The Enrichment Entrepreneur presented by enrops

Starting a business isn't just a professional decision. It's a family decision. In Part 2 of this conversation, Dr. Arielle Hammond and her husband, Ryan Hammond, continue reflecting on what entrepreneurship has required of both of them, how their perspective has changed over the years, and what they hope other families know before taking a similar path. It's an honest conversation abo...

Starting an after-school enrichment business comes with a lot of decisions, and some matter more than others. In this episode, Dr. Arielle Hammond shares what she'd do differently if she were starting an after-school enrichment business today. From choosing between a mobile or studio model to finding your first school partnership, setting class sizes, and knowing when to hire your first instru...

Building an enrichment business changes more than a career...it changes a family. In this first of a two-part conversation, Arielle is joined by her husband, Ryan, to explore the side of entrepreneurship that rarely gets discussed: what it looks like to support a growing business from behind the scenes. Together, they talk about the uncertainty, sacrifices, and everyday decisions that come with ra...

Instructor payroll isn't a system problem. It's a mirror. Every gap in your operations shows up there first, every week, on a deadline that doesn't care what else you have going on. This episode covers the full journey...Chase direct deposits and hand-made pay stubs, Gusto, a part-time assistant reconciling spreadsheets every week, and self-reporting that nobody actually did on time. T...

Spencer Rubin spent 26 years in broadcast radio before a PE teacher planted an idea that wouldn't let go. Three years after that conversation, he was changing into coach's gear in school parking lots, working until 10pm, and building Play. Fit. Fun one school partnership at a time. He was still showing up as a top performing salesperson every single morning while quietly laying the groundw...

Choosing the wrong registration platform can cost time, money, and a whole lot of unnecessary frustration. In this episode, Dr. Arielle Hammond walks through the most popular platforms in the kids enrichment space, not as a software reviewer, but as someone who has operated programs, managed teams, worked with schools, and lived the consequences of these decisions. Sawyer, Jumbula, CourseStorm, Ja...

When Jessica Vorster joined Journey to STEAM as Program Manager, she didn't start by changing anything... she started by mapping every school, every contact, and every unwritten rule first. In this episode, Arielle and Jessica get into what actually shifts once someone with that kind of pattern recognition joins a team: the recap email that replaced 30 separate manually-sent templates, the dat...

After ten conversations with operators, founders, and industry experts, some of the biggest challenges in enrichment started looking a lot less unique. The same themes kept coming up: marketing that actually works, staffing and retention, growth ceilings, canceled programs, strategic partnerships, and building systems that can support long-term growth. In this episode, Dr. Arielle Hammond looks ba...

In this week's episode of The Enrichment Entrepreneur, Arielle is joined by Jeff Kerestes, founder and CEO of The Ukulele Project, a music education program now serving 25 schools across Portland and Vancouver. Jeff's path to entrepreneurship was anything but traditional, beginning with a career as a professional musician before a series of unexpected changes led him into the world of afte...

There were multiple points in my journey as an enrichment entrepreneur where I seriously questioned whether I could keep going. Scheduling chaos, enrollment tracking, instructor management, payroll, parent communication, every time the business grew, the complexity grew with it. In this episode, I share five moments where my systems broke, the lessons I learned the hard way, and why I eventually r...

One of the most effective growth strategies in kids enrichment isn't a new marketing tactic. It's picking up the phone. In this episode, Arielle is joined by Jeannette Sermak-Proulx, founder of Plaza Production One Mobile Dance Studio, to talk about how she built her business through relationships, consistency, and a commitment to serving families and schools. They discuss earning partners...

Most enrichment entrepreneurs don't have a pricing strategy. They have a number that felt right when they started and a lot of hope that it's still working. In this episode, Arielle breaks down why pricing feels so difficult in youth enrichment, the hidden costs most operators forget to include, and the simple framework she uses to determine whether a program is actually profitable. She al...

