Where Does Growth Opportunity Exist In Your Studio Business?

In today's episode, I explore the SWOT Analysis—a foundational strategy tool that can revolutionize your studio business. 

Unpacking Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats, this episode provides actionable insights tailored for studio owners in the wellness industry. 

Whether you're a veteran or new to the game, tune in to learn how to leverage your strengths, address weaknesses, seize opportunities, and prepare for potential threats. Equip yourself with the knowledge to make data-driven decisions and set your business on a path to sustainable growth

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

If you're a studio owner who is looking to grow your business as we head into the new year, but maybe you are not sure where to start this episode. Today we are going to be diving into the SWOT analysis. This is a strategic tool that can help you better understand your business, the landscape you are operating in and where there could be some opportunities for growth. So grab a notepad you won't want to miss this one. Well, hi there, I'm Sarah. In Glenfield, I'm a business and marketing strategist just for boutique fitness studio owners like you. If you're ready to be inspired and make a bigger impact, you're in the right place. All you need are a few key strategies, the right mindset and some support along the way. Join me as I share the real life insights that will help you grow a sustainable and profitable studio.

Speaker 1: 0:59

This is the Pilates Business Podcast. Welcome back to the Pilates Business Podcast. I'm here with you today with another episode filled with tips to help studio owners just like you thrive in the ever-evolving wellness industry. If we haven't met before, I'm Sarah Ann, and I'm so happy that you're here with me today listening in and learning how you can grow your boutique fitness studio business, and today we're going to be taking a little bit of a step back and looking more at the bigger picture. I spend a lot of time on this podcast, sharing with you some of the deepest details, some of the nitty-gritty facts and insights that will help you build your business from the ground up, and I also, though, often get asked about what's coming next. Where are there opportunities in our industry? How can I continue to grow? And all of this is helpful to know as you're looking ahead into, especially when we're looking into a new year, wondering what might come about, wondering what opportunities might come our way.

Speaker 1: 2:11

So today, instead of sharing with you some of these insights and facts that I often share, I'm actually going to give you a little bit of an exercise that you can follow along to do with me, and that exercise that I'm going to take you through today is a SWOT analysis, which is a powerful tool. You may have heard of it, and it can help you to really understand and dial in where your strengths are. It can help you to understand a little bit more about your weaknesses in your business, but it also helps you to see where opportunities exist and what perhaps there might be some opportunities for other things that you may be able to help your business to achieve. But also in that the final segment is the threats part of it, and a threat is a little bit of an extreme word to describe what would happen to your business, but it's what works for this acronym, for this exercise. But that's really where there perhaps might be some things that might be impacting your business, things that you might not be aware of right now, might be thinking about often, and so what's really helpful about this exercise is that it really is helpful for you to be able to take stock of where you're at in your business, as it relates to your business in and of itself, but also the landscape that you're operating within. So if you've ever studied business, this is something that you absolutely would have come across. This is sort of business 101. And I know that for many of you who have been learning about building and growing a business, this is something that comes up very early on in any sort of business training education, and I wanted to take it and share it with you here today because I think it's always a good exercise to do at the end of the year and, like I said, as we look ahead into 2024, and perhaps you're in a place where you're feeling pretty good about your business, or maybe you feel like there are opportunities to do better.

Speaker 1: 4:16

Perhaps you're feeling like there are some threats to your business, or perhaps you really want to leverage your strengths, perhaps understand a little bit more about where you might have some weaknesses. I always call these opportunities, because I always think there is always opportunity there if you're looking for it. So I'm not a fan of these negative words, but we're going to roll with it today. So what I want you to do is to grab a piece of paper and on that piece of paper, you're going to just draw an addition symbol across a plus sign right down the middle of the page, okay, and then the top left is going to be your strengths box, the top right is going to be your weaknesses box, the bottom left is going to be opportunities and the bottom right is going to be threats. Ok, and from there let's dive on in and fill out this exercise. Let's fill out your sheet as it relates to your business, ok. So what exactly is a SWOT analysis? To start, well, this was really developed for a strategic planning. Like I said, swot stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, and each of these categories tends to offer a little bit of a lens to view your business through, and when you kind of put on these filters, these lenses, these glasses, that allows you to see your business purely from that one perspective, it helps you sometimes to see things you might not have otherwise seen.

Speaker 1: 5:47

Any time that you're undertaking an exercise like this, what you're doing is you are taking the time to step out of your business to focus on your business. So many of you, I know, are in the nitty gritty in the day to day, putting out fires here, there and everywhere, wearing so many hats, and this is often something that you're not necessarily carving out time to do, but when you do it, it is so incredibly powerful for your business because once you've completed this type of an exercise, you're often able to make smarter decisions about your business. Often you're able to make data-driven decisions and often you see opportunities that you might not have otherwise seen. So the first thing is you want to as you're kind of rotating through these four different categories and assessing your business through those lenses, you definitely want to make sure that you are not that you are being completely open to all the things that you see when you're seeing it through that lens. So let's kick off with the top left, which is your strengths.

