Episode 343: The $1M Ceiling: Why Your Business Feels Stuck Even Though Revenue Is Growing

Is your boutique fitness business growing in revenue but still feeling chaotic, stressful, and exhausting behind the scenes? In this episode of the Female emPOWERed Podcast, Christa Gurka breaks down the real reason so many Pilates studios, PT clinics, yoga studios, and wellness businesses get stuck between $500K and $1M in revenue.

Christa shares the biggest operational mistakes that keep owners trapped in overworked operator mode, including poor delegation, low schedule utilization, lack of systems, unclear leadership structure, and unprofitable service offerings. She also explains how to identify whether you truly have a revenue problem, profit problem, or capacity problem — and what to do next.

If your business is making more money than ever but still feels overwhelming, this episode will help you build a more profitable, scalable, and sustainable business without burning out.

In This Episode, Christa Covers:

•  Why more revenue doesn’t automatically create more freedom 
•  The “Seven Figure Fallacy” most business owners believe 
•  The 5 biggest reasons boutique wellness businesses plateau 
•  How to identify revenue vs. profit vs. capacity problems 
•  The key metrics every studio owner should track weekly 
•  Why poor schedule utilization quietly kills profitability 
•  What to delegate, automate, and stop doing immediately 
•  How leadership and middle management change everything 
•  The hidden cost of staying the bottleneck in your business 
•  Why systems and SOPs are essential for scaling sustainably 

Free Download + Resources

📥 Download the FREE Operational Scorecard:
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📲 DM “Accelerator” to Christa on Instagram for information about Fit Biz Accelerator:
 @ChristaGurka on Instagram

🌐 Learn more about Fit Biz Strategies:
 Fit Biz Strategies Website

🎧 Listen to more episodes of the Female emPOWERed Podcast:
 Female emPOWERed Podcast

Keywords

Pilates studio growth, boutique fitness business, PT business coaching, wellness business systems, Pilates business profitability, studio owner burnout, business operations, fitness business leadership, boutique fitness marketing, scaling a Pilates studio, seven figure business, operational systems for wellness businesses, Fit Biz Accelerator, Christa Gurka

Transcript

Speaker 0:00

Hey there, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the Female Empowered Podcast. I'm your host, Christa Gurka, and today I wanna talk about something that I really see all the time in this space, boutique fitness, Pilates, PT, yoga, the wellness space. Your studio, your business, your clinic is growing. You're making more money than you ever have before in terms of revenue. Maybe you're at 500,000, maybe you're at 750,000. Maybe you're flirting with crossing the seven-figure mark. And from the outside in, things look pretty incredible. But behind the scenes, you are exhausted. You're answering texts at night. You're still filling the schedules manually. You're putting out fires every single day. You worry about cash flow. Where's all the money? In the bank. And secretly, you're wondering, "If this business is making more money, why doesn't it feel easier? I thought it would get easier as I got more successful." And here's the thing I wanna tell you. More revenue does not create a better business. In fact, it usually makes it harder. There's a space between $500,000 and a million dollars in revenue that is a real sticky spot. And if you don't change the way the business runs and how you run the business, you will just keep building a bigger, more expensive, more exhausting version of the same problems. So in today's episode, I'm gonna walk you through the five biggest reasons I see businesses plateau between 500,000 and a million, how to figure out whether you have a revenue problem, a profit problem, or a capacity problem, the three numbers you should know every single week off the top of your head, what to stop doing, what to delegate, what to automate. And at the end, I'm gonna give you a real million-dollar CEO audit with 10 questions that you can score yourself on and see where you actually are. So if you're listening to this at home, grab a notebook, 'cause it's gonna be really practical like I always am. So segment number one, the real reason growth stops feeling good. one of the biggest misconceptions I see is that owners think, if I just get to a million dollars, then I'll finally feel stressed." I cannot... Sorry, not stressed. "I'll finally feel less stressed." I cannot tell you how many discovery calls I've had where someone's goal is to get to a million dollars, and I say, "Great. Tell me more. Why do you wanna get to a million dollars?" And they're like, "Because things will get easier, because I will make more money, because I can pay my team more." And I wanna say to you all, that is backwards way of thinking. Unfortunately, that is not true. It's not. oftentimes, as you start to get to a million, a million and a half, seven figures, you have to have more infrastructure, more systems, more people to manage, at least a job like ours, like a brick-and-mortar service-based business where you're a time for money model, where you're have a real person giving another real person in human time a service. All right? So I actually