All Other Miscellaneous Schools and Instruction (U.S., NAICS 2022 code 611699)

A Histometrics industry primer for public-market and private investors.

1. Overview

This is the education sector's junk drawer — the official "everything else" bucket for teaching that does not fit any named school category. Under the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS, the U.S. government's standard industry taxonomy), code 611699 covers instruction that is not academic school, college, trade, business, fine-arts, sports, language, tutoring, exam-prep, or driving instruction. What is left is a grab bag: yoga instruction (studios, camps, and teacher training), public-speaking and personal-development courses, survival training, speed-reading, CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation) and first-aid certification, non-degree Bible schools, charm and modeling schools, and much of the life- and executive-coaching world.[1][2]

Why anyone allocating capital should care: this is a large, growing wellness-and-self-improvement demand pool served almost entirely by very small businesses. As the federal statistics measure it, the industry looks tiny — roughly $4.9 billion of receipts and 55,000 payroll workers.[3][4] But that figure counts only businesses with employees. The real economic activity, once you include hundreds of thousands of solo instructors and nonprofits, is a multiple of that. It is a fragmented, low-capital, high-turnover service industry — a mosaic of specialized instruction businesses, not a single homogeneous sector.

Ways in differ sharply by investor type, and it is worth stating up front that this is primarily a local, private, service industry rather than a stock-market sector. For public-market investors there is almost nothing pure to buy — the handful of listed names touch the category only partially. For private investors it is a natural hunting ground: franchises, owner-operated studios and schools, coaching practices, and private-equity roll-ups of multi-unit operators. The strongest businesses in it, public or private, tend to share the same traits — repeat purchases or memberships, trusted instruction, measurable outcomes, efficient customer acquisition, and low fixed-cost intensity.

2. What it is, and what it excludes

Scope. NAICS 611699 is one of the residual "all other" industries. The Census Bureau's own illustrative examples are public-speaking training, survival training, speed-reading instruction, and yoga instruction (camps or schools).[1] In practice it also absorbs CPR/first-aid training, non-degree Bible schools, personal-development and self-improvement courses, charm/modeling/etiquette schools, and coaching delivered as structured instruction.[2]

What it explicitly excludes — this matters, because most headline "education market" numbers you will see actually belong to these adjacent codes, not to 611699:[1]

• Exam preparation and tutoring — NAICS 611691
• Automobile driving schools — NAICS 611692
• Sports and recreation instruction (many fitness-style yoga/Pilates operations land here) — NAICS 611620
• Fine-arts (music, dance, art) schools — NAICS 611610
• Language schools — NAICS 611630
• Business, computer, and management training — NAICS group 6114 (professional and management development training is 611430)
• Technical and trade schools — NAICS 61151
• Academic K–12, junior colleges, and colleges/universities — 611110 / 611210 / 611310

The line is genuinely fuzzy. A yoga business run as a fitness membership can be coded as recreation (611620) or a fitness center (713940); "yoga instruction, camps or schools" — teaching and teacher-certification — is what belongs in 611699.[1] Leadership and personal-effectiveness training straddles 611699 and 611430. Treat the boundary as porous.

Typical business models. Local, instructor-led classes; short courses and certifications; membership-based enrichment; online courses and subscriptions; corporate or government training contracts; and franchised brands with centralized curriculum, marketing, and royalties.

Ownership mix. Overwhelmingly small, private, owner-operated for-profits, plus a meaningful nonprofit slice (religious/Bible instruction, and the certification giants behind CPR training). The prototypical operator is a single certified instructor with a rented room or a Zoom link. The federal data do not publish a legal-form or public-versus-private ownership split for this code, so we do not assign a precise ownership percentage; the point that matters is that the employer market is highly fragmented and the true supply base is broader still. Publicly traded ownership is rare and, where it exists, indirect.

