The Pilates Business Podcast has rebooted so that clinical Pilates business owners can learn more about how to survive and thrive through the many challenges that the clinical Pilates business owner must work through.

In this second reboot episode, we also explain why The Pilates Business Podcast had to take a break and more importantly, how and why it will help you as a clinical Pilates business owner. Will you listen and learn the business development strategies of other successful clinical Pilates business owners? There is one sure way to get that done. Listen to this episode of the rebooted Pilates business podcast, and stay awesome. 

Welcome back to The Pilates Business Podcast, episode two. We had a very long break from 2021 now to 2024 and our second episode of the rebooted Pilates Business Podcast. We really enjoyed episode one, where we had Claire Gunther - my wife, my business partner - explain some of the challenges that we had over the last few years that made it so difficult to do this podcast, and to progress some of those things that we would have liked to. We had to really concentrate on core business during what you other Pilates business owners and Pilates instructors out there will certainly recognise as a difficult few years.

And we didn't talk much about this, but, in that last year, in 2023 we had the exploding interest rates. If you had a business loan of some sort, and, as we explained, in our previous episode, we had two studios where we owned the studio spaces (they were owned via some loans, partly we owned them and partly the bank owned them).

We sold one, that worked very well, then brought our clients across to the other Pilates Can studio in Manuka, which is now owned by our self-managed super fund. Which is a really good way to go, but of course, self-managed super fund lending is a little bit more expensive.

So, as interest rates rose through 2023, and perhaps they will some more in 2024, we'll see, we found that put on more pressure, of course, on the bottom line. More pressure on us as a business, but also more pressure on our clients as well, they had less money to spend. Our clients are generally fairly well off, to afford personal training or semi-private personal training in Pilates.

However, high interest rates, they do affect everyone and that's what they're designed to do to dampen the spending. That creates pressures on the business, on the bottom line, and certainly gives justification for our price rises, but we already had justification for the price rises. Many things had already gone up in terms of our costs, in comparison to what we were able to bring in during those years between 2020 and 2023. So here's to a better 2024, and being able to move ahead.

One of the ways we're looking at doing that is by learning from our industry, helping our industry to learn about business development for clinical Pilates studios in particular. And, we'd like to invite you to, provide feedback for us so that we can provide the right subjects here at the podcast.

With that, I'd like to thank Claire for her wonderful contribution last week to the podcast, and, just define her role a little bit. She doesn't only do Pilates. She's certainly our chief instructor. She has over 20,000 hours of professional Pilates delivery. Does a fantastic job along with all of the other Pilates instructors on our team. She also does the accounts. She pays the pays to the dozen or so staff that we have working with us here locally, and also remotely on our admin team.

That's, of course, a very important thing. If you don't pay your staff on time, every time, you're going to suffer the negative consequences of that, of course. That's something that Claire makes sure of, that she pays the bills, and that she checks what we should be paying and shouldn't be paying. In this day and age of very many direct debits for this, that, and the other, it's important to keep count of those costs and keep those down, as well as to maximise your income, so that you can stay in business and keep providing the fantastic clinical Pilates services that you do for your clientele and the opportunity for employment and involvement with the studio for our fantastic instructors.

Talking about the fantastic instructors, that's a very important link. We have terrific instructors in our studio at Pilates Can, and I'm sure that's the case with many other studios around the world, clinical Pilates studios in particular. Those instructors, they care about their clientele, they care about what they're delivering, and they provide a service that delivers life-changing results in many cases. Clients are so happy with what they're getting, being able to change their mobility and be able to do the things that they perhaps couldn't do before. Lift the grandchildren, perhaps a round of golf, go for a bike ride, or just sleep well and not be in so much pain. Those sort of things are indeed life-changing. So thanks Claire for coming onto the podcast, with all of your other duties, looking after the team and looking after the clients.

Just to explain the delineation between myself and Claire in the business. Business development manager would be the way to describe what I do. I help to create the systems. We have an admin team and marketing and sales that help us with making sure that new business is coming in. Clients do move on for one reason or another, often it's they've moved out of town to be leaving us, and we want to make sure that we're working as much as possible to capacity in the studio.

Talking about instructors, we are helping to create more instructors to become involved with our studio and other studios in our local area, and how we're aligned with training, that does help also around the world. We'll get onto that a little bit later, but until then, I'd like to encourage you to subscribe to this podcast. We're going to be delivering a lot of fantastic content, and we want to make sure that you get that content so that you can give us feedback.

We might not have all the answers, but we know the right questions to be asking. We have answered a lot of the questions in our 25 years of business experience in health, wellbeing, fitness, and particularly in clinical Pilates. We've made a lot of mistakes and we've also learnt a lot from those mistakes.

We do a lot of little things right, and so we're going to be sharing a lot of those things with you. The details of those things, so that you can benefit from that, and so that we can benefit from your feedback, from your own ideas that we'll be able to share on the podcast, with real Pilates business owners and real service providers who help us to do what we need to do, because it's not always about just the delivery of the Pilates.

There's many other things that go into a clinical Pilates studio business to help it to tick along and keep everybody happy because that's obviously what you need. You need the clients to be happy, the staff, the instructors, and also the owners of the business - who are funding it, who are taking the risk of bringing it all together, and having a unique clinical Pilates solution for people - to be happy.

That's what we're looking to do. We're excited about that. We're excited about bringing the truth of what we do and how we do it, and finding more of that truth as we walk through this journey with you, and learn more about how the business development of clinical Pilates studios will and can work going forward.

You may be wondering, what are the reasons why we're back with The Pilates Business Podcast? We decided that we wanted to come back, both into business after COVID and during COVID (because we're good at what we do, we've certainly got a lot to learn as well), and this process of creating and publishing a podcast. This allows us to both learn those things, and share those things with you out there in clinical Pilates industry.

We'll call it a day there for this short, but important episode. Our next episode will be about clinical Pilates. We'll come up with a little definition, if you're wondering if you fit into that, and also talk about our instructors, and how important it is having people with the specific training and experience. We can't do what we do without fantastic instructors, so we'll talk about that important link in episode 3. Looking forward to talking with you again, and, until that time, stay awesome.