Exhale reviews

Management is so budget focused that guest service suffers and team members are not appreciated. Turnover is high so they hire out of desperation and schedule people with little training.

1) The Pay: You would think for how much they charge members, and for the fact that they are housed in exclusive neighborhoods/parts of town/hotels that they would pay their teaching staff a livable wage. Unfortunately your base pay (regardless of previous teaching experience) is lower than even the YMCA and you have to vie for incremental raises that amount to fractions of a dollar by achieving a host of intangible markers. For example, how many classes do you yourself take? how many students are returning to your class only? how many meetings do you attend? All of these plus others are added into a bizarre point system that literally adds up to $1.27 cents per year. 2) You are required to wear only their clothing/barre socks which you are required to pay for yourself. Yes, you can buy them on "discount day" but seriously? Again, see point 1. 3) The upper management seems to encourage and reward favoritism. If a particular teacher becomes popular, that teacher is handed more classes at better teaching times, additional teaching opportunities at Exhale events, promotions within, etc. It ends up being one teacher with 11 classes a week and the rest somewhere around 2-3. And then things shift with the tides of popularity. It leaves teachers feeling unsupported 3) They really don't care what your previous experience is, they simply want you to pay the $2,000 (circa 2013 for myself) for the training. Being paid $40 per class, how long does it take to pay that off? Especially if you are limited to 2-3 classes per week. 4)You have nil individual teaching freedom. I hear other barre formats out there have actual scripts that teachers have to memorize. Exhale prides itself on not "limiting" teachers in this way....but. There is the order of warm up, work out, cool down that must not be rearranged. Within workouts you must not get too "creative" as I was a number of times chastised for. It's like being told that you can teach anything you want so long as it is 98% as told you to do so. 5) advancement within is a joke. First of all, to be promoted from class teacher to manager of the class teachers, you already have to be considered popular enough. And then if you are, your hours are full time, your benefits non-existent and your salary commission based and averaging $24,000/yr (again, this may vary by location and that this story of mine is 3 years old). I once applied for promotion and was sought out by a previous manager telling me it was the worst mistake she ever made and that I should reconsider. Luckily, I wasn't popular enough and it didn't happen anyhow.