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Author: Katrina Hawley

Why Not Knowing Your Marketing Return On Investment Can Be Disastrous
When I Knew Nothing About Marketing Return On Investment – A True Story

I want to tell you how not knowing my marketing return on investment almost got the best of me. I’m hoping that by putting my story out there, it will help other business owners save time and energy when it comes to marketing.

When I finally opened the doors to my Pilates studio, I was elated. I had put so much hard work into opening my own place, and it had finally come to fruition. I had a great network of colleagues and friends who spread the word about my studio which landed me a bunch of wonderful clients.

After a successful year, I knew that I wanted to grow my studio even more. I decided to try all of the different strategies that I’d seen in similar businesses. The plethora of strategies included:
- Social Media Posts
- Blogging
- Opening a retail store in the studio itself
- Ebook for email list building
- Email Marketing
- Various Intro offers
- Internet ads
- Facebook ads
- Studio events
- Radio ads
- Newspaper ads
As you might imagine, after about six months of this extensive yet disorganized marketing plan, the exhaustion set in.

I was working so hard and knew that if I continued at the rate I was going, burnout was coming.

Creating the content, organizing inventory and planning events was taking so much time and energy. Not to mention the fulfillment side of the business; I still had to teach Pilates!

On top of all this, I had no idea what was working. Something had to give. But what? I didn’t want to take the chance of eliminating the wrong things.

But I had no idea what the right things were.

What You Don’t Know CAN Hurt You

The problem was that I had no idea what was working (and what wasn’t working) when it came to getting (and keeping) clients. I didn’t know :
1. 1What tactics were bringing clients in
2. 2What tactics were helping clients make the first purchase
3. 3What tactics were keeping the clients interested
4. 4What tactics were leading directly to increased income
I couldn’t tell if all of my efforts were worth it. I was working harder but not smarter.

And then a friend and fellow business owner told me how to figure out my average client value, or ACV. More importantly she showed me how to use it to make critical decisions.

I had heard about lifetime client value (LCV) but ACV was new to me. It turns out that in the fitness business industry, we can’t really go by LCV as an average. It’s too hard to figure out when you have so many different relationships with your clients. For instance:
- A 10-year relationship with a client vs. a 6-month relationship
- If a client has an injury that takes them out of commission for a while
- Maybe a client wants a home program and will only be coming for a few sessions
- If a client only comes in sporadically for check-ins
All of these inconsistencies in the boutique fitness industry make the LCV less helpful when making marketing decisions.

Checking the ACV for a consistent rolling time period paints a clearer picture of the habits of your clientele.

This customer data allows you to assess your marketing return on investment and client retention.

The ACV can also help analyze strategies that maximize customer value and aid in pricing decisions. But how do you do that? It’s actually pretty simple and I’ve narrowed it down to 4 steps. Keep reading

How To Figure Out Your Average Client Value
1. 1Time Frame – While you can do this calculation for any time frame, you’ll definitely want to know your ACV over the past 365 days.
2. 2Number of Active Clients – How many active clients and members do you currently have? Most scheduling softwares will have a report that tells you this. (If you use Mindbody, see the end of the article for specific steps to pull up this report.)
3. 3Total Revenue – Next, get your total revenue for the same time period.
4. 4Calculate – Total Revenue divided by Total Active Unique Clients will equal your average client value.
How ACV Can Measure Marketing Return on Investment and Help Maximize Customer Value

If you’re investing in internet advertising
- Calculate your rolling 365 ACV.
- Create your first ad budget. (Remember this is an investment and not an expense.)
- Make sure that in your intake process new leads have a way to tell you how they found you.
- After a period of time see how many people who clicked on the ads became clients.
- Multiply that number by your ACV and then subtract your ad spend budget to find your projected return on investment.
If you want to increase existing customer value
- Calculate your rolling ACV.
- Create a special that you will promote through social media and email marketing to your current clients. Possibilities include a retail sale, class special, and anything else you might like to try. (Click this link for some of the promotions that have worked for clients of FBP.)
- Run the special for a period of time.
- Calculate your rolling ACV again for the special’s time period.
- Compare that ACV to the previous period.
- Is it higher?
What about Retention?

