Creative Entrepreneurs
NASE Members Succeed With Arts Center

This summer in Salt Lake City, Utah, kids are taking classes with titles like, Pattern Games, Body Machine, and Rock People. The courses are part of the curriculum offered by Life Arts Center, a school for the creative development of children through the arts.

NASE Members Pearl Wagstaff-Garff and her husband, George Garff, own Life Arts Center. Pearl serves as artistic director. George handles business administration. Together they make a powerful team dedicated to teaching life's lessons through theater, modern creative dance, music appreciation, drawing, painting and literature. As they state in their brochure, "We believe that children are born with an innate capacity to be creative and expressive."

"I'm an artist and educator," says Pearl, who has taught for 37 years and founded Life Arts Center in 1976. "I could see that the arts play an important role in the way children learn. The arts are children's language. The arts create self-esteem and give children a sense of purpose. Experiencing music, drama, literature and dance is a valuable process for children. That process helps children develop into responsible human beings."

The school's statistics support Pearl's opinion. "We did a survey that found, of our graduates during the last five years, 98 percent went on to college, and 93 percent of those students went to college on some sort of a scholarship," says George.

Life Arts Center is an adjunct to the public school system, and each year 12 to 40 students graduate from the center. Curriculum is offered year-round, featuring classes for all ages in drama, choreography, painting, sculpture and even creative problem solving. Many of the center's students begin attending classes as preschoolers and continue through age 18. Classes are held throughout the day for young kids. Older children attend after school and in the evenings. It's not unusual to find Pearl and George working until 8:30 on many nights. They employ more than a dozen artistic specialists, each a college graduate and state-certified teacher also trained in early childhood development.

Although teaching creative endeavors remains the main focus of the center, the Garffs, like other NASE Members, must still tend to traditional business tasks-from accounting to marketing. The school attracts some students through mass mailings and newspaper advertising. But, as many self-employed business owners know, referrals bring in the bulk of business. "Word-of-mouth is so powerful," says George. "Ninety percent of our students come to us through word-of-mouth."

Meeting state and federal regulations doesn't come quite as easily as finding new students for the Garffs. The center's facility includes a main lobby area and several studios. Even though no disabled children attend the school, the Garffs must still comply with regulations governing the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA). It's not an inexpensive undertaking.

"We have to have handicap-accessible bathrooms because a disabled parent or grandparent might come to see a child perform. We also go through great scrutiny for fire walls because we're classified as a school."

"We respect the ADA regulations," adds George. "But the regulations shouldn't be blanket applied to every business. There's got to be some leeway." NASE Members who have been required to adhere to such strict regulations may sympathize with the Garffs.

Other Members may know from experience what George means when he talks about the necessity of retaining qualified financial help. "I firmly believe that, whatever business you're in, you should get yourself a great CPA," he advises. "We made mistakes and we got hit hard by the IRS. Having a really knowledgeable CPA would have helped us. We know that now."

They also know the importance of developing a business plan. The Garffs even included financial retirement planning in their business plan. "We have goals, for ourselves and for our business. We look at those on a weekly basis," George says. "It keeps us on track."

Staying on track can be a unique organizational challenge for the Life Arts Center. As George explains, the Garffs must decide which classes to conduct and when to offer them. They must then coordinate their specialists to teach the classes and project potential enrollment for each course. The school must also know the bottom-line cost of producing every class, not just in wages but also in the areas of support staff, materials and marketing. Life Arts Center receives no government funding. To help keep student expenses to a minimum, the school puts volunteers to work and frequently sponsors fund-raisers.

Although the Garffs certainly don't neglect the day-to-day activities of running their business, it's clear that they much prefer giving their time and energy to the creative development of their gifted students. Right now, they're in full swing with the center's eight-week summer classes - classes like Body Machine, a dance course, Pattern Games, a drama class, and Rock People, a nature course.

"We're facilitating the growth and development of someone on this planet," says George. "It's wonderful work to do."

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Life Arts Center
Owners: George Garff and Pearl Wagstaff-Garff; Partnership; NASE
Members for two years.