by entrepreneurs, for entrepreneurs

• Join - It's Free!
• Log in

George’s Key Move: Smart Division of Labor

George’s Story:

Doesn’t everyone want to reconcile the yin and the yang in their lives? George Lichter actually went ahead and did it when he melded his empathetic impulse to change the world with his hard-edged international-business savvy to establish a nationwide group of yoga centers.

And now, he and partner Rob Wrubel plan to make Yoga Works the global brand for yoga instruction. “There’s been a groundswell of interest in yoga in America ,” George explains. “As that occurs, it has to become scalable and deliverable everywhere – and that’s where the business comes in.”

George started doing yoga himself in the Seventies when he was living in a house in Alaska without running water, as a political activist fighting construction of the Alaskan Pipeline. His vocational interests morphed: George graduated from Stanford Law School , established an entertainment-law practice in Beverly Hills , and headed business development for an educational-software company, where he met Rob. Then the two ended up as executives for AskJeeves, the Internet company.

Soon, at about the same time, the two old colleagues experienced epiphanies that would change their lives. “We had worked so hard and traveled so much in our different jobs that our bodies started to wear down,” recalls George, who ran operations for AskJeeves in the United Kingdom .

“Independently, we had each started to do yoga. And guys don’t normally talk about this kind of stuff, but then we shared that we were each feeling better – and figured out that it was because of yoga.

“We had been looking at everything from blade-server technology to media companies to water purification for Third World countries as our next business venture, but then we said: Maybe there’s something in yoga.”

George and Rob immediately understood the huge challenge in effectively mass-marketing a 4,000-year-old exercise and meditation technique, with its attendant mysteries. They decided the best approach would be to acquire existing, independent yoga studios with established customer bases and “roll them up” under a common brand, while allowing the previous owners to keep managing them if they wished.

Yoga Works began with two studios in 2003 and already has expanded to 14, mainly in California , generating revenues of more than $10 million a year. “We’ve now codified yoga, just like public schools are codified,” George boasts.

But that’s just the beginning for Yoga Works. “It’s quite reasonable to think that, on average, the 10 biggest cities in America should be able to support 10 Yoga Works studios apiece,” he opines. “And we’re thinking the same thing about four or five cities in Europe and a handful in Asia . We also want to figure out how to bring Yoga Works to small towns across America .”

George’s Key Move: Smart Division of Labor

George and Rob run Yoga Works like a family, not a chain. And just as in every well-functioning family, household responsibilities are clearly divided. Everyone at Yoga Works has important, but highly differentiated, roles – and understands how they fit the good of the company.

The two partners are the strategic masterminds and business brainiacs, of course. But George and Rob also have been very careful to sustain important roles for the heads of the studios that they have bought out. They understand that the passion and expertise these people bring to Yoga Works remain crucial to the company’s success.

“Most people who own single studios love yoga and love to teach yoga,” George explains. “But they’ve found themselves overwhelmed by all the administrative aspects of doing business and then they get exhausted. At the personal level, they start to implode.”

So the partners have added by subtracting: Yoga Works takes over and standardizes basic business responsibilities such as accounting, payroll, human-resources administration and marketing, relieving these former entrepreneurs of unwanted responsibilities and freeing them to focus on how to make the yoga better.

At the same time, George and Rob are developing ways to enhance the satisfaction and status of studio operators. Yoga Works is developing a “faculty” so that “teachers can feel more worthy about what they’re doing,” George says. “So it’s not just about the class they’re teaching at the moment but also about building a career track through pedagogy, writing manuals, getting opportunities to teach in other cities and leading retreats.”

Yoga Works is young, and even these veteran business builders don’t have everything nailed yet. “We’re still trying to figure out exactly how to build an organization and culture that allows an entrepreneurial spirit for the people who work here,” George says. “It’s a big aspect of the riddle that we’re trying to solve.”

Yet at this point, you’d certainly have to say Yoga Works is working. And that without George and Rob’s method for tapping the creative talent of their teachers by freeing them of business burdens, it probably wouldn’t be.

George’s Bonus Insight

All things considered, it’s much better to be running a business that offers personal betterment than the alternative, George believes. Yoga is just the way he found to do that.

“The Internet business was just go-go all the time, and we thought at the time that was what it was all about,” he recalls. “When in reality, I felt so bad I had to wear a back brace. Then I went back and read the same yoga book I had used to get into it decades ago. It brought me back to reality.”