The ACV is a fantastic tool to calculate retention success. If you calculate your Rolling ACV on a monthly basis you can learn so much about your studio’s retention performance.
- If your ACV is increasing, look further. If the number of clients increased and your income increased you can be confident that your retention strategies are working.
- If your ACV decreases because your income is stagnant. This means you have more clients making initial purchases, but they are not purchasing as many services or services of the same price as previous months. In this situation, you can ask yourself what you can do to maximize the value of each and every client.
- If your ACV decreases because the number of clients decreases and the income is stagnant or decreases. You can deduce that there are problems with retention and look at your systems for retention after the first visit. Do you need more email nurture sequences, or do you need to speak with staff about making sure that clients are scheduling their next appointment?
Choices About Pricing
- Calculate your ACV.
- Recalculate your ACV with a 5% increase.
- Use this information to make decisions and create budgets around infrastructure and ad expenditure.
By knowing your ACV, you’ll have data that will tell you what is adding income to your bottom line.

Work Smarter, Not Harder

The bottom line is this. You don’t need to do all the things to try get a marketing return on your investment. Use the data. Use your ACV and let it tell you what specific marketing endeavors are profitable, and focus on those.

Our own Results

Data analysts tell us that at the end of Q4 2022
- The Pilates market had recovered to 100% of pre-pandemic revenue levels.
- That the Yoga market had recovered to 80% of pre-pandemic revenue levels.
By following the very advice in this article, our Pilates Studio, in a tiny market in Massachusetts, had recovered to
- 122% of pre-pandemic revenue levels
- With 40% fewer instructors.
You’ll have the same results by following time proven business practices like these.
March 14, 2023
The Quickest & Easiest Way To Start Your Pilates Blog
You are a business owner. You have found the best web designer. He/she has made your page, and when you review the website in the toolbar you see the word blog.

You pause for a moment. You’ve read blogs. You’ve even learned from blogs. But never in your life have you identified as a blogger. You’ve heard that blog posts help the world find your amazing business, but how in the world are you going to think of something to write about on a regular basis? Where are you going to get these ideas? What about time? Who has the time to put together these essays?

I have been there. I own a Pilates studio, and the first time I saw the word blog on our website, I had the same sense of panic. But then I realized something. I loved talking about Pilates, and even more I loved getting geeky about Pilates. If a client asked me about the knee joint, I could go on for hours with fascination about the intricacies of knees. And it only took me a little while for me to understand that this geekiness is what google needed from me to recognize my expertise and authority in the local Pilates market. Time was still a problem. I was teaching pilates after all, but over the course of a year, I found a few formulas to make the writing a little easier:

1

Joints

Pick a joint, describe it’s anatomy, then pick three to five favorite exercises for this joint, and tell your audience why you love them. Then snap a couple of pictures of these exercise and you’ve got yourself a blog post

2

Clients

Case study – You know those wonderful sessions where you feel the magic of Pilates and see your client’s body changing before your very eyes. Document it with your words and a picture and you’ve got a case study blog post.
- What was the goal of the session?
- How did your thinking create a workout?
- What was the result?
- What was the magic?
3

Challenge

Pick a hard Pilates exercise and challenge every client to accomplish this exercise as best they can. Take Pictures, Videos and tell a story for each client’s accomplishment and you have a studio challenge blog post.

4

Lifestyle

We all understand that Pilates will change a person’s lifestyle. We are healthier and happier when moving our bodies. Outline how might one can take the concepts of Pilates to other parts of their lives. Give tips and tricks to bring the magic of Pilates to everything you do

5

Sports

Pick a sport and write about the ways that Pilates will help improve the athlete that plays that sport. Golf, Horse Back Riding, Skiing, Swimming, Tennis and Dance are all great examples.

6

Anatomy

Pick an exercise and get nerdy. Write about the muscles, bones, and joints involved. This posts will appeal to the clients who like a deeper understanding

These 6 topic ideas can lead to countless blog posts and these posts will help with the content creation. But if you’re still undecided about the value of blogging to your marketing strategy, take a look at these 7 statistics.

