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A day in the life of one woman, her husband, and seven studios

By David Favrot

Think you’ve got your hands full running a dance studio? Now imagine running seven. We’re talking 2,500 students taking 600 classes a week from 20 teachers. Think of the scheduling, the payroll, the phone calls . . .

Welcome to Tiffany and Paul Henderson’s world. Their company, Tiffany’s Dance Academy, has seven California studios: six in the San Francisco Bay Area and a seventh in Costa Mesa, roughly 400 miles to the south. They began in 2000 with a studio in Livermore, where they live, and expanded to sites in Pleasanton, San Ramon, South San Francisco, and Costa Mesa, adding Tracy and Fremont studios last August.

How do they do it? To find out, Dance Studio Life followed Tiffany around for a day in mid-March.

9:00 a.m. Paul Henderson answers the doorbell at their two-story stucco house in Livermore, about a 5-minute drive from the studio that serves as their home base. Tiffany has been up since 6:30. She’s checked her email and gotten their two children—Jack, 9, and Halle, 6—off to school. (She carpools twice a week.) On a typical morning she’d be at the studio by 8:30, downing her third Diet Coke of the day. But first, she and Paul fill in some of their background.

Tiffany Henderson works with pre-jazz student Jordyn Craft while little Talia-Shaye Lauraya mimics a move from the sidelines. (Photos by 'Dance Studio Life')

Tiffany’s from Santa Clara, California, and grew up with a dance studio next door—her father bought her a pair of dance shoes when she was little so she could tap along with the class on a wooden picnic table in her backyard. She was a scholarship student at the Joe Tremaine Dance Center in Hollywood, earned a BFA in dance from the University of Arizona, and was a soloist with the La JAZDANZ troupe in Shreveport, Louisiana, and later in Pleasanton.

Paul, born and raised in Arizona, isn’t a trained dancer, but his mother owned dance studios, “and that turned into running a dance store” for her in 1996, the year he met Tiffany. Paul went on to sell software systems to dental offices, but he’s been acting as general manager of Tiffany’s schools since 2003. “In the beginning there wasn’t much money coming in, so I supported us on my salary,” he says.

The Hendersons now have a deep-pockets investor: a top official of a high-tech firm who is a partner in five of the studios. His daughter was one of Tiffany’s dance students, and he became a family friend. In casting about for investment ideas, he wound up committing $250,000 to become a 50-50 business partner with the Hendersons.

“If you want to expand as quickly as we did,” Tiffany says, “you would need a chunk of cash. You have these operating costs for the first few months where you don’t have any income.”

“He provides the money initially and we do everything else,” Paul says. “He’s great because he just doesn’t care” about day-to-day details.

“He hasn’t taken anything out [in profits] at this point,” Tiffany says. “He’s pretty much a silent partner.”

Tiffany explains her management style: She handles curriculum, quality control, and teacher issues. When she launched her first studio, “I had no idea how much management I’d have to do. It’s all day, every day.” (She teaches only at Livermore, where she puts in 9 to 10 hours a week on three afternoons.) “I enjoy the balance of teaching and being in the office,” she says. “I don’t think I’d want to teach 40 hours a week or even 20. Still, I have to dance each day or I’m not the same person.

“The challenge of having more locations is monitoring the quality,” she says. “I don’t want to just be a dance mill.” In the coming year, she has resolved “to review video of all the recital rehearsals. That’s probably the most time-effective way to do this.”

She admits that she’s “not a micromanager” and relies heavily on her regional manager, Robbie Teruya. “If she ever quits, we’re selling it all,” Tiffany says. “A lot of the things she does, I don’t even know how to do.” Teruya manages day-to-day operations as well as the 120-student performing company. She also supervises scheduling for recital rehearsals. Also, Tiffany’s mother is the Hendersons’ accountant and the couple had a nanny until last year to ease the domestic demands.

Tiffany holds monthly conference calls with the South San Francisco staff and visits the school two to three times a year; the remaining Bay Area studios are closer to home and get monthly visits. She drops in on the Costa Mesa school once a year.

How did they wind up with a studio so far from the other six? “Someone contacted me who was selling a dance studio,” Paul explains. “It turned out to be a studio for pole dancing. We had seven to eight studio managers interview with us while in the background somebody was giving a guy a massage.” After sinking $10,000 into renovations, they opened the studio in 2005; it now has about 400 students.

