The Studio CEO: Business Coaching For Yoga & Pilates Teachers & Studio Owners

The 3 Financial Goals Every Studio Owner Needs to Set in 2026

• Jackie Murphy • Episode 52

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In this episode of the Studio CEO Podcast, Jackie Murphy explains the three financial goals every yoga and Pilates studio owner needs to set for 2026: profit, salary, and revenue. Learn how to work backwards from the life you want, track your numbers monthly, and build a studio business that is profitable, sustainable, and supportive — not draining.

Key Takeaways

✔ Profit creates sustainability
 ✔ Salary is non-negotiable
 ✔ Revenue funds growth
 ✔ Monthly tracking matters
 ✔ Goals should stretch your identity

FAQs

What financial goals should a studio owner set?
Profit, salary, and revenue — in that order.

How much profit should a yoga or Pilates studio make?
10–30% depending on the stage of business.

Should studio owners pay themselves a salary?
Yes. Consistently and intentionally.

Work with Jackie Murphy


SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to the Studio CEO, the only podcast that empowers yoga and Pilates teachers and studio owners to step confidently into their role as CEO. If you are ready to show up with passion, take your business seriously, and scale to new heights without burning out, you are in the right place. I'm your host, Jackie Murphy, an award-winning certified business coach with over 12 years of experience inside the yoga industry. I have seen firsthand what it takes to build a profitable and scalable business. Join me as we dive into strategies, insights, and real-world advice that will help you grow your revenue, build a thriving team, and create a business that serves you as much as you serve your students. It's time to embrace your inner CEO and make more money without working more. This is just the beginning. I am delighted to be spending another year with you and happy, so happy to be back at work in the office. I'm doing air quotes because my office is in my home, but it feels so good just to have the time and focus and energy to pour into you all and into this business. This past Christmas, New Year's, I set my business up so I could fully take off almost two full weeks, like do nothing at all in my business. And my family and I went up to the mountains. We took my three and my four-year-old snowboarding for the first time, which was adorable, and a workout for sure. And it was just so lovely to have time to be, read, sit by a fire, drink lots of tea. But now I gotta just be very honest. We have for sure hit the ground running in 2026. I love the energy of the new year. I love taking down decorations. I love Christmas. I put my decorations up in October. I take them down and I get flowers and we do a deep clean and I just feel really ready and refreshed for the year. We have some exciting stuff coming this year. The first big announcement will probably be in early February. So if you are not on the email list, make sure that you get on the email list and stay tuned for what's coming this year. But just like me, right now, you may be thinking about your goals for 2026. And maybe you have already started to set a goal for 2026 or you're reflecting still on 2025 and trying to figure out what am I taking from 2025? What am I not taking? And I just want to preface this podcast. We're gonna talk about the three financial goals I think you should set, but I want to preface this podcast to say reflecting and evaluating are so key to you figuring out what your goal, quote unquote, should be for 2026. Like you cannot, I repeat, you cannot set a goal without reflecting on all of last year. I recently just heard someone say that means for them opening their photo app on their phone and going month through month and like reflecting on what each month was and the wins and the lows. I don't do that, but I do pull out my calendar and I look at my calendar month over month and I just kind of jogs my brain of like what was going on, what was happening. And I really want you to pay attention to what did you enjoy? What lit you up in your business? What was the most fun for you? Something that I started doing in 2025 was in studio visits for my private clients, and I cannot tell you how much joy this brought me. I have a piece of me that misses being in person in studio every single day so much. And so this gave me a little sense of what life used to be like for me. I was able to visit their spaces and help them evaluate their marketing in studio, meet with their teams, take classes, and it just felt so good. So we already have three of those planned for 2026, and I'm sure some more coming up along the way. But when you evaluate, that's exactly what I want you to do. Think about what do you want to keep? What worked for you last year? What lit you up the most? And what do you need to let go of? And then once you evaluate, that is the time that you can turn and say, what should my goal be? What do I want my goal to be for 2026? And it will be different for everyone. But I'm gonna make this really simple for you because I think there's three financial goals that you need to set for your business this year and not just one big financial goal. And that is the most common mistake that I see. People typically think about the revenue and they set a revenue goal for the year, and they're forgetting these two other goals that are just as important, if not more important. So the first goal that I want you to set is how much profit you want to create in your business in 2026. So let's define what profit is. Profit is what's left after you pay all of your expenses, including your salary. So it's gonna be revenue minus your operating expenses, minus your other expenses, and that will give you your profit. Profit is the money your business keeps, it stays in your business bank account or gets reinvested into the business. It is your cushion, it's your safety net, it's your growth fun. Profit matters