Solving The Right Problem For Your Business with Jessica Lackey

Discover a fresh approach to tackling business challenges with renowned business strategist Jessica Lackey. 

Explore the 'Five Why’s' method to uncover the root causes of your studio business hurdles, learn how to identify the right problems for your unique situation, and leverage your unique talents for growth. 

Plus, gain insights into setting realistic goals and the importance of ongoing education.

Connect with Jessica Lackey at https://www.jessicalackey.com/

Or in IG at: @jessicalackey_consulting

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Ever wonder if there's more that you could be doing to grow your business? Well, if you're listening to this podcast, the answer is probably a resounding yes. Now it is possible, though, that you might be focusing on the wrong problems in your business and perhaps a little too quick to jump on those fast fixes instead of getting to the heart of the issue, to the root cause. So today I've invited a very special guest onto the show to have a really interesting conversation about what to look out for as your business grows and how to use the five wise process to solve the right problems in your business. Sounds good, right, let's dive in. Well, hi there, I'm Sarah in Glanfield. 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: 1:16

This is the Pilates Business Podcast. Welcome back to the Pilates Business Podcast. I'm Sarah Ann, and thank you so much for joining me here again today. Today, we are going to be exploring a topic that I'm really excited to talk through today with our guest, and we're going to be talking about how to solve the right problem in your business, because often what we find when we start to explore perhaps opportunities or challenges in your studio business what we find is presented as the problem is not always what is going to bring us to the solution.

Speaker 1: 1:59

And today I am joined by Jessica Lackey, who is a wonderful business strategist and operations advisor, who has spent a lot of time thinking about and formulating ways we can think about creating success in our business. Now she has experience from the corporate leadership and consulting with McKinsey to, and having had experience working with first hand in the corporate environment, as well as a degree from Harvard, she has seen first hand the impact of that hustle culture and that, what happens when you chase that hustle culture and the impact on the bottom line. But her approach is so different to what you might expect that I was so excited to bring her on and share with you because she's a very good person. I was so excited to bring her on and share with you because she's combining all of her experience from consulting and into how she helps to guide businesses into growing in a way that is sustainable without compromising that well-being that I know that we are all seeking, and that is why we got into this business Right.

Speaker 1: 3:21

So welcome Jessica. I'm so glad you're here, super excited to be here as well. Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. So when I start working with studio owners and I'm sure when you work with your wonderful clients as well, what is it that you find are some of the most common sort of presentations? How do people come to you and what are they saying to you that they need help with? Most of the time, what you say.

Speaker 2: 3:49

When they come to me, most of the time they say one or two things I need to make more money or I need to have more time. And when they come to me and I ask what more money means, they don't really know. When they say I need more time, they say I don't really know. And that's where we start with getting clarity on what more time, more money, more freedom really means to people.

Speaker 1: 4:12

Yeah, yeah, I think it's really easy to avoid answering those questions, though, isn't it? Because it's quite hard? The specifics are challenging.

Speaker 2: 4:22

Specifics are very challenging, and answering those questions requires us to really slow down and define some of those things that are undefinable for us. It means making the goalposts stop for a minute, and when we're spending time marketing, we're seeing everything on social media. The goalposts never stop there. These are some pattern interrupt questions to make us say, well, what do I really need? And that's where I usually start with my clients.

Speaker 1: 4:50

It's so powerful right, because it's very easy to overlook how important it is to take the time and dedicate time to answering these questions as well, because they're often quite uncomfortable. And when you give yourself a chance to take that time, when you give yourself the time to sit down and think about what you really want or what it is that is perhaps holding you back, it's really, really enlightening. So when you have these conversations and you start to drill down what happens next, when you're having these conversations with people that you're working with, yeah, we start with where they are.

Speaker 2: 5:25

So when we say they want more money, they want more clients, well, how much money are you making now? How much money are you taking home now? Those are two very different numbers. In your business, how many clients do you have, how many clients do you want to have? And we really say what's the gap between where you are, where you want to be, and what's the biggest barrier, what's the biggest bottleneck to that growth? What tends to happen is that the answer that looks like the service answer is actually not where we start with bridging that gap and getting through those bottlenecks.

