We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Kimberly Downey a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Kimberly thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. How do you think about vacations as a business owner? Do you take them and if so, how? If you don’t, why not?

I would like to say I do ~ or rather, try to take them. I have a hard time breaking away mostly because when my kids are out and free to travel with me, it’s usually the time of the year we are the busiest at work. In terms of taking vacation and a break my advice would be 1. learn to do it – you need it. 2. preparation, preparation, preparation. Have a plan, then a back-up plan, then a back-up plan to your back-up plan
3. always have a right hand person who is just as valuable as you are and make sure they know you appreciate them having your back
4. Always have boundaries on under what circumstances to contact you, but do have a way to be contacted in case of emergency.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I am a 48 year old single Mom of two girls. I got my degree years ago thinking I would travel the world and do international business but wound up working for financial institutions out of college. I decided to find a job where I wouldn’t travel as much, assessed my skill set and started with a small dance program. I taught everything myself first, then when I had kids, needed help. I had great people that worked for me in the classroom so we got bigger and created a beautiful, cohesive team of fabulous teachers. We have about 26-30 employees that we call our “team”. We look at each other as equals, get one another’s backs and always strive to help one another improve and succeed in all they do, even once they leave us and go on to bigger and better things! It’s so much more fun this way!

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Just as business was at its peak, personally my life wasn’t in a great space and filed for divorce thinking I could support my kids and myself on my own. The next day COVID shut us down in 2020. What we thought would be a couple of weeks turned into years of closures for us where we lived. I went from knowing I had the ability to support us to child support being withheld, no place to live with my kids, and on food stamps while my ex pushed out our court dates which would enforce some support while I was closed. I applied for every grant for women in business, PPP loans to keep my staff paid in hopes they could stick it out financially, and an SBA loan. I applied to anything and everything I could do to make money but things were just shut and I now had kids doing school at home which made it difficult to leave the home to work. I went to my locations with action plans to keep people safe and provide dance for kids, I went to city council, you name it. We did have some successes but in the end most of our locations were mandated to remain shut for over 2 years. Though I wanted to give up, I had two kids and had built a great team and business for 12 years so I hung in there and glad I did.

I realized through all this that many other companies that do what I do were not making it through the pandemic and leaving the state or doing something else. These are the locations I marketed to in order to garner new business once things lifted. As I had hoped in my strategy, once things started opening again, we started getting more calls, classes were filled and wait listed with people more than ready to get their kids active again. The rough waters still weren’t over with so many people with conflicting perspectives on masks vs. no masks, etc for the classes but we trained our staff how to handle professionally and weathered the storm.

We are still in rebuilding mode but almost there. We work probably 60 hours a week now in the office, but no one complains. It’s too close still to when we weren’t sure we would ever come back from the pandemic. It was recently we decided to put all the struggles behind us, re-name, re-brand and look towards the future fresh and in an new and exciting way.

Do you have any insights you can share related to maintaining high team morale?

We love our team and we tell them often. Appreciation, understanding and support goes a long way. We treat everyone like equals and from day one tell them we foster open communication and if we establish honesty and trust we will help them with everything we can to make them happy, feel supported and successful not only here but in their future careers as well. Nearly everyone that has left and moved onto full time jobs or careers stays in touch with us and it’s my favorite part of my job. Once they leave, we can drop the professional veil and get to really enjoy our former staff as friends which has been so rewarding.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.SoCaarts.com