New entrepreneurs are trying to discover how to start a yoga studio and make it profitable fast. Why? Yoga is a favorite for many as it combines exercise with great spirit and activities, which is why it continues to get popular.
Although this is a good idea for a business, you must know that a yoga studio will take as much time and effort as any other business, if not more.
However, you don’t have to be discouraged since it is a matter of discipline and actually offering the services and classes.
With this in mind, how can you start this studio? Since we have some experience in the area, we figured it would be a top idea to share what we believe are the essential steps in the process.
Make Sure You Have a Certification
First, you should become a certified instructor at a Yoga Alliance Affiliate Institution.
Yoga Alliance is the body that oversees the national standards in yoga. Although it’s not required that teachers or schools be certified, it is the industry standard. Yoga Alliance has a list of requirements for certification for individuals and institutions.
This certification will bring great prestige to your business and give you an advantage over your competitors who didn’t take the time.
Thus, don’t see this step as a hassle but rather an opportunity, and take the time to get certified as soon as possible.
You must remember that the Yoga Alliance requires that an individual be certified by paying a $25 application fee and a $55 per year fee. To instruct 200-hour teacher training at your school, a registered yoga school (RYS) certificate is required.
The registration fee includes a $350 application fee and $200 annually for renewal.
Start Creating Your Business Plan
Next, you should create a business plan as this is the basics for any business in any niche.
Anyone who wants to open a studio must look at their working capital and create a plan based on it, short and long-term goals, and work around how you will make this studio happen.
You need projections. You should also be aware of the current rates for classes in your local area. Prices for yoga classes vary by location. They are usually more affordable in urban areas due to the availability of private and free instructors and studios that offer them.
This business plan includes more than how much you can spend and how you will work. It needs to have every idea and plan to achieve your goals when growing your yoga studio.
Also, it will work to request financing from any bank or lender you want or need to work with.
Should You Be an Owner or Sole Proprietor?
Many practitioners have given up their briefcases to teach others how to live a stress-free, healthy life.
Be aware that your stress-free existence could be affected if you trade in your suit for drawstring pants since your salary, in the beginning, can be about $40k a year and no more until you start growing in the business.
However, this can vary based on the option you choose for your business as well.
You have many options when it comes to starting your own practice. One option is to be a sole proprietor and provide one-on-one service for private clients. This is one of the most lucrative ways yoga instructors can make a living.
As a sole proprietor of a yoga center or private health club, you can also make a living as a yoga instructor. This option also offers added benefits, such as Equinox or New York Sports Club, which offer retirement and health benefits to their yoga teachers.
You can also open your own brick-and-mortar business. You have to pay rent utilities, manage staff and ensure that your business conforms with zoning requirements for the yoga you teach.
According to your projections, it is a matter of what you can afford, how much stress you can handle, and what looks and feels more profitable.
Build Your Clientele
It’s a good idea to start building your students and clientele even before you start the business itself. This will give you more knowledge and help you build a following from the existing students.
It’s not easy to get people to know you if you don’t take the time to network and socialize more than your introverted personality may be used to, but just remember how crucial it is, and you will get it done sooner than expected.
You may occasionally offer free classes or a donation-only class if you work for an established studio to increase customer interest in your teaching techniques.
You can always utilize a wide range of techniques and methods so people get more interested in you as the teacher and not the place where you may be working at the moment.
So when you are all ready to go with your own business, you get the chance to invite all your loyal students or those you know who show interest in your classes only to join you in your new adventure.
You Want to Select a Type of Yoga
It is important to decide what kind of yoga you are going to teach. Yoga, a broad term, can refer to thousands of different cross-disciplinary forms with different spiritual and physical goals. Some are more well-known and thus more lucrative than others.
Kundalini focuses on breathing techniques and working on the chakras among all the available options. These are energy points in the body and are quite popular along with Vinyasa and Ashtanga yoga. They are great workouts.
Hot yoga and Vinyasa Yoga are trendy, as it is very similar to going to the gym. Many instructors say that people are able to understand the concept and want to work out, lose weight and look good when they decide to offer this type in particular.