3. How big it is

Federal business statistics (our ground-truth figures):

A few things fall out of the arithmetic. Average establishment size is about seven workers, and average receipts per firm are roughly $676,000 — micro-businesses, not corporations.[3][4] Average pay works out near $33,500 per worker, consistent with part-time, hourly instructor labor (though this is a headcount figure, not a full-time-equivalent one).[4]

The undercount — read this before quoting the size. County Business Patterns and the Economic Census count only businesses that have payroll employees, and the Economic Census also generally excludes government-owned establishments.[3][4][7] The core activities here — yoga teaching, coaching, public-speaking and survival instruction — are dominated by sole proprietors with no employees, and by nonprofits and public programs classified elsewhere. Solo operators are captured (if at all) in the Census Bureau's separate Nonemployer Statistics, which tracks self-employed businesses with $1,000+ of receipts and no staff.[6] The gap is enormous: private market-research estimates put the U.S. professional-coaching field alone (life, health, and executive coaches, which spans 611699 and adjacent codes) at roughly $16 billion and 232,000+ coaches, with about 22,758 life-coaching businesses.[8][9] Yoga and Pilates studios are estimated at ~$14.7 billion (2024), again spanning several NAICS codes.[10] The lesson: the $4.9 billion employer figure is a real floor, but the true footprint of "miscellaneous instruction" — counting solo instructors, nonprofits, and public programs — is several times larger. State the employer number honestly, and flag the undercount every time.

The federal file also does not report industry-wide operating margins, enrollment, seat-fill or capacity-utilization rates, same-center sales, customer retention, or a current growth rate. Those metrics are genuinely absent here and should not be inferred.

Concentration. This is one of the least concentrated industries the government measures. The top four firms hold about 10.2% of receipts (CR4, the four-firm concentration ratio); the top 50 hold under 30% (CR50); and the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI, a standard 0–10,000 concentration score) is just 37.5 — near the theoretical floor.[3] There is no dominant national player and no natural one.

4. The investable universe

There is no pure public-market play on 611699. The category is a private, small-business and nonprofit industry, and listed companies report business lines rather than revenue by six-digit NAICS code. The two closest listed names touch it only partially; the real owners are private.

Closest listed proxies:

Adjacent listed education names (in excluded codes — tangential exposure only). Investors scanning the "education" tape will hit these, but note they are classified outside 611699 and should be analyzed as individual businesses, not summed as a measure of this industry: Coursera (NYSE: COUR; online skills, now including Udemy),[19] Duolingo (Nasdaq: DUOL; language-learning subscriptions — language is excluded),[20] Nerdy / Varsity Tutors (NYSE: NRDY; tutoring — excluded),[21] Skillsoft (NYSE: SKIL; corporate skills software — group 6114), and Strategic Education (Nasdaq: STRA; degree and employer education). None is a 611699 operator.

Major private and nonprofit owners (the on-target ones):

• CorePower Yoga — largest U.S. yoga-studio chain, ~220 locations, private-equity owned.[14]
• Dale Carnegie & Associates — the classic public-speaking and personal-development brand; private.
• Toastmasters International — public-speaking training; nonprofit membership organization.
• American Heart Association and American Red Cross — the dominant CPR/first-aid certification bodies; nonprofits that anchor a training market worth roughly $1.85 billion in North America (2025 estimate).[15]
• Tens of thousands of solo operators — independent yoga teachers, life/executive coaches, survival and public-speaking instructors — most with no employees.[6][8]

The roll-up template (mostly adjacent, but instructive). Private-equity "enrichment" platforms show how local instruction gets consolidated even when the underlying brands sit in neighboring codes: Unleashed Brands (Sylvan, The Little Gym, Snapology, Premier Martial Arts),[22] Youth Enrichment Brands / School of Rock, backed by Roark Capital,[23] and Kumon's franchised network[24]. Their brands mostly fall in tutoring, sports, music, or martial-arts codes, but the model — a platform standardizing marketing and curriculum across many small units — is exactly how institutional capital enters this space.

For public investors the honest summary: broad consumer-discretionary or education funds give you diffuse, incidental exposure; there is no dedicated exchange-traded fund (ETF) for this niche, and even the two "closest" stocks are small-caps whose businesses only overlap the category.

