Sticky Notes
Ever wondered what it's actually like to build a fitness business from the ground up? Meet Rosie and Leila, two Pilates instructors who crossed paths at a London studio and discovered a shared vision that was too powerful to ignore.
This podcast—Sticky Notes—is our real-time chronicle of building something from nothing. We're relatively new teachers stepping into entrepreneurship, balancing Rosie's big-picture dreaming with Leila's pragmatic planning. We're challenging fitness industry norms, particularly the narrow concept of a "Pilates body," and creating spaces where everyone feels welcome regardless of how they look.
Join us weekly as we document every decision, meeting, and milestone. Whether you're interested in Pilates, entrepreneurship, or simply enjoy witnessing the unfiltered journey of two women betting on themselves and their vision—we're glad you're here for the ride.
Sticky Notes
The Power of Showing Up: Fitness and Business Journeys (Ep. 6)
What do fitness and building a business have in common? More than you’d think. There’s a through line of one simple, powerful principle: just keep showing up.
In this honest and reflective episode, we talk about the surprising overlap between training your body and growing a brand. We’ve come a long way from recording with a badly propped-up iPhone—now we’re using Riverside and feeling a little more legit each time we hit record. But it wasn’t overnight! It happened one step at a time, figuring things out as we went, without planning too far in advance.
We’re excited to share that we’re putting our upcoming expert interviews behind a paywall on Honeycomb Studios. These are conversations with Pilates legends—people who’ve spent decades refining and teaching this work. Their insights aren’t just facts; they’re living history, passed down through generations, from Joseph and Clara Pilates to the students who kept the method alive.
Whether you’re lifting weights, launching a podcast, or starting a business, the rule stays the same: consistency leads to growth. It’s not about doing everything perfectly—it’s about being there day in and day out, taking it all as it comes.
Tune in to hear how simply showing up—again and again—can change not just your results, but who you are becoming. And stick around: our very first expert interview is dropping soon!
episode six. How cool is that actually, I keep saying that with every number.
Speaker 2:I'm like wow, episode six I wonder at what number we'll no longer sort of be impressed by it.
Speaker 1:We'll be like, oh, just another number I feel like for me it'll be like 20 fair a little bit, yeah, but it's crazy how fast they come though, like if you just keep doing the thing which you're doing, then you keep making them and producing them and putting them out, and then it just happens like it's been.
Speaker 2:That's so funny because I in which it's probably the title of the episode, and a lot of what we want to talk about in this episode is about fitness journeys and I think that is also so relevant to a fit not to really jump the gun. We'll pull it back, but not to really jump the gun. But a lot of what fitness is is just showing up and you don't get. You see results instantly. Whatever result you're looking for, it doesn't matter. It's that same concept of just having to show up and do the work and that's kind of what we've been applying to these podcasts is just showing up and doing the work. So it's kind of funny that you start off saying that and with the business honestly.
Speaker 1:Like you just have to do the task and then see what the next problem is, and then do the task, yeah, and then see what the next problem is and, behind the scenes, do the other things that you know need to. Problem is, and then do the task and then see what the next problem is and, behind the scenes, do the other things that you know need to be done, and then eventually, the product rule.
Speaker 2:I think it's also been a lot of problem solving, troubleshooting. With every step we start something and then we we troubleshoot or problem solve, and then we go on to the next one and we keep going.
Speaker 1:And this week we're talking less about business because there's just not as much to say and there's sort of a pending problem. Not problem, there's a pending situation or thing that we're learning to deal with and we'll update more on that next week. But the gist of that or not even the gist, the lesson learned from that is, if you are registering a business which, when was that that? We actually did it in May.
Speaker 2:Quite early on. That was one of the first things I remember you having done.
Speaker 1:And I feel like every single thing I do in life, I end up getting this advice from someone or learning it myself. So I wish I would just learn it, but just need to slow down a little bit before making decisions, because the issue that we're dealing with now could have very easily been avoided if I had just not been so like I need to register this business today. A totally arbitrary date. It didn't need to be that day. There was absolutely no.
Speaker 2:Oh, my God, I wonder if you know the date, because that would could be our anniversary of our business yeah, I think it.
