We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Ashley Mraz. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Ashley below.
Alright, Ashley thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Are you happier as a business owner? Do you sometimes think about what it would be like to just have a regular job?
When is the last time I have thought about what it would be like to have a “regular job”? 5 minutes ago!
As a business owner, you are on a constant rollercoaster of one day saying, “I am brilliant!” to the next day thinking, “This is horrible! How am I going to get through this?”, but then before you know it, you’re back up to “I am crushing it. Let’s go!!” But would I trade it? Absolutely not!
Do I have any background in IT or marketing or finance? Nope. Did I have to learn how to do all of those things? Yep. But the end of your schooling doesn’t mark the end of your learning. I think it is so important for everyone to constantly be learning and growing and pushing themselves.
It’s like training for a race. You put in so much time, effort, pain, and sacrifice that no one else sees just to feel the high of completing that race on race day. And does it always feel worth it? HECK YES!
Building this business has shown me so much about myself. My strength, my intelligence my purpose. Seeing the effect PeakZen has on others shows me I am right where I need to be.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
My name is Ashley Mraz, and I am the owner and founder of PeakZen Yoga, a new yoga studio in East Cobb, GA. We provide unheated yoga and strength classes, private training sessions, outdoor fitness events and wellness retreats! This business started 4 years ago with just outdoor events. We created an amazing community of individuals that discovered the power of getting outdoors, being active and connecting with others.
We now have expanded to a studio space in East Cobb that provides power yoga classes, strength classes and our unique format of 1/3 step aerobics, 1/3 strength and 1/3 yoga.
We are continuing to build a community of people who are dedicated to creating a healthy lifestyle for themselves and their family! And we want to help you have fun doing it! We would love to have you as part of our PeakZen Pack, and we look forward to helping you Reach Your PeakZen!
How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?
In my business, a huge part of someone’s experience is the PeakZen guide, the person leading them through a yoga class, group hike or wellness retreat. The energy the guide gives off is going to translate to our participants. They have to be authentic, positive, caring, motivating, uplifting and really connect with our members. At the start, I was the only one leading events for PeakZen which caused me to become the face of the company. This created a problem when I hired other instructors as people only wanted to come back to my classes. The instructor is what drew our members to come back time after time and to tell others about us. Although this created a limitation at first, it showed me the importance of hiring good instructors. It took time and patience to find people who fit the PeakZen lifestyle, but now that we have built a great team, our customers are coming back because of the several amazing guides we have.
Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?
The book that started to create more of an entrepreneur mindset for me was Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki. It is absolutely a must read. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson is not only very entertaining to read, it also straight up tells you how it is. It really helped this girl who tends to give a f*ck more than she should how to only care about things you can control.
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