, and just to even, you know, rock up the So House after work, and like have a drink, and bond with people over, like, such a strange niche interest is definitely how I view clubs should be thinking about community, which leads me to my next question. Do you think people can genuinely buy into community? I've thought about this a lot, and I know here we obviously connected and spoke about some of the topics that you might be asking me, and the sort of the nature of community, and its sort of value is something that I've given a lot of thought to in the last ten years of the consultant, so my considered answer to that is, I think the pandemic reminded us how important our friends and families and support networks really are, and so there's a great pull whenever for people to be part of groups that they relate to, and share values with cities where most clubs are, are really lonely places, and they can play a huge role in people's lives, especially when they're newcomers and living and working in a city where they might not have a friendship based from school or from college or from, you know, a previous job, you know, a lot of members that join clubs when you say, why have you joined and what are you most looking forward to, they'll say meeting new people, so there's this sort of desire around being part of a group, and having that friendship circle that can be sort of instant if you join the wide club, right? There's a sort of frequent line used about clubs, which is, when clubs are truly successful, members join for the facilities, but they stay for the people. So initially, when you don't know quite what the community is going to deliver for you, you know, the tangible elements of that club, oh, it's got a pull and it's got a gym and it's got a workspace and it's got a wherever, and those are things that are kind of obvious, you know, things that you can benefit from by joining, but actually over time, people recognize the value of the community more and more, and it's, you know, if you get the community right and it's a delicate process to do that, again, it can really make sure that the club is much more sticky, right? I think an overused word is belonging. Do you know what the definition of belonging is? A feeling that you're accepted? Yeah, not bad. Actually, it's a sense of security through friendship. Actually, a lot of people think it's about places, but it's not. It's about the people that you're with, right? You know, that line again, it's all about the people, literally, and clubs don't properly foster and grow their community and they get that wrong, they usually fail. And we all know when we walk into a room, whether we belong there or not, is it, you know, is it my people or is it not my people? So when I think when you're walking around a club, you're thinking about joining, you should be asking yourself, are these my people? Yeah, definitely. Because it's key, right? Yeah, it is. It is absolutely key. But from your perspective, both through your time and so house and also through the early clubs and also your time as a consultant for clubs, what makes a true community in the context of a membership business? Because I think what's the challenge nowadays is that because there are so many options, you know, a lot of clubs have had to kind of make exceptions and accept people that maybe they normally wouldn't. And it kind of, you know, disrupts that delicate balance that you just spoke of in terms of community and belonging and being around your people. And so I'm curious as to what you think makes a true community in the context of the fact that it is at the end of the day, a business? Yeah, I mean, this is what I'll actually say, a lot of clubs wrestle with. And, you know, for me, you know, what do we mean when we say community? And for me, it's a group of people that have been assembled and curated with a vision. Right? For a point of view, a degree of commonly held values, attitudes, interests, perspectives, something that they can share, something that haven't common right? The clubs by definition are not for everyone. So if I meet a prospective client and I say, well, tell me about your community you want to build and they're like, well, we sort of, you know, sort of everyone. It's like, well, that's not really going to work because you can walk into a venue with everyone in the bar down the road. Part of the Salver Club, I often ask clients, tell me, sell me your club. What are the selling points of your club? And that's then, well, it's got a great bar. It's got a great restaurant. It's got a great pool. And then talk about the spaces and the services and, you know, that's love. And then they'll stop talking and I'll say, and they go, I've actually gotten something. And then, yeah, the community, you're selling the community to people. Part of the attraction of joining a club and staying a member of the club is that you are part of a community, right? And I think if you don't have an opinion on what that community is and what it stands for and what connects that community together, it could be a mindset, it could be passion points, it could be an industry they come from, it could be a certain part of town or whatever it is, then I guess you don't really have any sort of community that's definable. I mean, in my experience, some clubs are more inclusive than others. Others are more exclusive. But the criteria of how you decide who you accept and who you don't is really important. And clubs are defined as much by who the members are, as who they aren't. And I think that's really key. Generally, not being too anything tends to work well. If you're too young or too old or too high network or too male or too female or too business, too worthy, you tend to run into problems because a lot of us don't want to go into a very myopic kind of group of people. What people like diversity. People usually join a community to meet new people, to have conversations they've not had before. Even if they might not agree with anyone's politics or opinions or views, you can still have a great conversation with someone. But I get it. In order to have a business, it's difficult if you only accept to say impetibly cultured aren't gallery curators as your members, because you know. have a very small community line. So it's sort of, you know, I call it social engineering, communities have to be built very intentionally and deliberately. And I have a process where I do that with clients, because you say to clients, tell me about your community. They talk about it in very sort of broad sort of ideas, but actually great communities have been built by being very scientific about the ratios. So I have a sort of analogy for it, which is growing and maintaining the community is like growing a garden. You have to plant the right seeds and then be diligent enough to care for and tend the seeds, fertilise them, water them, be patient, see what you get, watch various parts of your garden growing. You know what some of them, some parts of your garden, you have to cut back. In other parts of the garden, you might need to plant a bit more. And over time, the garden gets stronger and taller and more beautiful. And you think, you know what, all the hard work was worth it, but I didn't just go into the garden and throw loads of stuff into the garden. It was very carefully done. And I think that has a real sort of bearing on how much the community ends up being self-sustaining. What you really want as a club is not to have to try and do things to attract people to join. You want the community to be such a draw in itself that the existing members bring in more prospective members and you have this organic level of applications. And most clubs don't achieve it. I'm giggling internally because I'm thinking about when SoHouse had a purge of finance people. And I totally, I can totally see that analogy and that's a great insight. Well, I can tell you a bit about that, probably just to give you some context, you know, that the whole bankers crisis, which was covered quite extensively in the New York Times, came about because at the time, the GM up to House New York saw a spike in sales and it was from Wall Street guys that got in and spent a lot of money on like the most expensive wines in