serena Q. is your Backbone in Times of Need
Meet Serena Q. BFA MA, who specializes in confidence & resilience (that's her 51-yr old back BTW)
Serena is a dance educator meets business strategist who helps clients increase business success and profitability in times of turmoil.
"Dancers develop strong minds and strong spines that translates to strengthening confidence, reslience, and success, where ever you live or work." -Serena Q.
Post pandemic, with the global workforce in a crisis of confidence, career consultant, Serena Quaglia BFA MA, identified the need for a holistic, embodied, powerful way of thinking and performing at work, so she fused her 20+ year career and passion as a dance educator with her 20+ year career success as a business strategist in Canada's economic engine, Toronto, to create DANCE WISDOM FOR BUSINESS, the first proven method of its kind to strengthen confidence and ensure resilience and help to uplevel superstars who need to turn a downbeat around.
Backstory
A week after graduating with a BFA in modern dance from the University of Utah, Serena Q. was selected as an Original Cast Member in a $100 million show at the MGM Grand Las Vegas where she earned a recording credit with Grammy Award™ winning producer, Phil Ramone.
After leaving Las Vegas to perform on stages around the world, and teaching thousands of students from all walks of life, she exited the stage to earn an MA at York University under the tutelage of esteemed Guggenheim Fellow, Dr. Penelope Reed-Doob. Serena’s thesis was an ethnography about the convergence of the performing arts, the built form, and technology in Las Vegas that served as the springboard to her next career in the preconstruction, city building industry in Canada’s economic engine, Toronto.
While serving in executive roles in both private and public companies in the city building industry, Serena’s business strategies generated over $1 billion in sales; filled municipal coffers with millions of dollars of tax revenues; employed thousands of people; and contributed to public infrastructure improvements.
She conceived and led the go-to-market strategy for, Downtown Markham, the largest, LEED™ (Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design), mixed-used community in North America, a 243-acre site for 25,000 future residents, and she transformed skylines across Canada’s most populous province, Ontario.
At the root of Serena’s success is DANCE WISDOM intersecting the arts, business, wellness, and high performance.
Post pandemic, her mission is to share its power with career-focused people who drive innovation, social impact, and deliver better futures for all.
PROFESSIONAL AFFILIATIONS:
Ambassador, Global Wellness Institute, Miami, FLA
International Council of Dance @UNESCO, Paris, France
Urban Land Institute, Toronto, Canada
Serena's Success Strategies Have Powered:
CASE STUDY 1
The Client: A VISIONARY Land Developer with a Herculean Problem
Business Problem to be Solved:
How do you bring a **VISION** that's never been done before,
that exists on the back of a cocktail napkin
to market
and sell a futuristic, high-density, high-rise "city"
for 25,000 future residents, 30,000 future employees,
and rapid transit (i.e. busses)
in the suburbs north of Toronto, Canada,
where people want big houses and big, multi-car garages
to park their many cars,
and who don't want to ride public transportation
and who don't want "city problems?"
The Dance Wisdom 2.0 Serena Tapped and Applied:
Who better to capture hearts and minds
than a firm with expertise branding/ positioning/
designing/ and marketing
"things that haven't been invented/ designed/ built yet"
than a design/ advertising firm steeped
in Broadway Theater promotion?
WHAT? The VISIONARY land developer said,
then pointed at me and asked His Management Team
seated around the boardroom table, "who hired this person?"
After many, many, many design agencies
with expertise in real estate marketing,
presented their pitches,
the VISIONARY land developer,
un-inspired by anything He saw said,
“Bring in the Broadway People.”
The Result?
Because of Serena’s experience in live entertainment,
she knew the “Broadway People” knew how to
bring sizzle, razzle-dazzle,
and compelling excitement,
to sell conceptual design.
And project sales sizzled:
-175 townhomes with elevators
and no backyards (in the suburbs) sold out
-7 condominium towers in Phases One and
and Phase Two totaling thousands of units sold out
-commercial leases on future office towers razzle-dazzled
-major anchor tenants jumped aboard
-a satellite location of a major,
Canadian university located onsite
-rapid transit ridership was a big hit
The makings of a great city have taken shape.
Standing Ovation.
CASE STUDY 2
The Client: A Design/ Marketing Agency
The Client: an award-winning design/ marketing agency
whose high revenue-generating accounts
were in jeopardy because of relentless
staff turnover in the Client Relations/
Account Managment department.
Business Problem to be Solved:
How to retain clients/ remain credible to clients,
while simultaneously identifying the departmental problems (and fixing them)
in a "cashflow crunched" environment
(read: could not just "throw money at the problem/
pay higher salaries to retain quality Account Managers)?
The Dance Wisdom 2.0 Serena Tapped and Applied:
Would you ask a heart surgeon
to perform a breakdance solo,
with no rehearsal time,
onstage in front of harsh critics?
Serena's ethnographic research methods indicated that,
because the agency was so busy,
and Management was servicing its highest-proflie clients
and performing new business development (which they should),
they were lacking quality onboarding to new account team members.
In some instances, generalists were
being thrown into data-intensive, digital analysis
and clients were eating the account managers alive
when it came to the numbers.
The accounts people were operating
from a position of weakness,
stuck on their back foot.
And they were miserable. So they quit.
The Solution and Result?
Serena worked with Management
to repair its broken process,
by applying Dance Wisdom 2.0's
"Time + Communication" module.
Onboarding improved;
Account management employee retention improved;
and Client satisfaction survey scores improved.
Win-Win-Win.
CASE STUDY 3
The Client: Sales Advisory Group Advising Class "A" Land Developer
The Client, a leading sales advisory group in Canada serving Class "A" residential real estate developers, was tasked to launch and sell a 212-unit, townhome site the same week that General Motors—that city's economic driver—announced it was
shutting down all automobile assembly plants in the area,
effectively killing off all potential sales of the townhome site.
The plant closures made headlines around the world, with
The Guardian, in London, England, blaring:
“A kick in the stomach: massive GM layoffs leave workers distraught”
(when the globally influential Guardian shines a light on news
IN CANADA, it’s next level significant).
The business problem to be solved:
How could we sell any units in a city formerly dependent on GM,
and how could we give the developer confidence we could sell
$160 million worth of real estate in a distressed market?
The Dance Wisdom 2.0 Serena Tapped and Applied:
"When the music changes so does the dance." -Nigerian Proverb
Translation: we could not rely upon any proven, former, historical sales methods.
We had to change the choreography.
Drawing upon the elements of dance (body, space, time, energy, action, relationships (to whom/ to what), music (the "contractor that enables dance to flourish"), and choreography (the product), Serena helped her Client to
re-design the compositional structure of the sales approach.
Translation:
Serena identified the need to highlight different music
foundational to the product's success
(formerly GM, but now what?)
Partnering with City Hall, Econ Dev, and universities in the area (a first),
all aligned on the same songsheet and together,
championed emerging industries in the area
that had been sub-contractors to GM's research and development department
including cleantech, AI, environmental technology, robotics,
and driverless car technologies.
Armed with this new data, who would be interested in dancing with us?
We mapped the economic development data onto Buyer Personas.
This led us to India, a global leader in emerging technologies,
who saw the bright future in the former GM-run city.
The Result?
While other developers
with projects in the area closed up shop,
we sold out
commanding the highest price per square foot
that market had ever seen.
Mic drop.