Liza Minelli

The  Hardest Lesson In Life is: Realizing You Don’t Know WHAT You Don’t Know.

In my lessons with the elite of the dance world I never blindly accepted anything. I questioned and challenged everything. I learned that some people regurgitate what they learned without understanding the underlying principles. “Just because” was never good enough for me. The best could take any question and answer it in a way that held up to natural laws such as gravity, physics, momentum, and human physiology. I learned that you never stop learning, so while you may be the guru of a mountain top, somewhere there is a higher mountain. And so I am always in search of that guru. I look at everyone, no matter how experienced or green and I can learn from them (if even how not to do something). So in 40 years, the biggest lesson I learned from several masters is- “You don’t know WHAT you don’t know”.  So as Michael Jordan says above-You have to be humble enough to ask.

Another great lesson I learned is: “The great thing about ‘change’ is that if you don’t like the change, you can always CHANGE BACK! So don’t be afraid to try something new.

When I teach anyone, I love to be challenged. I try never to teach anything that doesn’t make sense, that cannot stand up to a challenge the way one does when presenting a masters thesis to a group of experts. Yet over my career I have heard some of the dumbest ideas proclaimed by so called experts. One of the dumbest is that group classes don’t make money. Over my studio days I would make more in a 90 minute class than I would have teaching 10 private lessons. If you value a private more than groups then your focus is on that. There is no question that McDonalds food is not the equal of Wolfgang Puck’s Spago restaurant. Yet as they say on the sign ” Billions and Billions Served.” If your group classes are held during the premium hours, are taught by the master instructors with boatloads of energy (not the newbie teacher to practice his Syllabus), the class becomes the highpoint of your day, your student’s night and is so much fun that they will bring their friends to join in with you having to beg and plead for them to do guest parties. By the way, I NEVER held a guest party because my students brought new friends at the beginning of each series.  HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE??? You’ll just have to ask me.

Am I suggesting that you give up privates for groups? On the contrary, With big classes came lots more students and people to dance with. Once the newbies realized that the FASTER they learned, the more people would ask them. Not the teacher doing it out of obligation. The key to faster and better was the path of privates, not pro-am. In my intake assessment of a studio, I going in already knowing why your group classes won’t grow, and why you fall back to privates during the prime hours and group classes in some dark back room or in a corner.

Advantages of Big Group Classes

• High Energy Studio
• Greater Visibility in Your Community
• Students Can Afford To Come Multiple Times Per Week
• They Make Deeper Relationships, Making It Harder To Ever Leave
• Less Need For Procedures, Excess Sales Managers
• Parties Become Events
•  When Students Focus on One Style, They Get Past The “This Is Difficult Stage” Faster
• When They Realize Dancing Is Easy They Are More Open To Other Dances Without Procedures
• Easier To Build Formation/Performance Teams.
• Studio Regains Control of Students Instead Of Individual Teachers.

My Loss Is Also Your Loss

In January 2021 I lost the 2nd of my mentors- my best friend and the Dance Legend Ron Montez. When I started, he was teaching classes of 125 students, and another mentor, Lou Schreiber was teaching classes of 225 and parties of 500. Both are gone now. I want to share their secrets and many that I learned by accident and observation on my way to creating the biggest studio in Los Angeles County. Both of them were part of this project.

Why have I spent so much time writing a book, building this website, collecting hundreds of videos and pictures to use as examples, and hundreds of hours on the phone with friends and colleagues? Simple- I love this business! I have seen the bad days of dance studio criminal behavior, started in studios that almost made me find another line of work. And I had a THIRTY-TWO YEAR run of fun. I am still in the business but evolving towards being able to stay in it long after the body says that’s enough. I want to see studios as plentiful and successful as McDonald’s. Many of you would like to be the only game in town because competition scares you. Studios on every corner would happen because MILLIONS of people are dancing. You can work your way up the corporate Dance franchise ladder or you can build a dream studio of your own. But I am not going to sugarcoat it. If your studio consists of classes of 10 students, boring weekly guest parties, and lots of one on one privates, you are me 36 years ago.