Ten Years – That is how long we have officially been in business. It is surreal to think about the first time this thought of owning a dance studio for adults entered our reality, and we decided to make it happen. Now we are about to move into our own space. I cant even believe I just wrote that. I mean, I knew it would happen at some point but I didn’t know it would be at the 10 year mark from the time we decided to go on this journey.
To be honest, I have been chasing this dream of owning a dance studio since 2010. I know I am using a first person point of view because it took sometime before it became our goal. Here is that backstory.
I had just rehabbed my torn ACL and was teaching at Curtain Call Dance Academy in Youngstown, New York. The owner of that dance studio, Stephanie Polka, was younger than I was and was very passionate about her business of dance. I saw her drive, her personality, and her talent all reflected in the students she was mentoring every class. At the time I was also teaching college kids at the Niagara University Kiernan center where I got my start as an instructor. Stephanie’s ambitious energy reinforced the belief within me to go after owning my own adult dance studio. I didn’t know how I would get it done but I knew I was going to figure it out.
I didn’t visualize owning a dance studio with a business partner at the time, but it has been a beautiful journey that has shaped the rest of my life. I found someone just as passionate about dance and teaching dance that ended up becoming my best friend and business partner.
Here is a brief backstory on how it all started…
Susie and I met at the NU Kiernan Center where I taught a weekly adult dance class. She didn’t know at that time that I was walking around with floor samples, color swatches, and mirror options to special order from home depot. All she wanted to do was learn how to dougie, and she boldly interrupted my choreography session to see if I could teach her how.
Lets move forward in time a bit to when we decided to create our own space. At the time, Susie was still in the passenger seat with this idea. She was content with teaching, because she simply enjoyed it, not because she wanted to make it her career or a business. She was content with us creating 2 separate brands where she could do what she loves, and I could focus on what I do. We operated like that for some time until we saw the potential of our collaborative efforts.
Learning how to collaborate as one entity has been the hardest component as business owners, but it has also been the most beautiful part of the growth of what Musicality Central is today. It took us countless hours of honest conversations, annual goal setting sessions, consistent weekly planning, brutally honest weekly class reviews, deep conversations about our end goals in life, working through our own self doubts, taking calculated action despite previous unfavorable results, following through with what we say, being efficient with our time together, learning how to pivot with intention, staying aligned with who we are naturally as individuals, taking responsibility for our role in our opportunities to be better, taking risk bigger than we could imagine, making our clients the absolute center of everything, creating a community that supports each other beyond dance, and being fearless in our pursuit no matter the challenges we faced.
Listing the framework of how we got to this point may sound like a lot of work and honestly it has been, but that is truly how she transitioned from only being a passenger who was along for the ride to being the co-driver of this dream. Most importantly, being friends first created the bridge to having those tough conversations that were instrumental in creating the tools we needed to bring us through so many rough patches. We weren’t able to avoid those rough growth patches, because after we experience conflicts or challenges with running our business, we were still really good friends at the end of the day. Therefore, we had to learn how to value each other’s perspective, listen intently to each other without objections, validate each other before sharing our thoughts, accept each other critiques without taking it personally, make sure our creative voices are heard in all decisions, navigate our emotions through major conflicts, communicate with transparency and clarity, be comfortable with sharing ideas out loud before we were comfortable with them and respecting it even if it is unfinished, learn how to work together as a team (we are still in the learning phase here), and always operating from a place of understanding each other so we can move forward better as well as stronger.
Running a partner based business is not for the weak. However, the fact that we figured out how to do that and remain friends after 10 years is really our biggest accomplishment. You all have witnessed our growth over the years – Our pivot when covid hit and our rebuild after the world returned to a new norm. Now we are finally transitioning into our own space after this incredible 10 year journey. Give us a moment to celebrate what that means in our story in progress.
We look forward to the new challenges this new space will present, but we are confident that we have the tools make this next move what we have always envisioned. Most importantly, we look forward to creating rich, new experiences that inspire everyone that enters the doors of that building to be better in every way as a person. Also focusing our efforts on the idea that dance is just the doorway into moving with the intention that helps you find the people that makes life continuosly better and happier.
