Sarasota dance fitness business goes mega-viral with videos | Business Observer
Sarasota dance fitness business goes mega-viral with videos
From members to instructors to now owners, Stacey Iltis and Kari Schroeter constantly chase their why at Fly Dance Fitness: to spread the love
- ByMark Gordon
- | 5:00 a.m. July 10, 2026
- | 2 Free Articles Remaining!
- Manatee-Sarasota
The owner of Fly Dance Fitness in Sarasota had a problem back in 2019: She sought to sell the business, a specialized fitness class studio with a small but loyal following. Yet she couldn’t find a buyer.
“She kept telling people, ‘“If I don’t find someone to buy it, I’m just going to close it,’” says Stacey Iltis.
The thought of losing Fly Dance Fitness was a nonstarter for Iltis. The studio, which combines thumping, hip-hop and 90s music with one part choreography and one part cardio, had become her happy place, a refuge of sorts as Iltis navigated motherhood and other life challenges. She started out as a member and soon became an instructor. Ditto for Kari Schroeter, Iltis’ friend and fellow Fly Dance Fitness member-turned instructor.
Rather than wait and see what happened, the pair decided they would be the ones to buy Fly Dance Fitness.
The duo has since turned that decision into what’s now a seven-year entrepreneurial odyssey. In surpassing $1 million in revenue in 2026, the business partners are also at something of a crossroads, as they navigate a common yet complicated challenge: to grow at the just-right pace to expand the brand without diluting the things that made it successful in the first place — a judgment-free, fun, welcoming culture that provides a comfortable space for members to not only take physically challenging classes, but form community bonds.
Highlights of the past seven years include:
- Fly Dance Fitness has gone from that one original location, on Cattlemen Road just off Interstate 75, to, as of June, nine open and running franchised locations, from Maryland to Arizona and South Carolina to Texas. (Cattlemen Road remains corporate-owned.) Another 15 franchise agreements have been signed, with the locations in various stages.
- The company will do at least $1 million in revenue in 2026, says Iltis, when totaling franchise locations, virtual memberships, merchandise and instructor programs. (Company officials decline to elaborate on specific revenue figures.)
- Embracing social media, with 1.2 million Instagram followers; more than 3 million TikTok likes; and comments and reshares of posts from the likes of music stars Lil Jon, Cardi B, Pitbull and Yung Gravy. One video, of Fly Dance Fitness members joining Iltis and her husband dancing at their wedding in 2025, has been viewed 145 million times and has more than 3 million likes. The company has utilized social media, too, to help it go bold and partner with some big brands, like the Savannah Bananas, the wildly-popular exhibition baseball team that does in-game dances and encourages fan participation.
- Fly Dance Fitness has also captured likes and attention from the franchising industry; 1851 Franchise magazine, for one, named the company to its 2025 Top 20 Boutique Fitness Franchises to Invest in list. And the pair was recently invited to sit on an industry panel at a major franchising conference in 2027. “No one else is doing what we’re doing in the dance fitness space,” Iltis says.
8-count
Iltis and Schroeter are seemingly up for the grow-at-the-rihgt-pace challenge.
The energetic entrepreneurs say they are constantly learning business lessons, such as knowing which opportunities to pursue and which ones to pass on. Another big lesson learned early on: drop the ego, hire people smarter than they are and out attorney they lean on regularly and a fractional CFO. “Neither of us went to school for business,” Iltis says, “but I feel like we are being schooled every day.”
The business partners and co-founders — Iltis, 36, is CEO, Schroeter, 43, is COO — are doing this while holding tightly to their humility, even amid the surge of accolades. (Another recent one: Fly Dance Fitness was named Woman-Owned Business of the Year by the Sarasota Chamber of Commerce in 2024.)
Part of that stems from their humble, hustling nature, where Iltis is fond of saying she strives to “just shoot my shot.” It also stems from the experience of starting with little, a few months before the pandemic upended their business (and presented new opportunities.)
“The beginning was really hard,” Schroeter says. “We were just starting out, teaching classes. We weren’t making money.”
Iltis wasn’t a total entrepreneurial novice when she and Schroeter bought Fly Dance Fitness. Iltis’ grandfather and father owned golf schools and courses, and she started and ran her own lifestyle photography business in Sarasota for 15 years. She has a bachelor’s in psychology from the University of South Florida and also worked in digital marketing prior to Fly Dance Fitness.