In some ways, the one-room Costa Mesa school is “the easiest location I have,” Tiffany says, citing her confidence in the site’s manager, Christie Stong, who also teaches there. “It’s not like I have to go down there and check her registration records and look at her books because it’s all in the computer; it’s a Web-based system,” she says.

By having multiple studios, Paul says, they are “diversifying the risk from teachers who quit and take your kids. If you only have one studio, that can wipe you out.”

10:20 a.m. Ready to leave, Tiffany hoists a huge dance bag, jam-packed with makeup, comfortable shoes, socks, a laptop, jazz and tap shoes, a scheduling folder, a brochure from a marketing person, an invitation to a child’s birthday party, medals won by her students, a “Miss Tiffany, born to dance” toy, a hairbrush, underwear, and a water bottle. It weighs about as much as a 12-pack of Diet Coke.

10:30 a.m. Off to the Livermore studio, sandwiched between a liquor store and an Italian restaurant in a strip mall. Adjacent to the pastel-blue lobby is a clothing shop; sales are a big part of the Hendersons’ business plan. Paul invented their online costume ordering system, CostumeManager.com, which lets studios search all vendor catalogs, assign costumes to classes, and accept customers’ payments online.

“We’ve taken a lot of the work [involved with costumes] away from the dance studio director,” Paul says. “Parents can buy stuff online and pick it up in the studio or have it mailed to them.”

In part, Paul was spurred by the memory of his mother’s struggle to make a go of her dancewear shop. “I learned a lot from my mom’s mistakes. She could never make money,” he says. “That retail experience made me realize that if you don’t have a lot of inventory and you require people to buy certain things and the price is right, you can make money on dancewear as a studio.”

11 a.m. Tiffany’s in her office, checking email. She usually gets 15 to 17 overnight and 75 to 100 per day. A dozen dance trophies crowd the top of a filing cabinet and the floor beside it.

Tiffany has reservations about competitions, despite her students’ successes. She’s wary of the “me first” attitude that the quest for trophies can breed. Dancers on her competition teams don’t get solos, she says. “I allowed kids to do solos the first year and at the end of that year I said, ‘No mas!’ When we were at ADA [American Dance Awards] we got a special award from Diane Gudat for dancing as a team. She could see that we shared the stage.”

Competition can also bring out parents’ dark side. “I had a parent attack me at one of my competitions. She got upset because she thinks I don’t pay attention to her kid. She said, ‘You never come to the rehearsals.’ And I said, ‘I can’t get to all the rehearsals.’ Then she started to cry and said, ‘I just want a piece of you.’ ”

11:10 a.m. Tiffany plays a video of her choreography for very young children. “This music will make you want to poke yourself in the neck with a pencil, but it works for little kids,” she says. “Over nine years I’ve invented a curriculum for every year up to age 6. I do all the baby choreography” for 2- to 4-year-olds, and it’s put on video as a training aid to teachers. “The baby program, hands down, is what the parents come for. It’s non-competitive, non-threatening, and convenient, and the teachers are knowledgeable.”

When she began teaching this age group, “I barely knew what a baby was,” she says, noting that working with kids can be tricky. Four years ago, back when she left teaching preschoolers mostly in her staff’s hands, she says, “we had this class get onstage and they had no idea what they were doing, and there were all these parents and grandparents watching. It was about eight kids. We ended up giving that whole class a full year’s tuition free.”

11:40 a.m. Tiffany confers with teacher Bonnie Fisk about Fisk’s next class schedule, which Tiffany calls up on her computer, with different time slots highlighted in red, yellow, blue, and lavender. “If you wanted to work one day in Livermore, I could just switch you and Sarah,” Tiffany says. “We’ll just leave a question mark here. . . . I know what you’re saying. I think you want to do more jazz than tap. This is the most advanced group we have, and I want you to do hip-hop. Can you do hip-hop?”

Later, Tiffany reflects: “The hard part about doing the schedule is anticipating what you’re going to need next year.” Classes start August 3 and run through the end of June. “We’ve never had summer programs that could pay for themselves,” she says. “Karate and gymnastics—they go year-round. So I asked myself, ‘Why can’t we start in August?’ ” In addition to shortening the low-income summer time gap, she also found that the backlash she feared—from parents upset at the infringement on prime family-vacation time—failed to materialize.

