← Pilates Business Podcast
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What should you actually get from a business coach? A longer to do list? A collection of ideas, A formula that worked for someone else in different city, a different market, or a completely different kind of business? I don't think so. Good business coaching should help you build a stronger business and make you a smarter business owner. It should? Yes. Increase your profit, sharpen your decision making, protect your energy and help you understand how your business works. Because the goal is not to become dependent on a coach. The goal is to become more capable, more confident and more in control of your growth. So I want to share today with you my philosophy around business coaching because I've been doing this for well over a decade and I want to share a little bit about what you should expect from a business coach and what you should be very, very careful about handing over. Well, hi there, I'm Sarah Glanfield. I'm a business and marketing strategist just for boutique fitness studio owners like you. If you're ready to be inspired and make a bigger impact, you're in the right place. All you need are a few key strategies, the right mindset, and some support along the way. Just join me as I share the real life insights that will help you grow a sustainable and profitable studio. This is the Pilates Business Podcast. Welcome back to the Pilates Business Podcast. I'm Saran Glanfield and the founder of Spring 3 Studio Business Consulting and I am here today in episode 282 having been hosting this podcast for over three years and a coach since 2013. So well over a decade. I want to talk to you about business coaching and more specifically, I want to talk to you about what you should actually expect to get when you invest in a business coach and or a business coaching program. Because in the world that we are in today, business coaching is a really broad term. It can mean almost anything. Now, back when I first started out working alongside studio owners, I called myself a consultant because a business coach was not so well known. And I am and still do consult in sort of the more traditional sense of the word. But I think that it's sort of become a phrase that has just been picked up like Pilates has, where it's used for a lot of different things. Right. It can mean almost anything. And so one coach might focus primarily on mindset, another may focus on sales. Another may simply hand you, you know, a playbook and tell every client to follow the exact same steps. Someone might tell you which trending audio to use on TikTok. You know, another might operate more like an agency and take over large, large parts of your marketing or operations. And then there are the coaches who help you to understand the entire business. Your strategy, your positioning, your marketing, your sales process, your client experience, your numbers, your team, your systems, your role as the owner. And these are very different, all different types of support, and they create very different outcomes in my business and the way that I work with my studio owners that I get to work alongside, I have a very clear philosophy about business coaching and my role in it. I think there are a lot of people who want to help others in the world that we're in today, which is wonderful. And they've had some experience in business of their own, and maybe they were successful in their own business. And so they want then to help others. And then they. So they, they started to do some business coaching. Right. And I think that's very nice. It's. It's wonderful. It's very generous of them. But the reality is that there aren't very many people out there who are actually qualified to be a business coach. And when I think about the reason why I stepped into this role in the first place, it wasn't because I'd necessarily solved all of the Pilates business problems, but it was because I'd already studied business and marketing and systems and operations and HR and finance and accounting from my studies. But then also having worked in, in the finance world and seeing within an organization that is incredibly efficient how things are done at that level. And that is what I brought to the conversations that I've been having with studio owners from day one. And over time, having worked with hundreds of studios around the world, what I've come to find is that no matter what, there is no perfect way to build a successful studio. Whether you're starting from scratch, whether you're growing from 1, 2, 3 locations, whether you're buying a business, whether you are inheriting a business, whether you are evolving your business, there is no one way to build a successful studio. There is no single schedule, there is no single pricing model, there is no single marketing channel. There is no single sales process. There is no single team structure. I think really what it comes down to is there is not a single version of success that every single studio owner that I meet should be trying to create. When I work with studio owners and we talk about your goals and your vision for what you want to do with your business, everyone has a slightly nuanced and different answer. Yeah, generally we want to see income increase, right? Yes, that's pretty much a given. But how that happens and the timeframe within that which that happens is very different across the board. So as an entrepreneur, which, if you're listening to this and you're building a studio business of your own, this is an entirely personal business. This is. It's a very personal thing to be building a business because it ultimately reflects your talents, your wants, your needs, your expertise, the market you're in, the capacity that you have, your creativity, your financial goals, and. And also, by the way, the type of life that you want to live. Some people want multiple locations. Some people want one highly