We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Kinsey Flores and Cathy Barnett. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Kinsey and Cathy below.
Kinsey and Cathy, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?
Dance is powerful. It has the potential to make you feel confident, carefree, comfortable in your body, and expressive. Dance is powerful and yet – dance can also be intimidating, judgmental, and unwelcoming. For every person who is the first on the dance floor and the last to leave, there is someone who was teased in middle school about their developing dance moves and hasn’t stepped on a dance floor since. I grew up dancing three days a week for 8 years in a small studio in Tucson, Arizona. My business partner had the same experience dancing in her hometown in New Zealand. Dance was and is a huge part of who we are and watching people feel rejected, unwelcome, and intimidated by simply stepping onto a dance floor was a problem we had to tackle, so we decided to open our own studio – PopRox Dance Studio. We focused on creating classes that were enjoyment-based instead of fixated on “perfection.” We hired teachers that had themselves experienced rejection from the dance community and were committed to creating a different experience for their students. Our customers range in age from 5 to 65 and have a diverse range of dance experience and stories. We have students who were told they shouldn’t dance because they were too overweight, too inexperienced, too gay, too old, and everything in between. We received confirmation early on that we were on the right path when we spoke with two moms who were looking for a dance studio for their son (who preferred tutus over cargos). He had been turned away from several other studios that insisted he stick to their dress code. We told them to bring him AND his tutus and we would gladly teach him how to dance. This moment made us realize not only were we on the right path, but we were serving a community that had never been prioritized, but was thirsty for what we were offering. Dance has lifted so many people up, it has also left so many people behind – and those people are our people.
Some of the ways we create our high-touch customer service environment is by learning our customers names, asking about their previous experiences with dance, cheering them on when they move up a level, and giving them a gentle push when they aren’t feeling their most confident. Our classes are student-focused instead of teacher-focused. We achieve this by moving at the pace of our customers, always offering modifications for anyone and everyone who may need them, and making sure each class is filled with encouragement and reassurance. In the year and a half that we have been open at our current studio, our dance community has become a dance family. We have watched customers go from only taking private lessons because of their nervousness to performing with us at an arena venue. We have comforted dancers on their bad days and encouraged them in moments where they are unsure of themselves. PopRox Dance Studio has grown in ways we never imagined, and we can’t wait for the opportunity to continue to serve our community.
Kinsey and Cathy, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
Cathy and I both grew up dancing in traditional studio environments. Every class was the same — we would stretch, do our “across the floor” exercises, and then work on our routine. While this structure provided a level of predictability, it always felt like there wasn’t enough room for our personal creativity. I grew up in an academic home surrounded by multiple family members with PhDs and there was a subliminal message in my home that dance was for fun, but wasn’t something that could be an actual occupation. So when I was 17 and focusing on college applications and what my future would look like, I stopped dancing cold turkey. Cathy continued to dance through high school, college, and continued to dance professionally in music videos and local nightclubs until her career took her into different disciplines.
Later on in our lives, when we wanted to get back into dancing for the fun of it, we both tried a number of classes in the city buy felt like every class was catered to the experience of the instructor instead of the customers. The instructors seemed to be hyper-focused on their own choreography and wanting to make sure that customers did the dance exactly as they wanted them to. This seemed counter-intuitive to the fact that we, as the participants in their class, were the paying customers.
When we opened our studio in 2017, we were primarily a kid’s dance studio because we wanted to create a different relationship with dance from the ground up. Many people begin their dance journey in childhood, like we did, and the messaging about the “right” and “wrong” ways to dance start early on. However, over the past five years we have grown into a kids and adult class dance studio, because dance is for everyone and everyone deserves to have an experience with dance that is positive, encouraging, and empowering.
We offer kids classes and summer camps, adult weekly drop-in classes, series classes, private lessons, and custom wedding dances. Our classes are focused on creating confidence-building classes that are good for the mind and the body. We are the most proud of the community we have created along the way and the positive impact our studio, instructors, and classes have had on our customer’s mental health, confidence, and relationship with dance.
Have you ever had to pivot?
Being able to pivot is perhaps one of the most important skills that you can have as a business-owner. Every entrepreneur begins their business journey with ideas about what services or products they will provide and a vision for how they will look, feel, and be used. However, the biggest mistake you can make as a business owner is to be so married to your vision and ideas that you are unwilling to listen and adjust to the market and what your customers and community are asking for.
A perfect example of this for us was when we opened our first location in the University of Washington neighborhood in Seattle. Over the course of the first few months that we were in business, we were getting multiple requests for K Pop classes. These classes are uniquely different from other dance classes, because instead of offering custom choreography, customers want to learn the dances from the music videos and performances of their favorite K Pop artists. At the time, we not only were uneducated about this genre as a whole, but it was something that was not within our skill set. We had two options – continue to tell customers that we did not offer these classes or find someone who was knowledgeable about this genre and capable of teaching these classes.
We were lucky that we had a young woman walk into our studio one day asking about these classes, when I told her that we didn’t yet offer them because we didn’t have anyone to teach them — she informed me that she could teach the classes. I took her at her word and she went on to build our entire K Pop program, which is one of our highest selling classes with a dedicated and enthusiastic customer base.
If you would have asked us at the beginning of our business journey if we intended on offering K Pop classes, we would have said no. But we listened to demand, trusted our customers, and were able to pivot to offer a genre of classes that has gone onto become a beautiful part of our community.
How do you keep your team’s morale high?
One of the most challenging parts about owning a business has been building a team that aligns with our values while making sure that each individual on the team feels listened to, empowered, and honored creatively. Dance is a creative endeavor and often times combining creativity with business can feel contradictory. It is important that each of our classes, no matter the instructor, make every customer feel confident, empowered, and supported. On the other end of the equation, it is important to us that our instructors feel like their creativity is valued and they can bring their unique perspective and experience to the classes they teach. We found that part of achieving this balance was communicating our values early on in the interview process and making sure that the instructor’s we hired not only understood our values but shared them.
When it comes to maintaining morale on the team, we have found that the most important thing we can do as leaders is offer opportunities for their input and genuinely listen to their ideas, concerns, and feedback. More often than not, our instructors have ideas that we never would have thought of on our own because they are plugged into a part of the business that we are not. We work hard to have open, honest conversations with them where they feel like their opinions are not only respected but valued.
The other important part of building a successful team is realizing that everyone is human. We all have bad days, we all get sick, and we all have unexpected life events that deter our plans. It is important to value their well-being not just because it serves you as a leader, but because their well-being is important. Be flexible and allow room for things to go wrong, people to have bad days, and things that do not go according to plan. Lastly, something that is unique to our industry, is that our instructor’s physical well-being is important in order for them to do their job to the best of their ability. This means being preventative instead of reactive. If their leg is sore, encouraging them to take a few days off to give it a break. If they are starting to feel like they might be getting sick, telling them to take time off and get some rest – even if it means canceling classes. You have to prioritize the people who keep your business running in order to gain their trust, earn their respect, and communicate that the first priority is their health and well-being, both mentally and physically.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.poproxdance.com/
- Instagram: @poproxdancestudio
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/poproxdanceseattle
Image Credits
All photos of people: Itzel Luccas All photos of dance studio: Erik Sven