Building Something That Outlasts Us

A note from our founder

I was 21 when I was handed the keys to a small studio in Victoria. 120 students. Big dreams. No real idea how hard the next four years would be.

By the time I left, I had 8 seniors. Eight.

I don't share that number to be dramatic. I share it because it's the number that taught me everything. It taught me that passion for dance and the ability to run a thriving studio are two completely different skill sets — and that nobody had ever taught me the second one.

So I went looking for it.

I moved to Adelaide and qualified in fitness and gym management, because I wanted to understand how businesses were run, not just classes. I spent four years learning that world. Then I stepped into a city ballet studio, filling every one of my classes while others around me sat halfempty — because now I understood not just the art, but the mechanics behind it.

That understanding is what I brought to Mitcham Dance.

When I arrived, the ballet program was failing. By the second term, every student was enrolled in it. Not long after, I bought the school outright — 120 students at the time. Within three years, we'd grown past 1,000.

But here's the thing I kept running into, over and over, at every studio, in every city: great studio owners were being let down by the industry around them. There was no proper full-time Certificate IV pathway for dancers in South Australia. I asked every full-time studio in the country to license their course to us. Every one said no.

So we built our own. It took two years and a team of people who believed in something that didn't exist yet, and at the end of it, we became the only Registered Training Organisation of our kind in SA.

Most people would have called that the finish line. I called it the starting point.

Because the real question was never "how do I build a successful studio?" It was "how do I help every studio owner build theirs?" So we opened our doors — partnering with studios across Australia to deliver dance qualifications under one shared standard, one shared belief in what's possible.

Then COVID hit, and like everyone, we had to move overnight. We took our face-to-face programs to Zoom — and something unexpected happened. It worked. Not as a stopgap, but as a genuinely better way to reach dancers who'd never had access to this kind of training before. So we expanded again, bringing our qualifications to dancers across Australia and New Zealand.

Today, Empowerdance delivers Certificate I through to Advanced Diploma, alongside First Aid for Dancers, Child Safety, and Leadership and Management courses — every one of them built specifically for our industry, by people who live in it.

None of this happened in a straight line. It happened through a huge team of people who gave years of their lives to something bigger than any one studio — some who are still with us today, and some who moved on along the way. Every one of them is part of this story.

To date, our work has touched over 1.2 million dancers. In the next three years, we aim to double that.

But the number was never really the point. The point is this: when a studio owner understands not just what to teach, but why it matters and how to build something lasting around it — that's where the real gold is. That's the shift that turns a class into a career, and a studio into a legacy.

I didn't set out to build a training organisation. I set out to save eight seniors from becoming zero. Everything since has been an answer to one question I keep asking myself:

If more people could see the importance of how they do things and why — what could we build together?

That's the legacy I'm here for. I hope you'll keep building it with us. 

Written by Gabrielle Robinson