even created a talk about it that I do speaking engagements on. It's called the Seven Figure Fallacy, and it's all about how getting to seven figures should not be the goal. The goal should be what you actually think is gonna happen when you get to seven figures. "I wanna make more money," which means you should be more profitable. "I wanna be able to pay my team more," which means you should be more profitable. All right? So the top line revenue isn't always the thing that solves the problem. So what happens usually in businesses is, around two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, you can really survive by working hard, doing a few things great. At five hundred thousand, you can hustle and grind. You can grind your way there. Somewhere between five hundred and a million, this is when business really starts getting hard, and it demands leadership and systems. And if you don't build those things the right way, you become the bottleneck. You are the person every question comes to. You have to approve everything. You have to solve every client problem. You're the one that knows all the passwords, if you can remember all the passwords. You fix the schedule, you train the staff. You're the marketing department. You're HR when people get hired. You're the sales department. You are the person carrying the emotional weight of the entire business. You are not leading. You are driving. And this is not a business problem. It's a business model problem, because what you've created, which is what I did, you've created a business that is built on you to function, and it's a business that depends on you, and that business cannot scale It just can't. It cannot scale when one person is required to do every single thing it can't happen. All right, so what you wanna do is you have to put some systems into place, which might mean you as a leader have to become a different person, okay? So now what we're gonna talk about are the five biggest reasons businesses plateau during this mark. And I wouldn't say they actually plateau, they just stall because of what is required to get to this next level. All right, let me take a little bit of water. All right, you ready? Here we go. We're gonna dive in Okay, so number one is the owner is still doing too much. This is the biggest one. This is usually the reason that it's happening, okay? You are still operating like the past employee in the business instead of a CEO. You might be teaching too much. You might be seeing too many patients. Maybe you're the one still answering the phone and managing the front desk. You're still the one posting on Instagram at ten o'clock at night. You're still the one creating the content, doing the videos, editing, creating the graphics. You are approving everything. You're the one creating the promotions, doing the social media, doing the payroll, doing the vacation requests, being customer service, fixing the equipment, ordering the equipment, covering when someone is out or sick. You are the one at the networking events. You're the one that's marketing. You're the one that's posting the hiring, the interviewing, the onboarding. You're doing the performance reviews. Do I need to continue? Because you all know what this feels like. You cannot grow a million-dollar business while you're spending your week doing twenty-five dollar an hour tasks. you can't. Okay? So here's what I want you to do. This is the exercise. Write down everything you did last week or next week. Coming into next week, I want you to write down every single thing you do. I don't care if you do it in the notes app on your phone, if you carry around a Post-It notes. Literally, it's "Oh, I had to talk to this client today. Okay, I had to go in early because someone forgot the key. Okay, I did a marketing meeting. I did this, I did that." Then at the end of the week, so for seven days... Even at home. What are you doing at home? What are you doing between cooking dinner and doing homework with your kids? What are you doing every single minute of the day that includes something you do for work? Okay? At the end, what you're gonna do is you're gonna put them into categories. You're gonna put only the things that you can do. So if nobody else has access to payroll, okay, that's something only you can do right now. But then you're gonna decide, can somebody else do this with training? And for payroll, yes, the answer is yes. Okay? Could someone else actually do this better than me? If you're doing your bookkeeping, the answer is yes, a bookkeeper could do this better than you. A graphic designer. Right now, AI and Claude could do graphics better than you. Okay? And then the fourth one, should this even be happening? Okay? Should you be the one that's finding coverage for your team? If they're employees, even if they're contractors, if you put in the process, they need to find their own coverage when they're taking time off. You don't even... That part doesn't even need to be happening. This is why it's important to have systems and processes in place. But if you don't have a process for this, your team cannot do it because there's not a process for them to follow. Does that make sense? some of these things should not even be happening, which is why you need processes. If more than 50% of your week is spent in categories two through four, which is like you don't need to do them, somebody