Meet Brittany Hyde

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Brittany Hyde. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Brittany below.

Hi Brittany, so happy to have you with us today and there is so much we want to ask you about. So many of us go through similar pain points throughout our journeys and so hearing about how others developed certain skills or qualities that we are struggling with can be helpful. Along those lines, we’d love to hear from you about how you developed your ability to take risk?
I am an extremely pragmatic person by nature. I make decisions based on logic first (by a mile!) and then emotion. When I look back on my decision to open a fitness space in the middle of a pandemic, I question my sanity! The reality is that we are naive when we take big risks – if we knew how hard it would really be, we probably wouldn’t do it. But I had done the prep, found the resources, and I believed in my vision. But perhaps most importantly, I trusted my ability to run a business and decided that if I didn’t try, I’d regret it. All of my prior corporate experience – both good and bad – had prepared me to take this risk.

Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?
I graduated from a liberal arts college with an economics degree with zero desire to work in finance. I moved to Boston and got a job EF Education First, an educational travel company, and after floating around in some entry-level sales jobs, I landed in airline operations and didn’t look back – ops was where I was born to be! I spent 12 years working my way up through management, coaching and developing staff and new managers, all while handling every passenger/airline emergency you can imagine. I finished my time there working on the contract negotiation team, handling our events, and working in some project management. EF was where I grew up professionally, worked incredibly hard, had a lot of fun, andmade lifelong friends. But in 2016 I decided that it was time for me to head back north to Maine, where I grew up. Somehow an operations role was open in Wayfair’s Brunswick, Maine office – it was the perfect step up in leadership in a space that I knew well. But what I didn’t anticipate was how hard it would be to change industries and the learning curve was steep. I had a team of 80+ over two offices and to put it mildly, it was extremely challenging and not always in a good way. But Wayfair helped me realize that working in a mission-driven environment was the most important thing to me – I hadn’t realized it at the time but EF’s core values and mission were what motivated me when the 40 hour weeks turned into 80 hour weeks. Running on the proverbial hamster wheel just to climb the uber-corporate ladder was not for me.
In April of 2020, after a brief, covid-shortened stint at a non-profit in Portland, I found myself unemployed and professionally lost. I spent 3 months living with my sister, brother-in-law, and their 18 month old daughter, trying to figure things out. That summer, a friend suggested I open a spin studio in my hometown. Honestly, the rest is history. That one suggestion was a lightbulb moment – five months later I signed a lease and 5 months after that, I opened the studio just a few weeks after vaccines became widely available.
I consider myself to be in the business of helping people make their life better. Yes, the studio is focused on fitness but exercising in a group is about so much more than fitness. I’ve seen people make new friends; I’ve had people with tears in their eyes tell me that the studio has changed their life for the better; I’ve seen so many riders improve their mental health and general happiness; and I’ve seen people do things they didn’t believe they could do. We start class together and end class together – no one gets left behind, we all get there in our own time and I think that is magic. Additionally, we’ve made a commitment to raise money for hyper-local non-profits – to date, we’ve raised just shy of $40,000. We are a small studio in a small market but I feel so proud of the impact we’ve made on our local community.
Not to be forgotten, I am also a photographer, a side hustle that I’ve had for 12 years. It is a completely different outlet for me and it often a relief to use my brain in a different way!

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
1. Resiliency and discipline 2. Passion
3. Confidence derived from doing the work

All three of these are generally considered soft skills but when I look back, they are 100% what got me where I am today AND continue to push me forward when things are tough. It’s so easy to give up when any number of things go wrong (which they will) or they take longer than you expect (which they will). I think if you consistently ask yourself: Am I doing everything I can to make this work? Do I care about this enough to push through the discomfort of it not being what I want it to be right now? Am I confident in my idea/plan/etc? Am I being honest with myself about the work I’ve done and what I might still need to do?
Constantly questioning yourself and being honest with yourself will build up those skills over time. Taking everything one task/day/month/etc at a time instead of looking ahead at what might or might not happen builds that discipline.

How would you describe your ideal client?
My ideal client is someone who is looking for a place they can belong. They are looking for fitness experience but more than that, they’re looking for a new community – not one to replace a community that they already have but a new group that shares the belief that group exercise is one of the most wonderful things we can do for ourselves. My ideal clients want to get to know me and and my team and eventually, our other riders. They want to be in our space and cultivate a culture of support, care, and working hard!

Contact Info:

Image Credits
Katie Kelley Photography (the two outside photos) The rest I took!

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