champagne. So I think the curational diligence around who got to join sort of slightly wavered at that point. And so, you know, a few Wall Street guys and quite a few more Wall Street guys and they all get to join. And before you know it, you've got to have a couple of hundred Wall Street guys. And as much as Wall Street guys are incredibly talented in a lot of ways and obviously you can buy it smart. They may not be great for a very nuanced club for young creatives, just what SoHouse is. So, of course, they sort of behave in a certain way and can be quite rude and quite entitled. And you know, for them, it's all that money and status and identity and sharing off and all that sort. And who, remember, started to resign, to remember, started to resign. And the unfortunate nature of that process was that it wasn't your average every day members that resigned. It was the most powerful, most influential, most important members that resigned. The editors of magazines, you know, the presidents of television channels, the incredible artists, you know, musicians that are public figures, these people started resigning in droves. You know, we didn't really know what was going on. So, we took a trip to New York, the senior team and just sat and observed what was going on. And it was pretty obvious what was going on. So, we had to cut out, you know, that sort of bad element that had got into the club. There's plenty of clubs for Wall Street people in New York that those guys just didn't really belong in the community and the community sort of showed their displeasure by marching out the door. And we had to ensure that we dealt with it. And, yeah, you know, look, all those, all those guys in Wall Street that should never have been allowed to join in the first place, got the letter on the same day. And that was that. The memberships were at an end, and the crisis ended. But you know what, we never got a lot of those members back again because the trust had been broken. The promise that they were going to be part of this community that was creative and inspiring and similar to them, their peers, you know, had fallen away because they felt that the club had sold out and allowed these other people to get in. And so, they didn't believe it might happen again. So, they didn't return. I didn't know this context, by the way, so thanks for sharing that. It's interesting because, so I always talk about how hospitality is such an emotionally driven business. And I think especially for something like so-house, we're having a membership being accepted, says something very critical about the person who's, you know, who's purchasing the membership. It's interesting to see how you guys have kind of foregone, you know, maybe the temporarily high revenues from like the high spend on liquor for like a more long-term decision to maintain that sense of community. And ultimately, like, that sense of brand that in the long run is the crux of what so-house is today, even. Yeah, I mean, look, credibility and authenticity are everything at end of the day. And so, as is always pride of itself on having an opinion about the kind of members that make up its community who they are. And it goes back right next to the roots of the brand in 1995, you know, the original members of so-house were group of people that worked in film and media and they had nowhere to go. Because all the other clubs in London were a very wealthy people, and most nearly all of them, either in the Groucho club, nearly all of them were just for men. And creative people, you know, the creative industry is a, is a, from a gender point of view, very balanced kind of sector, you know, there's lots and lots of men and women who work in all those creative industries. So why would any of them want to go to a club that is just full of men? We're looking for somewhere else to go and so-house sort of wouldn't say it happened by accident, but that was sort of conceived for that group of people. And that was always, you know, the roots of what so-house more is for people with creative jobs. I think now Nick would say that so-house is for people with a creative soul because, you know, necessarily having a creative occupation can be a bit sort of narrow. You know, you can be a guy that works in real estate, but if you're the foremost expert on Salvador Dali in Europe and you, you know, go and do talks about Salvador Dali and you collect Salvador Dali prints and you, all you're interested in, your passion is Salvador Dali. Are you a creative person? I mean, I guess you are. Maybe you don't want to talk about the day job. So I feel like defining people sort of only by their occupation has sort of slightly fallen away in recent years and it's been a bit more many clubs would say. And these days, people are kind of appreciated for membership based on their kind of personalities and their stories and their passions and not necessarily just what they do for the day. Generally from your point of view, what is the number one driver for retention? So I thought about this and it's hard to think of a number one. When I work with clients, I have 14 levers that affect retention. So we're now trying to think about just one, because they're all interconnected. So I sort of thought of like three for each of these retention and attrition. I feel like being seen is a huge one. If members feel like they come to their club and they don't remember who they are and, you know, they don't see the same weight as them weightresses and they don't get to know members that, you know, they may have connected with them. They sort of feel like they're slightly anonymous and they come and go and they may not have a load of friends to bring with them, but they don't feel like they can go to their club and feel like they recognize straightaway and then they could be going to any venue. People want to feel like they're welcomed in and then people remember them and they know something about them and they have a relationship with them. So being seen is a huge part of retention. I don't want to give them my membership because I know everyone at the Sir House and they know me, right? I think being inspired, you know, you can't sort of just do the same stuff as a club. You've got to surprise members every now and then and keep them guessing and have, you know, every club in the world sends a news letter every week and most of them are pretty boring. So every now and then you've got the same one who ever go well, look at this that they're doing. We've got to sort of keep members guessing, keep members interested and it gives them another reason to visit the club because it's another reason to talk about the club or be proud of the club. You know, what you said just now, the club that you're a member of is defining for you as a person as part of it's part of your identity. It's not the same as joining a gym or, you know, whatever. And so they want to feel proud of the club that they're a member of and if you keep inspiring them in ways and keeping them interested and that's part of that. The last one on retention I would say, it's fair pricing because when your membership comes up for renewal and this is key for social clubs, if it's a little bit too expensive, you're going to be like, you know what, how many times did I go last year? How much value did I get? Because this is not an amount of money that I can just, you know, it's not a forgettable amount of money, it's going to come out of my account and I'm going to notice it. So do I really want to pay it again for the following year? If it's a little bit lower, you're like, yeah, you know what, it's actually pretty good value. And I've been a few times, but the price is the right level. You don't have to be too low whether business suffers financially, but you also don't want it to be too high. A, because it filters the community by the ability to pay, which a lot of clubs that want to appeal to younger, more cultured, more creative people don't want to do, you don't want to use those young, young minds being part of the community, but also it makes people think twice that renewal and you don't really want your members to be thinking twice of renewal, has a huge effect on your attention or lack of. And I think attrition, the three that I thought