Success story: Diamond School of Dance

This studio owner opened her incredible dance classes to EVERY family.

Teams from Diamond School of Dance Capture National Titles

Summary

Entrepreneur scaled her dance lessons business from a few families in her parent’s basement to thousands of families in a gorgeous studio, but couldn’t scale her personal mission – offering discounted classes to families who otherwise couldn’t attend. By partnering with Village, she now offers scholarships that allow EVERY family to participate in Diamond School of Dance's incredible classes, without sacrificing her business.

First week in Village:
Registrations
42
Earnings
$2,898

Background

As we can personally attest to – our founder’s sister was one of Alicia’s early students – DSD is a prime case study in how to scale an extracurricular business from the ground up. Alicia’s self-taught knowledge has made her a thought leader amongst the national community of dance lesson business owners.

The one thing that hasn’t scaled, though, is Alicia’s ability to serve dancers from lower-income backgrounds.

In DSD’s basement phase, providing financial flexibility was easy – Alicia knew every family personally, and she had little to no costs besides her own time. If a family needed a special arrangement in order for their child to attend lessons, Alicia could make an exception to her normal rates.

But as word of mouth spread and DSD’s customer base and business expenses grew, it became increasingly damaging to the business to make these exceptions:

  1. To keep up with the volume of customers DSD needs to standardize billing, but these family-specific financial arrangements make that a hassle.
  2. Alicia no longer has personal relationships with all of her customers, so decisions on whether to lower rates for a family need to be made on blind trust – which has come back to bite her multiple times.
  3. Back when she was a solopreneur, waiving lesson fees just meant less money for Alicia. But now DSD relies on a staff of instructors, so giving away lessons for free either hurts their wages (and therefore product quality) or conflicts with Alicia’s goal to keep the lesson fees as low as possible for all families.

There was one path to solving all 3 of these problems that Alicia was aware of – starting a nonprofit to fund dance scholarships – but that came with its own list of barriers:

All of these cost time and money that DSD simply doesn’t have as an independent studio.

Alicia faced a dilemma: If DSD was much larger, she could offer scholarships because she’d be able to run a nonprofit. If DSD was much smaller, she could offer scholarships because she’d know the families personally and could teach the lessons herself without any overhead. But as a mid-sized activity Provider, Alicia found it impossible to both do the right thing for her business and fulfill her personal mission to increase access to the extracurricular she’s passionate about.

Coming out of COVID-19, this became a business issue, too, when registrations decreased as families’ economic realities worsened. Scholarships were needed badly, but Alicia was stuck.

Teams from Diamond School of Dance Capture National TitlesTeams from Diamond School of Dance Capture National Titles

Our partnership

When Alicia found out about Village and its scholarship program, she was ecstatic.

Within days of first finding out about Village, Alicia’s team had all of DSD’s upcoming lessons moved over to Village and alerted their community about their new capacity to offer scholarships.

One day later, scholarships were being issued for DSD’s registration, all without further work by DSD, or a single dollar leaving their pocket. Here’s how:

We’re just getting started in this partnership with DSD to increase access to dance for families in their community, but the impact is already evident both on a small and large scale:

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