else could be doing them better, you can train people, this is why your business feels heavy. So now your action step is you're gonna pick three things to stop doing. You're gonna stop answering client texts after 5:00, or even at all for that matter. If you have an admin person, they can do it. You are gonna stop manually creating the schedules yourself, or you're gonna delegate that to someone else, or you're gonna create the schedules for a year, and this is what the schedule is, okay? You are gonna stop personally following up with every client inquiry. You should have a system, an automation that does that. Posting every social media graphic yourself or even creating the social media graphics. You are gonna decide what you're gonna delegate, what you're gonna automate, and, create a simple SOP One of the reasons you're doing all the things is the next reason is businesses stall between five hundred thousand and a million dollars in revenue. You have no middle management. You have no team leads. You have no buffer between you and the team, okay? Most businesses at this point outgrow the everyone reports to me model. If you have more than four people reporting to you, you need layers. You need a buffer between yourself and the team. You need someone who owns the schedule. You need someone who is responsible for hiring or onboarding. You need someone who handles the day-to-day client issues. You need someone who can make decisions without texting you, and by the way, they shouldn't be texting you. You should be using an internal system like Slack or Voxer or something like that. That's another one of my pet peeves. You should have an internal communication system, okay? Because if every single problem still comes to you, your business is capped by your time, your energy, and your emotional bandwidth, and this is the huge thing. This is where I say you as a person need to become a different person to get your business to the next level, okay? So what does a hire like this look, look like? It could be promoting someone to lead instructor or lead therapist that's responsible for performance reviews, responsible for onboarding, is the one that handles vacation requests, okay? You can have an administrator that's the client experience manager, that they're the ones responsible for refunds or cancellations or any customer service issue. You could have a full studio operations manager, right? That is not even a teacher necessarily. That's an operations manager, and I'm telling you, if you are someone who is approaching a million dollars or has gotten past a million dollars, you need this person on your team, okay? You need this person on your team. You could have a front desk lead, which many of you, if you're approaching a million dollars, you should be having someone, an administrative lead, okay? You do not need a huge corporate org chart. That's not what I'm saying. You just need one, maybe one and a half people who own outcomes, not just throwing them back on your plate. They own the outcome. Let me give you an example The air... This is summer, right? So the air conditioning breaks. The old way that you, or the current way you've been doing it, is someone calls you and says, "Hey, Christa, the air conditioning's broken." And then you are now responsible for, is it really broken? Figuring out who's responsible for that. Is that you or the building? Calling an AC repair person, figuring out when they can come, deciding when you can be there to meet them, when it's not disrupting classes or everything, meeting them there, getting it fixed, ordering the parts, maybe they have to come back, all this stuff, and then deciding if you're gonna cancel classes or not cancel classes. That's now on you. You could be the bottleneck in that, right? What it should look like when you have someone in that role, whether it's a studio manager or a director of operations or something like that, this happens. The air conditioning breaks. Nobody calls you. They call this new person, and they say, "Hey, the air conditioning's broken." That new person pro- maybe lets you know, maybe doesn't. Maybe lets you know, "Hey, I've got this under control. Here's what's gonna happen. I've already called the property manager. We're gonna have an AC person out here to look at it. I'm gonna meet them there at four o'clock. If it's still broken and the studio's really hot, I'll decide to cancel the classes in the evening or the clients, and I'll reach out to everyone and let them know." And then this person is the one that meets them there, is the one that handles the payment, is the one that does all the stuff, and reports back to you when it's done. That's what it's supposed to look like. So Now, looking at every recurring problem that happens in your business, you are gonna write next to each one who currently owns this. Who currently owns the decisions to charge people for cancellations or not? Okay, who currently owns the sub-situation when there's a vacation request and nobody can cover? If your answer is me to almost every line, to every problem, that in itself is a problem. All right? That needs to be fixed. So next. So we talked about the owner's responsible for everything, which also means you probably don't have, a leadership team. That's number two. The next thing we are looking at why businesses stall during this timeframe is poor schedule