Speaker 1: 6:02

Where does that then take you next? What direction do you tend to go and what is a typical kind of path that often comes up for people?

Speaker 2: 6:10

Yeah. So most people want to move up up into the right, and when we want to go growth, I say we don't move up before we go down. I say we go deeper into those questions. When we were doing the pre-podcast conversation, I talked about a tool that I bring from my consulting days, my lean manufacturing days, called the Five Ys. So we ask the question you want more money or you want more clients? Why? They say, well, I need to bring in this amount of clients and I'm not there.

Speaker 2: 6:43

Yet we start to ask the next question why? This is when the path starts to diverge a little bit. We say we need more clients. Typically the answer is I need to do more marketing. But when we ask well, the question of why or how, one studio owner may say I need more clients, therefore I must need to do more marketing.

Speaker 2: 7:05

How do you know you need more marketing? Well, I don't have enough repeat clients on my books. Why is that? They book once but then they don't come back. Well, why is that? Well, we can't get them in, we don't have enough open spots or they can't seem to book again. That's not a marketing problem, that is a customer capacity and operations problem or a client retention process. Exactly. That's not a marketing problem, that is a putting more top of funnel isn't going to solve the bigger problem.

Speaker 2: 7:39

But then you have a different studio, who they are doing social media marketing. They have a lot of followers. You ask the question well, how do you know you need more clients. Where you know, why do you think the marketing isn't working? And what it turns out is booking on their site for even the first session is really hard. People have to wait for a month. I went to a Pilates studio and I couldn't. They had a free week trial and I couldn't use the free week during the free week because there wasn't any spots open so I couldn't. They're fully booked so I couldn't go in for the free week, even though I wanted to Also.

Speaker 1: 8:16

Oh really, it's very common and these, these are all you know and these are all you know. It's funny because you're sharing this. You know this is, this is something that comes up often and it it it. When you start to drill down into these, these questions, it really opens up a lot of other opportunities perhaps, and you start to really be able to discover where there is perhaps some gaps right in the in the business, and sometimes you might find that there's more than one gap, Maybe it's, you know, maybe with this scenario you just mentioned, with the, with the, with your free trial, and you couldn't get in.

Speaker 1: 8:55

Well, that's a scheduling problem. That's a top of funnel marketing problem, that's a customer support problem. You know there's a whole bunch of things that sort of opens up that you say, oh, wow, like we should. You know we should, we should, we should do something about that, because that's not really helping a business right. So it opens up a lot of different opportunities, which is amazing because I'm always big. I mean maybe some people look at this right as a, as problems, but we can solve a lot of these and then they become opportunities.

Speaker 2: 9:25

So exactly, and this is how we become sustainable in our businesses. Because, again, the, the, the natural, the natural thing I think we're sold is what we need to hustle more, we need to do more activities to get more output, more input to get more output. But really what we're doing is, in some cases, finding the real problems and the real bottlenecks that are the leaky parts of our systems, and by fixing something once means that we're not having to forever have more activity to get more impact. And I think that's what's interesting about building these sustainable businesses is how do we go deep enough to find the real, the first there could be many, but the first bottleneck that says this is this is something our growth. How do we fix that and fix the root cause, versus spending our time kind of grinding in the, the hamster wheel of just more activity?

Speaker 1: 10:18

Right and the and the and the activities and the tactics you know it's. You know, and that's where I think it's it's when you're looking around and you're not, like you said, slowing down and reflecting on your business. It's very easy to look around and see, perhaps, what other people are doing and then saying, oh, that must be why my business is struggling or fumbling or why I'm, why I feel stressed or why I feel overwhelmed is because I'm not doing that, that that studio is doing or that that studio owner is doing. And then we start spinning by copying other people without really thinking about whether or not it is aligned or fit for our businesses or for that, for our particular studio. And so you kind of spin in these tactics and which actually is way more exhausting than slowing down, reflecting on those kind of deeper layers and then kind of thinking through what, more strategically, what the kind of root cause is Right.

