5 lessons in leadership: from the boardroom to the studio

Working directly with CEOs for many years, as board director myself, has taught me that growth comes down to several key leadership principles. When people understand where they’re going, why it matters, and how their individual contribution moves the business forward, the entire organisation thrives.

Now working with independent studios, fitness brands, and wellness entrepreneurs, I see how transferable these principles are. The following principles, rooted in boardroom experience and now applied to service-providing small business owners, form the backbone of sustainable, human-centred leadership.

1. Unite everyone behind a single, long-term vision

The risk: Without a shared vision, even the most dedicated team members can pull in competing directions — one focused on community building, another chasing short-term profit, another prioritising creative expression. The result is fragmentation: inconsistent decision-making, diluted messaging, and a brand that feels disjointed to both customers and staff.

The solution: Define and articulate a clear, emotionally resonant vision — one that anchors every strategic and day-to-day decision. This should specify what success looks like, the transformation you are providing for your customers, precisely how you will provide that transformation, the role that everyone has, and collectively how they will be organised.

You can then bring this to life in tangible ways:

• Begin team meetings by restating your collective purpose or reflecting on how current priorities are helping work towards it.

• Embed it into onboarding materials and training so new hires instantly understand your vision.

• Reference it in creative briefs, class design, event planning, and brand partnerships.

When everyone is singing from the same hymn sheet, decision-making becomes far more cohesive and culture flourishes.

To work together on defining your brand’s distinct purpose — and crucially how to articulate and activate it amongst your team and beyond — get in touch.

2. Communicate with clarity and consistency

The risk: Leaders often assume people “just know” what’s going on. But lack of clarity breeds anxiety, confusion, and rumour — particularly in smaller teams where boundaries between roles blur. Misinformation fills the gaps, people make assumptions, and lack of trust in the management team starts to breed, which quietly compounds into operational inefficiencies or poor morale.

The solution: Create simple, repeatable communication rhythms. Hold a short weekly meeting to align priorities. Use one clear channel (such as Teams or WhatsApp) for day-to-day coordination and ensure everyone receives important updates directly — not via hearsay.

Externally, consistency matters too: your tone of voice, visual style, and brand story should be unified across your website, email communications, and social media. This isn’t about ‘fluff’; it’s about building trust. When people hear the same story from every corner of your brand, they believe it.

For help putting in communication systems that build trust, drop me a message — I’d love to work with you.

3. Do one thing exceptionally well before diversifying

The risk: Diversification too early is one of the most common ways businesses dilute their impact. When you spread limited resources — time, energy, skills and budget — across too many offers, nothing reaches its full potential. Operational complexity increases, your team becomes overstretched, and the customer experience becomes inconsistent.

The solution: Establish a signature offering that embodies your brand’s promise and runs like clockwork. Use customer feedback, trial iterations of the offering, establish your unique point of difference against your competitors, and then commit to perfecting it — operationally, financially, and culturally — before adding another.

Doing one thing well provides the operational blueprint for everything that follows. It’s how you scale intelligently, not reactively.

If you’ve mastered your core offering and you’re ready to diversify, let’s discuss the way forward from here.

4. Measure what matters — and make metrics meaningful

The risk: Many small business owners either ignore their numbers or fixate on the wrong ones. Without shared visibility, decisions become reactive, based on instinct or emotion rather than insight. For the wellness sector, that could look like not knowing which of your classes is the most profitable, not knowing how many of your ClassPass customers actually become members, or not knowing whether you’re able to invest in that much-needed studio refurb, the beautiful retreat, or the customer service manager that would relieve you from hours of admin.

The solution: Identify a few key performance indicators (KPIs) that genuinely reflect your goals — and make them transparent and visual so that you can see patterns. Examples might include:

• Monthly class attendance and repeat booking rates (retention)

• Average revenue per customer

• Customer satisfaction scores or reviews

By sharing the key numbers with your team, you bring them in on the journey, empower them, and help them understand how their actions impact the performance of the brand.

If you need support in how to identify the most important numbers for your business (and how to put the systems in place to measure them), send me a message.

5. Build a culture that reflects your philosophy

The risk: A business can have a beautiful mission and still fail if the internal culture contradicts it. Disconnection, interpersonal tension, or lack of shared standards can quietly erode customer experience and team morale.

The solution: Culture isn’t slogans on a wall — it’s the sum of daily behaviours, decisions, and rituals. This means embedding wellbeing practices for your staff, not just your clients. It means rewarding results and celebrating the small wins together. It means investing in training so that your customer-facing team consistently embody the brand ethos in the way they speak, move and interact. Your teachers, trainers or coaches are the primary interface with your customers, so hiring and nurturing talent matters.

If any of these principles feel like development areas for you, I’d love to discuss how we can work together.