Fitness entrepreneur with fast success craves more impact, growth

The USF Fast 56 Awards ceremony held last month in Tampa had special meaning for Stacey Iltis. 

For one, a company she had co-founded and run since 2019, Sarasota-based Fly Dance Fitness, was being honored for its rapid growth. The company has gone from one corporate-owned studio to nine franchised studios and another 25 in some stage of development, and is projected to surpass $1 million in revenue this year. (The USF Fast 56 is named for the school’s founding year, 1956.) 

Photo by Mark Wemple

But beyond Fly Dance Fitness, Iltis was being recognized as a USF alum. Being the first person in her family to go to, much less graduate, from college, winning an award reserved for alumni carries deep meaning for her. Even better: Fly Dance Fitness was ranked No. 14. “I was tearing up hearing the numbers count down from 56 and where we stood in their rankings,” Iltis wrote in a Facebook post about the event. 

“It was really special,” she adds in an interview. “It was a really exciting night.” 

Iltis is likewise excited about the future of Fly Dance Fitness, a business she and her co-founder and mentor, Kari Schroeter, essentially got into out of necessity. They both were instructors at the Sarasota location, which was the sole studio. In 2019, the owner said she was going to close the studio if she couldn’t find a buyer. Iltis, who had owned a photography business soon after college, and Schroeter, who had been a management trainee and sales rep for uniform giant Cintas, decided to buy it.

The pair have formed a formidable team, with Iltis, the CEO, being the bold and front-facing voice for the business and Schroeter, the COO, handling more of the operations and payroll side. Iltis says she admires, and has learned from, Schroeter’s steadfast resilience and quiet confidence. Iltis has also learned to pair her wild ideas with a plan, not just wing it, from Schroeter. “She will often say a failure to prepare is preparing to fail,” Iltis says.

Iltis’ affinity for Fly Dance Fitness goes back to even before she and Schroeter met, to around 2013 when she discovered the studio as a client. A dancer in high school, Iltis had a hard time finding a workout studio that combined fun, yet push-yourself challenges with a supportive community. Being a new mom, she sought that match even more. 

“I tried Zumba, I tried Pure Barre, I tried everything,” she says. “It was a huge void I had, and nothing would replace it. But as soon as I walked into Fly Dance Fitness, it was just a hit.” 

Fly Dance Fitness has found success in mixing choreography with cardio and pounding hip-hop with muscle and hustle. That approach has won the business not only franchisees from Tampa Bay to Texas, but a devoted clientele, just like Iltis was a decade ago. Today she gets stopped, she says, in airports and other places when she’s wearing a Fly Dance Fitness T-Shirt, by people who tell her they love that place and its classes. Even two labor and delivery nurses at Sarasota Memorial Hospital commented on the shirt when Iltis had it on two years ago while giving birth to her second child, a baby girl.

That recognition humbles Iltis, and also motivates her to take Fly Dance Fitness further.

Asked if being recognized like that on the street is a “we’ve made it moment,” Iltis pauses. “It’s not so much that we’ve made it,” she says, “but that we’ve made an impact on people.”