7 Steps to a Successful Performing Arts, Drama, Music or Dance School

We are excited to present a guest blog post by Sarah Gittins, an award-winning dance business coach with over 23 years of experience as a dance school owner. After successfully running her multi-venue school in Wales, she transitioned to mentoring and coaching other dance, theatre, and music school owners to empower them to gain more time, money, and life balance. She specialises in helping them create efficient, financially solid schools that align with their personal definition of success. For more information, visit her website or Facebook. 

As a business mentor that helps theatre and dance school owners to streamline, simplify, and grow their business, I am often faced with: 

“I am just so busy juggling everything that I don’t have any time to work on my business. I would love to be less stressed and earn more money, but I don’t know where to start.” 

Start here with some simple steps to help you bring balance to your dance school.

I’m a big planner. In fact for 3 sold out years my Performance Business Tracker that is specifically designed for dance school owners has been helping the performing arts industry plan their way to success. I cannot stress the importance of planning. People often say “Oh, you are super organised” and maybe I am, but I would rather say I am super planned!

If you find yourself always firefighting, if you want to stop this merry-go round you need to get ahead of yourself. Planning is always going to be number one. Let’s say your term is re-opening and you need 30 students. How are you going to do it?

First make a list: 

• Marketing
• Referral
• Sales Page
• Check links are working
• Check what the customer sees

Once you have your list, figure out how long all of this is going to take you. Let’s say 2 months. Break down your jobs into half, then into weeks and if you want, days. (I tend to do weeks).

Then you are planned and ready. Rather than saying the day before you open “I need 30 students” and sending you into panic mode, the aim is to get you out of this and it starts with planning. 

Consistency falls into every aspect of your dance school. Starting with your product, which is the actual classes that you deliver. Whether it’s just you or a team, there has to be a consistency within the quality of the work that’s being delivered. There has to be consistency in your customer service, communication, and in your marketing to make it work. Consistency goes through everything and it starts with systems. Systems are about giving things an order.

Let’s say for example, your enrolment. When you start to have an order to your enrolment, and you do the same thing every single time, that’s when you start to get consistency and your customers get the same communication and service from you. So those enquiring from Facebook get the same as those on email. When you start putting systems in place, people start getting consistent service, and you start getting consistent results.

When you start to work consistently you can start tracking. It’s like having a measuring stick for your business. 

Questions to consider:

• How do you know that your marketing is working?
• Are you tracking where those people are coming from?
• How do you know if the systems you have in place are working?
• Are people opening those emails?
• Are people responding to those emails?
• If they're not responding, Why are they not responding?

Maybe you’ve missed out a call to action in an email you sent out. So you go back and review, and tweak a little bit. You monitor, you track and you realise that people are responding now and that’s it’s because you missed out your call to action. When you’re tracking you can really see what works and what tweaks you need to make. 

PS - You can't track when you are firefighting! 

I will add here…

If you are still in step 1 and step 2, then adding tracking to your to do list will potentially overwhelm you. This is why planning and consistency comes before tracking. That said, you can start collecting data while you’re getting on top of those… 

For instance, if you have invested in a website then make sure you get Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Google Business Profile properly set up and then leave them ticking along in the background. They are free and quick to set up, so you can use them to gather data in the background while you’re getting on top of your planning and consistency. This way, when you’re ready to start taking tracking seriously, you will already have something to work with.  

Delivering a good product, service or class is crucial. Invest in your CPD (Continuing professional development), update your skills and support your staff in their development. Ask important questions to support your retention:

• How are you managing the consistency of the product?
• How are you making sure that the children are achieving week on week?
• Do the parents know what the children are achieving?
• Do the parents understand the progress journey?
• Are you adding in variety?
• Are there options for them to progress if they need to progress?
• Is it fresh, up to date?

I am a massive fan of props in my own dance school as they are visual cues that can help the students. We all know everyone learns in different ways and it’s about how we can engage those variations. I create props, flashcards and think to myself, how can I create a WOW moment? This is where the children leave thinking WOW that was awesome! What is going to create that reaction? How can you amplify the WOW in your own activities?

The internet changed everything. People’s perceptions of service changed and instant answers are the norm. However, in our service based industry, whilst we can have a degree of automated answers, nothing quite beats the personal touch.

Little personal touches, which again, takes me back to the consistency of your customer service. Is everybody getting the same quality? Is everybody getting the same welcome or goodbye? If you have a set ‘hey, welcome!’ every time they arrive and a high five when they leave, is your staff doing it as well? Where is that consistency of the service that they are getting?

If you think about what makes you stand out from the next activity provider or dance school owner it will be a combination of two things; you and your customer service. How you run your school, your values and what you want for your students will always be different to the next person. Same as your communication, how you deliver the service will always vary too. If you uplevel the customer service, you will stand out for the right reasons. 

When you have a mentor you move faster and make fewer mistakes because they’ve walked the path before you. Think about a jungle, if you’ve got somebody in front of you with an axe, chopping down everything and clearing the path so that you can see the potholes to avoid falling into them. It makes your journey a lot easier. It means you can walk without getting slapped in the face with the palm tree because the mentor would have cleared the way. 

I wish I had a mentor when I opened 23 years ago. It would have saved me so much heartache, stress and money. In the long run, I think my business would have been in a very different place. 

It’s about courage. It’s about understanding your values, and standing strong. You know what you want from your dance school and why you started it. There will be times where people will come along, or your mind monkeys will start speaking to you saying “Who are you to run that? That’s not going to work. What if you do this? Surely that will be better.”

They will come.

I want you to have the courage and conviction to stand strong and say “no, this is my school and this is what I want. This is what my values are and what I stand for”. 

When the 7 steps all come together like a beautiful circle, they all feed and support each other. Things start to click into place and it becomes easier to run a dance school. Step by step my lovely people, always one foot in front of the other.