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What do Ask Jeeves and Yoga Works have in common?

George Lichter, former president of Ask Jeeves International, has assumed a new "position", co-founder of Yoga Works.

Discover how this guru has taken his startup to successful heights - personal betterment, revenues of more than $10 million a year.

1. Where did you get the idea to create a national brand of yoga studios?

My partner, Rob Wrubel was CEO of the internet search engine Ask Jeeves and I was Ask Jeeves President of International and CEO of the UK . We were looking for our next business to start-up and were exploring a variety of companies, from water purification in third world countries to technologies which enhanced VOIP (voice over internet protocol). Our health had slipped a bit over the last few years starting-up Ask Jeeves -- lots of late nights and long flights. Rob and I were each -- without the other knowing -- doing yoga to pull our bodies back together. And it was working. When we confided with each other about our personal success through yoga, we realized others could benefit as well. Why not build a business around that?

2. How many locations do you have today and how many are in the works?

We have 14 today: 4 in LA, 5 in Orange County and 5 in New York . We expect to expand to the other major cities in the US, as well as, several in Europe and Asia over the next several years.

3. What’s behind your strategy to acquire locations initially, instead of creating new ones?

We began by acquiring Yoga Works, the famous Los Angeles studio from which many of the best most well known instructors in the US had come. Yoga Works had the best teacher training in the company. We then acquired studios that at one time had been connected to Yoga Works and a few which were strategically located near our existing studios. Right now our strategy is, in fact, to develop new studios -- creating new environments which offer a few special activities and amenities which perfectly complement the Yoga Works experience. From this point on, acquisitions will be only done opportunistically.

4. What have you learned about bringing out the best in employees?

One of the true ironies of businesses is that in getting big, they tend to make the people who work there feel small. That's part of what we call the "corporatization" effect. That same corporate effect then extends to the customers and finally to the communities in which the businesses exist. That would be completely unacceptable for Yoga Works. We want our employees to feel BIG and proud of what they do.  We want them to learn and for that we provide a large amount of training but we also want to instill a strong sense of individualism, to look at their work and projects in fresh ways and if those ways work, to teach the rest of us what they've learned. This process generates new solutions and ideas that might never have been thought of otherwise. In the end, we treat everyone with respect and give them responsibility -- and that gets reflected with how we treat our customers and our communities.

5. Do you have any special insights on training personnel?

Our most important training is our teacher training. After all, at Yoga Works we want the best instructors! To do this we have adopted a faculty approach, similar to that which exists at a University -- with a Dean and "department" heads who are leaders of each form of yoga. In essence, we have the best instructors become our best trainers. We distill what they are teaching into training manuals which then become the foundation for instruction all around Yoga Works. So, in a very real sense, we've found that the best personnel teach us, and our job is to then make that available to everyone. 

6. Is it important that each location be consistent in all ways? Or do you allow for variation from location to location?

Communities and neighborhoods are different and so our locations need to reflect that natural variation. That’s another way we fight the sense of coporatization that pervades so much in our society. Of course, their are functional aspects -- computers, software, and systems that need to be the same -- and there will be several signature items that let everyone know they are in Yoga Works, but we would never want a Yoga Works in the desert to look like a Yoga Works in a rainy  climate. Difference is not only good, it is essential to reflect that we are different as people.

7. For someone who wants to build a business with multiple locations, what are three pearls of wisdom you can share?

First, get your model down beforehand. Learn from what has gone before you, yes, but make hypotheses about what you want to do in every area from design and construction, to operations and customer relationships. Second, make everything modular and scalable. If you don't, you can't operate across geographies. Third, really understand the capital needs of operating across multiple locations, especially during the growth phase as you are building ahead of revenues.