of were overcrowding, I think is a really important one, which various clubs have suffered with over the years. Selling out is a huge one. Selling out can take many forms. Oh, let's hire out parts of the club to the private events so the members can't use those parts of the club. Or, you know, let's be really promotional and silly and have lots of kind of sponsor and everything that looks like the club is for sale in every possible way. So if people feel like the club has been sold down the river to make money, that's another one I think that affects attrition and also being cheap. Clubs need to be generous. If members feel like their eggs and bacon is like one egg and half a piece of bacon, they're going to be like, really, with all the money I pay, this is what I get. Even though I'm paying to the eggs and bacon, I get this. Be generous. Because what does one extra egg cost you? I mean, it's pennies, but it makes a difference to the member. And so I think those are really my top, my top three, I think. It's actually funny because I right before this interview, I was remembering one afternoon, I was at Sewhouse, West Hollywood working with my team, just like doing a co-working in the afternoon. And they served tea and scones at 4 p.m. And I was just like, that is honestly amazing. Like I actually love that. I love that. It sticks out, you know, many almost five years later, I still remember that one afternoon when my favourite waiter asked me if I would like tea and scones complimentary. And it was just, yeah, it's just like a nice touch. Well, you can look at that in two ways, right? You can look at that as the club team saying, you know what, we love our members and we want to do something nice for them. So let's, you know, offer them three tea and scones and they'll be delighted. Or you can look at it that someone in the accounts team is like, how much does tea and scones cost? If we give members three tea and scones, do you think we can increase our attention by 5% in the next, for this month's renewals, you know? You can look at it from both sides. But actually, both of them are kind of right because things that make people feel special do increase the businesses at first. Everyone knows, you're still talking about those scones now. How long ago was it that you had? You're still talking about it? 2019. 2019, right? It's five years ago. Five years ago. And that's the scones they gave you cost five dollars or three dollars or something. So it's the best investment they ever made because now you're still talking about it. So it's those little surprise and delight things. It costs nothing, but the value goes on for five years in your case or even more. You're still going to be talking about it five years from now. Yeah. Yeah. The surprise and delight thing is so important for keeping members. In addition to members clubs, so House has expanded into the spa brand. So there's obviously the skincare brand that launched, I think, a couple years ago. And then there's Cowshed, obviously, hotels and the furniture brands. Why do you think no other hospitality brand has been able to successfully branch out as a lifestyle brands? I think there's kind of a few things on this one. I mean, if you speak with Nick Jones, he'll tell you that many of the So House brand extensions were really due to member demand. They were in response to members sort of asking about them or needing them. So when So House opened Babington House, which was the second ever So House, and it was in the countryside and it was envisioned as a weekend retreat. You know, the original So House in Soho didn't have many members visiting it other weekend because people weren't hanging around in Soho, however we can't. They were hanging around in Soho when they worked there during the week. So he was level where all the members of the weekend and the answer was, well, they all go out, they all leave London and they go to the countryside to get some fresh air and spend time with their family and whatever they thought, well, we need to probably see a club in the countryside. And that was the genesis of Babington House. And it's level, we have to have hotel rooms because we can't just be a club like the club in Soho. It needs to be people that have some way to stay right. And I think when Soho was in York opened, which was a few years later, having hotel rooms in New York for members where they could be in the club but also had a safe space where they knew they could get hotel rooms there. There's a huge benefit for them. You know, Soho houses sort of hotel ambitions were always based on the needs and wants of members as opposed to expanding to be a hotel company, particularly. And these days, you know, Soho House doesn't really have to sell hotel rooms to anyone except members because there's got a big enough community that keeps the rooms pretty full. And if you think about something like Countshed, Countshed was created because Nick wanted to create a product for Babington exclusively. So when you stayed there, you could get, you know, it had a sense of humor and it was a very countryside theme too. So the company worked to create those initial products. But then members that were working at Babington's club, they were like, well, you can't, you can just get them at Babington. Well, if you could buy them, I'd buy them for my house and it started from there. You could buy the Countshed products as far as you could buy them on the Countshed website. And then you had Countshed shops and then, you know, now Countshed is a big brand. But it came from members saying, I want this. And Soho home is the same. You know, I love the beds when I stay at Soho House. How can I buy one of those beds? And that's where Soho home came from. So I think when you look at the brand extensions that Soho House has created, to some people, they can seem like, oh, well, this is always the plan. But actually, it's just how the company's pivoted and evolved and adapted to deliver more things than members want from Soho House. You know, Soho has been seen as having a sense of style and having a sense of quality and having a sense of the products and experiences that Soho House offering was so desired that the members wanted to take them home with them, essentially. But beyond that, there are many other brands that are expanding into lifestyle brands, you know, briefly outside of hospitality for a second. You know, I feel like luxury retail brands. Yeah. It's jewelry brands, you know, they're all trying to have a hotel or a club or anything. But when you think about hospitality brands, I mean, we can come on to this more detail later, but every hotel brand on earth is wanting their own club right now. So they're going beyond, you know, overnight stays and restaurants. They're now sort of coming up with every iteration you can imagine as a brand extension into members clubs. And they all see members clubs as the ultimate level of belonging to their brand, you know, more than just the casual overnight stay person or someone on a loyalty scheme. It's somebody that actually wants to spend their, spend their time with us, you know, and buying into a club brand that we've created. Those hotel-created members clubs have had mixed success to sure. Yeah. But I think when you think about other club brands managing to, you know, expand their breadth of offering, I think that's not really happened that much yet. Most of them have one side. You think about famous clubs. Nearly all of them are just in one territory. And many lack the global membership scale or public main recognition to support major moves into new sectors, I think. Yeah. You know, so I think if we, so House has benefited from the scale of its community in order to launch these things. And launching these things initially wasn't easy because you have to, you've got a new product to go to market with. But if you've got a large group of people that know already know your brand, they're going to give it a try, right? Whereas if you're a club that has one location in a city and you might have three or four thousand members, I think hard to go into the home where it's division. Because again, you know, like Maison Estell or something in London. If you're part of the central London set and