profitable, efficient, optimized studio. Some want to continue teaching 20 to 25 hours a week. Others want to step away from teaching almost entirely. Some come into it and are not teachers and don't intend to become teachers. Some come into it and are not teachers and want to train to be a teacher. Others want a large team. Some want perhaps smaller, simpler businesses with fewer moving parts. Some want to upsize, some want to downsize. Some want to build something that they can eventually sell. And others want to build a business that supports their family and allows them to do this work for many, many years. None of these goals are more valid or more important or better than the other. And I think when we work together inside of Thrive, my business coaching program, we talk about this all the time because we don't realize how easy it is. We are so biased and. And I think we're so exposed to all these different sort of success ideas in the world we're in today with social media and where it puts us or how it gives us access to that, that we. We automatically kind of compare, right? We just do. We compare and we often have this bias that one type of goal is better than the other, right? And we talk about this a lot because I think it's so important. None of these goals are more valid, right? And so what we want to. What we get clear on, first of all, is exactly what it is that you want from your business. And sometimes you may not know, but we generally can find a direction for you to head in because all of those different goals require different strategies, right? And they often require different strategies well in advance. So years in advance of where you want to take the business is when you need to start to be aware of the strategies you need to be implementing. And this is why I get very concerned when I see coaching that treats every business owner as though they're building the exact same business. This happens a lot when I see that there are studio owners who've become coaches because they are using their own single experience. In a lot of cases, not all, but in a lot of cases of what they're then recommending to people. And what happens often is that they're saying, you know, run this promotion or post this type of content or add this type of membership package or, well, I raised the prices by this amount. And so you should too. Or you should be teaching fewer classes or you should spend more on ads like I did, or, you know, and. Or you should open a second location because that's the only way for you to grow, right? And none of these ideas, by the way, could be wrong, right? But the real question is whether they are right for you. Because advice and ideas without context is just more noise, right? And I think that as studio owners, with the size of the industry and how much is happening in the industry, there is already enough noise out there, right? You're listening to this podcast, right? You've attended the webinars, you've downloaded the templates, you've been to the conferences, is you've watched other studio owners on social media and you've probably heard five completely different options and opinions about pricing and memberships and intro offers and paid ads and email marketing and how much you should or should not be teaching, right? So you don't need more disconnected information, truly. And a lot of what we focus on and what we do inside of Thrive is ensuring that we are giving each and every single one of our members just what they need in terms of information and what it the information that they get is highly relevant to their business. Because you don't need just more info. We all have an abundance of information in the world that we're in today. But you need someone who can help you understand what really matters in your business. You need someone who can see the entire picture, someone who understands business strategy, not just the latest, you know, Instagram tactic. Someone who understands systems and how they integrate into your business. Not just have an idea, right? My husband gives me great ideas all the time. I listen to maybe about 5% of them. He's trying to help me. I'm sure your spouse and partners and friends are all trying to do the same thing. They are not experts in your business and they don't have contacts for the industry, right? So you need someone who can truly help you to decide what to do next and what order things need to happen in. And I think also more importantly, and I do this a lot with my members too, is telling them what not to do. And it's so I saved someone recently and it Was sort of like such a happy moment for both of us when we realized, when we had. When we finished our coaching session, and she was like, oh, my gosh. Oh, I don't have to do that. You serious? And I'm like, nope, we're not doing that. And she was like, oh, okay. And what a weight was lifted off of her shoulders because her business is going to be more stronger and more profitable from not doing the thing that she thought that she had to do because a friend of hers had a coach who told her that they should do it, right? And this happens, and we all get pulled down these paths. It happens. But a good coach shouldn't just give you ideas, right? They should not just be these, you know, throwing spaghetti at the wall. A good coach should really help you to be. To help you. And this is really important, really help you to become better at answering the questions your business will have of you. So they should help you to learn how to filter for what will work and what won't work. Because that's the biggest difference, truly, between creating your and building and developing your own capability to grow a business. Creating just a codependent relationship, right? And I think that difference matters more than many, many business owners realize. So let's talk about some of the misconceptions that I see. All right? And I think one of the biggest misconceptions that business