- Allison Ko
- Apr 16
- 6 min read
Updated: Apr 17
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Life has a way of taking us down unexpected paths. Michelle Spurlock knows this all too well. Twenty years ago, Michelle was a professor of pharmacy and a mom—as well as a yoga teacher on the side.
At the time, aerial arts was not on her bingo card. “I had never even heard of aerial arts,” she recalls. “I had no idea what it was.”
But, as fate would have it, Michelle found herself at an aerial arts recital featuring one of her yoga students. “And I was immediately hooked,” she says.
Little did she know that aerial arts would completely upend her career. Life, it turned out, had many plans for Michelle. Among them—becoming an entrepreneur.
Owning a business was “never on the radar”
Sometimes, a business idea strikes like a flash of lightning. Other times, it comes much more subtly than that.
In Michelle’s case, starting a business was far from her mind. At the time, she was balancing her busy schedule while completing her fifth year of practicing aerial arts.
But “in 2015, my husband got a job that required us to move [to Burlington, North Carolina]. When we moved to the new place, there were no aerial studios. And I thought, ‘Oh, no.’ It's kind of like you don't realize how important something is to your life until you can't have it anymore.”
The realization came quietly, but powerfully. “[I thought,] ‘I don't think I can not have this in my life,’” she says. “I never thought, ‘Oh, I'm gonna start my own business.’ That was never on the radar. It was more like, ‘I have this thing that I really love, and I want to keep doing it. How can I keep doing it?’”
It started with private aerial arts lessons, which Michelle taught out of a local yoga studio that she sublet. When that yoga studio closed down, she moved to a local gym.
“Again, it wasn’t my space, so I was teaching classes when they didn’t have classes going on,” she remembers. “But it was also around that time that social media was really starting to take a hold in people's lives. And so, when people tried this amazing thing, they wanted to share it—it was basically like I had free marketing.”
She soon faced a classic supply-and-demand challenge: the demand for classes grew faster than she could keep up with.
“That's when I decided to go ahead and start the business.”
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The business of running a business
It didn’t happen just like that. It took several more years—during which time Michelle trained several students into teachers and saved up enough money to afford her own space. (“It was really scary because obviously paying for pharmacy school and getting a doctor of pharmacy…that’s a huge commitment. So to tell people, ‘Actually, I'm going to let all of that go and teach people to join the circus.’ Everyone just was like, ‘You are insane.’”)
Then, when Michelle finally opened the Upside Aerial studio in 2020—COVID hit. Just five days after opening, she had to shut the studio down.
“I thought, ‘this is the end.’” She had a three-year lease in hand and instructors to pay, but no way of teaching aerial arts. “So, we taught pull-up bar classes, cardio classes and strength classes. We did everything I could to keep people interested in still being part of our community until we could reopen.”
Miraculously, the strategy worked. Many grueling months and online events (including Zoom snack parties) later, the studio reopened. And being one of the few studios that survived the pandemic, Upside Aerial greeted students from all across the area who were emerging from their homes and seeking a new gym.
Taking an offline sport online
Today, finding a gym usually begins with an online search. When it comes to aerial arts, being online is especially important for educating the public on the sport itself.
“Our website basically became the crux of the whole business because lots of people don’t know what aerial arts is,” says Michelle. The Upside Aerial website, built on Wix, dons photos of both staff and students high up in the air using a variety of apparatuses. “That made our community feel really important,” she adds. “It made our students feel like, ‘Whoa, that's me up there.’
“People also tend to have this idea that circus arts are just for young people with specific body types…so it was important for the website to show people of all ages, all sizes, all colors and all fitness backgrounds so [site visitors] could see that this is for everyone.”
Beyond its thoughtful visuals and messaging, the site clearly displays class packages and pricing. Visitors can do everything from scheduling classes and joining a waitlist, to chatting with instructors and booking performances online.
All this translates to Upside Aerial’s mobile app, which allows users to manage their bookings and waitlist signups on the go. The staff similarly uses the app to check people into the gym, or to message and enroll students on the spot.
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Behind the scenes, the team leans on Wix Analytics and automations to keep things running smoothly. Analytics shape the class lineup, while automations streamline communications and keep the community engaged.
“Some people might approach Wix in two different ways,” muses Michelle. “One is they already have a massive vision of all the things they need, and Wix checks the boxes. But then others might start with Wix for the website builder, and then find all the other things that they can do with it—and then that all just falls naturally into their plan over time. I'm the number two person.”
Strength in the air and on the ground
You could say that Michelle and her students are defying gravity every day. But for anyone who knows their story, their greatest achievement transcends their feats of strength; it lies, rather, in their ability to create a tight-knit community, rooted in a culture of resilience, inclusivity and support.
“I think this goes for any business…if you make it more about the whole person and a community, then it will only strengthen your business and make it that much more rewarding,” sums up Michelle.
Michelle celebrates her fifth year of being in business, as well as the title of “Entrepreneur of the Year,” as presented by Alamance County, North Carolina. Looking ahead, she hopes to see the studio grow and her fellow instructors take the spotlight.
“My next evolution as a leader is actually to be able to just take a little bit more of a back seat so that my team can start to really shine,” she says.
Regardless of what life throws her way, she stands ready, holding fast to the truth that “when you really love something and you know within your heart that it's what feeds your soul, then some of the hardest choices are easy to make.”
Lessons from Michelle
As an “accidental” business owner, Michelle honed many of her entrepreneurship skills by jumping in. That said, there are many lessons she hopes to pass forward to help out the next generation of entrepreneurs:
Don’t underestimate yourself. “I took a test in college to help figure out what career I should go for…it basically said that the very last thing I should do is be an entrepreneur because I don't have that personality. [It said,] ‘You're not a risk taker, you're not a dreamer. You don't have big ideas.’ So, I would say, don't let that stop you because even if you don't have that type of personality, there's another way. You can be a slow-and-steady, detail-oriented person and still come up with a really successful business.”
Invest in community. “The other thing that's so special about this art form is it really tends to bond people quickly because you're doing something risky and scary and super challenging. So, the community of people that I worked really hard to build [made sure] I didn’t feel like I was alone. Even though I was ‘alone’ starting the business, I didn't feel like I was alone.”
Invest in your team. “If you're constantly telling yourself, ‘I don't have enough time to train anyone else to do this’...That's a red flag. You should absolutely put in the time to train your help and to get help, because otherwise you're just going to burn out.”
Learn to delegate. “It’s easy to convince yourself that you're the only one that can do something, and you're the only one that can do it the way that it should be done…[But from my own experience,] there's no bigger teacher than life saying, ‘You literally cannot do this [on your own] anymore.’”
Be on the lookout for free resources. “One of the mistakes that I made is I didn't realize that there are so many resources, especially if you look to your local government. A lot of local governments are really interested in helping small business owners...There are all these free resources for people like me who don't have a business background and don’t know how to create a business or how to make a business plan…Plus, it gets you out of your silo and it gets you to know other people in the small business community.”
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