Unlocking Hidden Revenue: Creative Income Streams for Your Studio

Hello, friends. I'm Amanda Barr.

And I'm Rebecca Lou Brennan. And welcome to Dance Principals United, the podcast.

Together, we are passionate about helping studio owners with the business of running their studio.

Join us as we talk everything from marketing systems, studio culture, motherhood, life, and everything in between.

This is the Dance Principles United Podcast.

Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Dance Principles United Podcast. I'm here with the amazing Beck. How are you going back? How's the start of your week been?

Yeah, really good. We've been doing a lot of podcasts together lately, Nathan.

I know, right?

I do love podcasting with you. Yeah, having a great week. I actually got up early this morning and went to the gym and walked and. God, you always feel so much better when you do that, right?

Oh, absolutely. I made, like, I have my twice weekly pt, which, look, I'm not really a gym person. It's not something that I love doing, if I'm honest. I've always been more of a team sports kind of person, but as I get on in years back, I just realized it's something that we've got to do. Right? Like, I've got to try and stay. Stay as strong as possible, as, like I said, as we get a bit older and it's just that thing, like, staying consistent with stuff just makes. Makes it so much easier, right?

Yes. And I think, like, doing something for yourself, like, I, you know, went to the gym, then I walked and got myself a coffee, and I just felt so good about the world, Nath. I really did.

Oh, that's deep. That's real deep. Like, I'd much rather go. I'd much rather go and play golf, but reality is, I can't take four and a half hours out of my day to go and play golf. So, like, I've just got to take that 45 minutes to an hour and do what I need to do.

Golf is so long. I was talking to Linnae, one of our clients yesterday, and she was like, golf just takes up a whole day for these boys. I'm like, yep, Tim loves it, too.

Exactly. Like, not quite as long as cricket. Like, Manda would prefer golf than cricket, if I'm honest, because cricket's like, twice as long, whereas at least golf, like, sometimes I can be up and gone at like, 6am and back by 11. So, like, that's much less. Much less of an imposition. Right, But I don't think. I don't think we're here to talk about golf and cricket today, are we?

But it was fun anyway.

Yeah, I don't think many of our listeners would resonate with a golf and cricket podcast as much as I could talk about it for half an hour. What we are here to talk about today is, look, it's something we have chatted about before, but it's something we would love to touch on again because we're always learning and evolving ourselves. And it's something that we know is so important to studio owners, and it's ways that we can add extra revenue streams into our businesses, which I know is something that you're super passionate about.

Well, it's something that we're really developing at pause at the moment. And so that's why I kind of wanted to chat about it today, because there's some pretty cool ideas that we've been playing around with. But, you know, Nath, it's. We're not saying to people, don't try and get new students in, don't try and market and just use these as extra money, because we know it's the thing with the extra revenue streams is they're not consistent. You know, consistency is getting that constant flow of money coming into your business every week with those lessons and concert tickets. That's consistency. This stuff is inconsistent, but it is nice little cash injections into your business every now and then, right?

Oh, absolutely. Like you said, like bread and butter has to be our classes and trying to get more students and increase our class placements, because that's the biggest lever we can pull to increase our revenue, our profits in our business. But there's other amazing things we can do. And I know, like, some of the things that we'll get to are driven from the fact, Beck, that realizing, you know, that we're closed. Like those classes, if you run during school terms, you are closed. Like, schools don't open 12 weeks of a year. Right. So we can't give up. No other business gives up 12 weeks of revenue just like that, do they?

No. You know how passionate I am about this. It's crazy that we take. Like I always say to clients, can you imagine if the restaurant down the road was closed for 12 weeks of the year? Like, we would just think, that is so dumb. There's actually a cafe near me, Nath, that's closed for four weeks during December, January. And I've driven past that multiple times and thought, how are you even affording to do that yet at dead schools? We have 12 weeks off. It's even longer. It's crazy.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So what we're going to run through, like, what we consider to be at the moment sort of our top five or six things and ways that we can bring in additional revenue to your studio to help boost your profitability and live and build the studio of your dreams. Live the life of your dreams. What is the first one, Beck?

