When what started as a pandemic project quickly took off, the team behind Dance Motion Marketing found themselves unequipped to manage the financial demands of their sudden success. Bryce Conlan and Kristian Altuve needed banking tools that would help them keep up.
Bryce Conlan is one half of the founding team behind Dance Motion Marketing. The multi-service firm produces promotional content for dance studios, and offers strategic coaching and digital tools to help their clients pursue business leads. Bryce and his business partner, Kristian Altuve, come from the film production world—neither one of them are dancers. But when the pandemic hit and film production came to a halt, the pair wanted to keep busy and direct their energy and skills towards a temporary enterprise.
Altuve had worked with dance studios in the past, and recognized a potential opportunity to support them in their marketing efforts. “We took on a 90-day project just to test the market, to see if there was something there,” recalls Bryce. “There was. By the end of that 90 days, we committed to actually building a business and taking it as far as it would go while we waited to get back to our video production. By the time we could start shooting again, neither one of us really wanted to.”
Wanted: a partner in Profit First
Early on, the two co-founders developed an affinity for their dance studio clients and a drive to help them succeed. “As small business owners ourselves, we know what it's like to struggle. We know what it's like to have a to-do list that has more things on it than there are hours in the day,” Bryce says. “We're pretty particular about who we work with and we have a different business philosophy than I think a lot of people do, which is to just show up and make money. That's just not how we're playing the game. We're looking for partners.”
The partnership that wasn’t working for them was the one they had with their bank. With all of their income and expenses flowing through a single business account, cash flow issues began to creep into their lives. “We had a couple of bad months, truthfully, where revenue dipped and expenses went up, and we didn't catch it because we just weren't looking at our numbers closely enough,” Bryce says. “We’d miss bills all the time. A commitment shows up, or someone delivers on a project that you signed a contract on five months ago and you forgot about it—that bill comes due and you're like, ‘We don't have that, we didn't plan for that, we lost sight of it.’”
In search of a solution to their cash flow crunch woes, Bryce decided to implement the Profit First method—but quickly found that his bank was the biggest roadblock. “It was such a pain to set up multiple accounts. We just started to do it ourselves and manually track all this crap, which is a massive headache. That's really where we failed to implement it, initially.”
Banking with a can-do attitude
Finding a straightforward banking system that offered clarity, while keeping his business a step ahead of financial obligations, began to seem impossible. Then Bryce discovered Relay. “I don't think anything really seemed possible before Relay. And that's not hyperbole. Truthfully, we always felt like we were coming up short when we were using a different bank. When cash was all going into one cash pool, we'd get to the end of the month and go, ‘There's just not enough.’ And it didn't matter how careful we were with our spending, or how diligent we were with our budget. It always just got spent.”
Relay’s multiple free checking accounts make it easy to set up the Profit First method, and easily allocate funds for different purposes. “With Relay it was really easy to say, ‘Okay, I understand that we need money for this, but you can't take it from that account.’ In a very real way, it made us more nimble, more agile, more creative. A lot of outside the box solutions started coming to the surface because cash was now earmarked and it was off limits. Everybody on our team could see it very clearly.”
"[Relay] made us more nimble, more agile, more creative. A lot of outside the box solutions started coming to the surface, because cash was now earmarked and it was off limits. Everybody on our team could see if very clearly." - Bryce Conlan
That kind of clarity and transparency, says Bryce, is crucial to building trust in a business relationship—something that he and Kristian struggled with during their early days of working together. “When you're building a business, trust is paramount,” he says. “Had we had Relay back in those early days, we both would have had access, we both would have had logins… and it would have just created a lot more ease and trust in how we built the business.”
Playing the pro game
Bryce says that he and Kristian felt the impact of using Relay at the end of their very first month on the platform. “Feeling a sense of peace and relief for the first time in my entrepreneurial life was huge.”
Since then, Dance Motion Marketing’s profits have been consistently on an upward trend. “Not only that,” adds Bryce, “our ability to hire and scale has been clear. That has allowed us to hire a couple of additional people who have been super helpful and we've been able to take on some expenses that, truthfully, we should have taken on earlier, but we just didn't because we were scared that we didn't have the cash flow for it. I just feel like we're playing more of a pro game than we were before.”
Switching to Relay has allowed the firm to open and close accounts as needed, earmark funds and set them aside, and begin to make plans for big moves in the future. Setting money aside today is creating an opportunity for Bryce and his team to hire more staff, employ freelancers and consultants, and engage with coaches who will support the business’s future growth. What Bryce means when he says that the firm was able to play a pro game is that they’re able to predict their next move and imagine a bigger future.
“We were actually able to look down the line in a way that we hadn't been able to in the past,” he explains. “We were able to get into the arena where we could almost see around corners, where it's like, ‘Cool, we know this is going to be a problem in six months' time, let's start putting cash aside and planning for it today,’ in a way that we were never able to do when we were just using one bank account and a spreadsheet. That money always got spent, but pulling it out and pushing it to the side allowed us to really start playing the game like a big corporate business.”
Simple, better business banking
“Working with Relay has been a game changer for us, because we have visibility into where we are and where we need to be,” says Bryce. “It makes it so simple to manage finances. One of the biggest challenges that I've had is actually keeping tabs on my finances, because it's scary and I don't want to look at it. The way that Relay lays everything out is unbelievably simple. Just log in and at a glance, you understand the health of individual accounts and the overall health of the business. It's my absolutely favorite part of banking with Relay.”
Whether it’s the ease of opening new accounts or the availability of ultra-detailed banking data, Relay is designed from the ground up to serve the needs of small businesses with big goals. The platform is purpose-built with small business needs in mind: like saving time, skipping bank branch lines, and taking the headache out of end-of-month bookkeeping. From receipt capture tools to team spending that always stays under your control, Relay offers features that truly support the small business owner—and helps drive their success.
“I tell everybody I meet who's in business, ‘You've got to be doing this.’ I’ve run my own shop since I was 17 years old. Running my own businesses has always been a struggle. Switching to Relay and incorporating Profit First was the easiest decision I ever made—and one of the best,” says Bryce.“If you're an entrepreneur and you really want to build your business, you need to be partnering with Relay.”
We’re here to help you keep your business on the money. With a Relay account you have:
Up to 20 free checking accounts, with no hidden account fee or minimum balance requirements
Auto-transfer rules for Profit First allocations
Free check payments, mobile check deposits, ACH, and wires
The ability to open an account online in just 10 minutes
Safe and secure banking without having to visit a physical branch
Seamless accounting software integrations with Xero and QuickBooks Online
And SO much more…
It’s time to see what banking that supports small business entrepreneurs looks like. In just ten minutes you can sign up for your own free business banking account with Relay. Click here and get started today.
