Success stories / Letitia Walker
Letitia Walker · Purna Yoga 828 · Asheville, NC
She wasn’t sure her yoga studio would survive the pandemic. A year later, she had her best month ever.
Meet the CEO
A yoga teacher whose classes kept filling up, who didn’t see herself as a CEO until she joined the Collective.
Letitia Walker is the founder of Purna Yoga 828, a lineage-style yoga studio in Asheville, North Carolina. She has taught since 2004, committed to teaching full time in 2013, and opened the studio when her classes outgrew every space she could rent. She also leads the Great Yoga Wall Training for yoga teachers, physical therapists and yoga therapists.
When the pandemic closed the studio on March 16, 2020, she reopened online the next day. By the time she joined The CEO Collective® in July 2021, she honestly wasn’t sure the studio would make it, or how to keep it going without living on a constant treadmill.
The goal
Decide whether to keep the studio, and if so, build a way forward that felt sustainable: a clear plan, real support, a salary she could count on, and downtime she protected.
Before The CEO Collective®
Passion for the work. No bird’s-eye view of the business.
01
A studio owner, not yet a CEO
She had a general sense of the year: group classes, a few workshops, maybe one big visiting teacher. What she didn’t have was a view of how the revenue streams came together to pay her and her support.
02
Yoga training isn’t business training
Like most yoga teachers, she had learned the practice in depth and the business almost not at all. Pricing, marketing and sales were afterthoughts in an industry where most of the money goes to clothing.
03
Shaken by the pandemic
The studio closed overnight and moved online. For a while she wasn’t sure she would ever teach group trainings in the studio again, or whether keeping the business made sense at all.
“I was really struggling with whether I was going to keep my business, and if I was going to keep my business, how was I going to be able to move forward in a way that felt sustainable and not just being on a constant treadmill?”
The 90 Day CEO Operating System® at work
What the system actually built for Letitia.
Letitia used the same simple tools Racheal teaches in the Fired Up & Focused and Plan Your Best Year Ever challenges, the CEO Date, the model calendar and the weekly CEO score, and layered the 90 Day CEO Operating System® on top inside The CEO Collective®.
Phase 01
A bird’s-eye view of the year
Plan Your Best Year Ever showed her what had worked, what hadn’t, how her marketing fit her offers, and what to sell at what price. One chart mapped each offer to its price and the number of sales it would take to pay herself and her support.
“I feel more in control of my business rather than reacting to my business.”
Phase 02
Support she hired on the first try
When the studio went online, she hired Sarah, a front-desk worker and freelance writer who already knew the community, to run the inbox, correspondence and copy. A second assistant now handles social media, studio software and a new training website. Every hire starts with a one-to-two-month trial on both sides.
“It’s really important for me that all of my relationships be collaborative and supportive, and not just merely transactional.”
Phase 03
Out of the $10 tasks, into the $1,000 ones
With the day-to-day handled, she had the mental space to write level two of the Great Yoga Wall Training, and to protect real downtime as a former workaholic.
“If you don’t set aside those $100 tasks, you’re never going to get to the $1,000 tasks that are really going to move the needle.”
In her own words
What it looks like when you finally see yourself as the CEO.
I don’t think I really considered myself a CEO until joining The CEO Collective and seeing the shifts and changes I’ve made by implementing all of Racheal’s very simple, practical, easy-to-follow systems. I have a completely different mindset around running a studio now.
I was drawn to Racheal as a mentor because not only has she built a successful business for herself, she’s done it with integrity and with heart. Someone who is actually following their own plan was really important to me.
I think it’s impossible to run a business focusing on $10 and $100 tasks.
You’ve got to have that space in your mind to let it wander, daydream and become curious. If you’re always thinking, “We’ve got to write back to Mary about changing her membership, and nobody made the flyer for that thing,” that’s not going to give you the dream space you need for the bigger work.
After a year in The CEO Collective, I can’t believe all of the gains I’ve had, including the best month in my business ever. I’ve got systems and support that I never really had throughout the entirety of my business.
What’s different now
Letitia’s biggest wins.
Result 01
Her best month ever
“After a year of being in The CEO Collective, I can’t believe all of the gains that I’ve had in this last year, including the best month in my business ever!”
Result 02
Paying herself more, with two assistants
“I am paying myself more than I ever paid myself before, and I also have two assistants that are providing such great support for me and for the studio.”
Result 03
Her teacher training, live again
“We’re also doing it as a hybrid training. We have people from Germany, England, and Canada, and from all over that are joining us.”
Result 04
A new offer bringing in the right students
“We started that in January of this year and it’s just been taking off like gangbusters. It’s going to be the thing that continues to bring new students into the studio that are the right fit for us.”
Featured episode · Promote Yourself to CEO®
How Taking It Easy Can Ramp Up Your Business Success with Letitia Walker
Letitia joins Racheal to talk about simplifying the inside of her studio to amplify her results: the CEO Date, the model calendar, hiring her first assistants, and why getting out of the $10 tasks finally gave her room to create.
More member stories.
Business ran without herDr. Lisa Griffith“A last-minute need for coverage didn’t turn into an emergency. We had everybody lined up, and we made it work.”Read her story ↗
Rebuilt her teamAdrienne Loker“I couldn’t have made it this long. I would have collapsed last spring.”Read her story ↗
Scaled her practiceDr. Libby Wilson“Racheal practices what she preaches. Watching her model boundaries while building a business gave me permission to do the same.”Read her story ↗Simplify your business to amplify your results.
If your business has grown layer by layer until you’re the one cranking the wheel every day, The CEO Collective® is where you step back, see the whole year, and put the simple systems and support in place that let you lead it.