Five questions every aerial studio owner should be able to answer about their business

If someone asked you right now — an investor, a landlord, a potential business partner — how healthy your aerial studio is, what would you say? Most studio owners would talk about how full their classes are. How much their students love training there. How great the community feels. All of which matters enormously. But none of which answers the question.

The financial health of a studio comes down to a small number of metrics. They’re not complicated. But they’re also not widely discussed in the aerial community, which means many studio owners either don’t track them or aren’t sure how to calculate them.

Here are the five you should know — what they are, how to find them, and why they matter.

1. What is your monthly retention rate?

Retention rate is the percentage of your active members who are still active members the following month. It’s the single most important metric for a subscription-based studio business.

To calculate it: take the number of members you had at the start of the month, subtract the number who cancelled during the month, and divide by the starting number. If you started March with 80 members and 6 cancelled, your retention rate is 74/80 = 92.5%.

Why it matters: a small difference in retention rate has an enormous effect on your revenue over time. The difference between 90% monthly retention and 95% monthly retention might sound modest. But at 90% retention, the average student stays roughly 10 months. At 95%, they stay roughly 20 months. The same student, generating twice the lifetime revenue — simply because you kept them slightly longer.

What’s healthy: top-performing boutique fitness studios aim for monthly retention above 95%, meaning monthly churn below 5%. We don’t yet have aerial-specific benchmarks for this — which is one of the things the Aerial Arts Index survey is designed to establish.

2. How long does the average student stay?

This is your average membership duration, and it flows directly from your retention rate. If you track when each student joined and when they left, you can calculate this directly. If not, there’s a simple formula.

First, calculate your monthly churn rate: divide the number of students who cancelled in a given month by the number of active students at the start of that month. If you started March with 80 members and 6 cancelled, your monthly churn rate is 6/80 = 7.5%.

Then calculate average membership duration: divide 1 by your monthly churn rate. At 7.5% monthly churn, the average student stays 1/0.075 = 13.3 months. At 10% monthly churn, the average student stays 1/0.10 = 10 months. At 5% monthly churn, the average student stays 1/0.05 = 20 months.

Why it matters: membership duration is the foundation of lifetime value — how much revenue each student generates before they leave. Everything that improves membership duration (better onboarding, stronger community, performance opportunities, skill progression) directly increases the value of every student who walks through your door.

What to watch for: the beginner cliff. Students who make it past three months are significantly more likely to stay for a year or longer. Students who leave in the first 90 days often do so before they’ve experienced the real rewards of aerial training. Tracking where in the journey your students are leaving tells you exactly where to focus your retention efforts.

3. What does it cost you to acquire a new student?

Customer acquisition cost — CAC — is the total amount you spend to bring one new paying student through the door. It includes everything: paid advertising, the cost of introductory offers and trial discounts, any referral incentives, and the time you spend on marketing and outreach.

To calculate it: add up all your marketing and promotional spending for a given period, then divide by the number of new students who joined in that same period. If you spent $500 on Instagram ads in March and acquired 10 new students, your CAC for that channel is $50.

Why it matters: CAC only makes sense relative to how much a student is worth to you. A $200 acquisition cost is fine if students stay for two years at $150/month. It’s a serious problem if they stay for six weeks. Understanding your CAC helps you decide how much to spend on marketing, which channels are worth investing in, and how urgently you need to improve retention.

What’s realistic: boutique fitness studios typically see CAC ranging from $100 to $400 depending on market, discipline, and how much they rely on paid channels versus organic word-of-mouth. Aerial studios with strong community and social media presence can achieve much lower CAC through referrals and organic content. The aerial community’s visual nature is an advantage here — great content on Instagram and TikTok converts.

4. What is the lifetime value of a student?

Lifetime value — LTV — is the total revenue a single student generates over their entire time with your studio. It’s the number that tells you whether your business model is sustainable.

The simplest way to calculate it: multiply your average monthly membership fee by your average membership duration in months. If your average member pays $150/month and stays for 14 months, their LTV is $2,100.

Why it matters: LTV is what CAC has to be measured against. The standard benchmark across boutique fitness is that LTV should be at least three times CAC — meaning for every dollar you spend acquiring a student, you should generate at least three dollars in lifetime revenue. If your LTV is $2,100 and your CAC is $200, you’re at a healthy 10:1 ratio. If your CAC is $800, you have a problem.

The good news: LTV is much more within your control than it might seem. Every improvement to retention — better onboarding, showcases, community-building, private session offerings — increases LTV without requiring you to spend more on acquisition. Retaining students is almost always a better use of resources than acquiring new ones.

5. What is your revenue mix?

Revenue mix is the breakdown of where your income comes from: monthly memberships, class packs, drop-in fees, workshops, private sessions, retail, events, photo sessions, and anything else your studio generates — expressed as percentages of total revenue.

To calculate it: pull your revenue by category for a given period and express each as a percentage of total. Memberships $8,000, workshops $1,200, privates $800, retail $400 — total $10,400. Revenue mix: memberships 77%, workshops 12%, privates 8%, retail 4%.

Why it matters: a studio that generates 90% of its revenue from memberships is highly exposed to churn. When members leave, revenue leaves with them. A studio with a diversified revenue mix — memberships as the foundation, supplemented by workshops, private sessions, and events — is more resilient and typically more profitable. The additional revenue streams also tend to be the ones that most effectively retain students: the showcase you produce, the guest instructor workshop you run, the private session series you offer — these are both income and retention tools simultaneously.

What to aim for: there’s no universal right answer, but studios that generate 70–80% from recurring memberships and 20–30% from supplementary sources tend to have healthier overall economics than those at either extreme.

The honest truth about these numbers in aerial arts

Here’s what’s worth saying directly: most of the benchmarks referenced above come from the broader boutique fitness industry, not from aerial arts specifically. Aerial-specific data — what retention actually looks like in silks versus lyra studios, what typical CAC is for studios relying on Instagram versus paid ads, what membership duration looks like across different markets — doesn’t exist in any published form.

That gap is exactly what the Aerial Arts Index is working to close. If you track these numbers for your own studio, we’d like to know what you’re seeing. And if you don’t track them yet, we hope this post gives you a reason to start.