5 Things That Will Change How You Run Your Studio This Week

I just wrapped Day 1 of the new Grow Mastermind cohort. Full day. Marketing and sales in the morning. Leadership and team in the afternoon.

Every person in that room is smart. Works hard. Loves what they do.

But they were all stuck on the same five things.

In this episode, I'm breaking down the five shifts that came up again and again. If you feel like you're working way too hard for the results you're getting, at least one of these is the reason.

In this episode:

1. Why you're chasing tactics when you should be choosing identity
2. How to stop trying to fix everything and find the one broken link in your business
3. The mistake that's losing you 38% of your leads before you even talk to them
4. Why you feel busy all the time but nothing's moving (and what to do about it)
5. The conversation you haven't had with your team that's keeping them stuck

Resources mentioned:

• The Growth Formula (inside the Grow Mastermind portal)
• The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni
• 9-12 email nurture sequence framework (inside the Grow Mastermind portal)

Links:

• Join the Grow Mastermind waitlist: https://www.jackiegmurphy.com/mastermind
• The Studio CEO Program: https://www.jackiegmurphy.com/studioceo
• Follow me on Instagram: @studioceoofficial

About Coach Jackie:

Jackie Murphy is a certified business coach and ERYT 500 who built a multi-seven-figure coaching business after driving 40,000 miles teaching yoga in one year. She's the founder of the Studio CEO Program and the Grow Mastermind, helping yoga and Pilates studio owners become the CEO of their business instead of the employee of it.

Work with Jackie Murphy

• Say Hi on Instagram @studioceoofficial
• 3 Marketing Mistakes Yoga & Pilates Business Owners Make:
  https://www.jackiegmurphy.com/3-marketing-mistakes
• Join The Studio CEO Program: https://www.jackiegmurphy.com/studioceo

