Before she opened Scout Pilates in August 2019, Lucy Beaumont was in a career transition.

“I worked in interior design and architecture, then changed careers and went into clinical nutrition,” says the Sydney-based Beaumont. “I had always done Pilates as a client. [But I] had the opportunity to do my [Pilates] teacher training, so I just kind of did it on the side.”

Though Beaumont moonlighted across studios in Sydney, it was going to classes in New York that provided the inspiration for what would become Scout Pilates. “I found the New York pilates scene refreshing – very different to what I’d seen in Sydney,” says Beaumont. “It was really inclusive … Everyone can do pilates.” She was determined to take that inclusive approach into her own practice.

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Setting up Scout and initial challenges

When Beaumont opened Scout in late 2019, from a space on King Street in St Peters, the motivation was to provide more than just a place to exercise.

“The feeling people get is very different at Scout,” says Beaumont. “A lot of people are like, ‘I come to Scout for my mental health rather than my physical health.’ It’s not just about coming in and exercising and getting a bikini body. It’s really moving your body, meeting different people, feeling really welcome in the space.”

Opening a public-facing business a few months before a global pandemic provided an unexpected challenge for Beaumont, with Scout having to transition to digital classes during the first lockdown. “I don’t like online classes,” she says, “but we had such a strong community already. It really saved us and kept it together – and [kept] the business going.”

Having an online presence had always been important, but it quickly became a necessity. “The challenge was overnight trying to pivot the business to online, having never done it before,” says Beaumont. “My instructors had never taught on camera. It’s a very different way of teaching.”

Post-lockdown and ongoing success

Even after the lockdowns ended and in-person classes resumed, Beaumont maintained a focus on Scout’s online side. “Coming from a design background, if I see a website that I think is a bit clunky or old fashioned, I’ll judge the brand on that,” says Beaumont. “You need to have a really elevated platform and you need it to work.” Scout’s site is hosted by Squarespace, which Beaumont says allows Scout to focus on both aesthetics and functionality. “I’ve used Squarespace from the beginning, when I kind of just had a very low key web developer help me do something quite simple. And now the website’s much more elevated, we’ve gone through some different rebranding - it’s always been really easy.”

Despite the difficulties of pivoting to online classes and back, Scout has embraced the challenge, expanding to two locations with another on the way. Success has clearly come from Beaumont’s passion for an inclusive, people-focused service, but she has some advice for other business owners.

“It’s about being flexible and being open to change,” says Beaumont. “Sometimes we’re like, ‘That class that’s worked for two years just doesn’t seem to be working at that time.’ So we change the time. We get a lot of feedback from clients as well. We’ll do surveys or post social questions like, ‘What times do you want? What classes do you want?’ It’s fun to try new things. Sometimes they don’t work, sometimes they do.”

This article is produced by Broadsheet in partnership with Squarespace.