Chat EYT Episode #8: How NOT to Feel Salesy and Still Grow

What happens when mentorship becomes harder to find in the Pilates industry? Jessica shares the inspiration behind Chat EYT and explains why AI isn't here to replace great teachers—it's here to preserve the knowledge, guidance, and mentorship that every new instructor deserves.

She also tackles one of the most common questions Pilates professionals face: "How often should I do Pilates?" Learn how to answer without sounding salesy while empowering clients to make the right decision for themselves.

Plus, Jessica dives into one of the most overlooked drivers of a successful studio: emotional consistency. From creating loyal clients to retaining great teachers, she shares simple but powerful strategies that build stronger relationships, a healthier studio culture, and long-term business success.

In this episode:

• Why mentorship is becoming a challenge in today's Pilates industry
• The vision behind Chat EYT and how AI can support—not replace—great teaching
• How to answer client questions without sounding like you're selling
• Jessica's approach to recommending class frequency
• The importance of emotional consistency for client and teacher retention
• Practical ideas to strengthen your studio culture and build lasting loyalty

Transcript

0:03

Hello, my friends, and welcome back to Chat EYT, the podcast. I am your host, Jessica Spillane, and I am very excited to be back in your AirPods for another episode. I hope summer is treating you well so far, and that you are getting a little bit of a break as people start to vacation, and maybe you yourself are vacationing. Enjoy that. Soak it up, 'cause you know that it gets busy before we know it. We're gonna be juggling busy studios once again. Exciting news. I had a wonderful conversation with the publisher of the Pilates Journal, a woman by the name of CJ, and she shared a lot about what, the Pilates Journal is about. And the reason why we connected was because she has been following me and saw a little bit about Chat EYT, the AI platform, and she wanted to know more about it and what its origins were and how it's supposed to work, and then invited me to be a panelist at the expo this September in Miami. So it was a wonderful conversation because I feel like many times when I have these discussions with industry veterans, there's a defensiveness. Some people's, shoulders go up a little bit. There's a little bit of a tension in the jaw, when I talk about, having built an AI platform for education. But I think it's really something that's misunderstood, 'cause I think a lot of AI is misunderstood, and people need to relax into it see how it works for them, see how it works as it's intended to work, and then make their judgment. And CJ loved the concept, and the whole origin behind bringing the Pilates Journal to market was really because there's, a void in the industry of quality teaching, a platform for quality voices, and she wanted to bring that back to our industry, which I wholly appreciate. And that's really the origin behind Chat EYT, the AI Mentor Where it comes from is, I've been at this for a really long time. Been in this business for 25 years, been teaching teachers for 18 of those 25 years, and in the past six years, the model changed and I've been working with a lot of studio owners to bring teacher training into their communities the secondary and tertiary communities that often are overlooked by the big box and therefore quality training becomes unattainable. And in this process, there's been a trend of a lot of very new teachers who are opening up studios, and I applaud that. I think it's fantastic. I think it's wonderful and good for you. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. That's not what this is about. But when you have a brand new teacher opening up a studio and then hiring more brand new teachers, there is a complete and total void as to who can mentor them, who is sharing knowledge and helping them understand how to navigate a particular body type or a particular injury. Who are they shadowing? Who are they absorbing information on just basic, how to answer the question, what's Pilates gonna do for me? Or how to handle cancellation policies, or how to handle clients that push back or are aggressive. When everyone in the space is new and they don't have anyone to look for, it sets up a institutional system that's broken of what we as an industry relied on for so long, which is that built-in mentorship that happens when senior teachers take the newer teachers under their wing and help them evolve into the teachers that they're supposed to be So that's one issue. But then we also, at the same time, have an issue where those of us with 20, 25, 30 years of experience, there's not a lot of us, first of all. This is definitely a pyramid-type industry where there's very few of us at the top who have a lot of experience, and the bottom is getting very heavy, with a whole bunch of new teachers, and that's fantastic. But there's a bandwidth issue for the people who have the experience. We don't have the kind of time to devote to a lot of mentoring. And then there's the cost, right? We do have to sometimes charge for our time if it's someone who is calling us from, out of