A Yogi’s Guide To Grow Your Yoga Business | Actionable Tips

So you are at a stage where you are ready to grow your yoga business. Perhaps you are a yoga studio owner or a yoga teacher and find yourself having a thriving yoga business in your hands. 

I have been in your position before. You are past the initial phase of attracting customers, setting up operations, and running your business somewhat smoothly. Now it’s time to grow what you have created.

In this guide, I will give you simple ideas, strategies, and tactics you can use to start growing and scaling your yoga business. I will begin by covering ideas around how to identify if you are ready to grow your yoga business. Then I will explore key strategies and tactics that worked for me to 3X the revenues of my wellness business in weeks. Finally, I will explore a sample growth plan. 

How To Grow Your Yoga Business

So, how do you grow your Yoga business? To grow and scale your Yoga business:

1. Identify reasons for your current success and double down on what works
2. Embrace technology 
3. Automate recruiting of yoga teachers
4. Have the right pricing strategy for growth
5. Shift your time from execution to strategy work

Identify Reasons For Your Current Success

Growing your yoga business is just doing what works for you currently but at scale. You will be taking all the best practices and everything that has worked so far and double down on them. 

Identify Successful Customer Acquisition Channel

Start by identifying the single best way you have found to get new clients for your yoga business. This channel could be Instagram marketing, posting in local business directories or Facebook pages, or Google ads. Any channel that has worked well in acquiring new clients and which you can scale up.

Once you have identified the channel of customer acquisition, put your resources in it to acquire new customers. In my case, local SEO played a significant role in attracting new customers. So, I spent my time and money on improving local SEO for my wellness business.

I got my business listed on local directories, started working in partnership with local businesses to attract backlinks to my website, and optimized Google my business page. Putting your resources in your most successful customer acquisition channel will guarantee a steady stream of new customers and ensure growth for your yoga business. 

Identify Successful Customer Retention Actions

Even if you are terrific at attracting new clients to your yoga business, your yoga business will fail if you cannot retain your clients. Go back and ask your customers why they choose to continue attending your yoga classes. 

Perhaps they find the quality of yoga teachers in your yoga business to be the best. Maybe they feel valued when every staff member knows their name. Or perhaps they like the fact that you hand out free mats and towels before every yoga class. 

Once you know the key reasons why your clients remain with your yoga business, then you can double down and do more of it. Put processes in place so that these customer retention actions become a part of your yoga business. 

Once you can maintain customer retention as you grow, then scaling your yoga business will be natural. 

Embrace Technology To Grow Your Yoga Business

Adopting technology is the fastest way to grow your yoga business. When I was ready to grow and scale my wellness business, utilizing technology was the single factor that enabled me to 3X my revenues in a matter of weeks.

I was able to automate the process of booking sessions and billing. Before that, I had to check the availability of therapists when taking bookings manually. After implementing a booking system, all my backend tasks, including reminder emails and review collection, were automated.

As a yoga business, you need a few pieces of technology to begin growing and scaling your business. 

Selling Class Packs And Memberships

You need a simple way to sell your class packs and memberships. Having a website is not necessary, but you need a simple page where people can look at your class schedules, buy class packs or memberships and pay for it. 

Class Attendance And Check-In

You will need to provide a way for your members to check-in directly into your class for class attendance. Or you could have an iPad at your reception to manually check your members into class.

Automated Class Reminder And Review Collection

You will need a system to send automated reminders to your clients, informing them about upcoming classes, or sending invoices. You should also be able to automate the process of collecting reviews. 

CRM For Managing Clients

Finally, you will need a simple CRM or a database where all your client information and history are stored. 

If you can use technology to automate these critical tasks, then you can effortlessly grow your yoga business and reach higher revenue goals. 

Any yoga studio booking software will provide you with the features and functions I have listed. However, I am partial to StudioGrowth. I built this yoga studio management software based on my bad experience with clunky, slow, and expensive booking systems. 