Speaker 2: 11:18

Yeah, and this gets back to where we started with. We don't really know the back end of that other studios business. We don't know how many, how many other people they have in their business, what kind of office staff, what their rent is, if their physical locations. We don't know those things. We just see the output of I'm on social media. They're sending emails, but we don't know the why behind they're doing that Like. Are they profitable? You know, we don't really have any idea.

Speaker 2: 11:43

But that's why we go back to what are your goals? What is your current state? What is your financial reality? What do you need to bring home from this business? And that's where we then can say the bottlenecks to close, the deeper work to close to someone else's vision may be very different than the work needed to close to your vision. And I think that's where not only do we have to go deeper into our the elements, like the five wise question, go five layers below the surface level, the surface level symptom, but also get really clear on the vision we have for our businesses ourselves. So we're not not just solving the wrong problem in our business, but we're actually solving, like, the wrong problem overall in our, in our businesses. You know we could be trying to scale up, add more locations, add more people, and then you're like I actually don't really want to do that. So by solving that surface level problem in the first place, it's actually taking me off course for the type of business I really want to run.

Speaker 1: 12:37

Oh, absolutely. I could not agree with you more and I think it's really hard to filter, often, out some of those external inputs that we are bombarded with every single day and really filter through is this the right thing for my business? And if you don't have a really clear picture of what you want for your business, then you don't have really that filter to put it through because you're not sure what you're filtering for. You know, just earlier this week I was talking to a studio owner who was thinking who would have the opportunity to add a second location to her very successful business and we were looking through the data and the numbers and it looked great and she said I guess I just need to decide if this is what I really want. Right, and it wasn't.

Speaker 1: 13:30

As you know, we, if we had ignored that question, you know completely she may have found herself kind of going with the momentum of this decision, but it was very smart to be thoughtful about. You know, is this what she really wants? What's her vision, not just for today? And like, isn't this an exciting opportunity? Yes, it is, but you know, two years from now, three years from now, is this aligning with the vision that she has for her life and her business, and that's, you know, I think that it's. It's often, I think, we find ourselves avoiding those sorts of kind of conversations with ourselves right. So, again, slowing down is helpful.

Speaker 2: 14:07

Yeah, those discontinuity points where you're adding additional practitioners, opening a second location. What isn't commonly acknowledged in the discourse is that fundamentally changes your business model. It changes your profit structure, it changes the roles and responsibilities in your organization, like who's going to cover different locations. A lot of times the top line revenue is celebrated, the growth is celebrated, but it's a fundamentally different business. And again, this is where I think the power of having other people you can talk to to help you sort through the decisions and really look at the pros, the cons, the tradeoffs, particularly at these points of bringing on employees, bringing on additional practitioners, second location, a different product stream these are all fundamentally changing different parts of your business. That's not typically acknowledged in the kind of the seek for growth.

Speaker 1: 15:01

Agreed? Yeah, absolutely I agree. You know it's very, very easy to celebrate those big. You know we see it every day of the week on. You know, if you look at any sort of a business and marketing post on Instagram, you know it's the big numbers, it's the how many 10X, how many X the business and how many time, and it was overnight and I made $10 million, you know, and it's like, yeah, but that's not maybe what everybody wants, right, it might not be what, you know, it's very easy to get swept up with that and it's not always what everybody wants.

Speaker 1: 15:33

But I will also go back to what you said before, which I think is really another kind of important component that we kind of skipped over but I don't want to ignore, which is that even when we look around and we kind of have an idea of where we want to go, you know we are surrounded by these kind of this bombardment of inputs, right, and when we see what other folks are doing, we kind of tend to make these associations with that, and often that means that we're seeing someone in a more positive light, for some reason maybe, than they actually are, and the studios that may be struggling the most may look like on the outside like they are the most successful.

