We recently connected with Cortney Berry and have shared our conversation below.

Cortney, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Often outsiders look at a successful business and think it became a success overnight. Even media and especially movies love to gloss over nitty, gritty details that went into that middle phase of your business – after you started but before you got to where you are today. In our experience, overnight success is usually the result of years of hard work laying the foundation for success, but unfortunately, it’s exactly this part of the story that most of the media ignores. Can you talk to us about your scaling up story – what are some of the nitty, gritty details folks should know about?

When we first started our mobile swim school, it was a one-man show! I did all of the marketing, scheduled the clients, collected payments, and taught all of the lessons by myself. I slowly added staff, and eventually my husband quit his full-time job to help me build our family business.

After we added several instructors, we decided to expand into a new territory. We were operating in Houston Texas at the time, so Austin seemed like a logical next step. We ran into several obstacles, such as difficulty finding clients because not as many people have home pools in Austin. Also, the territories were more spread out and traffic patterns were different so our instructors faced timing issues traveling from class to class. We tried for 2 years, but unfortunately we had to close our Austin location.

From there, we understood we needed a larger market. We looked for warm weather, a concentration of wealth, and an abundance of home swimming pools. After much research, we decided on Miami Florida. Miami has one of the highest drowning rates in the country, and the demographics seemed perfect for our business model.

Once we started operating in Miami, we quickly determined that are full attention was needed on this market. We did keep operating in Houston, but we already had the infrastructure in place. We took a chance, and moved our family to South Florida. We found a home that we loved in Northern Palm Beach County. This move helped us quickly develop Miami-Dade, Fort Lauderdale, and Palm Beach County.

After several years of operating in both Texas and South Florida, we were ready to expand again! For this expansion, we chose not to expand into another territory. Instead, we added philanthropy, and child care centers.

We currently raise money and sponsor children for free swim lessons in the summer. We offer scholarships to families that could not otherwise have access to swim lessons. This has become an extremely rewarding part of our business, and we work hard to raise the money for as many scholarships as possible!

We have partnered with a daycare center that has a pool on site to offer their students swim lessons. This has proved to be an excellent way to help children become water safe that may not otherwise have access to a swimming pool. The children are able to swim 5 days a week, which yields amazing swim results!

This year, we are proud to add a summer camp to our services. We are working with an indoor, heated pool in Wellington. We have put together a fun summer swim camp, and are so excited to launch it this June.

We believe that it is important to keep moving forward. Not all expansion plans work, but it is important to try different things until you find what works!

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?

My degree is in healthcare administration, and I worked in that industry for several years. I took a part-time job teaching swimming, and instantly fell in love with the industry. Quickly I became the director of the facility, and realized that this was my life passion. From there, I ran an aquatics program at a tennis and fitness club.

When I got pregnant with my third child, I left my job to teach swim lessons out on my own. I noticed while working at the swim schools, how the parents struggled to bring their kids to the pool, change them before and after lessons, shower them off, etc. I thought it might be easier to do swim lessons at the home.

I chose the mobile Swim School model to make it easier for the parents, and to conduct lessons where most accidents occur.. In backyard pools.

We have been able to take this model and expand it from Texas to South Florida. We teach swim lessons in the comfort and convenience of our clients home or community pools.

Our style is to take a gentle approach to learning to swim. We teach all ages and skill levels, focusing our efforts on survival swim and learn to swim. We pride ourselves in getting our students water safe, while learning to love the water!

We feel proud every time we get another student water safe! Drowning prevention is our true passion, and our life’s work is to spread the gift of swimming!

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

At home swim lessons have proved to be a popular mode of learning to swim for people in the territories that we service.. until COVID happened. After the shutdowns, we realized that even though our lessons were private and at home, many people simply were not comfortable having instructors come to their pools. Public pools and community pools shut down. Our daycare centers and other contracts were terminated. We were left not knowing how to move forward.

We were the lucky ones. Our business model does not include high overhead costs. Therefore, we were able to shut down and ride out the pandemic. Once things started opening up again, we were easily able to incorporate safety measures such as face shields and hand sanitizing in order to make our clients feel safe.

We slowly build our clientele back up, and are now starting to regain our contracts! We have begun teaching in all territories again, are now offering scholarship lessons, and are proud to open our very first summer swim camp this year!

Can you share one of your favorite marketing or sales stories?

COVID was difficult for our business and our family. My husband and I own and work on our swim school together, and have no other significant sources of income. Since we lost all of our contracts, and much of our business.. We did not know if we were going to be able to keep the doors open.

We gave ourself one more year to try and make it work. We gave everything to make sure that we were a success.. Not only for ourselves, before our employees. We were able to secure a contract with a daycare center, and start a summer swim camp in the same year! This income will save our business, and allow us to move forward in a productive and successful way!

Contact Info:

• Website: Safeswimmingschool.com
• Instagram: Instagram.com/safeswimmingschool
• Facebook: Facebook.com/safeswimmingschool