I removed all the unnecessary features and built a simple class management software designed to grow and scale a yoga business. Do give it a try and write to me if it helped you grow your yoga business. 

Automate Recruiting of Yoga Teachers

One of the biggest roadblocks I faced when growing my wellness business was recruiting good and reliable therapists. Similarly, the biggest challenge you will face when growing your yoga business will be attracting excellent and dependable yoga teachers to teach for you. 

You will need to identify a way to automate the recruiting and retention of yoga teachers, although you cannot automate the process entirely. 

Identify the place where you can find good yoga teachers reliably. Maybe it is posting jobs on Indeed or Gumtree. Or perhaps you get yoga teachers contacting you from your website. Possibly it is a sign outside your studio that drives walk-in applications.

Then understand why your best yoga teachers stick with you. Maybe you pay the highest commission per class in town. Perhaps you offer full flexibility without a weekly minimum. 

Once you know how you can attract the best yoga teachers and retain their services, double down on those efforts. For example, If you find good teachers on Indeed, then consider spending on Indeed ads. If your yoga teachers remain with you because of the payment, then consider maintaining the highest commission in the city. 

Have The Right Pricing Strategy For Growth

As often is the case that when you start your yoga studio, you usually price conservatively. When you begin your yoga business, your prices are nowhere near where they could be.

Before you begin growing your yoga business, revisit your current pricing. Consider surveying to get feedback from your existing customers regarding your pricing. 

In the survey, you can mention that the prices for the members responding to the study will not change. You can then ask your members a couple of questions:

1. How much do you feel our single class is worth
2. How much more are you willing to pay to attend yoga classes at <Your yoga business name>

The responses will help you understand if you can safely increase your prices as you begin to grow and scale your yoga business.

Remember, the right pricing can significantly accelerate the growth of your yoga business. 

Free Up Your Time To Focus On Growth And Strategy

You cannot grow your yoga business if you spend all your time doing all the tasks in your yoga business. Maybe you like to teach classes, but now that you are growing your yoga business, you need to think like an entrepreneur.

Begin by recruiting and hiring people to take your place. For example, if you teach the majority of the classes in your yoga studio, begin hiring equally good, if not better yoga teachers. Outsource any work you cannot do but were forced to do when you started your yoga business, e.g., accounting and managing your books. Automate tasks by setting up a yoga Class Management software.

If you do this, your time will be freed up, and now you can focus on growth strategy. You will stop working in your yoga business and will begin to work on your yoga business. 

Growth Strategy

Once your time is freed up, you can focus on how you will grow your yoga business. You can now identify the right strategy. Perhaps you have identified the location for a new yoga studio. Or expanding to a new city would be a good option for you. Or you can begin offering your yoga classes online and attract customers globally. Identify the right strategy to take you to the next revenue goal for your yoga business. 

Work on the critical partnerships needed to grow your yoga business. Perhaps partnering with local technology business with more than ten employees helps you attract their employees to your yoga classes. 

Identify new products and services you can offer to grow your yoga business. Perhaps you can begin offering yoga teacher training. Begin by providing this service to your most loyal clients. Use your freed up time to test and validate these new products and services. 

Study how you can automate customer loyalty and customer referrals. Maybe you can test different class packs and offers to keep members coming back. Study how you can encourage customer referrals, perhaps you can provide simple incentives for referrals. 

Once you can free up your time, you will see your business growth accelerate. Today I rarely spend time doing mundane tasks such as taking bookings or billing. My time is spent working on and testing strategies and tactics to grow my wellness business. Freeing up my time is the single most significant factor that accelerated the growth of my business. 

Right Time To Grow Your Yoga Business

The majority of you reading this guide have bootstrapped your yoga business up until this point. For a yoga business that has been set-up with your savings, loans from friends and family, and funded by customers, it is essential to identify the right time to focus on growth. 

Focussing on growth too early can put a strain on your cash flow. Growth, when your yoga business is not ready, is the easiest way to go bankrupt and destroy what you have created. 