Speaker 1: 16:16

But you know, I have to say, having worked with hundreds of studio owners and seeing the back end of their businesses and seeing the numbers, it really, really, really is not always the case at all, which again lends to we need to stay really focused on what it is that you know you want for your business and what we want for your business, and then when you kind of get clear on, that is peeling back the layer of the onions to figure out, ok, what's holding you back from getting to the place where you want to go. And so tell me a little bit more about you. Know how or why this kind of five wise process works so well. What is it? Do you think that is the is kind of keeps. It makes it such as such a great kind of concept to use in the business.

Speaker 2: 17:01

Yeah, the reason why I think it works so well is two things. One, it's questions are a pattern interrupt and we're not allowed to solution until we're at five wise down. So it requires us to really go deeper and ask the questions that in our fast-paced society we don't really ask. But usually it's done. You can do it with yourself, but a lot of times it's done with a person that's outside who is thinking about coming into the perspective with what are all of the options that are available to us at each y-step and then asking critical questions as we go down.

Speaker 2: 17:34

So I always like to start with the I want to make more money question. Well, there's two avenues just right off that. First, why do I need to get more top line or spend less? And then each of those I need to make more top line revenue is do I need to attract more clients, keep more clients, renew more clients? Right, each level down is a path forward and by having someone who's a trained practitioner help you guide through that.

Speaker 2: 18:03

One, it's going to keep you from solutioning too fast, but two, it's going to open up the doors of possibility to really expanding the options available to think about versus it's so easy to stop at the first one and just be like the solution for the symptom is this.

Speaker 2: 18:22

But if you take the time to ask five wise, you're going to really see oh, the problem is here and it's almost always something that's not sexy, something that you've been avoiding, something where it's outside of your skill set to do, which is why you don't naturally go there. And when you kind of sit down and acknowledge it all the way at the bottom you're like, okay, I can't ignore this thing that I've been ignoring for a really long time because it's outside of my y'all got into business to lead Pilates, not set up customer relationship management systems. Like, that's not, I'm assuming why you do what you do, and it's probably a lot of times. You find the things you duct taped over time and you say, okay, I could keep trying to hustle or I could solve the problem and then call in an expert to help me solve this problem.

Speaker 1: 19:10

Yeah, right, and what do you find? Is there like a typical kind of place that you get to, where there is sort of a? Is there a particular kind of point in which you kind of feel like or I should say what's the best way of saying this? Is there a skill or a problem that you kind of come across? That is often the crux of the problem. Ultimately, there is similar across many businesses, or is it very unique and specific to each business? Do you find?

Speaker 2: 19:36

I think it's very unique and specific to each business. I think it falls along the general customer journey of attract, invite onboard, deliver and then off-board and then team management. Those are the foundational business blocks. But for your particular business, I don't know which one of those are gonna lead to the. It's the bottleneck in your business. We don't know, because some people could again have very strong marketing but really poor billing systems, or they actually their top line looks great but the reason that they are running around like a crazy person is because their back office people are.

Speaker 2: 20:16

You know, it's a people challenge where tasks aren't getting done even though the marketing is working really well. So it's. I would say there's a not infinite number of problems. But for your business I don't usually know where it is, especially when you're smaller it's usually marketing and sales. But when you start to become more known and fill your roster, that's when it's more interesting for me as an expert to say, okay, cool, you've got the basics down. Now what? That's all dependent on you and your gifts and where you like to spend your time and where you like to play and the network you came from before. So at the beginning it's always marketing and sales, but once you've start to build a consistent client base, that's when it spans across all those functions.

Speaker 1: 21:05

Right, because that's when you've met the viability of the business. In my experience, that is also when often you start to reach the limits of what you can figure out on your own. There is a ceiling often, and everyone's got a different point in which they reach that bottleneck. Years ago I worked with a really wonderful studio owner in London who loved to teach and she was so passionate about what she did. She built a phenomenal business with multiple locations. She turned to me and she said to me look, she was.

