Ask Me Anything

Pilates studio owner edition

I put a question box up on Instagram asking what you wanted to know about running a studio, and the honest answer is I could have answered fifty of these. Here are the five that made the cut.

“How did you learn everything about opening a studio? Legal, construction, tech, all of it?”

I still have the text messages from April 2023, at 23 years old, texting my boyfriend asking him how commercial leasing works and what he thinks a space like that would even cost. That’s the whole origin story, I didn’t have a background in this, I didn’t have anyone in the industry to call, ChatGPT didn’t exist yet. I just had an idea and a willingness to figure it out one very confusing decision at a time.

Legal, I learned through some genuinely hard and expensive mistakes. Construction, I learned by talking to a lot of contractors and not being embarrassed to ask questions that felt stupid at the time. Tech, I learned by spending way too many hours building things myself so I actually understood how they worked instead of just paying someone to make the problem go away. MarianaTek is a wonderful platform and I wish I’d started there instead of cobbling something together myself, but that’s the tradeoff. You either pay for the shortcut or you pay in time, I paid in time.

Four years in, I’ve learned an absurd amount and I am still learning every single day. That’s genuinely the fun part!!!

“Thoughts on Pilates certs and education, plus your own experience getting certified”