Women’s business group One Roof is the kind of community that makes you want to stick around, order hot chips and another drink, and open up about all your challenges, curiosities, obsessions, wins, and brain worms, safe in the knowledge that you’ve found your people.
I’ve been a member of One Roof since 2020, when they pivoted their Melbourne co-working space into a virtual membership. One Roof has kept me sane through the exponential rate of change in the online business world, and I’m proud to be a Sydney Ambassador, organising face-to-face events and get-togethers for established business women, growing owners, and those curiously flirting with business.
In 2023, One Roof launched Inner Circle, peer-led coaching circles. As all good online businesses do, they sought feedback from participants with the view to iterating and improving.
In late 2023, they engaged me for a VIP Strategy Session and together, we reimagined the program, redesigned it based on feedback and insights, and repositioned it, to relaunch in early 2024.
The necessity for change
A beta round of Inner Circle in 2023 successfully enrolled 80 One Roof participants at $200 each. Says Frances Goh, Head of Community and Growth, “We believed there was considerable value in the Inner Circle offer, substantiated by excellent feedback from participants.
“But when you’re contemplating a significant price rise, it’s normal to feel uncertain. So we engaged Brook because of her specialist skills in online business, digital marketing and premium positioning.”
The time was ripe. With so many new online businesses, online networking groups, and women’s business groups entering the market from 2020 onwards, One Roof needed to continue to differentiate themselves, especially after a sharp rebrand from Formulaik in 2023 that has elevated their perception.
One Roof were keen to improve, iterate, and reposition the Inner Circle program at a new, higher price that better reflected the value.
Pricing and values feasibility and implications
No business wants to alienate or annoy clients, and any time we seek to change something, we expose ourselves to this. But no matter how collaborative and client-centric our approach is, we also need to balance this with market trends, opportunities, and our personal preferences.
In other words, sometimes we need to be bold and clear with our segmentation strategy.
One Roof owner Sheree Rubinstein and Frances have a naturally collaborative, generous-spirited approach which is absolutely crucial if you’re to run and grow a networking group.
They have firm fans and excellent client retention, but change is the only constant in business (and life!). The larger One Roof has become, the more invaluable resources have been created. Ironically, for the membership business model, the more resources provided, the trickier client retention becomes as it is easier for people to become lost or overwhelmed, and to opt out.
This common issue for membership owners means that it’s not your fault, but it becomes your problem.
The Inner Circle program was a way to add additional value to members and profit to the business by focusing on the diamond of One Roof’s value proposition – its networks.
Increasing the price six-fold
Together, we created a new membership tier, which included Inner Circle in the new tier. The price was lifted from $200 to $1999, including an annual membership. Changes were introduced, including elevating the central feature of relationship-building.
While most owners know the value of their network, in practice, this is far harder to actually do — requiring time, chance (or luck!), emotional intelligence, patience, and many more attributes. One of the key features of Inner Circle, which makes it so valuable, is the curation of each small group.
Sheree and Frances spend considerable time picking individual members of each group, carefully curating the personalities, business types, and maturity levels of each. Inner Circle was restructured to rotate the groups, so that Inner Circle members would commit to a longer period of time, and rotate to different groups, which means more opportunities to meet other businesswomen and get to know, like and trust them.
Changing the program format also meant opening up a rolling enrolment, thereby expanding promotional periods and opportunities for sales — both to existing members and to attract new members to the One Roof world.
What I delivered
Alongside two in-depth strategy sessions with Sheree and Frances, our VIP Strategy Session included the new tier membership run sheet with a new profit plan for One Roof.
I delivered an in depth website analysis and suggested changes, plus a new sales page for the membership, alongside other detailed recommendations, listed in order of priority, focusing on improving membership retention and client experience.
The new Inner Circle program launched at the beginning of 2024, to a higher than anticipated response!
“People are loving the new format and getting a lot out of it, with an 85% ‘excellent’ response to our client satisfaction survey,” says Frances. “Working with Brook gave us the confidence to put it out there and her perspective brought so many little nuggets of gold that we hadn’t considered.”
(Please note, my link to One Roof is an affiliate link, which means I receive a small financial reward for any sales that eventuate. I would never recommend something that I didn’t enjoy, use myself, and genuinely recommend.)
