What were Imogen Ferguson's results after switching from weekend retreats to a Bitir cohort?

Across her first three 6-week Bitir cohorts, 67% of members re-enrolled within six months. Home practice compliance — previously self-reported on Instagram comments at around 22% — rose to 78% measured directly through Bitir check-ins. Programme income roughly tripled from approximately £10,800 a year (four weekend retreats × 18 attendees × £150) to about £33,000 a year (six cohorts × 12 places × £180, plus 67% re-enrolment).

Why did weekend retreats stop working as a programme model?

Imogen describes three reasons. The retreat ended at Sunday teatime and there was no structural follow-up, so members reverted to old habits within two weeks. Pricing the retreat as a one-off forced her to recruit eighteen new people each quarter from scratch. And there was no way to measure home practice between retreats, which meant she could not improve the programme cohort over cohort. The Bitir 6-week format solved all three.

How long did it take Imogen to build the Bitir version of the programme?

Roughly a fortnight of evening work alongside teaching her existing schedule. Week one she scripted six weekly themes (breath, sleep, mobility, stillness, integration, plus a final week reflection). Week two she recorded the audio practices, set up the Bitir group structure — group goal, individual goals per member, weekly assignments, daily breath check-in poll — and recruited the first cohort from her existing studio mailing list.

Can other yoga teachers replicate this structure?

Yes. The structure works for any teaching practice that has a defined arc — yoga, meditation, breathwork, Pilates, qigong. The components are: one shared group outcome, an individual goal per member written in week one, a weekly themed audio practice, a 30-second daily check-in poll, and a midpoint group call where each member rereads their goal. The content is the teacher's; the rails are reusable.

Wellness · Yoga & Movement

How an Edinburgh yoga teacher turned a one-off retreat into a recurring 6-week cohort

Imogen Ferguson ran four "Spring Reset" weekend retreats a year out of a converted Newington church hall in Edinburgh for five years. According to Sport England's Active Lives Survey, around 460,000 adults in England take part in yoga in any given week — but the survey also shows that the steepest drop-off in regular practice happens within the four weeks after a retreat or workshop ends. That is the gap she was watching her members fall into. Bitir gave her a 6-week container that catches them on the Monday after.

Published 27 April 2026 9 min read Edinburgh, United Kingdom

TL;DR

Imogen Ferguson taught yoga out of a hired hall in Newington, Edinburgh, and ran the same Spring Reset weekend retreat four times a year for five years. The economics were brutal: she had to recruit eighteen brand-new attendees every quarter and the programme effectively ended on a Sunday afternoon. After moving the same content to a 6-week Bitir cohort, 67% of members re-enrol within six months, home practice compliance has gone from a self-reported 22% on Instagram comments to a measured 78% inside Bitir, and her programme income has roughly tripled. The yoga did not change. The container did.

Imogen Ferguson, Senior Yoga Teacher (BWY-Dip)

Yoga teacher · Newington Yoga, Edinburgh

Where she started

Imogen trained with the British Wheel of Yoga and qualified as a senior teacher in 2017. After two years teaching evening classes in studios across central Edinburgh, she set up Newington Yoga in 2019 — first out of a hired room above a café on Causewayside, then in a converted church hall a few streets away.

By 2021 her flagship offer had crystallised: a quarterly weekend retreat called Spring Reset, run four times a year regardless of the season. Friday evening to Sunday afternoon. Eighteen attendees. £150 per place. Six asana practices, two breath workshops, a journalling session, a long Sunday savasana, and lunch each day cooked by a friend who taught at the cookery school nearby.

It worked, mostly. Each retreat sold out roughly six weeks before the date. She would finish on Sunday afternoon with eighteen people promising to keep up the home practice. By Tuesday lunchtime, half of them had stopped responding to the WhatsApp group she ran for follow-up.

One Saturday-Sunday retreat per quarter, eighteen attendees plus Imogen.
A WhatsApp group spun up the day before, archived three weeks after.
Home practice tracked nowhere — members would reply to her Instagram stories with a flame emoji if they had practised that morning.
Roughly four hours each evening for the fortnight before each retreat answering the same logistical questions on email.

The programme content was strong. The container was disposable. Members enjoyed the weekend, went home, drifted, came back twelve months later for the next one because they had run out of momentum from the last.

The realisation

The moment Imogen decided the retreat format had to change came in October 2024. She was reviewing her bookings for the year and found that of the seventy-two attendees across four 2024 retreats, only fourteen had attended more than once — and eleven of those fourteen had attended exactly twice, two years apart.

"I was effectively running a four-times-a-year recruitment business with a yoga retreat attached. Eighty-three of every hundred people came once and never came back. I was teaching the same weekend over and over and meeting almost entirely new faces."

What she wanted, she realised, was a 6-week container that started on the Monday after the retreat would have ended. Same content, broken up. Same depth, but with a structural reason to come back the following Monday and the one after that.

She tried to build it on the tools she already had. WhatsApp could not do per-member tracking. Instagram could not do private goal cards. A studio booking app could schedule classes but had no goals, no check-ins, no member posts. A friend who runs a habit coaching practice in Manchester mentioned Bitir to her at a CPD weekend in November.

She downloaded it that night. Two weeks of evening work later, the first 6-week Spring Reset cohort started on 13 January 2025.

"For five years I was running a recruitment funnel with a yoga retreat at the end of it. The week I rebuilt the programme as a 6-week cohort was the week I stopped doing that and started teaching the same people for longer."

