Today we’d like to introduce you to Cindy Leske.
Cindy, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
I had danced my whole life and in HS had the opportunity to dance at some great venues including Carnagie Hall in NYC. When in college, I was offered a full dance scholarship and minored in dance. I had always loved teaching classes and choreographed and did private lessons as well as taught classes all over Chicago. While attending school, I danced for a DJ company (Energy Productions) that primarily did bar mitzvah parties for the 13yr old age bracket and while there realized that there was a huge market for this on a smaller scale for kid’s birthday parties. At that point started running kids dance parties for ages 4-12yrs and also started a kids dance program teaching and fully running a kids dance program. Once the program started growing rapidly and I was doing 5-10 birthday parties a weekend I realized I had a much larger scale if I marketed to all of Chicago and created my company Chicago Loves Dance (CLD logo also stands for my initials Cindy Leske). Once I started my company I branched out too many park districts and schools and now run partnerships with venues, schools and park districts all over Chicago and the surrounding suburbs.
Has it been a smooth road?
The hardest part for me was as my company was rapidly growing making sure I had a reliable and talented staff of teachers to run our programs. We now run about 75 classes in the school and parks weekly and teach everything from kids yoga, adult classes, gymnastics, breakdance and cheerleading so learning to trust and rely on my instructors was a challenge but luckily, I have a great staff that loves what they do and also have a passion for teaching so the transition from one instructor to 45+ was a challenge but thankful to say worked out well and couldn’t grow without such a great team.
So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the Chicago Loves Dance story. Tell us more about the business.
We specialize in dance, yoga, gymnastics, and cheerleading programming as well as kids birthday parties. We specialize in running after school enrichment programming in the school systems. Teaching in the schools is not only perfect since the kids are already at the location but this helps working parents not have to commute their kids to studios and they are able to keep them at school an extra hour at the end of the day getting the same technical training they would in a dance studio. Another big outlet for CLD is running park district programming. Many park districts in the city and North Shore outsource their dance, cheer, yoga and gymnastics programming to Chicago Loves Dance. Finally, we are also a birthday party company and specialize in dance and yoga parties for kids all over the Chicago-land area.
What sets us apart from others is we go to our clients they do not have to come to us. Any school, park or business that wants to add our programming can do so and we can run classes at any day/time that works in their schedule for any amount of kids.
What I am most proud of is how many communities of children we are able to reach and watching them improve not only in dance ability but in their self-esteem and team building through our programs. Another aspect that I am really proud of is being able to help other small businesses grow. We are constantly adding more venues to our programming and many of these venues have space but not sure what to do with it so bringing in our programs help them become more profitable and brings more business into their venues as well. We partner with kids candy shops, fitness studios, clothing stores, kids salons etc to bring in our programs and birthday parties which really can help boost and support other businesses in the community.
How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
I would hope to be in triple the amount of school districts and have programs in every suburb as well within the next 5 years. I would like to keep growing until all of CHICAGO LOVES DANCE 🙂
Pricing:
- Birthday party packages starting at $175
Contact Info:
- Website: www.chicagolovesdance.com
- Phone: 773-485-0777
- Email: cleske@chicagolovesdance.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chicagolovesdance
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CLDANCE
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/ChiLovesDance
Image Credit:
Chicago Loves Dance
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