state who wants some mentorship or needs questions answered, or we do weekly Zooms with people. It's creates a problem and a lack of access. And then there's the retirement issue. There are then those who are actually retiring because they've been doing this for a really long time, and it's time for them to hang up their magic circle, which I talked about in an episode prior. There's a space here that is lacking. And what I did was I worked with an AI company for the past eight to 10 months, and I cataloged absolutely every single piece of curriculum, every workshop, every podcast episode all of our anatomy, all of our seminars, every single thing I've said I've basically recorded and I cataloged it, and I handed it over to an AI company, and they then made it into a platform that can serve as a mentor when the person doesn't have access to one. It is not a training program. It couldn't even be a training program if it wanted to be, because you have to actually know the questions. You have to know something about Pilates. You have to know something about the exercises to even generate a correct prompt. It's a mentor for newer teachers or newer studio owners who are faced with choices or decisions and they don't have the time or maybe their next coaching call is in two weeks. They also shouldn't be crowdsourcing certain answers, like going out onto Facebook and asking a group that has 13,000 Pilates teachers what they should do about a person who complains about their wrists. You're gonna get 13,000 different answers. So all of the data that is in Chat EYT is based on our curriculum. The anatomy is from our physical therapists. We have physical therapists who work for us and helped design the entire anatomy curriculum that EYT uses. It is rooted in the classical method, and it is there for that kind of in-the-moment help, and it's supposed to be a going back and forth, right? It's a conversation tool Whatever someone would text me at 10 o'clock at night, instead they can now go to Chat EYT because my phone is on silent and chances are I am sound asleep. So they go to Chat EYT and they ask it questions, they give it a proper prompt, which part of Chat EYT and what I do is I try to teach people how to do proper prompting, and it will give the answers or the suggestions, and at least give somebody something to work off of that buys them time till they have a meeting with a studio owner, maybe have a meeting with their senior teacher, their mentor, their coach. It fills that void for people who don't have access to mentors, people who might be in a more rural area and they're the first ones to open up a studio. Who are they gonna ask? What are they gonna do? That's what this is here for. So CJ and I had a really wonderful conversation just about how we don't want mentorship to die, and there's not enough of it. There's not enough structure around it, and we can't complain about the lack of quality in the teachers that are coming up if we're not willing to help them, if we're not willing to do the work. So this is a tool that helps. Is it the singular answer? Absolutely not. Is it better than having a face-to-face or a person who works in the studio who's literally there to help guide you and everything? Of course not. But those are rare instances and not everyone is that lucky. So Chat EYT is there to fill that void. We had that conversation, so she is gonna do an article about it in the magazine, I think for the September issue, and asked me to be a panelist at the expo in September. So with all of that this is a long way of saying, hey, if any of you are gonna be in Miami for the Pilates Journal Expo, let me know. Email me, send me a Voxer. I would love to meet up with you, and I'd love to maybe even record a podcast with you. Let's talk about some industry stuff. Let's actually, riff a little bit about what you're seeing in the industry. What are you passionate about? And I'd love to have those conversations and bring it to our podcast community. That's the exciting update that I have for everyone. Now I'm gonna move on to some common questions. I had a few individual groups that I did trainings for over the past two months, and I think I've shared in another episode, just how hectic it's been and how there's been a real demand, especially for Matt. So I have a lot of students who have come through in the past two months who I have been in regular contact with. And a couple questions that keep coming up, and I thought, why not answer it here, is, how do you answer certain client questions without sounding salesy? I know that just meeting so many Pilates people over the years, studio owners, teachers, apprentices, one thing that we all share and that we have in common is we don't like sales. It is so not who we are. We are in this for the work. We are in this for Pilates. We love what the movement does. We believe so wholeheartedly in the system and the magic that it is, that the last thing on our mind is actually trying to sell somebody on it. It feels like we're allergic. We're allergic to actually promoting. We're allergic to answering, certain questions like, how many times should I come during the week? Many years ago, I found an answer that worked for me, and I've been using it ever since, and I share it