7 Statistics on Why You Should Be Blogging
- Among those who use e-mail marketing, companies that blog get twice as much traffic from their email than those who don’t. (Source: HubSpot)
- Companies that blog have 55% more website visitors. (Source: Simple Marketing Now)
- 82% of marketers who blog get positive ROI. (Source: HubSpot)
- Top three ways bloggers drive traffic to their posts: Social Media Marketing; Search Engine Optimization; Email Marketing. (Source: Orbit Media)
- You have a 434% higher chance of being ranked highly on search engines if you feature a blog as part of your website (Source: Tech Client)
- Blogs have been rated as the 5th most trusted source for accurate online information. (Source: Searching Engine People)
- 94% of people who share posts do so because they think it might be helpful to others. (Source: Ad Pushup)
Leave your comments below if you found this helpful, and feel free to leave a link to your Pilates blog.
May 21, 2019
How to Get Your Pilates Business from Vision to Reality

A good vision is important for success in anything. Asking the Universe for what you need plays the role of connecting both your subconscious and conscious mind on the path to getting what you want.

I’ll be honest, the phrase, “Put it out into the universe.” seemed ridiculous to my scientific mind until I owned my own Pilates Studio. I can hear my previous self now. I was working with a very real problem that needed a solution and someone says to me, “Just ask the Universe for what you need.” I don’t know if you can see my previous self’s eyes rolling, but at that time I didn’t buy it one bit! But later I had to admit that asking the universe is a thing and it works.

Visioning leads to planning and goal setting, and all of these things are key to the development of a Pilates Studio.

If you can’t imagine success, then you won’t be able to recognize the opportunities that will lead you to the success you desire. For example:

On a micro level, if you can’t imagine having a full schedule with a waiting list. It is going to be hard to convince that new client that she actually needs to schedule the recurring appointment so that her spot is guaranteed.

On a macro level if you can’t envision making a living owning your own Pilates Studio then you might not notice the real estate sign in the window of the perfect space.

Visioning is the big picture in your mind

That big picture helps you structure your decisions and get you on the path that is the shortest distance between your desired destination.

Ask yourself the question, “What do I want?”

How the rest of this plays out can be of personal design. My business partner sits tall in her office chair and literally asks for what she wants. And you know what? It works! My visioning comes when I hike. I am in the woods, I imagine my life and let my mind be open and the ideas flow.

Wherever you find your mind in its most creative imaginative space, is where you want to start the visioning process.

Recognizing A Great Idea

When you have an idea, notice the energy around it. Hear yourself say, “Wow that would be really cool.” Then give yourself the freedom to ask, “How am I going to make that happen?”

It’s also important to be aware of the unhelpful thoughts that get in the way of the best visions. These are the thoughts that get in our own way. I try never to let my mind say, “That’s ridiculous.”

Write Your Vision Down

Pen and paper works, but you want to write the vision down anywhere that you can access frequently. Bathroom mirrors, whiteboards, poster boards, and journals are all spectacular places for visions to exist. Any place that you will see nearly every day, so that your subconscious and conscious mind are focused and working together.

Begin visioning the answer to “How am I going to make that happen?”

Depending on the vision you may start writing a business plan or you may begin developing strategies, but most importantly you have a vision that is guiding you down a path.

Once you answer, “How am I going to make this happen?” it’s time to pull out our S.M.A.R.T goal strategies. These will help you decide on and prioritize your actions on your chosen path.

The question, “What can I do in the moment to get the life I want?” Can be much easier to answer when you have a clear vision of the life you want!

April 17, 2019
6 Quick & Easy Ways To Prevent Burnout
It’s important to be honest about the reality of teacher burnout. Given the type of person attracted to the profession, it’s a more a question of when burnout will occur not if it will. Quite simply, people that want to make a difference in the lives of others are more likely to sacrifice their own needs to those of others. Case in point.

Imagine the Most Dedicated Teacher
- She has a waiting list and every week she ends up adding one more hour so that she can fit everybody in.
- She is a brilliant teacher and has a great rapport with all of her clients.
- She is full of energy and is generous with her time.
- She is a workhorse and folks wonder how she does it.
She likes that perception of her. It validates who she is in her own mind. The demands put on her increase gradually and without even realizing it, she begins reaching a limit in her capacity.

