Episode 320
320. The 5 stages of Pilates studio business, with Raphael Bender
These are the 5 predictable stages every Pilates studio owner goes through — from dreamer to thriving CEO. Exactly what breaks, plus what to do to grow at each stage.
Stage 0 – Wantrepreneur
Stuck in planning mode. No revenue.
Fix: Stop thinking, start doing. Follow Ep 273 for exact steps.
Stage 1 – Solopreneur ($1k–$10k/mo)
Teaching, cleaning, selling — overwhelmed.
Fix: Raise prices, set client boundaries, focus on one offer, outsource admin.
Stage 2 – Builder ($10k–$40k/mo)
Small team, people problems, misalignment.
Fix: Get clear on values, enforce standards, fire low performers, track key metrics.
Stage 3 – Entrepreneur ($30k–$60k/mo)
Great first studio, second struggles.
Fix: Nail positioning, document systems to scale team and quality.
Stage 4 – CEO ($50k–$100k/mo)
Multi-location chaos, communication breakdown.
Fix: Install leadership systems, clarify roles, trim fat, build a real marketing team, and define a cash-positive growth model.
Connect with me on Instagram: @the_raphaelbender
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Transcript
These are the five stages of pallide studio growth. Welcome to pallide's elephants. I'm Rafael Bender.
Speaker:I agree with my pallide studio from zero to 2.4 million a year, over a decade and
Speaker:for the last four or five years I've been mentoring pallide studio owners I've seen over a hundred
Speaker:lots of financials for pallide studios. I've seen these stages very consistently.
Speaker:And basically what I've found is that there are predictable things
Speaker:that break at each stage in the predictable constraints at each stage that you need to
Speaker:get through in order to unlock the next stage. So I'm going to talk you through all of
Speaker:those. All right, stage zero. Wantrepreneur. This is where most
Speaker:people get stuck. Revenue zero, team zero. You're stuck
Speaker:thinking, researching, analyzing, planning, preparing,
Speaker:you've haven't basically taken any action. You're maybe you've got
Speaker:lots of notion boards or Pinterest boards or mood boards or plans, business plans,
Speaker:but you actually haven't done anything. And the core problem at this level
Speaker:is you're waiting for the perfect plan, instead of just creating momentum by taking action.
Speaker:And so what you need to do is stop planning and just do something.
Speaker:And the actual thing that you need to do is go listen to Episode
Speaker:273 of Pilatez Alphonse. That's how to make 100 K-year teaching Pilates. And just follow the exact
Speaker:steps in that episode. Just do it. And that's basically going to be you
Speaker:doing a warm-out reach. So essentially messaging people, you know, and saying, "Hey,
Speaker:you know, come and do Pilatez with me." So I go listen to that episode. There's more detail on what you need to do. But you need to stop thinking,
Speaker:"You're way over thinking this." And you need to start generating some action. And when you have action in my
Speaker:mentor, then the plan will make itself as you go. Right, so that's
Speaker:stage zero, the wantrepreneur. And to unlock that stage, you need to actually
Speaker:just do something, you need to take action. All right. And when you take action, I'm not talking to like one action.
Speaker:I'm talking to take consistent action over, uh, smear multiple weeks or a couple of months.
Speaker:Then you get to stage one of the solarpreneur. And this is where you have actual revenue, you have actual clients. And you're
Speaker:still just a solar person, you have no one working for you yet. Uh, you might be making in US dollar terms
Speaker:a thousand up to about 10,000 a month. And you've
Speaker:got a team of zero, you're doing everything you're teaching, you're selling, you're doing the admin,
Speaker:the cleaning. Uh, maybe you have a business in your, you know, at home. Um,
Speaker:and your problems at this stage are that you have very poor boundaries.