with all of my apprentices, and I'm going to share it with you. So one of the questions that's common is, how many times a week do I need to do Pilates? And if you answer straight up "You need to come two to three times a week to feel the benefits," it's going to sound like a sales pitch, right? It's gonna sound like somebody is trying to make their numbers, try to sell a bigger membership, and consumers are very savvy to that. I'd never answered it that way. So many people may answer, with Joe's answer, which is, "In 10 sessions you'll feel a difference, 20 sessions you'll see a difference, and in 30 sessions you'll have a whole new body." And I used that for a long time, but I'll tell you how I used that. But first, going back to what my standard answer has become. When people say, "How often should I come?" I say, "Your body is going to tell you the answer to that in a few weeks." And they look at me and say, "What do you mean?" I say you're gonna start out with us with the amount of time and budget that you have, and that's fine," right? 10... If you wanna just come once a week and that's all you can afford, that's all you can find the time for, that's absolutely fine. But your body might start to tell you in a couple of weeks "I'm really craving it. I'm really craving adding a day." And if that's the case, you're gonna listen to your body. Your body might not crave it. You might do other things. You might have a really full schedule and a really full fitness protocol that doesn't ask you to add this once a week. But your body might say, "You know what? I feel like I'm craving it. I need a little tune-up. I wanna go and get that feeling of being zipped up." And if that's the case, then you add a second day. But if you don't feel that way, then you don't add a second day. And they say, am I gonna get the same benefits?" And then I say to me, Pilates is like having an American Express card. At every level of American Express you have benefits, right? The green card certainly gives you a certain amount of benefits, and that's once a week. Then you would have the gold card. That's twice a week, and there's more benefits. There's more things that open up for you when you expand to gold and then to platinum." And then I always say, joking around, I said, "And then you get to black. Black would be five times a week. Nobody needs five times a week. That's just showing off. People who have a black card are just showing off." And everybody laughs, and I say, "So you just decide what level of benefit that you need in your life. Some people, it's the green card. Some people wanna go for platinum. That's gonna be your choice, and your body's gonna tell you what it wants." And everyone appreciates that answer so much. First of all, they laugh when I explain it, that it's like the American Express card, so that right away, creates a little bit of a relationship. But they don't feel like they're being sold. I'm putting them in the driver's seat to make the decision, and you know what happens every single time? They come twice and even three times a week, but they felt like they made the decision I know that's what's gonna happen, but I don't need to be the one that tells them. Let them feel empowered. Let them feel like they're in the driver's seat and they're making the choice for themselves. We all know that twice a week is that magic number, and people usually come if they're a Tuesday person, a Tuesday/Friday tends to be a good grouping. A Monday/Thursday tends to be a good grouping. Sometimes you get the Tuesday/Thursday or the Monday/Wednesday, but, that tends to be what it is. And we know that from experience, but they don't, and they will find it out on their own, and we don't have to sell them on it. That is a very safe answer for how to approach the how often should I do Pilates without feeling salesy. And then, I often will say, Joseph Pilates said, at 10 sessions you feel a difference, 20 sessions you see a difference, and 30 sessions you have a whole new body. And I'll be honest with you, maybe that was his marketing, maybe that was based on his research, no idea. But over the years, I have put that to the test, and I can say with tremendous confidence that when people come in and say "I just feel stronger. I just feel better. I feel sturdier. I feel like my core is engaged. I feel like I'm standing a little taller." If I go and I look at their schedule, I look at their, account, they're generally speaking somewhere between eight and 12 sessions If they come in and then say "I'm looking different. I can see that my waistline is getting more narrow, my ribs are closing, my posture's improving," and I were to look at their account, they're generally speaking between that 18 and 22 session. And then when they come in and say "My pain is gone. I don't have that knee pain anymore. My back can handle long car rides," generally speaking, they're somewhere around that 30 session mark. So I have stress tested Joe's saying, Joe's quote, Joe's marketing pitch, for many years, and that's what I have found. So when I say that to them, it doesn't feel like I'm selling them. I'm having a conversation. I'm educating them as to what I see in my experience. I'm not just giving a straight out answer, "Two times a week, you