This ballroom-studio owner in Seattle has always been resourceful, operating a restaurant and creating a popular date-night experience for her clients taking lessons in social dance. But the pandemic is stretching her creative muscles to the max as she tries to preserve both her studio and restaurant businesses until her customers can safely return.
A smart plan can serve as a road map through a world of unknowns. Here’s why your dance business needs one, and four steps to set you up for planning success.
Though Jenelle Manzi had a snack bar company in the works for years before the pandemic hit, the time has proven perfect for bringing her first product to market.
We often associate vision, mission and values statements with big nonprofits or corporations. But the truth is such statements can guide businesses of any size through challenging moments and help them stay focused on what’s important—especially now. Dance Business Weekly asked three small dance businesses how they’ve used their vision, mission and values statements.
After 30 years, a new generation of leadership has stepped into the shoes of the organization’s original founders, with ambitious plans to put this former horse farm on the cultural map.
Hundreds of dancers from dozens of dance studios huddled onstage awaiting awards; a theater full of parents; a new city every week. The traditional formula for dance competitions clearly won’t work in COVID-19 times. So what’s the alternative?
Amid the uncertainty of doing business during the COVID-19 pandemic, two popular community dance hubs with very different trajectories—L.A.’s EDGE Performing Arts Center and Chicago’s Visceral Dance Center—share their plans for the future.
With a second location opening soon, a shortage of volunteer teachers, and a $1.1 million fundraising nut, Groove with Me dance studio in East Harlem boldly enters its 25th year.
What happens when a founder dies just before opening his dance school? At the late Kabby Mitchell III’s Tacoma Urban Performing Arts Center, a new leader was born in Klair Ethridge, who has grown the school threefold since its opening in 2017 and demonstrated what a mission-driven dance organization looks like today.
Between a global pandemic and a long-overdue reckoning around racial injustice, it’s clear that the time for business-as-usual is over. But at a time when typical marketing tactics feel irrelevant—or even inappropriate—what’s a small dance business owner trying to bring in revenue to do?
