Studio Shift - Business Lessons from Inside A Pole Dancing Studio

After 25 years in senior corporate roles at General Electric, Mark Sheppard made an unexpected move — he now runs Sydney Pole , a fast-growing chain of pole dancing studios. Studio Shift explores what really happens when big-business thinking meets small-business reality. This podcast isn’t about theory or perfect frameworks. It’s about decisions made in real time, where customers are visible, fee...

Episode one of Studio Shift begins on show night at Sydney Pole. It’s a Saturday night in the Camperdown studio. The audience is full, the lights are on, and performers are waiting backstage in the green room. And among them is Mark — face covered in black makeup, wearing a costume he probably shouldn’t be, and standing in eight-inch black patent heels. Tonight, Mark isn’t watching from the sideli...

In the last episode of Studio Shift , we talked about what it really means to walk in your customer’s shoes — not as a slogan, but as a daily way of making decisions. And when you genuinely do that, one thing becomes immediately clear: Speed matters. Customers don’t experience your org charts. They don’t see your internal processes, approval chains, or meetings. They just feel the delay. In this e...