Most boutique fitness brands expand the same way. A market feels right. Someone knows someone. A broker calls with a great space. And before anyone has asked the hard questions, there’s a lease on the table.

RTR Pilates did it differently — and their founder will tell you exactly why that mattered.

Partnering with SABRE was a turning point for us, says Reina Offutt, RTR’s Founder and CEO. Their ability to translate complex market data into a clear, actionable expansion strategy allowed us to move into Philadelphia with confidence. They don’t just find new locations — they are the architects of our growth.

RTR spent nearly two decades building a premium reformer Pilates brand across the DMV. Strong community, proven product, consistent experience. By most measures, they were ready to grow. Demand for reformer Pilates was climbing. The brand had equity. The timing looked right.

But “ready to grow” and “ready to scale” are not the same thing.

First: Get the house in order

Before anyone looked at a single piece of real estate, RTR engaged Tom Jacobson, Principal of SABRE Business Consulting. His job isn’t to find locations. It’s to figure out whether a brand is actually built to support them. Jacobson spent time inside the business — examining operational systems, leadership structure, and unit economics — asking the questions that determine whether expansion strengthens a brand or exposes its weak points.

“A lot of brands come to us wanting help finding locations,” says Jacobson. “The first thing we do is slow that down. Because if the infrastructure isn’t right, more locations just means more exposure to the same problems. With RTR, we needed to understand what they’d built, what was working, and what had to be in place before they could successfully operate outside their home market.”

That meant getting specific about things operators often treat as assumptions: Who exactly is your customer outside the DMV — and where do they actually live? What does your leadership structure look like when you’re running two markets instead of one? What unit economics need to hold true for a new location to perform, in a city where you’re starting with zero community?

These aren’t soft questions. They’re the ones that determine whether your second location validates your model or quietly starts eroding your first.

Then: Find the right market

Once the internal work was done, SABRE National Advisory Principal Douglas Jerum took the lead on market identification and site selection — bringing the real estate and market analysis expertise to match the brand’s now-clarified customer profile to the right geography.

Philadelphia wasn’t chosen on instinct. Jerum’s team analyzed RTR’s existing client base, mapped regional demographics, and identified where the brand’s ideal customer already lived in meaningful density. Philadelphia surfaced from that data. Strong household demographics, a wellness-oriented population, real demand for premium reformer Pilates, and limited direct competition.

“The brands that scale well are the ones that do the hard work before they expand,” says Jerum. “That means validating market selection, clarifying leadership roles, pressure-testing systems, and making sure the customer experience can be delivered consistently somewhere new. RTR was willing to do that work. That’s why this Philadelphia opening is such an important milestone.”

From there, the site search ran three months across more than a dozen potential locations before landing on Narberth Square at 650 Montgomery Ave. in Narberth, PA. Accessible, dedicated parking, a lifestyle retail environment that matched the brand’s premium positioning — and enough square footage to build the studio to RTR’s exact specifications rather than compromise the experience to fit a space.

The result: a 2,766-square-foot studio with 16 reformers, opening August 2026.

What this looks like at scale

RTR’s Philadelphia studio is the first proof point in an aggressive expansion plan — three additional locations by end of 2026, eight in 2027, ten in 2028. That kind of trajectory only works if the model underneath it is solid.

What SABRE built with RTR isn’t just a path to one new studio. It’s a repeatable framework: tested infrastructure, validated market criteria, and a site selection process that can be applied to every market that follows.

That’s the distinction between opening more locations and actually scaling. RTR understood it. SABRE helped them execute it. Philadelphia is where it starts.