EPISODE 109

Melissa My degree is in marketing. Again, just like always, I had the passion for sales and the rush that that gives you, and then the journey of the people and getting to know them. And I’ve always said, as a membership director, we’re like a matchmaker for friends. And we know all the members in our club, but the people who are coming in don’t. And it’s our opportunity and our pleasure really to introduce them and get them to meet their next best friends for this phase of life.

Derek The role of Director of Marketing and Membership to somebody who is not from the club world, that sounds pretty cut-and-dry, but we know that inside the club world, that’s a big thing. I can’t imagine looking at your job responsibility, the chart of all the things that you do. Walk us through what a typical day looks like for you. How many hours are you there? This morning, you were already walking through with some prospective members.

Melissa Yes, so I’m a team of one. I would say overall, my club is a boutique-style club here, so we’re on the smaller scale. Oftentimes, people see how present we are on social media and our digital presence, and they always think that we’re this huge club. We’re actually a small boutique-style club. I like to start super early in the morning. My office is right down by the golf shop, so I love to greet the golfers. So I’m typically in around 7.30, and I get started. I love to see those golfers who are going off at 8 a.m., and just to greet them and meet their guests is so important. In the membership and marketing role, I am a department of one, definitely a challenge, and I rely on a lot of partners to assist in making me good at what I do. But I think the challenge is always being able to step away from your office and your desk. Because for me, I start my morning, and I live in my CRM system. We have a lot of digital tools on our website where you can download form fills and get the membership guide. And so overnight, while I was sleeping or at baseball with my son, I had maybe five to seven form fills come in of people who had shown interest while I had stepped away from the club. So as soon as I get into the club, I start to just follow up with them and really dive into that CRM system and foster the leads. But then just really getting out there and seeing whatever events that we have going on, especially for golf. I try to just say hello, whether it’s ladies’ day or men’s day, and greet the members and try to be a face and be a presence for some portion of the day.

Derek How much of the work that you do is the kind of stuff that’s so behind the scenes that members don’t even realize? You see them on the first tee, but you’re doing so much other work inside your office that they’re probably not even aware of.

Melissa I would say 90% of the work that I do, they’re not aware of. I think that a lot of people think the role is just giving tours. And so they see me walking people around, but they don’t know the work that goes into actually getting those people on property.

Tucker Talk about that a little bit, about the transition of people from prospect to member, and how that happens. And from your perspective, what are the key moments that you think are like, this is when you either make or break a membership?

Melissa So digital presence for me is so important. I just feel that in 2025, the journey is starting online, and it has been for a while. Member referrals are great, but people want to go online and get the information that they need in the time that’s convenient for them. And so what we have implemented over the course of the past three years has just been a lot of gated content on the website. If they are not able to email me and get that immediate stuff in that moment, they could go on to the next club. And so that’s why I feel like it’s so important that we have those resources and those tools available for them in their time. But again, in order to give you something, I have to have something in return. So I’m a huge fan of pop-ups and gated content. Because that allows me to check them out, research them, and see who I’m going to be following up with.

Tucker How do you balance clubs being very private with how accessible and open content is? When I look at a lot of clubs that are really high scale, and they go, we don’t want everyone to know everything about us, so how liberal do you get with all the content that you give, and how much do you push out? How much do you just provide the public?

Melissa I get that question all the time. And I feel like a lot of the clubs up north, especially, are super, super private. And they have a process of obtaining that information. For me, I don’t tend to agree with that. For me, it’s just information. Anything that I’m sharing with them online is what I would provide to them during their first tour here. And so for me, it’s simply a vetting process because if they look at this information and they can’t afford it, or there’s something that they see that they don’t like, I’m not wasting my time bringing them in.

Tucker Right, and then that whole process, as a team of one, makes sure that we’re only really dealing with the serious candidates that actually want to be here and it meets all of their objectives, versus trying to get someone who wasn’t a good fit on property and trying to convince them to join if it wasn’t really going to work for their lifestyle anyways.

