Dance to Success: Merging Brands with Daniel DeFranco

Better People Podcast

Join host Holly as she speaks with Daniel DeFranco, Co-CEO of One Beat Dance Brands. In this vibrant episode, Daniel embodies the fusion of passion and business, sharing secrets from backstage management to executive boardrooms. Discover how culture, growth, and employee wellbeing choreograph the success of this dance-focused enterprise!

Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Better People Podcast:

• Daniel's Journey from Groove to One Beat
• Merging Dance Brands & Corporate Ethics
• Prioritizing Employee Growth & Culture
• Strategic Decisions in Entrepreneurship
• Retaining Talent in the Arts Industry

Resources:

• One Beat Dance Brands
• MidAtlantic Employers’ Association (MEA)

Connect with Daniel DeFranco:

• LinkedIn

Connect with our hosts:

• Holly DePalma - LinkedIn
• Margaret Uhrich - LinkedIn

Quotables:

• 02:35 - I love when people walk in and they're excited about the atmosphere, the environment, the energy that is the thing. I think one of the things I'm most passionate about, and I love the art of dance and I love work working with kids, especially as time's gone on, I've grown to love that even more. And creating a positive environment for young people to dance is really fulfilling. And to do a good job at it, I think is even more exciting.
• 16:14 - When you really are thoughtful about this kind of change and you are committed to doing the right thing, you mentioned ethics in the beginning about your partnership. While change is not easy for everyone when it's the right decision and the right thing to do, you can tend to sort of have less of a hiccup through it and have better sort of overall business results because of the way you go about that change.
• 10:47 - Holly: How did you go through the process of taking two different businesses and and molding them together down below? Obviously there was some duplication, you didn't need it all. Tell me about that.
  Daniel: So that's a great question. There's been some duplication. However, we kind of took on the mindset that as we merge, we want this to be better for everybody. It needs to be better for the customer, it needs to be better for the partners, it needs to be better for the employees. So we tend to err on the more generous side of things.
• 16:32 - Holly: While change is not easy for everyone when it's the right decision and the right thing to do, you can tend to sort of have less of a hiccup through it and have better sort of overall business results because of, because of the way you go about that change.
  Daniel: Yes, totally. And I think it would be foolish to say that of, you know, out of 50 people that nobody would have an issue with the change. So some people will have issues with change in the short term and then they adapt to long term.
• 30:35 - And traditional military thinking was about hierarchy, hierarchy, right? This general. And then your soldiers kind of executed and that was not how Al-Qaeda was operating. So what they needed to figure out was really how were they, how do they fight this new type of, of enemy? And the idea was rather than having one large team, was to create a team of much smaller teams, hence the title of the book.