Chat EYT Episode 10: Why I'm Not Instagram Famous(And Why That's My Superpower)

Every business has a story—and this week, Jessica is sharing hers.

In one of her most personal episodes to date, Jessica takes listeners behind the scenes of her 22-year journey from opening a single Pilates studio in New Jersey to building a nationally recognized teacher training and licensing program.

She shares the successes, failures, pivots, and lessons that shaped her career—including how the challenges of COVID unexpectedly became the catalyst for creating an entirely new business model that's now helping studio owners around the world solve one of the industry's biggest problems: finding and developing exceptional teachers.

If you've ever wondered who Jessica is, why she teaches the way she does, or what makes the UIT teacher training program different, this episode answers it all.

Whether you're a Pilates instructor, studio owner, aspiring educator, or entrepreneur, you'll walk away with valuable insights about leadership, resilience, innovation, and never stopping the pursuit of excellence.

In This Episode

•  Jessica's journey into Pilates 
•  Opening her first studio in 2003 
•  Growing from zero clients to a thriving business 
•  Why she created her own teacher training program 
•  Lessons learned from building a studio during the early boutique fitness boom 
•  How COVID transformed her business forever 
•  The evolution of the UIT Teacher Training Program 
•  Creating a licensing model for studio owners 
•  Why continuous improvement is at the heart of everything they do 
•  The biggest challenges facing Pilates studios today 
•  Building authority without relying on social media 
•  Why teaching teachers became Jessica's true calling