Schroeter, meanwhile, has a corporate and sales background. With a bachelor’s in industrial systems and engineering from the University of Florida, Schroeter says she uses her math-led brain to focus on the payroll and operations side of Fly Dance Fitness. In her previous career, she was a management trainee and sales rep for uniform giant Cintas
Pirouette people
A tipping point for the company came in 2023, when Iltis’ shoot-her-shot ethos connected Fly Dance Fitness with the Savannah Bananas.
The backstory: Iltis started posting dance moves on TikTok during the pandemic, when, she says, “everyone was bored at home.” One move was part of the Fly Dance Fitness signature Throw Down, an hour long high-intensity hip-hop fitness class that, the company says, combines a playlist full of songs from “your clubbing days and dance movements that’ll get you sweating, smiling and enjoying exercise.”
It’s perspiration with a purpose.
“Enjoyment is one of the strongest predictors of long term adherence to exercise programs,” Iltis says, “and we believe that sweat should be a celebration of what our bodies can accomplish.”
The Covid-era Throw Down clip Iltis posted went viral and “really resonated with a lot of people,” Schroeter says.
Iltis had long admired the Bananas for the team’s cheeky and quirky “We Make Baseball Fun!” approach to its brand and customer outreach. “They’re all about having fun and making fans for life, and that’s what we’re all about,” she says. “We want to do what they do, but for fitness.”
Iltis sent direct messages with the short Throw Down video on Instagram and LinkedIn to the husband-and-wife owners of the Bananas, Jesse and Emily Cole. The note said, after an introduction, simply, “we want to dance with you.”
A representative from the Bananas responded and said the Coles loved what they saw online of Fly Dance Fitness. A few months later, several players on the team came to the Sarasota location to take a class. “They rolled in here on their bus,” Iltis says, with players, coaches and even the famous umpire hitting the dance floor
Emily Cole connected with Iltis and Fly Dance Fitness, too. Cole joined the company at its franchise summit last year, for an hour-long virtual Q&A about branding, marketing and how to stay relevant in a noisy marketplace.
Iltis says a key lesson she learned from reaching out to the Coles was to, when in doubt, just do it. “I was like, I’m just going to do this. You never know who’s gonna be on the other side of that note.”
Box step
While Fly Dance Fitness oozes fun, there’s also a serious side to the business, particularly in franchise development and expansion.
There is a $35,000 franchise fee and a total investment range of $174,000 to $365,000, according to the Fly Dance Fitness franchise website. Other basic requirements include access to a studio at least 1,800 square feet and being an owner-operator with “an entrepreneurial mindset.”
Fly Dance Fitness stayed local with its first franchise, awarding a unit in 2023 in Lakewood Ranch to entrepreneur Tony Pinho, who, like Iltis and Schroeter, started as a client and then became an instructor. “It was really special for us that he had the faith in what we were doing,” Schroeter says.
Franchise locations have since opened in Myrtle Beach; Broomfield, Colorado; and Gilbert, Arizona, among other locales. The top-performing franchise is in the College Park neighborhood of Orlando, which has reached close to 200 members within its first year, Iltis says. The owner of that location is Cherie La Rosa-Ceppos, a retired NBA dancer for the Orlando Magic
Fly Dance Fitness has so far stuck to a one-unit franchise model — giving up some multi-unit opportunities and franchise fees in order to grow slow and steady. And the opportunities are plentiful: revenue in the boutique fitness studio market grew from $41.3 billion in 2023 to $46.85 billion in 2024, up 13.43%, according to data firm Research and Markets. The firm projects the sector will have a compounded annual growth rate of 8.23%, surpassing $75 billion by 2030.
“We’ve seen what happens when things (in the franchise fitness space) grow too fast,” Schroeter says. “We want the franchisees to be successful, even if it means we grow slower.”
To that end, Fly Dance Fitness recently hired a franchise success manager. That’s in addition to hosting franchisee lunch and learns, summit days and more. “We offer a lot of support” for the franchisees, says Iltis.
The franchise success effort is not only to drive revenue and brand success, but finding franchisees in and of itself is one of the owners’ biggest challenges, so when they sign up a franchisee, they want the relationship to be sustainable.
Iltis and Schroeter maintain all this while remaining instructors at the Sarasota Fly Dance Fitness. Asked what motivates them to keep going, they both answer that building a community of like-minded people, who come to Fly Dance Fitness locations nationwide for both their mental and physical well-being, is their north star. The business partners cite one thank you note, of many they’ve received, from a member who told them, “you don’t think you’re curing cancer, but for me you did.”
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