Why Good Children's Dance Teachers Are Important
Tiffany Henderson with Amanda Scott
If you look at the demographics within your dance studio business you will find 90% of your enrollment is comprised of dancers ages 2 - 12. Often times, when you first open your studio you are a “one woman show” and as your enrollment grows, classes are added to your schedule. Soon you are teaching 10 hours per week, 25 hours per week, 40+ hours per week in addition to all the other tasks it takes to manage your business and it becomes overwhelming!
I am here to remind you that being a “one woman show” as a dance studio owner is not sustainable. You are only one person! If you are teaching all the classes yourself, you simply cannot manage your business in a way that it can grow. Good children’s dance teachers are the pathway to growth for your business. They enable you to step away and improve work/life balance. Dance teachers are the lifeblood of any dance studio and will make or break the future financial and emotional success of your dance studio business.
To put it lightly, finding good children’s dance teachers is difficult. Dance is a niche market and our pool of qualified dance teacher applicants is sparse and sometimes non-existent. This is because dance teachers come to us with different backgrounds and training - mostly with little to no “preschool” or “school-aged” dance teaching experience; they prefer teaching high school and/or advanced dancers. Dance teacher applicants may have limited skills or little professional dance training or they only proficient in select styles - Modern or Advanced Ballet, for example. In addition, dance teachers sometimes have limited teaching availability due to second or other full-time jobs and geographical restrictions. Finally, most Universities and professional training programs don’t educate or ready dance students for a career teaching preschool or school-aged children dance.
So how do we find good children’s dance teachers? We don’t, we create them. As a studio owner you are proficient in training dancers as young as 2 years old dance steps of many styles. This is proof that you can also train an adult any style in dance with the proper resources and procedures. In my 20+ years of owning dance studios I have found it is not that dance teachers don’t WANT to teach preschool and school-aged dancers, it is that they don’t KNOW what or how to teach them.
Join Tiffany for her next small-group coaching session on Teacher Management this Friday, October 11 at 9:30am PST/ 12:30pm EST.
Have a vision for your dance studio business, but unsure of the steps you need to take or systems you need to implement to get there?
Join industry expert and dance studio owner Tiffany Henderson for the 2020 Dance Studio Owner Challenge.
Benefit from Tiffany’s 20 years of dance studio management and business strategy on a wide variety of topics including how to expand to multiple studio locations, how to hire and train teachers for your preschool and school-aged programs, and how to sell your business successfully.
This 10 month small group coaching and discussion runs September 2019 to May 2020 and includes:
Monthly Small Group Coaching and Discussions
Monthly Studio Accountability Check In’s and Measurements
Discounted Live Event Pricing
Ready to make 2020 your most successful and profitable dance season yet? Let’s get started: http://bit.ly/2020dance