Nobody Hands You Margins. You Take Them.

Tonight's Pairing
🍸 A slightly bruised martini, up
🧀 Aged Comté & Marcona almonds
On the table: The decisions no one sees.

I built a business once without really ever leaving my house.

I woke up one day and couldn’t remember the last time I felt like myself. Burnout has a funny way of showing up like that.

I’d spent years building something real online. But somewhere along the way, I lost what had always made me, me. Moving my body. Focusing on my family. Eating well. Traveling. Being around humans in real rooms without an overwhelming sense of anxiety.

I wanted my life back.

What came next stemmed from a craving I couldn’t solve. I wanted to get back to myself, and I knew that what I was looking for didn’t exist. I’ll be the first to admit that staying consistent with moving my body takes a community. It takes a place I feel at home in. A studio that inspires me.

None of which I could find.

So I did what felt obvious to me and slightly reckless to everyone else. I decided to build it myself.

I had the branding, sales and business-building skills to make something like this work. I was confident people would want to be part of what I knew I could build… there was just one small issue…

I had never taught a single Pilates class in my life.

So I reached out to the best in the game. Molly. My now co-founder, and the previous founder of the fitness studio I taught at post-college. She was the one who taught me how to be an instructor people actually wanted to show up for. She was the only way this was going to work.

I sent her a message while she was in Paris.

“Can you do me a favor and start a pilates studio on the west side of the cities…” Somewhat joking.

But I know Molly. So when she didn’t laugh it off, neither did I. We got coffee a week later and Rêve was born at that coffee shop.

A coffee shop in the same town where we’d open our first studio, exactly one year later.

You’ll hear plenty of studio owners talk about people first. They’re not wrong, you’re nothing without your clients. But you can’t serve a community if you have to close your doors. The truth is, we never built Rêve as a passion project. We built it as a business.

That’s what this whole August series is about.

So here’s where we’re headed this month. Five articles dedicated to how we built it that way from day 1.

Paid subscribers get the full stack:

1. Why owning a studio and running a business aren't the same thing, and how that difference is the whole reason we’ve gotten this far.

2. What actually goes into a brand people notice before they ever walk in the door.

3. The pre-sale strategy that got people paying before we had a place to put them.

4. How we built the team before we built anything else (collaborated with !!)

5. The exact marketing cadence and launch strategy I built to open at profitability.

If you want the real build framework, this is the month to be here.

Let’s dive in!!

Read more