Citizen Pilates

What America’s 250th Birthday Taught Me About Joseph Pilates, Entrepreneurship, and Building Something That Lasts

I’m writing this somewhere around 30,000 feet over Virginia on my way to Philadelphia.

The timing wasn’t accidental.

As America begins celebrating its 250th birthday, I wanted to spend Independence Day where so much of it began. Philadelphia isn’t just another destination. It’s where a handful of imperfect people chose an uncertain future over a comfortable present. Whether they realized it or not, they created the conditions that would eventually allow millions of entrepreneurs to bet their livelihoods on an idea they believed in.

That matters to me because Citizen was also a conscious choice.

The Revolution Wasn’t Finished on July 4

We celebrate July 4 every year, but history is a little messier than our calendars suggest.

On July 2, 1776, the Continental Congress voted in favor of independence from Great Britain. John Adams was so certain July 2 would become America’s great national holiday that he wrote to Abigail predicting future generations would celebrate it with “pomp and parade.”

He was off by two days.

On July 3, 1776, there were no fireworks. No hot dogs. No matching Old Navy flag shirts. Congress spent the day debating and revising the Declaration of Independence, editing Thomas Jefferson’s draft, removing entire sections, refining the language, and arguing over the words that would define a nation.

They were not preserving the first draft. They were improving it.

Foundations matter.
First drafts don’t.

America has never been defined by standing still. Our country has evolved through disagreement, reinvention, innovation, resilience, and the very American belief that something better can be built by people willing to take the risk.

Today, there are more than 34 million small businesses in the United States. They employ nearly half of the private workforce and create many of the new jobs that keep this country moving forward. America was not built only by giant corporations or institutions. It was built by people willing to sign leases, take loans, hire teams, solve problems, and bet on ideas that did not exist yet.

As someone who has spent the last decade building Citizen, I understand that kind of faith in a very personal way.

Citizen Was a Conscious Choice

Citizen did not happen by accident.

Every decision we’ve made over the last decade has been intentional. We wanted our clients to have the freedom to book classes, manage their memberships, and interact with Citizen whenever it fit their lives, not ours. We wanted our team to build careers instead of collecting gigs. We wanted to create a business that could scale without sacrificing hospitality, and a workplace where benefits weren’t considered extraordinary. They were simply part of treating people well.

So was choosing employment over gig work. So was investing in full-time careers. So was offering healthcare, retirement benefits and a real professional path in an industry that has too often asked talented instructors to piece together a living one class at a time.

We have rewritten plenty of first drafts along the way, because every good business does. But the principles underneath Citizen have stayed consistent.

We believe movement should be sustainable. We believe strength should feel accessible. We believe clients deserve excellent coaching without intimidation. We believe instructors deserve careers, not side hustles. We believe a business can be warm, human, disciplined, profitable, and principled at the same time.

Which Brings Me to Joseph Pilates

Joseph Pilates was not simply an instructor. He was an inventor. He designed equipment, experimented with springs, adapted exercises, and continually refined his work based on the people standing in front of him.

When Return to Life Through Contrology was published in 1945, it was not intended to become a museum exhibit. It was the best expression of his thinking at that moment in time.

Unfortunately, somewhere along the way, parts of our industry started treating it like scripture instead of strategy.

Spend five minutes on Pilates Instagram and you will inevitably find someone explaining why modern studios have strayed too far from what Joseph “would have wanted.” It is fascinating how confidently people speak on behalf of a man who passed away nearly sixty years ago.

Curiously, many of those same experts still spell his name incorrectly.

It is Pilates, not pilates.

A proper noun. A last name. Which makes it especially ironic that people so opposed to capitalism often forget capitalization.

Capitalism Keeps Pilates Alive

Meanwhile, the rest of us are trying to answer a much more practical question:

How do we make sure Pilates is still here another eighty years from now?

That answer is not found in a comment section. It is found in building businesses that can survive.

Every year, rent goes up. Healthcare costs go up. Insurance goes up. Payroll goes up. Utilities go up. The cost of replacing equipment goes up. None of those expenses care what Joseph wrote in 1945.

What keeps Pilates alive in America is not nostalgia.

It is entrepreneurship.

It is studio owners signing leases they personally guarantee. It is people willing to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars into equipment, train instructors for months, pay livable wages, provide healthcare, offer retirement plans, and create careers instead of asking talented teachers to drive between five studios every day trying to make the math work.

That is not abandoning Joseph’s work. That is preserving it.

Because a method without sustainable businesses eventually becomes a chapter in a history book instead of a living practice.

Honor the Foundation. Keep Building.

Just as America did not stop evolving after 1776, Pilates should not stop evolving after 1945.

Principles should endure. Systems should improve. There is a difference.

The freedom to build something, improve it, and pass it on to the next generation is one of America’s greatest contributions to the world. It is also why Pilates did not end with Joseph Pilates. His ideas were strong enough to outlive him because generations of teachers, studio owners, clients, and entrepreneurs believed they were worth investing in.

As I fly toward Philadelphia, I keep thinking about how every meaningful business begins the same way our country did. Someone decides there is a better way. Then they have the courage to build it.

America’s founders did not leave us a finished nation.

Joseph Pilates did not leave us a finished method.

Both left us something far more valuable: a foundation strong enough for future generations to improve without losing sight of the principles that made it worth building in the first place.

Ten years ago, Citizen became our contribution to that same American experiment.

We were not trying to recreate 1945.

We weren’t trying to recreate 1776.

We were trying to build something worthy of both.

Happy Independence Day.

Here’s to the founders who had the courage to begin, the entrepreneurs who have the courage to continue, and to the enduring belief that the best way to honor a great idea is not to preserve it exactly as it was.

It is to leave it stronger than you found it.