5. How the money works

These are labor-intensive, asset-light service businesses, and the economics reflect that.

• Revenue = seats × price, or memberships. An operator earns by filling classes and courses (capacity utilization / class fill rate), by selling recurring memberships and subscriptions, or via camps, certifications, licensing, and business-to-business (B2B) contracts. A half-empty yoga class or coaching cohort is the core failure mode.
• The main cost is the instructor. Instructor pay is the dominant variable cost; studio rent is the main fixed cost for physical schools, alongside marketing, software, payment processing, materials, insurance, and franchise royalties. Because owner-operators usually teach the classes themselves, reported "profit" is largely the owner's own labor income. With average industry pay near $33,500 per worker, this is a low-wage, part-time labor model.[4]
• Recurring revenue is the prize. The best businesses convert one-off buyers into repeat revenue: studio memberships, content subscriptions (Franklin Covey's "All Access Pass" produced ~$112 million of deferred subscription revenue at FY2025 year-end),[11] and — uniquely valuable — mandated recertification. OSHA (the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration) and many state rules force employers to keep CPR/first-aid credentials current, so recertification is estimated to drive 55–65% of CPR-training revenue on a one-to-three-year renewal cycle.[15] That is a non-discretionary, annuity-like base most consumer instruction lacks.
• Certification confers pricing power. Courses that grant a recognized credential — a CPR card, a 200-hour Registered Yoga Teacher (RYT) certificate, an International Coaching Federation (ICF) coaching credential — command premium prices and spin off lucrative teacher-training revenue.
• Franchising is how scale (and public capital) enters. A franchisor is asset-light: it collects roughly a 7% royalty plus a ~2% marketing fee on franchisees' system-wide sales, plus upfront franchise fees, without owning the studios.[12] Average unit volume (AUV, the revenue of a typical location) is the key franchise health metric — YogaSix's AUV runs around $468,000.[13] This royalty stream, not studio operations, is what a public-market investor is actually buying in a name like Xponential.

Format matters. A digital course can carry high incremental margins but heavy marketing and platform costs; a physical school earns strong local retention but is capped by rent, staffing, schedules, and available seats. Prepaid tuition helps working capital, but refunds and seasonal enrollment can reverse that quickly. The metrics worth underwriting: seat-fill and instructor utilization, revenue per learner-hour, membership renewal and churn, same-center sales, customer-acquisition cost and payback, instructor payroll as a percentage of sales, refunds/chargebacks, and franchisee-level cash conversion.

6. What drives demand

• Discretionary wellness and self-improvement spending. Yoga, personal development, and coaching rise and fall with disposable income and consumer confidence — the discretionary, cyclical core of the industry.[10]
• Regulatory and employer mandates. OSHA workplace first-aid requirements, plus state rules requiring CPR for teachers, childcare and healthcare workers, and (in some states) high-school graduation, create steady, renewal-driven, non-discretionary demand.[15] This compliance base is the industry's ballast and is generally steadier than discretionary consumer classes.
• Corporate learning-and-development (L&D) budgets. Leadership, communication, and coaching programs sold to employers move with corporate profits and hiring — the main swing factor behind names like Franklin Covey.[11]
• Cultural, demographic, and delivery trends. The long-run wellness boom, families seeking structured after-school and weekend activities, career changes and reskilling, remote/online delivery that extends an instructor's reach beyond a local room, and the professionalization of coaching all widen the market.[8][10] Artificial intelligence (AI) expands course supply and personalization — but also lowers entry barriers and raises substitution risk.