Speaker 1:I'll look at what the exact date was. I think I sent you a screenshot when it was registered, but I should look at the date I actually submitted. Yeah, this is our registration on company's house and we'll talk about it more next week. But I and we'll talk about it more next week, but I got a little bit of a scam situation with the virtual, I don't know. If it was a scam per se, would it be surprising to me if I were to get the scam?
Speaker 2:No, no and I don't think it would be really surprising to anyone who knows me, just because I tend to be so trusting which is why I exist in our dynamic to stop. And if there was anything, you know, if we were going to get scammed at some point in our business, I'm glad that this is what we got scammed on and hopefully this is, you know, our sort of our karma. Our bad karma is zapped by this one scamming. And we can go forth.
Speaker 1:I'll show you. I'll actually next week when we talk about it. I will show the email that came through from this tool that I was using because I had emailed and said this is the virtual website or the virtual address. I emailed and said look, this was rejected. Can you please explain to me why this was rejected? And the email that got sent back was like a text message Basically. It was like all bold and lowercase and definitely just not a professional email.
Speaker 2:Oh.
Speaker 1:And I immediately was like Half-like God and scammed yeah. Oh my God, and maybe it's not, maybe I'm just doing it wrong, but it feels very much as though I've been scammed, we have been scammed.
Speaker 2:Hmm.
Speaker 1:But there was an easy solution resolution and if I again had just taken more than half a second because what happens to me, which is an issue that I'm working on, is I'll decide to do a task and when I have decided to start that task, nothing can stop me, and I need to be better about letting some things absorb and letting them filter through and then coming back to it maybe the next day yeah and it would help me out a lot probably, but that's a lesson learned and we'll talk about it more yeah, where hopefully, hopefully, everything has gone through fine.
Speaker 1:Yes, I'm sure it'll be fine. The woman on the phone reassured me, so I'm sure it'll be fine. The other news that was very exciting was that editing this episode was much, or last week's episode was much easier I love riverside too, because we recorded our last week virtually because I wasn't here, and now I'm in london again and we're still recording virtually yes, whilst I would love to have you right beside me on the sofa, it just made the editing so easy.
Speaker 2:The software was very user-friendly.
Speaker 2:There was like a little bit what made it easy, like what was the it just I mean, it was it considered all, even though we had recorded sort of back to back a few times. And actually I wonder what it will do. It'll be interesting to see this new project, because I don't know if this is considered a new project or not. Um, oh yeah, but it had all the clips grouped together and just like back to back and so you could just go in and sort through it and then you could also edit just through the transcript, like if you cut out words, it was like it could cut it out from the text as well. Yeah, it also generated for us some clips. I don't actually know if you ended up using it, cause I know when you were posting a lot of the clips, it was my very sort of hectic 48 hours of the week, so I kind of need to just go through them now and like actually watch them all, like from my personal account.
Speaker 1:So Riverside does this thing where it creates a bunch of, basically, shorts for you and I really liked them, I, I.
Speaker 1:It was really interesting to me that when I've made the clips myself and doing the editing bit, I've only ever done it, so that when one of us is talking, it's on us and it just goes back and forth, whereas, however they do, it sort of made it look more like a conversation, because they would show some moments where one of us wasn't talking but was still listening, and I kind of expected them to be like pretty bad, and then they were actually really good. So yeah, this past, the ones I posted on Instagram are a combo of ones I made and ones the Riverside made, but I am curious to see if you know, if it produces good ones again, then I might just use those yeah, I mean it might always be worth it to have a mix of the both just because we are.
Speaker 2:It'll depend if there are parts that we think are more worthwhile to clip, if they because what I got from some of the ones I looked at and I didn't actually look at them in more detail, so I should is I felt that theirs were not more informative, but actual, like sort of substantive, like clips, whereas we might go and clip in like a funnier moment or just something more, not human, but just something small.
Speaker 2:But it is great that it means that we just always have that anyways, because if there is ever a week where neither of us have the time to go in or do a clip or whatever it may be, we know that it will be generating some that we can use. And even just while recording I like that I can sort of just check in, make sure my audio levels are like not at zero and then just knowing it'll all be there on the laptop. And then obviously the process. It was even easier than the SD card, which we all know. I never thought I could chop the SD card.