Similarly, not growing your yoga business, when your business is ready to grow and expand, means you are losing out on capturing market share (new customers). These are people who want to be your customers, but you are effectively turning them way. 

I will provide some simple pointers that you can use to guide you in your decision whether you are ready to grow and scale your yoga business.

How Do You Know Your Yoga Business Is Ready For Growth

So, how do you know if your yoga studio or yoga business is ready to grow and scale? Well, you are past the initial product-market fit stage. In simpler words, you have created a yoga proposition that customers are willing to pay money for and use. 

1. You have a steady flow of customers
2. Yoga clients are happy
3. Teachers are happy, and it is easy to attract yoga professionals to teach for you
4. You have identified at least one marketing channel that can be scaled
5. Your yoga business is profitable or your unit economics support growth
6. Compelling reason for growing and scaling your yoga business

You Have A Steady Flow Of Customers

You are past the dangerous stage where you don’t know clearly who your customers are and how to reach them. You now have a steady of new customers who can find you.

You know how to reach new customers, i.e., you have identified the customer acquisition channel that is working for you. What I mean by this is that you know where and how to get new customers, for example, you know you can get customers if you hand out flyers, or if you focus on Instagram marketing or if you run facebook ads. 

Your Yoga Clients Are Happy

It is relatively simple to make false promises and attract new customers to any business. You know your yoga business is working when your existing customers are happy and appreciate what you offer.

So, how do you know if your customers are happy? Well, you ask them. Conducting a customer survey via email is the best way to get fast feedback from members of your yoga studio. Ideally, when your members registered for your yoga classes, you had collected their email addresses.

Customer Survey To Identify If Your Yoga Business Is Ready To Grow

For the survey, you are going to ask your members a straightforward question: 

How would you feel if you could no longer use <Your yoga Studio/Business name>?

• Very disappointed
• Somewhat disappointed
• Not disappointed

You can ask your yoga clients more questions, but the question I provided will help you understand if you are ready to grow your yoga business or not. 

You can use the free Google forms or Jot form to create the survey and collect the responses.

Analyzing Results Of Survey To Find If Your Yoga Business Is Ready To Grow

Once you have surveyed your yoga studio members, find the percentage of members who selected the option “Very Disappointed” to the question above. If less than 42% of your members chose this option, then you are not ready to grow your yoga business.

In business terms, you have not reached a product-market fit. You have not identified your ideal customers who love your yoga proposition. If you start scaling and growing your yoga business now, you will have bad reviews and unhappy customers. 

At this stage, go back and speak to customers who selected the “Very Disappointed” option and try to find out what they like about your yoga studio, where they found your yoga classes, and why they decide to come to your yoga classes. 

Use this information to find more customers like them. Continue this process till you reach the magic number of 42% of customers who will be very disappointed if your yoga business disappeared. Once you reach this percentage, you are now ready to grow your yoga business.

Your Yoga Teachers Are Happy, And It Is Easy to Attract & Retain Them

This tip will not apply to you if you are the only teacher in your yoga business. However, if you run a small yoga studio, you will employ a few yoga teachers to teach some classes. 

Finding and retaining good yoga teachers for your yoga business is very hard. You might be able to find yoga teachers, but you might find that they often do not continue or are unreliable.

Before you can grow and scale your yoga business, you must have a clear idea of where you will find new yoga teachers and how you will keep them happy. 

You would have identified the commission structure or pay to attract the best yoga teachers. You would have also identified a process to assign classes without making the yoga teachers feel rushed or that they are forced to cover last-minute lessons. 

Once you know a steady group of yoga teachers can back the growth of your yoga business, then you are ready to grow and scale your yoga business. 

You Have Identified At least 1 Marketing Channel That Can Be Scaled

To grow your yoga business, you will need to attract new customers in a scalable and repeatable way. To do this, you would have identified at least one customer acquisition channel that you can begin to scale. 