7. Regulation

Light federal industry regulation, but several real touchpoints — and note that NAICS is a statistical classification, not a license, so what actually binds depends on the activity, location, customer, and delivery method:

• State proprietary-school licensing. Many states license and bond private/career schools. Purely avocational, non-degree instruction (a yoga class, a personal-development seminar) is often exempt, but operators must check state education-agency rules, facilities and safety codes, instructor background checks, and refund rules.
• Credentialing bodies set de facto standards — and they are mostly private, not governmental: the American Heart Association / American Red Cross / ASHI (American Safety & Health Institute) for CPR, Yoga Alliance's voluntary RYT registry for yoga teacher training, and the ICF for coaching. Quality signaling is self-regulatory and unstandardized.
• OSHA drives mandatory workplace first-aid/CPR training.[15]
• Consumer protection and advertising claims. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and state attorneys general police deceptive marketing — a live risk for coaching and personal-development programs that promise employment, earnings, test-score, or certification outcomes.
• Franchising rules. The FTC Franchise Rule requires franchisors to give prospective franchisees a Franchise Disclosure Document (FDD) covering 23 specified items before a sale; California has tightened franchise oversight, a headwind flagged in Xponential's own filings.[16][12]
• Children's privacy. Online providers serving minors must meet the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), including parental notice and verifiable consent before collecting personal information from children under 13.[18]
• Mostly outside federal student aid. Because these are non-degree, avocational programs, they generally do not qualify for U.S. Department of Education Title IV student aid (which requires an eligible institution and program, state authorization, and accreditation or an approved alternative) — sparing them "gainful employment" rules, but also denying them a federal-subsidy tailwind.[17]

For a private buyer, the FDD, state filings, insurance, complaint and refund history, and marketing claims deserve as much scrutiny as the income statement.

8. Competitive dynamics and consolidation

The defining fact is extreme fragmentation: a CR4 of 10.2% and an HHI of 37.5 make this one of the most competitive industries in the federal data.[3] Barriers to entry are trivial — a certified instructor plus a room or a webcam — which guarantees chronic new entry and price competition. Substitutes are everywhere: free online content and social platforms, in-house employer training, public recreation programs, community and religious organizations, and AI-enabled self-study.

Consolidation, where it happens, runs along three tracks:

1. Franchising — rolling independent boutique studios into branded systems (Xponential's YogaSix; the broader boutique-fitness roll-up).[12][13]
2. Private-equity roll-ups — assembling multi-unit operators for scale and density (CorePower Yoga; the enrichment platforms in §4).[14][22]
3. Digital marketplaces and apps — aggregating solo instructors and coaches onto subscription platforms.

Moats are modest and come from brand, recognized certification, membership density, and recurring revenue. The concentration data leave ample room to consolidate but little basis for a single national winner — instructor quality, local demand, and franchisee economics cap how far standardization can go. Undifferentiated solo operators compete on price and location and churn heavily.

9. Risks

• Cyclicality. Wellness, coaching, and personal-development spending is discretionary and among the first cut in a downturn; enrollment is also seasonal.
• Low barriers → permanent price pressure and a high small-business failure rate.
• Free/cheap digital substitution. Free YouTube yoga, low-cost online CPR refreshers, and AI "coaching" compress pricing on the consumer side and erode loyalty.
• Labor and key-person risk. The business often is the instructor; solo practices don't survive the founder, and multi-unit operators face wage pressure, turnover, inconsistent quality, and contractor-vs-employee classification disputes.
• Reputation and liability risk. Poor outcomes, safety incidents, child-protection failures, or misleading claims can damage a brand quickly.
• Real-estate exposure. Studios carrying leases were badly hurt in the pandemic — a standing lesson for physical formats.
• Regulatory risk. FTC scrutiny of unsubstantiated coaching/self-improvement claims; tightening franchise regulation (California); shifts in privacy (COPPA), student aid, or state licensing that hit specific niches disproportionately; fragmented, unpoliced credentials that dilute quality signals.
• Measurement risk. Federal employer statistics omit large nonemployer and government activity, so top-down sizing is unreliable.
• For the listed names specifically. Both FC and XPOF are small-caps; Xponential posted a net loss of about $53.7 million in 2025 and has faced governance and short-seller controversy, while Franklin Covey's enterprise sales are lumpy — and any listed "proxy" may have limited direct 611699 exposure, making valuation comparisons unreliable.[11][12]