for a few different reasons. Number one, profit is gonna give you options. It's going to give you the ability to say, here's how I want to reinvest this money and grow my business next year. It also is going to make your business sustainable so that you don't have to hit your highest revenue month every single month, but you actually plan for the summer months being a little bit slower, knowing that you have profit in the business bank account to cover those months if you need. And finally, profit means your business is actually working. If you are looking to build an asset that someone else could one day potentially purchase, it is very important that that asset is profitable. People like to purchase businesses that are profitable. So if you are generating revenue, if you're paying yourself, if you're paying all of your expenses and you still have money left over, that is a quote unquote real business. We'll call it. That's a really terrible way to say that. But that is the type of business that someone's going to look at buying or investing in. And not every business is profitable year one. Actually, it typically takes a studio two or three years to become profitable. And so when you're looking at this and you're thinking, I want to set a profit goal this year, you could start with just saying, I want to be 1% profitable. Like that's if you're brand new, you're getting you're in your startup year, you're investing lots of cash, and you're like, I'm just gonna put aside a little bit of money so I can be profitable this year. If you are kind of beyond that, I would say that minimum goal should be at least 10% profit after all is said and done at the end of the year. 10% profit is a healthier starting point, and it's gonna help you really get clear on how to be more efficient so that you can aim for 20 to 30% profit in your business, if not higher. Now, in order to know your profit at the end of the year, this is something that you're gonna need to track month over month or have your CPA tell you month over month as the year goes on. You wanna know what was my revenue this month? How much were my expenses? Did I overspend anywhere? And what was my profit this month? What is my plan for my profit this month? Am I gonna save it, invest it, use it for growth, and track that monthly. The mistake that I see is people can often think as profit as a end result that sort of just happens or doesn't happen. Super nice to have, but not necessarily essential. And what can happen is that you can start to overspend and not have the profit that you want in your business. And I'm here to tell you just set a goal with what you want your profit to be so that it's not this optional thing that maybe happens or doesn't happen for you, but you're intentionally creating a profitable business as you grow. If you're having a hard time being profitable, something is probably broken and you definitely want to figure out what that thing is. Is revenue too low? Are your expenses too high? Are you paying yourself too much? This is very rare in our industry. Usually it's the first two, but profit will tell the truth about whether or not the strategies and the business model that you are currently using is effective. So definitely set your profit goal first, ideally between 20 to 30%, unless you're on the newer stages of business, and then aim for one to 10%, but aim for some sort of profit in your business. The second goal that I want you to set this is incredibly important. You can pause whatever you're doing and listen to this right now. You have to set a goal for what you want to pay yourself from your business. I think very often we can get into the trap where we believe I'll start paying myself more win X. I'll start giving myself the salary that I want to have after I've hit this certain revenue. And it's really, really hard to come back from that. And it just pushes you off paying yourself for longer periods of time. So you want to decide what do you want your salary to be? What do you want your take-home pay to be? What do you want your personal income to be? This is gonna be the money that goes from your business bank account into your personal bank account, which should be two separate things. And it's gonna pay for your mortgage, your groceries, your life. You deserve to pay yourself a real salary, not just what's left over, not just you know, using your business credit card to do some personal expenses. You deserve it to be real, consistent, organized, and a livable wage. Now, this is something I would consult a CPA about because they can often guide you, especially if you're taxed as an S-corp, on what your actual salary, W-2 salary should be. But even then, you still get to decide what owner's distributions you want to pull from your business to live off of. I really recommend doing this consistently versus pulling owners' distributions when you have a high month. So just decide like this is what I want to take home. This amount of it is coming from my salary from my CPA, and the rest is gonna be owners' distributions that come out monthly. If that just went like too much over your head, if you're like Jackie, say it again, tell me how to do that. Send me a message on Instagram or if you're in the studio CEO program, we can talk about it. But you have to think about paying yourself first and making that a goal. It's really easy for business owners to prioritize paying rent, paying teachers, paying marketing, paying for a new water fountain, paying for new paint, paying for mats. And then if anything's left over, they'll pay themselves. But you are not the last priority in your business. You are literally the most important asset to your business. So if you aren't making money, if you aren't taking care of yourself, then it's gonna be really hard for your business to grow the way that you want it to grow. Now, you may have a salary goal for this year, and you're like, Jackie, that is not where I want to be long term. That's okay. We can work up to some