Well, the first one, and I know I've talked about this before, but we still have people coming to us saying that they're not doing it. Is uniforms okay, actually having uniforms in your studio? When I first started, Pause. We had zero uniform. We just did red, black and white. And I did that for years and years. Nathan made absolutely no money off uniforms at all. And then I don't even know what made me decide to bring uniforms in. Probably some good coaching from a coach at the time, I would say is what made me do it. But I really started to bring it in and now it is such a huge revenue stream for us. Absolutely everyone in our studio, including our staff, are in uniform 100% of the time. And it's at a point now where people are hanging out for the winter release. So we just did a winter release and I shared it on Tribe the other day and showed everyone what we do. But that winter release has just gone off and everyone is so excited to get the new items. Obviously we put a lot of time and effort behind building that FOMO up, but it's now a whole thing. Like people can't wait for the next thing to come out.

Absolutely. And I think the key is here, you talked about it being a great revenue stream, but you're also working hard to make sure that there's profitability in that as well. Because there's a lot of work that goes into it. You've got some of your team members that specific hours dedicated to that. What are you doing to ensure that it's not only a great revenue booster, but profit booster as well?

Well, absolutely. Just making sure that we are putting a markup on absolutely everything, estimating how many we think will sell of something and then working out profit from that. Also my head of uniform and she's head of uniform and costume, she has to come to me each week with how much revenue and profit we've made. And then she's got KPIs. So we say to her, like, she has to make 40,000 revenue in uniform across the term and she knows that. So it's just making sure of all of that sort of stuff.

Yeah, absolutely. I love that. And look, I think sometimes that we always hear from various people that we work with is that they Might try. They're hearing about this and they try it for the first time and they don't get like as much revenue as they would have liked or as much profit. I'm presuming you didn't just start one day back and jump straight to $40,000 a term revenue and great profitability off it. Right. Like, how did you sort of, like, obviously we don't have three hours to go through it here, but like, where did you start and how did you slowly start building up?

I feel like we started with a T shirt, to be honest. And I think, you know, like, I was at BFT this morning, I'm wearing the BFT T shirt. Like people like feeling a part of things and I think buying, getting them to start with something simple like a T shirt. Also I think, you know, our circus kids have to wear tights and it was painful for parents to have to go out and buy the tights. So then we started bringing the tights in for everyone to. And then I started to see that people actually really liked it. So we just sort of started to bring in little items bit by bit. And now it's like a whole shebang, obviously. But, yeah, definitely started small.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's, you know, something that we don't realize that, you know, we know that so many of our studios will send their client list, or essentially their entire client list right to an external, like, uniform supplier direct. Which, you know, I think we underestimate just how valuable our client base is. And it's something that we should work in tandem with the incredible suppliers that we've got in the dance industry here in Australia especially, we should work in tandem with them where we can, but just sort of like handing over all of that revenue straight to somebody else without, you know, we, we've built this, we've built this customer base, we've built the trust within not only our brand so that when we say, oh, you should go here. So like making sure that we are getting, getting a part of that. Right?

Yeah. I think also like dance shops are getting less and less and for us to travel to a dance shop from my town, nate, is a 45 minute to an hour drive. That's a long way for someone to have to go and buy, you know, winters come in now, potentially their ballet crossover or their jumper or whatever, it might be like it's a long way for them to go to get that. So I think realizing that as well, it's just convenience for your parents.

Yeah, without a doubt, without a doubt. And like, who are some of the like amazing suppliers that you team up with locally to make sure that that happens for you?

Cozy G is like, we love Cozy G. Flair Capezio is where we get our shoes from at the moment. They're great to deal with. What's that new? We just got jackets from the one that was at Expo. Nathan. I can't think of the name of them.

Tlc.

Tlc. We just got some jackets from them. They're great. CC Dancer. There's so many. Look, I learn about all these companies mostly from Expo, to be completely honest with you, because I didn't realize how much was out there until we created Expo. I know that sounds stupid, but you just don't know that there's so many of those amazing companies. My kids fave is Cozy G. I have to say they just love, you know, the. It's always something new coming in there. But yeah, there's. There's a billion of them out there. There's so many great ones too.