With seven schools to staff, retaining skilled teachers is a priority. “The benefits have been one of the biggest ways that we keep our teachers,” most of whom have dance degrees, Tiffany says. The Hendersons cover 50 percent of employees’ HMO premiums, up to a certain point, and also provide a 401(k) retirement savings plan with a 4 percent employer contribution match.

“We start our teachers at $25 [an hour] for the most part,” Tiffany says. “It averages about $30. We have a few teachers who make as much as $50. Other studios will pay you $50, but they won’t offer benefits.” Teachers are paid hourly and must put in 20 hours a week to get benefits, which Tiffany says motivates them to teach a range of age groups. (Administrative staff must work 40 hours a week to qualify for benefits.)

Later, Fisk says that benefits didn’t weigh heavily in her decision to take this job, which she’s held for four years. She’s at the studio because a cousin taught there and because “the staff’s really good,” she says.

However, a colleague says the benefits swayed her decision. Loree Kenagy, who teaches jazz and tap, works two days a week in her second year as a full-time teacher for Tiffany. Kenagy attended the University of Arizona, Tiffany’s alma mater, and says, “Tiffany found out about me from one of our teachers. She kept calling and saying, ‘Do you understand that you get benefits?’ When I ran the numbers I saw what a great deal it was.”

12:50 p.m. Time for a staff meeting. Nine people crowd into the anteroom to Tiffany’s office, with the South San Francisco site teachers on a conference call.

Tiffany reminds teachers that evaluations are due. For preschoolers, she says, “comments are meant to inspire and support. Older kids should get specific suggestions.” She notes that parents will be observing classes next week. “Please go out in the lobby and say: ‘Are there any parents who would like to come in?’ ” She advises teachers, “If parents talk, stop the class and keep the kids quiet until the moms shut up. And remind parents to turn their cell phones off.”

Tiffany discusses the start of registration on March 31. Parents who register that day will get a $50 gift card for dancewear and shoes; those who register in the week that follows will get a $35 card.

More nuts-and-bolts notices follow. “The preliminary fall schedule has been sent to teachers—check to see what you’re doing,” Tiffany says, before asking how the recital choreography is coming along. “If it’s not working, change it,” she says.

Paul appears with two large pepperoni pizzas. They’re gone in minutes. Tiffany moans, “I can’t believe I ate three slices.”

1:30 p.m. The meeting’s over. Tiffany’s back in her office and on the phone.

2:30 p.m. Tiffany calls a parent who has been complaining about having to pay for costume alterations and griping to other parents about online billing. Later Tiffany says, “She denies she said it. Both she and her husband are without income, but she swears she’ll be back next year.”

2:50 p.m. Halle, who had arrived with her dad and brother an hour earlier, comes in the office in tears. She doesn’t want to go to class. Tiffany is gentle but firm—she’s going. On a typical Wednesday, Tiffany explains, she picks up her kids at school and brings them to the studio, where they take class and do their homework before heading home around 7 p.m.

3:30 p.m. Tiffany has changed into gray pants and a turquoise T-shirt to rehearse her competitive group. She reminds the 11 girls, ages 9 to 15, of a weekend rehearsal. Two more girls appear, and soon everyone is moving to the Pointer Sisters’ “Neutron Dance.” “Everything matters,” Tiffany tells them. “You need to tell a story. Every time you do it, it has to be more.”

5:00 p.m. Off to the Pleasanton studio—a 2,300-square-foot facility in another strip mall—with Tiffany’s son, Jack, where Tiffany observes classes and adjusts the choreography during a Daddy-Daughter rehearsal. James Thordsen is in his third year with Daddy-Daughter; his daughter Kyra is 9. “This is mostly a chance to spend some time with my girl,” he says.

6:45 p.m. Tiffany and Jack arrive at the San Ramon studio, where Tiffany chats with waiting parents and watches teacher Tori Allen lead a tap/jazz combo class.

7:40 p.m. As we’re leaving, Tiffany asks, “Did you see that mom I was talking to? She’s the one I told you about, the one who attacked me at the competition.” Apparently fences have been mended.

8:10 p.m. Tiffany pulls into her driveway in Pleasanton. The Hendersons head off for a late dinner.