utilization. I've done a couple episodes on the hidden leaks in your business, and this is one of the biggest ones. You could be losing tens of thousands of dollars every year because of poor schedule utilization. Okay, so most owners assume they have a marketing problem when they actually could have a utilization problem. So the marketing is working. People are getting in the door. You have a decent sales system. You have a de- decent product delivery. But you don't necessarily understand what your utilization's numbers. What you need to do is you need to use your existing schedule better. What are some examples of this? So you have instructors with large gaps between sessions. So can you give them private sessions between that? Can they have duets? Can they do small pods? Can you put a community class in there so you can use it for training or onboarding or things of that, okay? You have clients canceling, and you don't have an accurate, a good, efficient process for getting people off a wait list. Maybe you don't even have a wait list pro- a wait list going. You don't have your front desk trained on how to get people rescheduled, on how to know how many visits they need on the schedule each and every week to be hitting your numbers and your goals for the whole year So you don't use efficiently your afternoons or weekends. You have too much inconsistency in your packages. there's too much leniency. There's not a good cancellation policy, all right? What your utilization percentage tells you is how much of your available revenue-producing time is actually being used, 'cause you're still paying rent all that time. So what you wanna do is you wanna use this kind of formula. You have how many hours are booked divided by how much is available, right? So if you have 10 sessions available and you have eight sessions booked, you have an 80% utilization rate. If you have 100 sessions available and you have 80 booked, you have an 80% utilization rate. If your schedule is sitting lower than 70%, lower than 60%, there is far more opportunity here for you to maximize the four walls of your studio, of your business, or your, of your clinic. You wanna be shooting for 75, 80, 85% utilization, all right? Even though people would be like, "Why don't I shoot for 100 or 90?" that's usually not sustainable 'cause people burn out, and there's always gonna be a little cancellations, but you wanna shoot, and you wanna make sure that hitting 75 or 80% utilization gives you the revenue and profitability you need to achieve your goals. And if you don't know that number, that is something that you should know. If not, you're kinda just running blind in your business. A 5% swing in utilization, increase in utilization, can easily add five figures of revenue to your business. So for example, if you have 100 slots available in a week, and on average it costs, it's $80 a slot... Actually, let's make it easier. Let's make it $100 a slot, even numbers. So you have 100 spots available. Each of those spots generates $100, and you keep 10 or 20 extra spots open each and every week that go unfilled, okay? That ends up being $1,000 a week. That's $52,000 a year. $52,000 a year. All right? That could be whether it's in classes, whether it's in private sessions, whether it's in duet sessions, whatever that is, you need to have those sessions full. And sometimes it's not a marketing problem. Sometimes you're getting enough people in the door, you're just losing them on the utilization. So you should know your utilization each and every week. So what do you need to do to fix a poor utilization problem? You need to figure out which team members need to fill those gaps. And why are those gaps not filled? Are they not completing plan of cares? Are they not converting people from intros or evals to long-term memberships? Are they not keeping people in their classes? And then you wanna create a plan. Do you have a wait list system? Is there a text outreach for cancellations? That should not be you. It should not be you. It should be the customer support person or the office manager or the director, or it could be automated. There's so many ways that you can automate these things. Have fewer flex packages, right? I talk about this a lot when I say, especially for physical therapy practices, they should have care plans, like monthly care plans, not package visits or one-off visits, right? Can you think outside the box and fill some lower demand, like those middle of the afternoons, with some, dynamic pricing? If you have a 2:00, a 3:00, or a 4:00 class, could that pricing model be a little bit less to entice people to come in during those off-peak hours? All right? So those are just looking at your schedule and your utilization and figuring out a way to utilize that, okay? I hear so many people saying, "Oh, I wanna expand and open another location," when their current location is at, 60, 65%. Your current location should be 80 to 90% before you think of expanding, okay? So what if you do have a marketing problem? What if the mar- the low utilization is marketing, right? What a lot of times happens is that most businesses at this level are not struggling because marketing doesn't work, even though they think that. They're struggling because they only market when they panic or when they feel there's a drop. So what happens? You get busy, you stop marketing. Your schedule gets