A little over a year and a half ago, Ashley and I had the crazy idea that we could start a performing arts summer camp for kids. It was the summer of 2021, and after a year of virtual college, Zoom theatre, and various fast food and retail jobs, I was desperate to do something that felt at least somewhat relevant to my career goals. When I was offered a position as a summer intern for a youth theater academy, I knew it wouldn't be the most financially beneficial way to spend my time, but I also felt the opportunity to be back in the theatre would ultimately be worth the next-to-nothing pay.
The company I was working for had a huge summer camp program, and I was assigned to work on camps throughout the season of various ages, lengths, and intensities. I loved getting to be involved with the productions and working with the kids each day, but I was also surprised by a lot of what I observed during my time there. My favorite camp was a half-day, outdoor session with kids eight and under. I've always loved little kids, and this was an especially adorable show. However, the camp cost close to $1,000; it was obvious that the majority of the kids came from extremely well-off families. The caliber of the final performance was mediocre a best; the biggest issue was that while the kids did great, the traffic from the nearby street was so noisy they could barely be heard. I invited my family to come watch the final performance and meet the adorable campers I'd been gushing about for the last two weeks, and as soon as we got in the car afterwards, my parents said, "You guys could totally do that."
So, we did. We had dreamed about starting our own theatre company since we were seven years old and would put on hours-long productions in our basement with our Barbies (shout-out to our mom for sitting through these--and only sometimes falling asleep). I'm not sure how serious our parents were about us actually trying to start our own company, but they should have known better than to put the idea in our heads. We felt that there was a major gap in the local arts education industry. Companies like the one I interned for were only accessible to the select few who could afford it. Additionally, we knew from our own experiences in youth theatre that programs where each student actually felt valued and encouraged were few and far between. Ashley immediately began drawing up plans for a youth camp production of "Peter Pan," and while we deemed it was too late in the summer to try to start something that year, the idea re-emerged in January when the time came to begin looking for summer internships or jobs.
If I'm being honest, I thought this was nothing more than a pipe dream. We were barely eighteen, technically we could still register for summer camp as attendees! But Ashley was 100 percent invested in the idea, and her enthusiasm wore off on me, so I agreed to work on a business plan together and present it to our parents to get their take on the idea. (Side note: my parents are never going to be relieved of the duty of being our business advisors, no matter how old we are. I ask their opinion on just about everything, not because I'm not mature enough to make my own decisions but because in addition to being my parents they are also some of the smartest business people I know, I just happen to be lucky enough to be able to use them as a resource!)
By February of 2022, Stagebugz Theatre was born. We planned to put on four summer camps of various lengths, with the goal of creating safe, uplifting, positive spaces for kids to explore the performing arts. In addition, we planned to offer free theatre workshops and scholarship opportunities so that anyone who wanted to participate in our programs could without a financial barrier. We opened camp registration and announced our first free workshop for March, the week we'd be home for spring break.
We never could have imagined how hard it would be to fill up that first workshop. We began advertising in February, and figured our 25 spots would be gone in a flash--who wouldn't want to take advantage of two hours of free fun? By the time we got home for spring break in the middle of March, I think we had less than ten people signed up. Our workshop was on Thursday, and I kid you not, we spent the entire week leading up to it preparing, hanging up flyers, and scouring the internet for any site, calendar, or Facebook group that we hadn't already posted in. Our efforts finally paid off as we narrowly filled up the spots and all the kids seemed to really enjoy the program, but I bet in total we spent upwards of 100 hours preparing for and promoting just the one workshop. While our goal with the workshop was to provide a free introduction to theatre, we were also hopeful that it might result in at least some interest in our summer camps. But not one person registered.
I won't go too much into detail into our struggles to get people to register for camp, but I will say that we were pretty confident we'd have to cancel them pretty much until the week before they started. One of the camps we were literally begging people to take free registrations because we had already paid the permitting fees and didn't want to have to refund the few people who actually did register. Our latest camp in July had zero registrations by June and we made the difficult decision to cancel before we spent more money on it. Every second of our summer that wasn't spent at camp was spent promoting the next camp. In the end, none of the sessions were more than half full.
Nevertheless, the programs themselves were more than worth the work. To see the profound impact that theater had on so many of the kids was absolutely incredible. I'll expand in a later blog post, but this was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. Despite that running Stagebugz was indescribably difficult at times, we were both certain that we wanted to keep at it. We didn't (and still don't) know exactly where our lives would take us over the next several years, but we felt that we could overall call our first summer a success. Because of that were hopeful that we'd be able to sustain the company, even if as nothing more than a replacement for a summer job, at least until graduation.
In addition to camps over the summer, we also continued to hold free workshops. While there was still a lot of preparation required, they became significantly easier over time. It was a huge reassurance for us that we continued to have the same kids return time after time, and many of our previous camp students were always among the first to sign up. In March we could barely fill a workshop after exhausting every advertising resource we could think of, but by July we were adding sessions to accommodate as many of the dozens of students on the waitlist as possible. And, in the fall we became a 501(c)3 non-profit, which meant we could begin accepting donations to support our scholarship program and our new "pay-what-you-can" class model.