If you ask us, yoga studios should focus on one type of yoga to avoid confusing customers and ensure you are attracting a particular yet profitable audience that won’t visit you for one reason and leave because that’s not what you actually offer.
Select a Location for Your Yoga Studio
Although it may seem unlikely that a Bikram studio could be established on a tight budget, ventures that are based around other systems can be much easier to get off the ground.
Costs for a yoga studio are dependent on how much you can rent in your area and the cost of buying real estate.
In addition, and regardless of the location and city you are in, you must remember that most landlords will require six months’ rent upfront.
This is why a yoga studio can require a minimum of $300k in many cases. If you are lucky enough, about $200k, and there would be additional costs for heating, ventilation, and other amenities.
Fortunately, the $300k mark is often reached in large cities like Los Angeles and New York City, which means that you get the chance to spend less for the same results in smaller ones.
You just need to play it smart and take the time to find the right place, not the first one you look at just because it looks pretty.
This step will take some time, and some trainers and yoga instructors decide to take it by starting in their homes or visiting some of their students.
We know the concept is a studio, which means you must have your own place, but you need to evaluate, before anything else, how much it will cost you and if you have the capital and clientele necessary to cover this expense.
We can suggest to you in this step in specific to take it easy. You don’t need the largest space or building to teach your yoga lesson, but maybe a small space like a room for about 10 to 20 people in every session.
You won’t start with dozens of students at once, and even if it was the case, you still need to separate them into groups at different hours. Thus, look for comfort but affordability as well.
Be Unique & You Will Expand Your Brand
Some instructors are concerned that yoga’s popularity will lead to fewer potential clients as more schools and programs join the market, and for good reasons.
So the question you should be asking yourself is: What can you do to set your yoga business apart from other competitors?
You can take your practice outside of the studio and incorporate it with a fun activity.
Yoga and surfing are two things that seem to work well and are very trendy among the younger crowd. Overall, this is a popular activity and one you will see a lot if you start paying more attention to it.
Other options include yoga with pets or preparing sessions in outdoor spaces for people who want a different place instead of the usually enclosed studio that, as much as it took you to establish, cannot compete (for some people) with nature’s fresh air and environment.
Make sure you are fully prepared before you embark on the journey of enlightenment. You may be able to offer more classes if you live in large cities, and ideas to compete with other studios will be based on what people do in the area.
However, if you live in a rural or suburban area, you might need to target a specific demographic, such as moms who work from home during school hours. Keep overhead costs low. You can start small and let your business grow with your clients, not vice versa.
Simple Advice on How to Run a Successful Yoga Studio
The whole process of starting your studio will be summarized to:
- Creating your business plan.
- Choosing your legal entity.
- Finding the right place.
- Building clientele.
- Marketing your business and being competitive.
Since this is cleared so far, we thought that leaving some tips and advice would be even more useful than repeating ourselves over the process.
First, it is great to be a yoga teacher and share your practice with others by opening your own studio. It’s also a great opportunity as yoga is on the rise in America.
The number of American yoga practitioners increased from 20.4 million to 36 million in 2012, and if we focus on recent statistics, this number increased to over 43 million.
Although it may seem daunting, there are many things you need to remember that you didn’t have to consider when you were teaching classes. These tips will help you run a successful yoga studio, whether you’re just starting out or an experienced teacher:
Be Authentic
Be yourself first and foremost. You can create a yoga studio that is authentic to your practice, your philosophy, and you. Students will notice the authenticity, and they will gravitate to your space.
Diversify
Diversify your teaching schedule if you have the time. It is best not to have the same teacher teaching the same class more than once a week or back-to-back.
Some students may not be able to connect with one teacher. They might look for another studio if the teacher isn’t teaching them at the time they prefer to practice.
This could mean alternating instructors during the day and different instructors every day for the same class.
Diversifying your class offerings can help you bring more students as well.
Your students may benefit from a Yin Yoga or Yoga Nidra class once per day if your specialty is Power Yoga or Vinyasa. If you teach mostly Hatha classes, students might enjoy Kundalini classes.