Melissa And, Tucker, I will tell you, 10 years ago, that’s the way that we did it. So it was all about, well, I’m not going to tell you. You’re going to have to come in in order for me to share the pricing with you and let me sell you on this dream before you decide. But things are different now. The initiation fee here is $150,000. If somebody can’t afford that club or decides that that’s something that’s not the right investment for them, I will let them find that out before they get here.

Tucker When you shift to onboarding, so say someone signed up, and they’re like, yes, absolutely. We’re going to do this. We’re going to be a part of this club. This is what I’m really excited about. How do you see onboarding? I know a lot of the great clubs see it as more than just orientation. Talk about that process for you. How do you get someone from a new member to a member who feels like they’re really a part of a club?

Melissa Onboarding is my favorite topic, so you’re going to have to cut me off. But I think that we have really evolved with our onboarding over the years, and what we are doing now is what I have learned from the things that have failed. And what I was seeing is that, you’re correct, it was just a new member orientation, and it was a book that I would hand them. We would do these group orientations. We would bring them in. They were mandatory before they got started. And we really just saw that that wasn’t enough and that the relationship with that new member really needed to be fostered for an entire 12 months.

Derek So you take them through that one-year journey, which I think is fantastic. I think there’s this gold standard of fostering this sense of belonging, and it goes from the member’s mindset of being, this is a place that I’ve joined to this is now a place where I belong to then actually getting to the next level of what we would call as a brand advocate, somebody who is then actively working on your behalf as a salesperson who is now starting to talk to their network, to their friends, to their colleagues, and telling the story of the club that they belong to. How do you find those people, foster that, nurture that, and lean into those brand advocates so that they’re actually helping you sell more memberships to what I would call right-fit people?

Melissa Absolutely. So what I have found has been key is the new member events that we have implemented in the club. So in the past, years prior, it was the traditional new member happy hour. And so you would have it quarterly, and you would have all your new members in there. They were all nervous. They didn’t know each other. It’s like blind dating, speed dating. They’re like in there learning bits and pieces of each other, and then they don’t remember each other’s names. It can be awkward, although it was necessary to do a couple of times a year. What has really been a hit has been implementing these really small and intimate events specifically for the new members. So some of those events are like Nine in Wines, where I will personally pair them with people who are maybe from the same hometown. Or maybe work in the same field. Or they’re the same age. We do a charcuterie board-making class, and we try to really limit this to 20 to 25 people max. We did a special wine tasting just for the new member ladies so that they had an opportunity to get to know each other. And I think kind of utilizing my knowledge, as what I’ve learned with them from new members and seating them with the right people, pairing them with the right people, that’s when you start to see those relationships flourish. And when you have those relationships, you’re just a raving fan of the club.

Derek This is awesome. You’re not just introducing them. You’re curating them to make sure that they’re meeting other people. You said you have a small membership, so you know all the members. So you can relatively easily know who’s likely going to have some certain synergies. Is there like a benchmark that says once a member’s met a certain number of people or been here x amount of time, like maybe it’s that 12 months, that now we’ve got them. Now they’re here to stay. And now the odds of them leaving for any reason other than moving or some sort of life change become less likely, like, we’ve got them now.

Melissa Absolutely, and that time frame is different for everyone. I mean, there are some people who, within the first three months, are in, and you move on from them. I don’t mean to say that in a negative way, they’re always a member that I love and stuff, but not all the energy is focused on them. But on the flip side, we pull these low user reports, and we’re looking every month to see if this new member is utilizing the club. And if they’re not, those are the people that we need to focus our energy on because there’s a reason that they’re not comfortable using the place that they just joined. So that journey is different. It’s a different timeline for everyone, especially for clubs that are seasonal. And a lot of people join in the off-season. That journey might be a lot longer to get them integrated into the next season. Yeah, it’s wild.

Tucker When we’ve talked to people across the industry, they’ve said that the members who are new and really happy are the most likely to refer new members, even more new members. How true is that statement?

Melissa I actually wrote that down as part of my notes today. I 100% agree. Just think, with any purchase you make, when you buy a new car, and you’ve just decided on that new car, you’re like the number one advocate of it. You’re so excited, you’ve spent all this time researching it, you spent all of this time test-driving these other cars, now you’ve found the car that you love, you’ve made this investment, and now you’re raving about it. It’s the same thing with the club. They’ve spent the time, they’ve researched, now they’re in. They want their friends and family to enjoy it, and they are absolutely the number one advocates. If you compare your prospects with your newbies, it’s like a game-changer. Membership’s sold!