Amazing. So like lean into it, guys, like reach out to lots of like all the amazing bands that brands that Beck talked about. There's always people posting their recommendations on the various groups around as well. But like reach out and start building relationships with these, with these brands because they take all the risk out of it for you, especially when you're just starting out. Like we went, as you know, Amanda's talked about it lots. Like we went another route. We would often team up with some of those suppliers as well for certain releases. But Amanda spent ages and ages building great supply lines direct through China because of the scale of our, of our studio. Now when we did that, we. We took on a lot of the risk ourselves, which meant that our profits were a lot higher. But the beauty of doing it locally with all these amazing local companies we've got is that they take all the risk on for us, which means that we give up a little bit of profit, which is fine because we're not having the risk. Right?

Yeah. It's also like we do it at the studio so we. They order it and they know that a week later it'll be there. So, you know, we kind of you with a lot of those companies like Flare Dance, where you can just order one thing, you don't have to order 10. And I think that's what's great about that for smaller studios. Not that we're a small studio about, you know, like sometimes I think that's a lot for them to think, oh, gosh, I've got to pay like 30 or $40,000 worth of uniform to get it in stock. I don't think you have to do that with suppliers now, but you do have to be on top of the ordering. You can't just leave it because then parents get very cranky about it. But if you're on top of the ordering, most of those companies will deliver within two or three days.

Yeah, absolutely. So I think it's something that you've got to put a little bit in to set it up. But once it is set up and you've got those relationships with your suppliers, then it becomes an absolute boon for you. Amazing. What is another revenue stream that studios should be focusing on?

Well, I. Tagging off uniforms, costumes. You know, we still hear about studio owners that are scared to put profit on their costumes and put a markup on their costumes. And we put so much time into it, Nath, even at my studio, you know, and I'm not as in that side of things because we have people that are more in charge of it. But it still is so much time looking through those costumes. And I do find it fun, you know, looking through the costumes, ordering them, sizing them. Like, I had one of my lead team leaders in there last night, just double checking sizes, you know, then getting them. Then something's gone to miss and you've got it. Like, it's just such a big job packing them into beautiful bags, making them look immaculate. Like, you should be making some sort of profit off that because it's costing you a lot of money.

It is costing you a lot of money. And, you know, there are things that we can't control as well. So, like, at the moment, Australian dollar is not great if you're ordering from some of the overseas companies for your costumes and stuff like that. Like, I think too many, too often I see studio owners feeling bad about having to charge and like, you've got to put that little bit of, like, at least that little bit of profit. Hopefully a little bit. At the end of the day, guys, like, I feel like sometimes we've just got to do it. We've just got to bite the bullet. And I know it's an unpopular opinion, and I know so many studio owners do what we do out of a place of love and wanting to share that love of dance. But dance isn't also a necessity. And it's one of those things that parents are signing up quite often knowing the costs. Like, often, obviously we can't, like, triple the price from last year and stuff like that. But if the cost goes up for us guys. Like, every business in the world passes those costs on, so we've got to start thinking that way, too, right?

Yeah, I. I say it all the time as well, but no one is getting cranky at Kmart because they, you know, put a markup on their things, like, and they do have a 300 markup on everything in there. I guarantee you that. Or, you know, Nike or wherever you get stuff for your kids from, I guarantee you that they have a massive, massive markup on those things. And I think, remember that their businesses, and we're a business, so we're allowed to have that markup as well.

100%. Okay. So we've gone, we've talked about uniforms, we talked about costumes, the oldies and the goodies. What else can we be focusing on for some extra revenue on profit streams?

Well, some of these are new ones for me, but I kind of wanted to chat it out. So Phoenix went to flip out for a birthday party. Ever done that, Nath before?

We did. We did. Look, we have done the flip out, and on the weekend, we did a holy moly. Birthday party.

So flip out for Phoenix. I think he had about 10 friends there. I did probably not the top package, but kind of the middle package. They were there for a couple of hours. 600, $700 it cost me for the party, which I think is normal. And I. I heard from a podcast, the. My first gym team who said that. And they're, you know, recreational kids, recreational facility like ours, that 50% of their revenue is from birthday parties. And I just found that really interesting. And I think Sunday at my studio, we do have preschool at one venue, but the other venue is free on a Sunday. And so I thought, why are we not leveraging off that? I've got staff that are younger that would want to work on a Sunday. I just think it's an extra revenue stream. We can really grow. Um, and, you know, we're doing Circus Acro parties, but I just think, like, it's something little extra that probably your current kids would love to do. We have done a few different types. We used to do Taylor Swift parties. We've done princess parties, you know, but we haven't done it properly. And now I'm like, right, we're doing this properly. We've actually got the booking form out. We're gonna keep plugging it. We're gonna put it on our socials, do all the things, but just an extra little thing.