light. You panic, you start marketing again. Then you get busy, and then the cycle repeats. We call this feast or famine. We call this feast when your schedule is huge and famine when it's not. What you have to have is a repeatable, replicable system that operates all the time in the background so that you're always getting a gener- generating leads. You're always having a sales process. And maybe so you have a wait list. It's okay. You have a wait list. Maybe you open more classes, all right? Million-dollar businesses, seven-figure CEOs do not rely solely on random reactive bursts of energy. No. They need a simple, consistent, repeatable marketing system, all right? So what does this look like for businesses like ours? Weekly or monthly email blast, making sure people know what's happening and what's coming on, and you're staying front of mind with all of your clients. Consistent social content. Now notice I said consistent, not a lot, just consistent. Consistency eats intensity for breakfast every single day. Be consistent. If that means posting twice a week, that means posting twice a week. That's it. Don't post six days a week for two weeks and then go, MIA. Post twice a week, and you can automate this. Have a referral ask process. Are you asking for referrals? Do you have a reactivation system for old leads and former clients? Do you have a predictable source of new traffic? Google Ads, meta ads, workshops, r- physician referrals, community partnerships. All of those, by the way, should work cohesively together as a marketing strategy. All of them. So you want organic, which is like your email list, your social content, and a little bit of paid. But in order to have the paid work, your organic has to be working, and you have a-- have to have a system that when people do opt in for your ad, they actually get a really good experience on the back end. Okay. Numbers you should know each and every week. How many new clients, new leads came in? Where did they come from? How many converted and how many old people that have fallen off did you follow up with? In PT, that could be people have been discharged. Are you sending out a follow-up maybe 30, 60, 90 days after they've been discharged seeing how they're doing? Do they wanna come in for a tune-up? For class-based studios, is this, are you sending people out who haven't been in the studio for 30 days or 60 days or 90 days, okay? If you are not tracking that, you don't really have a marketing strategy or process. You have hope. You have throwing something against a wall and seeing if it stinks. Sticks. Sticks, not stinks. Sticks. And this is why people feel marketing doesn't work. It's because they're not... They don't have a strategy, okay? It's the same way people are like, "Oh, I don't like Pilates. It was too easy," and Pilates instructors will be like, you weren't really doing Pilates then," right? So if you said to me, "Oh, I don't follow that stuff," I'd be like, "You don't have a marketing strategy then." Okay? Here's another one. You don't know which services are actually profitable. This is a big one. huge, huge. I see owners all the time fill their schedules with strong revenue, but they're not making money because they don't know which services are actually profitable, and they're filling their schedules with the services that are less profitable. Not every service line deserves to stay. It doesn't. Sometimes your private sessions are profitable and your group classes are not. Usually, often, it's the other way around. Group classes are usually more profitable than private sessions. Maybe your PT room or your massage room is breaking even. Maybe your workshops lose money. Maybe your teacher training makes great money but gets no attention, all right? Maybe your online system is dead, but it takes a lot of your time to create the content for it. You should know, as a business owner, you should know how much revenue comes in each and every service line. That means group classes. That means private sessions. That means PT sessions. That means if you have wellness services, auxiliary services, your teacher training program, your on-demand services, all right? How much, what is the direct cost of delivering that service? So how much are you paying out to deliver that service? And so how much profitability does that specific service present to you? So group classes, you're running at, a seventy-five percent gross margin, meaning you have seventy-five-- you keep seventy-five percent of the money that comes in. All right? Private sessions, you keep only forty percent of the money that comes in. Teacher training, you keep eighty percent of the money that comes in. We should try, as business owners, to pour our energy into the highest margin services. If you continue to pour your energy into the lowest margin services, you will stay stuck and exhausted no matter how much your revenue grows, because the profit that's left over after you deliver those services is little. that's why you have no money in the bank even though you have a lot of revenue coming in. So what I want you to do this week, take your top five offers. How much did they generate last month? maybe top three offers, okay? What did it cost to deliver those services, and how much was left over? So basically, you take how much was generated minus what it cost to deliver, and then that's what's left over, okay? Now, the