What Your Pilates Studio Might Be Missing {That is hurting your bottom line!}

Let me ask you, what is the next level that you want to take your Pilates business to?

• Are you thinking about opening a stand alone studio?
• Do you want to eradicate “dry months” from your schedule?
• Do you actually want to MAKE PROFIT teaching and running a studio?
• Are you ready to bring more instructors on board?

I feel like I have a lot of questions for you. But do you know how to take your Pilates studio to that next level? Or have you tried something but didn’t get the expected results?

Today we will be talking about the exact things that your studio might be missing to go to that next level. And we have just the right person to answer all of our questions. She opened 4 successful fitness facilities with comprehensive Pilates studios in them in 3 different states. She is a Pilates teacher at heart but today she spends her time managing the facilities and teaching studio owners the exact practices that can take a studio from the “starving artist” stage to the “profitable and flourishing.”

Are you ready to get to the good stuff? Introducing Lisa Kuecker, a Pilates and Yoga teacher, mother, owner of 4 profitable Pilates studios, founder of the Kismet Club (join it, it’s free and stuff that she shares will transform your business practices!)

Lisa has some amazing business tips to share with us on how to take frustration out of running a Pilates business and how to completely eradicate “dry months” out of your schedule.

Resources mentioned in the interview:

• Register for a FREE webinar Fill Your Studio to Waitlist Capacity In 90 Days {With Your Dream Clients} – click here
  The webinar is on November 11th at 12pm EST – Don’t miss it!
• Follow Lisa’s blog – LiseKuecker.com
• Connect on Facebook
• Website services for Pilates professionals

Video Transcript

Would you rather read than listen? Then dive straight into the transcript!

Anastasiya Goers: Lisa, how did your Pilates and business journey begin?

Lisa Kuecker: I got introduced to Pilates and Yoga at the same time. I was lucky, when I was growing up my mom had loved Pilates and barre. So kind of the barre based craze that’s going on right now, I started doing that when I was like 13. And when I was 20 I moved to Boston, and I had this awesome exposure for the first time to Pilates. I saw a reformer for the first time in my life. This is about 15 years ago, so you can imagine it wasn’t quite as prominent at that time. And when I went back to New Orleans I was just so lucky, I found an amazing mentor who had been teaching Pilates for almost 20 years, and I fell in love with that.

I think as most most people I did my first certification thinking it was going to be a fun hobby. I was going to teach a few classes, and I had other businesses that I was already running. Gradually more and more of my week became teaching, just because it was incredible. I mean you know being on a Reformer for the first time for me it was like dancing on air, I just never experienced anything like it.

I had this opportunity to move up to Washington State with my husband and I met a person who worked with Intel Corporations. I got an offer to develop a Pilates program for them, and it was a great opportunity.

This is my dream come true and I think everybody has that moment in their career where they imagine it’s all happening, I’m going to be a success story, I’m going to have this big corporate client, all these fantastic students. And I really quickly learned that everything I thought I knew about building a Pilates studio was wrong.

I was working around the clock; I had this nontraditional studio which was awesome in many ways. I had lots of people working for me teaching all kinds of things. And I think I was actually making no money whatsoever, but if it was possible to lose money I might have been doing that. And I got about a year into it, and I felt that it had to change.

My breaking point was when I was like eight and half months pregnant. I’m out on a hike and all of a sudden I’m going through preterm labor, and I’m like “This is not happening!” And I get to the doctor

“This is stress,” he said, “what are you stressed about?”

I’m thinking I have got a few things, namely the studio right now.

I just got obsessed, I came from this incredible entrepreneurial family, and I had owned businesses before and I thought what was I missing in this business? And it hit me – it was the recurring income, client retention and selling things that were going to really appeal to my clients was totally absent from everything that I was doing on a daily basis. So when I made this decision to open our facilities across the country, we knew we were going to have a strong mind body studio presence in all of them. I said I’m going to do something very different.

And we took all of this knowledge and now over the last seven years we built these four studios, they have been incredible blessings, they are in three different states so we are geographically insane.

So three years ago we started getting calls where people said “Could you just talk to a friend of a friend of mine, she’s got a studio, it’s not doing great. Or she’s got a studio doing really well, but she wants it to do better.” And that’s how the consulting chapter of my life began. It was all word of mouth.

And finally last summer became somebody contacted me who came through so many degrees of separation, I thought who are you and why are you calling me? And they said, we’ve heard about what you’ve done, we want you to work with us. Unfortunately at that point I was really busy and they said, what is it going to take? It’s when it really hit me that this was a real business. I don’t teach every day in a studio, I teach when I’m lucky enough to, because I’m always going to be an instructor at heart. But what I have spent the last seven years doing is creating these businesses.

