Dance Dynamics has been part of Melbourne's fitness community for 28 years. What started as a small ballroom and Latin studio is now a five-location group fitness business running around 250 classes a week and serving close to 2,500 active clients.
It might look like a dance studio on paper, in practice it runs like a membership-based fitness business, and founder Katherine Armstrong has been deliberate about that from the start. The mission she wrote before opening the doors still holds: to enable all to experience the joy of dance, thus enabling a fundamental expression of the human spirit. Dance is the vehicle. The real point is making movement accessible to anyone who walks in, whether that's someone who's never taken a class or someone who's been dancing their whole life.
The client base reflects that philosophy. Members range from 18 to 80, with around 80 to 90 per cent female and a significant cohort in the over-50 age group. Retention is strong and Katherine attributes a large part of that to the warmth of the team and the care built into every client touchpoint.
“A few sessions in, they’re hooked.”
Dance Dynamics was one of the earliest Mindbody clients in Australia. In its early days, that worked well enough. But as the business grew and Katherine got clearer on how she wanted to operate, Mindbody started getting in the way.
Her view on software is simple: it should fit how her business runs, not the other way around. Mindbody kept requiring the opposite, and the gaps were starting to cost her.
The most pressing problem was debt. There was no reliable way to stop clients attending classes when payments had failed. Debt was quietly building, and her three admin staff were spending a chunk of their time chasing it. Katherine wanted her team focused on clients, not payment recovery.
The other gap was communication. She had a clear idea of how she wanted to stay connected with clients: automated sequences triggered by actual behaviour, written to feel like they came from a real person. Mindbody couldn't get her there.
She spent a couple of years watching the market before making a move, kept an eye on Momence as it developed, had a few conversations with the team, and eventually felt the product was ready. The transition took a couple of weeks to bed down. After that, it was months of satisfaction.
“My software has to support my processes, not me having to change how I do business to fit with the software. That became the issue. It became extremely clunky, there was no customer service. In the end, it was doing harm, not help."
One of the first things Katherine set up in Momence was a payment-before-attendance rule. No exceptions. Combined with Momence's automated membership cancellation when a payment fails repeatedly, the debt problem cleared up almost immediately. No more accruing balances, no more manual chasing.
Her admin team didn't just get time back. They shifted from recovery work to proactive client engagement, which is exactly how she wants the business to run.
"It instantly built my bottom line. It was a fundamental change."
With the debt sorted, Katherine turned her attention to client communication. She built out a set of behaviour-based automation sequences and is careful about every word in them. Each message goes out from a named team member, references something specific about the client's visit, and reads like it came from someone who was paying attention.
One sequence gives you a good sense of the approach. An hour after a client attends their first class, they get an SMS naming the class, the instructor, and asking how they're feeling. It offers to help them figure out what to try next. If someone writes back saying the class felt too intense, that reply gets flagged to a team member who calls them, has a real conversation, and finds them something that suits better. Churn gets caught before it happens.
"My software is interacting with our clients all day every day, building relationships, warming, confirming, affirming our client relationship, with minimal effort from us. Only when there's a problem do my team have to pick it up."
Momence also changed how easy it was to do marketing. Before, putting together a promotion meant hours of manual work. Now Katherine can build and launch a campaign, set up a new membership type, or create a limited offer directly through the platform.
"It unleashed my marketing creativity, which allowed me to build revenue over time."
The booking experience was another piece. A large portion of Dance Dynamics' clients find technology genuinely tricky, so the app needed to be simple. Multi-site functionality mattered too, across five locations. The platform has kept improving since Katherine joined, popular classes book out weeks in advance, and she has the forward visibility to plan around it.
Last year, Katherine and her husband spent five and a half months travelling overseas. Dance Dynamics kept running. Five locations, 45 staff, around 250 classes every week, without her needing to be there.
That's what she'd been building toward: a business that runs on good systems and good people. The debt recovery changes fed straight into the bottom line. The automation sequences handle the client relationship work that used to require constant attention. Having everything in one place means the team stays on top of things without switching between tools or chasing down information.
Retention is strong, attrition is lower than comparable fitness businesses, and she's keeping an eye out for the right property on the Mornington Peninsula for a sixth studio. Not because she needs it, she'll tell you that herself. But she still enjoys building things.