How to handle competition in the studio business

featured, Founder Friday, Grow, Manage — By Poornima Vijayashanker on July 22, 2011 at 12:55 pm

The number of yoga studios opening up across the US is on the rise, which is great news for all of us yogis who want to get our fix! However, the side effect of an increase in the popularity of yoga and studios opening is an increase in competition. So unless you’re operating the only studio in town you’re definitely concerned about how many studios are within a 5-10 mile radius of yours. While differentiating your studio based on the style of yoga and quality of instruction are good ways to attract students and stay in business, its unfortunately not enough to stay and grow your yoga business. There are a few things you need to constantly track when you’re a new business or when you’re finding it hard to increase sales.

1. Cost of Classes

Just servicing students costs money! While you might think its a good idea to have full classes all the time it does cost you in terms of wear and tear on your studio, not to mention the rising cost of energy and utility bills. Keep a close eye on how much its costing you to run each class, this should include: paying instructors, utilities, cleaning, and any equipment needed such as mats, towel, or water.

As a studio owner you want to offer a lot of classes, but I’m sure you also want to stay in business! So once you figure out how much each class costs you will then have a better idea of how many classes it makes sense to offer.

2. Full classes don’t translate to new sales

People prepay for a class packages so while you’re getting paid ahead of time it means you’re not always making money when your studio is open. You’re actually spending a lot of time servicing students. Start tracking how many new sales you’ve made each day, week, and month. If you find that you need to be making more sales then you should track when student’s packages are about to expire, and be sure to notify them in advance so that they do indeed purchase another package.

3. Sell and discount to regular students

While daily deals are great for bringing in new students, it takes students a while to redeem their deal, and go on to purchasing a non-discounted package. To increase sales and repeat business be sure to offer discounts to regular students. Since you’re running a business that relies on a community of regular practitioners be sure to recognize the value they are adding to help you stay and grow your studio.

While in the short term competition might drive down your studio’s revenue focus on the quality of your studio, track and keep costs low, and develop a loyal set of regular students. These strategies will help you stay and grow your studio in the long term.

We’d love to hear how you have been impacted by competition recently, and what steps have you taken to protect your business?

Poornima is a software engineer and entrepreneur. She was one of the first engineers at Mint.com, a startup, which was acquired by Intuit. She graduated from Duke University with double major in Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science. Poornima has been a devoted yogini for the past 6 years and competes in Bikram Yoga. Through consulting with local studios looking to improve their management practices, she decided to create BizeeBee. Learn more about BizeeBee