Speaker 1:Isn't it funny also to think about the first, the first episode we did. We just had iPhone camera looking at us? Yeah, not even flip the correct way around, not even flip the correct way around, and we didn't know if our mics were picking up anything yeah we didn't have any kind of live feedback we just sat and airdropped them to each other afterwards as well.
Speaker 1:I know. And then, when you figured out that you could watch us on your laptop while we were recording, that was like yeah, oh my god crazy I also. One thing that I was really happy about last week is I expected the recording to look really clunky because we're not together and it actually had, I thought, pretty much no effect on how it looked yeah, it was super great yeah, so well done riverside. Whoever created this?
Speaker 2:I think it'll also be so great when we eventually have guests on as well. I also saw you can. So obviously we have both joined on as hosts. We could have. I don't know if you saw there was an option where you can join on as a producer, and I imagine if you join on as a producer there is just no camera, so your screen is not being filmed, but they could go in and sort of edit and work on the backend. So if we, you know, wanted to ever have a producer or there was a situation where we needed sorry, my hand was changing- where we needed to do that we could.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and there's a little I can see in the upper right-hand corner. There's like an invite thing. So I don't know, we haven't. I don't know if you've seen the way that we can invite guests on to record, but I'm guessing that is.
Speaker 2:So, basically, because I've been, I think, both times I've hopped on before you in the box, just like next to where my screen is. It'll be like another box and then it's like invite guests and it'll give like the link and it's basically you would share that and they sort of hop on it like a zoom link, so cool, or something like that. I think they may have to have chrome to do it. I would have to try and see, but because I tried to jump onto this through safari um and it didn't it doesn't allow me to, no, so it wanted me on chrome, which also reminds. So we are now halfway through.
Speaker 2:I think this is that the free trial for riverside pro um I, after our experience with it, I imagine we will be sticking with riverside pro. It's very cool, yeah, and so it was super seamless then, using this and, as much as I sort of hate the ai of it all, the ai assistance that it has, which is what has created the clips and what helps like just obviously everything run more smoothly alongside Buzzsprout and then art, the AI assistance through Buzzsprout as well, has just made this as seamless as possible because, whilst it is a passion project, as we keep saying, there are other things we want our energy to focus on. So if I can spend less hours trying to edit the podcast and upload the podcast, I can spend more time curating for honeycomb studios yeah, it's just the time.
Speaker 1:It wasn't like. I enjoyed making the little clips and things, but it is a lot and the editing you were doing was a lot of time.
Speaker 2:Yes, it was also then sort of just draining, because then I was like, well, I don't want to do anything else for the business, whereas like, for example, this morning um, because I also know there's stuff that I just need to do and if I just start it it will be much easier than my brain is building it up to be um, I've been doing early morning workouts, so I'm doing like that, like first.
Speaker 1:I saw your Instagram.
Speaker 2:See how funny that's how yeah, that's how I show up to the workout, that's how comfortable I feel around all the like group. I see there I came down the stairs to it in the morning and one of the coaches she just looked at me and like in a very like we are friends, she just like burst out laughing and she was like mood and I was like, yeah, I just are you a normally early morning?
Speaker 1:Do you just force yourself to do that, or is that?
Speaker 2:I mean, I'm an early morning person when I have been able to like sleep early enough the night before, and I'm early morning enough in the sense that I I prefer to teach in the morning. I like to work like clients that start at 8 am or 9 am. I have actually like absolutely no problem with that, but I was never early morning enough that I was doing that workout before the 8 am or 9 am.
Speaker 1:Um I I was also not working out before working out a whole different beast because you realistically yeah need to be up at five.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I'm very lucky in that I'm not. My commute to my workout studio is not that bad, so it means that I could sleep in a little bit longer. But yeah, it's that thing where I feel like there's being a morning person and then there's being an early morning workout person, pre-work, and that was like a whole different beast. But what was happening was also some days of the week I was having to wake up early to work out because it's the only time I could fit in that time. But because some days I was and some I wasn't, it was throwing off my sleep a lot. And it's, it's actually easier if I just stick with sleep waking up early, because it means I'm sleeping early and waking up early. And that consistency, yeah, is what's better.