you're a member of Maison Estell, or you've been there, or you have a friend that's a member, you'll know about it. But Maison Estell's reputation is quite limited to a certain coterie of people in central London. So if they then decide if they're going to launch a, you know, a home where's range or a spa range or something like that, I think it will be challenging for them. I think one day, if they're current expanding, there's no reason why they couldn't do it. But given that Sarah House has such reach in touch of the community, it's gone ahead and advantage to expand. And I think what the other part of that helped create that ability to branch out into other sectors is the style of which each house is decorated in. It's very distinct. Like, for example, we know what I'm currently decorating my house in Milan right now. And, you know, like some people like, oh, like that table is very so house. Right. What does that mean? A deep red burgundy marble or like, you know, a bouquet fabric? Or like, there's a very specific aesthetic in mind that I think allows that. And like, to your point about cow shed and like the cheeky branding, it's like, you know, when I stay at the hotel, that's on Greek street in Soho, I can try every single, you know, flavor or like, sense of cow shed body wash or whatever. And I, you know, I'll take time to read the copy on each of the bottles. And it's like, it's a very specific type of branding that is connected. And I think that's also part of the reason why So House is a category defining company because they have had that consistency for so many years. And it's a very distinct type of imagery, sensory, emotional, all of those components of the brand. So I think it's quite interesting as a case study. Yeah, sure. And having that. So I think as well it goes back to what I was saying at the beginning of the call about parts of the objective. You know, when I joined the company was to make the company more visible and to, you know, turn it from a strictly private brand into a brand with much more public recognition and from a mostly London centric brand into the international brand. And I think I certainly don't take credit for all that because a lot of people work very hard on making it happen, but it wasn't intentional sort of strategic goal. Right. You know, I was, when I was CMO, I always used to think of my job being split in half. How am I doing for the public, what am I doing for members? And, you know, so I was getting a lot of press in the early 2010s for our poplux film festivals and, you know, a lot of parties that we did, the celebrities around big creative tempo moments around the world. That just associated clits and glamour and, you know, big stars, etc. So people saw it as glamorous and that drove this big sense of desire around it. And, you know, it's not a secret that drones designed George Cleanie's house, for example. So people think of Nick as a design visionary in all of his kind of mid-century modern sort of approach to aesthetics and furnishings, you know, what people buy into that. It's very elegant and so I'm going to keep buying to it too. So I feel like he was important from the Sirhouse perspective in the early 2010s to build this public awareness and this desire about around being a member. You know, I remember getting into a cab in 1912. He picked me up from one of the Sirhouse cops in London and he said something like, "Oh, you know, I saw you just come out of Sirhouse and I think it was the electric. So he just came out of Sirhouse and he's not a new electric." He goes, "Oh, that's a big member. I mean, they never accept me, but what a cool brand it is." And it's like, "Wow, let's unpack what he just said." So you know what Sirhouse is. You're inspired by it, you're impressed by it. You know you're never going to be part of it, but you still think it's cool. You're not denigrating it. You're not going all those fancy, you know, idiots or people, you know, it's that cognitive dissonance, right? People tend to be unkind about things they can't have because it's easier to cope with it, right? It's a brain thing, right? But he wasn't. He was reverential about Sirhouse even though he would never be a customer. I think that was a big sort of sea change about Sirhouse in the 2010s. And that helped with launching more public-facing brand extensions. You know, you're not going to sell furniture to her. You're not going to sell furniture to members. You're going to sell furniture to people who want a little bit of the Sirhouse magic in their house. They might not be members. They might not even live in a city that has a Sirhouse, but they've seen it in the press and they have this desire around the brand. And so, yeah, that helps you create those brand extensions. This actually leads me to my next question about scaling and just like, you know, bringing it from a London centric brand to a global brand. How do you approach advertising exclusivity? Clubs have to market without marketing and sell without selling. That's what I would say. As soon as you're selling membership, people don't want any more. Whatever the club brand is, if there's social media ads saying, "Hey, join our club." I mean, if you're a workspace, sure, because that's not a once-driven offering. That's a needs-driven offering. Join the gym. It's January. This is our package. You know, we sign up all of our people in January. They never come to the gym, but they all sign up in January right after Christmas. Here are the ads. Here's the deal. Here's the price. Here's the offering. So, you can't be selling your membership because people want what they can't have. It's part of the human condition. Desire is driven by things that you want, right? You know, I read a. I'm very into music and high fives and stuff like that, and I read high fives and magazines. And one of their features in the high fives is called temptations. And it's like amplifiers that are like 60,000 pounds. And you're like, "Wow, look at this. Desire, I can't have it. I haven't got 60,000 pounds to spend on amplifiers. I still want it." Clubs are a bit like that, not necessarily because you can't afford it, but because you might not get it. And actually part of that fear or nonacceptance is sort of part of that kind of tension around clubs. You know, if you apply to a club and you get accepted in 10 seconds, you're like, "Oh, well, that's easy." So, I'm not saying you necessarily, things like some clubs would do this and make people wait so that they feel like there's a process and they don't really get it or not. But there is a little bit of that sort of, "Well, you can apply. You're not signing up. You're applying." And which inferes that your application may or may not be successful. So, desire is driven by scarcity and that feeling that it's not guaranteed. But you've got to drive at once, once-based entities are always driven by desire. You know, Ferrari are not sending you flies through your front door. They just have an ad in like luxury magazines or some kind of. You might see an ad on TV, maybe, but it wouldn't actually say anything. It would just be like the logo. And that's about desire. We don't need to tell you how much it is. If you need to know how much it is, you can't afford it. That's probably Ferrari's mantra, right? So, it's that whole thing up, right? So, I think, for me, it's all about creating desire. So, for me, everything clubs do should be about generating and maintaining desire and fostering and nurturing community. Those are the two things you have to do all the time. Memberships really have to be promoted by peer-to-peer networks with invitation, invitation-only mechanisms at the start, pair the secret activations and tactical PR and clever touch points, and it's all a bit behind the scenes. It's got to be a journey, not a transaction. The minute it becomes a transaction, it doesn't work. And I'm sure you, as a consultant now for clubs, that's something that probably you focus a lot on, right? Because there are a lot of new clubs as we have been talking about throughout this interview. There are. Yeah. And I think that that's something that I have to educate clients around is that joining a club is not an impulse decision. It's a very considered decision, things