should come two times a week." They're gonna be like, "Okay, all right so where do I sign?" There's no relationship. There's no engagement. There's no educating them or putting them in the driver's seat to make these decisions for themselves. That is my standard answer for when people ask how often they should come. All right. Another topic to talk about today is retention. There's two different tracks of retention that are important to us as professionals in the Pilates space, and that is client retention, obviously, because that helps keep us paying the bills, and then there's teacher retention. Both of which are equally important. If we are constantly losing teachers, then we have to look at ourselves and say, "What am I doing wrong here?" We need these teachers in order to keep our clients happy and to keep a full schedule, and we need our clients to stay happy to stay on our schedule so that we can pay our bills. As a studio owner or as a teacher, we always have to keep retention in mind. To me, retention is all about how you make the person feel. It is an emotional connection more than it is anything else. I'm gonna first talk about client retention. Are you providing a consistent emotional experience that makes the client feel like they are part of your community, that they are part of your business, that they are of value to the entire ecosystem of your studio's day-to-day? And is that feeling consistent? Is it consistent in each time they come, and is it consistent in each experience that they have at your studio? And those experiences are client-to-client experiences, and they are teacher-to-client experiences, and then owner/manager client experiences. If there's an inconsistent emotional takeaway, then you don't have that sort of tight hold on your brand and on the relationship with the client. And what do I mean by that? If you have one teacher who is a little toxic, a little gossip, And maybe when they teach on Saturday mornings and nobody else is around, like meaning there's no manager or studio owner there, and, they trash talk certain things about the studio. That is not the same emotional consistency that you may have Monday through Friday with other teachers who are perfectly happy who make the clients feel a certain way. So the clients who are in the Saturday mornings feel like this is not really a stable place or their attention is being drawn to negative things or maybe there's a souring of a different teacher because they're gossiping about them. So that Saturday group is actually an at-risk group of clients, and it's because the teacher is giving them a different experience than everybody else is having during the week. You as an owner, need to make sure that the client experiences are consistent and that your teachers know what that client experience needs to be. That's the first thing. There's that emotional consistency among all of the teachers and how they're making the clients feel. I also think that part of that is carving out time in your week and asking your teachers to do the same thing, to place phone calls. Maybe it's once a month, maybe it's once every three weeks, and you pick somebody and you call them, and I don't mean a text, I don't mean an email. But you call them and you just say, "I just am reaching out to let you know how much improvement you've made. We really see it. You've been consistent. You've worked really hard. We see the change in your physique or the change in your mindset or the change in your pain or range of motion." You pick it, whatever it is. "And we just wanna highlight that for you and make you know what a value you are to our community, and thank you for supporting us, and we hope that you feel supported in return." And it's because it's so rare that people just take the time to give others compliments. People are never quiet when they have a complaint, but they're always quiet when they have something good to say or when they're having a positive experience. So when you reach out to a client and you let them feel seen, and you have them acknowledged and their success acknowledged, they hang up the phone and they just feel good, right? They just simply feel good about themselves. And you put a smile on their face, and when that smile's on their face, they are going to then radiate that to the next person that they encounter. You're raising that person's frequency. You're deepening the relationship that you have with that client and their perception of your studio, and it goes so far, and it takes five minutes. And I know that you feel it. It's not a sales pitch. It's about just recognizing the people who are showing up, doing the work, and seeing them for who they are when today everyone feels invisible two of my kids went to a private school here in northern New Jersey for middle school. And that school had this philosophy, I'm totally stealing it from them. I did not come up with this myself. And the head of school made sure that once a month, each teacher called a parent and just gave compliments or told the parent what their child was doing well, what their child had succeeded on. Maybe it was even progress on something they were struggling with, and they were being brought in for a positive conversation about their child when usually