A Successful Yoga Enterprise Must Be Treated Like a Business
Small business experts tend to talk about how frequently businesses fail as a way to remind entrepreneurs that they need to be prepared to work hard and stick it out for the long haul if they hope to succeed. Doing so is more difficult in some industries than others. Take teaching. In fact, let us use teaching yoga nidra as an example.
A yoga nidra expert might not view what she does as a business enterprise. In reality, she wants to help people live better lives, enjoy personal growth, and reach their full potential. These are altruistic goals that are hard to put a price tag on. But here’s the thing she forgets: she still has to eat. That means she needs to be paid to teach yoga nidra. She is running a for-profit enterprise – an enterprise that must be treated like a business if she wants it to survive.
How Frequently Businesses Fail
The good news for small businesses is that the vast majority survive the first year. Approximately 80% get to the one-year mark. But after that, the numbers fall off dramatically. Only 45-51% make it to five years, and only about 30% survive for a decade. Those numbers are not very encouraging for a new yoga nidra teacher who is hoping to make teaching a lifelong pursuit.
It should be noted that why businesses fail is as important as knowing how often they fail. Reasons behind failure run the gamut from insufficient funding to a lack of business knowledge to poor marketing. But for something like teaching yoga, the biggest challenge for business owners is viewing what they do as an actual business.
A Real-World Example
A good way to illustrate the point I am trying to drive home is to look at a real-world example. For that I turn to Scott Moore, an internationally known yoga nidra expert and business mentor to other teachers. He posts client testimonies on his website.
One such testimony is from a client who completed Moore’s Business Mentorship Program. Interestingly, one of her big takeaways from the program was the need to develop her website. Apparently, her site had sat dormant for several years. It wasn’t helping her promote her business online.
Her training revealed to her just how important an asset her website could be. She immediately started developing it by adding blog post content, creating a newsletter, and zeroing in on what she wanted to communicate to students. As an added bonus, thoughtfully developing her website also helped her to clarify her mission and get a better handle on her strengths and assets.
No Need to Go It Alone
So many small business owners adopt the ‘if you build it they will come’ mentality under the false assumption that simply opening a business will draw customers. That is not the way it works. Building a successful business requires a tremendous amount of hard work, planning, financial investment, and even marketing. But the good news is that entrepreneurs don’t have to go it alone.
A yoga nidra expert doesn’t have to be a website developer to make the best possible use of her online presence. There are professional web developers capable of handling the task. Likewise for SEO, marketing, and all the other services her business needs to survive.
Her best asset is the understanding that what she is doing is as much a business as it is a way to help other people. The business side of things cannot be ignored, otherwise she will have no clients to help. That’s really what it boils down to.