coaching is the same as getting advice. It's not. Coaching is not simply paying someone to give you ideas. Ideas are everywhere, truly. Open up ChatGPT. It will happily agree with every idea you've ever had, and they'll give you five more. You can find ideas on Instagram, go search for them. You can find them on podcasts like this one. You. I give you tons of ideas, right? You can ask another studio owner what they're doing. You can attend a conference and come home with 50 pages of notes. The problem is really a lack of ideas. It's not a lack of ideas. The problem is knowing which ideas will work in your business, with your business model. And I think this is one of the other. Not misconception, but this sort of like this, we. We find ourselves making this assumption that other people's businesses are the same as our own. And so we think that a. An idea that sounds great and has worked for other people will also always work for us. And it doesn't. Truly, it doesn't. Which is mean that you need to have a filter, right? So which idea will solve the problem that you are facing? What's the real problem that you're even facing, which idea will fit the market that you're in? Which idea will support your goals for your business? Which idea is financially realistic? Which idea can your team execute? Which idea should happen now and which one should wait? We talk about this a lot as well, and that is truly where coaching becomes valuable. Let's say your studio, you want to make more revenue. I mean, this is a lot of people's goals. So it's kind of generic. And at first glance, the answer might seem pretty obvious, right? Raise your prices, get more clients. But is client acquisition really the problem? What if you're already generating plenty of leads but they're not converting? In that case, more leads may simply create more missed opportunities, right? Or what if your clients are actually joining but leaving after six weeks? And then the problem may then not be marketing. Maybe it's more on the retention side. What if your classes are already full during peak times? Then more demand might not help you at all. Unless you understand capacity and pricing and schedule design. And what if revenue is growing but profit isn't? Then the issue might be about your pricing architecture. Discounts operationally, perhaps inefficiencies that might be there, right? And so there, there is a big difference there, right? And there's a tactic. And we talk about this too, right? There's tactics and then there's strategy. A tactic looks at the surface, okay? But the strategy looks at the whole system, the whole ecosystem, right? So a tactical say you need more leads, you need to raise your pricing. Whereas the strategy will say, where is revenue currently being missed? The tactic is post more often, make reels that are this long with this music, right? But the strategy is saying, is the messaging clear enough to move the right person to act? Okay, the tactic says hire a manager, but the strategy says, well, what is that person accountable for? Is the business financially and operationally ready for that role? Right? And so what? A coach, this is a coach will understand more than that there is more than one way to grow a business and that they will help to you to decipher which of the options and ideas will work and in what order. So if the only tool someone has is paid advertising, then every problem will look like a lead generation problem. If the only tool someone has is social media, then every problem will look like a content problem. If the only tool someone has is. Is. Is. Is. Is. Is their sort of sales process, then everything will look like a conversion problem. But your business is probably honestly not down to one isolated problem. It's an interconnected system. So if you think about your business as a puzzle, it kind of is. And there's a lot of pieces that fit together. Some pieces are big, some pieces are small, some pieces are easy to slot together. Some pieces take a while for you to find. And if you think about your piece of business as a puzzle, which, with different size pieces and, and you're trying to put this puzzle together, it's. You're gonna find the bigger ones first, right? That's the easy stuff, that's the big stuff. But oftentimes it's those smaller pieces that, that make the, the picture come together, right? It's the smaller pieces that make it all work. And so what we find is that, you know, your marketing will affect your sales. Your sales will affect your onboarding, your onboarding will affect retention. Retention will affect capacity, capacity will affect pricing. Pricing. Pricing affects profit. Profit affects your hiring. Hiring affects your time and your owner. Time affects leadership and strategy and future growth. So everything touches something else. And good coaching will help you see through all of those different connections. It doesn't just throw random ideas right at the in into the bucket, right, of random, you know, throwing spaghetti at the wall and hope that one of them works. And, and it does not assume that the coach's own personal experience is a universal. A coach may have grown a very successful business, and that is amazing, and that is valuable. But her business might have existed in a different market, in a different place at a different time. Maybe when advertising was cheaper, maybe when competition was lower, when commercial rent was different, maybe the business model was required fewer employees, maybe their target audience was different to yours, maybe social media looked different. It probably did. And all of these things can be useful insight to have, for sure. Personal experience always is. But personal experience alone does not create a broad business expertise. So a coach has to be able to look beyond what has worked for her for them. She has to understand why it worked. She has to understand the conditions that made it work. And she