Tucker When you work with us, when we’ve talked to you behind the scenes, we talk a lot, we live in the brand world. That is just how we function. And you kind of live on the intersection of where experience and belonging and brand all kind of meet, which is really, really awesome. When you think about your role, how do you ensure that when a brand or a club says, Hey, we’re all about this, that actually happens, and people actually see it? Where do you see that here’s a key experience that our brand gets shown to our membership?

Melissa So I’ll be honest with you, that can be a challenge. I think that is something that I’m going to focus hard on in 2026. After being at this club for 15 years and not really having even a set of guidelines in place, we’ve recently started to implement some guidelines and set these expectations. And it is going to be a focus for us next year, sharing that with the staff and getting them all on the same page. I would say for us, for Old Cypress, when I think about our club in comparison to the hundred others that we have around us in Naples, what we really are all about here is fun. And so we’re not super formal, we are private, but it’s one thing that when you think about Old Cypress, you think that that is a fun group. So that needs to take place from your employees who are answering the phone, and their tone and how they answer the phone. This needs to be every interaction when they come into the pro shop, when they step on board, and drop their bags to go play golf. That fun tone and the atmosphere and that environment are something that we all have to be about.

Tucker And when you get down to all of those different things, like you were saying, the golf, the bag drop, the restaurant, the way people are served, and all of those other things, what about when you think about materials? When we say, Hey, we talk about our golf course like this, we talk about our restaurants like this, we talk about our pool experience like this, how do you make sure there’s consistency around those so they all align?

Melissa So I’m going to take one example. Photography is a huge part for us in telling our story. We work with a company that probably shoots about 25 to 30 events per season. And part of sharing our story is on the website and social media. We do a lot of video. We do a lot of Instagram stories. But part of the way that we share the fun, so I’m going to take this lady’s day, for example. And we have this one member, and she is a blast, she’s so much fun. But previously, when our photographer would come out and shoot opening ladies day, the ladies would all pose with their foursome, really normal and nice, and it would be a great picture. But then there was one member who said to her foursome, Come on, girls, let’s make this about all the fun we’re having. And so every event that the photographer comes around to their foursome, they do these wild poses. I mean, they’re like stacked up on top of each other, like cheerleaders. They’re holding people up. They are showing so much fun on the course, and now when we post that, and we’re showing that in our materials, the other ladies are like, Oh, we’ve got to outdo her group and we’ve got to show them how much fun we’re having. And so I think that’s really cool, and I definitely have to send you guys some of these pictures, because you’re going to be like, That’s not the norm. That’s not typically what we’re seeing in clubs’ collateral and stuff, but that’s us, that’s Old Cypress.

Derek I love how organically that happened. It happened because that’s the way the members are. That’s authentic, that’s the way the culture of the spirit is, and it came out just because of who they are. When I think of all of the people that you interact with who also express your brand, HOA, realtors, vendors like for your website, all of the outsiders that you partner with that help you, how do you make sure that they are represented? When you give them that photography, and you explain to them that this represents who we are, how do you make sure that the materials that they’re producing stay on script and stay on brand?

Melissa That’s so important, and that is key. Again, you learn a lot of these things along the way by making mistakes. I think that’s normal. But I think providing playbooks to your vendors and to your realtors, especially if you don’t have any expectations in place, I don’t think that it’s fair to expect anything from the people that you’re working for and working with. For example, realtors. We have this really cool tool when new properties are listed in the community that it showcases who the listing agent is. So, for me as a membership director, I’ll go to the listing agent right away, and I’ll hand them our digital playbook, and it will have all of our photography in there, and I will say, Please use our photography with the club instead of coming in on a Tuesday at 11 o’clock when the dining room is not set, and nobody’s eating in there. So many times, the realtors pop in, and they’re like, Oh, we’re just taking photography for the listing. And it’s like, no, no, that’s not going to sell the dream. So here’s an album of our photography that will and then it can all be cohesive. We’ve just recently created this 25-page branding guide, and so sharing this, not only with the internal staff but with the external vendors and realtors, and people that we’re working with, is going to be huge. I think again, as long as we’re communicating who we are and what we are, then we’re all easily on the same page.

