Yael Roush wants to stop treading water at her swim school — and that means fixing constant staffing challenges.
The owner of Little Kickers in Denver’s Virginia Village neighborhood recently bumped up pay for instructors to improve retention.
“It’s a high, high turnover industry overall. A lot of people do it as their high school job. Nobody really dreams of being a swim instructor as their career,” said Roush, who is the founder and owner.
Roush said she expects to have revenue of $5 million this year.
“People just haven’t been able to use it as something that will financially support them,” she continued. “Denver, especially, it’s very expensive here, so a lot of our instructors have two or three other jobs and sometimes this isn’t a priority for them.”
The recent change takes starting pay for coaches from $22 to $25 an hour. But the more noticeable jump is on the high end — pay is now capped at $50 an hour, up from $32.
Roush said the average instructor is now earning $35 an hour, a $10 increase from a month ago.
Little Kickers, which Roush opened with her sister in 2014, has 1,750 weekly students ranging in age from 5 months to 12 years. Most fall between ages 2 and 6. Roush said she thinks the increased staffing consistency will allow her to get the weekly student number to 2,000.
The school in 5,700 square feet at 1423 S. Holly St. charges $59 an hour for 30-minute private lessons. The $5 million in revenue projected this year is a slight increase over last year, when the business brought in $4.8 million.
As part of the pay increase, she requires her staff to commit to a schedule for a full year. She said in the 60 days since she started rolling out the changes, call outs and sick days have dropped 75%.
“Growth within Little Kickers for the past as long as I can remember has been, ‘How do I get out of the water? What can I do to get a shift out of the water?’” she said. “Because usually that means more money.
“My belief is that people who are the most excellent instructors should be making more than some of the people out of the water.”
The move is already enticing former coaches to jump back into Little Kickers’ pool.
Last Tuesday, Barry Friedman was in the midst of his first week back on the job. He started teaching for Roush in 2016, but returned home to South Dakota in October.
“The reason I left is because Denver is expensive. I was working two jobs and sometimes like 16-hour days,” he said. “It just got really exhausting.”
But when Roush called about the pay hike, Friedman opted to return.
“Some people look at swim instructing as a really easy job, but really it’s physically demanding,” he said. “It can be mentally and emotionally demanding. It’s a lot of work having kids climb on you all day, being in chlorine for 30 to 40 hours a week.”
Roush started teaching swimming lessons in high school at what used to be the Cherry Creek Athletic Club. She and her sister started Little Kickers in an office building’s pool, then moved to a since-shuttered Holiday Inn in Cherry Creek.
Seven years ago, the pair signed a 10-year lease for the current Virginia Village space. After getting the permanent spot up and running, Roush and her husband, Mark, who owned Great Play Cherry Creek before closing during the pandemic, opened the Kickin’ It Kids Gym next door to Little Kickers. That business is on track to do around $1 million this year.
One of the main reasons for the pay bump is that Yael Roush bought out her sister’s stake in the business earlier this year.
“We’ve created two phenomenal businesses over the past 10 years, and I think just over the past two years, our visions really started to grow apart,” she said. “We had very different ideas of what we wanted this to look like. … It’s been 90 days of me having the ability to not have to run an idea like a crazy compensation plan by somebody else.”
Cutting eight management positions earlier this year is one of the ways she is offsetting the costs. Another will be having more full-timers, which she hopes will bring down the employee count to 50. She also plans to increase the lesson price by $9, to $68.
Yael Roush said Little Kickers’ clients mostly come from Cherry Creek, Wash Park and Virginia Village. She expects them to benefit from coaching consistency.
“We were in a place where we were so nervous to fill our schedule because we didn’t know if we could rely on those coaches. And so we wouldn’t want to put a new family into a schedule because we didn’t know if that coach was leaving,” she said. “But with this, we can trust our coaches. We know they’re going to be there. We know they’re going to show up.”
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