451: Part 2 - Saving a Struggling Pilates Studio: Live Coaching With Mike Arce

All right, we are here for a part two. Jess, welcome back to the Behind Gym Door podcast.

Thank you. Excited to be here.

Okay, so let's get to work because we got some work to do. I did watch one of your reels on Instagram and it sounded like you've decided to really stick to the demand, right? I have. I think I was

just getting a bit too confused and I think then everybody else was getting a bit too confused on... what we're offering here, what the point of it is, what the goal was. And then I think by talking about classes and on demand, it was kind of almost diminishing both because I wasn't able to say all of the benefits of the on demand because there's so many benefits on demand because then I was like, but there's also benefits of classes and I'm not a marketer, right? I don't, I need to stick with the basics. I need to stick with one thing and talk to that market because that's how I started my studio when I didn't feel like it was failing and it was doing really well and it was covering all the bills and I was about to get into profits. And then I brought in the classes in January this year. And I feel like that's when things kind of just got murky and weird and everything like that.

I'm going to be sharing my screen here and then this way we can get my iPad on. Hopefully my iPad launches. There we go. Can you see it? Okay, so here's what we're going to do. If you want to go on demand, let's go on demand and let's figure out how to make it work. Okay, so first step in marketing is you want to be able to quickly identify who your avatar is, who you're actually going to be creating things for, who you're going to be marketing to and what you're going to be building in order to service them and make them happy. Now, you kind of went a little bit backwards because you said, no, we're going to build the product first. However, you said you did build it because you heard people say certain things. So what did you hear them say?

Well, what I was hearing, and I took it a lot from my own experience. So when I first started thinking about On Demand, because I've been thinking about this for probably, because I have my studio for just over a year, but I've been thinking about On Demand probably about three years. So it's been a long time. It wasn't just this quick thing that I was like, I'm just going to make this. It went quick when I started making it, but it was a long time that I thought about it because I wanted something I... I'm a really, really early in the morning workout. Like I want to be moving by 5.30 kind of person in the morning. Studios earliest class is always going to be six because obviously they need that time for enough people to be there. So that is worth it paying an instructor, right? So there was never going to be a time when it really went to a 5.30. Also in New Zealand, and it's the same in the States, like you still want to be by somewhere that's convenient to you, right? So even if there was one that did earlier, there was none by me.

I did

earlier. And I wanted a space where I could just go like, I'm confident in my ability. It's 5.30 in the morning. I don't want to talk to anybody. I just want to get in, get out, not