next question after that is if you doubled this service, if you doubled this offer, would it improve your business, or would it make it harder? If you doubled that offer, would it improve it or make it harder? I think that question alone changes a lot, okay? You want to go after at least have eighty percent of your revenue coming in with the highest profit margin services. And once again, if you don't know those numbers, I don't want you to be disappointed in yourself. I want you to be like, "Oh, I learned something today. I learned that I should know these numbers. How can I figure out how to do it?" you can contact people like me that do this for business owners like you and help you learn this process. The same way you would be like, "Oh, I don't understand how to heal a herniated disc in the back. I'm gonna go look and learn from people that know how to do that." This is the same thing. I don't know how to look at these numbers. I have all sorts of programs that can help you do that, all right? And I love doing this. I love helping business owners learn, because you can learn each and every thing that I already spoke about in this episode. Now, moving on. I want to teach you how to know if you have a revenue problem, a profit problem, or a capacity problem. So do you have a revenue problem, a profit problem, or a capacity problem? Okay? And I think this is an important thing to understand, because if you're solving the wrong problem, you're creating the wrong solution in your business. So you really have to get to the source of the problem. You will have a revenue problem if your schedule is not full. You have leads that are inconsistent. You're not getting enough inquiries. If that is the case, you will have a revenue problem. You need to look at your marketing problem-- process, sales process, your referral systems, and your retention systems. Those are all the things you have to look at. Okay? Marketing... Actually, you should probably look at your operations too, because maybe what you're delivering just sucks. All right? Sorry to say that. You have a sales problem, so you're getting leads in, but they're not staying because you don't have a sales process. You have a refer-- like, you're not asking for referrals, and maybe you don't have a good retention process. Okay? So what's happening here is you're not getting top-line revenue in. Your sales are going down. So how to now determine if you have a profit problem. You could have a profit problem if your revenue is growing, you're getting sales, your revenue's going up, you're doing fifty, sixty, seventy thousand, eighty thousand dollars, ninety, a hundred thousand dollars a month, but there's not enough cash in the bank, and you're like, "What is happening here? I have h- good utilization, I have good revenue coming in, but there's no cash in the bank." You usually will feel busy, but you're still stressed about money all the time. Your payroll is too high. If your payroll is over forty-five percent, you could have a profit problem. Okay? Or your prices are too low. So either your payroll is too high or your prices are too low. Okay? You are offering too many of those low-margin services, so you don't have capacity to build high-margin services. You wanna look at these things. If that's the case and you have a profit problem, you need to look at your pricing, your payroll, your profitability by service, and you need to reduce waste and inefficiency. look to your expenses. You have a capacity problem if you're fully booked but exhausted. You have no more room for more clients. Your team depends on you for every single thing. You cannot grow without you working more. If that's the case, you need to focus on delegating, systems, your leadership ability, your hiring process, your ability to say no, your people-pleasing tendencies, your micromanaging Your inability to hold people accountable. Most businesses beyond five hundred, seven hundred and fifty thousand, a million dollars in revenue, most of them often don't have a revenue problem. Most of you have a profit problem or an emotional capacity problem, and you think it's a growth problem. But what the growing pains are you as the owner are the bottleneck, and you haven't... You're growing and you're busting at the seams, but you haven't bought new clothes that fit you, okay? That's this whole adage of what got you here won't get you there. And what you have to do at this growing stage of your business is you have to become a different person and put different systems in place to solve this problem. If you keep operating like this, you will, if you're not already, burn out. And what usually is affected is your personal life, you personally, your relationship with your friends, your relationship with your partner, your relationship with your family, your relationship with your kids And we all work way too hard to sacrifice those things. We started our businesses usually because we wanted freedom, we wanted time flexibility, we wanted money, and then we created a system, inadvertently most of us, that was creating all of the opposite things of that. We have no time flexibility because everyone depends on us. We don't have a lot of revenue because our profit's bad and we're paying everybody else more than we're paying ourselves. And we don't have great relationships with our partners because we're just emotionally