CLEVELAND EXOTIC DANCE CASE STUDY
BUSINESS PROFILE
Cleveland Exotic Dance (CED) is a dance and fitness studio that has been in business since 2007 and is located in the heart of Cleveland just one mile off the shore of beautiful Lake Erie. Roxi DellaDonna, founder and co-owner of CED, created classes that are designed to challenge its members in dance fitness and provide a great alternative to traditional dance or gym style fitness.
When CED opened for business seven years ago, their classes were mostly taught at private events and parties. However, due to the large interest from clients, their business grew and the studio was opened to answer the demand.
Today the instructors at CED teach classes from both dance and fitness perspectives. Some classes are naturally more on the fitness side and some on the dance side, but the focus at CED is on the progress of each individual student. CED provides classes for Pole Fitness, Belly Dance, Hoop Dance and Burlesque. CED continues to grow their business by providing a positive experience for each member and engages with them in communication that is relevant to their fitness and wellbeing.
CHALLENGES
In the beginning, Roxi and her team used spreadsheets to keep track of all of the data for their dance studio. Every class had a worksheet tab in an Excel™ that listed each student scheduled to take the class. Instructors then had to list the names of the students who showed up for their class. Because many students showed up for different classes throughout the month, their names were scattered throughout different tabs of the workbook creating a complicated billing process. In addition, every month a new workbook was created to track that month’s activity leaving Roxi with twelve different workbooks at the end of the year.
Roxi’s time was consumed with spreadsheets that occasionally had formula errors that cost her business money and opportunity for growth.
“We just couldn’t grow as a business because the amount of time we spent on this data,” said Roxi. “This time should be spent creating new classes, marketing and improving member experience.”
She needed a dance fitness software solution that simplified the billing process and a process that easily and accurately tracked member attendance so she could focus on growing her business.
SOLUTION
In the Spring of 2012, Roxi began intense research on-line for dance and fitness software solutions. She conducted side-by-side comparisons of many of them and concluded that Zen Planner was the best answer for her studio.
“I realized that Zen Planner isn’t just for gyms and fitness studios,” said Roxi. “We can use it for our dance, fitness and private parties. We needed a solution where we could have a good tracking system for member information and Zen Planner was it.”
Roxi experienced a smooth transition to the Zen Planner software and immediately saw a 15% increase in profit. She uses many Zen Planner features such as automated billing, attendance tracking, automated emails and alerts. Roxi can now export her business’ financial data into a P&L report in a matter of seconds, which used to take days. Roxi has used Zen Planner for two years and has credited the software for saving her 75% of administrative time, which she now spends on marketing and interacting with her members.
“Because of Zen Planner, we can now communicate with our clients on a continual basis,” said Roxi. “We spend more time with them which creates a better experience for everyone.”
