On the day Sarah Abell’s Pilates studio was supposed to open, she wasn’t celebrating. She was panicking.
“I remember thinking, ‘This is real now. I have to fill this space for the rest of the week,’” says Sarah, who launched Groove Wellness in midtown Toronto in her early twenties. “It was the first time the pressure really hit me.”
Here’s the thing about that pressure—the kind that comes from choosing entrepreneurship over employment, from taking on debt instead of a salary. It’s becoming increasingly familiar to a generation that’s rewriting the rules of early-career success. While most college graduates are polishing their LinkedIn profiles and practicing their “tell me about yourself” speeches, Sarah was renovating a fitness studio and learning to navigate vendor relationships, construction delays, and the uncomfortable reality of asking people to actually pay you.
Her timing, whether intentional or not, couldn’t be better. The wellness industry is projected to reach $520 billion by 2035, with Pilates and yoga studios growing at annual rates between 8.4% and 14.3% globally. But here’s the stat that matters more: only 15% of Gen Z reported “never” feeling lonely last year, compared to 54% of boomers. 79% of an entire generation is experiencing some degree of social isolation. That statistic isn’t lost on venture capitalists—apps like Timeleft and 222 have raised millions to solve the very problem Abell identified organically, back when she was just trying to get strangers to talk to each other over dinner.
While tech founders pitch algorithmic solutions to loneliness, Sarah is betting on something decidedly analog: getting people in the same room, moving their bodies, and then feeding them. “I don’t want this to be a place where you come in, work out, and leave,” she says. The studio’s design reflects this—a smoothie bar takes up prime real estate, with plans to expand into prepared meals. On the wall, a mission statement reads: “Blending movement with mindful nutrition.” It sounds like wellness marketing speak until you realize she actually means it.
It’s a deliberate inversion of the boutique fitness model that’s dominated urban markets for the past decade. Where SoulCycle and Barry’s Bootcamp optimized for throughput and Instagram moments, Groove is optimizing for lingering. Recent events with Oui Chef, where participants exercise and then eat together? They feel less like fitness classes and more like dinner parties with a warm-up. Which makes sense, because that’s exactly where this all started.
Sarah’s path to this moment was unconventional by traditional standards, if increasingly common among her peers. She never did the corporate recruiting thing. Her first venture was running underground dinner parties called Supper Club—an operation that taught her the fundamentals of sourcing, logistics, and the critical importance of payment collection. “My favorite part was being able to step away from the table and just watch everyone talking to each other,” she recalls. That image—of a room full of strangers becoming friends over food—became the north star for everything that followed.
The influence came from her mother, who ran her own business. “I might not have realized it at the time, but watching her showed me it was possible,” Sarah says. After high school track and field, then a pandemic-disrupted college experience that left everyone questioning what they wanted from life, she took a year off to pursue culinary school and cooked religiously. That’s the kind of obsession any founder needs to make it. That’s when the dinner parties started, and when she realized what she loved most wasn’t the cooking itself—it was bringing people together.
The pivot from hospitality to fitness made strategic sense, even if Sarah would probably describe it more as following her instincts. Look at the numbers: restaurant businesses face first-year failure rates around 17% and require significant capital with slim margins. Fitness studios, particularly in the boutique wellness category, show considerably more stability. The differentiation problem that plagues restaurants—why should someone choose your pasta over the hundred other Italian spots in the city?—is less acute in an industry where community and experience matter as much as the product. Plus, she’d already identified the problem she wanted to solve. She just needed a different vehicle.
Still, Sarah’s decision to bypass traditional employment and go straight into entrepreneurship required a particular framing of risk. “I’m so young,” she says simply. “What’s the worst that happens?” That calculation, youth as a form of capital, time as a hedge against failure, is one that salaried peers in their twenties rarely have the luxury of making. But it also required family backing, both financial and emotional, the foundation for taking on the debt required to renovate and build out the studio, a process that took nearly a year. It really does feel like a lot all at once.
Here’s what business school doesn’t teach: the psychological toll of being visible while incompetent. Sarah describes a feeling she struggles to articulate—a kind of embarrassment that comes with putting yourself on the dance floor when everyone else is sitting and watching, and you don’t really know how to dance. It’s a remarkably honest admission in an era when founder culture demands constant performance of confidence. The reality of early-stage entrepreneurship? Daily confrontations with your own inadequacy. Every decision, from which coffee machine to buy to how to structure class packages, carries the weight of capital you’ve borrowed and promises you’ve made.
“You have to think long-term,” Sarah says, explaining her decision to invest in premium equipment despite higher upfront costs. “When you stretch it across years, the return works in your favor.” It’s the kind of reasoning that sounds obvious in retrospect but feels terrifying when you’re signing the invoice. When the money is real and the future is theoretical.
The self-doubt hasn’t disappeared. It likely won’t. But Sarah has developed a working relationship with it—acknowledging its presence while not letting it determine strategy. “You just have to focus on the vision of what you want to build and remember you’re doing what you love,” she says, with the kind of buoyant energy that suggests she actually believes it. And maybe that’s the real trick. Not eliminating doubt, but moving forward anyway.
Whether Groove succeeds will depend on whether Sarah is right about what Gen Z wants. The bet is that her generation isn’t just looking for fitness—they’re looking for friction, in the positive sense. They want reasons to slow down, to talk to strangers, to be somewhere other than their apartments or their screens. It’s a contrarian thesis in an industry that’s spent the past decade optimizing for convenience and efficiency. Get in, get out, get on with your day. But if Sarah is correct, the next wave of successful fitness entrepreneurs won’t be the ones who make working out faster—they’ll be the ones who make it slower, more social, and wrapped in the rituals of eating and talking that humans have been doing for millennia.
For now, Sarah is filling her schedule one class at a time, learning the dance steps as she goes. The floor is hers, and everyone is watching. She’s betting they’ll want to join her.
Yayy love groove and sarah!!🩷🩷🩷