Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Kelly Porter. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Kelly, appreciate you joining us today. Risk taking is something we’re really interested in and we’d love to hear the story of a risk you’ve taken.

I opened my barre studio, Barre Roots, in 2019. At the time, I was renting space from a small pilates studio. It was a really interesting location because it was on an historic property, behind a house, above a garage. I was living in Nashville at the time, so this space that was converted into a pilates studio used to be a music recording studio for artists like Johnny Cash and more.

Being a small start-up business competing in a market against larger, well-established franchises in the same industry was difficult. I tried everything I could with the budget I had to get my name out there, but it was really difficult.

Then 2020 hit and everything changed. In a way it leveled all of us and put us all on the same playing field. Now, don’t get me wrong, I understand the severity of what happened in 2020, but it was such an interesting time to be a business owner. It was really a sink or swim type deal.

I learned to get creative. I thought, “If I can’t be in the studio, how can I still build a community with Barre Roots?”

So, I started teaching pop-up barre classes in local parks and at local breweries. I also started teaching regular outdoor classes in my backyard because we sat on 5 acres. In addition to that I taught live zoom barre classes, and I created an online platform where you could take my class anytime you wanted! We lived in a tiny 1,100 sqft house and I would transform our dining room into a barre studio and film my classes there as well as teach private barre sessions multiple times a week.

All things considered; it was a very exciting time! However, being a brand-new business owner as of the year before, and quickly pivoting with the business, it put a lot of stress on our family. I had to make the decision to either continue to sacrifice family time and try to make the business work or walk away from Barre Roots.

I ultimately decided to walk away from Barre Roots. I knew that if Barre Roots was meant to be, it will come back some day.

So I took the risk of closing my business in order to make my business work, knowing that there was a very likely chance that Barre Roots was never going to come back.

After I closed down Barre Roots, I went back into the working world and took a job as the Director of Chamber of Commerce for our local chamber. When they say life comes at your fast, they mean in. Less than a year after taking that position, we ended up moving from Nashville to Fort Myers, FL. My husband started a meal replacement company and we both helped open a performance and physical therapy facility in Fort Myers.

To be honest, I accidentally reponed Barre Roots. I was trying to show our trainers at the performance facility how to host a pop-up fitness class, so I hosted a pop-up barre class.

I was a no one in this community. No one knew who Barre Roots was, let alone who Kelly Porter was. And 25 people came to the pop-up. Then they asked to do it again the next weekend, and the next weekend, and the rest is history.

Fort Myers welcome Barre Roots with open arms, and the knowledge and reflection time I had gained from stepping away from Barre Roots is ultimately what helped Barre Roots grow to what it is today.

Maybe closing down your business in hopes that it will come back bigger and better is what everyone should do, but it definitely is what Barre Roots needed.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

Barre Roots started as an alternative to therapy.

OK, maybe that’s a stretch. Maybe it isn’t. But when I was 22 I was living alone outside of Philadelphia, and was at a pretty low point in my life. I was seeing a therapist once a week to help me deal with a great deal of anxiety.

There was a barre studio next to my therapist’s office. But at that point in my life, you NEVER would have found me in a gym. My anxiety was too much. But every week I would look through the window of this barre studio, see the ladies in there who all looked so happy, and the workout didn’t look too crazy, so I wanted to give it a try. I talked a coworker into going with me for the first time, and I was HOOKED. I went back every day that week.

It wasn’t long before I swapped my therapy sessions for barre classes, and I never looked back. Barre helped me not only get control of my physical health- but, most-importantly, it helped me build confidence. I decided to become a certified barre instructor because I wanted a deeper understanding of the workout, and that furthered my obsession with barre and my connection to it.

When my husband and I moved to Nashville in 2016, I tried to find a barre studio near me, but I couldn’t find one where I felt I really fit in. Barre unfortunately gets a bad rap for “only being a workout for people with expensive workout clothes, and who are built like Barbie dolls, and who always look perfect.” I am far from that.

So, in 2019 I decided to open my own barre studio, calling it Barre Roots. It was to be a place where men and women of all shapes, sizes, and walks of life would workout, benefit from the physical aspects of barre, where everyone felt safe and a part of a community. I had grand plans for an elegant brick and mortar studio in Nashville.

But in 2020 the world shut down, and I had to get really creative. I started teaching outdoor classes in parks, I would host pop-up barre classes at local breweries, I would do “lunch and moves” via zoom for various corporations during the pandemic. I also started teaching private barre classes out of my house, and then I started a regular outdoor class schedule and taught in our backyard (since we lived on five acres.)

However, our son was three years old, and the entrepreneurial lifestyle was not conducive for our family at the time, so I put Barre Roots on pause. Life took some crazy turns, and we moved to Fort Myers, Florida at the end of 2021 to help open an athletic performance center where college football players train in hopes of them getting drafted. The center also trains the everyday athlete, like me.

But that itch to get Barre Roots integrated into Southwest Florida was there, and in March of 2023 I started barre Roots again. It has been so awesome to see how welcoming this community is, and I am excited to see what the future holds. Having a new lens on business, and where I’m at in life now, I am excited to help provide functional strength and movement to the community.

We’d love to hear about how you keep in touch with clients.

I serve first, then worry about money later.

I genuinely care about every single person that has ever done a barre session with me. If you were to look in my phone at my calendar and my notes, you would find random things jotted down, or reminders set.

If I just met you and you mentioned that you’re buying a house, just know that I have set a reminder to check in on how the new house is going. If I haven’t seen you in a while, be expecting a text from me.

I am a firm believer that if you serve first, everything else will fall into place. And I feel that because of that, people stick with me and my company.

Any advice for growing your clientele? What’s been most effective for you?

When first starting off and building your business, I like to partner with businesses that have an already established community.

For example, I did a lot of pop-up barre classes at breweries when I first opened (in fact, I still do a lot of pop-up barre classed at breweries…) I am able to tap into their client base by doing that, because of the ‘know, like, and trust’ factor.

If that business has a good following and has built a community, and they are promoting you (like hosting a pop-up barre class, for example), then their community is already going to trust you, even though they don’t know you yet, because the connection to you that they do know is promoting you.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.barreroots.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/barreroots
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/barreroots
• Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/kelly-porter-68b5b560
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCx3cftLxJR96c1RCdd5t-yQ