How it all started!

Episode Title: How It All Started: The Story Behind Amy Greaves School of Dance

Every dance school has a story, and this is mine.

In this episode, I'm taking you right back to the beginning—how Amy Greaves School of Dance went from a dream and a handful of students to the thriving community it is today.

I'll share the highs, the challenges, the moments I questioned everything, and the milestones that made it all worthwhile. 

If you've ever wondered what it really takes to start a dance school, you're thinking about opening your own, or you simply love hearing the stories behind successful businesses, this episode is for you.

It's an honest look at where it all began, the lessons I've learned over the last 20 years, and why I still believe that dance has the power to change lives.

So grab a cup of tea, get comfortable, and join me as I share the story behind Amy Greaves School of Dance—because every journey starts with a single step.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:02

Hello everyone, and welcome back to the podcast, The Real Dance Chat with me, Amy Greaves. Hope you guys are all okay and well, and we're gonna jump straight in with a solo episode today. And today is an episode that quite a few people have been asking for, and it's all about how my dance school actually started and how it's developed to what it is today. So get yourselves comfy because there's 20 years to get through. Um and yeah, let's go back to the beginning. So I was 21, I'd done dance since the age of seven, love dance, done loads of different performing, um, choreographing, and I was now at university um doing my degree. I was in my final year of uni, and I had been teaching at the dance school that I went to as a child, but unfortunately had to stop because a lot of my seminars at university went on till five, and then getting back from university just meant I was missing the classes. So I left there. I was working at Zara as well, which was an absolutely amazing job. I loved it, um, but I really missed teaching, so I thought, you know what, I'm going to put on my own classes on the days where I didn't have lectures, and I'm just going to enjoy teaching, um, dancing to the music that I like, choreographing things that I enjoy. So this is how naive I was. I was like, um, where shall I do it? And I think my sister went, Well, Bournemouth's nice, so just do it there. I was like, okay. I picked a random haul out of the yellow pages. Do you remember the yellow pages, guys? Um, they had availability, it was the first haul I rang. I went and had a look, it was nice and big. Um, it wasn't cheap, but it was reasonable. Um, and I just booked two hours on a Tuesday and had no idea how I was going to fill it. And I remember we started with a 45-minute freestyle class, quarter past four till five, and then we used to do 5 15 till 6, another um freestyle class. I don't know why I needed a 15-minute break after teaching one lesson, but anyway, that's what we did. Um, I remember printing um flyers off Word on my computer in my parents' lounge, putting them up, um, posting little flyers that I'd made through people's doors, and I started the dance school in June. Now there's no perfect time to start a business, but starting a dance school in June is perhaps one of the worst times to start because everybody is kind of just thinking about breaking up for the summer, then everyone goes on holidays. So I'll be honest, I really didn't get that many people at all. Um, I'd get the odd one or two, and they'd come for a week and then not the next week. But the only person that consistently was coming was this little girl called Ronnie, and at this point she was pretty much having a private lesson every week, was making zero money, I was in deficit. Anyway, one week she came and she was like, Oh, her dad looked really worried. He was like, Oh, I've got some bad news. We're we can't continue with classes because we're moving back to Israel where those are originally from, and literally my heart sank. I was like, I don't even have one student now. Anyway, um, her parents wanted a dance party for her leaving party, and at that point, I'd never it was my first dance party, like it wasn't really a thing back then. So we hired the studio at the Midlands Arts Centre, it's a brilliant party. All of her friends came from a class, and then the week after, it was a bit like a scene out of a movie. I remember it got to quarter past four, no one was there, poor little Ronnie had gone. I looked at my mum and I was like, Oh, I think we're gonna have to knock this on the head. And for the first time, my mum was like, Oh, maybe. Um, anyway, then I literally turned around, the doors opened, and loads of kids walked in. All these kids that were at Ronnie's party, um, and then they stopped, then like their older sisters joined, so we had like a teenage class, and then it would just it would just grow like that. Like I'd my mum used to, it was really traditional. My mum would sit with her little tin taking the money each week for classes, and she'd be like, Oh, next week we're doing a ballet class, so and so and so-and-so want a ballet class, so I just said you'll do it, and it it just grew like that really organically, and then I um decided to do my teacher training in a secondary school. Um, so I was working full-time in secondary school and doing this on the side, so that's when it kind of moved to Saturdays. And four ages for like six years, I qualified as a dance teacher, worked at a secondary school, was head of dance at secondary school, and ran my own dance school at the same time with a lot of help from my mum. And at that time, yeah, it just kind of was growing, growing, growing really organically. I knew zero about marketing, I knew zero about business, and I I'll be honest, I was just winging it and just like doing things that I thought were fun, enjoyable, and yeah, that's how the dance school built. And then sadly, my mum passed away when I was 25, and it was quite hard then doing the dance school by myself because one, I didn't have that confidant there to speak to and check, and my mum was my biggest cheerleader, but it was also just physically hard, like doing all the books, doing all the orders, and still working full-time. The dance school at this point was quite big, we were doing shows, we were performing in London, and it was just a lot. So I decided I either needed to quit quit my dance teacher job or quit the dance school, and I just thought I can always go back to teaching, but it's going to be very hard to get a dance school again. So I chose the dance school, I left, took a massive um decrease in pay, left a really