Stuck Teaching Every Class? Here’s Why Your Studio Isn’t Scaling

In this episode of The Pilates Business Podcast, host Seran Glanfield dives into one of the biggest growth blockers for boutique fitness studio owners: being the center of everything. 

Many Pilates studio owners build their business on passion and exceptional teaching - but without stepping into leadership, growth becomes capped by time, energy, and capacity. 

Seran explores the critical shift from instructor to business leader, sharing how to create systems, empower your team, and remove yourself as the bottleneck in your Pilates business. 

If you're feeling overwhelmed, stuck teaching too many classes, and struggling to scale your boutique fitness business, this episode will show you how to build a profitable, sustainable studio that runs smoothly—without relying on you for everything.

Learn more about Thrive: www.springthree.com/thrive

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Transcript

Does The Studio Run Without You

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Let me ask you something. What happens to your studio when you're not there? If you take a week off, does the business still grow? Do clients still enroll? Does your team still do what you need them to do without you? Or does everything quietly stall until you're back teaching, fixing, right, managing, or holding it all together? So many studio owners think that the goal is to be the best teacher in the room. But the studios that truly scale, they're built by leaders who actually remove themselves from being the center of the business. And in today's episode, I want to talk about that shift from teacher to business leader and how to build a business that is bigger than you. Well, hi there, I'm Sarah and 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. 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 Sarah and Glamfield. I'm the founder of Spring 3 Studio Business Consulting. And I'm so glad you're here, especially if you're new, because this is where we share all of the insights and tips and all of the things that I am seeing that I want to share with you from everything when it comes to building a boutique fitness studio business. If you've been listening for a while, welcome back. I'm glad you're here. This episode is about a topic that, oh my gosh, this is something that comes up over and over again. And it has always done, honestly, from day one. And it's it's for you, the studio owner who loves teaching, who has built their business around being the exceptional teacher that you are. You're incredible what you do. Your clients adore you, your classes feel full of care and intention and attention, right? But it also is often the reason why we're seeing some stalling, some pause and growth, some capacity constraints. Because often, if that is your role as the leader in your business, the business often also feels quite heavy for you because you're teaching a lot. You're making a lot of decisions on your own too. You're also carrying the emotional weight of other teachers' schedules on your shoulders. And somewhere along the way, you might wake up along the way and think to yourself, my goodness, literally everything in this business depends on me. And I think that a lot of folks fall into this idea. And I don't know where it comes from. I don't want to go down that path, but it is a bit of a misconception. I think it's not talked about enough in the in the industry, which is that we have teachers, uh, we have exceptional teachers, we have teet people who have been teaching for years and years and years and years and years who have no business running a business. And so being an exceptional teacher does not automatically make you a strong business leader. I believe you can learn those skills to become a business leader, but if you don't, then you cannot automatically assume that just because you have spent a lot of time, energy, and money on your teacher training, that that means that you are naturally going to be a good business person. And I don't think it's a flaw. I just think it's a different skill set. I know it's a different skill set. It's a skill set that I teach my studio owners inside of Thrive every single week. And I think that the studio owners that I work with, and I'm so lucky to work with, and these are who I love working with most, are studio owners whose businesses are built on passion first, on the love of movement first. That is a beautiful thing. And my goodness, the world needs more of you guys, truly. But that passion is not something that is really, really, rescalable without some of these other business skills as well. And the moment that you realize that your job is not just to teach, but to lead is when I see things start to shift. And sometimes that sort of smacks you in the face, right? Um, like a wet fish. And sometimes it's sort of like this 2 a.m. wake up of, oh my goodness, what did I do? So I want to talk you through the mindset shift, the shifts that happen when those studio owners that shift from being in that place where they are doing it all and they're reaching that capacity constraint to being in a place where they have a business that is evolving, that is growing, and that actually feels like it's freeing and exciting and beyond just one person. And this, by the way, to be clear, is not about stepping away from teaching at all. I do not believe you need to do that. I believe you, as a leader of the business, can also, and if it is what you want and love to do, absolutely continue to teach for sure. But alongside the teaching, it's also about stepping up and into leadership. Now, one of the problems that I see, and it's really common, and you might find yourself in this space as well, which is where you are the owner of the business, but you're also the kind of lead teacher, maybe some might call you the star teacher, right? You are the one who perhaps teaches many of the classes, sometimes most of the classes, but you also are the one whose classes everybody wants to be in. Clients want your sessions, they want your classes. Um, and at first, this feels fabulous, right? Because you've got four classes, you've got this loyal client following, and this is probably what propelled you in the early days of business ownership. But over time, and you might be feeling this, it becomes a bit of the