Karma Doesn’t Pay the Rent: Part Two
Packaging Your Offering with Alison Smith, Yoga Instructor
As the co-founder of LubbDubb, a scheduling, promoting and booking platform for freelance instructors, I spend much of my time dissecting the differences between the freelance fitness instructor and the boutique fitness studio. The needs for both users are very different, and since our mission is to support instructors in making more money, saving them time, and helping them become discovered by a broader clientele base it’s important that I figure out exactly how to service the needs of the freelancer.
As I dive deeper into product design, and look at what features our users want I have come across a very interesting difference… studios own the fitness “package”. What I mean by that is instructors very rarely create “packages”. I’ve never seen an instructor do a “3 privates & 3 group class” package, or an “unlimited monthly” package, but studios do these all the time. These packages are great tools which studios use to hook students into a routine.
Since many instructors are at the mercy of the studio, it makes sense that we don’t create packages. How can we do a “3 privates and 3 group class” packet if our students can’t even book through us, but have to book our services through the studio software. However as many of us are becoming disenchanted by teaching in studios only, we can now start getting creative on how we package our services.
So I was beyond pleased to speak to my yoga instructor friend Alison Smith about some of these topics, and I learned a ton about how she packages her offerings. Alison has been a full time yoga instructor for 12 years. Her most recent endeavor has been to open up her own studio space. It’s a bit different than the typical studio. Instead of a branded studio where she manages the class schedule and heards cats; it’s a space where instructors can rent by the hour or day i.e. share economy. So if you need a space to host your own events I would highly recommend The Space SF. It’s a lovely studio, with all the yoga accoutrements that you need to host either group workshops, classes or your private clients.
Mandi: I spoke to a piano instructor once, and she told me her students pay per semester. They commit to a day and time per week, and if they can’t make that time then they lose out on their session. Just like school! If your taking a college class, and you can’t make it, then you miss out on the material and you fall behind. As a Pilates Instructor my clients come and go, they often vacation, or can’t make their normal private time because of doctors appointments, and therefore I’m out of that money for the week. It’s feast or famine, there’s no continuity!!
Alison: One of my most successful offerings is something I call Yoga Club, and it’s offered in semesters. In the beginning I was offering many workshops per year, and these workshops were filled with many of the same people. So I was thinking, what if a student wanted to sign up for all five workshops? It would be $300 about $60 a workshop. And if a student was going to just “drop-in” they would be paying $75 — $85. So the series price is significantly less than a drop in. It makes sense for them to sign up for the whole series, even if they’re going to miss one or two. And that worked so well that I don’t even offer drop-ins anymore. Yoga Club sells out every time, and people don’t want to miss it.
Mandi: I love that!! How long have you been doing Yoga Club?
Alison: This is the third year. There are three semesters throughout the year, and this year I offered a package for the whole year, and it sold out immediately.
Alison: It’s great because then I can focus on other things. Because for me, it’s not just about getting paid well, but a lot of time and energy goes into marketing. Which can be stressful. Offering semesters allows me to market the offerings a few times a year versus having to market a single workshop every time I do it. And I like to do workshops about once a month.
Alison: I think the yoga community as a whole is ended up in this really bad habit of offering people teacher trainings to “deepen their practice”. But people graduate from that and then there’s nothing for them to do after. I believe some of the most underserved population in the yoga community are people who are super dedicated to yoga.
Mandi: How much is Yoga Club?
Alison: Yoga Club is between $360 — $240 per semester or $960 for the year.
Mandi: How did you come up with that price?
Alison: Each semester is about 20 hours. And each credit hour is valued at $20 — $25 per hour. Which is a pretty common number, this formula is what a lot of teacher training programs and other immersion programs use.
Mandi: Do you offer Teacher Trainings?
Alison: I have students who want to do teacher trainings but I will not teach a traditional 200 hour teacher training. I have taken what I know from the Anusara method, which was how I was initially trained. I’ve structured something along those lines, based on what feels good to me, which would allow me to create the type of teachers, who I’d be proud to say trained with me. And I don’t think a 200 hour training can do that. So, similar to Anusara, in these free standing teacher training seminars I teach vocational skills. Skills like how to position and create programs and pricing structures. I ask the people who want to be trained by me to accumulate a certain amount of hours in categories, like a college, and students are required to pass tests. So it’s structured like that, and then the teaching skills seminars are delivered in the same format.
Mandi: A lot of instructors, who are teaching outside of the traditional studio setting lead international retreats, is that something you are doing as well?
Alison: I’m partial to local retreats rather than international. Because if I take off a week to go teach in a foreign country my local students don’t see me for that week. There’s a huge correlation with consistency, and class size. So financially, it doesn’t make a lot of sense. In terms of personal time off and my ability to take a vacation significantly diminishes too. I think if 40 people were coming, maybe it would make more sense, but I don’t even like to teach the groups of that size if I don’t have to.
Alison: I get emails about working with companies to facilitate regular international retreats, but I don’t like using those type of companies for a few reasons. Sometimes I will broker deals with students if they really can’t afford it. If I manage my own retreats I can work some type of deal to make it happen. For instance, a woman who came to one of my retreats traded me for a bunch of pottery. Which was amazing because I’ve got all those beautiful pottery for my home and she got to come on the retreat for very low cost.