10. How to invest, and the outlook

Public routes (limited, indirect). Franklin Covey (NYSE: FC) is the cleanest listed proxy for the personal-development/leadership-training and subscription-content side; Xponential Fitness (NYSE: XPOF) gives franchise-royalty exposure to boutique fitness including YogaSix, though most of its system is recreation-coded rather than 611699.[11][12] There is no pure-play stock and no dedicated ETF; broad consumer-discretionary or education funds provide only diffuse exposure, and the adjacent-education tickers in §4 sit in excluded codes. The public-market thesis, where it exists, is really a bet on asset-light franchise royalties and recurring subscriptions, not on teaching itself — so start from segment-level revenue exposure, recurring-revenue share, retention, cash generation, debt, and marketing efficiency, and judge the share price, dividend yield, or valuation multiple only after adjusting for actual business mix. Useful tools include enterprise value (EV) to earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA), free-cash-flow yield, and annual-recurring-revenue (ARR) growth — none meaningful without normalizing customer-acquisition cost, retention, working capital, and instructor intensity.

Private routes (the main event). This is fundamentally a private and small-business industry. The realistic ways in: buying a franchise (a YogaSix or a CPR-training territory), owning independent studios/schools or a coaching practice, and — for institutional capital — private-equity or search-fund roll-ups of multi-unit operators, or venture investment into edtech/wellness platforms that aggregate solo instructors. Underwrite on capacity utilization, membership retention, recurring-revenue share, lease burden, instructor economics, deposits/refunds, insurance, litigation, and local competition. For franchises, scrutinize the FDD, franchisee closures and renewal rates, and the gap between franchisor royalties and franchisee profitability.

Near-term drivers (forward-looking judgments). Expect resilient long-run wellness demand and a durable, renewal-driven CPR/first-aid base as ballast, partly offset by cyclical softness in discretionary coaching and studio spend and by recovering-but-choppy corporate L&D budgets.[8][10][11][15] AI cuts both ways: it lets operators scale delivery and personalize instruction, but free AI coaching and content threaten pricing at the low end. Tighter franchise regulation in states like California is a headwind for the franchisor model. The overall shape is unlikely to change: a durable but low-margin, ultra-fragmented service industry where the winners are the few that achieve scale through franchising, brand, credentials, and recurring revenue — while the long tail remains thousands of owner-operators earning a living one class at a time. The federal data offer no industry-wide forecast; this outlook is qualitative and selective by design.

