This is part 2 (successful strategies) in an 8-part series on building a successful yoga business. To read more about the first step to building a successful yoga business, learn how to define success based on your life goals.
Balancing effort & ease
Last time, you learned all about the importance of defining success on your own terms. As a super-quick recap: if you aren’t clear what success means to you, it will be very challenging to know when you are succeeding in your yoga business. Defining success is the foundational skill for building a successful yoga business. Once you’ve defined success you have to have a plan for achieving it.
In the yoga world we sometimes rely a little too much on the magic of the universe to spontaneously align our chakras, relationships, and career prospects. Nothing against this ability to surrender, but as much as yoga is about surrender it’s also about effort and taking appropriate action.
Finding this balance between serendipity and strategy is perhaps the hardest part about running a yoga business.
If you’re really good at surrendering to the universe and going with the flow, then maybe you need a good dose of planning and successful strategies injected into your life. Likewise, if you’re an organizer at heart, it would probably do you some good to loosen the reigns a bit and open up to more serendipity.
The map
Regardless of your mastery at surrendering to the way things are, you still need a map to help you navigate where you’re going (unless your definition of success is to live your life like a feather in the wind, then you don’t need a map).
If your definition of success looks something more like creating impact in the world and living a fulfilling life, you’re going to have to do some work.
And while this work might be challenging, it’s fun too (and it’s all part of yoga)!
How do you draw your map and how do you know where to start? It depends on where you’re going.
You are here
To start, you need to understand where you are. To understand where you are, you need to know where you’ve come from.
If you’ve been teaching yoga for awhile, then you have a ton of data to help you work through this process. If you’re new to teaching, you’ll have a much easier time gathering the data you need to make smarter business decisions down the road.
Based on your definition of success, what are your current revenue/impact generating activities? These are the activities that you spend energy on that bring in revenue and/or create real impact. Write them all down. (You can download a worksheet template to help you through this exercise in the Successful Yoga Business Starter Kit. If you haven’t gotten access to the Starter Kit yet be sure to sign up below this blog post.)
Before moving on to the next step, be sure to also list all the previous revenue/impact generating activities you have done in the past. Take a moment to reflect on each, specifically whether or not these activities have the potential to help you reach your definition of success.
How to get “there”
Writing down all of your current and previous revenue/impact generating activities helps you visualize how you spend your energy. You may be surprised at how many different ways you have tried to share yoga in the past — be sure to acknowledge how far you’ve come! You may also realize that the current activities that suck all your energy are not contributing in the slightest to helping you achieve the successful yoga business you had in mind.
Unfortunately, this was the easiest part. You now know where you’ve been, where you are currently, and where you want to go. It’s figuring out how to get to your destination that is the real challenge.
I never, ever thought that the PR project from hell that nearly killed me from a semester’s worth of stress my senior year of college would help me so much in my life. But it’s this exact formula that I’ve customized for yoga teachers to help you figure out how to get from point A to point B on your own map.
It starts by understanding the difference between a strategy and a tactic.
Successful Strategies
The best way to explain this is by way of an example. Let’s say your destination (definition of success) is to teach yoga part-time while combining your passion for art, self-care, and movement. You want to work no more then 20 hours a week and spend the rest of your time taking care of your kids. You want to make at least $40,000/year to contribute to your family’s finances in a meaningful way.
A successful strategy to help you achieve your goal may be to develop and offer a 4-week series of yoga + art classes. Let’s say you can offer 6, 4-week sessions a year with a goal of filling each session with 20 people. That’s $24,000 of revenue if you charge a $200 fee and you’re already half-way to your annual revenue goal. The successful strategy is to develop an offering that aligns with your passions, provides a real service, showcases your strengths, and has the potential for real return (in either revenue, impact, or both, depending on what matters most to you).
Coming up with successful strategies is only the beginning, though. Now you have to do the legwork to make the strategy happen. This is where the tactics come in.
Tried + True Tactics
The tactics are your to-do list. All the activities that need to happen to make sure you get 6, 4-week Yoga + Art sessions scheduled and filled. This is where your social media posts may come into play.
It is at this point in the map navigation where most yoga teachers get lost in the weeds of trendy marketing tactics. We may know that success means filling our Yoga + Art sessions but then turn to tactics that don’t align with our strategy or our destination. Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube are all wonderful tools to help you promote your offerings, but they are not always great at getting people to walk into your local neighborhood Yoga + Art workshop series and hand you cash. Spending all your time trying to figure out how to photograph art pieces and yoga poses for your Instagram account is a waste of time if you could be spending that time talking to your friends and family about the event, posting flyers at local art studios, and spreading the word with all your local artist collectives, therapists, and yoga studios. Your tactics must align with the strategy and the destination, not with the marketing “trend” of the year.
In general, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube channels might be necessary for online yoga stardom, but if your definition of success doesn’t include anything online or you’re not offering anything beyond your local community, then you don’t necessarily need to worry about social media, at least when you’re just getting started.
The trip
When I was little, I remember my dad setting up camp at the kitchen table with his handy AAA Trip-Tik, plotting out the annual family vacation. Now that I think about it, I don’t know why he needed to get one of these every year, since we have gone to the same place for the last 20+ years of my life and the drive always takes 12 hours. Inefficiencies aside (okay, he was always looking at where the construction zones would be that year so he could time every mile to the minute and avoid traffic jams), that planning was necessary for making sure that everything went smoothly and we got a good start to vacation.
Unforeseen obstacles come up sometimes, like the time Hurricane Bertha made us evacuate and we ended our annual Hilton Head vacation in Gatlinburg, TN. That’s why we have the map to help us stay (basically) on track. When certain tactics don’t work, we don’t just throw away the strategy (vacation). We revise the tactics. Sometimes we add strategies (also known as diversifying your revenue/impact streams) and sometimes we delete strategies to better align with our destination and how long we want the trip to ultimately take.
The key to working the plan is making sure that every tactic serves its strategy and every strategy serves it’s destination.
This is how you develop an organized, successful independent yoga business.
Sign up for access to the Successful Yoga Business Starter Kit to get a Success Worksheet that will help you define success and a Successful Strategies template for helping you outline your strategies and tactics for getting there (This whole post will make so much more sense when you’re looking at the templates.)