to, you're presenting two types of things to somebody, when you're talking about a club to them, you're presenting tangible things, which are things that you can promise in there, they will be there, and intangible things. Like, we're going to have amazing events, and you're like, well, I haven't seen any of them yet, so that's pretty intangible. We're going to have an incredible community. Well, I'll be the judge of that when I walk through the door. Those things are, you have to sort of believe those things on faith. And so taking people on a journey, especially if it's a new club. Hi, I'm just launching this club. You've never heard of it before. Would you like to be a founder member and you're like, well, you've got to warm me up first. I mean, what, what is it? How do I, why would I want to be a founder member? And there's a journey from start to finish. You start from the place that I've never heard of this club, and then I don't know if it exists. And you end up, hopefully, at the end of that journey with, I have to be a member of this club. Huge desire. Whatever happens this year, I'm joining that club. And taking people on that journey through a series of touchpoints over a certain amount of time is something I call the process of cumulative momentum. Okay. So there's various touchpoints, and you do them at certain times. And the cumulative effect of those touchpoints is this peak, this crescendo of desire around opening. But if you don't do it properly, it doesn't work. And you open it and you're like, oh, we only got this many members. And it's a third of the people that we need. And then you start selling them. And then it's a downward spiral. Right. So yeah, it is a tricky one. Yeah, I mean, success in doing this. So scaling and expanding and launching clubs, means being brand-led, creating intrigue, luring an applicant in high numbers and choosing those that are most suitable. Social clubs are things you want, not things you need. So things that people want, you have to treat them differently in how you communicate them to things that people need. Because things you put me in, you just sell them and they don't have them. It sounds like there's a whole process that needs to happen long before a club even opens the stores, because I think, correct. Nowadays, like, everyone has access to, I mean, because of social media, everyone knows everything at record pace, like every, you know, information spreads really, really, really fast. So yeah, I mean, it sounds like just even from what you just told me that this process of maintaining the brand and like, you know, creating a brand-led hospitality business, it's just a very, it's a very thoughtful. Yeah, I'm very nuanced. And, you know, people focus on every detail of what you say. And so how you say it, you know, I spend quite a lot of my time copywriting the clients and they send me things that I would do you think of this and I'm like, well, you know. I get it, but you're being a bit too pushy or you haven't really explained what it is they want to know. And so getting, it's very intricate and very nuanced to sort of craft that journey and craft that messaging where people are genuinely excited because people are jaded. People have seen it all before, right? It's hard to, you know, someone like yourself who, you know, is very worried about it and culture and educated and has traveled around the world and they keep been to lots of things and gone to lots of venues and stayed a lot of places and gone to lots of probably events and first I'm guessing, right? And the events and festivals and parties and things are over the years, someone sends you an invitation to something or they want to interest you in something new. I mean, it's got to be, it's got to be impressive. Otherwise, you can be like shrug shoulders and other deleted email, whatever, right? So you will have think that a lot of the people that new clubs want to attract the kind of highly desirable people, they're pretty jaded and they've seen it before, especially in big gateway cities, right? - Yeah. - So you've got to come with a new angle and a new point of view, a unique positioning and take them on the journey and it's not simple but if you do it right, you can have huge success. - Taking a quick break here to talk about people Vine who has sponsored this episode so that you can listen wherever you get your podcasts. Up to 96% of members from a data set of over 150 club clients of people Vine renew their memberships. The way to increase chance of renewals is to not treat your members as just customers but as valued members of a community. That's why it's crucial to have a great CRM system so that you can track the details such as when membership renewals are approaching. People Vine CRM software is trusted by the best hospitality brands. Book your free demo to see why and how you can create a better experience for your members and your guests. I will leave a link in the show notes and now back to the episode. - I wanna ask you something that could be a little controversial, controversial coming from me. - Sure. - So Sewhouse has had some sort of recent negative press with the Glasshouse Research Report on their financials and I think since the IPO, because I'm pretty active on social media so I kind of see, get to see what members and other people are saying about certain brands such as Sewhouse and so there's also a feeling that post IPO, there's just been a bit of a crowding problem and people may be aren't as happy with the level of service that they were once used to. So I'm curious as to what your thoughts were on that specific topic with respect to Sewhouse and what your thoughts were on their IPO. - As a former employee, I'm not a spokesperson for Sewhouse and must be a bit circumspect about what I said. - My personal opinion is it's a bit ridiculous to use the word come back when Sewhouse hasn't gone anywhere. It's the most successful and best known club brand in the world and it's the only global club brand. So no one could argue that it hasn't been successful. I mean, all successful companies have situations they need to navigate and when you're the biggest player in a sector, people love to attack you or try to attack you for various reasons. - What I will say is in the context of members' clubs and this is any members' club, not one specifically, is that the careful diligence and patience required to successfully foster carefully curated exclusive communities doesn't always marry that well with the growth mandates and financial expectations set by owners and investors that may not understand how clubs work. - Totally. - I spend a lot of my time explaining to very wealthy people or very aggressively ambitious business types that clubs are delicate ecosystems and if you want them to succeed, you've got to support them for the long term. And they don't always, well, sometimes they don't always quite understand what I'm trying to say, but other times they think, you know what, now you've explained that maybe it isn't, maybe it's my version of doing a cup because they're maybe expecting to do a two year exit or some kind of flip deal, which doesn't really well in members' clubs. - Right, right, right. - So yeah. - I actually had animal Schwartz who used to lead West Coast memberships at SoHouse on the podcast. And she had an interesting point about when Ron Berkel came in and there was like, the Ron Berkel side and the Nick Jones side, like Nick Jones being like the creative, the one I cared really about the types of people who would join and like the community and then Ron Berkel who is an incredible businessman, extremely successful, you know, has this very ambitious vision for SoHouse and the two needing to balance each other out. And I think it's, yeah, it's such a totally fascinating story in terms of, you know, business case studies. Yeah, I was just curious as to your thoughts from like an insider's perspective. - Yeah, I mean, look, you know, I get asked about it a lot and SoHouse continues to be very successful. And so I feel like these negative bits of press, they're all speculative anyway. And a lot of people commenting, they don't really know a lot of the ins and outs behind the scenes. And so I feel like there's a bit of kind