Stephanie Ball-Mitchell is the founder and head coach of Online yoga school.
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For me, the decision to turn my local yoga business into a successful international business was not made consciously. On the contrary, the evolution from a small local studio to hundreds of online students around the world surprised me – a wonderful surprise, to be sure, but one that came with some growing pains.
There is something special about teaching people face-to-face yoga. I wanted to share this feeling on a more global scale, to allow more people to experience the power of yoga. So in 2015 I opened my online yoga teacher training to students all over the world and I was amazed at the interest the online training received.
I had to quickly adapt to the demands of running a global company – a steep learning curve – without losing sight of my core mission: to provide yoga in a format that is affordable, accessible and authentic. Here are some of the lessons I learned that may be helpful to other entrepreneurs whose businesses are in a similar transition:
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Be prepared for growth
For me, the biggest obstacle was that I was simply not prepared for the speed at which the company would grow. In the beginning I was a sole proprietorship. I did everything: I answered calls, checked emails, did advertisements, built the website, filmed the videos, designed and issued the certificates of completion. That would have been fine if I wanted to stay small. But I wanted to reach a global audience – and as my business started to grow, suddenly there wasn’t enough time in a day to complete the many support tasks that come with running a program on that scale.
This all came to a head when the pandemic hit, and more and more people stuck at home decided they wanted to become yoga teachers. At that time, it took me hours to manage email. Having a clear, systematic and organized workflow for these business processes suddenly became vital – and it was something I had to put together on the spot, which in hindsight I already needed as I started reaching a global audience.
Hand over the reins
Because I didn’t have an organized way of handling these business processes, I couldn’t just hand over the reins to someone else. I also had no experience hiring people. As a stopgap, I eventually brought in my family members to help with various tasks: my mom helped me issue certificates; helping my daughters with some business management tasks and billing issues; my husband answered the phone. My oldest daughter is my operations manager to this day. But in this respect I have been very lucky; not everyone has a large family that can jump in flexibly and cover all bases during periods of sudden growth.
In the end, I had to do the work of identifying each individual job, finding and hiring qualified professionals, and handing those jobs over to them. Being aware of what these tasks were and finding the right dedicated individuals to handle at least some of them from the start such as accounting, advertising, graphic design would have saved me (and my family) a lot of stress when things really started to skyrocket.
Keep your eyes off the competition
I consider other yoga teachers as my colleagues. But when colleagues become hostile and start using shady business practices, they position themselves more as competitors. I noticed that another yoga teacher who recently launched an online yoga teacher training course copied my mission statement and added it to her own logo design. This was troubling because my mission statement came from my heart and my personal lived experience. She also started using the exact same course packages I did, with the same bonus course offerings I had been offering for years. And when I went to look at her website, I found that her copy mimicked mine almost verbatim. At first I found this both frustrating and concerning: What would I do if this person used my own business model and my own personal mission to swindle potential students looking for my school?
Finally, I took a step back and realized that this practitioner could never run the same business I did simply because she wasn’t me. In creating these online courses, where the instructor’s personality and interactions with students are very important to the overall experience, it wouldn’t be possible for another instructor to provide the same experience as me. With that in mind, I refocused on teaching with authenticity and delivering great courses for the yoga teachers in training. The way to deal with competition is to avoid getting caught up in it; instead, spend your energy making sure you deliver your best possible product to customers.
Focus on purpose and authenticity
Ultimately, if you’re starting a business based on your passion, then that passion should remain at the center of what you do. Obviously things like sales and profit margin are important, but the key is to find good people to work on those things for you so that you are largely free to focus on what you can uniquely offer. It can be tempting to constantly check your phone to see how many people have signed up today, or how many followers you have on social media, or how much money is going into the account, but all of that is a distraction that undermines its true purpose. of your work.
Instead, keep your heart in the right place: make the best product possible, then deliver it with honesty and openness. In busy industries, customers want to deal with someone who is authentic, whom they can trust – that keeps them coming and coming back.
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