Perfecting the Turn

Welcome back to on the job. Hope you all are loose and limber, because this week we're going to put on our dance and shoes and head down to Austin, Texas to talk with Vanessa Vaught, who, as we'll hear, keeps the live music capital of the world stepping to the beat. On pretty much any night of the week in Austin, Texas, you can find a dance floor full of people in cowboy boots twirling each other around to

My name is Vanessa Vaught.

I'm the founder and lead dance instructor at doublin Nothing two Step and I currently live in South Austin, Texas.

Well, Vanessa isn't the only person teaching Austin knites how to boot scoot these days. In just two years, she's become one of the busiest and it really just.

Took off quickly in a way that even immediately I was impressed with and was happy with what it has become now literally having thirty events.

On the books in the next few months, is blowing my mind.

Four nights a week, she's teaching social classes at some of the city's oldest surviving Honckey talks.

Dance is a language, so there are regional dialects throughout the South, specifically of this style of dance, and we dance a small space style that fits on our little dance floors here and that's what we call Honky Tonk two step.

Other nights, she's teaching corporate events.

Yeah, so we work with a lot of the major corporations. I mean again, I never thought i'd have like Facebook, Meta Apple, Bevo Schlektslet recently hired us to come teach their cast and crew.

That was incredible.

HBO, Like my inbox is always interesting, I have to say.

And then there are the bachelorette parties.

Which we do line dancing and it's silly, adorable fun. It's funny because we don't socially line dance in Austin. The two steples will just run you over. And initially I had to say, probably the first four or five requests for line dance lessons.

I got, I was a little bit like, uh, we don't line dance here.

I'm sorry, and was trying to inform people and correct them and let them know, you know, we don't line dance.

And then I was like, Vanessa, what are you doing? Like these people want to pay you to have fun?

And I essentially gave in, still a little reluctantly, and then I realized how much fun they were having, and then I was sold.

I was like, all right, fine, we'll line dance.

There are almost more people wanting Vanessa to teach them how to dance then she can even manage. So business is going well, it's going well.

It's really wild. Honestly, I feel like I'm holding on for dear life.

I'm not lying. I struggle from attention deficit disorder and.

Organizational skills in general and keeping up. I have so many systems and checklists just to keep up with all my clients and how to follow up with all of them afterward, review requests, getting photos, all the things I'm doing with the social community.

And to think all this wouldn't have happened if Vanessa didn't suck at selling houses.

I had got my license in twenty nineteen, so I was doing real estate the pandemic hit.

And in real estate, it's all about experience.

And how many deals you've done, and just being able to prove that you have knowledge because it's a risky it's a risky thing to undertake.

I just wasn't really for me. I'm not a salesperson.

In fact, I took the disk assessment that compares your work mode to like your personal mode for lack of better description, and most people that are good at sales kind of shift gears and then go into like sales e mode, right, And my personality pretty much stays the same within both, and I realize that's perfect for what I'm doing now.

Was not good for real estate.

Without any money coming in from a real estate ventures, Vanessa, like a lot of people during the pandemic, tried some side hustles.

I was looking for another place to pivot and a form of income. In fact, I was selling vintage. I was doing all these things, so like really, anything that seemed viable, I was going to throw my effort at the vintage.

Thing didn't really work out, though, and no matter how many open houses she hosted, she couldn't turn them into sales. But at least she had dancing. Each night, she and her dance partner would scrounge up enough money to pay a cover fee. Then they'd get out on the dance floor, where Vanessa could forget all about her troubles.

Once we're moving, once we were like the bodies are moving around, it kind of washes it all away.

And the more Vanessa dancer cares away, the more an idea started to take shape, because she could see that there were all these great live music venues around town, and all these great bands to play in them, but on most nights there weren't a heck of a lot of people on the dance floors.

We were some of the only people and by only I mean maybe four people total in the bar dancing at the Sage Brush, with more people on stage playing music than we're in the crowd.

So Vanessa started thinking that what Austin needed was a dance teacher, and why not her. If for nothing else, she could at least get some more friends out on the hard work, and then if they wanted to give her a few bucks for her efforts, that'd be great too. And right around the same time as COVID regulations started to ease, the owner of one of those bars that she was frequenting came up to her.

He asked me if we would like to host the social classes and we said yes. That gave me essentially a goal, and in the six months it took to actually have that come to be, that's when I really started laying the foundation for this business, like social media website, starting to teach private lessons, really starting to just build awareness that this was something that was.

Going to be a thing.

And how did that first night go?

We had eighty people at our first social class. It was overwhelming.

But Vanessa could see right then and there on that first night, looking out over that crowded dance floor, that she'd tapped into something so true to her business name, Double or Nothing. She didn't leave it at that. She went to another country bar in town and said, hey, do you all need someone to teach your customers how to dance?

And they told me that they were hesitant at first, but I actually used to go there.

