October 30, 2024 — Legendary founder of Jazzercise recently turned 80-years-old and is a prime example of vibrancy and active living. What is her success formula? Well, exercise, sound nutrition, and walking, but mainly dancing every day.
She continues to teach classes and do choreography for her company, which has more than 2,000 locations worldwide, more than 55,000 customers in the US alone, and brought in $77 million worth of sales last year.
To give you insight into her company’s incredible sustainable success, we thought it appropriate to republish the original interview we conducted back in 2004 in its entirety. Enjoy.
September 10, 2004 Original Editor’s Note:
Unless you’ve been living in a cave, you can appreciate that Jazzercise and its founder, performer/teacher/businesswoman, Judi Sheppard Misset, are a phenomenon in the fitness world. Having recently celebrated its 35th anniversary, Jazzercise is now a $67 Million per year mega company.
Always in motion, we caught up to the peripatetic Missett and her daughter, Shanna Missett Nelson, corporate Vice President and Jazzercise trainer, during a taping event at the Dunkin Donuts Center in Providence, Rhode Island. A thousand Jazzercise teachers and students were at hand with people attending from as far away as Japan.
A lot of people credit Curves for Women as having great insight into attracting deconditioned women to fitness, and deservedly so, but, Ms. Missett was a pioneer in this area 35 years ago, offering a means for couch potatoes to have fun while exercising and to motivate them to get up and move through the joy of dance. She even removed the mirrors to remove the body comparison game.
Ms. Missett is still the creative force behind the company and still teaches several classes a week to this very day. What follows are her insights into the past, present and future of Jazzercise and clues as to where fitness in general may be heading.
An Interview with Judi Sheppard Missett, Founder of Jazzercise
FitCommerce.com: You started Jazzercise 35 years ago in Chicago. As you think about that era, what happened to get you started in this business?
Judi Sheppard Missett: I was going to Northwestern University as a theater major and I was working professionally in the theater. I started dancing professionally when I was 14, so I was working to help my parents put me through school. The work was with a professional jazz dance company. I was both performing and teaching in their studio.
I was teaching those jazz classes as though the students were going on to become professional dancers. I soon realized that a lot of them were not there for that reason, they were actually there to change their body size to get ready for a class reunion, or to just look better. This was particularly true of the women in the class.
They would come, take a couple of classes and then go on their merry way and I would never see them again. That sort of bothered me. I wanted them to experience the joy of dance and the joy that comes through movement and that art form.
I got permission from the director to try a different approach. I started turning people away from the mirrors, I made dance simple and fun, gave lots of positive reinforcement, and I became their mirror, as a dancer.
FC: What was the growth like in those early days?
JSM: In the first class I had 15 people, the second I had 30, and the next I had 60, and then the room wouldn’t hold anymore, then I realized I was on to something.
It was a great joy for me to teach because most of these people were not serious dancers, they were people that had some dance but they wanted to enjoy the experience that comes with that kind of movement. It was fun and I looked forward to doing it.
I only taught it once per week until we moved to Southern California. Then I decided to teach more often and perform less. Then my classes became very popular in the San Diego area and then I branched out and went North a little, then East a little, I began teaching so many classes, I had so many requests I couldn’t fulfill them all.
“I believe that life gives you lots of forks in the road, and there are always signs and messages, cues, that tell you what need to do next.”
I had to make a big decision, I believe that life gives you lots of forks in the road, and there are always signs, messages, and cues, that tell you what need to do next. What happened to me was that I was teaching so many classes that I lost my voice. I was very thin from working out so much. That was a sign to me to either cut back or train others. I chose to train. And, here we sit some years later and have almost 6,000 instructors all over the world.
FC: In the early days, when they kept coming back, they were obviously getting something out of it. Was it the results in their body or was it the joy the movement?
JSM: It was both. They achieved a certain level of fitness that they were able to maintain by coming to class. It was also the joy and the fun and the excitement that comes through excellent choreography which is very innovative, the variety in music, always offering new songs, always using cutting edge musical artists.
It gave people that combination of art and science. The art of dance and the science of exercise physiology. That’s something they don’t get in any other class, that’s what sets us apart from any health club or aerobics studio anywhere in the world.
FC: Can you talk about the creative process. How you come up with fresh material five times a year?
JSM: We do about 85 variations. Being a trained dancer, I started dancing when I was 2 ½ years old. I also studied with some of the masters in the art form. All of that just remains inside of me. I call upon it every time I have to do a new choreography.
Creativity isn’t something that you force, you can’t just say, ‘O.K., every Monday from 9:00 to 3:00 I’m going to create’, it doesn’t happen like that. It requires, of course discipline, when you get an idea, or you get music you have to work through and if it doesn’t work, you have to take it back to the drawing table and do it again until it does work.
I personally teach 5 classes a week. You cannot do the choreography and not teach. It keeps your finger on the pulse of what’s out there. It would be like a surgeon operating on your heart who never practices, who never actually does it. I get feedback from students every time I teach. I’m also in other instructors classes all the time and watching.