Tucker When I look at the importance of using tools, people, resources from outside the club, what about the importance of looking at other clubs and saying, what are fresh things? What are fresh ideas? It’s not like every idea has to be original to its own club. There are a lot of really great clubs across the country that do amazing things. What have you learned from other club brands, from other even industries, whether it’s hospitality or not? Talk about that a little bit.

Melissa I learn the most when I visit other clubs. It is one of my favorite things to do, and any time I’m traveling anywhere, whether it’s personal or for business, I try to see as many clubs as possible. I recently saw one, and I thought this was so cool. It’s called The Beach Club. It’s in Palm Beach, Florida. And it was my first time there, first time meeting the membership director in person. It was in the fall of this year. So, typically, wardrobe-wise, when you’re going into the fall, you’re thinking these sorts of colors, right? You know, darker colors, just kind of a fall palette. And when I walked in and met the membership director, I saw that she was in this light blue, and then white pants and a white overlay. And I thought, that’s really interesting for this time of year, but I didn’t say anything. And we started walking around the club. And she was touring me, and I noticed through our tour that she was matching the brand of everything in her club that she was showing me. All the views that we saw were the ocean, she had the blue on. All of the decor that we had was blue and white in the club. And she was the vibe. She was the vibe. So at the end of the tour, I said to her, I’m just curious, did you dress like this for a reason, or is it just kind of coincidental? She said that she actually implemented, at her club, a wardrobe brand with all of the employees. They’re the Beach Club. They’re the Beach Club 365 days out of the year. She made this branding book that provided all the different colors that employees are allowed to wear, different textures, everything that represents their brand, so that when you walk in, and I met the membership director, she’s not in black, not at the Beach Club. She’s not in bright red, not at the Beach Club. She is the brand, she is the Beach Club, and so is every other employee there. And I have never seen that. The board awarded everyone a $1,500 wardrobe stipend so that they could all get their wardrobe started, and they provide them with a little extra every year so that they can build on it. But I thought that was incredible because I felt the vibe the moment I walked in.

Derek You deal with so much stuff. So within your role, with what you see at other clubs, with what your learn in your speaking engagements, if there are other people like you, marketing directors, membership directors that are at other clubs, and you were to give them just one piece of advice that would help them do their jobs better, help them create more member value to impact your club, what might that be?

Melissa I would say that it comes down to building relationships at the end of the day. So taking time to just build the relationships with people, whether that is your vendors, your realtors, or whether that’s the members and their guests. At the end of the day, it’s a relationship business. There’s nothing better than you knowing these people, knowing their families, and helping them meet their newest friends, in my opinion.

Derek It’s marketing, but it’s all about the people.

Tucker If people are listening to this, Melissa, and they say, This person is the greatest person I’ve ever heard speak about membership, how can they reach you? How can they find your content? How can they interact with you?

Melissa I’m super loud on LinkedIn, just Melissa Hansen. But also feel free to email me or reach out Melissa@ melissahansen.com. I’m also on Instagram @melissahansenofficial. Those would be the best ways. I love to connect on LinkedIn.

Derek Thanks for joining us today. This was awesome. Appreciate your time. I think our listeners are going to learn a ton from your perspective. I really appreciate you sharing it with us.

Melissa Thank you, it was a pleasure being on. I appreciate you guys.

Derek This conversation has been a great reminder that the clubs creating the most meaningful member experiences are living the brand every single day. From the first interaction with a prospect to how a new member is welcomed, to how staff represent the club in every moment, including what they wear, it all matters. Melissa’s work shows us that membership directors are architects of belonging. And when they get it right, it transforms how members connect with their club. If today’s conversation resonated with you, please share it with another club leader in your network. Thanks again for listening. Until next time, cheers. At Sussner, we help private clubs build brands that create belonging. If this episode resonated with you, please share it with someone in your club world. And until next time, let’s create something worth celebrating. Thanks for listening to Clubs Made Meaningful.