exhausted. Our cup is not empty. Our cup is overflowing, and we can't put anything else in there So what I want you to think about each and every week is like these are the numbers that you should know each and every week. you should-- somebody should be delivering these numbers to you or you should know them, but mostly I like someone delivering these numbers to you. Okay? You need to know what profit percentage you have. So are you operating at a ten percent, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five percent profitability? The goal in our industry, the goal with a stable business is fifteen to twenty percent profit with you as the owner on payroll. Unless, and caveat, if you're in huge growth mode, meaning you're spending a ton of money on marketing and hiring, so maybe you did just hire a director of op-operations, and you're paying them seventy-five, eighty, ninety thousand dollars a year, your profit might be ten or eight or five percent. That's a different story, which is again, goes back to you need to know the numbers, but you need to understand the story behind the numbers. Okay? I know that makes sense to you guys. So the next thing you wanna know is what is your schedule utilization? How much of your schedule is utilized? Is it above 70%, 80%, great. Is it below 75, 70, 65, 60%? Why? Why is it below that? What is happening? You need to know the real source of the problem, which is how we all operate in our business, meaning in movement, in physical therapy, we look to the real source of the problem, the root cause, and fix that, okay? You need to know what's the root cause of this low utilization before you can fix it. And number three, you need to know your payroll percentage. How much of your income, your revenue, is going to payroll? ideally, it's lower than 40%. Ideally, it's between 30 and 40%. Maybe it's 42, but if you're going over 45% Either your pricing is too low, you have poor utilization, you have too many people doing the wrong thing, or you're... I don't wanna say you're paying people too much, what I'm usually saying is your pricing is too low for what you're paying people, okay? So I don't want... But if you are paying someone 60, 70% of what you're bringing in, you're paying them too much, right? So you can pay them the same, but you need to raise your prices, so that's more like 30% goes to them and 70% goes to you. And I'm not saying at all to pay your people $12. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying your pricing has to match your expenses So if you need to pay someone $50 an hour, $60 an hour, your price should be $180 an hour That's what I'm saying. So I'm not telling you to pay people $12, but I'm also saying that if you're paying them 50 or 60, what you should be charging is 180. That's what I'm saying. Okay? So utilization, profitability, and payroll percentage. Those are the three numbers you should know each and every week. Okay? They will tell you what's happening in your business, especially when you understand the story behind that. So that's what I want you to look at. I track them each and every Monday for the week before, because what gets measured gets improved, right? So now the next thing I really want to go through is what you should stop doing, what you should delegate, what you should automate. If you wanna break through the seven-figure ceiling, you cannot just work harder. I'm telling you, you cannot hustle and grind your way past a million dollars. I tried it. I- it broke me. I do not recommend, okay? 10 out of 10 do not recommend hustling past a million dollars. You need to be smarter than I was, and hopefully listening to this, you will be smarter than I was. You need to make different decisions. You need to stop doing tasks that drain you and do not grow the business. You need to stop micromanaging your team. You need to allow them to make mistakes. You need to have them be accountable for what they're responsible for. You need to stop saying yes to every single exception. Meaning like if your policy is no two people can be off at the same time, then that's your policy, okay? You need to stop saying yes to more clients on your schedule because it feels easier. Most of us, by the way, it's easier for us to see clients or, treat patients than it is to lead our team. Some of us are not built this way. You need to start delegating scheduling, front desk issues, lead generation, client communication, social media execution. All of those can also be automated. New lead capture can be automated, reactivation emails, wait list management, onboarding, and reminder sequencing. All of those can be automated. Maybe you need to look at raising your prices on your most in-demand services, on premium time slots, on pricing with you to work with you as the owner. Not necessarily because you're better, but because you're-- you have less time. You do not need to serve more people to make more money necessarily. You just need to run your business better. That is what you need to do Okay. I created this operational scorecard, and basically it's a list of questions, and it is gonna tell you exactly where you sit in your business. And you can download it for free and take this little test by visiting my website at christagurka.com/operationalscorecard. So www.christagurka.com/operationalscorecard. It has questions like, I know my weekly profit