Speaker:And so clients cancel at the last minute and they expect not to pay. Uh, they
Speaker:expect you to hold their spot for a month while they go away on vacation. Um, you're, um, you're
Speaker:probably, undercharging, probably over delivering. You probably are doing special services
Speaker:for eat for different clients. Uh, you're afraid to enforce boundaries. Maybe
Speaker:you're seeing people at times that you don't want to see them who you sing. Clients you just don't enjoy working with. Um, you're seeing people,
Speaker:you know, in the mornings and in the evenings and you have a five hour break in between. And maybe also at this
Speaker:stage, you are doing multiple different things. Like maybe you do bar and reform
Speaker:and mash. So that you can quite attract more clients to be a full service. Uh,
Speaker:and that just fractures your attention even more and makes you feel overwhelmed
Speaker:and, like, you're drowning. Uh, and so to graduate to the next level,
Speaker:what you need to do is raise, probably raise your prices, consolidate
Speaker:down to just one service. So just reform or just bar or just mat and communicate
Speaker:boundaries to your clients most importantly. And now all of that comes along with consolidating
Speaker:and erosing your prices. So you need to communicate your boundaries. So for example, you might
Speaker:say, hey, I'm only doing one on ones on Friday's moving forward. I'm not doing one on ones anymore. I'm only teaching
Speaker:groups. You might say, you know, you might start enforcing your cancellation
Speaker:policy and have a couple of uncomfortable conversations. You might via a couple of clients that
Speaker:you just don't enjoy working with or have consistently broken your
Speaker:boundaries. The final thing you can do here is you need to outsource
Speaker:some of the most manual tasks that you're doing. I'm talking cleaning, admin, bookkeeping,
Speaker:you know, that type of thing so that you can focus more on customer service like
Speaker:as in giving great classes and also retention and sales.
Speaker:Alright, so that is stage one, the solar printer. And when you do those things, you consolidate to a single service,
Speaker:you enforce boundaries, you're putting, put your prices up and you learn to have those hard conversations with your
Speaker:clients and guess what, your revenue goes up, your stress goes down,
Speaker:you free up time and you can, and you graduate to stage two, which I'm going to call the builder.
Speaker:And that is where you hit about $10,000 US dollars per month and this stage goes up to roughly, you know,
Speaker:30 or 40,000 a month. And this is where you've got a team, you start hiring people, you can't teach
Speaker:all the classes that demand increases, you've got a team of 1 to
Speaker:7 or so people, you've hired a few instructors that are nice people, but now you have people
Speaker:problems because when you hired, you went very intentional about your hiring
Speaker:and you just hired quite nice people. But it turns out that most of them, possibly all
Speaker:of them are not aligned. When I say not aligned, I mean, they don't want to work the hours
Speaker:that you need them to work or they teach a completely different style of Pilates
Speaker:so that maybe you're a classical teacher and they teach contemporary or vice versa. Maybe you teach strength-based reformer and
Speaker:they're interested in, you know, doing pelvic floor and breathing. So it's just, it's a non-aligned
Speaker:situation and possibly they're just probably they're just not
Speaker:that good. And how do I know they're not that good and how do you know they're not that good? Because you're still the most popular
Speaker:instructor and when you, and how do you know the most popular instructor just look at the class numbers, your class numbers are higher.
Speaker:And then you're thinking, "Ah, but Sally, you know, she teaches Thursdays and Thursdays on a great day, so maybe it's just that," and then I,
Speaker:you know, I ask you, "Well, do you teach on Thursdays?" And you're like, "Yeah, I teach on Thursdays and how you're Thursdays?" and "Yeah, my Thursdays I class
Speaker:is a full, okay?" So Sally's not as good as you. So your instructors
Speaker:are lovely people, but they miss a line most of them in terms of expectations, values and possibly, probably,
Speaker:ask your level as well. And when stuff breaks, you know, when someone calls in
Speaker:sick or the plumbing breaks, or a client has an emergency or the payment process that goes down,
Speaker:you have to fix it. Or the only one who doesn't eat fixing, first thing anyone does when anything breaks, is calls you.
Speaker:So, and at this stage, you're making money, but which is great. So you've got this great business that's
Speaker:making money, but you're not tracking your numbers, you don't know how much profit you're making, you certainly wouldn't
Speaker:know what your capacity utilisation is by instructor. You don't know your turn or your
Speaker:first visit to sign up conversions or any of that stuff. And although
Speaker:now you've had some clear tough conversations with your clients and you probably are enforcing your weight lists
Speaker:and you have good boundaries with your clients, you're not doing that with your instructors, you're avoiding tough conversations
Speaker:around alignment and as a consequence, you have a misaligned team and almost certainly you have at least one person on
Speaker:your team who you know in your gut and needs to go.
