Line Up with the Dots: Yoga Studio Management Tip
Posted on December 15, 2012 by Janis Bowersox, One of Thousands of Life Coaches on Noomii.
How to manage your yoga studio practice room so that you can easily accommodate a crowd.
As a general rule of thumb, it’s important to have a yoga studio that can hold a minimum of 15 students. Five students pay your teacher, five to pay the rent, and the five students pay the owner.
Class sizes are smaller in August/December and huge in January. In order to average 15 people per class year round, your studio would ideally hold a maximum of 20-30 people. This is a key to sustainability and abundance.
I’ve seen 10 people spread out in the Sanctuary at Kripalu, and the room feels full! Even in a large yoga room, people love space, and often mark their territory with water bottles and props. The end result can be a room that would comfortably hold 20 feels full with 10. The 11th student doesn’t know where to go. The teacher often has to intervene, asking people to move forward, back or side to side. Sometimes students are in savasana before class, or meditating, and it’s a shame to break their bliss.
Then there’s the flip side: how do you fit 30 people in a room that’s more suited for 15? This can easily happen on Saturday mornings or following New Year’s resolutions. Fitting everyone in can cut into class time, and people feel like cattle being herded.
At the Kripalu-affiliated studio I owned for 6 years, we found a solution to all of these problems—Line up with the Dots!
We laid out a system for fitting 28 mats in the room, and put a dot on the floor where the front edge center of the mat would go. Now all we had to do is ask students to line up with the dots!
When the class size is small, there’s no need to use the dots. However, if the class is filling up to capacity, the teacher can remind people “find” their dot. That way, even the last person to come in the room can find a space without disturbing his or her neighbors. The beauty is, it’s not personal, and teachers can focus on what’s important—meeting and greeting students, warming up their own bodies and getting centered. Some students genuinely appreciate the system—knowing where to put their mats.
A few extra tips:
• We used office product dots, and put nail polish on the top to try to keep them down, but they kept peeling off the floor. So we cut the dots out of duck tape—it comes in lots of pretty colors. You could also paint dots (or Om symbols) on the floor. If you have carpeting, next time you lay down carpet, consider squares that could be used as guides.
• If you have students face different ways for different classes, you may need to have a few different colors of dots for different set ups. You can even have different dots for different classes—one for the 15 person set up, and then a second set of dots for full capacity. If the rooms fills up past 15 dots, then announce that everyone needs to move from the red dots to the yellow ones! If you have a class that utilizes wall-space, set up dots for that too!
Many a feather is ruffled when students are told what to do in their sanctuary—this makes it easy because the system exists and works. The teacher’s attitude about classes being filled to capacity and beyond is key—it sets the tone for the students’ responses. Encourage your teachers to help the students see the bright side to full classes—the sense of community, getting to know your neighbors, a vibrant/flourishing studio, and practicing being with their feelings about a situation that might not be to their liking! That way, when your students take their yoga off the mat and into the world, they can handle the real life situations where the situation is not to their liking—breathing into it and being in the present moment. They might just smile!
Janis Bowersox is the Founder of Yoga Advisor, LLC, assisting yoga studio owners and managers build and sustain thriving businesses and fulfilling lives. She is a Certified CoActive Coach and Registered Yoga Teacher.
