The largest income category on the profit and loss account is membership, yet it often occupies the smallest amount of time on the board agenda.
At our club, growth was good, satisfaction was high, churn was falling, yet 78 members still resigned in 2025. At an average subscription of £966, that is around £75,000 walking out of the door. Most boards treat this as an accepted cost of running a club. The discussion quickly turns to replacing those members and developing new revenue streams — ventures that require investment, carry risk and may take years to generate a return.
Yet the largest untapped financial opportunity isn't attracting new members. It's keeping more of the ones you already have.
The problem is that most clubs are trying to improve membership using measures that can only describe the past.
The metrics clubs use to manage membership — churn, attrition, total numbers, leavers, joiners — are all useful. They have one common flaw. They tell you what has already happened. They tell you nothing about what is building underneath, and they perpetuate the myth that a joiner is equal to a leaver. As long as net change is positive, everyone is happy.
The fact is a joiner is worth less than a leaver.
That sounds counter-intuitive because both pay the same subscription. But they are not economically equivalent.
Two members, two very different values
Established members have been at the club long enough to become embedded in it. They enter competitions, have regular playing partners, know the staff and feel like they belong. They are the club's most stable source of revenue and the foundation of its long-term financial health. New members are at the beginning of a lifecycle that, statistically, half of them will not complete. They are still deciding whether the club is right for them. They have not yet built the social connections that make leaving unlikely. Our data shows established members generate 56% more total value through subscriptions and secondary spend than members in their first two years. An established member who leaves is a serious loss. It may take many years for a new member to replace their full value.
Some churn is unavoidable. A member who develops a health problem, moves house or changes job represents a loss the club could not have prevented. But much of what appears in the leaving figures each year is neither random nor inevitable. When you look closely at the data, patterns emerge that repeat year after year — the same stage in a member's lifecycle, the same age groups, the same characteristics. A club may be surprised by the resignation letter when it arrives, but the reasons for that departure have typically been building for months, and in some cases years.
What churn cannot tell you
Churn is a metric that treats all of these leavers equally. It is simply the number of members who left during the year divided by the number at the start. It tells you what happened. It tells you nothing about why, or when, or who. It cannot tell you that a member who joins over the age of 55 with a handicap is very likely to become an established member, while a member who joins under 40 without one will probably not reach their second renewal. Those two members appear identical in the churn calculation. In the data, they are entirely different populations.
Once I began looking at membership through the lens of the member lifecycle, I realised that resignation letters weren't the beginning of the story. They were the end of it.
The real story starts on the day a member joins.
The articles that follow explore that journey, what the data reveals at each stage, and why understanding it changed the way I think about membership management.