Speaker 1: 21:40

I know I'm the bottleneck in the business. I know that I don't have the skills to get it to the next level today, but I know that I need to do that. I think having that awareness for your own ability is really incredibly powerful for your business growth, because we all hit our limits at some point in terms of our ability to grow on our own professionally, which is why in the Pilates and yoga and fitness world we do so much continued education because we know that in order to become a better teacher, we need to keep learning and keep growing and keep expanding our knowledge and expertise. But often when it comes to business, we just expect that it's something we can figure out, but it's not always the case.

Speaker 1: 22:27

Again, often, like you said, it comes back to your background and what you've been exposed to and your circles and network and so on, and I think it's having the awareness and knowing what you're like you said, what you're good at, but then perhaps bumping up, you're bumping up against the limits and that's exposing where you might need to spend some more time and I'll say often is having worked with studio owners all over the world. I think that people management is often one of the places that people struggle often, and then also thinking and looking and at sort of setting goals and targets from a numbers perspective is also one of those kind of areas the core areas where it's sort of like oh, maybe we need to just get a bit more comfortable here, maybe we need to just go through some of the basics, maybe we just need to spend some time thinking about what's going on right here and with this part of business.

Speaker 2: 23:26

Yeah, I tend to find that with a lot of my creative clients, a lot of my practitioners that work with the body, that they didn't learn management skills. By the way, people think that you learn this in business school. You don't like this, is you don't? You don't not like how to run a small business, how to actually provide feedback and delegate, how to set targets that are not like super generic corporate targets. No one teaches that, and so I say this to my clients all the time like don't feel like you needed to go to business school for this, but recognize that there's some people who love projects and love goal setting and love taking big visions and breaking it down to tasks.

Speaker 2: 24:03

Those are usually not the same people who are gifted Pilates teachers. You know we, we, you know those are, we have. Everyone has their different zones of genius and I think there's. These are just things that are not taught in, you know, are usually our professional education and probably are not at all taught in any kind of like training for your specific profession, like they're just known. You know, probably in Pilates certifications you get like a class on like how to run your business and that's it.

Speaker 1: 24:31

Maybe not Maybe not, but you're right, it's not any business, you know, and a lot of business owners figure it out on their own, which means we know, which is why what is the start? I think it's like 50% of businesses fail within the first five years. It's like this is you know? This is why because there isn't a lot of business education for small businesses and but I what I do think there is now, which I think is very lucky for everybody who is out there right now starting and building and growing and scaling a business, is that there is a lot of folks out there who are able to give guidance and support and strategic advice, who can help you to avoid making some mistakes and perhaps help you to tap into more of what you want, whether that is more revenue or more freedom, or just perhaps even just to take time off whenever you want, right?

Speaker 2: 25:25

I think we all want to be able to take some time off and build that indoor schedules, and that's part, you know, again, those are part of like what do you want for your life and what do you want for your business? And it all comes back to that very beginning question, right?

Speaker 1: 25:36

And there's no wrong answer to that? Yeah, not at all. Well, thank you so much, jessica, for coming and sharing your amazing wisdom with us today. I really appreciate it. I'm really excited that we got to talk through the five wise process, and I hope that all of our lovely listeners will perhaps think about using that on themselves at some point, or perhaps using it as they go about building and growing their studio businesses. But if they want to get in touch with you, what is the best place for them to find you?

Speaker 2: 26:06

They can find me at Jessica Lackey dot com. Black backslash welcome. This is where I have my weekly newsletter and I teach a free business building class once a month. Oh, fantastic.

Speaker 1: 26:17

Well, I'm going to link to all of that in the show notes. Thank you so much again, jessica, for being here. I really appreciate it. Thank you, so I hope this is helpful to you as you go about building your boutique fitness studio business. If you loved what you heard today, I'd be so appreciative if you could take a quick minute, go to wherever you're listening to this and rate and review this podcast. It would mean a ton to me and it would also help make sure this podcast gets out into our community so that more teachers and studio owners, just like you, can feel encouraged and supported on their journey in our industry. Did you love this episode and want more? Head to spring three dot 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.