Oh, absolutely. Because, like, you said, like, I think, like, in the past, like, to be Totally honest. In the past, we shied away from doing them because at the time there wasn't as much as many of these things like birthday party things around and there just wasn't the. There wasn't the cash in it, to be honest. But like you said nowadays, you said you dropped 650, 700 bucks at flip out. I know for. I think it was Gigi's birthday party we did at Strike Bowling that was a similar 5 to 600 without trying. And for us it was as well. Like we didn't want to ever have to go in on the Saturday or Sunday. And so you do need a team of well trained up team. Right. Of probably like three to four key staff so that you've always got somebody to draw from, obviously, just like your casual employees that are willing to do an extra day on an extra few hours on a Saturday or Sunday. But if you can build a little team around that, that are all trained up, that can opt in and out and like put in their availabilities for Saturdays and Sundays, like, like most jobs do, you know, like picking up an extra Saturday or Sunday shift. Right. I think they can be absolutely invaluable. And what I love about birthday parties is that it's advertising that we get paid for.

Yes.

Right. Like we can bring in, obviously, like the majority of people are going to book it, are probably going to be our students anyway. But you're going to get a few outsiders coming. But the kids that are already dancing with us, they might bring 10 friends and probably half of them aren't going to be students. So we've got a chance to like advertise to five new people and they're paying us for it. Like, how crazy is that?

Yeah, exactly. And like if you're smart about it, we're gonna have lolly bags that we give out to all the kids with a flyer in it for a free trial. And you know, that costs us next to nothing, but it's just something, you know it is. It's free advertising. Exactly what you're saying.

Yeah. And what I'd recommend everybody doing if you're on this jump across to, like I said, we just did Holy Moly for Sassa's birthday on the weekend. Beck, you did flip out. I know. Like, I'm not sure what the booking process there was like, but I know the booking process for Strike Bowling birthday party and for Holy Moly birthday party was insanely good. Right. Like just the way they stepped us through it. Then the upsells that they tried to Hit us with. Yeah, bang, bang. Like, oh, yeah. Do you want to just pay like, what was it at? Holy moly. Do you want to pay an extra $125? No, sorry. $100 for $125. Food credit. Similar sort of stuff at the strikes bowling. Do you want to add the bumper cars for this? Do you want to add, like. And it was just all like, ching, ching, ching, ching. And the amount of parents that would go, oh, I just want to keep them happy. Yes. Yeah.

Like, oh, yeah. And easy. Like, that's the thing. Like, I could. I could add the birthday cake, which I think was 35, Nath. And you know what it was? I guarantee you the Kohl's ice cream cake. Not like legit, the Coles one. But I was like, then I don't have to worry about a cake done. So, you know, and that's a. I think that's the reason birthday parties are getting really big now as well, is that parents just want it all done for them. They don't want to have to set it all up. Well, busy parents, I feel, anyway, I'm.

Willing to pay a huge premium for that. To not have to clean the house before, clean it after, organize all the food. Like, if I can just turn up and just mic drop out of there. Yeah, I am more than willing to pay a premium. Right.

Yes. So something to think about doing those.

Birthday parties, without a doubt. So what is the. The next thing that you think people can maybe look at to build some extra revenue in their studios?

So again, slightly left of field, but this actually came up because I was in a one on one with one of my circus teachers, and she said to me, I've had a company reach out and ask me to do a team building afternoon with them. And I've looked it up, and we can charge about $45 per person. There's 12 of them coming. Could I. Could we try this as a thing? And I said, yes, we can. So this was actually this Sunday. This is how fresh this is, Nate. So you know how corporate do, like that team building stuff. There's a billion things they can do with it. So she bought this team in. I got a videographer in straight away because she's super into it. And I'm like, this is smart. We filmed it. We got testimonials from the people who did it at the time, which are insane testimonials. They had the best time. In fact, they've already rebooked for another turn with. Made great money, you know, like 12 people at $45 a head. I think my circus teacher, you know, she's on the higher end, but I think she's about dollars an hour. That is still great money. And the idea is that we could even do it on a weekday when she's there anyway. But it's just thinking outside the box because I think even putting this out to your parents, this was a parent at the studio who wanted her team to come and do it. So you don't have to necessarily put it out to the world, but just even putting it out to your parents, I'm sure some of them have corporate teams that would love to come and do a hip hop class or, I don't know, a ballet class even like something fun like that.