You might offer a “Yoga for Athletes” class if your studio is near one to attract college students. Students will find the right style of yoga for them. They can also combine different styles to achieve different results.
Specialty Events
Diversifying your skills can be done through adding workshops or teacher training. Many studios offer weekend and evening workshops. The possibilities are endless.
Are there many students who are interested in learning inversions, and would you be able to accommodate them? A Saturday workshop on inversions can be offered for a two-hour period. Take into account your community and your demographic. Offer a “Learn How to Meditate” workshop one evening per month if you live in a small community that makes it difficult to find meditation places or techniques. This useful article provides tips and tricks for planning logistics for specialty seminars.
To offer a Yoga Alliance-certified teacher training program, you will need to be a registered yoga school (RYS) through Yoga Alliance.
The Teacher Training program can bring in a lot of income, apart from the classes you offer. It also gives you a pool to choose from when looking for teachers to hire. This can be particularly helpful if you are a part of a small community.
You can keep current teachers engaged and active by providing continuing education workshops to your staff. This will ensure that you have the best and most knowledgeable instructors.
Retail
Additional revenue can be generated by selling retail items-yoga apparel, jewelry, water bottles, books, and other products. This doesn’t require a lot of space. Just a few shelves or racks in your lobby, check-in area, or yoga studio software will suffice.
This is particularly helpful for yogis who have forgotten their water bottles or clothes. They won’t have the need to skip class and can purchase those items at no additional cost.
Create a Website
Without a website, potential students can’t find your studio, view your classes, or look at what you have to say. Websites will allow you to grow your business and track potential students.
They also make it easier for students to register online for classes or events rather than having to do so in person. Websites are now affordable and offer a great return on investment.
Extra Info
These are some quick tips to help you set your studio apart from other studios in your locality.
- Make sure your packages are simple. Simplicity is good for students, staff, and yourself. It also makes it easier to report.
- Give a free class to all new clients. This will allow them to discover what they enjoy and if yoga is a good addition to their existing physical activity.
- Try Groupon. Consider running a Groupon promo if you’re just starting out or opening a new studio. This can also be a great way for you to attract new clients. You must ensure that your terms are fair and that you don’t undervalue your business. Offer a good and fair deal!
Mistakes You Should Avoid When Starting Your Yoga Studio
It’s important to avoid making the same mistakes as previous owners before you open your yoga studio.
You can learn from the mistakes of others and avoid them as you build your business. It is important to have a genuine love of yoga when starting it. However, you must avoid common mistakes we will mention next:
Hire the Wrong Staff
You’ve made a huge decision to open a yoga studio. Now you have to do much work. It can be detrimental to your success if you don’t have a solid team or hire people who aren’t passionate about your cause.
You may have to step out of your comfort zone in order to start a business. This could mean you are required to perform tasks you don’t have much experience with. It can be helpful to hire a team capable of handling tasks you aren’t confident with.
While the right staff members will help your business grow, it can also be detrimental to have the wrong people.
A Plan Is Not Mandatory, But It Is Game-Changing
You should not underestimate the business aspects involved in opening a yoga studio, whether financial, business, or vision. You must treat it as a business.
Your business plan is essential to the success of your yoga studio. This will help you secure funding and show investors that your business is going well.
Spending Too Much Money on The Wrong Place
The biggest challenge you will face is finding the right location for your studio within your budget. Is it accessible from the studio?
The location may not be ideal if there are no transportation links or parking problems. Your business’s location is likely to be the costliest. It doesn’t matter if you rent or buy; the location can cause problems very early in your business.
You Don’t Know Your Clients
Communicate with clients if you are already a teacher of yoga to find out their needs.
Yoga is a broad subject. You may choose to teach different classes or stick to a single path. Your market research and knowledge of your clients will help you make this decision.
Marketing Your Studio Without Skimping
Yoga is a strong community. Your existing yoga community is an excellent place to spread the word about your new studio. However, to get enough clients to sustain your studio’s existence, you will need to push the message further.
Get the most from social media and increase your online reach. After you have created a beautiful space, it is time to let people know about it and open the doors for them.
