Hey, My name is Phoebe. It’s super lovely to meet you.
I am a 28 yr old, 2x business owner, dancer, feminist, lover who is owning her shi*t and trying to make her mark on this world, and now I guess I can call myself a blogger too. 😉
To be brutally honest, I’m starting this blog so that I can make my presence known. I have a lot to say, to teach and to learn in life and I’m driven to make an impact. I feel passionate about a lot of things but high up on the list are definitely Pilates and Feminism. My aim is to empower the women around me to own who they are, to never stand for less than they are worth, and to look after themselves. Whether you are a young woman, a mum, a grandmother or someone in a similar stage of life as I am, I hope you can read my content and learn and be inspired to live your best life! Let’s be real people, we literally only have one life(that we know of) so why wouldn’t we live everyday to the fullest, you’ll never get yesterday back.
A bit about me.
I grew up in Wellington, NZ. Born in Wellington Woman Hospital on the 20th May 1990. My father runs his own construction company, Heyhoe Builders Ltd and my mother was the librarian at my primary school, though she actually studied to be a teacher. My mother is definitely where I get my mad teaching skills from. Thanks Mama Heyhoe. I have two siblings, both older. Yes I was spoilt and yes my siblings were jealous. When I was a child I never ate any vegetables because by the time I came around I think my parents where just too tired to bother forcing me to eat them! I also have a mad sweet tooth which I definitely gave to my nephew Arlo!
Growing up, my sister was(and still is) an insane singer, and I was a dancer. I started Ballet at the age of 4, Hip hop at the age of 12, and I continued on to study dance at University. I did my degree in Performing and Screen Arts Majoring in Contemporary Dance at Unitec!
When I was 16, my German class was going to Germany for a school trip and I really wanted to go. My parents said I had to earn half the amount of money that I needed for the trip and then they would put in the second half. Until that point I had only ever worked as a waitress for Wellingtons top catering company Ruth Pretty and I had no idea how I was going to earn $6000 in 6 months. My mum said, “Hey you love hip hop, I think you will be a wonderful teacher, why don’t you start teaching hip hop to little kids?” I laughed at her. “Nah that’s ridiculous Mum, I couldn’t do that.” I said. But then she broke it down for me. She said if you charge each child $90 for a school term of classes, you have two terms to earn $6000. You’ll only need 33 kids per term to pay your way to Europe. Then she went on to say, I’ll book the school hall for you, and I can get an advert out in the school newsletter, you’ll have 33 kids in no time. So she had me convinced! My biggest advocate.
Safe to say in 6 months time, I had more than made enough money to take me to Europe for a month, and I had the best time ever. I started to enjoy teaching so much that I actually made that business into a legit company, Stomp Dance Studios. We had an email account and everything. Hence Phoebe Heyhoe entrepreneur was born. Lol I ran that company for 3 years before I moved to Auckland for University.
As I said earlier, I did Ballet my entire life with Deirdre Tarrant Studios. Deirdre was like a mad aunty to me. She employed me as a cleaner and administration assistant, and she even gave me the privilege of training alongside her company Footnote Dance for a year before I went to Dance school.
Then life started to really feel right. I was at dance school, doing what I absolutely loved every single day. I don’t actually remember a time when I was happier. Yeah sure it was gruelling, yes I danced 6 hours a day most days and then went to the gym for a couple hours after cause I was a psycho like that, but I loved it. I was introduced to Pilates at dance school and to be super honest I didn’t like it at first. I didn’t understand my body well enough at that stage and it was confusing. I didn’t get what was going on anatomically for me to grasp what muscles I needed to activate. I got a taste of what it could be, it sparked something in me but not enough for me to fall in love, yet.
After graduating, I did a workshop in Wellington for contemporary dance called Choreolab. It’s organised by the wonderful Footnote. When I was at that workshop, I spoke with one of my friends who was teaching Pilates full time for a company back up in Auckland. She told me all about how sweet a job it was for her dance career because she could take as much time off as she needed as long as she found cover. Also being contract work, she could work less hours and earn more, leaving her with chunks of free time in the middle of the day for rehearsals. Plus she was learning and working with bodies still so her fascination in the body was growing. This just sounded too good to be true and then she hit me with, “my company is looking for new instructors and they will train you for free in return for you working 18months for them.” I was sold. So I came back to Auckland and started my career in Pilates.
I worked for that company for 3 years, and learnt so much. I did all the extra courses that I could do. I became an Advanced Mat and Reformer instructor, plus a Pre and Post Natal Pilates specialist. It was awesome, but my heart was still really invested in dance and I wanted to pour my energy into my freelance career. I moved to Melbourne and started the slog of trying to become known in the Melbourne dance circuit. Unfortunately 3 months in I received some terrible news from back home and had to make the tough decision to return to New Zealand.