sort of big lifestyle change or big salary increase for you. Just find what your goal is for this year. What do you need to cover your personal expenses and make sure that you are living comfortably, whatever that means for each of you? Decide what that is, and then every single month pay yourself the same thing so that your personal money can be just as organized and clean and efficient as your business money. So finally, after you figured out what profit you want to have, after you figured out what salary you would like to have, then you're kind of gonna back yourself into what does my revenue need to be? This is the most common goal that people set is a revenue goal. So revenue is the total amount of money coming into your business before you pay for anything. It's also called your gross income or top line revenue. So revenue is every dollar that comes through your door within the year. It's not your profit, it's not your salary, it's just what come is coming in. Revenue matters because it tells you the size and scale of your business and it also determines what's possible. If you're bringing in 10K a month in revenue, then you maybe can't afford a full-time manager and teachers and a social media person because the math doesn't work with the rent that you pay. But if you're bringing in 50K a month, then you can really start to think about building a team and spending 10% of that on ads every single month. Revenue is the fuel that makes your growth possible. So you want to set a revenue goal, but you almost want to work yourself backwards into that goal. You want to think about the salary that you want, your operating expenses from 2025, if you expect those to go up for some reason, and your profit goal and add all of that together. The salary you want, your operating expenses from 2025, plus 20% profit or 30% profit. And now you can look at a revenue goal that actually helps you create the life that you want to have and grows the business in a sustainable way. So I really want you to think about this. Let's give you an example. You want to pay yourself$60,000 a year. It's$5K a month. Your operating expenses around$15K a month for rent, payroll, software, marketing, and you want$3K a month in profit. This is the money that the business keeps. So it's$5K plus$15 plus$3K equals$23K a month in revenue. That's$267K a year. That is your revenue goal. So now, with that revenue goal, you know what you want to pay yourself. You know that you can cover all your expenses and you know you'll have profit. And in order to do that, you need to bring in$23K a month. And now we're solving the right problem. And again, this is something that you're going to have to track every single month. And you may be like, Jackie, yes, of course. But I find so often working with clients is that we're we're not intentionally consistently sitting down with our money, with our expenses, looking at our profit and getting really clear on what the money is telling us. So you want to look at the end of every month, look at your sales. You want to look at the end of the month what your expenses are. You want to look at what you ended up paying yourself or what you paid yourself. And you need to always know what revenue did you bring in? Are you on track to hit your annual revenue goal? Where is that revenue coming from specifically? Is it intro offers? Is it memberships? Is it retreats? You need to know this clearly throughout the entire year. So now you have these three goals that are gonna work together perfectly, right? You really want to think about your revenue is gonna fund everything. Your revenue needs to be high enough to cover your salary, your operating expenses, and your profit goal. Your salary is non-negotiable. You're not the last priority. You're gonna pay yourself. If you're not paying yourself, your business isn't going to be able to support you, which will drain you and make it harder to grow. And then your profit is what turns this into an asset down the line. Profit tells you whether or not your business model is sustainable and attractive. If you're hitting your revenue goal and your salary goal, but you don't have profit, something is still off. You might be overspending or your revenue goal is too low. This is how you're going to run your business in 2026. You set clear goals for all three numbers and then track them monthly. Now, here's what's gonna happen: you're gonna set a goal and you might feel some sort of way. Maybe your brain will start to tell you, oh, that's such a big jump. I don't know if it can hit that. I've never hit that before. That is your primitive brain pulling you back to safety of what you've done before, of being efficient, not changing anything, and staying inside of your comfort zone. I want you to set a goal that just setting the goal alone, just writing it down, just saying that that's your goal, elevates how you think about yourself, elevates how you think about your business, and elevates what your mission is on a day-to-day basis. You might look at your goal and decide that I need to stop doing X or start doing Y, or if I'm gonna hit this this year, I need to prioritize X, Y, and Z. Your goals should help you become a more full, more aligned, more authentic version of yourself. That is what the goal is for, to help you realize maybe something that at one point in time you didn't think was possible. So here's what I want you to walk away with today. You don't need to have tons of different goals. You just need three: revenue, salary, and profit. And these three numbers will help guide you for the entire year. Set the goal, track the numbers, become the person who can hit that goal and then make decisions based on what happens throughout the year. If you want support on this and you want support on tracking your numbers and building a business that really works for you long time, this is exactly what we do inside the studio CEO program. So you can click the link below to join us. I'll talk to y'all in the next episode.