It just comes into your body ; I’m choreographing almost every day of my life. I carry music with me and listen to it in the car. I teach a class once a week that is up in the mountains 2 hours from where I live, I get a lot done during that drive.
“What our classes are all about is success.”
The record companies send me lots of promotional tapes all the time. I have a woman who does music research and development for me. She’ll give me the songs which I’ll listen to and then I visualize: what does the song feel like, what is it telling me to do, what’s the feel of it, visualize movements, then I practice on them, I take them into class and I teach them. Sometimes they’re right on, and sometimes I have to tweak it a little bit.
“I visualize: what does the song feel like, what is it telling me to do, what’s the feel of it, visualize movements then I practice on them, I take them into class and I teach them.”
FC: Shifting gears just for a moment to talk about the ‘company’. You started off all alone 35 years ago and now you’re got this $67 Million per year organization which is a large company, it must take a large organization to run all that?
JSM: I never planned it. It was never something that I said ‘Oh, I want to develop this big company’, it was out of love. It’s what I do for love. It’s passion. Personally, I don’t believe that I could have been successful if I hadn’t done something out of passion. You have love what you do, it has to be inside of you, it has to be in your heart and your soul.
It was for me from the beginning. As a professional performer, I always loved the theater and then the interesting thing is oftentimes you’re either a great performer or you’re a great teacher. I was blessed because I could do both pretty darn well, and I loved doing both.
“Money follows ideas, not the other way around”
You either love performing or you love teaching, but I really loved to do both. So, I could bring that element of performance into the teaching. That’s why we were successful as a business. I never worried about the numbers, I never worried or thought about the money, I thought about ‘Will this be a great thing to do? will it be fun? Will it be good for the people who are my students, my customers? Will it be good for me? Then as the business evolved will it be good for our franchisees, our instructors? Does it feel right and feel good? If the answer is ‘yes,’ then we do it.
Money follows ideas, not the other way around.
FC: On the topic of physiology, was there a point where you felt you had to adapt your choreography to the human body to exercise certain muscle groups?
JSM: That’s what dance is. You’re not a good professional dancer unless you know how to do precisely that. I did that from the beginning, it was like rolling off a log for me, not something I had to learn. When you dance, you have to use your whole body and you have to use it properly, you have to do it in the right alignment and you have to give yourself a lot of options for movement.
I was using Pilates 35 years ago because I was trained in it. I was using low and high impact even though I didn’t know that’s what I was doing because the phrase wasn’t coined yet. I was using flexibility moves and strength moves, I was doing these because that’s what you do in a dance class.
FC: Over three and a half decades, you had to witness some cusps, the forks in the road as you call them; were there any major changes you can recall along that way where it was either music diverting, or exercise diverting, or perhaps both?
JSM: The music never diverts because we have the most wonderfully creative wonderfully talented musicians out there, and if you know where to go, you’re going to find those people.
We use their music in its original form, we don’t alter the music in any fashion, for instance forcing 98 beats per minute.
FC: I would imagine it makes the choreography, from a fitness point of view, slightly more challenging because you don’t blend in a pre-defined rhythm, is that true?
JSM: You never worry about beats. If you are a true chorographer, and you really understand how the body works, beats per minute mean nothing. There can be a song that has only 3 beats per minute and I can get your heart rate way up to where it needs to be.
It’s how you use the music to integrate the movement with the music. That’s difficult for people, who are used to the usual aerobic mentality, to understand. You would only understand if you have a background in the art of dance.
As far as the movements changing, as we learned more about what we’ve needed, I would adapt our class structure for that. In the beginning they believed 15 minutes of aerobic workout was fine, then it went to 20 and then 30. As we learned more about fitness, I adapted that to what we needed to make sure everyone got the most efficient and effective workout.
As we learned more about weight training, I added more of that into the program because I thought it was important to keep us ahead of the game.
We also introduced programs for kids, active aging adults, circuit training classes, use of balls, weights, tubes, and the Step.
In that respect, you have to change as you learn more about fitness trends. We hired people that were interested in doing these studies. I wanted to know what their results were and then integrate it into what we do.
FC: So, you have access to studies on certain exercise protocols and tapping into that and working it into your choreography?
JSM: Right. And some studies we actually commission ourselves.
FC: How do you cater to different levels of students?
JSM: What our classes are all about is: success. We want someone to come into a class and feel successful right away, not feel intimidated, not feel like ‘Oh, I’m a big klutz, I shouldn’t be going back there’. I want them to walk in and feel successful.
You walk a fine line between making it challenging but not so challenging that the new person walking in the door would say “Wow, wait a minute, I can’t possibly do this, it’s too difficult’.
It’s a double-edged sword sometimes. We have a lot of veterans that have been around for 20-25 years and that’s a big feather in our cap because we have staying power. On the other hand it can be a detriment in a way because people think we haven’t progressed. They think ‘Oh, Jazzercise that’s that big splurge of a program that happened in the eighties’.
“Personally, I don’t believe that I could have been successful if I hadn’t done something out of passion. You have love what you do, it has to be inside of you, it has to be in your heart and your soul.”