So back in Auckland, in a brand new relationship and needing a new challenge for myself to be back I thought about the frustrations I had when teaching Pilates in Auckland. I recognised that a lot of my dear clients who I loved, all struggled with similar things. 1. They were too tight from their sedentary lifestyles. 2. They struggled to even make it to classes each week because traffic and parking and life in Auckland was getting busier. How could I solve these problems? Then it came to me, what if I was a mobile mat instructor and I went to the people so they didn’t have to deal with the excuses that normally stop people from exercising. Hence MatWorks Pilates was born.
I had no idea what I was doing to begin with. I started with a crappy website, a gmail email address and just started teaching a few clients in their homes. Then I started sending out emails to different corporate offices to see if they wanted a Pilates instructor to come and teach at their workplace and was lucky enough to land a pretty huge and very loyal client straight off the bat. My partner at the time was extremely helpful throughout the whole process, helping me to define my why and boosting me up every day to believe in myself. We both had zero savings behind us, and when I asked my family for a loan to buy my first set of mats, they said no. I didn’t let that stop me though, as soon as I had saved my first $2000 I trotted off to Lululemon and bought my first set of beautiful Milky Mint Green mats(cause I’m boujie like that).
One year in, I was working my ass off, but still not really getting the traction that I wanted. I was listening to heaps of different fitness and marketing Youtubers and trying to figure out what I needed to do to get exposure. Then I had an idea, what about running an outdoor bootcamp over the summer? This dude I was following on Youtube explained how he had made a 6 figure business from outdoor bootcamps and I thought, this makes perfect sense. You don’t have to pay any overheads and you can fit as many people as you like.
That summer I taught 7classes a day, 6 days a week, in two different locations and I only charged people $30 for 5 weeks worth of classes. Safe to say I walked away with 100 new clients. I was pretty pumped. But what I hadn’t predicted was that these clients wouldn’t necessarily want to do one on one’s at home, or bring me into their workplace to teach a group class. I had built a community class culture and then I wanted to try fit them into my mould. It wasn’t going to work.
Thankfully none of them wanted to stop doing the classes, so they hassled me about whether I could find an indoor space to continue teaching them over the Winter. I worked my magic, got us into the Kohimarama Yacht Club, and boom CommunityWorks was born.
Skip forward a year and it’s still just little old me teaching classes, with the help of my partner to run my company in the background. The number of times that woman drove me around from class to class so that I could nap in between clients was insane. This just proves my point of how important it is to have a support network behind you. I decided I wanted to do the outdoor bootcamp again, but I could do it by myself, I wanted staff. So I put together a training programme from scratch(12 manuals long), I advertised in my dance networks, I interviewed a plethora of dancers and finally settled upon 5 who I thought had what it took. We embarked on the training process and I produced 5 incredible new instructors who dominated Auckland that summer in 17 different park locations. Hence Pilates in the Park was born. In the Winter we narrowed this down to just 5 locations and we have been going strong since.
Last year I was lucky enough to be approached by Xero the accounting software company as they wanted to run a campaign highlighting my company. I have used Xero as my accounting software from day dot, as my father told me it’s really important to go with the best. Firstly they came to my launch of Pilates in the Park and wrote an article on me. If you want to check it out you can do so here. I was stoked at this exposure and at the chance to work with such a cool company. Then the unthinkable happened. I got another phone call from them to say, “we loved working with you so much that we want to run another campaign on you.” The campaign was insane. They organised for me to teach a class on the top of the Sky Tower. Yup you heard me. On the outside, on the ring of the Sky Tower. Check out the video here.
Let’s just recap, April 2015 Phoebe starts MatWorks, one(two) woman band, barely making enough money to live from/basically living off her partner. Lol
March 2018 Phoebe has 8 staff members, running 30 classes per week in 5 locations as well as multiple homes and work places across Auckland. She also buys an orange mini which she absolutely adores! Beep if you see me driving passed! Hehe
As a side note, my brother bought his own business last year, and I had lots of conversations with him about why he choose to buy someone else business, versus starting his own (I know family of bloody entrepreneurs). He convinces me this is really smart idea, you don’t have to do all the hard slog of setting up the systems from scratch, building the momentum, trial and error until you figure out what works, you just step into an oiled machine, and you oil it some more.
Skip forward to April 2018, I notice there is an existing Pilates company for sale in Remuera, I got brought all the due diligence, fight the bank for some pinga and one month later I’m the proud new owner of Bodywise Pilates.
Now we are up to date. I’m currently 3 months into running 2 business’ side by side. Still teaching a few classes here and there but mainly sailing the ships from the background and f*cking loving it!!
Hopefully you enjoyed getting to know a bit more about me and can find moments from my story that inspire and motivate you to be your best self. Please recognise that there have been many many many low, self doubting moments along this journey that I didn’t mention. Maybe soon I might delve into some of those for you, but no success comes without great struggle and perseverance. I have wanted to throw in the towel many times, but I thank my Taurus nature for pushing me through regardless.
Remember to always love you,
Phoebs
xx
