How Talia Increased Revenue By 108% in 6 Months
Here's the deal: if your studio's monthly recurring revenue has been stuck for months, the answer is almost never "add a new offer."
I know that's not what most studio owners want to hear. When revenue is low, it feels productive to launch something — a workshop, a teacher training, a retreat, a new class pack, a private session bundle. The logic goes: more offers = more chances at revenue.
But here's what I see over and over again in my coaching: more offers actually equals more confusion, more burnout, and less revenue. Because when you're talking about ten things, you're not really talking about anything.
Today I want to walk you through what one of my Grow Mastermind clients did instead. Her name is Talia Blackburn, she owns Refuge Healing Studio in Greensboro, North Carolina, and in six months she went from $3,500 in monthly recurring revenue to $7,500. That's a 108% increase, y'all — without adding a single new offer.
Let's get into how she did it.
Where Talia Started: Throwing Offers at the Wall in Panic
Talia opened Refuge in June 2024 after a wild journey — finding yoga through Yoga with Adriene in a college dorm room, building a career as an elementary music teacher, doing her 200-hour teacher training the literal weekend the world shut down in March 2020, having two daughters 22 months apart, and finally losing her beloved grandmother in August 2024.
Her grandmother's passing was the moment everything clicked. Life is short. If she was going to be away from her kids, she wanted to be doing purposeful work she believed in.
So Refuge opened, beautifully, with Mexican design elements woven in to honor her grandmother. And then the reality of running a studio set in.
Like a lot of new studio owners, Talia was throwing offer after offer out of pure desperation. Workshops. Class packs. Pricing experiments. Anything she could think of. She was emailing her list once a month with a "Hey everyone, here's what's happening" newsletter — which, let's be honest, is not really email marketing. It's a heads-up.
She came into the Grow Mastermind in October 2024 with one goal: get the studio's monthly recurring revenue to a place that actually felt sustainable.
Here's what we did.
Change #1: Restructure Pricing So Membership Is the Obvious Choice
Talia's drop-in rate was $20. Twenty dollars, y'all. For a non-heated, boutique studio experience with a classically trained singer and certified Ayurveda health coach as the lead teacher.
This is one of the most common mistakes I see studio owners make. They look around at what the heated studio down the street is charging, they undercut by a few dollars, and they call it "competitive pricing."
Here's what I need you to know: you don't have your competitor's profit and loss statement. You don't know if they're operating in the red every single month. You don't know if they're paying themselves zero. Pricing based on what other studios are charging is not a strategy — it's a guess dressed up in a strategy costume.
We raised Talia's drop-in to $24. (Honestly? We could go higher. We're still working on it.) And more importantly, we restructured her class pack pricing so that membership became the clear, obvious, no-brainer choice.
Because here's the truth about drop-ins: you don't want people to be able to afford them. You want them to do the math, look at the class pack, look at the membership, and go "Obviously I'm becoming a member." That's the whole point.
Change #2: Stop Newsletter-ing. Start Email Marketing.
Talia's "monthly newsletter" was just a broadcast. Same message to everyone. No segmentation. No data. She didn't even know what her open rate was, because she was using the free version of her email platform.
Here's what shifted: we started treating her email list like what it actually is — a collection of real humans at different stages of their journey with her studio.
Cold leads (people who'd never set foot in the door) needed one kind of conversation.
Warm leads (people who'd done an intro offer or class pack but never converted to membership) needed a completely different conversation.
Hot leads (active members) needed nurturing so they'd never want to leave.
We tagged her list. We built sequences. We ran a campaign specifically targeted at warm leads — and pulled in 10 new members in one push.
Then we kept nurturing. And here's the receipt: between October and April, Talia did not lose a single member to cancellation. The one churn she had recently? A member who got pregnant. That's it.
Real email marketing doesn't churn your list. It builds your community.
Change #3: Focus on the One Thing That Matters Right Now
This is the mindset shift that I think made the biggest difference for Talia, and it's the one I see studio owners resist the hardest.
Stop trying to sell everything at once.
Talia has multiple offers. She has the studio. She has a three-month Ayurveda health coaching container that's a premium, high-touch offer. She has workshops. She has the option to do private clients. She has so much value to give.
But here's what I told her, and what I'll tell you: until your most important number is where you want it, that's the only number you're allowed to focus on. For most studios, that number is monthly recurring membership revenue. Everything else is a bonus. Everything else can wait.
When Talia stopped scrambling and got brutally clear that membership was the priority, three things happened:
- Her marketing got clearer. She knew what to post about, what to email about, what to talk about in classes.
- Her team got clearer. They knew the goal, they knew the numbers, and they could speak to it with clients.
- Her audience got clearer. They stopped getting confused by what she was selling and started actually buying it.
That is what the CEO mindset shift looks like in practice. Not "do more." Get clear, then execute relentlessly.
What This Means for Your Studio
If your monthly recurring revenue has been stuck, I want you to ask yourself three questions this week:
One: Is my drop-in priced so high that membership is the obvious choice? If you're under $24 in most US markets, you have room to move.
Two: Am I emailing my list strategically — different messages to cold, warm, and hot leads — or am I just broadcasting a monthly newsletter? If it's the second one, you're leaving conversions on the table every single week.
Three: What is the ONE offer I need to be selling right now, and am I actually selling it? Or am I splitting my energy across five offers, hoping one of them will hit?
You don't need a new workshop. You don't need a new class pack. You don't need to launch a teacher training next month. You need to do what Talia did: get clear, restructure what you already have, and sell it like a CEO.
Connect with Talia
Website = www.taliafalconblackburn.offeringtree.com
Ready to Do This in Your Studio?
If reading this made you nod along, sigh, and quietly think "yeah, that's me" — you're exactly who the Grow Mastermind was built for. It's where studio owners like Talia get the strategy, the coaching, and the community to actually move the needle on their monthly recurring revenue. No more panic-marketing. No more spaghetti at the wall. Just focused, CEO-level execution.
Want in? Apply at jackiemurphy.com/mastermind. I would be honored, and I would absolutely love to work with you.
