My journey to btone started long before I knew I was going to own a fitness studio. After losing my mom, Betty Lou, to multiple myeloma in 2002, I threw myself into endurance events with the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, completing marathons and triathlons while raising money for a cause that was incredibly personal to me. The problem was, I was constantly injured. Doctors kept telling me I needed to strengthen my core, and after discovering Pilates-inspired resistance training, something finally clicked. I was stronger, I was moving better, and I knew I had found the missing piece. When I decided to move back to Boston from California, I figured it was the perfect time to take a gamble. I got the idea for a studio in April, and by December 2010, the doors to my first location were open. Boutique fitness was still a pretty foreign concept at the time, and I had absolutely no idea what I was getting myself into, but I loved it.
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In those early years, I did just about everything myself, instructing, cleaning, fixing machines, running the business and reinvesting pretty much every dime I made back into it. Somewhere along the way, I cracked the code on how to make this little fitness studio work, and btone grew from one location into something much bigger than I ever imagined. What has never changed is what matters most to me: creating a place where people can come exactly as they are. I want the person taking their very first fitness class to feel just as welcome and challenged as the person taking their 500th. That approachable, supportive experience—and the community that grows around it is really the heart of btone. The btone method today remains centered on slow, controlled resistance training that can meet clients of different fitness levels within the same class.
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Eventually, I realized that one of my favorite things about building btone was helping other people flex their business muscles, too. People had asked me for years how they could open a btone of their own, and franchising gave me the opportunity to take everything I had learned, the wins, mistakes, sleepless nights and lessons and help others build something meaningful in their own communities. Seeing our owners succeed, watching our instructors grow, and hearing how btone has changed a client’s everyday life never gets old. What started as a gamble in 2010 has become a community I’m incredibly proud of, and somehow I still feel like we’re just getting started.