bottleneck. And the impact is that really you can't scale your schedule. There are only a certain number of hours that you can teach without being completely exhausted. But the other impact is that your revenue is tied to you being physically in the studio delivering your best classes time after time after time. And growth is then capped by that energy, by that time, and by your availability. And so what happens is the business can only grow as fast as you can work. And you're already human and you have other things going on. So what do you do? And I think that when you're in this place where your business relies on your presence being being in the studio in order for revenue to be generated, it isn't it isn't a business that is giving you a any freedom at all, right? It's really actually just a job with overhead, with rent. Okay. And I think that when you are thinking about your business and perhaps this next phase, so if you're in this spot right now, the next phase of growth for you is that it's not about replacing you, okay? It's about finding a way to repeat what you are doing elsewhere within the business. Okay. And I think that requires a bit of a different way of thinking about your role. Because typically, as a leader, especially as a early leader, as an early manager, as an early business owner, we're often micromanaging a lot of things. I see it all the time. And it's just natural because this is your business, you care about the revenue, you care about the clients, you have these standards that you know are so important and they are, but we don't even realize quite how much micromanaging we're doing. And it's not because you want to be a control freak, right? It's because you genuinely care about the standards and the quality that takes place in your studio. You want your experience to be a certain way, you want things done right. But when when everything literally runs through you, your team never is able to step up and make a decision or take anything on themselves. And in fact, somewhat of the problem is that you're almost training them to just come to you whenever anything happens, because everything just keeps running through you. And this sort of cycle could just continues on and on. And so you feel trapped in decision making, but your team also just feels very dependent on you as well. And you are exhausted because you are making all the decisions. And even if you get some help, you're still the one who is doing a lot of the things and making all the decisions, right? And so the next phase of growth isn't about necessarily being involved in everything. And this takes, oh goodness, it takes a little bit of discipline and self-awareness to recognize that actually, oh gosh, I think it's time for me to let go of that and I think it's going to be okay, right? And so it's not about being involved in everything, it's about being clear on what matters to you and to the business. And so when you're clear on your standards, when you're clear on your values, when your expectations are clear, and you can really communicate that simply and easily and transparently and directly, then your team will be able, anyone around you will be able to take care of things without you having to be involved, without having your hand in that pot, without you hovering over them. And I think this is where we start to see a lot of uh leverage being created, a lot of freedom, not because you're doing more, not because you're putting in more effort, not because you're working harder on more intensely, because you're aligning what it is that you want your business to look like with what is actually happening in your business. So I think that what we haven't touched on yet in this conversation that is important to mention is the systems piece of this. And systems and scale go hand in hand. You really can't scale a business without systems. And you cannot think about your systems without getting clear on what it is that you want for your business and your role in it. But I think before we even get to that place, there's also, I think, a lot of hesitation and maybe even this sort of mysterious objection towards systems. And I want to address this really quickly because I think there's a misconception that systems are rigid, are corporate, are impersonal, are paperwork, are bureaucracy. Um, and because of that, because that is something that you perhaps are not interested in, and I get it, no one wants that. Everything just sort of lives in your head, right? Because it's quicker to do it yourself, it's quicker to just get it done, it's quicker for you to do it. And to take on this sort of implementation of a system or actually mapping out a process, it takes a little bit of time up front, right? It does take a little bit of investment of thinking through what you want that to look like, thinking through the experience, and then communicating that with your team. So everything lives inside of your head right now, how you onboard your clients, how you do your marketing, how you handle issues like refunds or rescheduling or cancellations, all of how the decision makes, take, take, gets made in your business often sits inside the owner's head. And there is no one else who knows how to handle anything. And what that leads to very quickly is exhaustion and burnout for you. Um, often also a little bit of inconsistency in those standards, which is often the opposite of what you want. Um, and a business that honestly possibly falls apart when you step away, or more than off, more often than not, I find the studio owner doesn't really even like to step away from the business because they know things are going to fall apart. So the systems are not there to kill the culture and to make you super corporate and feel heavy. They are there to protect your culture, they're there to protect your standards, they're there to be able to allow you freedom. And let me tell you, they do. And those systems, once you've once you have taken the time just to simply think through what those steps are, uh, what the decisions need to be, you don't have to keep making those decisions again and again and again. So when your system, when your business runs on systems instead of on your memory and your brain capacity, trust me, your impact expands. Truly it does. And it's so incredibly powerful. And I have to say, you guys, with all of the tools that we