18%
16%
15 yrs
They went into COVID with 650 students. They came out with 137.
Tara Pickford has run Ambition for more than two decades, and for most of that time she grew it on grit and instinct. By 2019 the studio was having its best year ever.
Then COVID hit. Ambition went into the pandemic with 650 students and came out with 137.
Tara made hard choices to keep her teachers paid and on staff through the recovery, and she came out the other side knowing the next chapter would have to be built on systems rather than grit.
“I thought I knew what I was doing, but I had no idea. This is the first time I can say: we are thriving, and I did the work.”
- Tara Pickford, Owner and Founder, Ambition Performing Arts
Coming out of COVID, they rebuilt every system in the business. Except one.
Tara is an artist who loves the business side as much as the creative one. She calls herself a bit of a unicorn: building a business, to her, is its own art form.
Coming out of COVID, Tara rebuilt how Ambition runs: how it teaches, how it hires, how it meets, how it holds itself accountable. Every system got overturned and reimagined, except sales.
Sales came last because it was the part Tara understood least, and the part her team wanted least. Her teachers have teacher hearts. Give them a sales quota, or even skirt around the idea of selling, and they get squeamish. They want to teach the kids and do a great job. Before Outgrow, a teacher talked to a parent at the scheduled interview, or when something was wrong.
What they would find out is what every Outgrow team finds out: the families wanted to hear from them. Parents said yes to more, and said it faster, because the relationship was already there. The fear was never about the parents. It was about not knowing what to say.
The coach who had helped her build that operating system knew Tyler Nicholetts, a Certified Outgrow Advisor. At an event, he sat the two of them at a table and told Tara, “you two need to meet.” They talked for the evening. Tara had already read the Outgrow book, and she saw it as the next layer on top of everything they had built.
“We had reinvented every system inside our business except sales. It was the last piece, because it’s the piece I understood the least. And I knew it was the piece that would get us to success in a post-COVID market.”
— Tara Pickford, Owner and Founder
The launch workshop opened with the owner’s story. By the end of the day, the room had gone through two boxes of tissues.
In Outgrow, the owner opens the Launch Workshop, not the advisor. Before anyone teaches a single technique, the team needs to hear from the person who leads them why this matters, in their own words. Two-thirds of Outgrow is mindset, and the mindset starts at the top. So Tyler asked Tara to tell her team why.
She opened up and shared her story that many of the people in the room had never heard.
Thirteen years ago, after the studio’s early success, a hard season led her to close locations. The business was under real financial pressure, and she was the one who had to carry it through. She decided she had to become the leader the business needed and learn the financial side of running a company that size.
This is why the owner goes first. When the team doubled down that day, they doubled down on their mission, their value, their story not on a sales program: what we do is important enough that parents will pay for it, kids need it, and society is better when we raise better kids. Proactive conversations with families stopped being a task and became the way Ambition lives out that mission.
Two of Ambition’s core values are Always Growing (stay curious and coachable) and Leaders Raise Leaders. The team had watched Tara consume education for 13 years. They ask their own dancers to take corrections gladly, because a correction means someone believes you can be better. One more round of learning for the adults in the building fit the values they already lived.
“It’s the same thing we ask our students to show up with: we’re going to give you as many corrections as we can, not because you’re terrible, but because we believe you can be better. When you become the teacher, it doesn’t mean you stop learning.”
— Tara Pickford, Owner and Founder
The teachers learned to finish the conversation.
01
Tara timed the workshop for the week before parent-teacher interviews.
02
Hundreds of reps in one week.
03
The hard conversations got easier too.
“It’s not selling. It is serving. We are trying to help you use your investment better, and that really aligns with our teachers and the teacher hearts they have.”
— Tara Pickford, Owner and Founder
Four months in, registrations were up 18 percent over the same day the year before.
The conversations in February became registrations in June, and the registrations are still coming in. Four months after the Launch Workshop, 18 percent more classes and 16 percent more students were registered for the coming season than on the same day the year before.
By mid-August the studio had reached 84 percent of its registration goal for the season, a goal it normally reaches in March. The renewal rate was the highest in the studio’s history.
Tara has one comparison for this pace: the year before COVID, when the studio had 650 students and, in her words, terrible systems.
Tara watches the numbers that don’t fit in a table just as closely. Teachers solve problems sooner. Difficult news lands with less friction and needs less follow-up. And the trust that built up in those conversations is what parents are saying yes to.
— Tara Pickford, Owner and Founder
Accountability was already positive. Outgrow gave the team something worth being accountable for.
“We’re experiencing growth at a rate we last saw in our best year right before COVID. Back then we were successful in spite of ourselves. Now we have the scaffolding in place, the systems in place, and the team is excited to do their job.”
— Tara Pickford, Owner and Founder
The advisor kept the work consistent. Tara kept leading it.
Tara describes herself as a visionary. She shows up with jazz hands and new ideas, and she knows she needs people around her who can carry an idea to the finish line. That is the role an Outgrow Advisor plays for an owner: a partner who makes sure the work gets done every week.
Tyler brings plenty of information, but Tara says the value is the consistency: the weekly rhythm, and the reminder that arrives whether or not anyone feels like picking up the phone that week. Her team already knew what to do. Outgrow is what made them do it, every week.
Tyler worked with Tara and her leadership team the way Ambition already runs, in a weekly rhythm with clear accountability, so Outgrow felt like part of the business rather than a program layered on top of it.
Training is forgotten in three days. Culture is permanent. The difference at Ambition is the Outgrow system, the accountability it builds, and a Certified Outgrow Advisor who has done this before and stayed with them through it.
“The beauty of coaching is the consistency. It’s not that these are things we don’t know. It’s the consistency of doing the thing you know you need to do, and the reminders that keep you on track.”
— Tara Pickford, Owner and Founder
Her advice to an owner on the fence: it works. Be ready for it.
Tara has told a lot of business owners that Outgrow has been great for Ambition. The first question is usually about the investment and how they get it back. Her answer: think about the long game, which in her experience wasn’t that long. Tyler has been amazing.
Her one piece of advice is about the growth itself. When your team starts having these conversations, families say yes, and they say it faster. You need a business that can catch that: a weekly rhythm, real accountability, feedback as a normal part of the week. In her industry, the standard is a season kickoff in September and “see you in June.” Ambition had already built the habits. That is why the results came as fast as they did.
“It was a really great choice for us. The biggest concern people have is, what is the investment and how do I get that back? Keep the long game in mind, and it’s actually not even that much of a long game. Tyler has definitely proved his worth in the half a year we’ve been working together.”
— Tara Pickford, Owner and Founder, Ambition Performing Arts