Alison: A retreat company reached out to me and asked me to lead one of their retreats. But to me there’s not much justification to using a company like that. Because you’re paying a middleman. I guess, if you don’t have payment processing set up, and if you don’t want to do all the extra stuff they could be a good option. There’s not much extra travel logistics stuff that goes into a retreat, but some teachers are really nervous about doing it themselves. If you work with one of those companies they actually take like a pretty big percentage. A lot of instructors get kind of bound up with those logistics. I think it’s a terrible idea to have the flight included in a retreat. In my experience most students want to book their own flights, or use airline points or maybe the student wants to fly first class or an airline of their choice. Most resorts in Costa Rica and other popular resort areas will arrange for airport transportation for you. You just tell the resort when your students are coming and it’s not that big of a deal.
Mandi: I’ve heard some instructors, who are using those retreat companies, are making $500 and getting a free vacation out of it.
Alison: So it doesn’t make a lot of sense when you think about how much time you have to take off. And you’re working the whole time. For me it’s pretty exhausting, especially after five days, I’m done. I like don’t even want to talk to anyone anymore. So I don’t think I would consider it a vacation.
Mandi: Do you feel like you’re balanced in your teaching? Would you want to do more privates or more Yoga Club or is there something that you feel like you want to cut out?
I think a lot of teachers would feel a lot more satisfied if they had more creative freedom and more space to offer what really works for them or what they’re really inspired by.
Alison: I’m likely to reducing the amount of public classes I’m teaching in order to do more semi-private classes. I want to do more small group classes; cap the class size at six to eight students. I really like teaching small groups.
Mandi: You’ve built your following teaching public classes. If you weren’t teaching public classes anymore, would your students move with you?
Alison: A lot of my public classes are like 30–40 people and I don’t like it because I spend a vast majority of my time being worried about someone getting kicked in the head. And I don’t like it because the studios are packed into a room that really should, in my opinion, fit about 24, with 40 students.
Alison: So in private classes I can offer special programs. For instance, I’m doing a “Yoga For Athletes” series and the group that comes originally were private clients and they love the small group class. Doing small group classes allows me to do very specific yoga. For that group I don’t do a lot of flow. Most of them have a shoulder and neck injuries and they don’t need to do 50 Chaturanga
Mandi: So if you did give up your public classes would you be worried that you wouldn’t have that marketing channel to promote your other offerings?
Alison: I would never give up all of them.
Mandi: You’re just going to give up some, the ones that aren’t drawing additional clients from?
Alison: Or the ones that I feel like I could healthfully give up and people would transfer to other things or classes that I’m not happy with. One of the classes I’m considering giving up is by-far considered my most successful class. But for me it’s kind of a nightmare because of the space issue. It’s very stressful for that reason. I don’t like to tell people they can’t come in because it’s full. And a lot of those people have also studied with me for a long time. I’ve had that class for five or six years. So, I’m confident that if I left, and they really wanted to study with me, they would be able to find ways. You know I think those type of students move with you. You often have a relationship with them.
Mandi: It sounds to me that The Space SF is allowing you to have the teaching schedule that you desire. So you must be pretty excited that you have opened up The Space.
Alison: Yeah, to me part of the motivation behind it is I always felt creatively and economically a little bit limited at the studios. For example one of the studios I teach at have asked me to be a teacher trainer but I’m not interested in being part of their method.
Alison: So, in terms of me as a teacher, being able to offer whatever I want and whatever’s really lighting me up and in the structure and format that I’m interested in, like Yoga Club would never exist there. There’s a lot of things that I do which couldn’t exist within any studio. So that’s a big part of why The Space got created. I think a lot of teachers would feel a lot more satisfied if they had more creative freedom and more space to offer what really works for them or what they’re really inspired by.
Mandi: Is there anything that you want to add to this topic, that you think is important to instructors?
Alison: One of my teachers told me don’t underestimate the intelligence of your students. I think sometimes we get into a pattern of making things easy for people, by not asking our students to commit to, or go as deep as they would probably want to. I think we’ve made yoga kind of “lite”. And I feel like public yoga classes can be an introduction to yoga, but if you really want to learn about it, you should go to school. If you want to do cardio, kickboxing, you can do that at the gym, right? But if you want to learn like real legitimate Krav Maga or, Taekwondo, you wouldn’t want to go to a gym, you would want to go to school, right? And you would have respect for your teacher, and you’d being in a program, and you’d expect to progress and learn things versus just doing an exercise class.
Alison: I think that could be true in the yoga community. I think students actually want that a lot more. And they haven’t ever been given that opportunity. When I started Yoga Club, I was like, I think this is a good idea. I think people want this. I’m going to just try it and see how it goes. And that was three years ago. And it has been amazing. And by far the most sustainable thing I’ve ever offered and more sustainable than most of my colleagues with a lot of other things they do. Most of my Yoga Club people have been with me since the very beginning.
Are you a freelance fitness instructor and want to learn more about LubbDubb? We’d love to hear from you! info@lubbdubb.io
#loveyouryogateacher