have at our fingertips today to help us to craft these processes and these systems and all of the different softwares and project management tools, it is so much easier than it used to be. So I think that the systems are not about this sort of corporate efficiency, right? It's about leadership. It's about you stepping up and saying, I need my business to run like a machine. And in order for it to run like a machine, I need to know what these each of these sort of machines or systems do and what the inputs are and what the outputs need to be. Now, I think the final part of this shift into building a business that does not revolve around you as the studio owner is um a little bit more tricky to talk about. But it has to do with the way that you see yourself in your business and your identity. And because so many studio owners uh that I get to work with are so such uh are so invested in their teaching and are so care so much about the quality of their teaching and what their clients get out of their sessions and their level of education, they see themselves, you see yourself as a teacher first. And absolutely, nothing wrong with that at all. But the identity that you associate with truly shapes your behavior. There is often this idea that we want, don't want to be a business owner first and a teacher second, or we don't even want to be a teacher first and a business owner second. We still want to sit in the world of being a teacher only. And the reality is that if you always, if you only see yourself as a teacher, you will always default back to teaching when things feel shaky. And I see this a little bit where I see studio owners sort of take two steps forward and then one step back, where they'll invest in some of some developing some systems and hiring some help. But then the minute that things go a little bit shaky, they will take back those clients and put themselves back on the schedule and add more hours into the schedule at the beginning of the day and the end of the day, because that what that's what they know. And the impact of that is that you put yourself back in the place where you are then the bottleneck again. And the impact is that you stay busy, you stay needed and needy and dependent by the business to generate revenue, and the business just stays where it is, right? And so if you want to grow into that next phase where you're able to take time out, we have to really think about the identity that you have and how you think about the identity of being a teacher and a business leader. So the industry leaders are asking, you know, what is it that my business needs from me next? People who are thinking about business growth are looking at their business and thinking to themselves, I see all of the things that are happening in my business. Where do I need to be focused in order to grow from here? And what does the business need of me? That's the leader, that's the vision holder, that's the decision maker, that's the architect of, you know, designing the experience and the business as a whole. And this identity shift is actually quite subtle, but it truly changes so much. And once it clicks, the way that you approach growth, the way that you approach your team, your marketing, the way that you approach revenue generation and money and spending and income, so much of that also changes. So I want to wrap this up and leave you with that thought. Um, because building a business bigger than you doesn't necessarily at all mean that you have to step away from loving what you do at all. But it does mean that you need to design a business that doesn't collapse without you. That you want to build a business like you, like a machine that can operate without you having your hand in it at all times. And that shift from being a teacher to being an leader of your business requires often letting go of things, perhaps letting go of being the one who is teaching everything. And it also requires you to lead with clarity around what it is you want and the ability to be able to communicate really well, maybe letting go of some control and trusting that what you've built is solid, and using systems that help to um to maintain those standards to scale into what you want that vision of success for your business to be. And then stepping into that identity of the leader of your business. Now, this is something that comes up a lot, which is why I'm talking about it with you today. And if this did hit home for you, if this is something that you have faced and are thinking about and as you're aware of, and you know that your studio has more potential than what it is currently producing, or that in the way that it is currently operating, then this is the exact work that we do inside of Thrive. I will show you how to create the systems, yes. I will give you the marketing strategies, yes. I will help you to map out and plan exactly where to focus next and what opportunities exist in your business. But you guys, we also talk about mindset and your role as a leader and what that looks like. Thrive is the business coaching program for studio owners who are ready to grow smarter and not just work harder, right? It's for studio owners who want to build systems, who want to lead their business confidently and create a profitable, sustainable business that supports their life and does not just consume it. So you can learn more at springthree.com forward slash thrive. And you that is also where you will find the link to book a discovery call with me and my team to learn a little bit more about the options that you have inside of Thrive. So remember, your impact does not end at the end of your class. Honestly, there is so much more opportunity in your studio. And in order for you to grow to that next phase, it's going to be all about developing these other skills that help you to really continue to enjoy teaching as well. So I hope this was helpful to you as you go about building your boutique fitness studio business. And if you enjoyed what you heard, I'd be so appreciative if you could take a quick minute, go to wherever you're listening to this and rate and read this podcast. It would mean so much to me and help to get the podcast out into our community so that more teachers and business owners just like you can feel encouraged and supported on their journey in our industry. 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.