has to know whether those conditions exist in your business. And I think this is the biggest shift, right? You are not hiring a coach to give you more ideas. You're hiring a coach to help you to make better decisions about your business. Now, there is also a bit of a tension that exists right now in the industry, right? On the one hand, you know, sound business principles matter. Yes, they do. On the other hand, we see that there are. How those principles are expressed in your business is very, very personal. And so on one hand, you know, we, we know revenue, for example, has to exceed expenses Pricing has to support the way that you deliver your. Your business. The business needs clients. These are all basic business principles, right? The team needs oversight, direction, and clarity. The owner needs information to run the business. These principles, they're not optional, right? There are certain principles that you need for a business to run, but how those principles are integrated into your business is often very personal to you, right? Because you have a unique combination of strengths. Maybe you're an exceptional teacher and that is what gives you energy. Maybe that's what energizes you. Or maybe you're a natural community builder. Or maybe you are highly creative and you just love to create new things, new ways of doing things, new class types, and that's what actually is your energizer. Or maybe, just maybe, you are analytical and you love the data. You love the numbers. Maybe you know that you are an excellent leader and you can motivate people like no one else. Maybe you have a strong personal brand. Maybe you love developing instructors, or maybe you have a deep expertise in a. In a particular method or client population. Your business should use those strengths. It should not force you to imitate someone else who's got skills and goals and personality that are completely different from yours. So this does not mean that you should only do what feels easy. By the way, growth always requires you to learn. But it will ask you to become better at some of the things that you may not feel like you are as strong at. Leadership, finances, communication, marketing, decision making, sales. But I do want to be clear that there is a business. There is a difference between expanding your skills and building a business that fights who you actually already are. And there's also a difference between a business that looks impressive on the outside, but that is. Is. Is not aligned on the inside. You can build a large studio and hate managing a large team. You can open a second location and discover that you prefer the simplicity of one. You can step out of teaching completely, but then realize that teaching was one of the things that, that gave you energy. You can keep teaching 20 classes a week because you love it, only to realize that the business then has no space. And this is where a coach should help you think a little bit more deeply, truly. Because it's not just about how can we grow, but it's about how do you want to grow. What do you want your week to look like? Right? Because if you want multiple locations, but you do not like managing a large team, then there's gonna be some challenges there that you're gonna need to figure out. And the sooner you Figure that out, the better it will be. What kind of work gives you energy? What energizes you? We're all energized by different things. It's really important to be clear on that. There's also gonna be work that drains you. Drains you in the wrong way. Right? Drains you in a way that is just not good for you. Right. And you also need to be clear on things like how much money does your business need to produce? How much responsibility do you want to carry? How large of a team do you really want to lead? What are you willing to compromise on? Because along the way, at every stage of growth, there will be some compromises that you will be required to make. And I think that, you know, we always think that it's this linear ease, you know, as you grow, things get easier. No, there's always trade offs. There are always trade offs. Right. More clients may require more capacity, more capacity requires more space. Right. A larger team might create more freedom, but more management of people. Right. An extra location might increase revenue, but there's also risk in that as well. And capital required. Right. So there's no decision without trade off. And you know, the job of a coach is to protect, is not to pretend that those trade offs don't exist, because they do. And they should know those trade offs beforehand and be able to share them with you so that you're aware too. And this helps you to build your skills as a business owner so that you are more capable, more savvy and smarter. And you're empowered with that skill set not just when you're working with that coach, but for as long as you want to continue to be in business. So the job is to help you see, or to look ahead and see where, what might happen in different scenarios. And then you're more informed and can choose more intentionally about which direction you want to go in. And that's one of the things that we care deeply about. Inside of Thrive, we're not just throwing random ideas at you. We're not trying to push every owner toward the same definition of success. We are not trying to build identical studios. We're helping every single studio owner build a business that is profitable, sustainable, and suited to the life that they want. The underlying business principles are always going to be there, but the strategy, it has to be personal. Because you're not building a generic studio. It will not last in the industry that we're in today. You are building your studio and that is what we are here to help you to do. Now, this might be the Most important part of my philosophy, this next one. Okay. And I touched on it a moment ago, but this is really important for me, you know, as a