Meanwhile, we began planning for summer 2023 pretty much the moment we said our final goodbyes to our last campers in 2022. We knew we wanted to open registration early this year so that we'd have ample time for the hundreds of hours of advertising work we anticipated. We discussed at nauseum what the best age ranges and lengths for camp sessions were, and decided that we'd only offer three camps this summer since we'd had to cancel our fourth the year before.
By December of 2022, we'd announced our summer season, with plans to open registration in January. First, however, we'd need to finalize a location. An outdoor park was the only thing we could afford our first year, and while there were elements that we loved about being outdoors, dealing with the weather had been a bit of a disaster at times. We were fairly certain that an indoor location would still be way outside our budget, but we wanted to contact every local dance studio, church, and recreation center we could think of to make sure we were aware of all of our options. Ultimately, we had found a dance studio with very reasonable rates. It would still cost close to three times as much as the park, though. We expected some of our returning campers to register again, but if we decided to rent the indoor space we were going to need a lot more people to sign up just to break even. Between contemplating the decision and waiting on communication with the studio owner, we kept having to delay opening registration.
We had already put on our website that camp registration would open by January 23rd, so when that time came and we still hadn't made a final decision, we decided we would open the registration pages without a location listed, and offer full refunds if for some reason the location didn't work for them. We assumed this would be a complete non-issue, as we wouldn't send out any announcements about registration being open until we could share the location. "It's not like anyone's going to have marked January 23rd in their calendar," we kept saying.
So the 23rd rolled around, and I was leisurely making final adjustments to our registration pages before making them live. Sometime that morning I opened our email, and we had two Google Voice messages and an email, all from families who had come to some of our workshops, saying they couldn't figure out how to sign up. I ran to wake up Ashley, telling her that apparently people had marked the 23rd in their calendars, and I needed her to help me proofread the pages so people could start registering. We also decided that, since people were already interested in signing up, we might as well just send out a newsletter as well.
Within a week, we already had at least ten people registered, all either returning campers or kids who had done workshops with us. Ten might not seem like a lot, but I'm 100 percent serious that we didn't even have ten people signed up the week before camps started last year. And, we hadn't done any advertising besides our one newsletter.
To make a long story short, we remained cautiously optimistic over the next month as registrations continued to roll in, expecting them to at some point halt. Since we were both home for the semester, we continued putting on free workshops and began offering evening classes, loving every minute of sharing our passion for performing with each of the wonderful kids we got to work with. Luckily, many of these kids had as much fun as we were having, and signed up for camps as well. By the end of February, all of our camps were at least half full and one was already sold out with a growing waitlist.
I started writing this blog post about two weeks ago, when we decided to add a second session of our one-week camp (the one that had sold out). I truly couldn't believe that just last year we were cancelling our fourth camp, and now we were adding one. Still, I felt extremely uncertain about this decision. The dance studio we were renting was getting construction done that week so we'd have to use the park, and when only a few of the people on our waitlist initially accepted spots in the second session, I started to second guess whether that was the right choice. My excitement about adding a session quickly turned into worry that we had gotten to caught up in the taste of success and were in way over our heads. (So I stopped working on this post for a minute, thinking I was jumping the gun).
Two days ago, that second session of our one-week camp sold out. Our younger company two-week camp is also sold out, and we're focusing on filling the final four spots in our older company production. What a major, major difference from only having four spots filled at this point last year. I feel unbelievably grateful, but honestly shocked. We expected that filling programs would gradually become easier as we continued to reach more people, but we anticipated this year wouldn't be that much different than last.
Of course, even though our success in registrations this year came as a surprise, it's not like it came easy. We have poured so much of ourselves into Stagebugz over the past year and a half, and certainly had our fair share of challenges. Most of our campers this summer are returning students from our other programs or were referred to us by our students, which I take pride in being a reflection of mine and Ashley's unwavering commitment to do our best to give the kids a life-changing experience. We've had so many kids who wanted nothing to do with theatre when they first met us, that now sign up for every program we have and tell us they want to be actors when they grow up. And the hard work is far from over, even though camps filled quickly this summer we still have a long way to go if we want to turn the organization into a sustainable source of income, and we have much bigger long-term goals for expanding our ability to provide accessible arts education.
One year ago, starting our own theatre company felt impossible. Ashley and I would have the conversation at least once a week of "What on Earth were we thinking, why did we think this would work, when should we make the decision to cancel, when should we start looking for summer jobs..." But we did everything we could to turn this dream into a reality, holding onto hope that the hard work would be worth it. And it was, for so many reasons.
So why am I saying all of this? Because there are so many other aspects of both of our lives that we have poured copious amounts of time and energy into with little results. My whole life, whether it be in a class at school or my acting career or the web series we created or even our podcast, there's always at least something I'm working on that feels impossible. Of course, all of these are things I enjoy simply for what they are, but when you're dropped by your agent or the web series episode you spent forty hours filming and editing only gets a few views, it's hard not to wonder sometimes if your efforts would be better directed elsewhere. The 180 degree turn we saw with Stagebugz was a huge wake up call. I really did think it was impossible that we could actually create a successful company, but now it rather suddenly feels not so impossible. I hate the concept of overnight success because I think that 99% of the time the "success" is just the part everyone sees after often years and years of work and failure, but I do think that often the switch from "impossible" to "possible" happens unexpectedly. So I take this as a lesson, and I hope that you will too, that if you're passionate about something that seems impossible, keep pursuing it, because one day you might be surprised to wake up and find that it is not.
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