In my early twenties, so a while ago. Same staff still there and they knew me.

I think through seeing that I was teaching the classes at Sam's as well, essentially extended an offer for me to come and try teaching at dance.

Now we're about to hit the two year mark. I believe.

And we've literally had seven plus people at those classes and that is not a big dance floor.

We've had them definitely spilling out over the dance floor.

It is. It's been amazing, and they just when I leave the bar on Wednesdays are like.

Thank you so much. It's just crazy. It makes me emotional now.

I still feel out a lot, actually, but it's overwhelming that just the gratitude people had, and somehow it was attributed to myself and my Ben dance partner. We're not we're here too, you know, this is awesome for us to like it felt It just felt odd to be credited with again what we were so.

Grateful to have as well. It was lovely and it still is sometimes. I still just like, oh my god, it gives me emotional.

When we come back from the break, we'll step out onto the dance floor. So if you don't already have your cowboy boots on, go grab them.

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Every Wednesday at six pm, Vanessa Vaught separates a crowd of inexperienced, somewhat nervous dancers into two groups, leaders and followers. Since founding her dance company Double or Nothing Back in twenty twenty one, these social classes, which she does four nights a week across Austin, have become incredibly popular, and tonight is no exception, with dancers spilling out towards the.

Pool taping's that hart I beget You're here?

Thank it?

Whether we want to give credit to a post COVID desired get back out amongst the people again, or the TV show Yellowstone or Beyonce's new album. The country scene is thriving these days and Austin, Texas and Vanessa Vought are right at its center.

Fine, I'm not here to make you uncomfortable.

I want to make you that are the really fun opportunity to enjoy the city. Well, specifically, what's happening here is a massive live music scene and just the opportunity to go out and see so much live music every week really has created a strong dance scene. There's tons of them, and it's very intimidating for a lot of people to come in and see that. But that's kind of where I step in and encourage them that everybody

The crowd tonight is a wide array of folks, everyone from twenty somethings and short skirts and skinny jeans on up to a retired couple who've got to take rests in between songs, and all of them are trying to stick to the rhythm of slow, slow, quick, quick, orreas Vanessa likes to say, I love two steps right.

Another way to need about this is I love.

Wow. Our beginner class is so much fun. It's probably one of my favorites. I mean, I say that about all of them. They're amazing in different ways. But the beginner class is often people that are nervous to be there, they're trying something new, maybe they're from out of town. It's generally an introduction to the scene as a whole,

We learn how to do some spins and swing, and then we learn how to jump back to two steps.

So that is really the foundation for the beginner sequence, as I call it, and that's always my beginner classes, that same pattern. My intermediate classes and advanced classes go from there.

Are you still excited about dancing.

I'm always excited about dancing. It's always the thing I want to do the most. It really does change the way you feel. Sometimes when I'm on the dance floor and I'm dancing with someone that's making it very very clear, and I don't have to think, and I close my eyes. I close my eyes a lot when I dance. It is it feels the same as sitting still. It just feels so good. I love it so much, and I realize it's not where everybody starts, because it wasn't where

When you were doing the real estate thing, you're sitting outside of a house that doesn't sell. Could you have ever foreseen being where you're at now?

Not even remotely.

No. I was in freefall during the pandemic, absolute free fall. I was borrowing money from my sister to pay rent. I was looking in my couch cushions for enough money to get a five dollars bill to get into the bar to go dance.

I was in absolute free fall. So could I have foreseen this? No? All right, thank you for doing that.

I was really cute. We're going to do? Do you think you'll stick with this business for a while.

I think about that a lot. I will definitely probably ride it into the ground. We'll see, but I also realized there's so much potential that I've yet to tap, and so I guess I'm at a bit of a point where I'm just trying to figure out what path to take, and also to remind myself that it doesn't have to be perfect, and just allowing myself to kind of play a little more with ideas that I have versus feeling like I constantly need to be booking events and going and working them.

No matter how good of a dancer you are, there's always room for improvement, and the same holds true in business. So this year, despite all her success, Vanessa's really trying to create more of an online presence to reach all those people out there who might be interested in dancing, whether they be near or far.

I again realize it takes physically connecting with another human to really learn what it is to partner dance, but I do think there's a lot to be gained.

In addition, of course, couples can enjoy this.

People visiting Austin that maybe want to get a head start on dancing, learning how to do our regionally specific dance and then just go out and have a good time.

So I think that there's a market there. I think that there's a market there.

I'm not sure it's directly my social community, but the internet's a big place, so I'm looking forward to tackling that next.

So if you want to learn how to two step, be on the lookout for double or nothing coming to a computer screen near you, or better yet, just get on a plane and come join us down here. But I'd advise you that if you're coming for the beginner class, you better show up early if you want a spot on the dance floor for on the job. I'm Avery Thompson.