of negative chatter and then it sort of dies down again. And that gets on with their lives. It's not like SoHouse is, you know, even trouble in the way that some of these articles like to make it make out that it is basically. - Yeah, totally. - I also want to talk about just generally your career in the club world. So you had a stint at the Burley clubs, which is really interesting to me because it seems like SoHouse was born out of the need for a challenger club to something like the Burley club. So something that you mentioned earlier in this interview about how previously members clubs in London were geared mostly towards men and like mostly towards a very certain type of person in central London or I should even say Southwest London. And so you worked on Annabelle's pre renovation. Is that correct? - Yes. - Okay. So based on your experience at Annabelle's, what do you think institutional clubs should be doing to stay relevant? - Legacy clubs, most of which are in London because London has just that sort of timeless centuries of club culture, clubs around the world that are very old tend to be either in London or in colonial locations with a British Empire. Because members clubs are really a kind of British invention and they only existed in somewhere in 18 something because it was part of the British Empire, right? So there are quite a few old clubs in New York 'cause New York was a good example of a location at the time of the British Empire. But yeah, I think staying relevant, as you said, is the most important thing they need to do. I mean, clubs need to constantly evolve and ageing club community, unless you start to underpin them with younger members. Eventually they age and fade away. I mean, a good example is a club like Morton's in London, which has a very old community and younger members were not joining and eventually it goes. So you've got to find a way of bringing in new blood and remaining relevant to the next generation of members. I mean, the luxury industry has found this very hard to do in the last 15, 20 years. Realized that a lot of their big spenders are aging and part of the millennial demo and definitely kind of the gen Z and those, they're not spending on luxury products that they used to and they don't feel luxury brands have felt that they haven't been able to maintain relationships with those groups. So they've had to pivot and adjust and sponsor and partner with new types of content and new types of events and new experiences that are relevant to those age groups. You can't always be a sponsor of the polo when most people that go and watch polo are 60 plus or whatever. I don't know anything about polo by the way, but that's an example of the kind of thing I mean. And maybe you need to, maybe Chanel need to sponsor some gaming convention or you know, that's the ultimate stream but sponsor something that younger people are interested in and I think when it comes to clubs, credibility and being community first are always the most important things. But if you're so community first that you're not interested in expanding your community and diversifying your community and keeping it going, then eventually it sort of peed us out. Clubs need to protect and stay true to their brands but they need to have updates, refreshes and they need to incorporate technology and they need to move at the times. Well, Isaac, I left behind. I think a one really good club that has done this while is Fy Parkford Street. Because whenever I go there, I always run into friends and I always run to their parents. And it's like a place where like you can go with your parents, have a nice drink and then you might run into some other friends and it feels like safe. It's like you walk in and you know those are your people. And I really like that. The idea that you have to recruit the next generation just get their kids to join. Well, yeah, I mean, look, there are a few clubs in London that have this multi-generational sort of focus on their community and it can work. I mean, it's probably most prevalent in sort of like sort of country clubs. So in the US there are a lot of kind of country clubs I'm a US, they have a lot of sports facilities and they're incredibly hard to do. join and very expensive to join, but what happens is that the children of the existing members become the next generation of the members, right? Which makes it an incredibly tight clique, but that's how they like it, right? This is a country club for people that live in a certain area and have a certain level of wealth and we all know each other, it's all interconnected and into another version of community. This is our community and naturally we're very protective about who gets to be part of it. So again, it is a point of view and those people that are part of those communities feel like they belong there. So it's a success run, but when you don't have that multi-generation approach and you have, again, this sort of aging demo, then the clock sticking in there. Right, right, right. So now as a consultant, I'm curious as to what your honest thoughts were on the proliferation of club businesses, because it seems like post pandemic, a lot of restaurant tours were like, oh, so house is still making money, even though everything is closed down, why are we doing that? So a lot of people are just trying to attach this membership or like, you know, recurring revenue to kind of buffer their food and beverage revenue. I'm curious as to your thoughts on that, you've stolen part of my answer. But yes, yes, you're right. I feel like a lot of players have come into the club space to benefit from that traditional magic and mystique and desire and exclusivity that clubs have. So it's a bunch of different sort of players, like some of an entrepreneur, some of the brands, some of the companies, organizations, and they're launching themselves into the sector. Traditionally, clubs always launched by people, not companies. So it's interesting, it's slightly different proposition when a club is being launched by a company. So yes, you're right. Hospitality companies have been at the forefront of this. So there are plenty of restaurants that have expanded to include clubs. In fact, club at the Ivy in London was probably the original one, creating a club upstairs. But yeah, you've got major food group and ZZs and Chipriani and, you know, H. Wood is launching a club in Delilah is launching a club in Canada to urban. There's lots, right? And hotels is really so bonfire now in terms of if you are a luxury five-star hotel and you either don't have a club already or you're not developing one, then you're the outlier, because I worked extensively on the Rosewood Club in Hong Kong, which is called Karlmann Curve, which was their first club. But the doorchester is developing a club. The Amman group has a club. He has Faiena in Miami. There's probably 20 examples, right? You know, Andriba Lars famously said, "Well, I'm thinking about calling and changing all my hotels in LA to be clubs." Yeah. Right? And the answer I think that came back was they kind of are already. You can't just wander into them, right? Right. You can't just wander into the shadow, even though it's technically a public place, right? So it's sort of a club without being a club, but I think he was thinking, "Well, if it's sort of a club, I know I was trying to monetize it in a club, but he hasn't really done that yet." And obviously in London, Chilton Firehouse is sort similar. Yeah. The haves like a club, but isn't technically one. So yeah, I mean, look, the proliferation of clubs is fascinating to watch for me. You know, there are still big luxury city clubs coming to market, so like the more in Miami and a club called Wild in the land, Kensington Roof Gardens in London, that's a big play, right? These are clubs with huge investments and they had multi-purpose clubs with lots of facilities and, you know, but there's also kind of, there's a, there's various things going on that they all contribute to this surge. And there's the re-invention of classic legacy clubs in London. So brands like Annabelle's that was rebirth and re-invented, tramp is re-launching. George has just been re-affirmed in Mayfare. The South Kensington Club has been acquired and someone's