We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Beth James a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Beth , thanks for joining us today. Covid has brought about so many changes – has your business model changed?
Covid was such a wild time in my life both personally and as a business owner. My company is all about in person events. I put on an annual yoga festival in Michigan every summer, Barefoot and Free as well as lead retreats around the world. Right before covid hit I was actually in Bali, I had lead a retreat there and was staying after with my family. Flights were getting cancelled out of China and literally the day we flew home quarantinte started. This was also the start of the end of my marriage, so things were heavy for sure.
I didn’t know until June if I could have the festival and by then it was pretty clear that we couldn’t. I had no income coming in and had HUGE amounts of credit card payments to make rolling in from the previous year. It if wasn’t for unemployment and help from my family, surely my business would have ended.
Even the following summer when I was able to host the yoga festival again, we only had 3 months to plan and we had to work with a much smaller budget. It was sort of miraciloius that I managed to pull it off.
Fast forward to now out of the covid woods, I am back to leading retreats and hosting the festival. I also host smaller workshops and gatherings through out the year. Covid taught me a lot of things as a business owner, the big one being. you can not always forsee the future and how to budget for events is an very changing challenge.
I also recognize in my field of wellness and yoga events how very important in person gatherings are for people both mentally and spiritually. I make low budget events a priority and I am still financially recovering from the debt I accumulated during covid. Many small businesses like myself did not get any government money so recouping the year off has not been easy.
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 background is in yoga. I fell in love with. yoga after graduating college taking a 6 month trip to the other side of the world and coming back lost and confused about what the heck to do with my life. I started yoga and fell in love deeply with a studio and the teachers there. Yoga helped me effortlessly replace some really unhealthy partying habits with a new found love for not just yoga but a feeling of being healthy in my body and my mind. I did teacher training at the age of 26 and it began very clear while I was in it that I would teach. After teacher training, teaching. yoga and yoga really was my life. I met my ex husband through the studio and many of still dear best friends and that was my whole world. But with teaching yoga full time came many challenges. The strange dark side of being in the yoga and wellness world is so many of us teaching wellness to others end up not being well ourselves. This is because it is very hard to make a good living as a yoga teacher. I would walk dogs, house sit, take nanny gigs, do any odds and ends jobs in order to pay my bills. Things like dentist visits and needing time off when I was sick would often put my back account in the negative. In fact, the one studio I taught at we still had to buy our membership and I remember multiple months when I overdrew my account to pay for my monthly membership at the very studio that I worked at and spent almost all my time.
Who knows how long this would have gone on, probably like many full time yoga teachers I would have gotten burnt out and quit at some point. But I had my first child and I had to give up teaching many of my classes because I couldn’t pay a babysitter and still make money. I had an idea that summer and I took a chance on it! My idea was to have a yoga festival in the woods, the woods are actually the woods where I grew up. As a child I loved being in the woods and in nature. I like to say my parents were hippies without being or calling themselves hippies. My mom breastfeed us all and made all our food, we camped in a tent every summer, we spent most of our childhood outside literally BAREFOOT and FREE! I realized as an adult that besides yoga the places where I could feel my most calm and connected version of myself was outside in nature. I asked a friend for a very small loan to put the deposit down for the yoga festival and I took a HUGE leap of faith.
That was 9 years ago. Since Barefoot has grown slightly though it still remains a relatively small yoga festival with an average of around 1,000 people in attendance. I also lead yoga retreats around the world and have been to over 10 countries hosting more then 100 people going to places like; Bali, Greece, Morocco, Costa Rica, Hawaii, Mexico and more.
I still have a love for teaching yoga and in recent years a more specific love for working with women, leading women circles, gathering, and retreats catered specifically for women. I have a huge invested interest in all the ways we can empower young women because I am a single mom to two daughters. I am also very passionate about speaking about the challenges of work life balance and the in balance I see in our world between men and women. It is very hard to be a entrepreneur and a mom to little ones. Yoga is essential for me to find time to dedicate to my wellness so I am not totally depleted.
We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?
When I first got on instagram I was a new mom and honestly I had heard from other friends that it was possible to make money on instagram just by sharing your life. This was right before the first festival and I had not very much so I thought it seemed like a great possiblity, since I was home all the time with my new baby. I mostly shared yoga, yoga poses and flows and insights regarding being a new mom. I didn’t make any money, hahahaha. But I did slowly gain a following and looking back now 9 years later I kind of cringe at it to be honest. My first yoga retreat to Bali, my family and I stayed in Asia for 6 months traveling and I documented a lot of it on social media. That was around the time that I realized social media could help me spread awareness to my yoga festival and retreats so I finally created a Barefoot account as well as keeping my own.
My journey has changed through out the last decade with my own personal social media and my views of it. I do find social media to be an interesting look at our human psyche, it can be a inspirational place and it can also cause depression and a lot of anxiety especially for young people. My oldest is 9 and her dad and I have no interest in allowing her to be on social media !!!
For myself, I find that I reach a lot of other women because I am pretty real or I try to be on my instagram. During my divorce, I was married for 11 years I had many awakenings. Sexual, sensual, and just emotional releases and revelations that I started sharing a lot of my journey on my social media. I would and I still get negative push up when I overshare on instagram but yet at the same time I get beautiful messages from women thanking me and sharing how I am helping them in some way with their own struggles. Now that I am a bit older and a tiny bit wiser, I do realize how addicting and silly social media can be. I do my best to limit my time on there and use it to be as productive as possible.
I find instagram a great research resource for me and my business. I use it to find yoga retreat places and gather ideas. For the festival it is a powerful way we advertise and really essential to market our events.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
Getting divorced with small children while trying to run a business during a pandemic was no easy feat!
Perhaps you are aware of the statistic how since covid we are an unhealthier, more depressed anxious version of ourselves then post covid. While many were gaining weight and over eating and drinking I was very a spiritual awakening and doing a lot of shadow work on myself. Movement is medicine and this is something I have used my whole life. During covid I started running again and got into weight training and HIIT workouts where previously I was only doing yoga. I also increased my meditation practice and invested in relearning kundalini yoga and breathwork. I took a shitty situation and made the best of it. Here I was while the world seemed to be falling apart, a newly single mom getting over her marriage and choosing to thrive and feel it all and heal.
I didn’t know for awhile if I would continue or be able to continue my business so I used that time to focus on what I could control. I taught small classes out of house and online and I tried my best to work on myself and be the best version of me that I could be for my daughters.
Contact Info:
- Website: barefootandfreeyoga.com
- Instagram: Beth James yoga
- Facebook: Beth James
- Youtube: Barefoot and Free Yoga
Image Credits
Jessie Belanger photography Erik rousch Alyssa Alaverz