stable job and was now self-employed. Um, and then yeah, and then I just threw everything and anything at the dance school um and really put my all into it, and that's how it grew, really, mainly through word of mouth. Um, I did finally get a logo and start branding a little bit more, and we got a bit more professional, we got a uniform and stuff. Um, but it was still just me doing everything. I was literally doing admin, accounts, orders, choreography, editing music. I don't know why I edited my own music, there's so many people out there that can do better than me and quicker. Note to anyone listening: don't edit your own music, get someone else to do it, it takes forever. Um, and that's kind of how the dance school grew. Um, the name, I never named it the Amy Gree School of Dance. Um, how that came about was in the early days someone rang up my house, as in my parents' house on the landline and was like, Oh, is this the Amy Grew School of Dance? And I just went, Uh yeah. And then that's the day the Amy Green School of Dance was born. And then I remember telling my parents that from that day on they had to answer the house phone saying, Hello, this is the Amy Grew School of Dance, which really annoyed my dad, but he still did it. Bless him. Um, and then fast forward to 2019, um, I was pregnant and had my little one, and that was the first time I think the dance school for me I found quite tough. I had a really complicated birth, I had emergency C-section, I was in and out of hospital for most of my maternity leave, and I just really underestimated how big a life change having a child is, especially one that doesn't sleep. Um, so I found it really hard going back after I only had four months off. We went back and I found it quite challenging. Um, I don't think I really gave myself enough time off because I was so worried when you're self-employed, if you're not there, how is everything gonna happen? And I kind of just went from overnight doing everything to handing it over to various teachers, which did an amazing job, but I don't think the children were really used to it, so it caused quite a lot of chaos, should I say. Um, but we got through it, I went back, and we were about to perform at the Hippodrome, and then we went into lockdown. We were about to perform at the Winter Gardens in Blackpool, but that didn't happen either because of lockdown. And lockdown was really weird, it was horrible for so many obvious reasons, but it did give me that little bit of extra kind of maternity leave that I felt I missed out on the first like when I initially had my child, so that was quite nice. But I hated teaching on Zoom, um, and probably because I wasn't that passionate about it, it probably came across, and there were some children that loved it, and we still kept some Zoom lessons going for those that I knew really enjoyed it, but we it didn't make any money to sustain a dance school, and I still had all people think like when you're not working that all the overheads go away, but you still have like insurance, you still have you have to pay for Zoom, there's still other business heads and like music licenses that you're still paying for. Um, so yeah, luckily the government funded the dance school during COVID, but the worst bit was going back to work because we'd lost so many students, we'd gone from like 157, I think, down to like 50 students, and then getting new students we couldn't really offer new students in because we had to all be two metres apart, so we didn't really have that much space in the actual studio, and then we had to dance on the spot, so it was more like aerobics, and it was just the the dance school was not making any money at all, and I was it was really around that time where I thought, Am I gonna have to get a different job? and I was like, Oh, and then we got offered to do Blackpool Tower, and we did it, and it was amazing. I'll never forget the students running off the stage, screaming and jumping and crying because they were so proud of themselves, and it was that moment that I went, you know what, I need to make this work financially, I need to make sure the school can get back to what it was, or if not bigger, and that's when I got a business coach, and she really helped me to understand how to still be passionate about dance, still care about your customers, still love the students, but run it like a business. And she taught me about marketing, about branding, about you know, the your customers' journey, and she one of the first things she said is you need to get a team around you. And I thought, well, how the hell am I gonna pay a team when I'm struggling to pay anything? Like we've been in COVID two years. Before that, I was on maternity leave, and now you want me to employ people, but anyway, I did listen to her, and lo and behold, we've got a wonderful team now, which is the best thing we've ever done because it means we can offer so much more to the dance school. I've got so many more um brains I can pick, we can bounce ideas off each other, we can pick each other up if one of us is having a bad day, and it just takes the weight off my shoulders, and I just feel like the dance school can offer so much more and is more sustainable now and runs and operates at a level that can keep going, and I'm really proud of that. Um, so yeah, I'd I would say since coming back from COVID up until now, it's been the most exciting time for the dance school, and I've probably enjoyed it the most, and that is definitely because it correlates with having a team, like I'm not doing it by myself anymore. There's a group of people sharing in that energy and passion and getting other people seeing other people being excited about teaching at your school and being part of events is really really special. So I've really enjoyed that. Um done we've had some brilliant moments since coming back from COVID. Blackpool, as I mentioned, CYD, super weekender, loads of workshops. We've had added a whole aerial programme to the dance school, which has been a dream for years. So yeah, it's been it's been exciting, and here is to another 20 years. God knows what the dance school will look like in 20 years' time. Um, but yeah, that's how it started, that's how it grew. My advice to anyone who wants to open a dance school up is get some business knowledge, don't wait 20 years before you get a business coach. Like just invest in learning from day dot and don't give up learning, just keep going and keep making little changes day by day, and you will get there. So, I hope you've enjoyed that very unscripted, very off the cuff um episode. Um, and yeah, I will see you next week for another episode of the Real Dutch Chat.