Dd Entrepreneur School, Edition 1!

Greetings Dders!

Aaron and I and the Dd team felt—in the true Dd spirit of innovation, education and new possibilities—strongly that we should share with you what we’ve learned while starting our new business, Barre. Over the course of the past year or so, we’ve certainly had so many lessons, some large and some subtly small. And we figured what the heck, why not share some of this stuff with the crazy-multitalented Dd community, to give you all a leg up (sorry, couldn’t resist the pun there…)?!

Here it begins, though what detail we give to certain topics remains fluid as we’d love any input from you, the Dd community, regarding what you’d like to hear about and what questions you’d like answered! So please do let us know!

Lesson #1:

just do it.

Don’t think for a second that you don’t have the capacity to actually DO that which you want to do, or think that it has to happen in that general time frame commonly referred to as LATER ON IN LIFE.  This should be somewhat of a no-brainer for such an overachieving subset of the population as dancers, having already attained goals loftier than many ever dream of. That being said, dancers’ lives are often quite structured, and that structure can bring with it a certain rigidity, or perhaps the feeling that there isn’t space in one’s life for that “dream” project. I’m here to tell you that you can create space; moreover, that space will indeed be created for you in many ways once you’re committed and out of the gates.

A visual timeline of our progress - the evolution of the Barre wrapper on our dry erase board!

My dad, a self-declared serial entrepreneur, suggested to me and Aaron when we first started out (just about a year ago this month) that we print business cards with our respective job titles and “work” emails. Though we had yet to make up the job titles (a fun project, right?) and didn’t even manage to set up the Barre email accounts until the day after I handed my first card out to someone, having those cards printed was a huge first step. It was a revelation—truly one of those “If you build it, they will come”, Field of Dreams (this is an old Kevin Costner movie reference, for all you youngins…) moment. And it worked. We declared it so, and then it WAS: we were in business!

Those business cards were an “it”—one of the first of many teeny, tiny “it”s that, in the aggregate, have amounted to an actual business. So my advice is to move in the direction of your dreams by taking action with some of those “it”s. They will accumulate, accelerate, and you will continue to surprise yourself!

Next lesson in the lesson plan: If you don’t know how, ask (aka, how to be comfortable admitting you have no clue what you’re doing…!).