Transcript

0:05

hello. Welcome back for another episode of Chat EYT, the podcast. This is Jessica Spillane, your host, and a woman filled with opinions, commentary, insights on all things Pilates, studio ownership, and even things I probably don't have any experience with. Now that our podcast has got much broader reach and our audience is getting larger every single week, which I love and I'm excited about, we're reaching, across the oceans, people from other countries are really dialing in, and I'm getting a lot of emails from people saying they love the podcast, they're listening every week, they relate to me so well, and that makes me very happy. But I think that it might be a good moment to take a step back and introduce myself on a deeper level to everybody and maybe explain why I have the right to be sitting in front of this microphone and talking so deeply about all the things that I talk about. I am not Instagram famous. I am not one of the people that you see who's been around as long as I've been, who's, traveling all over the world, teaching, looking great, bopping around, doing all sorts of creative things on the reformer. That's not who I am. I'm a teacher's teacher. That's the most important thing to me. I really love to dive into the work truly pull apart the system, understand the why, understand the scaffolding that it takes to be a proficient mover as well as a proficient teacher to these movers., I would say, my life's work while I was an exceptional teacher to clients, my life's work really is meant for teaching teachers and making them better at what they do. That doesn't make for sexy Instagram content. Let's be honest, it just doesn't. So if you kinda scroll through my Instagram, you're gonna see a lot more words, a lot of me saying what's going on or what's inspiring me, or new things I might be doing or adding to my teacher training, because that's where my passion lies. And it lies also in the studio ownership side, because I spent so much time in that space and learning so much, trial by error, obviously. There were no coaches back when I started. There were no online programs. There was nothing. There wasn't even social media when I started. I didn't have the benefit of that, and I had to learn everything the hard way. I have a lot of experience, a lot of insights, a lot of failures under my belt that give me the authority to sit in front of this microphone. I'm very proud of everything that I have accomplished, and I'm proud of every bump and bruise and scar that I might have, and there's a lot of them that, may come up in future podcasts. But I thought that I would explain a little bit about, where I come from and really what UIT is, what we do. I'll just go back in time a little bit. I've opened up my first brick-and-mortar studio in 2003. I had a goal of opening up my own studio within one year of graduating from my teacher training program, which was Power Pilates in New York City, and I did just that. I think I made it by, just under a year by a week or so, and that was my mission. I wanted to be a business owner, and this was the kind of business that I wanted to be in because I loved everything about Pilates, I loved everything about teaching movement, but I also loved the business side of it. I have that kind of brain, and I'm good at it. I opened up my own place. It was a raging success. When I tell you, it was, stupid how successful it was. Now, at the time, there weren't any boutique fitness facilities We were very much at the beginning of that. The Bergen County, New Jersey community, we had three leaders of movements who were around us. Myself, I owned the Pilates space, and everyone came to me for Pilates. And then we had a woman named Hillary Weller, shout-out. She owned the yoga space. She was very early on in teaching yoga. And Jen Sherman, who you all probably know and love from her Peloton fame, she was the spinning queen. And the three of us, Hillary, Jen, and I, we had a lot of the same exact clients, and they all just rotated amongst us, jen and Hillary and I would see each other, and, we all knew the same people, and they went on Monday to, to spin, on Tuesday to Pilates, on Wednesday to yoga, and then back to Thursday, back to spin. And it just kept rotating around and around. And we were the only games in town. Over time, many more spin studios opened. Over time, much more yoga came into the space, but there never really was a lot in the Pilates world, probably because it was such a huge investment, right? You really need a lot of square footage and you really needed a lot of money for the equipment. I stood alone for a long time in the Pilates world, which I was grateful for. But in my first six months open as a studio, I had zero clients on day one I was opening up and looking to give free trials. Within six months, I had 50 paying private sessions a week. 50. That means 50 hours of one-to-one client-facing time. Anybody who teaches a lot, you know that is the fastest road to burnout. But I was so hungry, so highly motivated, so excited by what was happening that, I was running on pure adrenaline, but I did know that it wasn't sustainable, and that if I wanted to expand and change my locations I needed to hire people. But there was no one to hire. Many studio owners today, you know this feeling, right? There's just no one around to hire. I spoke to some people who I thought were awesome, and I asked if they wanted to be sponsored. I would even sponsor them for them to drive into the city and go to Power Pilates. The answer mostly was no, and that was simply because even though we live only seven miles away, they didn't wanna drive across the bridge, pay the toll, find parking, go through their apprenticeship hours that they weren't getting paid for, and be back in time for pickup. It was almost impossible. The answer was, I'd love to do this, but I don't wanna commute into the city. I had called Power Pilates to see if they would allow me to host the program and they would come to me. But they, opened up MapQuest because that's what we used at the time, and their answer was no, because when they looked at MapQuest, we were only a couple miles away. They felt that would cannibalize their own regular seasonal enrollment, and they were just like, "Send them in to us." It was not working out. So I decided to take a dive in and make my own teacher training program. I modeled it after everything that I knew and learned at Power. I modeled it after how I was teaching clients. I followed a very similar structure in terms of seminars and workshops and weekly meetings and apprenticeships, I had my first cohort. Everybody did great. We had so much fun. We laughed a lot. We learned a lot. They all ended up teaching for me. I was able to expand, move into a new location. Spectacular, right? Everything was working out just as I wanted it to. The hiring of that next round of teachers, our business just started to, quadruple. Four teachers. I didn't actually give up any of my clients, so I was still teaching the crazy amount. All the teachers just took on additional business, so we were exploding. I did another round of cohort, and then I did another round, and the next thing you knew, this became a regular part of my business. And I loved it, but it was only really meant to feed my studio. It was only meant for that. I did not have aspirations to, teach worldwide like I do now. I did not have aspirations for people to license the curriculum like what's happening now. That actually comes much later. The teacher training program was great. I had the manual. We did our weekly workshops. Everything was humming along and a lot of fun. Then we come to COVID. I'm fast-forwarding. Nothing changed. Everything existed going back from 2008 until 2020, it existed in the exact same way, exact same method. In 2020, we knew nothing of what our future was going to be. How were we actually even gonna come back as studios was the question, right? When would people want to come back to in-person experiences? When would they feel comfortable being in a studio environment around others? I decided rather than collapse under the fear and the anxiety and the stress of the unknown, I was going to make myself very busy on a project that I had no idea what I was going to do with. I decided this would be the time to take my teacher training program and give it a fresh coat of paint and really look at what the materials were that I was using, how I was structuring the curriculum getting more detailed into, homework assignments and what people should be working on their own, the apprenticeship. I hadn't done that. It had been working just fine, every time I was done with one group, the next one appeared. I didn't have the opportunity to take a step back and say, "I wanna give it a revamp." 