The Local Lead Generation Process for Your Yoga Studio
All right! So, everything is about building properties and generating leads. But how does the process actually take place? Are there other steps I need to know?
The steps I mention below are what students from our local lead generation program follow to generate leads for businesses like yourself. So I’ll help you see what we do. And how if you join our program, you can simply generate leads for your own business (unless you want to start a side hustle and build a laptop lifestyle business).
Essentially, our lead generation can be divided into four steps:
The first is prospecting. You need to take the time to do market research on a niche (industry) and determine how many phone-driven businesses are there.
Keep in mind that this is local research as you need to know how many companies need leads. For example, you may search for “plumbing services Youngstown OH.”
You will find dozens or even hundreds of businesses trying to get themselves in front of the customers by ranking on Map Listings, organic results, and even Ad.
The second step, building. When you find a niche (plumbing, tree services, a software company, real estate…), you will need to start building your digital properties. You don’t need to be an expert in HTML or coding. It can be easy with the right tools.
The third step is now taking time to rank your lead gen website. With the site done, you need to work on SEO strategies and start dominating those Google search results. If you’re new to SEO, it stands for Search Engine Optimization.
To keep it simple, it consists of the entire process of growing a company’s visibility on search engines like Google and generating organic traffic. And remember this, local lead generation is part of the strategies.
Moving on to step four, once you rank the site, you will start getting your ROI and profits. You only need to rent it out to a local business interested in the leads the site generates. You can offer a couple of free leads to their move on with the actual pay per lead.
To review steps 1-4 above, I described it to a normal student who is building a lead gen business to help local service providers generate more calls. But replace the student with you as the business owner. And replace sending the leads to a business to simply siphoning the leads to your personal business.
By the way, fun fact, about 20% of our students in our local lead gen program are actually business owners who went through the program. And they use the skillsets we teach to generate leads for their own business.
An Example of Lead Generation: Home Advisor
You must be thinking, “if lead generation sounds so good so far, how come I haven’t seen any company?” That’s the thing; there are many out there. You just don’t know they are dedicated to it.
HomeAdvisor is one of the best examples you can find on the Internet as it is a top lead generation company that has spent millions building its brand but also earned even more zeros for this same reason.
They started small as everyone else but invested in building their brand awareness to make people who are looking for home services go to their website and find what they need. They are over 75% of people’s first choice when they need those services.
If you don’t get HomeAdvisor that much or need a refresh, users need to submit their information to request a service and get a professional or expert who can provide it.
HomeAdvisor’s job is to share your information, which makes you a lead, with local companies so they can contact you and offer the service you’re requesting. For sharing this lead information, HomeAdvisor gets paid by the companies. This happens for every single lead they send to multiple businesses.
Business owners who don’t have marketing skills or don’t even know how to have any online presence will always rely on those pages to list their services. They will save time and effort, but companies like HomeAdvisor can make them spend lots of money as leads aren’t exclusive (one lead is sent to multiple companies after all).
Using Facebook Ads aka Paid Ad Platforms: Do They Generate Leads?
They DO generate leads. If not, no one would use them.
However, you need to remember two facts:
- Paid ads or platforms can be expensive.
- They don’t generate “natural” leads.
Whenever someone sees or clicks in one of those ads, over 80% of them did it by accident or are trying to close/report it.
Why? Because they aren’t looking for those services. At least not at the moment.
What those ads do instead is interrupt their time on the platforms. Users aren’t there to find companies or businesses unless they are searching for a specific company’s user, and for that, there’s a search bar. This is why it is hard to convert them to actual customers who will show interest in the companies’ services. Also, you’re limited by a budget.
When using lead generation, everything is organic. You aren’t forcing others to pay attention to your business but rather being there when they need you. This is why Google’s organic traffic will always beat paid ads, and the reason companies continue investing in it, which is a lot cheaper as well.
What Is Local SEO?
Don’t worry… I didn’t get it at first either. Following the short explanation, local SEO focuses on scaling businesses’ visibility on search engines. However, this is only for those who serve their communities face-to-face.
What does this mean?