developing that. The Sloan Club is completely revolutionized itself and re-launching early next year. So that's an interesting one. There's a resurgence of dining clubs, high-end dining and wine clubs. It's easy and 67-pound mall and Oswald's and Maxwell's and these sorts of clubs, which five, ten years ago had sort of faded away a bit, I think. Keep it simple. We're all about dining, we're all about drinks and whatever. And I think that previously it was all about gateway cities, the T-shirt cities, New York, Paris, London, those ones that had clubs. But now you know conversations with or I'm working with clubs in places like Malta and Turkey and Bahrain and Singapore and Melbourne and Ho Chi Minh and like you wouldn't believe it. So you're like, okay, right, you want to create a club and Vietnam, okay? Cool. So I think that's definitely part of it. There's obviously more country clubs coming to market for obvious reasons. But also I think neighborhood clubs are starting to appear, the pandemic has created, has made neighborhoods destinations because people are not always traveling into central town. So in New York and London people are developing smaller neighborhood clubs that are not right in the middle of the city and some of those are launching soon and then the newest frontier where everyone is talking about now in the club world is wellness clubs. Yeah, true. Wellness clubs, yeah. There's one coming in Mexico City, there's one in development and Dubai, there's one in development in Madrid, there's two in development in London, there's huge pipeline of these in 12 months time. We're going to, you know, wellness clubs can be its own category. So some of these clubs are amazing. It's a mixed bag, some of them not so amazing. You know, why are some of them not so amazing? Well, some of them just don't have any real identity. They're created as a gap, you know, to fill a gap in the market, not because they're places of culture and charisma and passion and, you know, whatever. They often are quite ill devised and they're created without any expertise, you know, I sit on the sidelines and watch someone say, "So what we're going to do is this club I'm thinking to love with that." Because, you know, I've benefited from, you know, 16 years of working in the club world and I've seen a lot of things work and not work. Sometimes they're too democratized and too accessible, they want to have everything and you can't. You have to have a point of view. Right. But often they're all about the money. As you said before, it's like this kind of thing where if you reverse into the concept from what you think you can make from it, you know, your example of, "Hey, we're a successful restaurant. Why aren't we doing a club?" It's like, I always ask people, you know, why are you doing a club? If they don't have an answer that's rooted in some kind of authenticity and credibility, then often these clubs either fail or they just become zombie clubs. They get to a certain level and then they just sort of don't grow beyond that. So yeah, I mean the clubs are facing challenges as well. Clubs are closing. There's a whole evolution going on, you know, clubs like the wing and assemblage and hospital club and bright leaves and the more, more tons as I mentioned before. I think it's interesting to see the kind of ed and flow of these clubs opening and closing. In some ways, the sort of real estate ventures that say, right, we've got this building, but the 100 floors, that means you're going to have this much resi, this much retail, this much whatever, and office. And hey, we're going to have a members club. Those are the members clubs that are usually the worst because they're just part of something bigger. They don't have their own identity. And you look, the real corporate sort of, the places that I say are where all dreams go to die are the executive floor in a hotel, because there's no one ever there ever. And the residence lounge are a beautiful condo department because the condos are nicer than the residence lounge. Why would you spend time there? Your home is like upstairs. You're just going to be at your own space. So I feel like everyone's coming to market and they think that this is, that it's easy. And it's not. There's car crashes going on. And clubs are, club's are struggling and a lot of people who are trying to get these ideas away and that maybe don't have a corporation behind them of struggling to raise money. So it's a really interesting time with a lot of flux going on. Yeah, definitely. I mean, I, I like to call it the, the members club bubble. Right. Well, I think bubble isn't a bad thing. I mean, yeah, survival of the fittest. Right totally. And yeah, so, so I'm watching with fascination and sideline. Yeah. I wanted to take some time for you to answer audience questions. Sure. So someone asks, in the face of rising fees and other entrants into the membership community space, how can communities slash clubs best increase the value proposition to their members outside strictly access to network and people? Are there any tools, programs, etc to minimize churn? I feel like we kind of, we touched on this throughout the interview, but if you have any other answers to this post pandemic, what people want from clubs are slightly changed. You know, there's been a big flight to from cities during the pandemic. Like people thought, why am I in some polluted, cramped, tiny place when I could just, you know, rent it out and sell and move to a greener, more life-affirming, healthier, more nourishment place. But a lot of these people have businesses and they can work from home most of the time, but then they also need a club in the city. that they can come to every now and then because they no longer have a home or an office in the city. So clubs have been, I keep getting asked the question, you know, has the pandemic made clubs sort of obsolete and it's a level night, made them even more valuable, I would say, yeah. Because, you know, if you are a freelancer and you live in the surrounding areas of a city and you come in on a train or whatever and you've got a meeting at 10 a.m. and a meeting at 2 p.m. you do your meeting at 10, you do both meetings in the club, but between the meetings you have some lunch, you connect with some other people or whatever and it gives you somewhere to be. You know, would you want to be in a cafe, in a hotel lobby, I mean, you know, and you can, you know, you come and meet me at the club. So I feel like clubs to a degree have to have a little bit more utility, not so much utility where they become needs driven because then the desire falls away. You can't be a workspace and the club because if you, if you're trying to, it's like trying to be part space station, part ice cream parlor. Yeah. You can't, you're one or the other right. Yeah. You can be a club that has a little bit of co-work and a little and a room where you can use laptops at some of the time, but the minute it becomes a sea of laptops, the social is dead and it's six o'clock everyone's gone because nobody wants to socialize where they work. Yeah, exactly. But I mean, said that clubs need to tick more boxes for people in the post-pandemic work because of the weave as I'll explain, but I think Aguente, what year you're part of your question was about churn and smart clubs are monitoring what members are doing or have systems that monitor what members are doing for them. A smart system should be able to flag a member's attendant has been decaying for the last three months, six months, nine months and three months before a new all tell you, look, you know, Nadine, you should be aware that Jamie's membership is coming up in three months and last year, you know, three months, six months ago he was coming twice a week and now he hasn't been for two months. It's going to flag that I am likely to not renew. So that's when your member relations person gives me a call and is like, hey, look, we're doing a cup of supper this week. Why don't you come in? Yeah. You need to start re-engaging people before that moment comes and of course we spoke before about the price of renewal as well. Like if the price of renewal is a little bit higher, it's even more important that you do this because I'm going to