female business, a business owner, as a. Someone who's owned their own business for over almost 20 years. Good business coaching should empower you. It should not make you dependent. There's a version of support that I think often feels very attractive, especially when you're overwhelmed, where it says, you know, someone says, you know, give us all of your marketing, we'll do it for you. We'll build your website for you. We'll do everything for you. Let us run your operations. Let us make the decisions. We'll tell you, you know, we'll, we'll, we'll run all of your marketing. And when you're tired and overwhelmed, that can feel like a relief. You don't want perhaps another course or a complicated framework. Right. You want someone to take the problem away, and I totally understand that. And inside of Thrive, you have the option to do that. We will take all of that off of your plate if you want to. What we're very, very intentional about is also giving you the information, the skills, the insight, and the step by step of how it all works. So that if you, and when you, because you should at some point take it back, then you know exactly what to look for. Okay? You do not need to personally perform every function inside of your business. You certainly should be hiring support for bookkeeping, for advertising copy, putting together your, your content, administration design, maybe payroll. Yes. And, you know, anything else in between. So it's not whether or not you should get help, you should absolutely get help. It's whether you understand the function that you are outsourcing. Do you understand what you're outsourcing and what, how that can get done. Right. You want to. In order for you to continue to be a powerful leader in your business, you absolutely want to make sure that you have got the knowledge to take that back and know what are the critical questions to ask to figure out where to go next. So what happens, you know, if you're in a situation where your business coach leaves? What happens if the program closes? What happens if the agency shuts down? What happens if the person managing your advertising disappears? What happens if a platform changes? What happens if the strategy stops working? What happens if you need to evaluate whether the work is actually producing a return? Do you understand the decisions that are being made? Do you know all of the ins and outs of how your sales process works, your marketing? Do you. Could you, could you figure it Out. Could you figure it out quickly, right? You don't have to do anything. Sorry. You have to do everything. But as the owner, you should absolutely understand how the business works, because that knowledge gives you power. And in the role that you're in, you need to be able to assess performance. You need to know the right questions to ask. You need to be able to hire effectively. So picking the right people for the job. And you also need to recognize when advice does not fit. And I think this is especially important for female entrepreneurs. I want the woman that we support to see themselves as smart, capable business people, right? Not just teachers with a studio. Not reluctant entrepreneurs who have to apologize for caring about profit. Not people who need someone else to rescue them when things get challenging. You can be passionate about movement and be financially savvy. You can care deeply about your clients and still understand your margins. You can be warm and community orientated while still holding your team accountable. You can be an excellent CEO and an excellent teacher. These identities are not in conflict. But becoming that kind of owner does require a little bit of learning. And a coach should help you to build that knowledge, to help you to fill in the gaps, to explain the reasoning behind a decision so that you can see these patterns, you can learn how to evaluate the results. Should help you to also develop a level of judgment. Because the most valuable thing that you gain from coaching is not one successful marketing campaign. It's the ability to make decisions long after the campaign ends. So imagine you've got two studio owners. The first is handed a promotion and told exactly what to post, what to charge and what to say. The promotion works super useful, but when the market conditions change, she might need another set of instructions. Now, the second owner understands why the offer was structured that way. She understands the client problem that it solves, how that fits into that larger client journey. She understands the financial impact. She understands what data to review. When market conditions change, she can adapt. The first owner got a tactic, right? The second owner developed their capability. And that is a completely different return because that capability compounds. So once you understand positioning, you can apply that to future offers. Once you understand retention, you'll be able to identify problems earlier forever. Once you understand capacity, you can make better scheduling and pricing decisions, right? So once you understand all of this, you know you can build a team that owns outcomes versus just waiting for you to tell them what to do. You can actually delegate properly. And this is how coaching becomes bigger than just advice giving. It changes the quality of the owner, right? It changes the quality of the decisions that you make where you focus your time and energy and you become a stronger leader of your business. And when you become a stronger leader of your business, the entire business gets stronger too. Now, there's another question I believe every business owner should be asking when they are considering coaching. And it's this. Is this helping me to create a short term spike or a business that can still be healthy five years from now? Okay, now don't get me wrong, short term results matter. You still need revenue, you still need leads, you need clients, you still need