While we’re all dealing with social distancing, many of us who are business owners are stressing about getting contractors and bills paid! My Pilates teacher, Carey Sadler said she felt like we needed to brainstorm, so we set up a session.
The situation is this. There’s a pandemic, and Pilates studios were ordered to close in our state. Carey quickly moved to virtual, but not everyone signed up! Even in 2020 — some people aren’t “on the internet”. Some clients are really tied to Pilates equipment classes. There’s also the opposite side of this — the people who signed up for an unlimited package are taking more classes than normal, because they’re just hanging out at home with time to spare. There’s an incentive payment for Carey’s teacher’s who actually build a following (measured by the number of people in classes) and so her cost per class, has gone up.
We got on zoom to do some brainstorming and we talked about money that was rolling out faster than money was coming in — and I believe both of us were starting to get overwhelmed. YIKES! STOP! STEP BACK!
We had to get this down to a problem we could manage. You eat an elephant one bite at a time – what could we do as a first bite?
The first step in that was dividing out the expenses weekly instead of monthly.
Example: (I am totally making these numbers up but it will show you what i’m talking about).
- The first “problem” we chose to address is instructor payroll. at 20 classes per week, 4 weeks in the month and average cost of class now $25 — that’s $2000. That seems staggering right now.
STEP BACK. THINK. THAT’S NOT ONE BITE, IT’S A PLATE FULL. - Let’s break that down by the week instead of by the month. 20 classes per week x avg instructor payment of $25 per class is $500. How can we make $500? Answer – a workshop. My idea was to develop a workshop we could sell for $50 and sell 10 of them. We talked about a foot workshop because that usually sells pretty well, but Carey was going thru email one day and found notes about a Happy Back workshop that we had never put together. Exercises for a Happy Back was born! Then Carey told me she wouldn’t charge $50. I went down to $25. We’ll sell 20 at $25 and we’ll make exactly $500. Once again, Carey said she thought it was too expensive. Sometimes it’s really hard to be bold! She priced it at $20. So we needed to sell 25 to come up with that $500.
- How we did it? I’ll put a step by step guide in Blog 2 of this series. But we put everything together in 10 days, sold the workshop to 39 people (my personal goal was 40 and we just missed it!) , and brought in $731! Why the odd number? Because staff get a discount on workshops so several people paid $17 instead of $20.
Do you want more details? You can purchase the training class here for $97!