Postpartum recovery led Alice to Pilates and Pilates led her to leave a 15-year corporate career. Now she has built a studio in Rozelle  for women who have lost touch with their bodies.

Key takeaways

• Capital spent before you open buys a head start. Pre-sale marketing mattered as much as the studio itself.

• Memberships and auto-pay beat casual packs on profitability and retention.  Lifetime value compounds in a way one-off revenue never does.

• Learn your own marketing before you outsource it.

• Revenue and cash in the bank don’t tell you the full story. Track profit and loss not just top line.

Rituel Movement started with a body, not a business plan. 

After the birth of her second child, Alice was dealing with severe abdominal separation. Pilates changed her from the inside out and slowly became the practice that reconnected her to her own body.

It wasn't only physical. It gave her  permission to take time for herself, which she describes as one of the hardest things to give yourself as a new mum. That permission became the foundation for what came next. Comprehensive Pilates teacher training and, eventually, walking away from a 15-year corporate career to open a studio.

"It wasn't just physical. It was permission to take time for myself, which is one of the hardest things to give yourself as a new mum." - Alice Zikou

Today, Rituel Movement bridges classical Pilates with strength training in a boutique Rozelle studio built around small class sizes and considered individual corrections. Her customer is ambitious and high-performing, often juggling a career, a family and a list of goals so long she's lost touch with her own body along the way. 

As one client put it, coming to the studio made her feel like the master of her own body, rather than a passenger in it.

The mistake that taught her the most about money
Alice launched Rituel Movement without enough of a pre-sale runway. 

In hindsight, she believes she should have spent more time and capital before opening to build demand and bring the studio closer to 70–80% capacity from day one. Instead, the studio opened and marketing started from there, meaning she grew into capacity rather than launching with it.

"Capital spent before you open buys you a head start you can't buy back later."

The most profitable decision she ever made
Two structural shifts, not one big bet.

 First, moving clients away from casual class packs towards memberships and auto-pay.  Members attend more often, stay longer and carry significantly higher lifetime value than one-off buyers. 

Second, building marketing capability in-house rather than outsourcing it from the start. Coming from a corporate marketing background, Alice learned the channel herself, made the mistakes and understood what actually worked before bringing in a team to scale it.

What she wishes she'd known from the beginning
How much revenue and cash in the bank can mask the actual health of a business. 

Alice now tracks a small set of key metrics weekly, monthly, quarterly and annually, with a clear view of profit and loss, not just top line revenue.

"Revenue and cash in the bank tell you almost nothing about the actual health of your business."

Knowing those numbers, she says, isn't just about visibility, it allows her to make informed decisions on when to pivot, when to hold and when to push, based on what the business is actually telling her rather than instinct alone. .

F5 Collective exists for founders building exactly this. A business born from something deeply personal, built with ambition and now run on real numbers.

Discover Alice and Rituel Movement here: https://www.rituelmovement.com