3 Reflections & 3 Celebrations for Our 3rd Birthday
This time last year our management team met to set goals for our third year of operations. We had high hopes for 2020: achieving financial sustainability, collaborating on a bigger and more inclusive wellness fest, launching a teacher training program focused on advancing racial equity, expanding our instructor team, and continuing to evolve our programming to help our awesome community of existing and new students build confidence and vitality through Pilates.
The year got off to a great start, with progress on all goals.
On Sunday, March 8, in partnership with the amazing Jae Webb and the Fuse Her Fly team, we celebrated International Women’s Day with approximately 200 women community members and 15 femme wellness practitioners and businesses at our “Renew Your Wellness Fest” at The Joinery in Logan Square. It was a powerful and beautiful day, with in-person connection that we would treasure as the year went on.
Just one week later, the shock of coronavirus hit our community and our studio. We shut our doors on Tuesday, March 17th. We scrambled to make sense of the pandemic and its impact on our operations, and on those ambitious goals we’d set just a couple of months earlier.
As we look back upon what we hope was the hardest year we’ll face as a small business, we’d like to share 3 reflections and 3 celebrations.
3 Reflections
Our team and our community is more agile, creative, resilient, and supportive than we could have imagined. We are still standing, when many more mature and better-resourced businesses shuttered. And that’s thanks to our team and to you - our community of students. We pulled together as a team (with the incredible Taylor at the helm!) to launch a virtual studio just 48 hours after we had to close our physical space. We built a library of over 100 recorded classes featuring our amazing instructors. When we could reopen for private and duet sessions, we developed and implemented safety protocols that reflected the latest public health guidelines. When half of our instructor team had to relocate out of Chicago due to the pandemic, we were able to keep them teaching virtually and bring on other awesome new instructors. And we saw our community support us like never before - purchasing virtual memberships and sessions, buying swag, coming back in for privates/duets and size-limited classes when allowed, and trusting us with their health and safety. We are humbled and grateful.
Slowing down and taking it one day at a time can teach us a lot. As many of you know, we opened Logan Square Pilates in just 2 months. The 2017-2018 holiday season was exhausting - finding a space, building it out, buying equipment, setting up our business, hiring instructors, and establishing our operations. We didn’t have the financial cushion to take our time. Once we were up and running, we kept sprinting ahead to the next goal - and layered in several new efforts and initiatives along the way to create the community-centric Pilates studio of our dreams. While we’ll always seek to stretch ourselves, we gained a deep appreciation of living in the moment this year. We learned that you cannot plan for everything - and sometimes you need to just stop, breathe deeply, and focus on what you can control, one day at a time. We built in more time for rest, spent more energy on strengthening the fundamentals of our business, and created new virtual, more accessible ways for our team and community to connect. As a result, we feel more centered and will seek to sustain this healthier pace post-pandemic.
Nothing is more valuable than our health and wellness. This year was incredibly hard for all service businesses that rely on in-person operations - fitness studios, wellness providers, restaurants, bars, etc. And while we’re grateful that we’ve been able to offer virtual sessions and classes, we know it’s not quite the same. The Federal Payroll Protection Program (PPP) and Chicago Small Business Resiliency Loan funds have helped us stay afloat, but honestly we had a really hard time deciding whether to renew our lease this past fall. Financially, we’re in a tough position and had to put more personal funds into the business to keep it going after having already made it through two years of losses as a new business. And when we were able to reopen in a limited capacity, it was a hard decision because there is no “zero risk” way to operate an in-person business during a pandemic. But staying closed would have meant the end of our business so we reopened with safety protocols as our top priority - ensuring that our students and instructors who choose to come into our studio can trust us and each other. And we’ve worked to make our virtual offerings as engaging as possible. We aren’t out of the woods yet, but we are hopeful - and this pandemic has made us more committed than ever to supporting the physical, mental, and emotional wellness of our community, which has suffered immensely over the past year.
3 Celebrations
We’ve welcomed several new little lives into our community! (And expanded our prenatal and postpartum classes.) Amidst so much loss and hardship, we’ve been fortunate to celebrate four births among our instructor and management team this past year. Paige, Katie G, Wren, and I have all been blessed with healthy babies and we are so grateful for them and also to have had each other for support along the way! Several of our community members also welcomed little ones, leading us to expand our offerings for new mamas. Katie G and Wren teamed up to provide our first virtual Prenatal Pilates & Yoga series, Katie G worked with Jackie on a weekly Prenatal Pilates morning class, and together they recorded a dozen prenatal videos on our virtual studio. I personally also benefited immensely from virtual Private Pilates sessions during my pregnancy and post-partum, cementing my appreciation of Pilates for my physical and mental wellness.
Taylor McDonald has joined our studio ownership team! Aileen and I could not be more thrilled to welcome Taylor McDonald to the LSQP ownership team! Taylor first joined the LSQP staff as a part-time front desk team member in Spring 2018. She quickly proved to be invaluable to our operations and was promoted to Assistant Studio Manager then again to full-time Operations Lead a year later. She has continued to grow and expand her leadership role within our business and has been so critical to our studio’s ability to survive the pandemic with her resourcefulness, fast learning, grace, business intuition, action orientation, work ethic, positivity, organizational skills, and values and mission orientation. We are so honored and grateful to have her as part of our ownership team and ask you to join us in congratulating her!
We are launching our LSQP Community Advisory Council! Last February I shared our commitment to antiracism, equity, and inclusion in all facets of our business. One of our goals for 2020 was to launch a mechanism for hearing directly from a diverse group of community members. Before we were able to kick this initiative off, COVID hit. A few months later, we saw many other businesses engage in the growing social justice movement in response to the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and other Black lives senselessly taken across the country. The performative allyship we witnessed encouraged us to commit to learning from Black Pilates and wellness industry leaders prior to taking action. Our management team participated in invaluable trainings on equity, inclusion, and the practice of antiracism hosted by Sonja Herbert, Founder of Black Girl Pilates and Maryam Ajayi of Dive In Well and Eliana Chinea of Embody Inclusivity, and our instructors joined us for a dedicated series on equity, inclusion, and community with Liz Jansen of Women Unite!. While we still have a lot to learn and more reflection to do, we feel ready and excited to launch the LSQP Community Advisory Council. With this Council, we seek to bring together a group of LSQP community members to examine issues, identify opportunities, get input and feedback on initiatives, and otherwise inform and advance our antiracism, and equity, and inclusion efforts. We are specifically seeking participation from people from underrepresented groups – including Black, Latinx, Asian, LGBTQIA+, and other marginalized and minoritized groups as well as people of all shapes, sizes, and ages. We will bring humility, a sense of responsibility, and an action orientation to quarterly meetings. We hope you’ll consider joining! More information and a link to apply are here.