I started Dancing with Louise in 2001 with a single class in Hendon and no idea what I was doing.
No business plan. No funding. No website, no CRM, no marketing, no systems of any kind. Just me, a church hall, and a handful of parents who liked what they saw.
By the time I looked up, twenty years had passed. MOUVE had grown to over a thousand students, eighty-plus weekly classes, twenty school clubs, and a team of twenty-two. And I was still running every part of it the same way I had from day one: manually.
What does a business without systems actually look like?
It looks like success from the outside. Full classes. Great reviews. A waiting list in September. Revenue that grows year on year.
But behind the scenes, it looks like this:
- Every enquiry answered personally, usually from my phone at 10pm
- Every new student onboarded by hand, one email at a time
- No way of knowing how many leads came in last month, or where they came from
- No follow-up if someone enquired and then went quiet
- Revenue that reset to zero every September and rebuilt through word of mouth by December
- A team that could teach brilliantly but could not run the business if I stepped out for a week
I had built something genuinely valuable. And it was slowly consuming me.
That is the operator trap. You are so good at the work that the business moulds around you. And then you cannot leave.
Why did it take twenty years to fix?
Honestly? Because it was working. The classes were full. The students loved it. The revenue was there.
When something works, you do not question how fragile it is. You just keep doing it. And the busier you get, the less time you have to step back and look at the structure underneath.
I also did not know what I did not know. I had never heard of a CRM. I did not know what a funnel was. Automation sounded like something for tech companies, not dance schools.
It took a business coach asking me a simple question to shift everything: if you could not show up for a month, what would happen to your business?
The honest answer was: it would fall apart.
What did I actually build?
The shift happened over about eighteen months. Not overnight. One system at a time, each one solving a specific problem.
Lead capture. Instead of enquiries arriving via email, DM, text message, and word of mouth with no central record, we built a single system that caught every enquiry from every channel and logged it in one place.
Automated follow-up. When a lead came in, they received a sequence of messages guiding them to book a free trial. If they went quiet, the system followed up. If they booked, they received a confirmation, a reminder the day before, and a welcome text on the morning of the class.
Conversion tracking. For the first time, we could see the numbers. How many leads came in each week. How many booked a trial. How many showed up. How many signed up. Where the drop-off happened.
Review automation. After a new student’s first class, they received an automated text asking how it went and whether they would mind leaving a Google review. We went from a handful of reviews to 121 five-star reviews without a single manual chase.
Onboarding sequences. Once a student signed up, the system handled welcome emails, class reminders, term renewal nudges, and re-engagement messages if attendance dropped. The team did not have to remember any of it.
The business went from depending on me for every decision to running a customer lifecycle that worked whether I was at the desk or not.
What would I do differently if I started again?
Everything. I would build the systems from year one, not year twenty.
Not because the first twenty years were wasted. They built the product, the reputation, the community. But the infrastructure could have been there from the start. And if it had been, I would have scaled faster, burned out less, and spent fewer evenings answering the same five questions by text message.
If you are reading this and your business is already past the startup stage, already generating revenue, already busy, here is what I would tell you:
- Do not wait until you are overwhelmed to build systems. Build them while you still have the headspace
- Start with lead capture. If you do not know where your enquiries come from, you cannot improve anything
- Automate the follow-up before you automate anything else. That is where the most revenue leaks
- Track your conversion numbers even if the numbers are small. The pattern is what matters
- And stop treating the business as something you do. Start treating it as something you have
What does this have to do with Women Making MOUVES?
Everything. Women Making MOUVES exists because I kept meeting other women in the same position I was in. Brilliant at their craft. Revenue coming in. But the business consuming them because the infrastructure was not there.
The four systems I teach in the masterclass are the same four I built inside MOUVE: Strategy, Systems, Visibility, and Freedom. I am not teaching theory. I am teaching what I actually did, what the numbers looked like, and which system to fix first.
I ran the school for twenty years before I did any of this. Marketing and automation is key. You do not have to spend twenty years figuring it out.
Frequently asked questions
What systems does a service business need first?
Start with lead capture and automated follow-up. If enquiries arrive across multiple channels with no central record and no follow-up sequence, you are losing potential customers every week without knowing it. Everything else builds on top of knowing where your leads come from and making sure they hear back.
How long does it take to set up business automation?
Inside MOUVE, the core systems took about eighteen months to build fully, but the first results appeared within weeks. Lead capture and automated follow-up can be operational within days. The compounding effect grows over months as you refine each stage of the customer journey.
Do I need technical skills to automate my business?
No. Louise is not technical. The implementation was handled by a team that builds the infrastructure alongside the founder. That is the model Women Making MOUVES uses: strategy and coaching paired with technical implementation so things actually get built.
What is the difference between a CRM and posting on social media?
A CRM (customer relationship management system) tracks every lead, every interaction, and every stage of the customer journey in one place. Social media reaches people who may or may not be your ideal client. A CRM makes sure that the people who have already shown interest actually hear from you, follow up happens automatically, and no lead falls through the cracks.
Want to see the full four-system architecture? In sixty minutes, I walk you through Strategy, Systems, Visibility, and Freedom, and show you which one your business needs first.
Louise Leach is the founder of Women Making MOUVES and MOUVE by Dancing with Louise, a dance school she built from a single class in Hendon in 2001 to over 1,000 students, 80+ weekly classes, and a 5.0 Google rating with 121 reviews. She now helps female founders build the systems to scale beyond themselves.