The signs look like this:

This Teacher Is Now up to 36 Teaching Hours per Week
- She finds herself teaching the same workouts.
- Her cues become more scripted and she stops seeing the body in front of her.
- Client eccentricities become aggravating instead of interesting.
This teacher is on her way to burnout.

Strategies for preventing burnout, can range from simply being aware of how you are feeling and noticing your irrational beliefs or can be as complex as boundary training, sales training and other continuing education.

Here Are 6 Ways to Prevent Burnout

The first three options are for awareness and learning and the last three options are for boundary setting and sales training.

Awareness of your own body and how it is feeling.

Taking the time for your own movement. It is amazing the difference that a body can feel when it follows all of our wonderful advice. Also realize that the movement doesn’t necessarily have to be Pilates.

So, if you find yourself talking to your client about making sure that she is getting vitamin D by spending time outside, take a moment to ask yourself, “when was the last time I was outside?”

If you find yourself asking a client about other kinds of exercise he gets remember to ask yourself, “What kinds of exercise do I get?”

holding yourself accountable first

Are you practicing what you preach? If the answer is no, don’t judge yourself, just find time to move.

If it’s a Pilates session that’s wonderful, but after a long day of teaching, maybe a walk is just fine!

Get someone else’s eyes on your own body.

We can feel and master and practice alone, but if there are no eyes watching us move, we will almost always miss something. Look for partner who would recognize the mutual benefit of taking turns watching each other move.

Remember, it doesn’t have to be another Pilates instructor. There are many options including: Fitness Training, Feldenkris, Yoga.

Keep learning things, both about Pilates and other things.

There is something about new knowledge that is so energizing.

Have you ever taken a continuing education course and realized your love of teaching Pilates all over again?

Everyone should have a teacher that they follow both on the internet and in person courses. Always be looking for new information to teach.

Learn about things that aren’t Pilates as well:
- Learn more about your hobbies.
- Study other movement forms.
- Learn to cook.
- Try baking bread.
Do anything that keeps your mind engaged and watch your satisfaction at work skyrocket!

Practical boundary setting.

There is nothing quite so exhausting as a client that feels like they are sucking your energy. We’ve all felt it, and if you have this particular client, he or she is there to give you the opportunity to learn how to set the boundaries that you need for yourself. There is nothing more important when you are preventing burnout than setting clear boundaries with the difficult clients but also the clients you love.

I always know when I am teaching too much when a challenging client makes me frustrated instead of curious. In these cases, sometimes imagery is the best medicine. I imagine a shield kind of like a hamster ball that keeps their energy from taking mine, and then I practice saying the word no. -Katrina Hawley

Schedule Clarity.

If you are working on burnout prevention, set your schedule in stone and don’t vary from it.

If you don’t have a session available for someone:
- Refer them to another teacher in the studio.
- Work on moving people to classes.
- Get your clients to take power over their own sessions.
- Maybe even encourage them to learn their workout and come more often independently.
Have a Team.

Preventing burnout, requires a team of people. We often find ourselves as business owners doing everything. The marketing, bookkeeping, reception, and everything. You are the experts at Pilates and to avoid burnout you need to find the experts to help you with the other things.
- Never let yourself be frustrated with quickbooks. Have a bookkeeper instead.
- Scheduling services are grand. Better yet, hire an office manager!
Surround yourself with the experts that can help your business be the best so that you have the time to take care of your instrument. Your brilliant brain and generous heart will thank you!

What ideas do you have for preventing burnout?

We’d love to hear about them. Let us know in the comments below.
April 10, 2019
Discover The Secret to Getting Your Client to Book Their Next Session
Client Retention is a key factor in the health of a Pilates Business

Consistency is key. Helping clients maintain a consistent schedule is the first step in increasing client retention. As Pilates Business owners, we all have faith in our “product” We have felt the results, and we have found the beauty in feeling healthier and stronger. However, sometimes we need to give our clients a little extra help in discovering this magic. A consistent schedule is a great step in the right direction because it helps your clients establish habitual behavior that will help them reach the fitness goal of feeling great.

