Membership Retention Consulting

Your membership is losing people for reasons you haven't diagnosed yet.

Most membership owners keep treating the symptoms. Steve finds the actual leak and builds the system to stop it.

Not sure where to start? The free report shows you exactly where your membership is leaking.

As seen in
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You've tried all of it. The churn kept coming.

"I know the content is good. I just can't figure out why they keep leaving."

Win-back campaigns. Community pushes. Free 1:1 calls you burned yourself out doing. More content. Stu's TRIBE. Amy's frameworks. Prompting ChatGPT at 10pm hoping it sees something you missed.

None of it wrong. All of it applied without knowing which specific part of your membership was actually broken.

That's the whole problem. Every intervention you've run started at the wrong end. You've been treating symptoms while the real leak kept running.

Win-backs work on members who've already decided to leave. Community pushes add noise without understanding why people weren't engaged. Adding more content, when overwhelm is one of the top cancellation drivers, makes it worse. You thought you were adding value. You were adding pressure.

Nobody gave you a way to diagnose the specific failure point in your particular membership before telling you what to fix. That's what this changes.

What you've already tried
  • Win-back email campaigns when churn spiked Brought back people who left again within 60 days
  • Community challenges and engagement pushes Temporary lift. Same churn rate underneath.
  • Free 1:1 calls with at-risk members Exhausting. Most cancelled anyway. Never again.
  • Adding more content when members left Overwhelm is a top cancellation driver. This made it worse.
  • Stu McLaren's TRIBE Good philosophy. Same churn rate. Too general.
  • ChatGPT for a retention strategy Good ideas for the average membership. Nothing for yours.

The blind spot most membership owners don't know about

20%

of your churn may have nothing to do with members choosing to leave.

Cards expire. Banks decline. PayPal accounts close. Members fall out without meaning to. Nobody catches it in time, and they never come back. Up to 20% of total membership churn is involuntary — billing failures, not decisions. Your platform shows you one number. That number is almost certainly wrong.

Get the free retention report

Two ways to fix your membership retention.

Some membership owners want it done for them. Others want to get in and do the work themselves. Either way, it starts with the same diagnostic and the same framework.

Do It Yourself

You implement it. We give you everything you need.

The full Retention OS training walks you through all six framework elements in detail, with the templates, scripts, and step-by-step implementation guides to build it yourself at your own pace.

$197 one-time
  • All six framework elements covered in full
  • Templates and scripts for each retention system
  • Step-by-step implementation guides for each element
  • The behavioural science behind why each element works
  • Implement at your own pace, in your own time
Get the Retention OS

Start with the free diagnostic to know which elements to tackle first.

Diagnosis before intervention. Every time.

The reason everything else hasn't permanently fixed your churn is that it started with a tactic, not a diagnosis. Member Engine starts differently.

1

Run the free diagnostic

35 questions. Five minutes. Covers all six elements of your member lifecycle, from the moment someone joins to the moment they become a lifer. Your personalised results land in your inbox: which framework element is failing, what's driving it, and what to look at first.

Free. No credit card.
2

Talk to Steve

The discovery call isn't a pitch. It's a diagnostic conversation. Steve comes in having already reviewed your results, so the first question isn't "tell me about your business." It's "here's what I'm seeing. Let's confirm it."

30 minutes. No obligation.
3

Fix the actual leak

The engagement applies the framework to your specific membership, builds what's missing, and implements the retention infrastructure that should have been there from the start. You end up with a system that runs without you watching the MRR number every morning.

Applied to your membership. Not the average one.

Six failure points. Most membership owners are only watching one.

Find out which of the six framework elements your membership is failing. The diagnostic maps all of them. The consulting engagement fixes the ones that are broken.

Element 01

Activation

On short trials, 55% of cancellations happen on Day 0. What happens in the first 48 hours determines whether a habit forms. If it doesn't form by day 90, the member is already at risk.

Highest-risk window
Element 02

Habit Formation

Members who build a ritual around your membership stay. The ones who don't cancel after month three. Not because the content was bad. Because returning never became automatic.

Trigger. Ritual. Retention.
Element 03

Connection

People stay for other people, not products. The identity shift from "subscriber" to "member" is what makes cancellation feel like a loss rather than just stopping a payment.

Identity, not transaction
Element 04

Communication

Most memberships email too rarely when members are new and too much when they're disengaging. The cadence inversion problem costs members who would have stayed.

Timing is the variable
Element 05

Detection

By the time they cancel, they've already left. Leading indicators show up weeks before anyone clicks cancel. Detection is about seeing it before it happens.

Leading vs. lagging signals
Element 06

Ascension

When a member achieves their goal, what happens next? Without an answer, completion becomes a churn event. Ascension turns achievement into a reason to go deeper.

Net negative churn

What membership owners say.

It's finally great to work with someone who actually understands how memberships work. Steve goes deep into how your membership is actually running, where it's leaking, and how to build the system to fix it. He turned my business around.
Jesse  ·  Neiru
The level of understanding he brought to our membership was extraordinary. Every time I work with Steve my results skyrocket. Without his support on retention we would not have grown as rapidly or as sustainably as we have.
Kjetil  ·  Deliciou
Having someone experienced map out exactly what to focus on, in what order. That's the most valuable thing. We went from guessing to having a clear plan. If you're stuck with your membership retention, Steve breaks it down into exactly what needs fixing and when.
Joe  ·  Hobby Hoard
If you're running a membership and want to stop losing members, this is the right person. Steve doesn't just hand you theory. He finds the specific levers in your membership that are costing you people and shows you exactly how to fix them.
Chris  ·  Snobby Coffee Club
🥃

More case studies coming soon.
Steve speaks to every new client personally.

Book a discovery call
🥃
The Whisky Order: $275k subscription business, 2015 to 2018
Subscription Accelerator: retention consulting program
Regular podcast host, OceanX
Podcast guest, Subbly with Stefan Pretty
Featured: BuzzFeed, Venture Magazine, The Weekly Review

Member Engine is built on scar tissue.

From 2015 to 2018, I ran a subscription box called The Whisky Order. I'd import rare whisky, decant it into 30ml samples, and ship five per month to members with the full story behind each one. Year one hit $110k. $275k over three years.

Then it died.

Not because I couldn't get subscribers. I was good enough at that. Good enough that other subscription businesses started paying me to run their Facebook ads. It died because I had no retention system. No communication architecture. No early warning signals. No habit formation beyond the monthly delivery. No ascension path.

When my daughter was born and life got loud, I went quiet. And when I went quiet, they left. There was no glue underneath holding members in place.

After The Whisky Order I spent years in consultancy through the Subscription Accelerator program, helping membership businesses fix the same problems at different scales. Every client had the same story: great at getting members, no system for keeping them.

Every framework element addresses a specific failure point I've seen, either in my own business or in the dozens of memberships I've worked with since. It's not borrowed theory. It's what I wish I'd built when it mattered.

Steve Forrester Membership Retention Consultant  ·  Founder, Member Engine

Start with the free retention report.

Free report reveals the six places memberships leak members, including the one your platform will never show you.

Get the free report →

Free. No credit card. Your report lands in your inbox immediately.

Stop watching the number.
Fix the leak.

Every billing cycle you hold your breath. You don't have to. Book a discovery call and let's find out exactly what's happening in your membership.

Starts with a conversation. No obligation until you decide it's the right fit.