Speaker:All right, so the central, you know, the core problem at this stage, the builder stage where your first day
Speaker:in the higher team is that you're scared to lead and as a consequence, you have a low performance
Speaker:culture and so what you need to do is get crystal clear on your values and you're teaching method
Speaker:and enforce those. You roll those out to your team, enforce those
Speaker:and higher lead, coach and when necessary for out to those values
Speaker:and teaching method, you need to start tracking key metrics monthly. So your sign-ups to the studio,
Speaker:your conversions from sign-up to, from first visit to sign-up, your capacity utilization by instructor and by
Speaker:class and your turn, and you need to basically start acting like the leader you want to be.
Speaker:Set x-pake expectations, have straight-up conversations, get rid of like performers and people who are not
Speaker:a value-spit. And when you do those things, you'll graduate to stage three, the entrepreneur. And that's
Speaker:what I call the entrepreneur. When you're reviews at roughly 30 to 60,000 U.S. dollars a month,
Speaker:there's probably still a single location, although you may have opened a second location.
Speaker:At this level, you have a team of probably between 5 and 10. And you've figured out those things that I
Speaker:just mentioned. So you've got a great team who's a line, you've got a strong brand at Studio #1.
Speaker:And like I said, you're thinking of opening a studio #2, it may be already have, but
Speaker:it's not going as smoothly as Studio #1. And the reason is that you build up
Speaker:this fantastic team at Studio #1 by mentoring people and getting people a thousand percent
Speaker:bored into the vision and the mission. And you've got just these fanatical team members who will run through
Speaker:a big wall for the company and for you, and fanatical clients who love
Speaker:your classes, but you haven't documented what it is that you do.
Speaker:You don't actually have processes for building a team, you've just kind of done it by instinct.
Speaker:And so now when you're thinking of opening a second studio or maybe you have opened a second
Speaker:studio, you've been essentially coasting on your brand equity. What I mean by that
Speaker:is you're a great teacher, you're very personable, you really care about your clients, you've transformed people's
Speaker:lives, and you've trained up your instructors to do that as well. Although most of
Speaker:them are not quite as good as you, and I say that as a measure of as measured by class attendance,
Speaker:you've got a cancer really, really love your classes, and maybe
Speaker:you started a few years back now, so if you're in the 30 to 60,000 US dollars a month range, you've probably been going, you know,
Speaker:two, three years at least. And back when you started maybe, you know, 2021, 2021, 2021, 2021, something
Speaker:like that, there wasn't a lot of competition. And so you just opened up, put the word Pilates on your own your sign, and
Speaker:clients came in, and you did a great job, and they loved it, and they started and I told their friends about them now.
Speaker:The landscape's different. There are more competitors around, there are franchises coming in, undercutting
Speaker:you on press. And you, you're okay, a studio one, because you've got a fanatically loyal
Speaker:client base, because they see and feel the difference, and maybe a few people went and tried those cheaper franchises,
Speaker:and they came back and said, you know what, that was your way better. So, you know, if you're doing good at studio
Speaker:one, but when you're open studio two, you find it really hard to get people in the door, because you haven't
Speaker:made it for a differentiator yourself from your competition, and so you're scaling
Speaker:prematurely, because essentially you haven't got a clear, clearly differentiated position,
Speaker:you can't say, in 10 words or less, how you're different from your competitors in
Speaker:a way that is meaningful to your ideal client. Like you might say, you know, we do Pilates
Speaker:that promotes x, y or z, but the thing is probably x, y or z is something
Speaker:that some are all of your competitors also say, or /a/ and something that you'll meet your clients actually
Speaker:don't care about or know what it means. So you're not clearly differentiated, and I know that because
Speaker:if you were, you wouldn't be struggling to get clients. And you
Speaker:also don't have documented processes
Speaker:to hire, train, lead a team. And so
Speaker:in order to graduate to the next level, you need to nail your positioning. So
Speaker:you need to be able to say, in 10, short word or less, how are you meaningfully different from all
Speaker:of the other competitors in a way that's important to your ideal client. And you need to