progress. Yes. I'm not suggesting that everything should take years to work. It should not actually. But there is a difference between creating something that is built to last and creating something that is kind of fragile. And a promotion might generate a large number of clients very quickly. But on the the fallout from that is, can you continue to deliver an excellent experience to those clients? Does that promotion that you run build allow for profitability for the next year or did it look like a nice cash boost over that particular month? Can the schedule handle the demand? Can the team support all those new clients? Will your existing clients stay? All of this kind of comes into play when you're thinking more strategically, right? Because a marketing campaign can create a lot of attention, but what happens next? And a lot of times, you know, growth will expose weaknesses, right? Honestly. And you know, that's why we care about strategy and systems inside of Thrive. Because we're not only looking at how to create strong, you know, at the strong next quarter, we're looking as to whether the business can hold the result that that gives. And also that you're building towards a business 12 months from now that is stronger than it is today as well. 24 months from now is stronger than it is today. So we're looking for the longer term, right? Which means that we're not building a business that is held together by tactics or just what you can remember you did last time. We're not. We are not building a business that doesn't let you take time off. We're not building a business where you get sucked into every job, right? That's not sustainable. We want a business that it feels good to you because your wellness matters too, right? Your energy is not separate from your business strategy. Your health is not like there's something that you can focus on later. We know that. And you are one of the business's most important resources. So your ability to think clearly matters, your ability to regulate matters, your ability to make decisions matter. Your ability to lead with patience and consistency matters. Your Creativity matters. Your relationships matter. Right? And when you are completely depleted, the business will feel different. Every decision feels heavier, everything feels more urgent. You're more reactive. Oh my gosh, it's just not a great place to be. And so you make a lot of short term choices because you don't have the energy to think strategically. So protecting your well being is not selfish. It's part of protecting the company. And so what we want to do is make sure we're building a business that helps you to stay in a healthy place. Right. And that doesn't mean that we're going to eliminate everything that is difficult at all. Your business will always have seasons that are more demanding than others. We, but we also don't want to build a business that requires you to stay in a permanent state of utter exhaustion. That is not a successful model at all. The goal is not only to make you more money, it's to help you build the leadership systems and strategy and structure that will help you to sustain your business and to feel very fulfilled by it. I want that studio to exist for as long as you want to own it, whether that's five years or 15 years. Okay? So let's talk about what return should coaching produce? I want to talk about money for a minute. Business coaching is an investment. And just like every single other investment you have made in your life, you should expect a return. And I believe that good business coaching should put more profit back into your pocket than it takes out. Now, that doesn't mean that every result is immediate at all. It does not mean that every benefit appears neatly on one line of your profit and loss statement. But business coaching should create value, measurable value from your business. Okay. And what that means, and this is often, you know, we see, I have to say, you know, this is an industry where we see a lot of numbers being thrown around, right. And we have to be very careful with those numbers and how we interpret them. Okay. Because you can make numbers look a whole lot of different ways. And whatever way you want it to look, you can make it look. So we want to be thoughtful about how the, how we are, what the expectations are for the return. Okay. And that value, the return should come from higher, higher revenue numbers. Yes. Stronger margins. Yes. A more stable, structured business. Yes. Fewer costly mistakes. Yes. Better hiring, improved team performance. And you as the owner, getting back time in your day, in your week and in your month. And this should be something that is, you should be able to see over the course of the coaching experience that you have. And I think when we think about cost of coaching versus return. We always are thinking about it in terms of revenue, and we should be actually, if you're paying 25,000, 30,000, $40,000 for business coaching, you should not be satisfied with a few interesting conversations and a few PDFs, okay? You should be looking for a multiple on that investment. You should be looking for an return of at least two to three times what you've invested over the period of the coaching. Okay. And I think this is really important because if you are paying, and I've seen it, 30 to $40,000 and your ROI is expected to pay you back over five years, well, yeah, that's obviously going to be appropriate, but you should be looking to see the return much, much quicker because good coaching will give you that return much, much quicker. Right. And so if you're looking, if you're investing 30,000 or $40,000, you should be expecting to get back in profit in your pocket, you know, 60 to $100,000. And this is something that I'm seeing is not happening, unfortunately. And I think that we have to be really careful about this investment that we are being being sold in a lot of places by a lot of people because I think it's