Imagine the following scenario. It’s the end of the session, and the client has the beautiful glow of a body that has moved in all planes of motion. Now it’s time to schedule the next session and the teacher says, “Do you want to make another appointment?

In this scenario the client a giant opportunity to say “no”, or “I’ll call you”, or “do you think this is helping”? And any of these questions could lead to the attrition of a client that might have found the magic in Pilates in just one more session.

Ask questions or make statements that give everyone what they need:
- “Let’s get you in the schedule again”
- “Let’s go make another appointment”
- “Wow I am sure that at your next appointment we can accomplish …”
When the scheduling of the next appointment is assumed you are giving a gift to your client. You are making it easy to be consistent and supporting healthy behavior. Try this at your next session let us know how it goes.

Client retention will Increase if your clients are accustomed to seeing More than 1 Teacher

Having multiple Pilates Teachers is a treat. Everybody learns differently and hearing a concept explained by more than one mind increases the chances of movement integration and improvement. If we teach from this assumption, it makes it possible to maintain our own work life balance without sacrificing our client retention and consistency. Now we just have to convince our clients of this.

Imagine this scenario – You have a vacation next week, but you usually see this particular client twice a week and she loves you! And by love I mean she LOVES YOU! She calls you a miracle worker (though we all know movement is the miracle) and wants you to have everything in this world! It’s time to schedule her appointments while you’re gone and you say, “Do you want me to find you a sub?”

First of all this client loves you and would never want you to be inconvenienced, so if you offer this as a question she is going to say no…Because you would have to go to extra work and she would never want that for you.

Do the work ahead of time:
- Find the sub ahead of time. That would give you the ability to say, “I found you a sub for next week while I’m gone, let’s confirm those appointments with Dawn.”
- With this sentence you are stating the name and you have already done the work.
- Your client would never want any work that you do to go to waste.
There are always going to be barriers to scheduling the next appointment in the moment.

Efficiency is key. If a client is standing in front of me and I say, “do you want next Tuesday at ten?” and she says yes, the next time I have to think about that appointment is next Tuesday at ten.

There are always barriers to scheduling like:
- Calendars that are left in the car
- Appointments that need to be confirmed
- Errands that have to be run
- Kids that have to be picked up
These barriers can make scheduling in the moment difficult.

Use the following lines to help set up that habit of scheduling efficiently.
- “Let’s pick an appointment, and you only need to call if it doesn’t work.”
- “Do you want to make this appointment recurring and then you only have to tell me when you can’t make it?”
- “I only have these two appointments next week, let’s pick one.”
<p “=”” style=”text-align: left;”These get the person in the schedule, and if she gets down to the car and it works, all is done. This is a convenience for your client as well as you./pp “=”” style=”text-align: left;”>The way that you use your words at the end of your session can go a long way towards improving client retention and thus keep your bottom line moving in the right direction.

When the scheduling of the next appointment is assumed you are giving a gift to your client. You are making it easy to be consistent and supporting healthy behavior.

Try this at your next session let us know how it goes.
April 9, 2019
Discovering My Word-Of-Mouth Marketing Assets
Whether you are just starting out, or you are trying to grow your Pilates studio word of mouth marketing is key. Waiting for your clients to refer their friends or family is only one way for word of mouth referrals. Read on for more.

Ten years ago I was a Pilates Instructor who worked at a studio. I had spent my professional life being as nerdy as possible about the human body and functional movement. I was addicted to continuing education and had developed a strong practice and reputation as an expert Pilates Instructor. Then came the opportunity to buy the studio with my colleague and best friend. What could be better?

I knew plenty about how to teach Pilates, I didn’t know anything about business.

For example, my business partner and I wrote a business plan in which we used the word “doable” (looking back at that I questioned whether our banker actually read our business plan)…but with some perseverance and a whole lot of googling we eventually became the proud business owners of a pilates studio with a new name and a new website. AND the first thing we learned as new business owners was that google was listing our website about six pages down…So basically we had just purchased a studio that had a clientele who found the studio via the web, and then changed the website and branding of the studio, which caused the studio to lose all of its google cred…

This led us to a big, “now what??”…

We had to figure out how else to market the business while we were learning how to help the google algorithms find us. We had to assess what we had besides our soon to be but not quite yet very effective website that was found on page 6.