Transcript

Tempo: 120.0

SPEAKER_00 0:12

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. Hi, welcome back to the Studio CEO podcast. I am Jackie Murphy and I am diving in for a little solo episode with you all today. Over the past few weeks, you've had the opportunity to hear from multiple of my clients about their stories, their journeys. And I have heard from so many of you how impactful those episodes are. You can always message them and tell them, or you can send me a message on Instagram. This comes up every single time I share a client story because I do really believe it's helpful to see ourselves in others in order to realize that you can have the success you want. You can overcome problems that are coming up and you can get to where you want to be in your business. That being said, it feels pretty good to be back on the mic today talking to you guys, just me and you diving in. How to build a really solid team, what their strengths are, and how to use that to really step into the next level of leadership. And every single time I lead this kickoff day, I am reminded that no matter what quote unquote level you are at in your business, like we have people within the mastermind at the million-dollar business level. We have people in the mastermind who are opening their studios. And it really doesn't matter because no matter what level you were at in your business, there are strategies, there are leadership skills that have probably never been taught to you. Like you can be the hardest worker, and you probably are. You're probably resourceful. I am guessing you are smart. You are working more than you've ever thought you would work before. And still your business can hit a bottleneck. It can be stuck at certain points. And that isn't a reflection of you or what's possible for your business. But more often than not, it is a reflection that you've never been told, hey, like this is how you accurately build out a funnel from start to finish, or this is actually how you can identify and diagnose team dynamics that are slowing your progress down. That's not covered in any certification. And so we deep dive into this in one day together to give them the best setup for our next for this situation, nine months together, so that they can take everything they've learned and really start to implement it. So think of it as like the fast track, right? Instead of spending nine months learning, we spend one day going over things and they spend nine months implementing. So I wanted to kind of give you guys a behind the scenes like look, insight to what we talked about. I'm gonna go over five things that we covered on our day that can totally change how you are running your business this week. And I want you to listen for like which one of these may be my stuck point. Which one of these things, if I shifted or if I changed, could completely shift what I'm seeing in my business and the results that I'm getting. So, number one, you are chasing tactics when you should be choosing identity. This is what I call the how hunt. I see it all the time. You are looking for the right funnel, the right ad strategy, the right email sequence. You are consuming probably a lot of content on social media about how to build a business, or you have downloaded lots of freebies about how to do X, Y, and Z thing. Maybe you've even started taking courses and you're trying stuff, but nothing is getting you to that next level. And if you keep trying strategy after strategy after strategy, but nothing sticks or nothing works, you probably will start to wonder if it's you. Like if for some reason you're not cut out for the business side of things, you're not meant to be a CEO or an owner or leader of a company. And that is not it. It isn't that you are missing a tactic or skipping a step. Before you figure out what tactic or strategy to use in your business, you have to focus on who you are becoming. So I asked the cohort on Friday, think about the version of you who already has the revenue that you want. They already have the team, they already have the flexibility or freedom in their schedule. What do they do in the business differently? How do they make decisions? What do they say no to? This isn't like woo-woo manifestation we're talking through right here. We're really wanting to make it a strategy because when you're clear on who you're becoming and how that version of you would show up, act, make decisions. You can stop second-gassing everything that you're currently doing. You can stop trying 17 different things at once. You can pick the thing that matches where you are going. So, this is what I want to offer you the who before the how. Now, I didn't come up with that phrase, and that phrase isn't new. You maybe have even heard it before, but I think sometimes we forget to embody this on a daily basis. Who am I being in my business versus how can I get where I want to go? When you focus on the who, the how will naturally present itself. When you focus on walking around, acting, deciding, talking like a multiple studio, million-dollar, multi-million dollar business owner, and then you act from that place, you will literally come up with different strategies. For example, I was talking to a client about this last week or two weeks ago, and we were specifically talking about the version of her that she is going to be when she hits 50K monthly recurring revenue. And I was like, okay, let's just like tap into that version of you for a second and talk to her. And one of the things that her current self was considering doing was creating a whole new offer to make more money. And I was like, you know, let's let's imagine that you're you've already done it. You're at the 50K monthly recurring revenue mark. Like, what does that version of you think about this little like side offer that you're considering right now? And she was like, oh, absolutely not. She would never do it. And that clarity came through so fast and so click, quick. And that means it's like quite literally a different strategy than what her current self was going to use. That's why this can be so impactful. Because when you focus on who you're becoming and where you're going, what you do or don't do, what you say yes to, what you say no to, it quite literally might change. So write down three characteristics of this next level version of yourself. This could be that they're resilient, grounded, focused, clear, confident. Write those things down. And then every single day, before you get into doing checking items off of your to-do list, task off. I want you to embody that version of you and then get to action in your business. This is not something you do once, and you're like, yeah, that's nice, Jackie. This is something that you intentionally bring yourself to daily. You are intentionally creating your life. You are intentionally creating the person that you want to become. You are intentionally creating the business that you want to have. Okay, teaching