And doing all of those, so it’s natural progression for me instead of teaching Pilates or yoga, now I can teach other instructors. And it’s been mind blowing, so since we really launched internationally in June, we’ve had almost a thousand instructors that we’ve got to train between our free trainings and our mind body profit academy, and it’s been rolling, pretty exciting stuff.

Anastasiya Goers: Are your studios mostly stand alone studios, or they are part of other facilities?

Lisa Kuecker: We have four fitness facilities that have a mind body component to them. So we’ve got people who are doing extensive yoga programs, a lot of other one-on-one programming within the mind body sector. And that’s really the majority of our work right now. We have extended extensively to do a lot more group programming, I think group programming is the way of the future. And it’s certainly for most studios a really necessary component. So the last 7 years have been kind of what I like to call it this really fun experiment where we are like “Okay, does this work? – No. Does this work? – Yes.” But we’ve been figuring out what really works, and that’s pretty powerful.

Anastasiya Goers: So what is coming up with your consulting business?

Lisa Kuecker: I’m really excited, we’ve talked to a lot of people for the last five months. And what we really wanted to hear was What the studios were really missing. And we developed this program that just wrapped up, and it’ll come out next year again that was all about creating a highly profitable studio, but looking at everything. But beyond what people said “we don’t know how to get new clients,” and “we don’t know how to really turn prospects into clients” we heard “I need more clients, I want to have a wait list.”

And this is something that we’ve got great systems for, so at the end of this month we are launching another round of free webinars that are going to be all about taking your studio to wait list capacity in a short period of time. I think there is this myth in our heads that a Pilates studio and yoga studio needs to take a year to certainly make it. I haven’t seen that, I think that it can make it very quickly, and I think if you give yourself 90 days, you use the right processes, you qualify your students, you can build a recurring income source that’s incredible within the first 90 days.

Anastasiya Goers: After working with over 1000 instructors, did you notice any recurring mistakes that almost all of them were making?

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Anastasiya Goers: How would you build a conversation with a potential client that will lead them to buying a package from you?

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Anastasiya Goers: Talking to a potential client who already contacted you is a done deal now. But how can we actually get the word out about our Pilates studio? What forms of marketing work and do not work?

Lisa Kuecker: The first thing I will tell most people is that even though we have brick and mortar businesses, most people aren’t walking down the street and walking into our studios. They are walking down the Internet and walking into our online front door which is our website. And the first thing that I would want to explain to most people is that the website is crucial. It needs to be something that’s very clean. Your website also needs a place where someone can really enter their information, where they can clearly contact you.

I don’t think we need to tell them the entire history of Pilates, but I think you really need to tell them what the benefits of Pilates are. Because most people aren’t necessarily concerned these days about what happened in 1945, what they want to know is, “Is Pilates going to fix the problem that I have now?” So I think changing the copy on your website and the flow of the website is something we do with even our most successful clients.

And then secondary to that your Facebook page and Facebook ads have to be a key part of your business. And I hear over and over again, Facebook ads did not work for me. And what I always want to say to people is that Facebook ads probably didn’t work, but you didn’t actually ask your client to do something.

Facebook ads for brick and mortar businesses work at their best when there’s a really strong call to action. When you are saying

• you need to come in and you need to schedule a session because X is going to happen.
• you need to come in because we are running this awesome sale, or
• we’ve got a challenge that’s starting.

You’ve got to really understand the types of Facebook ads that work. And then beyond that I find that people have no idea of how to target their audience. Most people just hit “Boost post,” it’s not the best way to go.

There’s so many new answers within Facebook that are so powerful that you can turn this into the most incredible tool, where you can literally go out to your community and say, I want to see people in this neighborhood. And I want to target women between 35 and 55 who have kids, and I want them to have this type of spending habit.

And we do this all the time, I mean Facebook accounts for 80% of our ad spend, because it’s so stinking targeted that I can’t even imagine doing much else.

The things that I see that don’t work and this is over and over again, the first is radio and television. Because for you to spend the money that is going to require to get the number of impressions in front of your customer, I mean if you’ve got a $20,000 per month ad budget great, but if you are trying to stick to $600, it’s just not going to make enough of an impact.
And then beyond that I think there is a tendency to market (that is not even marketing) saying “I’m just going to tell people about my studio.”

Tell them why they need to come in today, like be sure to tell them this is why you need to be coming, this is what you miss, so I want to make you come through the doors today, this is why it’s going to value you. I think that’s super important.

Anastasiya Goers: I wanted to ask you a little bit more about Facebook advertising because a lot of people are just overwhelmed with how much should they spend. Should they spend $5 a day, should they spend $100? Should they spend like 50 cents per click, should they go all the way? Can you offer any good piece of advice

Lisa Kuecker: Yeah, so a couple of things. I use two types of Facebook ads I use, and the way that we teach the most of our clients is to use cost per click only when they’re doing specific types of campaigns. I like cost per click, but Facebook is then optimizing your ad to only reach out to people who want to click on it. Right, I don’t want them to just click on it; I want them to do something with it.