percentage, payroll percentage, and utilization percentage. Okay? Things like this, like you know it off the top of your head. Things like, I know exactly which services are most profitable. It has team questions. And when you... It'll actually add up your score, and it will tell you what you need to improve on, what you need to focus on, and where you are in your business. So once again, I'll link it in the show notes, but www.christagurka.com/operationalscorecard. Go grab it. It's really exciting. Okay? okay. So all of these things, by the way, that we talked about in this episode, if you're like, "Holy shit, Christa, now I feel worse about myself." I don't want that. I literally want you to think, not that way. I want you to be like, "Wow, I learned something today, and I learned that if I learn these things and I get a handle on these things, my business will be better." Because your business can be better. It worked for me, and I've helped hundreds of business owners doing this. You're not failing. You have an incredible business that you're building. If you are over $500,000 in revenue, you have an incredible business. But the skills that got you there are not the exact same skills that got you to a million dollars. The skills that got you to being a novice Pilates instructor or a new grad PT are not the same skills that get you to be the most sought-after PT in your area or the Pilates instructor that works with professional athletes It's the same way in business. They're not the skills that build a business that can run without you. And this is exactly why I created the Fit Biz Accelerator. It's the next level up after my Fit Biz monthly community, which is a community month-to-month membership, which is great. This accelerator is built for female business owners who have already built something successful. You have something that's working. You have proof of product, but you need to stop being the bottleneck. You need to improve your profitability. You need to build leadership inside the business, which means becoming a better leader yourself, and you c- need to create systems and structures so that you can have the freedom you want. And most people, when they think of this stuff, they're like, "Yeah, I know all of this in theory, but how do I have the time to make this happen? How do I have the time to get all of these things in place? I can barely keep my head above water now." that's why I created this program, because the resources alone in the resource library in the accelerator are worth over $10,000. They are resources like a fully, literally 90, 90, nine-zero SOPs that are white labeled that you can pull and put into your business tomorrow. Literally everything from client communications, sales and marketing, hiring, onboarding, 30, 60, 90 day onboarding processes, the checks and balances you need in your business that take you forever to create on your own. So now we give you these 90 SOPs, and we also teach you how to implement them in your business, how to have the conversations with your team members, how to hold your team members accountable for the work they're supposed to do, how to train and onboard those lead, instructors or those lead PTs or your new managers that you are hiring. We teach you not only how to take those SOPs and processes, but we teach you how to implement them, and then we're there with you to s- problem solve and troubleshoot in real time. So you're like, "Oh, I did that, but it didn't go as I planned." we're there to troubleshoot. The same way you would be with a physical therapy patient, you're like, "You're doing so good. We're gonna start running next week." And then they start running, and they come back, they're like, "Yeah, my knee's really messed up after that." You're like, "Great. Now we know what the problem is there. Let's tweak it, so the next time you run, we're gonna make it better." So you look at their hip, and you look at their ankle, and you're like, "Oh, we need to do a little more of this." That's what this program is. It's you going out and implementing with our support and then coming back and say, "That didn't go as good." And every business is unique in that way. Okay? The goal here is to build a business that gives you more freedom, more options, more value in the future, so you can decide, do I wanna keep it, do I wanna scale it, or do I wanna sell it? Okay? If you want more information about the accelerator, the applications are opening soon. You can send me a DM over on Instagram. I'm @christagurka. You can just click right now, go over on Instagram, @christagurka, and you can DM me the word "Accelerator" Or we are gonna link the application in the show notes. This program is being capped at 20 women, okay? It's the second enrollment of 2026, and we will not be enrolling again. if you're interested, there's no obligation to apply, so just apply, all right? See if we're the right fit. We'll jump on a discovery call. remember, you do not have to do this work alone, and you absolutely do not need to work harder to make your business run better. You need to build a business that no longer requires you to carry all of it alone, and that's what this is. You will come out of this program a better, smarter, more confident business owner. I promise you that. I can guarantee you that. So thanks for listening, ladies. As always, I'll see you next time. And bye for now.