point number two. What else came up? You're trying to fix everything instead of finding the one broken link. When we go through in the mastermind, the marketing and sales strategy that I teach that is proven, it is very tempting to be like, oh my gosh, there are elements at every single point in this strategy that I could fix. I could tweak this, I could rewrite that, I could change this ad. I could focus on transaction size and retention. And it is so tempting. I watch it every single time for my clients to try and do all of it at once. And this can be happening for you too, that you are trying to fix everything, but really none of it is deeply impactful and really moving the needle. I want you to think about your marketing and sales funnel like a chain. It all links together. Your visibility links to your number of leads that you're bringing in. Your leads link to how many people are showing up, your show-up rate links to how many sales you're making, your sales links to how many the average transaction size of each person. The average transaction size links to your retention. If one link is severely broken or not connected, the entire chain underperforms. The entire business underperforms. And so it's really tempting to treat your funnel like a to-do list. Fix this, then this, then this, then this, then this. Start at the top, work your way to the bottom. But that is not the most strategic way or the most effective way to do this. Because you probably don't need to fix every stage in your new student to new member journey. You don't need to fix retention at the same time that you fix visibility, but you do need to be able to identify the one part in your funnel, the one link that is actually like quote unquote broken. I'm doing air quotes there. And you focus on that for 90 days at a time, for six months at a time. Like maybe you're realizing your website views are super low and visibility is the main thing that we need to fix. Or maybe people are opting in, but they're not showing up, and your show-up rate is actually what we need to fix. Maybe they're showing up, but they're not converting, and we're gonna focus on conversion. How do you know what part in that chain to fix? Data. You have to look at the data. Once you know what data you should be hitting, what your current data says, you'll stop spreading yourself thin. You'll stop feeling like I need to fix all of this right now. And you'll feel permission just to go deep on the one thing that actually is going to move the needle the most. And it will feel so grounded and confident, kind of like your future self feels, right? You'll be able to be like, I know for sure if I fix this, this will move the needle in my business because the data has shown me that this is the point that I need to focus on. So you really want to look at your entire journey from someone finding you to someone stepping into your business to someone paying you to someone sticking around. Look at the data and figure out which one of these things is not hitting the mark. And that's your focus, and everything else waits. Everything else gets put aside. Okay. The third teaching point that I wanted to talk to you guys about is you're asking for the sale before you've earned the trust. This one caused some like real pivots on Friday. I asked how many people were sending their ad traffic straight to a checkout page. That means like you're running an ad, or you're even doing your organic marketing and you're sending people to an MBO checkout page or straight to a booking page for classes that they can purchase a drop-in. And a lot of people said, That's me, that's what I'm doing right now. And here is the problem when you send someone who doesn't necessarily know you very well if they're coming from an ad to a checkout page, and that checkout page requires them to create an account with you where they're filling in name, address, phone number, why they're interested, injuries they have, etc. The data has shown that you're gonna lose 38% of those people immediately because they don't know you enough, they don't trust you enough yet, they aren't sold enough yet, that just the ask of creating an account to put their info in to pull out their credit card is too much, too fast. And so a lot of Friday we talked about well, where do I send them instead? What is important for me to gather so that I can take this new person in my world and I can start to build a relationship with them so that they do know, like and trust me, and I can continue to talk to them. And then when I have that information, I'm building this relationship with them, then I know how many emails to send over the next week. And then I know when to follow up, and then I know when to actually send the checkout page. And now when people land on the checkout page, they're so much more likely to purchase because we haven't skipped the necessary warm-up that has to happen for them to start to know you, trust you, like you, and for you to have credibility for them to buy from. And so a lot of people, a lot of these businesses on Friday, we uncovered were losing people before they even actually had the chance for them to come into the studio or buy from them. So we really want to look at the client journey from every point. When someone finds you on Instagram, what's the URL? What's the link? When someone goes to your website, where do they click around? What buttons do they hit first? When someone sees you on an ad, what page do they land on? If you haven't audited that journey recently, it's time to do it right now. Okay, next teaching point. You could be bleeding capacity and you don't even know it. This came up just naturally in a conversation before, I think, our afternoon session. I was just asking, like, what are your ajas and what are your takeaways? And this came up because someone was like, you know, I really identified that I want to feel focused in my business and I don't even feel focused when I sit down to take a class. Like now when I'm taking class, I'm thinking about everything that I could be doing, the to-do list that still needs to be done, etc. And I think that is so common. I have had that experience where you can start to feel busy all the time. You're constantly working, even if you're not like actually doing work, but you're in your mind working. And at the end of the day or at the end of the week, you may look back and be like, what did I do today besides answer emails and just like keep the business afloat? What did I actually accomplish to move it forward? If this is you, you'll start to feel really exhausted because the business isn't really moving forward, you're just maintaining. And that can come from one thing: context switching. The data on this is wild. Every time that you switch tasks, you lose 40% of your performance. Meaning, like if you're writing a newsletter and then someone texts you about needing a sub and you start to answer that sub text, 40% of your performance, your