As you follow your journey in starting your own yoga studio, there are definitely some things to remember or to avoid. What can you do to make sure your experience in opening your own yoga studio is the easiest it can be? There are certain things you should know before you start.
Before you open your own yoga studio, make sure you treat your studio as a business, price your services fairly, creating a branding package, seek stable financing, communicate with your students and your staff, pick a location where you can expand, hire the right, knowledgeable staff, and teach an authentic way of doing yoga.
As you follow your business plan to create your yoga studio, remembering these items can help make the process much easier. Read on to find out more about each step and what you can do to make sure you’re providing the best services to your students.
Treat your yoga studio as a business, not as an extracurricular activity or a hobby.
While this feeds into many of the following points, it is one of the most important ideas to remember. You may enjoy yoga and feel like you want to share it with the world, but unless you have a day job and only want to teach yoga as a hobby, then you should be treating your yoga studio like a business. Like the following point, if you do not treat it with the amount of professionalism and the amount of focus that it deserves, you could be looking at failure before you even begin.
How do you treat your yoga studio like a business? One of the ways to do that is create your own business plan. There are many steps to take when creating your business plan, but the following are some of the most important:
- Choose a business name.
- Decide on your operating procedures. What are your hours, and what kind of rules are you going to uphold?
- Choose how you want to staff and manage your business.
- Decide on your mission statement and both short term and long-term goals.
- Receive the proper licenses and permits.
- Get the proper insurance for your business and your location.
- Decide on your business structure. Many small businesses function as limited liability companies, which splits your business assets from your personal assets. If something were to happen in your business, your personal assets would not be affected.
- Create a budget. This should include your location, a scheduling and point-of-sale system, marketing, staffing, and insurance or any other business expenses you may incur. Make sure you include yourself in the staffing salaries.
- Your services should be priced fairly—for both you and your students.
One of the most important lessons you can learn before you start your yoga studio is making sure you do not sell yourself short. Your education, experience, and focus on detail and customer service should all be great reasons for people to come to your studio, and your classes should be priced as such.
If you’ve spent years working on your skill and your lifestyle, it’s important not only to include that in your marketing, but make sure your students know what they’re getting when they attend your classes. You can also sell yourself short by offering classes too cheaply—your students may take you for granted or not take you seriously.
Consider making a pricing chart for your students, including drop in, several class passes, limited memberships, or unlimited memberships. That will give you the opportunity to know exactly how much you should be bringing in monthly in profit, and that will help your bottom line, too. Costs vary depending on location, so make sure you are also priced competitively in your area.
- Come up with a proper marketing and branding package—and stick with it.
One of the major downfalls that small businesses have are not creating their own branding package. What goes into a branding package? Anything you might use to market your business—a logo, color scheme, signage, business cards, social media images, etc. Why is it important to create a proper, cohesive brand? Because it will make you seem much more professional not only to the people who you’re trying to bring in to become regular students, but professionals and even those you’re trying to ask for financial help.
- Seek stable financing and don’t sell yourself short.
Financing a small business is always a challenge, but make sure you’re being realistic when you put your budget together. Don’t assume that you know everything there is to know about creating that budget—make sure you do your research or even talk to an accountant beforehand. There may be items in your budget that sneak up on you, and those eat into your bottom line.
When you’re looking for funding, make sure you exhaust all your other options before considering a bank loan or selling assets. You can find grant funding through your local chamber of commerce or your local development agency, or you can check out the Small Business Administration at sba.gov for additional information.
- Talk to your students about what they want and what they expect out of your studio, your classes, and you.
Starting a yoga studio is unlike any other business—you’ll be working closely with people who may become regular students, and you can have the opportunity to watch them grow in their skill set. But make sure you’re also speaking to them about their goals, aspirations, and what they expect from you. If you don’t communicate with them, you’ll never know where they’re struggling or what they’re working on, along with what they find most helpful or what they don’t find helpful at all. Offering a high-quality experience means making sure that your students are happy, learning, and eager to come back.
8 Essential Items For A Yoga Room
- Pick the proper location, and make sure you have enough space to grow.
While you may find that your small studio works for you in your first couple months of being open, what happens when you want to expand? When you’re just starting out, a larger studio space may seem daunting and impossible to fill, but if you follow your goals and market your skills, it won’t take long until that space is filled and you’re looking to expand.
How do you combat this? Make sure your space is already prepped for expansion before you open. You should also make sure you have a great relationship with your landlord, or, in some cases, you may not have to be worried about that if you purchase the building yourself.
- When you’re ready to expand, make sure you hire the right people.
Who are the right people for the job? It depends on what you want out of your studio, but the most important aspect to consider when broadening your staff is their experience. Do they know what they’re doing when it comes to yoga? Are they on your same educational level, or plan to be? Make sure they also fit into your business model, your goals, and your mission statement. You don’t want to hire people who aren’t working with you to that goal.
Once you have that staff, make sure you evaluate them regularly. One of the worst things you can do as a yoga studio owner is ignore your staff’s wants, needs, and shortcomings. If your students aren’t learning from your teachers, they aren’t going to want to come back, so consider your bottom line when looking at your staff.
- Make sure you are dedicated to your mission, your goals, and the lifestyle of teaching yoga.
It’s not just an activity—yoga is a lifestyle. What that means to you is for you to decide, but make sure however you teach, you teach authentically to you and what you want to share with your students. Whether you want to share the tenets of the spirituality of yoga, or want your students to bring whatever they believe and want into the yoga studio, make that very clear at the start of your business. The more people who realize exactly what you’re bringing to the table, the more likely you’re going to get committed individuals who will never miss a class.
9 Things Every Yoga Studio Needs
Frequently Asked Questions
There is no requirement for you when building or renovating a yoga studio when it comes to deciding how much space to include. For many yoga studios, though, they will make sure there is enough space for a two by six-foot area for an individual student.
If you want to have a well-equipped class in your yoga studio, you should have non-slip yoga mats, mat bags or slings, blankets, yoga blocks, yoga straps, and yoga bolsters. Your studio could also use yoga wheels, and also make sure you have a sound system for your classes. Encourage all your students to wear loose fitting, comfortable clothes.
To learn more about starting your own Yoga Business check out my startup documents here.
Please note: This blog post is for educational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Please consult a legal expert to address your specific needs.
Meet Shawn Chun: Entrepreneur and Yoga Fan
I’m a happy individual who happens to be an entrepreneur. I have owned several types of businesses in my life from a coffee shop to an import and export business to an online review business plus a few more and now I create online yoga business resources for those interested in starting new ventures. It’s demanding work but I love it. I do it for those passionate about their business and their goals. That’s why when I meet a yoga business owner in public at a studio or anywhere else I see myself. I know how hard the struggle is to retain clients, find good employees and keep the business growing all while trying to stay competitive.
That’s why I created Yoga Business Boss: I want to help future yoga business owners like you build a thriving business that brings you endless joy and supports your ideal lifestyle.