It’s pouring outside and one of the dogs has decided the doorway is the place to lie, so I’m stepping over him every time I get up. This is the least businesslike sentence I’ll write all year, and I’m leaving it in for a reason I’ll come back to.
The thing teachers say to me most often about the business side is some version of I’m just not a business person. Said apologetically, as though admitting to a missing organ.
For me that’s the wrong way round, and it’s worth taking apart, because the belief does more damage than any actual gap in knowledge.
When to use this
- Before you start anywhere else in this collection
- If the business side feels like something you’d have to become a different person to do
- When you’ve bought the course, downloaded the template, and still not started
- If you’ve ever said “I’m not a business person” out loud
The dots nobody joins
Here’s what I notice, over twenty years of watching teachers do this.
A teacher will spend eleven years patiently working on one posture. Practise on a Tuesday in February when nobody would know if they didn’t. Look at a student with a sore shoulder and know the problem is in the ribs. Stay twenty minutes after class, unpaid, because somebody needed to talk.
And then tell you they aren’t disciplined, aren’t patient, can’t see patterns, and aren’t good with people’s needs.
In my experience that’s describing the mat and the desk as two separate lives lived by two different people. They aren’t. There’s one of you, and you’re already extremely good at the five things the business side actually requires.
You’ve just never once pointed them at the business.
The five you already have
Five things hold a working life together. Each one has a name, because a thing with a name can be carried into a room nobody wrote an article about.
### Joining the dots
You read the whole body, not the sore bit. A student says their shoulder hurts and you look at how they stand. That’s joining the dots, and it’s the entire skill. The equivalent at the desk: numbers keep dropping in the winter term, and the answer is almost never in the winter term. It’s in what happened in September, or in a slot that never suited anyone.
### Accountability
You practise when nobody’s watching. No one checks. There’s no register, no supervisor, no one who would ever know. You do it anyway. That’s accountability, the only kind that works — the one you hold yourself to, on a date you picked, for reasons nobody else needs to approve.
### Taking action, over a decade
You know a posture takes years. You’d never expect to arrive at something in eight weeks, and you’d think it slightly odd if someone did. Yet the business side gets one frantic January, and when it isn’t sorted by March it gets abandoned as proof you’re not a business person. Most people overestimate what they can do in a year and badly underestimate what they can do in a decade. You already believe this about your practice. It’s equally true at the desk, and it’s the reason to start with one thing rather than all of it.
### How you do one thing
You’d never say you’re rigorous in class and sloppy everywhere else. You know it doesn’t work like that. How you approach one thing, under pressure, is how you’ll approach everything under pressure. Which cuts both ways, and the useful direction is this: the studio contract you’ve been avoiding for four months is being avoided the same way you’ll avoid the venue dispute, the awkward conversation about rates, and the year a class dies. It isn’t a flaw in you. It’s a pattern, and patterns can be caught.
### Serving higher than anyone else
You already serve beyond what you’re paid for. The twenty minutes after class. The message answered at half ten. The modification you worked out at home for one person. You do this instinctively and you don’t count it. The only thing missing is doing it on purpose, and further than anyone else in the sector bothers to — because that, not price and not advertising, is the thing nobody can copy.
So what’s actually missing
Joining the dots. Accountability. Action over a decade. Consistency under pressure. Service past what’s paid for. You have all five, and you’ve had them for years.
So what’s missing isn’t character, and I’d say almost never aptitude. Two things only.
Information you were never given. What an hour actually costs. What a studio can afford to pay. Where students genuinely come from. Nobody taught you any of this, and none of it is hard once it’s in front of you. That’s what the rest of this collection is.
Permission to point the discipline somewhere new. Which is yours to give, and is mostly a matter of deciding the desk is part of the practice rather than the opposite of it.
The dog in the doorway
I left that sentence at the top because of what it does.
You’re not going to build a business by becoming someone brisk and unrecognisable. The teachers I’ve watched do this well got quietly better at four or five ordinary things over about a decade, in among the school runs and the wet Tuesdays and the dog in the doorway. None of them turned into anybody else.
That’s the whole method, and it’s slower and duller than anyone selling you a course will admit.
Action steps
- Write down the last time you were patient, accountable or observant in your teaching. Anything. One line.
- Read it back and ask whether that person could cost a class properly. They could.
- Pick one thing from this collection. One. Not a plan for all of it.
- Give it a date you chose, and tell one person.
Related resources
- Who do you work for?
- What an hour of your teaching actually costs
You might read all that and decide the business side still isn’t for you, and carry on exactly as you are. That’s a real answer and plenty of good teachers have taken it. But take it as a decision, rather than because of a sentence you once said about yourself and never checked.