Seth Miller didn’t set out to build a music school…he set out to recreate the feeling of community he found inside Portland’s jam circles and folk music spaces. In this episode of The Enrichment Entrepreneur, Seth shares how Portland Sound Academy is helping kids build confidence through low-pressure, collaborative music education instead of isolated practice and performance pressure. We talk abou...

The enrichment industry is growing fast, but a lot of operators are still running their businesses through spreadsheets, disconnected tools, and systems that only make sense inside their own heads. In this episode, Arielle talks about the operational pressure quietly building underneath the industry right now…unstable enrollment cycles, inconsistent cash flow, rising complexity, and the long-term...

A lot of people love something. Far fewer people figure out how to build a business around that thing without eventually draining the joy out of it. In this episode, Arielle talks with national fiddle champion and music educator Aarun Carter about what it has actually looked like to sustain a life in music across decades…through performing, teaching, competitions, parenting, business ownership, an...

You can run a program parents genuinely love and still struggle to fill seats consistently, and that disconnect frustrates a lot of enrichment operators because good programs do not automatically guarantee visibility. In this episode, Arielle breaks down why marketing for kids enrichment businesses works differently than general small business marketing advice and shares the costly lessons learned...

In this new episode of The Enrichment Entrepreneur, Dan VanDetta and I talk about what it actually looks like to build youth programs that last. One of my favorite parts of this conversation was hearing how intentionally Five Rings Jiu Jitsu develops instructors…prioritizing temperament, patience, and relationship-building over polished resumes or technical expertise alone. Dan also shares his per...

If I were starting a kids enrichment business from scratch today, I wouldn’t just follow my passion...I’d follow the demand. After building a STEAM business that now serves over 1,300 children annually, I’ve realized that scaling is a choice between creating order or multiplying chaos. In this episode, I’m walking through my exact 2026 launch sequence: from choosing "sticky" programs tha...

Darren Chase, founder and CEO of Chase Youth Programs LLC, graduated college at 20 and founded a company four months later. But his real competitive advantage wasn't his degree, it was a childhood experience in an after-school program that changed the trajectory of his life. We’re talking about what it actually looks like to scale from zero to 16 schools in under a year, his 'servant-leade...

"I’ll just do it myself." If you’re a woman in business, especially in the kids enrichment space, those words are practically a survival mantra. I know the feeling of hitting that ceiling where your calendar is the only thing standing between you and the next level. In this episode, I’m breaking down why getting help isn't a weakness…it’s the only way to build something that outlasts...

Loving your craft is a great place to start but it is not a business plan. Professor Dr. Schreiber has been teaching magic in Portland-area elementary schools for 15 years, full-time for the last five. He performs in an 18th-century style, but what he’s figured out along the way is that the hardest parts have nothing to do with the tricks. It's the scheduling conflicts, the enrollment that doe...

At some point, what used to work stops working and most enrichment operators don’t realize it until everything starts to feel heavier than it should. In this week’s episode of The Enrichment Entrepreneur, Dr. Arielle Hammond walks through the systems she built while managing 75 partnership sites, because keeping everything in your head is not a strategy, it’s a bottleneck. She breaks down what act...

Twenty years in enrichment will teach you things no course ever will and David Dodge came ready to share all of it. Dr. Arielle Hammond is joined by David Dodge of CodaKid to get into the real mechanics of building and scaling in this industry: bootstrapping without a safety net, knowing when your delivery model has maxed out, building a value ladder that keeps your best customers around longer, a...

Most kids' enrichment businesses are struggling…quietly accumulating operational debt they never agreed to take on. In this episode, I name what that looks like in practice: fragmented systems, constant rebuilding of the same materials each term, and decision-making happening in isolation without any shared industry playbook. Once you see it, you can’t unsee how much time is being spent on wor...

Amir Moazami, co-founder of Rookly, joins Dr. Arielle Hammond to share why he walked away from a successful after-school chess business and what led him to build something entirely different. Rookly is an online chess league that helps school clubs compete without the usual logistics, now used by 275+ schools across the U.S. and Canada. They talk about hitting the “ceiling” in your business, what...