everybody listening knows, oftentimes when that phone rings and it's the school, it's because you're being told your child did something wrong or they're struggling with something, or because that's how things work. But to get those phone calls just randomly, I'm in the grocery store, and the art teacher calls to tell me how, my son stepped up and helped another child that day, and it was so heartwarming to see because... I don't even remember what it was. But, along those lines, it goes so far, and my child came home from school, and I gave him a huge hug, and I'm like, "I'm so proud of you. I got a phone call from school today, and your art teacher had nothing but wonderful things to say. It wasn't even a parent-teacher conference. She just took the time to call me to tell me what a rock star you are." And you know what? He couldn't wait to get back to school and go to art because he knew his art teacher appreciated him. So it was this full circle emotional connection that deepened our relationship with the school, deepened his relationship with his teacher, deepened his relationship with that particular class. Maybe if his math teacher had called, we would have different math outcomes. I don't know. But it just gave us all of the feelings that you want. So do that for your clients. Maybe it's a handwritten note, and you leave it on their reformer, and you just put it in their locker, put it in their shoe, and it's a little handwritten note to let them know what they mean to you. I didn't go too deep in it, but ideas like that on client retention. And then you have teacher retention. Very similar. You need to have a consistent emotional experience for your teachers as well, and this comes from the top. This comes from the studio owner You can't have favorites, I guess you can have favorites, but you can't make your teachers feel like they're our favorites. You have to invest in them, and I don't necessarily mean financial investment. Investment of time, attention, appreciation. If you want your teachers to grow, and if you want them to do good work for you, make them feel important and feel like they're part of the team. If you don't want them to feel like they're clock punching and just showing up to do the class and then leaving, then try to not treat them as though they're clock punchers. Do monthly meetings. Have everybody come in, pay them for their time, but have monthly team meetings. Bring in some food, bring in some desserts, make it an off-site so that everybody feels like they're, not going to work, and pick a topic that is something that's gonna help them all grow and be better at what they do Also, how they are treated and compensated matters, right? Don't do things like not pay them for late cancellations because then they don't feel valued. So the reason why you have to have a late cancellation policy that you stick with is so that you can pay your teacher for that late cancellation, 'cause they're saving time for you. That's time they could be doing something else. So appreciating them with investing in them, investing in their growth, investing in them as a whole person showing them the value that they bring to your business, and then also treating them with respect when it comes to compensation, paying them for their time where you might have to do meetings, paying them for the late cancellation fees, and then simply complimenting them on things that they might be working on. Might be consistency of full classes. It might be wait lists. Appreciation, acknowledgement, having them feel seen is going to translate into a much better teacher mindset at your studio, and then that then translates to how they treat the clients. And then you have this emotionally consistent experience for everyone who is walking through your doors, but it has to get set from the top. You have to do these things, you have to model these things, and you have to train them in these things. And then also, if you have a toxic teacher, you need to get rid of them because that is going to drag down your entire business just by having one toxic teacher who may be a gossip or who may be a complainer, and maybe they are a very popular teacher, but you have to make bigger, harder business decisions and know that long term, that is going to be a challenge for your studio to recover from is keeping someone who's toxic there So that wasn't really a deep dive on that. It was more of a conversation starter because I do wanna come back to this. Because I do have ideas for future talks about the emotional consistency at your studio, both on the client experience and the teacher experience. Hopefully, this was a good warmup for that future episode, and I'd like to actually talk to some of you about that too. So send me an email, drop me a DM, and as always, I'd love it if you could give us some five stars, show up for me and give me an acknowledgement of the work that we're doing here. So I hope everyone has a wonderful day, and I'll see you soon. Thank you for listening to Chat EYT, the podcast. And a special thanks to Christy Carrubba at Next Chapter Exchange for producing and editing. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And of course, leave us a rating and a review if you like what you heard. We'll see you next time