have, I'm going to pause if my membership price is two, three, four hundred dollars or pounds too high. You know what? I am not going as much as I used to, but if I feel like I'm being seen and being included, and you know, I'm not going to realize that it's three months to renewal because I'm not really thinking about that. The club suddenly reached out to me. It could be a little bit like the T.M. scones moment that you had and that's all it was there, right? But you get a renewal out of it. It might be more than a few thousand pounds. That's good business, right? So I think don't, don't let members sort of lose faith in value of their club by just not coming without trying to encourage them to pick it up again and re-engaging them. That's a huge sort of saving grace when it comes to lowering churn. Yeah. Offer T.M. scones. Offer T.M. scones, yeah. Still talking about it. So another person asks, according to you, are a bed considered a cost or investment? I think people's views differ on it. I think there's structurally where do you put the cost of events in the business? And then there's, you know, how much value do you get out of investment events in clubs? They're less of a slightly different question. I think, you know, as we sort of touched on previously in this conversation, having a vibrant program in calendar has a huge effect on recruitment and retention and actually a lot of clubs consider it. They put it as cost of sales from membership. They put it in there as a cost of, you know, recruiting and retaining their members, but there's a sort of truism about events, which is for most clubs, 90% of members never go to an event. But the fact that their club does events is part of the identity of that club. So I've seen members showing round friends around the club. And they'll point to the event calendar that might be in the lift or in reception or somewhere and it's like, okay, look, we've got all these cool events that are happening this month and their friend will be like, wow, these are cool, and they're like, yeah, they're amazing. And then you look up that member later. They haven't never been to an event. Yeah. So for them, they could go to the events. They don't, but they could. And actually, when you cancel the event, that member is going to complain first. Well, hang on, you can't just cancel the event. It's part of my membership, and you just need more. You never go to them, but they could go to them. So a lot of the events is creating content and giving you that phono and thinking, you know, I should go to more events. But a lot of it's pride in that cultural credibility that those events bring to the club. And if you take them away, members will soon notice. And they'll think that you have shortchanged them when you've been cheap or you've sold out, you know, you thought, you know, well, we're going to put this money in the bottom line. And the members don't care about it. It's like, actually, even the ones that don't go to the events care about them for those. So yeah, I think usually the cost of those events is basically a cost of sales membership. Yeah. Do you see any real ROI in terms of, for example, like food and beverage, revenue, or like footfall related to events specifically? Yes. Over the years, I've been challenged by operators when they've said, look, you know, why aren't we doing these events? You know, they're cool, but I think we would have had the same effort be taking them without the cost of the event, if we hadn't done the event. And when you do the analysis, it depends on the event. If it's the niche, you know, tarot weaving, right, then the event on the effect on FMB is obviously smaller. But, you know, there's a reason why clubs do events on sort of Tuesdays and Wednesdays. People don't go out on Monday nights, usually. And when you get to Thursday, that's that's the ramps that we can. So you're going to have DJs and FMB events and fun things. But the kind of salons and panels and talks and that stuff is usually Tuesdays and Wednesdays for clubs. So if you measure Tuesdays and Wednesdays and not that busy as night, you measure attendance and you measure FMB sales when you have events and don't have events, you can map it out exactly what the result is. And it soon, it soon makes operators who are looking to cart because they're usually looking to cart. They go very quiet at that point. Like, hey, look, you got, we spent X on the event and you got uplift of why based on the six previous Tuesdays. And I like, okay, yeah, good point. So yeah, yes, it can be additive to FMB sales. For obvious reasons, it brings people in when they wouldn't have come in on a slower night. That's so interesting. There's a whole science to this that I even I hadn't even thought as deeply about. Like Tuesdays, Wednesdays, you got to get the program. They have to be this way. Oh, yeah, there's there's a strategy every single day of the week. And also seasonally, you know, they've entered in January and nothing like the events you're doing in May 0. So, you know, because you have to go throughout the year. And so yeah, I won't join on with that. So as a final question, so another person asks, I'm interested in Jamie's ideas on strategy and operational approaches for establishing a successful expansion of clubs and club like venues in rural areas and smaller towns. Yeah, I think this is a very big question. And it's something that I could talk about for hours, but I mean, in brief, you know, launching clubs in rural locations and smaller towns isn't easy because clubs require quite a big community of members to keep them busy all day every day. It depends on whether your club is going to have hotel rooms and facilities. That means people are going to travel from bigger towns, maybe even a city that's quite nearby because your target, you need enough of sort of a nearby community of people that you can you can lure in. So come to our country club and you can play tennis and facilities become a bit more important in that regard. If you're in a rural location and you're going to a large town and saying, you know, hey, Nadine, you should join our club and you're like, okay, tell me about it. But it's great. We've got a great community. You're like, but I live in a city. I'm probably not going to come to the countryside to hang out with people who live locally in the countryside as nice as it may be. I'll come to the countryside another spa and another hotel and there's scones or what, you know what I mean? Like stuff that, you know, stuff that I can enjoy and then there's a reason and you're telling me that I can relax there and I can, you know, someday then I can just decompress. But successful rural location clubs are often in quite well populated areas or near to bigger towns and cities that can support them and having the hotel rooms is a huge, huge factor because your hotel rooms are your members when they stay with you. And so if you've got a decent, a decent sized hotel room, you know, an absolute 80 rooms, say. Or if you're selling your rooms well and you're giving people deals during the week when it's your weekend rates are going to be higher. Then that's a couple of hundred people in the club. per day and that can make all the difference. So I think you need enough local people to support it and you need the facilities and services and offerings to draw people in from those population centres. That would be my initial thought. I think the question was about a network of these things. If the network is within a certain distance, then you can get that cross-selling and people wanting to use different ones. But you've got to launch one first, right? And if the first one doesn't work, it's going to be harder to launch the others. So yeah, those would be my initial thoughts. Thank you so much. This is actually the longest interview I've ever done and I'm sure I kind of want much longer because you have a lot of great insight and experience. I mean, you were like, you know, ground zero in the club world. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for your time, Jamie. And I will leave a link in the show notes for anyone who would like to get in touch with Jamie and his consultancy called Seven Gauge. And I will see you guys in the next episode.