I tend to teach most of our clients to use cost per registration, cost per conversion. And that involves a tiny bit more work on the front end, but once you’ve done it the first time it’s very simple, and then you’re only paying for people who actually interact with you. So someone who actually registers for your events, someone who actually signs up to be on your email list, someone who actually registers for a challenge. I think that’s a more valuable way of doing things.

Now when it comes down to what I spend, I believe that you need to target intensely. I have lots of little ad sets that I have, so let’s say I have one campaign coming, and I am running a challenge and I’m ready for 10 days of marketing. I might have 10 ad sets that I am going to spend only two dollars a day on. $2 is my rule of thumb; I pretty much always start there, because want to see how these ad sets are going to work. Do people like the ads?

One thing about Facebook ads that we don’t talk about is that they have to be monitored and there is a science to monitoring Facebook ads. You have to monitor these ads and you have to kill off the ones that aren’t working and you have to gradually increase the ones that do. Start small don’t leap in and say I need to spend $50 per day on these ad sets. 99% of the time we’re overspending if that’s the case.

Instead take a number of ad sets, see which ones were best, don’t be shy about trying out different images and different copy. That makes a big difference, we take the same ad all the time for people, and we put a second image and suddenly it’s half the cost for someone to register. It takes some experimentation, but give yourself that time the first few times. It’s my biggest advice is to– and don’t be shy to ask for help on this. I am not going to lie that when I started doing Facebook ads we wasted a lot of money; it’s very easy to waste a lot of money doing Facebook ads.

I finally met with somebody in California who was just a Facebook expert and said you know what I want you to transform my mind on how I am doing this. I was doing my math on this, but I am guessing we spent tens of thousands of dollars the last few years on Facebook ads, and they are working incredibly well, our business would not have been nearly as successful without them.

Anastasiya Goers: Do you have any training coming up?

Lisa Kuecker: I do, we’re going to be releasing something, I don’t actually even know when, but we had so many requests from clients on building a Facebook ads program and making it absolutely user-friendly.

We started breaking down Facebook advertising literally into every detail: this is how you create a custom audience; this is how you do this. We explain the whole funnel, because Facebook ads are a funnel. You drop a lot of people into it, everyone at Facebook shows up to you, and then at the bottom of the funnel, hopefully your ideal client pops out. Then into every part of the funnel, every layer of it needs to be cracked so that people can keep flowing on down.

We build and teach people what are the major processes on this, what are the right kind of images, how do you write click copy, what’s the anatomy of an ad, what are the must-haves. Then we also do the highly technical, which is the part that I struggled with the most for long which is how do you set an ad in power editor? Step by step you click this button, let’s go to the next one, you click this button. You know how do you build the custom audience? What is my favorite way to set a location? So we built this entire technical library. We learned a lot of these things because we’ve had a great training, but for an average small business that’s not the case.

Facebook advertising is a lot easier than you think. At some point this fall we will release it. We’ve filmed everything now, we’re about all done, and started getting great results, and I think that’s what we’re waiting to see. We want to share the results everywhere so that people understand even if it hasn’t worked in the past it can really work.

Anastasiya Goers: We’ll be looking forward to your training!

Lisa Kuecker: We always tell people “Send us an email!” I know that sounds silly, but I really love getting an email and just talking with people.You know we’re always looking [for testers]; we got our first round of people testing this program. You know we might hear your story and be like “Yes that’s the program for us!” You can be one of our beta testers. I am lucky I’ve got a team that works with me; this is my baby that I am having a lot of fun building right now. Let us engage and let us help you.

Anastasiya Goers: How can instructors and studio owners raise awareness about Pilates in the areas where it is not very prominent?

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Anastasiya Goers: Should you use free sessions as an introductory offer at the studio?
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Anastasiya Goers: How should you price your Pilates services for the best profit margins?
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Anastasiya Goers: What types of classes should you offer to build a successful studio?

Lisa Kuecker: So here is how I look at studios, because I personally think home based studios are brilliant. I mean I think for a lot of people a home based studio is an ideal fit, because my first decision on any studio is strictly by the numbers. How many clients do I need to see in order to pay the operating expenses? And a home studio takes a lot of that off of me. If I can see 20 people out of my house versus 40 people out of a location, gosh I think I’m better off seeing 20 people at my house. But there’s inevitably this time when we say okay, well, we are ready to make this leap. First of all I think the numbers have to be right, I think that you can have a really successful home based studio, we have our own client that we are working with now who has three reformers, a tower and a Cadillac in her home.

And these group reformers do great small group classes. It’s a powerful thing, I think that can be phenomenal, I think it also is appealing to certain clientele, let’s say I don’t want to be in a studio, I like the privacy.

