Michelle Wahler's Advice for Scaling a Business

For years, Michelle Wahler's husband and business partner had one question ready whenever a bright new idea distracted her: was Beyond Yoga, the leggings company they built together, on every body in every yoga class in America yet? If the answer was no, he told her, do not even mention swimwear (47:22). Wahler tells this story near the end of her second appearance on How I Built This, and it works as a kind of key to everything that comes before it. The episode is not really about yoga pants. It is about the discipline of staying with one hard thing long enough to make it work, and about what happens when three different callers, each wrestling with some version of that discipline, ask a woman who did it for advice.

Wahler and her co-founder Jodi Guber Brufsky built Beyond Yoga slowly, through yoga studios and department stores, for about ten years before the brand found wider traction (05:53). In 2021, Levi's bought the company for $400 million (05:53). Wahler stepped away as CEO in 2024 and now teaches a course on company culture at USC and runs a platform called Quince Hill, which she describes as an investment and mentorship operation for other founders (07:18). On this Advice Line episode, host Guy Raz brings her back to take calls, and the callers form a useful cross-section of small business trouble: too much interest and not enough bookings, a growing business haunted by its own early mistakes, and a beautiful product that no one can feel through a screen.

The Gap Between Interest and Yes

The first caller, Kerry Angoff, runs a company called Elective Study Abroad, which sells week-long seminar trips for adults, mostly retirees, on topics like architecture in southern Spain or world religions in Istanbul. In its first year and a half, the company ran five courses for a total of 26 students, keeping each group under ten people on purpose (11:22). Angoff's problem is a common one: people love the idea, they click, they book a call, and then they vanish. The average course costs $6,200 (14:28), and neither deadlines nor discounts had moved the needle.

Wahler's diagnosis is about what the product actually is. Looking at Angoff's website, she notices stock images of maps and classrooms that could belong to any tour company anywhere.

"You are selling an experience. You're not selling the class." Michelle Wahler, [13:00]

Her fix has two parts. First, filter earlier. Instead of letting anyone book a call, ask a few pointed questions up front: is a prospect ready for a seven-day immersive trip, willing to spend around $6,200, and genuinely committed to being a lifelong learner (14:00). People who answer yes to all three arrive at the call already sold. Second, Raz argues the real hesitation is not money but loneliness: a week with strangers is intimidating, so sell the group itself, not just the syllabus, and add testimonials from people who almost did not go (16:40). He also floats an idea that sounds almost quaint: a small print ad, around $1,000, in a publication like The New York Review of Books, aimed at exactly the intellectually curious, over-fifty reader Elective Study Abroad already serves (19:02). It is not a growth hack. It is closer to knowing the audience already sitting in front of her.

The Second First Impression

The second call comes from Grace, who runs a custom upholstery workroom in Nashville that serves interior designers and homeowners. She started the business almost by accident in 2021, was immediately swamped with demand, and, by her own account, let some early clients down with poor communication and blown timelines. Five years later, still doing the work alone as a side business bringing in about $50,000 a year (28:56), she wants to hire staff and scale, and she wonders whether she can go back to the designers she disappointed the first time.

Wahler's answer is that most people will give a second chance to someone who owns the first failure honestly and briefly, then shows rather than tells.

"Underpromise and overdeliver. That needs to be, like, written very large on a wall wherever you are." Michelle Wahler, [31:14]

The tactical part matters as much as the sentiment. Wahler tells Grace to get her process in order first, streamline estimates and communication, before reapproaching anyone, because a second broken promise will be much harder to survive than the first. Then work through the list of burned relationships one at a time, starting with the smallest account, learning from it, before moving to a bigger and riskier one (31:56). Padding timelines becomes its own tool: quote a longer delivery date than needed, then call two weeks early to say the project is done ahead of schedule (36:15). An upholsterer who once made a designer look bad by running late can, with the same craft, make that same designer look good in front of their own client, which Wahler calls being a rock star for them (33:51).

The third caller, Angel Raymer, runs Sacred Paws Soap Company out of Bristol, Indiana, alongside a full-time factory job and five children. Each bar hides a tumbled stone tied to a feeling, rose quartz for love, amethyst for calm, and takes six weeks to cure before it can be sold (41:08). At vendor markets and metaphysical fairs, people respond instantly to the story behind the product. Online, that same story disappears, and sales stall.

Wahler's read is blunt: the website has almost no story on it, and its About section, when she clicks it during the call, is essentially empty (42:57). Raz reaches for an old shampoo commercial as a comparison, a woman washing her hair in a bathtub who is suddenly transported to the Caribbean, and suggests Raymer sell that same five-minute escape rather than a generic self-care kit (45:09). Wahler adds that a product people put on their skin needs visible trust signals, ingredient information, a clear reason to believe, alongside the story (45:56). None of this costs much money. It is a matter of finishing a story that is already half-written on the site.

What ties all three conversations together, and loops back to the swimwear rule from Wahler's own marriage, is a kind of discipline about attention. Elective Study Abroad needs to stop chasing every possible customer and instead qualify for the right one. Grace needs to resist reopening every burned bridge at once and instead rebuild trust one relationship at a time. Sacred Paws Soap needs to stop assuming the story sells itself and put it, deliberately, in front of a customer who cannot smell the soap or hold the stone. In each case, the constraint is not money or even time. It is focus.

Wahler applies the same logic to her own history with fundraising. Asked what startup advice she thinks is overrated, she does not hesitate: the idea that a founder must raise outside money to build something real (09:02). Bringing on investors, she argues, tends to shift a company's center of gravity toward an eventual sale, which is a different motivation than the one that got most founders started in the first place (09:30). Beyond Yoga grew for a decade before it became large enough to interest Levi's, and it did so on Wahler and Brufsky's own terms. Her advice to callers, and to anyone listening, is not that ambition is wrong. It is that ambition without a clear no, whether to swimwear, to venture capital, or to the next shiny idea, tends to dilute the one thing worth being great at.