We were lucky to catch up with Molly Galbrecht recently and have shared our conversation below.
Molly, so excited to have you with us today. So much we can chat about, but one of the questions we are most interested in is how you have managed to keep your creativity alive.
My creativity is expressed through my choreography. Dance has been such an important role in my life and I am lucky enough to own my Studio and teach full time as a dance instructor. I get to have the opportunity to share my passion with my students each and every day.
My choreography is an expression of myself and my life. It is a beautiful art form and there are endless possibilities to create. I am able to keep this creativity alive by expressing any and all parts of my thoughts and emotions through movements and dance skills.
I teach various styles and different age groups for dance classes. One of my favorite style of class is called Leaps & Turns at my Studio. Typically all the skills learned and taught in class are “technique” dance movements that need endless amounts of training. Even with theses skills there is room to change and alter them to create something new. In my other styles, such as tap class, there is even more freedom to create new rhythms and patterns to challenge and push my dancers.
The energy my students come to class with motivate me with a positive energy to keep pushing myself as a teacher. They allow me to continue to challenge myself and grow as a teacher to create more. The energy that arises for me while expressing myself through dance is one of my favorite feelings and I feel so grateful to keep creativity alive.
Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?
I own a dance studio with my sister Diane called The Studio School of Dance. I grew up dancing at The Studio beginning at the age of 3 and danced there all throughout my high school career. It is funny too as in my first dance class, I didn’t even dance for the first month. The teacher told my mom that dance might not be my thing. Ironic how life works like that! I had the chance to come back and teach classes at The Studio after I graduated from college. One of my old dance teachers invited me back to teach few of the younger classes. At that time I was soul searching trying to figure out what my career path was going to be and all I knew was that I wanted to teach dance classes as that bought me joy. A few years after teaching, there was an opportunity for my sister and I to purchase The Studio School of Dance and we did! It was has been a wild riding learning and growing our business as owners.
The Studio doesn’t feel like a job as I enjoy that I get to create and share of my passion of dance with my students. We are currently in our 2023-2024 dance season and we have availability in our classes for more students to join us. Our dance classes are geared to children from 2-18 years of ages and we offer a variety of different styles of dance classes from ballet, tap, jazz, hip hop, leaps and turns and more. Our season goes until the end of May and we finish off the dance season with our Annual Spring Dance recital. Recitals are our chance to preform on stage and show our families all that our students have learned that dance season
Dance is a beautiful art form that allows us to express ourselves. It also creatives athletes. Our dancers train many hours a week all to bring you a three minute piece of art. I am very honored to be able to share and train my students as dance has always been a healthy outlet for me and has taught me many life skills that I still use to this day.
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
Three things that where most impactful on my journey as to where I am now are time management, trust and self care. Time management is one of most important things to keep me on task and to get it all done. As a business owner, the to-do list is never ending and continues to grow. Time management is something that was my weakness and has now became my strength. It is all encompassing as I had to create a schedule for my personal and business life. This allows me to show up and get the business details accomplished before teaching classes and accomplish my personal goals. This one little thing helps me keep on track so I can teach my students the lesson plan with full focus for each class. Now instead of surviving, which is what I had been doing, I’m thriving.
Which leads me to my next item…trust yourself. Seems so easy when you are constantly having to make decisions all day from small items to slightly larger items. We forget that all decisions have a compound effect and builds on itself. I’ve learned to trust myself and believe the decisions I am making where all the right ones for my business and students. Trust allowed me to let go and ask my teachers to take on more responsibility. Spreading out the tasks over a few people helped me focused and allowed more time to get the business details done along with grow the business. Asking for help from those families offering and willing to help created a warm family environment and more balance for myself.
This all leads to self care. Self care is something I wish I had focused more on in the beginning to create more balance. A lot of advice I received when I began my journey as a business owner was I was going to have to grind and keeping grinding. Although that advice is true, one thing that is more important is my own self care. When I stopped taking care of my emotional, mental and physical health I could not show up and perform my job to the best of my abilities. My student families were very preceptive and noticed when there was shift in me. When you spend so much time with the same families, I get to watch their children grow as they were watching me grow as a dance instructor, business owner and a person. My self care had to be important to allow me to keep growing and learning to be able to keep my business going!
Is there a particular challenge you are currently facing?
Our number one obstacle I tend to struggle with is marketing. It seems simple enough. Open a dance studio and get new students pouring in the door to learn. That is not the case. We are constantly seeking new students for the same age group each year which meant changing our mentality of how we get them in our doors. I needed to learn to ask for help with marketing. I had put so much effort on myself to figure it out and make it successful all on my own and it was not feasible or obtainable. Marketing is a part of every job and when I had to focus on a multitude of items as we are a small business, the larger items felt more challenging to grasp. This year I learned to ask for help. I found a small business who specifically works with dance studio’s to help us learn how to market more efficiently to the families interested in dance. Seeking help was one of the greatest things I did to help grow our business to help improve my weaknesses to become my strengths.
Contact Info:
- Website: studiosodance.com
- Instagram: thestudioschoolofdance
- Facebook: thestudioschoolofdance
Image Credits
Dawn Conners