Speaker:build a hiring and ramping system to clone yourself or your top instructor. So maybe at
Speaker:this point you are, you'll probably still are the best instructor. Although maybe at this point you have
Speaker:one or two like trusted instructors who you kind of coached up from, you know,
Speaker:from a pub who are as good or maybe even better than you. And if that's the case amazing, you can clone
Speaker:one of those people. But you need to clone someone who's a top instructor in the studio. And
Speaker:in order to do that, you need to implement consistent QC or quality control, so essentially,
Speaker:regularly like weekly, auditing instructors classes, giving them feedback and coaching
Speaker:them on a weekly basis. And so once you do those things, you graduate to stage 4, which
Speaker:I call the CEO. This is where your revenue is in the US $50 to $100,000
Speaker:per month range. You've got two to three studios. You've
Speaker:got a team of probably 10 to 20-ish people. And
Speaker:you've got multiple locations and you're preparing to really scale. And you have systems, you have a studio manager, you
Speaker:have some delegation in place, you're no longer managing the instructors yourself, you're managing the managers,
Speaker:who manage the instructors. But now you start to run into organisational problems. Communication
Speaker:is breaking down. People at Studio One are doing something in class. Studio Two doesn't know what's happening.
Speaker:There's a special on a Studio Two, Studio Three doesn't know what's going on. The rostering gets
Speaker:mixed up. There are just communications between different communication problems, between different locations,
Speaker:different departments, that the left-hand starts to not know what the right-hand is doing. And so there's duplication of effort,
Speaker:there's confusion, there's people working across purposes, and there's lots of inefficiencies, people working on the wrong
Speaker:things. So essentially, your scaling and complexity
Speaker:gross, and you need to develop
Speaker:systems to matter to facilitate clear communication and alignment of
Speaker:priorities between the team. And at this point, you probably do need to trim a little bit of fat
Speaker:off the team, because probably people are doing things that are not crucial to the business,
Speaker:so you need to cut hours, maybe for some roles, you know, maybe word wasn't
Speaker:an important role when you're at one studio, but now is not relevant. Ensure everyone
Speaker:knows who owns water and what the reporting relationships are. And finally here, in
Speaker:order to scale as profitably and fastest possible, you
Speaker:need to decide on your growth model. So if you open your own studios and you're only 100 percent, that's great.
Speaker:You've got total control, but it's very expensive to open a studio and you need to recruit that cash out layer. The capital
Speaker:out layer before you open the next one, otherwise you're going to run out of money, you know, the more studios you open, the less
Speaker:money you have. So you need to either figure out a way to bootstrap it with a very low start-up cost and quick way to recruit
Speaker:that cost so open, you know, like pre-launch marketing and so forth, so that you open already
Speaker:very close to or cash positive or you need to, you know, take on partners
Speaker:or do a franchise model, which have their own challenges, which is not the
Speaker:place for me to go into those here, but you need to figure out a cash positive
Speaker:way to scale. And at this point, you probably need to hire or build a real marketing team
Speaker:as well, because maybe you're doing the marketing or maybe you've got somebody who does meta-eds for you or whatever, but it's kind of like
Speaker:one part part time person doing it. And at this point, you probably really need like a professional to do your
Speaker:ads and probably a couple of professionals, you know, someone on Google, someone on meta, someone on organic. So,
Speaker:you know, you're posting on Instagram, just won't cut it anymore at this point. So, and then you've
Speaker:just in terms of the communication, what you know there is leadership rhythms, so like weekly one-on-ones,
Speaker:uh, weekly leadership meetings, weekly team meetings, you know, dashboards, everybody in the company can see, you know, accountability
Speaker:metrics, all of that stuff. And once you nail most of that,
Speaker:you get to scale all your business profitably, uh, and uh, the next level,
Speaker:I don't know what the next level is in Pilates Studios, um, I'm sure there is an next level, because if I look at,
Speaker:say, club Pilates, they're at 700 franchises, they must be doing in the, you know, in the, uh, hundreds of
Speaker:millions per year, um, so, uh, you know, or if probably in
