Dance School & Youth Organisation
Urban Motion
The flagship founder story behind OWND: Urban Motion moved from disconnected third-party tools and repetitive manual admin to a bespoke Business Operating System built around its real multi-location dance operation.
Background
The business.
Urban Motion is Jamie Fagan’s own multi-location dance and youth organisation. The business runs weekly classes alongside trials, memberships, camps, workshops, events, parties and other programmes, with parents, students, coaches and administrators all needing different parts of the system. As the organisation grew, its operational model became more complex than a standard class-booking platform could comfortably support.
Before
Where things stood.
Urban Motion had grown around a collection of third-party tools, spreadsheets and manual processes. Booking software handled part of the customer journey, payments sat elsewhere, communication required separate workflows and important operational tasks still relied on somebody remembering to complete them. Each workaround was manageable on its own, but together they created a growing admin burden and limited how quickly the business could change.
How the operation worked before
Parents booked through third-party systems, staff maintained operational information across separate tools, and recurring tasks such as trial follow-up, membership administration, payment checks, class updates and customer communication required significant manual involvement. New ideas often had to be shaped around the limitations of the software rather than around the needs of Urban Motion.
Existing stack
- Third-party class booking software
- Stripe
- Spreadsheets
- Manual email and admin workflows
The operational problems
- Third-party software never fully matched Urban Motion’s multi-location operating model.
- Customer, student, class and payment information was fragmented across different tools.
- Repetitive administration increased as the number of programmes, students and locations grew.
- Trials, memberships and follow-up required too many manual steps.
- Reporting and payment visibility required information to be checked across different systems.
- The customer experience was constrained by workflows designed for generic class providers.
- New operational ideas depended on whether an external software provider supported the feature.
The system
What was built.
Jamie rebuilt the technology around Urban Motion itself. The result is a bespoke Business Operating System connecting the parent and student journey with bookings, trials, memberships, recurring payments, class management, registers, staff tools, communications, finance and automation. Instead of asking how Urban Motion should adapt to software, each workflow was designed around how the organisation actually operates. The system continues to evolve alongside the business and became the proof-of-concept that led to OWND.
Core system components
- Parent and customer accounts
- Student profiles and family relationships
- Multi-location class finder and programme discovery
- Trial booking and attendance workflows
- Membership enrolment and recurring billing
- Class, capacity and register management
- Stripe-connected payments and finance reporting
- Registration pass and annual registration workflows
- Camps, workshops, after-schools, parties and event booking
- Merchandise and member shop journeys
- Customer cancellations, credits and refunds
- Teacher and staff dashboards
- Admin CRM and operational reporting
- Waitlists and location-specific availability
- Automated customer communications
Automation
Workflows handled by the system
- Trial booking, attendance and post-trial follow-up
- Trial-to-membership joining workflow
- Membership onboarding and account updates
- Recurring payment and failed-payment workflows
- Nightly Stripe payment synchronisation
- Class capacity and waitlist handling
- Post-checkout cross-sell and programme recommendations
- Closure and billing-date handling
- Registration and customer status workflows
- Operational email triggers and internal notifications
Integrations
Connected services
- Stripe
- Email delivery
- AI-assisted internal tools
Results and operating scale
What the system supports.
Urban Motion is Jamie’s own business. Any admin reduction is founder-reported, rather than an independently measured client result.
~90%
Manual admin reduction
Founder-reported reduction in manual administration after core Urban Motion workflows were moved into the bespoke system.
- A single operating environment for the core customer, student, class and payment journey.
- Urban Motion can add or change workflows around the business instead of waiting for a generic platform roadmap.
- Parents experience a branded Urban Motion journey rather than being sent through a third-party marketplace.
- Staff have clearer operational visibility and fewer repetitive cross-system tasks.
- The system became the working foundation for the OWND service now offered to other businesses.
Timeline
How the build evolved.
Built initially to solve Urban Motion’s own operational problems, then continuously expanded as the organisation grew. The system became the foundation for OWND and remains an active operating system inside the business.
In their words
Client testimonial.
“The system I built for my school reduced 90% of my admin.”