Official: BodyChance Is Opening A Studio In Hollywood

Considering a 5 year lease and committing to $277,704 in rental costs over 5 years, wages of top of that, and a host of other technical, marketing, human, legal and logistical concerns is what woke me up at 3.30am this morning. It's a point of no return – all my planning, thinking and research meets itself at a point where my decision is needed. Mine alone. I've never been good at these moments, simply because I know from the past two outcomes are equally possible: it won't work/it will work. I want to position BodyChance at the higher end of the market, appealing to people whose decision is not dictated by price alone, and that needs a business model working in an appropriate space. Putting that all together – the right studio/location, the operational system, the marketing system, the service/product mix and the teachers and staff to have it hum along is an expensive operation. To pay for it all I sold my one true asset I had kept safe all these years – a home in Sydney – to realise the cash to invest in BCLA; to invest in my own ideas. Would you sell you home to build your business? Many people have done that: now I know how they felt. BodyChance in Japan didn't start that way – it grew from humble beginnings, in stops and starts, until it reached the position it is today: 130 students in Teacher Education, hundreds passing through our two studios every week. In America the experiment is: let's start with everything in place. Like Kevin Costner's baseball movie – build it, and they will come. I have heard that expression ridiculed in business and marketing circles: wishful thinking is no substitute for a sound business plan. Of course – as the reader knows – I have a deep faith in the veracity and power of what we do, and I have a plan. It is not wishful thinking that Alexander's Discoveries have great value to great numbers of people, but communicating that value in a financially vibrant way seems to have eluded many dedicated people for a long time… Why is this time any different? I built an Alexander Technique business model, then proved that it worked. However, I did it in a foreign (to me) country, so now the task is to prove the system is universal, that Japan was not a fluke, but the start of a glacial change in the way Alexander Technique is delivered to mainstream society, originally inspired by the teaching innovations of Marjorie Barstow. Today I am the beneficiary of many peoples' wisdom. A variety of people have contributed and made possible this moment. Yet I feel alone. There is no-one to ask any more, other than me. I ask me, and I tell me, and that is the only person who knows what to do in this moment. If this experiment works in America, nothing in Alexander land is ever going to be quite the same again. A new era will come, a watershed moment. I am excited, fearful and wondering if I am delusion? or really at the edge of something truly wonderful? When I sense any panic start, I decide to lose everything. What would happen then? And my joyful discovery is: "I still have a job in Japan." Dear Japan, now my security comes from my friends there, not a building in Sydney. The business here continues to grow and throw off income - so thank you Japan for being my back up plan. I am going to sign the lease.