The 8 WORST Mistakes Dance Studio Owners Make
Tiffany Henderson
I was a young, naïve, idealistic dancer just a few years out of college when I first opened my dance studio 20 years ago. Today I own seven demographically diverse locations of Tiffany’s Dance Academy servicing an enrollment of 4,500 students and I’m the founder of Twinkle Star Dance.
Before opening my studio, I taught at a couple different dance studios; one of them was 50 miles away from my house. Despite that awful commute that sometimes took two hours each way, I started to understand the importance of certain types of students in certain types of studios. You see, I really, really loved to dance and I still do to this day. I wanted to share my passion with my students and I wanted them to grow into amazing dancers that pursued their passion for the rest of their lives. The 100 mile-a-day commute eventually grew to be too much for me. My husband, Paul, and I crunched the numbers and decided to open our own dance studio near our new home in Livermore, California. “What could possibly go wrong?” we thought.
The reality of owning a dance studio is quite different from the “dream” of owning a dance studio...especially for an idealist, like me. Paul and I had calculated that we needed 60 students to “break-even.” I did some marketing and handled all of the phone calls myself. Luckily, we had our break-even number of students registered and paid before we actually started running classes. Once we started the classes, students came from all over. Hundreds of them! We had over 355 dancers at the end of our first season.
Sounds dreamy, right? Wrong! While the revenue was okay, the stress was unbearable. Why? It’s because we were trying to do too much, too soon, with too few. I was teaching too much. Collecting tuition, chasing down late payments, writing newsletters, ordering costumes, sorting costumes, delivering costumes, creating summer schedules, creating Fall season schedules, marketing my schedules and my camps, selling recital tickets, running rehearsals, dress rehearsals, recitals. I was utterly exhausted and for the first year of my “successful” business, I cried almost every night because some crazy parent had yelled at me for some ridiculous reason.
If you own a studio or are thinking about owning a studio, learn from my successes and failures.
Studio owners make a lot of mistakes, like not answering the office phone during business hours or failing to implement online registration. I’m only covering the 8 WORST things you can do if you want to earn a comfortable living doing what you love...teaching dance!
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Meet Tiffany Henderson, industry expert and dance studio owner just like you. Tiffany shares the 8 worst mistakes a new studio owner makes plus her tired and true tips to help you avoid burnout while you run and grow a profitable dance studio business.
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