Speaker 1: 6:59

We all like to talk about what we're good at. Just this week, I was talking to quite a few different studio owners and we were working a lot on their brand messaging, and so one of those things that I asked everyone to do and in that case is to talk about what do you feel you're really good at, what do you feel that you're really strong at, what do you feel that you really help your clients achieve? So we're not just stroking egos here. Truly, we are doing this because it's really important to understand how people see us and what it is that we care about in our business, and by understanding your strengths often we're able to better position your services, offerings and packages and pricing and memberships around your strengths. So one of the things you might want to ask yourself is what sets my studio apart from the competition? What is it that I care about so much more than anyone else I see out there? What is it that my clients tell me that I do really well, that they tell me that keeps them coming back to the studio? What, perhaps, do people commonly share in their testimonials or in their reviews. What do they say about you?

Speaker 1: 8:11

And this often requires you to have a little bit of an observation about how people behave in your business. Sometimes you may have a very specific qualification that you know people are seeking, and that certainly is a strength. You may have anything from a great location to a fabulous logo or a wonderful social media following or all of these things are things that, as you assess your business or a place of seeing purely its strengths, you want to make sure you get everything out of your head and on to paper. There is no wrong answers here, by the way, so I encourage you just to write whatever comes to mind, but don't overlook anything. Anything that you think is positive for your business goes here in this category. The goal is to really identify what you can perhaps leverage going forward, what you might be, some of the strengths that you might be overlooking and perhaps could be using to improve your growth prospects. So segment number one is your strengths.

Speaker 1: 9:22

Now the next step is those weaknesses, and no one likes to dwell too much on their shortcomings, but I will be honest with you. Often I do find that many folks tend to have this sort of bias towards seeing, perhaps, what they're not so good at. It's not a place I like for my studio owners to sit. I don't think it helps you necessarily to frame things in your mind as weaknesses and to dwell on them in a negative way. But if you are aware of the things that perhaps might be holding you back, you often can't address those things right and perhaps work a little bit harder on some of those things or spend a little bit more time on some of those things, or perhaps spend a little bit more energy and focus on some of those things. And so spending a little bit of time being aware of and identifying your weaknesses is obviously very helpful for your overall business growth. Because if we just focus on what we're really good at, some of those things that we don't spend any time on that we're not so good at will eventually kind of keep us stuck. And that's often where people come to me and where they're always in that kind of situation where they've grown their business to the point where they can make it, where they can get it, and there's things missing. They know there's things missing. They know they're not sure what those things are or how they can overcome those things, because they're their weaknesses. Right, and we all have weaknesses. It's all good. But once you kind of identify what those things are and you can get some strategic action steps in place, you can put some, you can make some new hires, you can do all sorts of things you can do things start to move along nicely and we start to see growth again.

Speaker 1: 11:01

So you want to just take a minute just to think about what is it that might perhaps be not your strong suit? What is the things that might be holding you back? Are your class schedules too limited? Perhaps Are your classes already too full? Perhaps Is your location the best it could be? Is it a turn off for some people? Is there? Do you have a great team around you? Do you have people you can delegate to on the business side and on the marketing side? Do you have a team of teachers who work really cohesively and really well together? Are you able to communicate effectively with your clients, with your community? Do you spend time marketing your business? Do you spend time getting visibility for your studio? These are all kind of questions that often come up. These are often the places where I see there is what I call opportunity. People might say that they're weaknesses, but I say there's opportunity there. But those are the things you might want to take a few minutes to put down in this segment and, again, the key is often not just to recognize them but to then say, okay, how can we be proactive about taking this thing that is made perhaps currently holding us back and making it something that actually propels us forward? So I do always say, where there's weakness, there is always opportunity for growth, and this is how I would encourage you to see this segment as well.

Speaker 1: 12:31

Now, next, after we have spoken about your strengths, after we have taken a look at those weaknesses, next we look at opportunities. And this is a very kind of big shift in gears, because typically, when we look at the sort of the lower portion of this sort of this symbol on your page, right, the lower two boxes these are what we would call probably more external factors that drive both the opportunities and the threats in your business. And so when we're thinking about opportunities right now, I will go ahead and say there is tremendous amounts of opportunity out there for anyone who is in the well-being, wellness and movement space. We are seeing growth like we haven't seen ever before, and huge amounts of investments coming into this market and just the amount of interest there is across all ages, across all parts of the world is profound, and so we are seeing huge amounts of opportunity there for those businesses and those studios who are willing to step up and step into the ring.

