She wasn't trying to start a business. She was trying to keep her clients.
When everything shut down in March 2020, Cara Schroter wasn't thinking about opening a business - she was thinking about her clients. A personal trainer and Pilates instructor at Lifetime Fitness, she'd been told the closure would last two weeks. "I was one of those people that actually thought it was going to be two weeks," she says. Her worry: the clients she trained daily would come back deconditioned. The next day, she moved everyone to Zoom. Five days a week became six, then seven. It wasn't a plan - it was a bridge. "It was never the plan to open a studio. It was like, I just need to keep these people going."
The bridge held longer than two weeks. About a year later, she took the smallest space she could find - a $600-a-month unit in an industrial park. She bought a reformer and two towers off Facebook Marketplace; one reformer became five. Trained as an interior designer, she spent as little as possible: a coat of paint, a Pergo floor laid over the existing rug, "and I called it a deck."
A second-time founder
What looked like a leap was actually a return. Cara had opened a studio once before, around 2009, and it hadn't gone well - the rent too high, her experience too low, and an unlimited membership she now calls "the kiss of death in Pilates," impossible to forecast against a room that seats only a handful. The failure taught her what coordinating the Pilates program at Lifetime later reinforced: the numbers matter. So the second time, she tiptoed in - low rent, equipment she owned outright, a clientele that already trusted her. "I wanted to go into it knowing it was going to be fine. I didn't want to fail."
Growth she didn't go looking for
She wasn't planning a second location either. That idea came from her husband, Nick, after the year's taxes showed him what the studio had done. "He's like, we need to duplicate this. And I was like, but you can't duplicate me." She made herself one bet: if Nicole - a manager she'd known since 2014 - said yes, she was in. Nicole said yes and Allendale followed, then a third studio in Ho-Ho-Kus that "completes this triangle" - three locations eight minutes apart whose combined radius covers much of Bergen County.
The rule she won't bend
The constant through every location is a number: six clients per class, maximum - the opposite of the high-volume reformer model, and a line Cara won't cross. With six, she can keep notes on every client - who has a herniation, who used to dance, who plays pickleball - and pair the same people together so they progress as a group and hold each other accountable. "You get a text message if you don't show up, from someone in your class that's used to seeing you." Bigger rooms can't do that, she says, and can't safely spot advanced work. "Six is even a lot."
That level of attention only scales if the back end can carry it. After years cobbling together other platforms - Mindbody, Glofox, MyBestStudio - Cara moved CS Fit onto Zipper, which runs scheduling, payments, memberships and client management cleanly across all three locations. It lets her keep the personal touch without drowning in admin.
She holds the line on pricing, too: no sales, no unlimited memberships. "I think it devalues the talent." Her prices are built around paying good instructors well - and finding those instructors, she says, is the hardest part of the business. So she let the solution grow out of a passion: a devoted Peak Pilates instructor, she made CS Fit a host studio for classical training, so candidates log certification hours there in what becomes a months-long audition. "It kind of turned into this really cool internship program without it being an internship." She hires for personality first. "There's no snooty in my studio."
What she tells other owners
Cara's advice is disarmingly simple: be kind, and be present. Even with three studios, she insists on knowing every member by name - when an unfamiliar face turns up, she'll call her manager to find out who they are. "I want to know everyone who's coming in there." She jokes that as an owner she has "500 bosses" and no freedom - "but it's my choice." Fitness, she warns, is a dime a dozen; you can't run it from the sidelines. "You have to be in the trenches with your people."
What's next
So what comes after three studios? Not, she's quick to say, a fourth - at least not yet. The next chapter isn't about square footage; it's about giving herself and her team room to breathe. With instructors teaching all day and Cara still wanting a pulse on every client who walks in, the bottleneck is time, not demand. That's why she's excited about Zipper's new AI assistant, which she beta tested ahead of launch. For her, the appeal is simple: it takes daily admin off her plate. Freezing a membership, sorting out a sub, pulling numbers she used to dig for by hand…for an owner who's done all of it herself for years, that time back is, in her words: “a game changer.”
Years in, Cara is still catching up to what she's built. "I don't think it's clicked that this is happening," she says. "I've just been in the midst of building, building, building. But I'm so proud of what we've made - an amazing teaching team, a community that looks out for one another, and all the people whose lives have been dramatically changed by Pilates."
Reach out to Zipper to learn more here.
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