Solution 1: use my reputation in the community

I was already known as an excellent Pilates instructor in my community. We quickly learned we could use that reputation to grow referral sources for new business.It is a wonderful thing to learn that your excellent listening skills are a great marketing tool!

Remember

Marketing isn’t about selling your services. It’s about showing potential customers how you can help them.

How can you help them transform?

I had a good reputation in the community as a Pilates Instructor because my clients liked me and my work and my work excelled because I was a good listener and observer of the folks I taught. I was especially good at this part because I was using every tactic I could to avoid talking about myself.

Surprisingly, it just so happens that when you learn the name and goings on of every family member of a client (even if it is only to avoid letting them learn about the goings on in your life), that client might start sending those family members to you when they are in need. The client feels heard and respected, and then says to her friend, “You just have to see this person who helped me.”

Imagine this conversation:

Pilates Instructor: How’s your husband doing these days?

Client: Oh goodness…He is struggling with some intense back pain. It’s all he talks about.

Pilates Instructor: hmmm does he sit a lot at work…I wonder if he should find a way to open the front of his hips.

Client: Wait… do you think you could help him?

Pilates Instructor: It depends on what’s going on, but often when folks sit at a computer a lot the posture leads to some back pain…

Client: Do you have gift certificates?

Pilates Instructor: Of course!

While waiting for folks to find us on google we created a great referral incentive for our current clients.

There is space in the pilates session to learn about the families of the clients. I can’t tell you how many times I have delighted clients by knowing the names of their grand kids and remembering the events of those lives.

Solution 2: Creating referral relationships with physicians in my network

When finding referral partners:
- Find people that see the world similarly to you.
- Make connections, find common ground and develop assets.
- Then offer them a free session.
It’s a slow game with a gigantic return on investment.

I had a friend who happened to be transitioning from ER Medicine to Sports Medicine. We were acquaintances. Then luckily enough there was a two year period where I would walk across the street carrying some anatomy book or another and have lunch at the cafe with what my business partner called my lunch buddies.

Picture a bustling cafe with a large round table where people are working/eating in parallel with reading material or screens.

On one of these days I looked up and saw this friend that I knew as an ER doc. As we were catching up, I found out that he was becoming a sports medicine doc. He saw my Anatomy Trains book and we had a geek out session. (Nerds unite to save the world) For the next two years we would end up at the round table once or even twice a week and we built a friendship grounded in collegiality.

When my business partner and I bought the studio I offered my friend a free session. Now 10 years later he is the studio’s largest referral source!

PS I found our web designer and health insurance agent at the round table too…Never eat lunch alone is real, but it can also happen with parallel lunch at a community table in a cafe.

take away

A friendship that starts over a common interest over lunch is likely to develop into a referral partnership.

Solution 3: Networking at the chamber of commerce

Third, the chamber of commerce is your friend. That’s right, go to the events and every lunch that you can.

The first time My business partner and I went to a chamber arrive at five it was a lesson in awkward small talk…We’d play games. We’d say to each other, “Let’s split up and meet back together with five business cards. This was a little fruitless. At least, I am not sure we did anything with those business cards. But we were determined and we showed up every time.

Then we started making headway. We were building relationships again. We were adding touches to the folks out there. Every person at the chamber knew us as the Pilates gals. We weren’t selling pilates to the folks at the chamber, but we were making sure that we were at the top of mind when a chamber member’s loved one said, “You should try Pilates.”

Remember

It is a basic marketing principle that it takes seven touches before someone will internalize and/or act upon your call to action.

What can you do to build your Word of Mouth marketing
1. Make lists – Who do you know and how do you know them. Who are you eating lunch with? What organizations can you be a part of?
2. Learn and Remember the names of your clients friends family, and anything else they talk about. Keep asking questions!
3. Keep going to the chamber networking events…Don’t sell Pilates but be prepared to answer any question that a person might have about their own body.
April 3, 2019