This Week on The Run Rate - Issue #13
Weekly Roundup · Sep 27– Oct 4, 2026
A ring maker with four times the orders it needed couldn’t go public. A breath test that only pays the second time. And the age group most likely to send you a referral is the one least likely to be on your floor.
Oura Postpones $15.6 Billion IPO: Why Investors Pushed Back
Oura pulled its listing on September 29. Buyers had ordered four times the shares available, the company says it is profitable, and it expects revenue up 90% this year. It still didn’t happen. Of the 50 million shares on offer, 36.5 million were early investors cashing out. And nobody wanted to pay a 42% markup on a funding round that closed earlier this year.
Here is why that reaches you. Oura now has to show growth with no public listing to point at, and the cheapest growth in wearables runs through somebody else’s building. Expect partnership and member-perk approaches, sooner and keener than before. When one lands, remember that you are the cheap channel and price your side of it accordingly.
Gyms Can Now Run VO₂ Tests Without Staff. The Retest Is Where the Money Is.
PNOĒ’s new mask runs an eight-minute metabolic test with nobody supervising it, from $400 a month. Taking staff out of the room is what changes the economics, because the labour was always the reason this stayed a premium add-on.
The first test is the easy sell. The second one is the business, because a number only means something once a member has one to compare it against. So price the retest in from the start rather than selling a one-off and hoping. Weighing up any measurement product? We ran this same exercise on recovery gear last month. The best-selling kit had the thinnest evidence behind it. The full Take is here.
Fewer Than One in Four Women Aged 45 to 64 Lift Weights. That’s a Referral Problem.
Under a quarter of women aged 45 to 64 do any strength training. On the surface that is a participation number. Underneath it is a growth number, because this group refers more than any other and they cannot refer you if they never walked in.
What to do with it: look at what your 45-to-64 intake actually looks like before you buy more traffic. Does the gap in your member base match the national data? Then the cheapest growth you have is already sitting in your existing members’ address books.
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Read This Week
Posts worth your time from people actually running studios.
The Membership Tier Ladder Is Where Your Margin Actually Leaks — Courtney Clapper, The Business of Pilates
Courtney puts numbers on the thing most studios never check. The industry average class price is $21.32. She estimates it costs $12 to $18 to deliver. So an unlimited member taking 20 classes a month costs you $240 to $360, before a penny of overhead lands. Unlimited members retain 34% better and drive 50 to 65% of revenue at well-run studios, so the tier earns its place. Her sharper point is about the grandfathered rates nobody revisits: “When half a roster is frozen at a five-year-old price, one cancellation can push the location into the red.” Worth reading straight after our 45-to-64 piece, because both land on knowing which members you actually make money on. The back half sits behind a free claim or a paid subscription.
Dipping My Toes Back Into This Work Thing… — Kenzie Wesp, The Founder’s Files
Kenzie runs two separate concepts in Nashville, TRUEFORM and The Format. She is coming back from maternity leave in stages: operations from home through October, then a full return to teaching and floor leadership in November. The post is about what happens to a business when the owner’s time stops being elastic. “My time is more focused. It is more intentional,” she writes. Then the harder line: “When you are handing your fresh favorite human to someone else so you can go do your work, that work better be freaking worth it.” Every other piece in this issue hands you something to go and do. This is a fair counterweight for the week you try to do all of them.
That’s the week.
Three stories, one through-line: the money is rarely where the headline puts it. Oura’s was in the sellers’ pockets, PNOĒ’s is in the retest, and yours might be in the members you never recruited.
The Take goes out twice a month for paid subscribers, $8/mo or $80/yr, and it’s where we do the long arguments properly. If the Roundup is useful to you, that’s the one worth upgrading for.