The first major insight

Part 2 of 4

Hey it's Omar again. Remember that phone call I told you about?

The one where I was standing at the back of the Hip Hop Championship, casually chatting with a colleague while my team handled everything?

Here's what I didn't tell you.

That moment of freedom? It didn't last.

2011–2012: WHEN EVERYTHING FELL APART

2011–2012 was a perfect storm.

My business partnership ended—for personal reasons I won't get into here—and with it, I lost my front desk support.

Then a key team member left. She had become indispensable to running both my studio and the championship.

All the institutional knowledge? Gone.

Even though I had written down a lot of things, most of what it actually took to run the event was in my head.

No written record of tweaks. No documentation of changes. In some cases, we didn't even have the forms we used to run the event saved anywhere.

THE CONSEQUENCES

When I had to run the event with a whole new team, I basically had to start over.

I didn't have everything I needed to run it smoothly. It took me forever to piece together all the moving parts. That led to some pretty serious complaints.

At one event, the general manager warned me that if we didn't finish within a couple of minutes, the event would be shut down. Fortunately, we were on the final crew.

But the damage was done. A lot of people walked away thinking my only purpose was making money and that I didn't really care about the experience of the participants and their families. That hurt.

I'm sure there were crews who decided not to come back because it all felt messy and unreliable.

IT WASN'T JUST THE EVENT

My studio suffered too. I remember recruiting an amazing ballet teacher. Actually, two of them. Both eventually left.

They could see what I was trying to build, but they were frustrated that I wasn't consistently returning their calls, answering their questions, or paying them on time.

That's embarrassing to admit. But it's the truth.

THE LONG CLIMB BACK

Because the event only ran once a year, it took years to iron out the problems. You only get one shot per year to test your systems. One chance to see what breaks.

It was slow. Frustrating. Humiliating at times.

2016: THE TURNING POINT

The breakthrough came in 2016 at a meditation retreat center in Herefordshire, England called Dhamma Dipa.

I was doing kitchen service—part of the volunteer work you do during these retreats. And I was blown away by what they had on the walls all around the kitchen.

Picture this: the kitchen manager might be the only permanent person. Everyone else? Volunteers. Many with little to no commercial kitchen experience. Yet they were serving upwards of 100 meals, twice a day, like clockwork.

How? Written procedures everywhere. Clear. Simple. Step by step. Anyone could walk in and know exactly what to do.

I'd read books about building structure and had already started implementing some things in my business. But this was different. This was volunteers running complex operations smoothly—not because they were experienced, but because the system didn't require them to be.

THE REBUILD

It took time to implement those lessons. With an annual event, you don't get many chances to perfect your systems. But I started making changes: clear roles and responsibilities for my team, service level agreements, and written documentation for everything.

My coordinators had authority to make decisions in their areas. If something cost under a pre-agreed limit and solved a problem without breaking competition rules, they could just do it—no approval needed. Regular meetings, but short and useful (I hate long meetings).

And slowly… things started to work.

THE LAST FOUR YEARS

The last four years of the Hip Hop Championship? I can say with pride: we started and finished within minutes of our published times—every time.

The studio systems became far more reliable. Teachers stayed. Students stayed. I could actually take time off without everything falling apart.

From 2019 onward, my team handled almost everything. I organized most of it from my phone and computer—no costly, time-consuming face-to-face meetings.

BUT HERE'S THE QUESTION I KEPT ASKING…

If I had finally figured it out… if the systems were working… if I could step away without everything collapsing… why was I still so exhausted?

That's when I realized: there are five problems every studio owner faces that no amount of systems can fix—until you understand what they are.

More on that next time.

In the meantime, if any of this hit home, hit reply and let me know.

Be well,
Omar

P.S. The turning point wasn't more marketing tactics or money-making strategies. It was understanding that anyone with clear systems will outperform experts running on tribal knowledge. That changed everything. I'd love to hear your automation wins.