Interested in starting your own entrepreneurial journey in dance education but unsure what to expect? Then read up on our interview with Deavondre Jones, Founder of DanceSpire, located in Grand Rapids, MI, USA.
What's your business, and who are your customers?
Our mission is to standardize hip-hop dance education. Our customers are dance studio owners, chairs of collegiate dance departments, and other dance program directors.
Tell us about yourself
I grew up without much exposure to opportunities for upward mobility and a fulfilling life. Simply having opportunities is something I am grateful for, and I do not want to waste the life I have by forgetting the life I used to have. As talented and driven as I am, my pathway was still difficult. Ideally, creating pathways with less resistance for the next person is my way of leaving the world better than how I found it.
What's your biggest accomplishment as a business owner?
My biggest accomplishment is hosting a drop-in class for 5 years every Wednesday without any weeks off. That level of commitment increased my capability, capacity, and confidence within myself, which will serve me for the rest of my time. I believe the extra commitment to ordinary promises we make to ourselves is what turns us into extraordinary individuals. I wish everyone experiences the level of self-efficacy that I've witnessed over the past years.
What's one of the hardest things that come with being a business owner?
The hardest thing is decision-making, especially as you evolve. As you reach new depths of personal development and new heights in your career, you will face equally powerful challenges. Your new habits and thinking will become foreign or even seen as a threat to the patterns that your family, friends, and colleagues once identified within you. You experience one of the oldest tales of human nature, which is to cling to comfort rather than an adventure to the unknown. When it's loved ones or people you've shared history with, you realize the downside to your success and growth is not being able to share your reality with the people who may have been the most important to you based on relation or time spent together.
What are the top tips you'd give to anyone looking to start, run and grow a business today?
- Stop "looking" and start "doing." Pick something you spent a lot of time doing and do it weekly in public for accountability. In two years, you won't recognize the person who is reading this document today.
- Read and implement: Build a desire to learn more than you know. Then create the habit of doing more than you believed was possible.
- Health and Travel: Exercise is medicine to the body, and weights are medicine to your mentality. Meet new people in new places; you'll learn more about yourself the more you meet other people who didn't grow up in the places you're familiar with.
Where can people find you and your business?
Website: https://dancespirestudios.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/deavondre.jones.16
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/deavondrej/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Deavondrej
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/deavondre-jones-58b37060/
If you like what you've read here and have your own story as a solo or small business entrepreneur that you'd like to share, then please answer these interview questions. We'd love to feature your journey on these pages.
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