It took losing her biggest stream of income for Sunet Wagner to sit back and completely re-evaluate her business. “We had no depth,” she says of her theatre production company, Minimax. “We needed different layers to sustain us. Instead, we created end-of-year productions for schools and universities, and we were competing with moms who didn’t work who offered a similar service for free. Our skills were not enough of a differentiator to justify our costs.”
Nevertheless, Sunet knew she had something special to offer, she just needed to work out how to package it. “We needed to take our power back, and the only way to do that was to create a platform for our services.” The solution, once hit upon, seemed obvious. Minimax specialises in conceptualising and creating threatre productions, and instead of relying on other institutions to hire it, it has opened campuses that children of all ages can attend during the holiday season. It has created its own client for its services: itself. With 40 campuses already open in under a year, the business model is growing at an exponential rate, and because the workshops are held during the holiday season, they are hosted at local schools. Parents and both primary and high school students love the concept.
“Programmes run for six months, and parents pay us a monthly subscription for their children to be involved. We host holiday workshops at local schools and perform throughout the year. Previously, holiday months were our dead months, now they are our biggest revenue earners,” says Sunet.