2020 became that moment. I rented a space, and that was just a small empty room with a white wall, and I threw down a carpet. I put up a screen a, a drape in the back, and I moved in one reformer, one tower, one chair, and I hired a videographer, and we did COVID testing every single week, and I used one of my clients, and we filmed every single movement in the system, along with its progressions And it really was great. It kept me focused on something other than, crawling into the fetal position and worrying that my life's work had, vaporized. But it also helped me start to think "Okay what's this next iteration? What am I doing next? What's happening?" I had a huge studio, and I didn't know if huge studios were gonna come back, at least not in time for me to recover. They exist now, but late 2020 to early 2021, everything was still pretty shrunken down. I couldn't pay my overhead I needed the volume. I had 1,000 people in my studio in January before COVID. When I looked back at my mind-body numbers, that's what it was, and I needed that kind of volume in order to pay my teachers well, pay my rent, pay my bills. Having this focus on the teacher training program helped me channel that anxiety into a healthy place simultaneously, I took over the studio owner network on Facebook as an administrator, and what was constantly coming up was everyone's need for teacher training in their communities that were outside of the major metropolitan area. They were in the same situation that I had been in 2005, 2006, 2007, they couldn't find teachers. They couldn't find people who would travel to a major city, which is where the teacher training program hubs were. They couldn't find people who were willing to do that commute, and they were struggling. They couldn't meet the minimums that the big boxes require they have in order to fly somebody out and host. They were just throwing their hands up saying, "I'm stuck. There's nothing I can do. I'm powerless in this situation." That's when I said, "Hey, listen, I have this teacher training program. In its original format, it's very good, but in this new format where I videoed things and I'm trying to write this curriculum, I'm not sure how good it is yet, and I don't know how it would be delivering it virtually, but would anybody wanna do the beta test with me?" I had five studios raise their hands, and they said they would do the beta test, and what that meant was they were on site with their apprentices. I was at my studio on Zoom, and I would broadcast into their studios. There were still travel restrictions. There were still all sorts of different, things that were holding people back from leaving what was, this safe little world. This was a good option. We ran that program. It went okay. I'm not gonna say it was exceptional. It was hardly exceptional. It was the first time we did anything, and that's why it was a beta test, and I made sure I charged everybody appropriately. When you think of what teacher training costs, I think I charged everybody $1,500 as opposed to, what teacher training costs now. But it was, like, with the understanding that you guys are going to help me make this better. You're gonna roll with me as I figure this out and I make all sorts of mistakes, and this doesn't work and that doesn't work. I'm buying your forgiveness, and everybody did. They rolled with me. They were great. All of them are still practicing teachers, and they are in shock and awe as to where we have come. That was the first semester, and each semester, we just kept getting better and sharper and more aligned with what the mission was what was needed in the curriculum, how we needed to expand it, how we needed to refine it, and how we were really going to work in a relationship with host studios. What we, eventually migrated to, and once I got very comfortable on camera, I was able to tackle the next thing and make it better, and I would reach out to hosts and I would say, "Listen, if you wanna do this with me I will give you 20% of every student tuition. If you bring students in, to the program, I will compensate you 20% of what they pay, and that's for them to use your studio, that's for them to practice at your studio, and that's for your help on both seminar days as well as throughout the course of their training. We are available to them, but they might have one of those in-the-moment questions like the client's coming in five minutes, and they're doubting the decision, to do pulling straps on the box, for example. So that's where I need you as studio owners to be my wingwomen And we just kept expanding the network, expanding the number of people who would host. I had a bunch of people, a bunch of those originals, and maybe even the second or third year, once they started to see what we were doing and how much and how fast we were evolving, they said, I wanna get in on this. How can I become, a more permanent player with what you're doing?" Then I launched the master teacher training program. That was a way for me to take someone who was a host and bring them into the fold and train them to be me, train them to be the person who leads the program. That took some pressure off of me, and if I, God forbid, got the flu, I had other people who were able to help me. That became the next iteration. Then we realized we had such strong enrollment, and everybody had to send in assessments, and I couldn't keep up with the assessments, and we needed to standardize the assessments. I took some of the master teachers, and I made an assessment team, and we spent hours on the phone with each other trying to figure out what the best way to assess everybody was that was standardized, that was comparing apples to apples, that was objective, that gave them proper feedback, and then developing the rubric with all the core competencies that we evaluate on so that they had something to practice against. That became the next iteration. Once we realized that not every single host was as committed as the next one, we realized that the student experience was different and inconsistent depending upon how active the host was. So we decided to add in office hours and a student advisor, and that's when I hired Sarah to be the student advisor who leads biweekly office hours. Sarah and I worked together to develop what the agenda was for each one of those meetings, and she is exceptional at it. She's now, on year two, which means it's the sixth or seventh cohort of being the student advisor. We refined our homework. Instead of giving them the syllabus upfront, we now give it to everybody on a weekly basis so that they're able to stick with it and be consistent, and it also doesn't make them look at the program in totality and get overwhelmed. I brought in a physical therapist who I hired, and that physical therapist did our