writing skills, your ability, gone. Gone. And it takes you 25 minutes to fully refocus after a switch. So it's not like, oh, I'll just answer this text real quick and then keep writing. Your brain has gone somewhere else, thought about something else. Your performance has dropped, and it's gonna take you time to get back in actually writing the newsletter. So it can be really tempting to try and do everything all at once to have your email open, to have MBO open, to have your Slack open if you use Slack or clickup or whatever it may be. But this is why you feel like you're working nonstop and nothing's ever really getting done. Because you're never in deep work, but you're constantly bouncing between operator and marketer and manager and teacher and financial consultant. Every single switch will cost you. So here's what you can try to see if this is more effective for you. You can build batch days into your week where Monday you spend all day working on marketing, Tuesday is clients, or maybe your teaching classes, Wednesday is team, you have all of your meetings, you meet with your teachers, you're at the front desk, whatever makes sense for your life. But the point is one role per day, one type of work per block, instead of letting your inbox run your schedule or your to-do list or your notifications run your schedule. And then ideally, if you can swing it, protect at least one two-hour block for deep work where you shut every notification off. You already decide ahead of time what you want to get done, and you get it done. That could be a two-hour block per week. Ideally, a two-hour block per day is gonna really move the needle forward. But for so many of us, that's not realistic anymore. But you have one project, notifications off, you're going into deep work. This is where you can actually dream about the retreat or the training that you want to build, or you can write PR pitches to local news stations about your upcoming event. Like you need time just to block everything else out and move the business forward. That's when the real work is gonna happen. Okay, finally, teaching point number five. You may be frustrated with your team, but the conversation was never had that needed to be had. This comes up so often. Your team isn't stepping up the way that you want them to. They are maybe not selling membership, they're not subbing, they're not going above and beyond, and you feel like you are carrying everything. And you can start to think maybe I just hired the wrong people. Maybe this whole team needs to go. And Maybe there are some people who need to go. That can happen. But sometimes the team underperforming can happen because expectations were never clearly set from the beginning, or they were set once, like in the interview or in the handbook or in the contract. But there was no follow-up and no management making sure that those metrics, the contract, the KPIs, were actually hit. So this really comes in when people want their teachers to be selling and the teachers aren't selling membership. We look at, okay, was selling a part of the original contract something we asked them to do. And then we look at is someone managing teaching the teachers how to sell? Is someone uh giving feedback on how they make their afterclass announcement or how they show up at the front desk? Is someone following up each month to make sure a teacher sold a membership? Those elements are usually missing, honestly, because most people don't have the bandwidth to have a manager managing that level of reporting from your teachers unless you happen to have like a sales and marketing manager. And so when you have this dynamic, we really dive into in the mastermind the five different behaviors that can become really dysfunctional in a team and they build on each other. You have to have trust, you have to have honesty, you have to have accountability, responsibility, you have to have the ability to ask for help. And all of these things can add up and create the type of team that you're currently living in if you don't start by intentionally building your team, starting with the foundations, starting with trusts, starting with the conversations that you've been avoiding, starting with the contracts that need to be renegotiated or re-signed or restructured, starting with the fact that maybe you haven't followed through on what you want them to do in terms of training them how to do it, following up, making sure they know how to do it. If you are feeling this frustration with your team, we don't necessarily want to just go to the person that I've hired is wrong. We want to go to has the business set them up well to do a very clearly defined role? And do they have the training and management they need to make that happen? If the answer to that is yes, it really may be that the person is not the right fit. If the answer to that is no, then we're going back and we're looking at, okay, what do we need to set up within the business? What do we need to start fresh at the foundation in order to create that team? So I really want you to think about like if there's a point in your business or a point in your team where you are frustrated with some team member, scheduling a meeting with them and making sure that you're on the right page, you're having a real conversation of what they own, how they own it, what the results are, so that everyone is on the same page. Nothing is passive, nothing is hinted at, everything is direct, clear, kind, but very, very clear. Your team will rise to the expectations that they know exist and that they know you are actually going to follow through on. That you're actually going to make sure make an impact in the business. Okay, so those are the five things that I wanted to touch on today. Identity before tactics, finding the one part of your funnel that could be broken, not sending people to checkout pages. So making sure that your new student journey is accurate, you're sending them to the right place. Not context switching from role to roll to role or tas to tas to task, and then having conversations with your team to be really aligned. If one of those hit you, like just focus on that one. You don't need to focus on all five, just the one that stood out the most and really dive into changing that over the next 90 days. This is what we do inside the mastermind, but we spend, yo, this was like a 20-minute episode. We spend an entire day talking about these things and then we spend nine months implementing this stuff. And the Grow Mastermind just started. It is totally full. But if you want access to the mastermind when it opens in 2027, you can click the link below and join the wait list for the Grow Mastermind. And if you want something to start changing your business today, you can always click below and take our three marketing mistakes masterclass, and that will help move you forward. All right, my friends. I will talk to you in the next episode. Have an amazing week in your business.