When you go to make that leap into a studio, I think that one you need to make sure that it needs to be large enough, and you need to decide, if you can ideally fit 10 people from that class and have a minimum of four reformers although I would love to see six, I think you are in golden ground for doing group work.

And to be honest with you, a Reformer is easy to add. I tell a lot of people because I think the one mistake I see a lot of businesses make is that when they start out, a lot of your startup costs, more than you’ll ever going to think, need to be devoted to marketing, they need to be devoted to just keeping the business going in a float to payroll, to expenses that you are not going to expect. You don’t need a studio that’s completely equipped, every piece of equipment on demand. You need a studio that has the right amount to start, and then you can add. So I would say if you’ve got four reformers and you are doing a ton of group classes — group classes by the way are amazing profit-margin-wise, they are your most profitable.

I call them my profit gold mines; I mean you should be running them. And that should be a big focus, because the costs are a lot more affordable to a lot of people. So beyond that when we start getting going on this, if I can start with these four reformers, when I have 80% of my classes full, or nearly full, I’m 80% capacity, that’s when I’m going to add the next reformer. That’s when I’m going to add and say okay, now I’m ready to go in and spend that money. Don’t feel like you need to spend it all upfront.

Anastasiya Goers: Yeah, so is it better just to start with small props and mat classes?

Lisa Kuecker: We have two clients in Australia right now that are blowing my mind. All they do is mat work and basic props with it — and they have some of the best students that I have ever seen. I mean they are doing so well, I’m just so impressed with them, and I think that’s proved that’s not as hard.

I was in a Pilates session this morning and the first half of the session was we did all mat work and I got a serious sweat out of it. People think “this is easy,” it’s not. I mean it’s powerful work, and it’s how you sell it to people, and how you share it with people that really makes the difference to whether or not they view it as something more, something bigger.

Anastasiya Goers: Yeah, something I want to share from my personal experience, I actually met a lot of clients who were very uncomfortable especially in the beginning working with the Reformer. They were just terrified of all those springs, they…

Lisa Kuecker: It’s like a torture device.

Anastasiya Goers: Yeah, they just felt too awkward or not quite coordinated enough to control the springs. For the first five to ten sessions they didn’t even want to touch it.

Lisa Kuecker: And one thing when you think about group training that I wish more studios thought about is that their Pilates classes are not the same that they get at a gym. This is a perfect example, I walked into one of these classes not long ago. And there were 35 people in the class. I almost fell, I’m like well, there is no one-on-one attention here. I’m glad I know what I’m doing. But what I find is that we really need to market our mat work and our group reformer classes for what they are. They are not just classes; I mean otherwise people are going to equate them to what is in the gym.

They are personalized training, they are not personal training, but they are personalized training. And there’s a real difference in that, I encourage people that they don’t even call them classes. If you have 10 people in there, I’m sorry it’s not a class, it’s personalized training. You are going to have to be able to touch each person.

Anastasiya Goers: Question from a reader. How do you hire qualified instructors for the studio?

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Anastasiya Goers: Lisa, you are sharing a lot of great information and great advise with us. I also know that you have a free webinar coming up really soon.What else can we learn from you?

Lisa Kuecker: During the webinar we teach all of our clients four steps to taking somebody from, “Hey I might be interested in your studio” to “I’m going to be client of yours for years to come.” And there are four distinct aspects of it.

Stage 1. Introduction. We talk about the initial phone call, and emails, what they have to look like.

Stage 2. Questions to ask the prospect. What do you need to talk with people about? What are the questions that you need to ask that really reveal everything?

Stage 3. How to educate the clients.

Stage 4. Follow-up formula. And there needs to be a follow-up formula that takes people from, “I like your studio, I want to come for the next ten sessions,” to “I want to come for the next ten months.”

And we’ve spent years getting to actual science of this. That first month matters significantly. So we are going to be talking about each four of those stages of the processes. I hope more than anything that people walk away from this understanding that you don’t need this crazy ridiculous sales process that’s aggressive or scary. You know, you can take what’s made you great which is to be a teacher, and you can weave this process on the end. You can ask people the right questions, you can really get to know them, you can educate them into a sale, and you can make lots of sales and lots of profits doing this. And more so than anything, it is effortless.
This is an effortless system.

My goal at the end of this training is that your clients don’t go, “I can’t believe how much money that is.” But instead they are like, “This is so valuable. I think this is the best deal ever.”

That’s really what you should be saying because I think as instructors you already know that. Pilates offers more value to people than I could ever imagine. It changed my body, I’ve seen it change my clients’ bodies, I’ve watched in so many clients in studios that we work with, these powerful stories. We can’t be shy about the value. It’s there. We’ve got to own it. That’s good for us, good for our studio in the end.