We were lucky to catch up with Jay Schwertfeger recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Jay, thanks for joining us today. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

As a teenage, I always wanted to be a professional drummer in a rock band but I also had an itch to be a teacher. Along with these two passions, I was also very into fitness. Just before Covid hit, I was teaching 2nd grade and I had started to bring in my hand drum to school to create a live version of freeze dance for my kids. As we got sent home to do online learning, I decided to create a video of me drumming doing our freeze dance for my kids.

This is essentially where my idea came from. I realized that I could make freeze dance more educational by adding in lessons to the part where the kids froze in place. I was able to combine my love for music, learning and fitness into these freeze dance videos and then realized that it didn’t have to be limited to my class alone; I could create these for kids everywhere.

From there I dove in and focused on creating freeze dance videos for K-3. It was during this time that I realized as kids get older, they don’t necessarily like to “dance”. I began experimenting with different ways to have kids move and have finally landed of five styles: freeze dance (moving freely to the music), guided movement (following along to gross motor and crossing the midline movements), desk drumming (drumming on their desk while following the patterns I show), pool noodles (drumming on the desk with giant drum sticks and finally dot freeze dance (kids create five colored paper circles and step on them in alignment with pattern on screen.).

All videos follow the formula of move, freeze, learn, repeat.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I got into teaching after fulfilling my dream of being a professional drummer as Jay on the Drums. Being a teacher was a dream I also had as a youth as I wanted to be positive role model for other people. This idea sprung out of my love for the band 311 as their positive lyrics helped me through the loss of my mother.

I was able to combine my love for teaching, music and fitness into one vocation (kidsfreezedance.com) during Covid and have been working hard every day since. My service is essentially a video streaming service for teachers and homeschooling parents. The video library contains thousands of educational videos that mix movement with learning. The goal here is to make learning fun!

Essentially, my service solves the issue of keeping kids engaged in learning by using purposeful movement to help educate. This has been a game changer for teachers as it helps create variety in their day and allows children the change to proactively use their energy. My service is vastly different from the common youtube videos that exist as those are less focused on learning and more on silly movements and brain breaks.

I am most proud of how I was able to combine my three loves (music, teaching, fitness) into one service that actually helps people. I feel I’ve gotten to live out my dream of being a positive role model through this avenue.

I want my customers to know that I truly love making these videos and it is so rewarding when I hear how their kids love it.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

I feel that resilience comes from discipline. I have found a way to set aside 2-3 hours each day to work on my business. During the times that I have my lowest about what I am doing, the routine of my work flow has really helped save me as I’ve set it up in such a way that I can do it almost without thinking.

I believe that routine is very important in business and the more consistent you are with that, the better results you’ll see. I would rather have discipline that motivation, as the later is fleeting while the former is long lasting.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

I recently had to learn how failure is going to happen and how to not take it personally. I found a great talk by Jim Rohn in which he details how seeds from a tree are going to land where they land. As they land, maybe a small percentage will take and start to grow. This is something we can’t control.

From this point, maybe only 1 out 3 will grow, and again – this is something we can’t control. The moral is, the more you seed the better your chances and don’t waste your time trying to understand why something didn’t work or in my case, someone cancelled their membership on my site. The quitters are going to quit and the users are going to continue to use :)

Contact Info:

• Website: http://www.kidsfreezedance.com
• Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/kidsfreezedance
• Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/kidsfreezedance
• Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/kidsfreezedance
• Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/kidsfreezedance

Image Credits

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