The Truth About Fitness Studio Finances Nobody Talks About

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If opening your P&L spikes your heart rate, this conversation will feel like a deep breath. We bring on Lauren and Lisa from Active Core Consulting to turn finance anxiety into focused action, showing how simple metrics and a steady mindset can reshape a studio’s future. Instead of treating numbers like a verdict, we use them as a map to smarter pricing, cleaner costs, and clearer decisions that grow profit without chaos.

We start with the emotional side of money—why shame keeps owners from looking at data—and walk through the Finance & Flow approach that pairs mindset with method. From there, we dig into the Owner Pay Roadmap to define what you need to take home, then reverse engineer revenue targets, capacity, and acquisition. On marketing, we set practical guardrails (5–10% of revenue) and press the key question: is the spend producing the right results? With a simple funnel—lead cost, trial conversion, member conversion, retention, LTV—you’ll know where to fix leaks and where to double down.

Operations and payroll come into focus next. We connect offers to staffing and schedule design so your team supports demand sustainably. You’ll hear how a tiny $12.40 per-class improvement rolled into more than $20,000 a year, proving that small, low-risk changes compound. We also cover trimming expenses with a blunt filter—either elevate the customer experience or drive top-line revenue—and show how phases of testing turn “risk” into structured learning that powers scale.

Along the way, Lauren and Lisa share a client journey from heavy credit card debt to multi-studio growth, four months of reserves, and confident marketing investment tied to ROI. If you’re a newer owner with at least a year in business and $250K in revenue, or a multi-location leader chasing optimization, you’ll find a clear, actionable path here. Join the conversation, borrow the KPIs, and start acting like the CEO your studio needs. If this resonates, subscribe, share the episode with a fellow owner, and leave a review telling us the one metric you’ll track this week.

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