very challenging to make that amount of money back in profit multiple times over. So no ethical coach will ever guarantee a specific financial result. I don't do that. Why? Because you are the business owner, you're the one on the ground, you're the one making the decisions. But we can give you guidance as to what to expect. And our studio owners in Thrive get a return on their investment that is very, very, very, very healthy because we care about results, we track your results, we see your results, and we are mindful of. And our goal is always to give you more profit back in your pocket. Right. So I want, as you're thinking about, you know, your, your investment, you know, you're thinking about what is, what will make this investment worthwhile for you. What is it that you want to get out of the experience? And I think that it's also about what you then get after that fact. Right. I talked a lot about what we give to our members inside of Thrive in terms of empowering them with skills and insights and processes and structure that creates values for them for years. You know, a better retention system will affect hundreds of thousands of future client interactions. Right. A better, better leadership tools and skills will give you back in more enjoyable experiences of running a team. Right. It'll take away a lot of stress for you, better understanding of your numbers will probably help prevent costly mistakes. Right. And so all of the ways that we work with our studio owners is giving them the immediate results that they're looking for today, solving problems that exist today, while also helping them to build the skills and the expertise to take that business forward and whatever version of that business forward for as long as they want. Right. And I think that that compounding value is what makes Thrive so incredibly powerful, which is why we have such strong relationships that all of our members. And it's what makes really good coaching different from just getting expensive advice. Right? So you also, you know, have to be willing to learn, willing to do, have to be willing to implement. And so it is not this sort of outsourcing of responsibility for your business, truly. And in order for us to empower you as a business owner, it cannot be that. It is a partnership. We come together, we work together, and our goal is to help you build a successful business in whatever shape that looks like to you. So the coach should bring perspective. They should bring this sort of pattern recognition of understanding the business. The industry and where you're heading should bring business knowledge, yes. Strategic thinking, yes. The insights, the tools, the tactics, the secrets of how to grow, for sure, but also accountability processes and support as you implement, right? And you as the owner, you're going to bring the context, you're going to bring the action. You're going to bring the honesty about where you want to go and what might be holding you back. And you bring ultimately the ownership of your business and then also the rewards. So what do you get from a business coach, at least from my perspective, you should get a lot of clarity. You should understand where your business is now, where you want it to go, and what is getting in the way. You should get strategy, not random ideas, not a collection of disconnected, random tasks. You should get a clear understanding of what matters most and why it matters. You should get perspective. When you're in the business every day, it's often difficult to see those patterns objectively. So a coach should help you to step back and see what you might not see from the inside as being the problem. But you should also get a little bit of accountability, right? Not accountability that makes you feel like a child completing homework or someone who's harassing you, but accountability that reconnects your actions to the goals that you said already mattered to you. But you should also get education. You should understand more about the business at the end of the coaching relationship than you did at the beginning. You should get stronger systems, right? The Business should be more consistent, more measurable, and less dependent on your remembering everything and your personal effort. You should get stronger decision making, which means that you're going to be more confident in assessing opportunities. Opportunities like who to hire. You should also be able better at understanding risks involved in investments and understanding how to make trade offs and compromises where you need to. And you should also get more profit, but more than that, know exactly how to get more profit, right? So your business should become financially more stable, more robust, and you should get more ownership. And not ownership in the legal sense, you already own the business, but ownership in the psychological sense, right? That feeling that you understand your business, you can lead it, you're making the decisions. You're not waiting for someone else to rescue you or blindly copying another studio or not operating on hope, right? You're becoming the kind of businesswoman who can truly build something incredibly durable and powerful. And that is what we work with our studio owners to achieve inside of thrive. We're not here to create dependence. We're here to build your capability. We're not here to turn every studio into the same, you know, three location studio. We are here to help you identify the best model for your goals, your market, your talents, your life. We're not here to chase revenue at every cost. We're here to help you build profitably, which is important and also equally as important, sustainably. So we're not only asking how can we grow this, we're asking should we do this? Is the business ready for this? What will this growth require? What will make it possible? And what will it cost you as the owner? Because those questions all matter too. Growth for the sake