Speaker 2:Because it was being hard, it was becoming hard on days where I didn't want to sleep early because I had woken up late. So it was. And I know the switch is much better, much more productive. If I saw you know, there it's only positive, because I was saying this to another coach this morning she's like I've yet to see the negative. You're saying I was like yeah, well, no, I just I don't want to commit to all the more like I just I just never saw myself as this person. So now that I am becoming an early morning workout person, I don't it's a new identity for me, um, but it meant that I finished work or finished my workout and then had time to just sit and get some of the studio or some of the work on the spreadsheet that I had to do before I made it to work, cause I had a bit of a later start with my classes today, before coming to work, even.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I just had like I had half an hour, an hour free and I was like I was sat on the couch and I was like I can just sit and do it like just open the spreadsheet, because it's been looming over my head, um, and I had a lot of time for it, like later today, um, sometime yesterday and then also mainly friday. But I was like, if I just start it, I know it's going to be so much easier than I thought and I was on that post-workout endorphin high and I just sat and I tipped out away and wouldn't you know it it was fun.
Speaker 1:It's just the getting started. It's like what you said last week about even teaching a class and you said second, I do my half rollback yeah there. I'm ready and relate to that as well. This morning, when I woke up to come to pie, I had 30 seconds of. Is there any possible reason why I would need to not go? The answer was no, yeah, and then I went and then I was so happy that I went yeah.
Speaker 2:Just how it is. It was nice in the studio today, yeah, it was nice, it was good energy.
Speaker 1:yeah, it was nice, it was good energy this week. Well, I guess we talked about this a little bit last week, but we have decided to put interviews that we're going to do behind a paywall, which actually it was funny this morning I saw keelan and the first thing she said to me was great idea, interviews behind a paywall, really okay.
Speaker 1:And I thought, okay, that's good. And I just have thought about it even more and I continue to feel. I mean, even we were having a conversation with Holly, the owner of pie, who we've mentioned several times. I don't know how many times I have to say the owner of pie, but that's who she is, holly. I was talking to Holly and she and you were right there and she was already starting to kind of say you should interview this person and that would be really cool. And to your point afterwards where you said maybe she could help us get in contact with those people, there's just value that we have created in the relationships that we've made, not in a selfish way, but it's. It hasn't come from nowhere, you know.
Speaker 1:I've been working with Polly for over a year and we trust each other and have a good relationship.
Speaker 2:So yeah, no, I think it. It makes a lot of sense. I think it also even like paywall aside, I think what we were trying to build with honeycomb, it just aligned so closely with that vision that I think it would have to. Even if we weren't putting it behind a paywall, I would have wanted to find a way to embed it onto that website in some way or another. So this only makes more sense.
Speaker 2:And maybe there are some interviews with people who are newer to the Pilates world that we may or may not. Maybe that can live on both, but I think, at least with some of the sort of people who we want to interview because of how established they are and their like legacy, almost it makes sense to exist. And, like you're saying, we might have the first five minutes on sticky notes. But I think you know I also like that sticky notes will always be us two. There's no requirement to get a guest on. We are each other's guests. So there's no pressure to have a certain amount of interviews or not. There's no pressure for each week to necessarily have a roadmap, whilst we always will try to and have you know, we want it to still be somewhat productive, our conversation.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there will be a much higher bar set for um, that podcast or those interviews yeah, I don't want to say the name just yet, because it is so special and it gets me really excited because, um, it was the part that I was most excited about during my thesis, my final dissertation for university, and that chapter was my actual favorite. So I want to see if I can repurpose some of that actually because I just talked about what it is in general in that dissertation and it should be probably documented.
Speaker 1:That's the other thing that's been so cool about it, and actually I was saying to Holly uh, what was I saying to her? Oh, she was talking about the teacher training program at Pi and I asked her because it's getting, it's now being expanded and will be taught in um Tala's studio at True Pilates, and so I was just asking her about how that's going to look financially and who will be teaching it.
Speaker 1:And so she's going to teach weekend one and four. Nice, and then Nazia and Sophia are doing two and three, but she said she was hoping to pass along weekend four. I think she really likes to be there for Weekend 1 to.
Speaker 2:Introduce them.
Speaker 1:Introduce and kind of. This is the thing about classical Pilates. Right, it is getting passed down. It's not a I was going to say it's not a theory, but that's not quite true. It's very much rooted in sort of storytelling in some way and there's a history to it. And so Holly said that she was hoping to pass along the fourth weekend to someone and that she just wanted that person to observe her teaching at one time to get the story woven in was some.