entire anatomy curriculum. She's also a Pilates teacher, so she knew exactly what needed to be done, how to break down the anatomy in the way that I wanted to. She understood my vision, and she ran with it. We have a full anatomy course that goes along with it that's much more robust than many other programs out there. Then we had the manual, which we, revised. That's still the original, but we have revised it a few times and are gonna do another iteration now. Then we started creating more online materials, more study materials, and it just kept growing. It kept growing because we are not a group of people that are satisfied and rest on our laurels and say "Oh, it's done. Okay, now just let it run itself." I'm at my desk every single day, and that is all I'm working on, is making this program better. That is how we got to where we are in terms of host relationships We then had hosts who did this with us a bunch of times, right? We're now six and a half years of running three semesters a year, and many of our hosts are repeat, and come back They said, "You know what? I'm kinda ready to do this on my own. I've been through this with you a bunch of times. You've trained me. How can we create a relationship where I can run the program myself?" That's when we launched the licensing program. Some of my studios who have hosted multiple times, took the next step and really helped me launch that version of this business, which is the licensing. I'm not gonna license just anybody 'cause my name is on this. Someone who has been teaching for a minimum of 10 years, they can pay one flat fee and teach unlimited number of students at their studio in a given year during the course of that license. They now are pocketing all the money, as they should. They're doing the heavy lifting. In the other version, I'm doing the heavy lifting. In licensing, the licensees pay me a flat rate of $6,000 for one year, and during the course of that year, they can train as many number of students as they want. If they get five students, for argument's sake, let's just say it's reformer and mat only. They can do Cadillac, chair, and barrels, but that's usually something they do once a year, not multiple cohorts. Let's just stick with reformer and mat. If they get five people who do reformer and mat, they've made $20,000. If they get 10 people in a year to do reformer and mat, they have made $40,000. I don't take any of that additional revenue. They pay the flat fee They get every single bit of materials that we have created. They get training on it. And I don't just ditch and run. I'm probably really annoying 'cause I'm constantly creating new things for them to use. I'm constantly creating new resources or new ways to make their lives easier. And there's more coming that they don't even know about. They will be finding out about on August 12th 'cause I'm having a big meeting with my licensees, and my employees and big announcements are being made, which you're gonna find out too after that meeting. We just don't stop. We're relentless. I think I've said that in other podcasts that's one thing I have going for me. I am relentless. So this program and this business is something that I take exceptionally seriously. None of it is sexy. This is not Instagrammable. This is not an Instagrammable business. The reason why I'm explaining it is because Some of you might say "Who is this person, and where did she come from? I've never seen her on Instagram before." I'm proud of my entity. I'm proud of my team. I'm proud of everything that we've built together, and none of that is really conveyed by, an image or a video of me standing in front of a group with a microphone. Just doesn't work. So that is why I am not Insta-famous, but why I have all the authority in the world to sit in front of this microphone and comment and opine on various topics that are relevant to our industry. Thank you for sitting and listening through that. I just thought it might be a good time to share and, give you a sense of why I'm doing this. That's pretty much it. This is going to publish before we're at the Pilates Journal Expo, so if any of you are planning on being there, I really hope that you find me and you come say hello. I will have a small table. I'll probably be buried in the corner a little bit. Where I'm introducing Chat EYT, the AI mentor, and I probably am going to be looking for opportunities to record some podcast episodes while I'm down there. If you're interested, I'd love to chat with you, and we can put you on and record and get a dialogue going on a different topic, maybe even some topics that come up at the expo. So come find me. I'm also going to be on a business panel where we talk about the teacher crisis that many studios are facing and what our perspectives are on how to handle that. I think you all know what I'm gonna say. Host your own. Join us. Join our network. Join our club. It's a good place to be, and you're part of it because you're a listener. So thank you very much as always for tuning in. And you know what? Let's close with an exercise. Let's close with footwork Random, right? Random. I've been picking the random ones. There are so many obvious favorites, but I've been picking the random ones because sometimes I feel like they are so underappreciated and skipped or not given their moment to shine. But footwork, to me, is such a great opportunity for you to shine as a teacher. When you have a brand-new client and you're teaching footwork to them, first movement, laying down on the mat, this is your chance to really teach them about breath, about what Pilates is, about how we move everything from the core, how we try not to move from our limbs, that this is the chance for the limbs to take a back seat and let the core move us. It's an opportunity for you to help them feel how the breath can move and create propulsion, and it's an opportunity really to teach that's what our job is. Our job is to teach, not instruct, not coach. We are teachers. Use footwork to teach. Once the person knows all of that once they've been there for five, ten sessions, you don't need to continually go back to that because now they know what they're looking for. They know about the abdominal connection you're striving for. What you wanna move to is start talking about the anatomy of footwork, and teaching them about how when we're in our Pilates stance and we're in our toes, how we're turning off the hip flexors, we're turning off the quads, we're allowing ourselves to really work through the abdominals. When we're on our arches and our legs are zipped up, we're welcoming in the inner thighs. We're welcoming in that connection up through the pelvic floor. When we're moving up to our heels, we're bringing into the glutes and hamstrings. So all of these different foot positions and rotation in the hip joint is creating a different movement pattern for the leg, and it's creating a different connection to the different parts of the leg, and we wind up by the end really working all three hundred and sixty degrees of your leg, and it's pretty magical. They won't get it if they aren't taught it. They're just gonna press out and in, and out and in, and and talk about dinner on Friday night and maybe what movie they saw this weekend, and it's gonna be a non-event, and we all know how much I hate non-events and how much I despise missed teaching opportunities. Use footwork as an opportunity to teach. Use it as an opportunity to set the intention for the rest of the session, creating that breath connection, creating that abdominal connection, reminding them that they are in the Pilates studio, they are not in the gym. That is my, exercise for the day. Remember, my friends, always, when in doubt, just exhale. Have a great one. 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