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Sources

1. U.S. Census Bureau, "NAICS 2022: 611699 All Other Miscellaneous Schools and Instruction" (definition, illustrative examples, and cross-references), 2022. https://www.census.gov/naics/?details=611699&input=611699&year=2022
2. IBISWorld, "NAICS Code 611699 — All Other Miscellaneous Schools and Instruction," 2025. https://www.ibisworld.com/classifications/naics/611699/all-other-miscellaneous-schools-and-instruction/
3. U.S. Census Bureau, "2022 Economic Census — Concentration of Largest Firms (EC2200SIZECONCEN), NAICS 611699" (firms ~7,239; receipts ~$4.89 billion; CR4 10.2%, CR8 14.1%, CR20 21.2%, CR50 29.6%; HHI 37.5), 2025. https://api.census.gov/data/2022/ecnsize/groups/EC2200SIZECONCEN.html
4. U.S. Census Bureau, "County Business Patterns 2023, NAICS 611699" (establishments ~7,912; employment ~55,031; annual payroll ~$1.846 billion; first-quarter payroll ~$422.9 million), 2025. https://www.census.gov/data/datasets/2023/econ/cbp/2023-cbp.html
5. U.S. Small Business Administration, "Table of Small Business Size Standards, NAICS 611699 = $16.5 million average annual receipts," 2023. https://www.sba.gov/document/support-table-size-standards
6. U.S. Census Bureau, "Nonemployer Statistics (program description and coverage of self-employed businesses without payroll)," 2025. https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/nonemployer-statistics.html
7. U.S. Census Bureau, "Understanding NAICS and Economic Census Coverage" (Economic Census generally excludes government-owned establishments), 2025. https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/economic-census/year/2022/guidance/understanding-naics.html
8. ResearchAndMarkets (via BusinessWire), "United States Professional Coaching Industry Report 2025 — 232,000+ coaches, ~$16 billion industry," Dec. 2025. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20251204763253/en/
9. Grand View Research, "U.S. Life Coaching Market Size, Share — Industry Report," 2025 (life-coaching businesses ~22,758). https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/us-life-coaching-market-report
10. MMCG Invest, "The Business of Yoga and Pilates Studios in America" (~$14.7 billion, 2024 data), 2025. https://www.mmcginvest.com/post/stretching-toward-prosperity-the-business-of-yoga-and-pilates-studios-in-america
11. Franklin Covey Co., "Financial Results for Fourth Quarter and Full Fiscal 2025" (revenue ~$267.1 million; deferred subscription revenue ~$111.7 million), 2025. https://ir.franklincovey.com/news-releases/news-release-details/franklin-covey-reports-financial-results-fourth-quarter-and-full/
12. Xponential Fitness, Inc., "Form 10-K FY2025 and Q3 2025 Results" (FY2025 revenue guidance ~$300–310 million; North American system-wide sales ~$1.73–1.75 billion; ~7% royalty + ~2% marketing fee; 2025 net loss ~$53.7 million; California franchise-regulation note), 2025–2026. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1802156/000180215626000016/xpof-20251231.htm
13. Franchise Chatter, "YogaSix Franchise Review 2025" (~192–200 studios; AUV ~$468,000), 2025. https://www.franchisechatter.com/2025/05/30/yogasix-franchise-review-2025-costs-fees-news-average-revenues-and-or-profits/
14. FitnessNav Intelligence, "Yoga Studio Market — brand benchmarking" (CorePower Yoga ~220 U.S. locations), 2026. https://www.fitnessnav.com/insights/fastest-growing-yoga-studio-brands/
15. MarketIntelo / Dataintelo, "CPR and First Aid Training Market Research Report" (North America ~$1.85 billion, 2025; OSHA renewal-driven demand; recertification ~55–65% of revenue), 2025. https://marketintelo.com/report/cpr-and-first-aid-training-market
16. Federal Trade Commission, "Franchise Rule" (Franchise Disclosure Document; 23 required disclosure items), 2026. https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/rules/franchise-rule
17. U.S. Department of Education, "Federal Student Aid Handbook: Institutional Eligibility" (Title IV eligibility requirements), 2025. https://fsapartners.ed.gov/knowledge-center/fsa-handbook/2025-2026/vol2/ch1-institutional-eligibility
18. Federal Trade Commission, "Children's Online Privacy Protection Rule: Not Just for Kids' Sites" (COPPA notice and verifiable-consent requirements for children under 13), 2026. https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/childrens-online-privacy-protection-rule-not-just-kids-sites
19. Coursera, "Coursera Completes Combination with Udemy," 2026. https://investor.coursera.com/news/news-details/2026/Coursera-Completes-Combination-with-Udemy-to-Build-the-Worlds-Most-Comprehensive-Skills-Platform/default.aspx
20. Duolingo, "Company Strategy Overview," 2026. https://investors.duolingo.com/company-strategy-overview-0
21. Nerdy, "Fourth-Quarter 2025 Financial Results," 2026. https://investors.nerdy.com/news/news-details/2026/Nerdy-Announces-Fourth-Quarter-2025-Financial-Results/default.aspx
22. Unleashed Brands, "Brands" (Sylvan Learning, The Little Gym, Snapology, Premier Martial Arts, Class 101), 2026. https://www.unleashedbrands.com/brands
23. School of Rock, "Roark-Backed Youth Enrichment Brands Acquires School of Rock," 2023. https://www.schoolofrock.com/news/franchise/roark-backed-youth-enrichment-brands-acquires-school-of-rock
24. Kumon North America, corporate/franchise overview, 2026. https://www.kumonfranchise.com/