Speaker 1:It was along the lines of that, and I had a moment where she was telling me that and I thought that's exactly why I want to do all of this anyway, because I think there's a huge difference between going through a training program and not getting any history about what it is. You're actually learning and going through a training program and not getting any history about what it is. You're actually learning and going through a training program and understanding the origins and the people involved and the various actors and being potentially critical about its history. These are all very important things and, again, in alignment with honeycomb studios, it all makes a lot of sense and I kind of it's cool that it's evolved to this place because it does just make sense.
Speaker 2:I think of that very first meeting you and I had at the coffee shop by Pi at District and where it sort of has come from then, and it is so cool because I think especially Honeycomb Studios has built out to so much more than I was expecting it to.
Speaker 2:I thought the sort of big behemoth of a task and of a website God, sorry, my angles are all over the place would be Hex, and whilst Hex has a lot to it as well, I think Honeycomb Studios is becoming such a vibrant website and a vibrant community in the exact way we wanted it to.
Speaker 2:I think we had hopes of this, but I don't think we really expected this, for example, um, and yet to what you're saying, I think that would be so cool to talk about and I think it would then, almost conversely, be so interesting to talk to people who have set up and run or started teacher training programs in places where they may not have any of that history or that background and to see how they teach it, because ultimately, everything can always be traced back to something. So the equinox teacher training traces back to power pilates, which traces back to whoever had done that, and it all goes through you know some route, but it would be cool to then where we are able to talk to some instructors who have that first-hand experience and then some who don't, because that's another thing of that like whole elitism, and whilst it's not, I don't think it's elitist to speak to people and to highlight, maybe, the importance of that history. We're not saying that you need it to be a good teacher, but we're saying that because it exists and it is such a recent ideology, or an ideology god. That's a whole other conversation.
Speaker 2:Theology, not even theology what is this thing?
Speaker 1:I didn't know. I almost said theory. I mean, it's a practice a practice.
Speaker 2:I like practice.
Speaker 1:Some would say a way of living, but also and I again don't remember if we spoke about this last week, but you've talked a bit about your education, being in geography and maybe being interested at one point in anthropology, history, those types of things did a lot. I did a liberal arts education and studied a lot of history and philosophy and things, and it is cool that we're getting to sort of apply that to this in some ways and I really do think it's important, especially now because Pilates is such a popular, often incorrectly advertised. I guess that's not really fair because Pilates is a lot of things but it is advertised in a really broad way and I don't really hear a lot of conversation about where it came from. I mean, and I haven't done a ton of research on it except for my own education on it through Pi but and reading, you know, return to Life and things like that but it was. It came about at a pretty interesting time in history and there's definitely some criticism to be had around elements of it and Joseph Pilates.
Speaker 2:I have no doubt so, and it doesn't mean to bash the whole system, but it's just important to acknowledge and talk about because it's and I think also as much as it's his work, although I actually did something, something today which is true, and they were saying to also mention his I believe she was his wife, clara or cara, or I believe it's clara because she did so much of the documentation of his work and was so integral to his work and whilst he gets credited a lot for it, you know she was very integral to it, uh, but also so, whilst it is his or their work, there is also so much everything we know now in our teaching comes from his original students who wrote it down and created what we now understand as the sort of system that you can train people through and assess people through.
Speaker 2:He just taught because it was all lived in his head, so he didn't have, he didn't write it down for anyone so well. And that's not to say that he does not deserve criticism, or there shouldn't be criticism towards what it originally was, but the people who will be speaking to have experience, not necessarily with joseph, but with those students and what they, each of those students, created it to be and what it has like gone on to become. So I think that, whilst it was this original ideal, or whatever we want to call it contrology, which is what it was originally referred to. Um, it is. It did change through each of those students, um, and that is almost what we want to discover.
Speaker 2:I feel like, even more than anything, because it should it does and you know what it might be interesting to speak about, because it does deserve to be shared, and it is like almost like knowledge and property. But there was that whole court case where, um, there's someone who's trying to sue about that knowledge and really I don't know if we want to name names or anything, but um, that was something that was going on about whether it's like sort of public domain and public knowledge or whether it could all be kept.
