Julie Rice's SoulCycle Success

Julie Rice discovered spinning when she was working as a talent agent for Handprint Entertainment in Los Angeles. "It was my therapy," she remembers. So when Rice, now 41, left Hollywood to open a Handprint office in Manhattan, she looked for an East Coast exercise equivalent. "I couldn't find anything that had the emotional and spiritual energy," she says. Deflated by her fitness prospects and the comparatively marginal New York film scene, she decided to open her own spinning studio.

In 2006 a mutual friend introduced her to Elizabeth Cutler, a former real estate broker looking to get into the fitness business. With their savings—derived partly from Cutler's investment in beverage maker Izze, which was sold to PepsiCo (PEP) for $75 million in 2006—the duo opened a studio on Manhattan's Upper West Side. The building didn't allow signage, so they bought a rickshaw on eBay (EBAY) and painted an arrow on it pointing toward their front door. Initial costs included equipment, instructor salaries, guerrilla marketing, and the daily $65 rickshaw parking ticket.