What You Can Learn from Club Pilates as a Studio Owner

You've had the Club Pilates thought. Don't pretend you haven't.

You drive past one on a Tuesday morning and their lot is full. Yours is not.

Somewhere between their parking lot and your own front door the thought shows up uninvited: whatever they're doing, you should probably do that.

Give me four hundred words before you act on it.

You can copy most of what makes that lot full, and it won't cost you anything. What you want to leave alone is the machine bolted on top of it, which has had a rough eighteen months and taken a lot of owners down with it.

The Short Version

If you've got sixty seconds, here's the whole thing.

Xponential Fitness (NYSE: XPOF) owns Club Pilates and has since 2017, when it became the company's first acquisition. The one you drive past is one of 1,414 studios open worldwide, against 1,996 licenses sold, as of December 31, 2025, per Xponential's most recent annual report.

Who founded it is a messier question.

The brand started in San Diego in 2007, and local San Diego press has credited Allison Beardsley, though Club Pilates itself names no founder anywhere on its own site.

Buy one and you write a $65,000 check, then hand over at least 10% of everything the studio takes in for as long as you own it.

That's before whatever local advertising the FDD requires on top.

If you're weighing that against starting your own Pilates studio, the rest of this is your comparison.

You can copy four of the things they do without paying any of that: a hard cap on every class, memberships priced by how often somebody comes, one free way in the door, and instructors you grow yourself.

Leave their growth model where you found it. Give the last eighteen months a look and you'll see why.

Who Owns Club Pilates and Who Founded It

Xponential Fitness owns it, and has since 2017, when Club Pilates became the first brand the company bought. The studio you drive past is run by a franchisee who licensed the name.

The founder question is messier than the ownership one.

NBC 7 San Diego and the San Diego Business Journal have credited Allison Beardsley with starting the concept there, and reported that she kept a stake after selling it to Anthony Geisler's LAG Fit.

Go looking on Club Pilates's own about page, though, and you won't find a founder named at all.

Neither does Xponential's annual report, which says only that the brand was founded in 2007. One franchise trade outlet credits "a team of instructors and entrepreneurs" and leaves it there.

The CEO you'd be reporting to is Michael Nuzzo, appointed in August 2025, and he's the third person in that chair in about two years, per the annual report.

Keep that one in your pocket. It comes back later.

How the Club Pilates Business Model Actually Works

Say you called the franchise line this morning and asked what it would take.

You'd get two numbers fast.

The license costs you $65,000. After that, 8% of gross sales goes back as royalty and another 2% goes to the national marketing fund, both published on Club Pilates's own franchise FAQ, which points you to Items 5, 6, and 7 of the 2026 FDD for everything else.

Then you'd get the part that ends most conversations.

Xponential wants you holding $250,000 in liquid assets and a $500,000 net worth, plus the means to put $270,000 to $1.2 million into the build-out depending on which of its five brands you pick.

Across all five brands, the average incoming franchisee put in about $554,000 in 2025, and that all-brand average is the closest thing to a benchmark Xponential publishes.

Add it up before you get emotional about it.

You'd have something like half a million dollars in the ground before anybody books a first class, and at least a tenth of every dollar after that already spoken for.

Opening your own Pilates studio costs a different order of magnitude, and nobody takes a royalty off the top of it.

So you're mostly paying for a system. You can rebuild most of that system yourself, and it'll cost you a decision instead of half a million dollars.

Twelve Reformers and Fifty Minutes

Club Pilates caps its signature Reformer Flow at 12 reformers and runs it 50 minutes, per its own beginner's guide.

Your teaching didn't get worse between 96 and 80. Your room just got emptier and nobody wrote it down.

You'll never see that gap unless something is counting it for you.

The cap lives in the instructor's head, the no-shows get filed under life, and the reformers you financed sit empty during exactly the hours you needed them full.

Memberships Priced by Frequency

Pull up your own price list next to this one.

Those are the national ranges on Club Pilates's blog, every studio sets its own real number, and none of them publish it.

Every tier is asking one question: how many times a week are you actually going to come?

Anybody walking into your studio can answer that. Ask them what Pilates is worth to them instead and you'll get a shrug and a maybe.

It also hands you a number you can forecast against, which starts to matter a lot around the time your lease comes up. There's a whole guide on pricing Pilates classes if you want the mechanics.

If your revenue is a pile of class packs that expire whenever, you're just guessing at next month.

One Free Way In

Club Pilates offers exactly one way to try a studio for free, and its homepage puts that offer in the nav, in the hero, and in the mobile bar. The copy reads:

The button says "First Class Free."

How many ways can somebody try your studio for free right now? If the answer is more than one, you've got a leak you've been calling a funnel.

It's one offer, it's thirty minutes, and somebody walks the new person through the equipment so the reformer stops looking like a medieval problem.

Copy the shape of it in your own studio.

Pick one intro, make it free, keep it short, and put one of your people next to the newcomer for the whole thing. That last part is most of what converting trials into memberships comes down to.

