By Ken Sain
Managing Editor
Claire Larson has built a successful yoga business in a couple ways.
In addition to managing a Chandler yoga studio, she also started her own company, giving individual lessons and offering group sessions.
Not bad for someone who failed the final exam of an elective yoga course in college.
“I took this yoga class thinking, ‘This is my for fun joke class. How will I not do well on this?’” Larson said.
“I had aced the midterm, which was very postural based and I thought that the final would be just like that. It ended up being all history and philosophy, which I didn’t know, I hadn’t opened my book. So yeah, so it didn’t go well.”
Larson said despite that setback she liked doing yoga. – especial since her life in Minneapolis started to get hectic working in public relations and marketing after leaving the University of Wisconsin.
he signed up for some yoga courses and not long after that was teaching the courses.
“Two blocks from my first apartment was a CorePower Yoga. So I immediately got hooked on that and started teaching within a couple of months of joining as a member, just because I knew it was something that I wanted to keep doing on the side.
“And then eventually, once I moved [to Chandler], it became a full-time deal.”
When a serious climbing accident left him with six permanent screws in his shattered ankle, CorePower Yoga founder and CEO Trevor Tice turned to yoga.
An avid outdoorsman from Telluride, Colorado, he found yoga a good exercise to replace the running, climbing and other physically challenging activities that were no longer accessible to him.
Traveling for his technology business, Trevor practiced a variety of yoga disciplines at yoga studios across the country and in 2002 opened his first CorePower Yoga studio in downtown Denver with a proprietary form of athletic, heated yoga in modern, welcoming and spa-like studios.
Larson said she didn’t think about starting her own business. After she would teach classes, her students would come up and ask if she did private lessons.
“My answer forever was no,” Larson said. “And then I kind of realized, ‘why is it no?’”
Her first client was her dentist, who hired her to put on an event for the entire office.
Most of Larson’s group events involve businesses or corporations looking for a bonding event for their employees.
“Maybe those people who weren’t necessarily comfortable doing yoga, all of a sudden they feel like this window has been opened where they are comfortable because they’re with their friends and their colleagues and they’re laughing, and joking at the same time, and they make it a lot of fun,” Larson said. “So that’s a fun experience for beginners.”
Her clients who sign up for individual lessons usually fall into one of two camps.
“Oftentimes, it’s people who have never done yoga before,” she said. “And they’re too intimidated to walk into a studio. Or they’re trying to just learn a little bit more than what they can get from a teacher teaching an entire group of people.”
When she’s not doing individual or group lessons, she has another job in managing the CorePower Yoga location in Chandler.
Starting a business is an intimidating process. Larson said her background in public relations and marketing would be a benefit, but there was still a lot to learn.
“This was very much out of my wheelhouse,” Larson said. “I never saw myself as a small business owner. But then I kind of had the realization that I can be one. So far, it’s working out great.”
She said she will continue to accept individual and group sessions after starting the job at CorePower.
“I love that I still have this piece of me that I get to keep as my own outside of that business.”