Speaker 1: 13:49

So when we think about the opportunities that exist, there is a lot of opportunities, and you might be inside of your market, inside of your town, inside of your city, be able to see where opportunities exist for you to grow your business. Are there gaps in the market that your studio can fill? Do you see that there is opportunities for growth already in your business? This is where you want to get all of that down on a bit of paper because, frankly, most of us are quite visual and when we can organize our thoughts in a way like we do in this exercise, it's very, very helpful for our brains to be able to process. So we certainly want to look around and see where there might be some opportunities for growth or opportunities to perhaps generate new revenue, to expand. Perhaps that looks like a larger location, a second or a third or a fourth or a fifth location, adding a new offering. There is a tremendous amount of opportunities, and what I'm seeing right now is that many studios are expanding the number of revenue streams that they are generating in their business, so they're able to leverage their existing client base to generate more revenue by adding new services and products and offers into the mix, and that is really exciting and a way that a lot of studio owners have been able to take advantage of this real interest in wellness, well-being and movement.

Speaker 1: 15:16

Okay, moving on to the final segment, this is where we talk about threats, and again, this is often a threat that is external to your business, where you may not have control over this at all. So one of the biggest threats that we didn't see coming in the last five years but came and hit us all really hard was global pandemic. Now you might want to put that down number one threat to your business, but typically this might also be perhaps a concerning economic outlook. We might look. It might include things like perhaps increasing expenses, increasing wages, inflation or also threats to your business. But it might also be competition in your local area as well, perhaps someone who is opening a studio down the street that might affect your ability to acquire new clients and have new people come through the door. And again, when you see these threats, what we can do when we're aware of them, once you've got them kind of out of our heads and onto paper, is that we're able to process a little bit better what we can be doing proactively to perhaps shore up the business, to perhaps stabilize the business and make sure that the impact of any of those threats that may become real is minimized, thank you.

Speaker 1: 16:43

So this is where doing something like diversifying your revenue might be helpful to distinguish and separate yourself from the competition. Perhaps things like including specific loyalty programs or developing your network locally with referral programs might help to shore up and stabilize your ability to get new clients and enhance retention. We might also look at some of the industry trends to see where people are focused more or less. I think that as we look into 2024 and having seen what happened in 2023 to some of the larger online fitness groups, perhaps we might be a little bit concerned about whether or not having an online business in the fitness space is something that people still want. Perhaps it is, but perhaps that is a market that has been saturated and perhaps the opportunity is less now than it was a couple of years ago. So there's a lot to think about in this area. One of the things is obviously consumer behavior, and the trends we're seeing in the marketplace and in the industry is something to take into consideration as well.

Speaker 1: 18:00

And ultimately, the more prepared you are for these threats, the less disruptive they will be, and there's many things that you can do to avoid these threats really truly impacting your business in a very, very negative way. So the more you can do to understand what those threats might be, the stronger of a position you will be in. So there we have it. We've talked about your strengths inside of your business, what that looks like, what you're really good at. We've talked about your weaknesses, which I like to classify as opportunities, but things that you perhaps don't do as well as you would like, or things that you perhaps are, things that might be holding your business back. Then we talked about opportunities, perhaps in your local area, but also in the industry itself overall, and then, of course, we talked about threats, which can range from a competitor opening down the street to the larger, broader economic outlook.

Speaker 1: 18:58

Now, the more prepared you are for all things, business will make sure that your business is stronger and better for it, and taking the time to complete an exercise like this will be really, really helpful to you as you grow and move into 2024. This, by the way, is not something that you should just do once. It's something that I would recommend you kind of consider to be an ongoing planning part of your planning process, something that is something that is your con. You perhaps might be updating on a regular basis and reviewing on a regular basis. You might want to make it part of your quarterly or your biannual review of your business Inside of Thrive. One of the things that we do is we work every 90 days on putting together a strategic plan for everyone's business inside of Thrive. We do a little bit of this in that process, so you can certainly take that kind of timeline to make sure that you're focusing. Taking the time to focus on your business every quarter or every six months is a great cadence for this type of an exercise, and it is a living document, so I don't need to pull out a new piece of paper every time to do this, but simply take out the one you've had before, perhaps adjust it based on what's been happening more recently and then add to it as well. So there you have it.

Speaker 1: 20:20

To wrap it all up, a SWOT analysis is really more than just a generic business exercise. If you truly take the time to work through each of these categories, it will bring to light opportunities for you to build and grow your business, but also to strengthen and stabilize your business. So it really is a crucial tool that can help you to navigate your studio's path to success. It gives you some insights, allows you to play a little bit more to your strengths, perhaps improve upon some of those weaknesses, open up opportunities for your business and make sure that you are protecting your business against some of those threats. So keep it front and center, refer and review it regularly, and you truly will be better equipped for the journey ahead. I hope this is helpful to you as you go about building your boutique fitness business.

Speaker 1: 21:13

I did a 101 on business here today and if you enjoyed what you heard and would like to share this with some other folks that you care about in the world, in the industry, then I'd be so appreciative if you could take a quick minute to rate and review the podcast. It would mean so much to me and would help to get it out there into our community, so that more teachers just like you would feel encouraged and supported on their journey and our industry. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Did you love this episode and want more? Head to spring3.com and check out my free resources that will help you run a profitable and fulfilling studio business. And before you go, one last reminder there is no one way to do what you do, only your way. So whatever it is that you want to do, create or offer, you've got this. Thanks again for joining me today and have a wonderful rest of your day.