It's.

Yeah. Anyway, it's work. I'll let you know how it goes, but I feel like it's going to be great.

Yeah, absolutely. And like I said, I think the key with both this one and the birthday parties, if you're in the phase of your studio where you're just happy to get in and do it all yourself, go for it. Absolutely love that for you. I know at one stage that would have been Manda, without a doubt. But if you're at the stage where you're not wanting to go in Saturdays and Sundays, if you're setting these things up, making sure you've got somebody like your amazing circus teacher or the three or four junior staff for the birthday parties is. Is key as well. So just making sure you're recognizing what point of your studio journey you're on and whether these are things you're going to be taking on yourself and whether you're happy to. Or whether you've got the team to be able to pay because that's going to affect the profitability of it as well, right?

Yes. But also you don't have to do it every week. Like that's the thing with this stuff. And with our calendar, Lee, for the birthday parties, for example, we've been really smart already to put in. You know, obviously we're not going to do it for our mid year concert because everyone's away. We're not going to do it when we have a comp on because everyone's away. So we've already blocked those dates out. But you could block every weekend out except one a month and maybe you just do one Sunday a month and that's a little bit of extra money and put that on there and it's. It'll probably work out.

Oh, without a doubt. Because that's the thing, like I said, like if you did two a month, right, so two a month, gosh, is gonna really test, test my maths. But two a month, you could probably bring in easily like $500 revenue. And that's gonna be a thousand. I'm at like 12,000 extra revenue. Your costs might be max, three or four max. Right. So like it's going to be really good profit as well at the end of the day. So like not only bringing in revenue, it's getting your staff some extra recognition. And like our staff do like we all have those team members that love to do the extra shifts, that love to bring in some cash. Right. So like it's, it's rewarding them and helping them get some extra hours. Like so much of it is just win, win. Right, okay, so we've got, we've talked about uniforms, costumes, birthday parties, team building. What else have we got?

Well, holiday workshops. And I know that we have talked about this before, but just doing one or two days of a whole day holiday workshop. You've got plenty of kids already at your studio whose parents probably work and are looking at some sort of option for them to do. These are going really well. At my studio we don't, we don't go crazy with it, but we usually do. Again, we do circus aqua. It's just a fun opt in. I find that kids like that. But my staff are really good at this actually Justin, my studio manager, he loves running these nath, he has so much fun. But they do the toilet paper outfits, you know, where they dress them in the. They have to make an outfit out of toilet paper and they do a fashion parade and they play lots of games and they watch a movie and it's a really fun day. The kids have a ball and parents love it because they want something.

Parents need it.

Their kids, they do need it. They do need it. Yeah. So especially in that school.

Oh no, sorry, I was just gonna say parents can't take, parents can't take 12 weeks holiday a year.

Exactly. So especially in that school holiday time, putting a couple of days in, you know, if you don't want it to be on a, do a Monday, Tuesday, something like that, that's just like not too intrusive for you, but that allows those parents to have that. But yeah, I know heaps of our clients are doing really well with this because we set it up with SJC and they're killing it with the holiday workshops. Right?

Yeah, absolutely. We just did, like I said, and so many of them are Doing it on rinse and repeat. We set up the, all the automations for them, all the emails, the payment systems and all that and so many of them. Yeah, just turn it on, rinse and repeat, change it out one go from the Taylor Swift holiday workshop to the mermaid party workshop or stuff like that. Just change out an image here or there and so for an hour work between holidays it's just, they're ready to go and just filling those, yeah, filling some of those 12 weeks because it just by the time we start to add all of these little things up like we talked about, like it's just like it starts snowballing like we talked about at the start. The biggest levers we're pulling with our revenues and profit in our studio is our classes. But if you just do like just bits of all these things we're talking about by the time you get to the end of the year and you're chatting with your accountant and looking at your pnl you're like, oh crap. Like look like, look at all that extra revenue just from like we talk about doing all the things right.