Speaker:the head office, they're probably doing definitely in the tens of millions per year, possibly over 100 million, um,
Speaker:so they're definitely here's another stage, beyond my stage four here, but I haven't been there yet,
Speaker:um, my company's currently doing about 300 or 250,000 U.S. per month, and, uh,
Speaker:I think we're basically still at stage four, so maybe for my particular business education, that goes
Speaker:up beyond 100 per month. Uh, but we're in that same head count where it like, uh, 18 head count,
Speaker:I think at the moment. So those are the five stages, stage zero, the wantrepreneur, you need
Speaker:to just do something, and what you should do is listen to episode two, 73, and actually implement the things that I say. In that episode,
Speaker:stage one, the solopreneur, where you've got one to 10,000 US a month, revenue, uh, and you need to
Speaker:raise your prices and solidate down to a single offering, communicate boundaries to your clients and
Speaker:outsource basics, like admin and cleaning. Stage two, the builder, you're doing, like, roughly 10 to 30 or 40 k a month,
Speaker:you've got a small team of one to six or seven or eight. Um, you've hired a few instructors, but they're probably not
Speaker:aligned. They're almost certainly not anywhere near as good as you. Um, when anything breaks, it falls on you
Speaker:and you need to get crystal clear on your values and you're teaching method and it's start tracking method metrics monthly
Speaker:and you need to start putting on your big girl pants or your big boy pants and acting like the leader that you want to be
Speaker:in set expectations, have straight up conversations, get rid of life performers and people that are not a values fit.
Speaker:When you do that, you've got your eight to stage three, the entrepreneur, where you're revenue somewhere in the 30 to 60 K a month range. You've
Speaker:got a team of roughly five to 10. It's a great team. They're all aligned. They're all good. They're all teaching great classes. You're
Speaker:maybe thinking of or have just opened our studio too, but it's not going as well because you
Speaker:didn't have good positioning. You just had brand equity and you also didn't have processes.
Speaker:You just had you riding a bike really well, but you couldn't draw a checklist
Speaker:of how to ride that bike. That's somebody else can follow and ride the bike as well as you. So you need to do those two things
Speaker:to scale. You need to clearly differentiate yourself in articulate your positioning in a way that is meaningfully
Speaker:meaningful for your ideal client avatar and that they can easily understand and you need to develop processes
Speaker:around hiring, training, leading your team of instructors.
Speaker:And part of that is implementing QC. And then finally, if stage 4, the CIO where your revenue is roughly in the 50-100
Speaker:K-month, you got two or three studios, team of 10 to 20 roughly. You've got systems,
Speaker:you've got a studio manager, you've got excellent instructors, you've got QC, you're no longer managing the instructors,
Speaker:you've got someone else who does that for you, now you're managing the managers and you're starting to run into your limitations there where
Speaker:you're finding that, you know, one manager doesn't know what the other managers doing or the managers are working across purposes or somebody's
Speaker:waiting on somebody else to do something but they're dragging their heels on it, there's confusion, there's misalignment, there's inefficiency
Speaker:and the core problem is that you don't have systems in place for
Speaker:communication and so you need to put those in place, you know, to probably trim some of the fat in the organisation,
Speaker:you've probably got to many levels of middle management, to many managers of this that and the other. And then you also need
Speaker:to find a profitable growth model whether that's bootstrapping it with a low capital cost of OpenHS
Speaker:Studio and a quick road to profitability by pre-selling memberships before you open
Speaker:or whether that's franchising or a partnership model. And you probably got to need a real, you know, grown up marketing
Speaker:team at this point because just you're posting on Instagram is not the thing anymore. All right, so I hope
Speaker:you found that useful, dear listener, that is a true record of what I know about
Speaker:scaling Pilates Studios from Scouting My Own Studio up to stage 4 there and from
Speaker:also helping I would say 15 or 20 Studio Owners also start scale
Speaker:to stage 4 and hundreds of clients at various stages of each
Speaker:of these stages and I've seen the financials of over 100 of those businesses. So I believe this is a
Speaker:pretty accurate record, a pretty accurate roadmap of how to scale your Pilates business.
Speaker:All right, much love and I will see you in the next one.
