Position: Owner
Company: Anahata Yoga Center
What they do: Teach yoga classes
Revenue: $95,000
Goals: Open a yoga store adjacent the yoga center, expand classes and offer workshops.
Bien Le bought the Anahata Yoga Center about three years ago, intending to reopen her Saigon Restaurant there, but a good vibe about the place swayed her.
“I felt a lot of good energy with the community, and decided I couldn’t close a place with such good energy.” Even though she knew little about yoga at the time, she renovated the center and focused on growing the business.
Over time, the good energy not only swayed her, it won her over.
Now Le’s planning to expand classes by offering some for children and will open a 1,000-square- foot yoga store adjoining the center this year. The store will feature items such as clothing, an organic line of bath and body products and other earthy, calming items.
“It’s a different service,” she says of running a yoga center and a Vietnamese restaurant. At first, Le says, it was all business to her. But she recognized she had much more than that with the center. “I started taking yoga, and I do really see and understand why people like it. I also see why people like to go to the center, and why it’s important.”
Two years ago, when the lease ran out on Saigon in the University Shopping Center and the center’s new owner didn’t renew, she looked to the Perkins Road yoga center as her restaurant’s new location.
But Le says, while it felt good seeing people enjoying her food and having fun at her restaurant, she realized how much time and work it took to run it, too. The center posed a welcome and more interesting challenge.
“Overall, I’m very happy. We are in the right location, and the people are very supportive. Some of them have been coming here over 20 years, so it’s good. Hopefully, I can make it better, but overall I’m very happy.”
Le says it’s been a mellowing experience for her, as well as an enlightening one in which she has learned to let her 10 instructors do their thing.
“You can’t tell an artist how to paint or what to paint. I think Baton Rouge is getting hip.”
Comments
Post a comment
(Requires free registration.)