Experts and professionals like painters, plumbers, and dentists (but not only them) offer their services to their local customers. Why? Because they can’t deliver them unless they are located in the same area of their customers.
To make sure those businesses get more leads, you need to rank them locally by claiming the business listing on Google to place them on Map Listings. Local SEO also involves online reviews, citation management, and how you manage your entire online presence in the local area.
If you are going to bet on lead gen, you need to adapt yourself to today’s world: The Internet.
Keep in mind that although traditional channels and methods like billboards, warm calls, and pamphlets still work, they aren’t part of your tools. Whenever someone needs a service, they go to Google and search for it.
“Dentist in Miami” or “plumbing services in Orlando,” etc. And you can keep coming up with services or professionals people need and look for. Thus, you need to make sure you’re using Google to get the companies in front of their clients.
Users will always click on the first search results (those near the top), and many of them will be either Ad links (people paid to place their websites there), Map Listing, and then you get websites. Almost all of them are your goal and where you should always aim to place yourself.
Can My Yoga Studio Utilize a Local Lead Generation Strategy?
If you want customers, you better know you need it. Following the previous explanation, lead gen is all about placing businesses in front of their customers, choosing them over their competitors.
Put it simply – it’s all about closing deals and having clients for those companies to make money. The main difference with the usual methods companies use for this is how lead generation approaches different channels to get them in the right place of the market to get customers.
Those channels are all focused on the Internet as most people are searching for products but also services across the net. The issue is that the Internet is way too broad, and businesses don’t know how to place themselves. They usually try, but they get one common result: losing money and time.
How Powerful Are Organic Yoga Leads from Google?
For companies looking for customers, it’s everything. For you? Pretty much the same. When you build a business with digital properties, you get to make thousands of dollars a month.
This isn’t a “get started today and get rich tomorrow” thing, but it is HIGHLY scalable, and ROI + positive results are guaranteed. Learning a fairly decent and very needed set of skills to create your digital properties and start ranking them on Google is required.
I have invested in several online businesses over the years, and if there’s something uncertain, whether you will get your ROI or not, even more than the actual profit.
However, this business moved my earnings from five figures a year to a month in ONLY passive income while sitting comfortably at home.
On my laptop. Anywhere. Anytime.
You can look at one of the first sites I built back in 2016, and it continues making me over $1.000+ every month. The best part is that I don’t need to touch it or the rest I’ve built over the years, just like this digital property.
What Makes Lead Generation SO Alluring?
Here it goes: you can work from home.
The main issue with regular business opportunities is how much you need to invest in staff, equipment, or rent to have a place to sell your products or offer your services.
We all know the hassles of traditional businesses that involve regular expenses, which are extremely high. Can you afford it? I don’t think so, and even if you can, is it worth it? Now, it isn’t only about the money. You also need to put in a lot of work, and it isn’t only during the first couple of months or years. Usually, it is as long as you continue running it.
You can save yourself those headaches and bone-breaking tasks and expenses with lead gen since it is more about generating leads with digital channels—mainly websites.
Websites can be VERY cheap to build, and with many tools online, you get to do it in a couple of hours instead of days. Any virtual or digital business is scalable and won’t need constant maintenance.
So, let’s summarize this:
- You save money in regular expenses with traditional and most online businesses as what you need is yourself and digital properties (websites).
- You can bet on passive income.
- There’s no need to hire more people to get started.
- You can generate leads in multiple industries, which allows you to work on any niche you want.
How Can I Get Started in the Local Lead Generation Program?
Anyone can start and learn. That’s the beauty of this business model. I knew nothing about SEO, Map Listing, and everything I’ve mentioned so far. It is all about learning the skills, gaining experience, and deciding to take the step.
Remember that this business model will never get old as business owners are always looking for leads. They need to do business and scale their companies. Why not do the same while helping others and still making money?
You can start with this local lead generation course highly recommended for anyone wanting to grow in the business. It is a close training that will take you through each step and make sure you are able to get your ROI, profits and take control of your life.
You will be added to an incredible lead generation family ready to help you 24/7 when asking questions on the group. Anyone is welcome who’s willing to put in the work. Click here to watch the lead gen webinar.