FC: Is it difficult to strike a balance between the original recipe that got you here and modifying it for the times?
Yes, it’s true, we experienced great periods of growth in the eighties, but we’re still here in 2004. If we hadn’t done what we do well, we wouldn’t still be here. If we hadn’t changed, we wouldn’t still be here. Yes, it’s the same program in name, but we always keep up with the times, we’re very cutting edge.
Longevity is great because you have staying power, but on the other hand sometimes people forget that in order to have staying power, you have to be excellent every day of your life.
FC: As a business woman, were there any many major business challenges over 3 ½ decades? Any stressful moments?
JSM: Yes, there’s always challenges, you always have peaks and valleys. I’m happy to say that we’ve pretty much always have been a profitable company, certainly some years were better than others, that’s what corporations go through.
There have been challenges about how to move into the next transitional stage. The thing that is so fortunate that I have is fabulous people around me. You cannot run a company, you cannot do great things, without a great team and I really have one. I have wonderful people.
When I speak at business seminars, I say one of the most important things you can do as a business owner is to surround yourself with people who lift you up. If you do that, there’s not telling where you’re going to be lifted.
The team has kept us going through those valleys, kept us moving forward, and on to the next level. These last few years have been the best years we’ve ever had as a company.
FC: Do you specifically target a particular audience? Is there a specific demographic profile that you’re going after instead of too wide of a spectrum, all things to all people?
JSM: Yes, if you look at our demographics, they’re age 28 to 55. That’s our core. But, that doesn’t mean we don’t have older and younger.
Our two programs that we really are pushing are the junior program for the kids and the Lite program for the active aging adult. Because we have a lot of people, all the baby boomers coming into that phase. They want to stay active and healthy, but yet might not be able to do exercise quite as strenuously as they used to, the Lite program really addresses that.
We have this terrible childhood obesity problem in this country, so my whole effort is to target kids and tell them, ‘You know what? Fitness can be fun, it doesn’t have to be a drag”. If they learn that it can be fun while they’re young, then it will be fun all their lives. It’s a natural thing to dance and to exercise.
FC: There are couple of other movements going on that are very popular, Pilates, which you’ve already mentioned, and perhaps yoga. They seem to be kinder, gentler type movements that the boomers seem to be gravitating to. Is that a threat to your market share?
JSM: No, it’s not a threat at all. Jazzercise is really a fusion of all those things. I’ve always incorporated Pilates moves. A lot of yoga movements are the basis for jazz dance technique. So, I had a lot of training in that. I just naturally integrated it into what I do.
They’re a nice coupling with what we do. You do need to work aerobically and we offer that. In this time and age, so many people are looking for things that will just take an hour of their time where they can get it all, and they can do that with Jazzercise.
If they want to come to our classes 2-3 times a week and go to yoga a couple of times per week, that’s fine, we always recommend cross training to all of our students.
I was fortunate to study with one of Joseph’s Pilates protégés when I went to Northwestern I got a lot of good background that way.
FC: In the U.S., are there a lot of health clubs that are franchised with Jazzercise?
JSM: No, not many at all.
Our competition is not with health clubs but with the ‘couch’. These people probably wouldn’t be working out unless they were coming to Jazzercise because it’s a comfortable environment and they feel secure. You’ll see every shape of body from the elite to those that are significantly overweight in the same class having a good time. There are no mirrors, so nobody is comparing themselves to others.
FC: As you peer into the future of Jazzercise, say the next half decade, what are you anticipating?
JSM: I have 2 books to write for the future. As far as the Jazzercise program goes, it’ll be more of the same, focusing on that older crowd and the kids. The boomers will be aging and more will be coming in. We’ll continue to really implement the Lite program as an alternative even for people who have been doing regular Jazzercise and now need something just a little gentler.
And the kids thing is an important aspect of what we do.
We have some other ideas that we may involve ourselves with as far as getting even younger children involved. The current Kids program is really targeted to kids age 5 and older. We may be working with younger kids and brand-new moms and that kind of thing.
I’m always open to change. I love to change, I love to take risks; I love to try new things, who knows what’s going to be coming. If I see something that feels right to me and creates winning situations for everybody involved, I’m going to do it. And oftentimes I’ve done it against the advice of some of the people around me, but I was right and they were wrong. And sometimes they’re right and I’m wrong, that’s the fun of life. What is life if you can’t experience those things.
FC: Are you testing these concepts, do you put it out to an audience, perhaps in one of your own clubs to see if it’s going in the right direction?
JSM: Sometimes. Shana and I both travel a lot, we’re out in the field all the time. We hear comments, we listen, we talk, we go and teach regular classes. You really get a lot of good information just doing that.
You have to listen, you have to be aware of the signs, the messages and the cues. And then you have to be open to what they’re telling you. Sometimes you may not like what you hear, but other times you do.
FC: What do you do in your spare time?
JSM: I don’t have much spare time, and it’s O.K. because I love what I do. Sometimes I almost feel guilty because I’m having so much fun with what I do. Coming here to Providence, seeing everybody, getting on the plane was fun. No this isn’t work, it’s fun.