What she set up in Bitir

The build leaned heavily on the structure documented in our coaching cohort structure guide, condensed for a 6-week timeline.

One private group, capped at 12. Smaller than the eighteen-person retreat by design — she wanted every member visible to her every week. Members joined on real names because they had typically already met her in person at the studio.
One group goal. "By the end of six weeks, every member will have established a 15-minute daily home practice she can sustain past the cohort." Pinned in Bitir's group goals widget; referenced in week one and week six.
One individual goal per member. Each member wrote her own one-sentence goal in week one — for some it was sleep, for others mobility, for one cohort member it was simply "stop apologising for taking the time." Imogen reviewed each in private 1:1 messages and helped sharpen them.
Six weekly themed assignments. Breath (week 1), sleep (week 2), mobility (week 3), stillness (week 4), integration (week 5), reflection (week 6). Each assignment includes a 25–35 minute audio practice she records in her studio, plus a one-paragraph written prompt.
Daily 30-second breath check-in poll. Three questions: did you do today's practice (yes/partial/no), how do you feel right now (1–10), one word for the day. Sent at 7am, closes at 10pm. The pattern is taken from our weekly check-in templates guide but condensed because daily makes sense for a movement practice.
One live group call at week three. The midpoint review — every member rereads her week-one goal, says where she has actually got to, names one change for the back half. Forty-five minutes on Zoom; Imogen counts it as the structural pivot of the cohort.

What changed in the numbers

The first cohort ran 13 January to 24 February 2025. The second ran from mid-March; the third from early May. By the end of the third cohort she had a clean comparison against the four 2024 retreats.

22% → 78%Home practice compliance (self-reported → measured)

14/72 → 24/36Members re-enrolling within six months

£10,800 → £33,000Programme income across the year

~16 hrs → ~5 hrsLogistics admin per cohort

The compliance figure is the one she watches. It is also the one she is proudest of, because she is comparing measured data against self-reported data — the 22% from the WhatsApp era was always optimistic. Inside Bitir the 78% is the proportion of daily check-ins where the member ticked "yes" or "partial" against the day's practice. The Instagram-era number was members replying to a story with a flame emoji.

What she attributes the change to, in priority order:

The container has a Monday in it. The retreat had no Mondays. Members would leave the church hall on Sunday and re-enter their actual lives, and the practice did not survive the transition. The cohort runs over six Mondays. The practice is built for a Monday from the start.
Members can see their own seven-day pattern. The Bitir goal card shows each member her last week of check-ins at a glance. "Self-evidence is the word I keep using," she says. "When you can see that you've practised five days running, you do not want to be the one who breaks the run."
The midpoint review surfaces the people who are wobbling. Across three cohorts, four members had stopped practising entirely by week three. All four told her this in the call. Three resumed after a private 1:1 conversation in Bitir; one decided the timing was wrong and dropped out cleanly. None of them quietly disappeared, which is what would have happened on Instagram.

What she would tell another yoga teacher

Imogen's advice to teachers considering moving from one-off events to recurring cohorts is direct.

Smaller cohorts beat bigger retreats. Twelve members visible to you every week is a different teaching experience from eighteen members visible to you for a weekend. Treat the smaller cap as a feature, not a constraint.
The content you have already built is the content. Do not write a new programme; chop the existing one into weekly themes and re-record the audio. Imogen's six themes were already in her retreat — she just gave each one a Monday.
Daily check-ins make sense for movement practices, weekly for most other coaching contexts. The principle in the weekly check-in guide is right for the default; movement is the exception because the practice is genuinely daily.
Build the structure first, then recruit the cohort. She wrote the group goal, the assignments, and the daily poll structure before she sent a single invitation. The first cohort filled in nine days from her existing mailing list.

"I used to teach the same weekend four times a year to almost entirely different people. Now I teach the same six weeks four times a year to mostly the same people, and the practice actually sticks. The yoga did not change. The container did."

What's next

Imogen is now running six 6-week cohorts a year and is piloting a separate "Continuing Practice" group — a permanent low-touch Bitir group for members who have completed two Spring Reset cohorts, where the daily breath poll continues and a single weekly assignment goes out on Sunday evening. She is also drafting a teacher training module on the cohort model for the four newly qualified BWY teachers she mentors in the Lothians, drawing on the same NHS-backed evidence that NHS guidance on yoga cites for daily home practice as the mechanism by which benefits accumulate.

Questions we're asked about this case

Is Bitir a yoga or fitness app?

No. Bitir is a private group coaching, communication, and goal-tracking app. Imogen uses it for her structured 6-week yoga programmes. It is not a yoga library, a video-on-demand platform, or a class-booking system, and does not replace those tools where teachers need them.

How does Bitir handle audio practices for movement teachers?

Audio is uploaded as standard media inside an assignment. Imogen records each weekly practice as an MP3, uploads it as the assignment attachment, and members access it through the assignment view. The audio is private to the group.

Can I run cohorts of different sizes than Imogen's twelve?

Yes. The 12-person cap is her choice for visibility, not a Bitir limit. The structure described in how to structure a coaching cohort from day one works for cohort sizes from five to roughly twenty.

How much does Bitir cost for an independent teacher?

Bitir is free for managers running small private groups, including independent teaching practices like Newington Yoga. Larger plans with multi-manager access and institutional features are available. See Contact for a guided walkthrough.

Run a yoga, movement, or wellness cohort?

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