Speaker 1:So we're almost trying to do the exact opposite of that yeah, and I think maybe we're biased to it because we're in the world, but pilates is kind of a household term in a lot of ways, maybe not correctly if you're looking at it through a classical lens, but there are, to your point, many other people who have contributed heavily to the way that it is taught and passed down today, who I don't know who they are, and I mean, even if you think about it, when we had John Claude Nelson come to Pi and this is obviously not to discredit him at all, but, oh sorry, the screen flashed or something.
Speaker 2:I thought I was going to say. I was talking to Javier, about him, to ask if he had heard about John Claude, because Javier has been teaching, I think, upwards of 20 years at this point and because all of his teaching, or the majority of it, had been concentrated in Latin America and Jean-Claude was based in Europe. There was almost sort of no overlap and whilst each of them are quite well known in their respective circles and are to be credited as they should be, javier had no clue who he was or hadn't heard about him. Um, and it shows you where there are a lot of bubbles of this, but there's nothing building and bridging them all together yeah, and even only there was a platform that could all of them together if only I wonder where it is.
Speaker 1:I wonder where we could find it me. I am not. I have not been teaching for very long.
Speaker 2:I had literally never heard of Jean-Claude neither with, with all due respect to Jean-Claude and and he showed up and he was the kindest, sweetest, funny, engaging.
Speaker 1:I wasn't supposed to stay for the whole workshop and I wasn't able to stay for the whole thing, but I was like pulling myself away from it slowly because I wanted to just be in his presence for longer. He was just amazing and he has a website. He has, you know, information about himself out there. But also like coming back to putting this kind of thing behind a paywall is people have spent a very long time learning how to appropriately teach this work and acquiring the knowledge, and someone like John Claude. You know that workshop with Pi was not cheap.
Speaker 2:No.
Speaker 1:And he did a chair class and he did a few privates and they were very, very expensive and I think it's an accurate reflection of his value in this world. And that is the same for whatever you know story he has to tell about. Yeah, and he can tell us. It's not like we're gatekeeping the story. He can tell that to whoever.
Speaker 2:but no, of course we.
Speaker 1:I think it's appropriate to have it If we are platforming.
Speaker 2:No, it's. It's the same thing with with anyone who we are to have. They have decades of experience and they've worked with the people who are seen almost like. I heard someone describe them as elders in Pilates. I don't love that terminology.
Speaker 1:I don't love that term.
Speaker 2:That to me does make it sound cultish and elitist.
Speaker 1:It sounds religious-y.
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, in a negative way, yeah, and whilst it does sometimes feel like a cult because we're all very obsessed with them, we want to learn and we want to live and breathe and die by Pilates, ultimately it is, or at least what we are in is not a cult, and we don't want it to seem even more unattainable than it may already seem to some people. But we do just want to honor just how many years and how much time and money they have put towards it, I guess more than anything. And a lot of these people are relatively private. A lot of them have public Instagrams that they can be contacted through, but for most of them, what they do, and what they love to do, is to teach, whether it be a workshop, privates classes. A lot of them don't necessarily have a goal of social media stardom, so with respect to that, it will be on and behind a paywall. I think I think we have more than justified, even though I don't even think it needs a justification.
Speaker 1:I think it is more than justified yes, and even if it was, you know, no one really needs to know why. It's our decision and we can do what we want with our own business. Um, so that's kind of the only things we want to talk about with honeycomb. Is there anything else you wanted to?
Speaker 2:say, I'll let you say that we have spent half an hour talking about why we have to just a few 32 minutes about there's not much we have to say, but we will be justified we do have our first interview tomorrow hopefully tentatively tomorrow if it's not tomorrow, it'll be next week and I'm very excited about that.
Speaker 1:That's a special first one. That's episode 6 wrapped up. Thank you for listening. Special first one that's episode six. A lot of exciting business. Yeah, more updates to come on that front.
Speaker 2:Yes, we're meeting with our web designer again soon to sort of really clarify things, and we've been working both of us on the back end to build up the content from our side that is needed, so there will be more to talk about soon for sure, lots more.
Speaker 1:Bit of a hiccup which we'll discuss. Nothing major but interesting to share Life lessons.
Speaker 2:So it was a bit of a shorter one this week, but there we go.
Speaker 1:I think that's a sign we should wrap it up.
Speaker 2:Thank you, bye, bye.