For my wellness business, I had found a repeatable way to obtain new customers from SEO and content. In your case, it could be Instagram marketing or perhaps partnerships with other local businesses. 

In short, unless you have found a marketing channel where you can find new customers as and when you want, then you are not ready to grow or scale your yoga business. 

Go back to testing the various marketing channels till you find one that scales. Some of your marketing or customer acquisition channels could be:

• Leaflet drops in residential areas
• Google My Business optimization
• Instagram marketing
• Facebook ads
• Google ads
• Listing and posting in local directories and craigslist
• Conducting workshops to attract new customers
• SEO & content [would stay away from this in the beginning especially if you are not a marketer]
• Partnerships with local businesses

Your Yoga Business Is Profitable Or Your Unit Economics Support Growth

The majority of you reading this guide have built your yoga business with your savings or personal loans. In such a situation, it is crucial to make sure growing your yoga business is financially viable.

Profitability could be a simple measure that tells you that you can add more customers and hire more teachers. However, an even important metric that will be your guide is related to your unit economics.

At this stage, you will need to have identified two critical metrics. One is the lifetime value of members, and the other is your customer acquisition cost. Let’s keep this simple as most of your yoga businesses are still small. 

Lifetime Value Of Your Yoga Studio Member

The lifetime value of your members represents the total amount of money they spend with you. Let’s say a typical member comes to your yoga studio or yoga class once every week and spends £120 a month with you. Let’s also say an average member stays with your yoga studio or class for three months. In this case, the lifetime value of your customer is £360 [£120 X 3]. 

Customer Acquisition Cost For Your Yoga Business

The customer acquisition cost for your yoga business is the amount of money you have to spend to acquire a new customer. To keep things simple, if your primary channel to get new customers is Instagram, then you can calculate the amount you spend to create new posts and manage your Instagram business account monthly.

For example, you hire someone to edit your photos, or you use a scheduling tool to schedule your Instagram posts. Then divide that cost over the number of new customers you got from that channel in that specific month. This amount is your customer acquisition cost.

Putting It Together

Once you have your metrics, your lifetime value of your members should be much higher than your customer acquisition cost. If this is not the case, then you are not ready to grow your yoga business. Go back to testing marketing channels and work on keeping your members happy so that they continue returning to your yoga studio or classes. 

You can think about this intuitively. Imagine that all the money your customers pay you in a month has to pay for all your spending such as rent, electricity, yoga teacher pay, etc. It also has to pay for your marketing to attract new members. Until you reach a point where the money paid by your members exceeds and covers all your costs, you are not ready to grow.

An exception to this is when you have taken investor’s money and your focus on growth. In this case, if the lifetime value of your members is slightly higher than your customer acquisition cost, then you can focus on growth. In this situation, you will not be immediately profitable, but at any instant, you can choose to stop growing and become profitable.

Compelling Reason That Indicates You Should Grow And Scale Your Business 

A pivotal reason to grow your yoga business is that you have identified an apparent reason why growing your yoga business is necessary. For example, you have found a way to expand the capacity of your yoga studio. Perhaps you have decided to offer yoga classes at people’s homes and book new customers. Or maybe you have access to several fantastic yoga teachers who are willing to teach for you.

There should be a clear driver for your reason to grow your yoga business. In my wellness business, the key reason for me to embark on the journey of growth was the growing demand for mobile wellness in London. I wanted to capitalize on this trend and focus on growing and scaling my wellness business. 

Conclusion

This guide has been designed to make you think about the right time that you should focus on growing your yoga business. And once you identify the right time, I have given you clear and precise strategies you can use to grow your business. I have personally used these tactics to increase the revenues of my business significantly. 

Know that growing your yoga business is not always the best option. I have seen several boutiques go bankrupt in the pursuit of growth. Keep an eye on cash flow. I have always been in favor of predictable and controlled growth. 

If my ideas and concepts helped you do write to me and let me know, I love hearing from my readers.