Then take the other four offers off your website. They're splitting your traffic and telling people you're negotiable.

Where Club Pilates Gets Its Instructors

You have never once solved a hiring problem by posting on Indeed. Nobody has.

Club Pilates runs its own 450-hour teacher training program and charges people to attend it (Xponential's annual report still calls it a 500-hour program, but Club Pilates's own site and its December 2025 catalog both say 450).

Tuition is $4,995 up front, or a $2,100 deposit and five monthly payments of $630, per the 2026 program catalog.

The catalog also puts apprenticeship eligibility at 142 of those 450 hours. Clear that and a trainee starts teaching in a restricted format, and the classes they teach count toward the hours they still owe.

Read that twice. People pay about five thousand dollars and, partway through, start staffing the floor as part of their own coursework. Your payroll has never once worked like that.

They've built a hiring pipeline that charges admission, which is the single most annoying thing about them if you've ever tried to staff a Saturday.

Don't Copy the Growth Model

Don't buy the growth model. The owners who did have had a hard two years, and you can read most of it in the filings.

Between December 31, 2024 and December 31, 2025, Xponential terminated 284 franchise licenses in North America and 65 more internationally.

That's 349 licenses gone in twelve months, and behind a lot of them is somebody who was in your position.

In December 2025 the company settled with 509 current and former franchisees for $22.75 million, payable in four installments through 2028.

Those franchisees had alleged they were "aggrieved by purported misstatements and omissions."

The operating numbers you'd be judged on went the same direction.

In the quarter ended June 30, 2026, North America same-store sales fell 6.8% against 2.4% growth a year earlier, and average unit volume slipped from $686,000 to $659,000. Xponential then cut its 2026 outlook to roughly 150 net new studio openings, down 25%.

Now that CEO you put in your pocket.

Three people have run this company in about two years. Your franchise agreement and your commercial lease would both run considerably longer than that, so you'd be signing a decade of your life to a growth plan whose author keeps changing.

Pilates itself is fine, by the way. People still want reformer classes and they'll want them from you next year.

The company got scored on licenses sold.

So it sold licenses into markets that couldn't carry them. The person left holding that bag signed a personal guarantee, same as you would have.

So take the operating system into your studio. Your version of "more" is a second room, or a second Pilates studio, once the first one is genuinely full.

The Fifth Thing: Something to Count With

You've now got four things to copy and no way to tell whether any of them worked.

Three of your four are software.

Your cap has to be enforced by something other than an instructor's memory, your frequency pricing has to bill itself on a schedule, and your free intro has to land somewhere that follows up on it.

The fourth one, growing your own instructors, is just you paying attention to your members.

Without reporting you're guessing on all three. That's the piece a franchisee gets handed pre-configured for their ten percent.

You already own the expensive part.

You have the teaching and the relationships a chain spends its entire 2% marketing fund trying to manufacture. What's missing on your side is the plumbing, and plumbing is a software problem.

That's the job Gymdesk's Pilates studio software does for you.

Real-time booking with capacity limits, so your cap stops living in somebody's head, and self check-in by QR code, PIN, or app.

Then the part that answers your actual question.

Attendance reporting gives you members per session, sessions per member, a filterable check-in log, and per-session reports, so you can see which Saturday slot has been quietly running at 70%.

Turn on no-show detection and a missed class deducts from that member's session count the same way a check-in does, so the seat they booked and skipped stops being free for them and invisible to you.

You can fire an automation off that no-show and follow up before it turns into a cancellation.

The rest is the plumbing you'd expect. Recurring billing that flags declined payments before you have to have an awkward conversation about them.

Pricing runs on your active member count and starts at $75 a month for up to 50. Staff seats are unlimited at every tier, so you can add coaches without adding to the bill.

And when that first room really is full and you open the second one, each additional location runs $50 a month.

Turn on cross-location check-in and your members move between the two on one login. Pink Pilates' multi-location setup is worth reading before you sign a second lease.

What to Do This Week

Five moves: the four you can copy, plus the one that tells you whether they worked.

1. Put a real cap on every one of your classes and let the software enforce it. A number your booking system honors, so nobody's counting heads at the door.
2. Rebuild your pricing around frequency. Four, eight, unlimited. Let people pick by how often they'll actually turn up at your door.
3. Cut yourself down to one free intro. Thirty minutes, a real person walking them through the equipment, and every other trial offer comes off your site.
4. Pick your next two instructors out of your current members and pay for their training. They're already sold on the place.
5. Turn on no-show tracking. Empty reformers are your whole leak, and they stay invisible until something counts them for you.

Then watch one number for ninety days: the share of your booked seats that actually got used.

Move that number up and everything else you do gets easier, which is roughly the argument the Pilates marketing guide makes at greater length.

Xponential spent $22.75 million settling with 509 franchisees and gave up 349 licenses in a single year.

Finding out how full your room is costs you a login and ninety days of paying attention. You can just count.