We were lucky to catch up with GVM Studios recently and have shared our conversation below.

GVM, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. How did you scale up? What were the strategies, tactics, meaningful moments, twists/turns, obstacles, mistakes along the way? We’d love to hear the backstory the illustrates how you grew your brand.

Our studio still has a lot more room for growth, but we are without a doubt more successful now than when we first started.

A key point to our success is having a presence on social media. Once we created an Instagram account for the studio and posted on it frequently, we naturally got more followers from classes/events we would host. These followers would tell their friends about us and from there, it was all word of mouth that brought people in. We sometimes have people discover our space through their explore page as well.

The studio really started growing once we started adding more weekly classes. When the space first opened up, there was about 4-5 classes total. We would post on our IG stories whenever we were looking for more instructors to hold class in our space and many people would answer. We weren’t exclusive to any one and welcomed all types of classes into our space.

After some time, we opened the studio to event rentals. Whenever we aren’t holding weekly classes, anyone is able to rent the studio for their private event, dance/fitness class, baby shower, birthday party, comedy show, music release party, etc. This helped us grow as a business as well, especially when we become a more popular space to rent on Peerspace.

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?

GVM (Good Vibe Mafia) started as a CBD store where we sold Good Vibe CBD. The opportunity to lease a studio two doors down came about and it made sense to take it since people who take a class in a studio might also need to use CBD after their workout. Unfortunately, only after a few months of being open, COVID hit and everything shut down. We took that opportunity to give the studio a new look. Once everything started opening up again, we added more classes than we ever had before and started letting people rent out the studio. That brought us to where we are today. We now offer a wide variety of classes including dance classes, yoga classes, cardio classes as well as pop-up events such as paint and sips, sound healing events and much more! A couple of months ago, we decided to move our CBD store to the front portion of the studio. Now you can shop Good Vibe CBD/Chakra Skin and take classes all in one building!

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

The key to building a following on social media is to be active with posting and interacting with your followers.

As a studio, we try to post videos of our actual classes so that people can have a real visual of what a class will be like without actually having to come in and see if it’s a good fit for them. This is much better in comparison to a class flyer.

It’s always good to interact with your followers, share their posts, comment on their pictures, even follow them back. It gives a more welcoming feeling rather than being the business that refuses to follow anyone and give minimal interactions. It shows that you appreciate your community.

Do you have any insights you can share related to maintaining high team morale?

The best way to manage a team is through communication. The manager needs to communicate any rules or changes that will affect the team and a team member needs to communicate whenever they have a need that they want met. Both sides need to effectively communicate while being patient with each other.

It is also important for the manager to be organized. Especially in our kind of business where people are making appointments and rentals, it’s important to make sure nothing gets double booked so that everything runs smoothly and no one is upset.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://gvmstudios.com/
• Instagram: @gvmstudios
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thegvmstudios/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgQc2ZYjIbD6zpEwPTYYV2Q
• Other: Tik Tok: @officialgvmstudios

Image Credits
Staff photo with white background: Aaron Bonilla Paint and Sip event: Trice Simmons