I read with interest and some sadness this New York Times article published last month.  Having just finished a full weekend of yoga continuing education with a group of women (most of whom were about to graduate from a registered teacher training like the one I completed last November), I feel compelled to say a few words about the article and the business of yoga and yoga instructor training.  My perspective on the matters raised in the article is, of course, colored by my background in business law practice and teaching and my recent teacher training experiences.  I am sure that co-blogger Colleen also would be interested in the article for similar reasons (and given her earlier post on yoga and entrepreneurship).

The article highlights specific tactics allegedly used to generate then expansion/growth of a particular yoga business.  The core aspect of the article–reports that instructors were pressured or coerced to make sales pitches that may have misrepresented the instructor training program or the results it can achieve–struck me most clearly.  To say that the “story” told in the article was chilling understates the case.  My thought after reading it?  This does not look like the yoga businesses or instructor training programs I know . . . .

Yoga Alliance instructor trainings include information on yoga teaching as a job or career and as a business.  There are many good online resources on the same. See, e.g., here and here.  As these resources and others on the business of yoga indicate, studio revenues from classes are not typically even day-to-day and week-to-week.  Teacher trainings, by comparison (as the article notes), generate revenues that are relatively large and, with solid ongoing recruitment efforts, relatively consistent.  The article’s text illustrates how revenue challenges can drive unethical–even if not unlawful–sales activities.

From a legal perspective, intentional or reckless misrepresentations made by yoga studios through their instructors about the nature of yoga teacher training or the market for yoga instruction, whether or not incentivized by financial or other benefits, are not only potentially tortious but also likely to be within the purview of consumer protection laws.  Under Tennessee law, for example, “[r]epresenting that goods or services have . . . characteristics, . . . uses, benefits or quantities that they do not have” and “[r]epresenting that a consumer transaction confers or involves rights, remedies or obligations that it does not have or involve” constitute “unfair or deceptive acts or practices affecting the conduct of any trade or commerce are declared to be unlawful.”  Tenn. Code Ann. § 47-18-104(b)(5) & (12).  As I earlier mentioned in a post focused on consumer protection issues relating to Starbucks drinks, state consumer protection law is supplemented and complemented by Federal Trade Commission and Better Business Bureau complaint processes/reporting.

In addition, yoga schools and teachers registered with Yoga Alliance (like similar business entities and professionals in other industries) agree to abide by rules set forth in a code of conduct.  These rules include agreements to, for example, “[f]ollow all local government and national laws that pertain to my yoga teaching and business” as well as “[r]espect the rights, dignity and privacy of all students” and “adhere to the traditional yoga principles as written in the yamas and niyamas.”  (Truthfulness (satya) is one of the yamas; purity (saucha) is a niyama.)

Ultimately, the article not only offers lessons to the yoga community, but also holds wisdom for entrepreneurs and business management more generally.  Business growth fueled by fraudulent or other misrepresentations is illusory and avoidable.  I could not help but think about the recently reported Insys Therapeutics convictions:

The jury, after deliberating for 15 days, issued guilty verdicts against the company’s founder, the onetime billionaire John Kapoor, and four former executives, finding they had conspired to fuel sales of its highly potent drug, Subsys, by not only bribing doctors to prescribe their product but also by misleading insurers about patients’ need for the drug.

Sobering facts that provide important warnings to mindful business promoters.