Yep, absolutely. Absolutely amazing.

We've got one more.

My last one, my very last one is discos again. Just recently did one. Two and a half thousand dollars we made off two discos. The main reason I think for that is because we sold so many glow sticks and light up ones we bought heaps actually we had a lot of light up ones left over from the concert last year to be honest and we topped them up a little bit. But you know you have the light up ones that we give out light up ones to the kids at the concert and then we bought heaps of glue, glow sticks, not glue sticks, but glow sticks from Teemu and they went off like obviously had an entry fee as well. And also we were smart about it and called it Mum and dad date night. And I think that makes more people opt in because they're like, oh, I can go on a date rather than calling it Kids Disco. But I know you went to a disco at DS on the weekend, right?

Not gonna lie back. Personally I didn't go to the disco. But you are right, I did go and drop my children at a disco because they had Dance for Sick Kids and then as part of like the end of Dance for Sick Kids week they do a big disco and you get free entry if you raised $50 or you can just pay 50 bucks for your ticket and all the money goes to Dance for Sick Kids. But again like all the parents you could see Them all dropping and all, all the, all the mums and dads were dressed up and started to walk down the street down towards where all the restaurants were. And yeah, like it was 5 till 7, so enough time to head down and grab an early dinner, kid free. And we would talk like we were sitting there at dinner because, you know, we just sit there and talk about business shit when we're at dinner. Like, we don't talk about normal stuff like normal people, but like talking about like what studios could do, right? Like if you did it like once a term, like it could be. And again, I think it would be a huge advertising push as well because like, you know, then, you know, you've got all your die hard parents that come obviously to that one. But then they're like, you know, they put their, they put their post on Instagram, like, kid free date night people like, oh, what? Where were the kids? Like, oh, up at the disco. I'm at the Dance Sensations disco. But can you imagine if you was like something like, you know, looking at you like, obviously you'd look at your calendar for the whole year. But if everybody knew that the Saturday of week four was always parents date night, can you imagine like what people, oh, hey, it's week four next term as well. Should we all get together and do something, we'll drop all the kids out there. So instead of just dropping that one, they get three of their other like parents friends as well. So like, and they've got like five kids between them. So just that one dancing kid, you've got another five kids at the disco, right? Like, and then again, it's getting those five kids through the door and maybe three of them are interested in date. Like you sign three of them up for debt. Like it's just one of those things that could snowball into so much more than just like I said, you're getting paid to advertise just like those birthday parties, right?

Exactly, exactly. So guys, I hope you have enjoyed all of our extra things today. If you're doing none of these, that's fine because guess what? I used to do none of these as well. So if you're doing none of them, just pick one and just start with it. But I do want to say, the last thing I want to say, Nath, is you will only get out of things what you put into them. Because often I hear people say, oh, I tried a holiday workshop but it didn't really work. And you've got to understand that you have to put so much time and effort into Consistently marketing this. Our last holiday workshop, perfect example, Nate. We put out, I think, six emails. We put it constantly on our socials. Those emails were to our cold leads as well. We were talking to the kids about it. We actually got a couple of weeks out. We only had seven people and we were freaking out. So then we put more, more, more behind it. We ended up, I think, 27 kids on the day. But you can't just put one email out and then think that that's going to work. You've got to be really big about it. You know, we have posters up, we do all the things to make it work. It's totally worth it. But just be mindful of that.

Absolutely. And, you know, hopefully, fingers crossed, if you pick something like that and it will go off first time, but maybe it won't. Like, maybe you've got to warm into it. But again, that too often we see people, like, try it once and they're like, oh, no, it doesn't work for me. Like, I promise it will. It'll just be next time it'll be a bit better and then better still, and then you'll get used to it and then you'll just have a rinse and repeat and it will just, if you stay consistent at it, it'll get better and better.

Absolutely. I hope you guys have really enjoyed today's podcast and we can't wait to see you next week.

Thanks, everybody. Bye.

Bye.

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