of growth is not the goal. The goal is a business that truly works for you, right? A business that serves its clients well. A business that supports a fantastic team, that has great energy. A business that creates meaningful profit that you are proud of, but also a business that can adapt and evolve and does not collapse if you take a two week vacation. But ultimately, I want to help you build a business that allows you to to be healthy and happy enough to enjoy what you have built. So let's bring this all together. There is no one size fits all plan for building a successful boutique fitness studio. Your strategy has to reflect your market, your strengths, your goals, your capacity and the life that you want to build. And that is why good coaching cannot simply be a coach repeating what has worked for them. It cannot be a collection of random tactics and it cannot be a system that takes all the knowledge and power out of Your business out of your hands. Good coaching should help you to understand your business more deeply and make you a stronger decision maker. It should improve your strategy and strengthen your systems and also by the way, protect your amazing energy, all while helping to make your profit stronger too. And ultimately it should create a business that has longevity, that can still be healthy five years from now, not just one that has been is going to be good five months from now. Because when you have good coaching, it should empower you. You are not just a Pilates teacher, a yoga teacher or a bar instructor who happens to also have a studio. You are a businesswoman and you can understand strategy and you can understand numbers and you can understand marketing and you can lead a high performing team and you can make great decisions and you can build a profitable business without abandoning the enjoyment and that passion that brought you into this industry in the first place. And the right coach will help you to develop those capabilities, not take them away from you. So if you're considering business coaching, ask yourself, will this person, and it's important that you're talking to a person help me to understand my business? Do they understand the multiple paths to growth, the different doors that are that I could be stepping through into to reach that next level of growth? Can she help me see the whole system, not just one tactic here and there? Will I become more capable as a business owner through this process? And is there a clear path towards a meaningful return on my investment? And is this approach helping me build the business that I actually want? I think those the questions that matter now. If everything that I spoke to you about today, this philosophy that I have around coaching resonates with you, then this is exactly how we approach coaching inside of Thrive. Thrive is my business coaching program for boutique fitness studio owners who want to build a profitable and sustainable business. We help you to think strategically about your marketing, about your sales, about retention, pricing systems, team leadership and yes the numbers and financial performance as well. But we are not building the business instead of you. We are building the business with you, alongside you. And we're going to help you to develop that knowledge, that confidence and that decision making skills to lead it well in the next 12 months, but also for the following 12 months and maybe the following 12 years. Because your business should become stronger through coaching and so should you. Now I would love to talk through a little bit more about how Thrive works and what you get inside you get. We, we ha. We have our sort of our, our pillar is our weekly coaching sessions that we do all join and it's such a fabulous community of generous studio owners inside. I can't tell you. It's so wonderful to see the smiling faces every single week when we talk and hear about where they're at, what they're focused on and how they're growing. And just watching them develop these incredible skills and insights and just this, this sort of, this, this sort of knowledge base that they, they have now sort of are leaning into that is they are more empowered as business owners. It's wonderful. I cannot tell you how wonderful it is to see them grow. And if you want to be a part of that too, then you can learn more about thrive@spring3.com forward/thrive. And I'd encourage you to just hop on a quick call and we will take you through it. All right, so I want to leave you with this question. All right. Right now, if you're considering or are working with a coach right now, I want to just to think about whether the support that you're getting making you a more savvy, smarter business owner or are you simply depending on someone else? Because I think that'll tell you a lot about the kind of coaching that you're getting right now. And perhaps if you want to become a more knowledgeable, smarter business owner, then perhaps there are other options available to you. Thank you so much for listening to me as I take you through the ins and outs of but business coaching in the boutique fitness studio industry and my philosophy. I really have enjoyed sharing with this with you. It's been something that I've been thinking about doing for a while and something that I very rarely do, honestly. So I will be back to our regular programming next week talking all about boutique fitness studio growth strategies and sharing a lot of my insights on that as well. So have a great rest of your week and I'll see you in the next episode. Did you love this episode and want more? Head to spring3.com and check out my free resources that will help you run a profitable and fulfilling studio business. And before you go, one last reminder. There is no one way to do what you do, only your way. So whatever it is that you want to do, create or offer, you've got this. Thanks again for joining me today and have a wonderful rest of your day.