Life & Work with Elijah Ryberg of 130 N Central ave

Today we’d like to introduce you to Elijah Ryberg.

Hi Elijah, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
Where to begin! Well, it all really started when I first learned about swing dancing. A little place called Kats Korner in Mesa, AZ. If it wasn’t for that place and the community I found there, I probably wouldn’t be here now. I would never have started teaching classes and never started hosting and organizing events.

In high school I found what I thought was a silly little activity for me and my friends to go every week and dance around with each other, in a safe place. No drugs, no alcohol just a bunch of teenagers and some adults dancing with each other. It was wholesome and unbelievably fun.

Over the years I eventually discovered Lindy Hop, I learned how it was NOT “east coast swing” I learned about it’s history, I learned about the music it evolved to be danced to, I learned about the national and international communities that practiced it. And it became a much more serious activity for me. I would go out as many times as was possible; volunteering and exchanging work for admission to all the local venues because I was a broke student, trying to get as good as I could with the resources I had.

But I got started with the business side after years of reading books, working as grunt labor for small businesses, large businesses, becoming executive assistants to other entrepreneurs. I learned how to run a business without going to business school. Just lots of reading and doing the work out in the workplace.
As the pandemic gradually diminished in severity, I realized this was an opportunity to carve out a place for a market that I predicted would pop up over the coming years. People being cooped up inside their homes will realize their lives have been missing something vital.
They will realize their lives have been devoid of meaningful activity, maybe meaningful work, and they might realize they were working to work, and breathing to breath, eating to work, and sleeping to work the next day. People will question what their lives have been lived for up to this point. The pandemic gave many people lots of time to think. And hopefully, they will want to do something different with their limited free-time when it became an option again.

All of the market analysis aside. I took all the information I had from running a business and decided to try it out in the real world. With my wife’s and my limited savings, we bootstrapped a business from scrap, from the ground up; no loans, no financial grants. (However the city of Mesa helped immensely with providing resources to assist our efforts.) Just grit and a bit of an insane dream. A dream to show PHX the joy and meaning-making that can come from learning this dance and being part of it’s community.

We believe in offering the most affordable options possible. Taking volunteers in exchange for classes, even offering business-management level partnerships as a trade, word of mouth promotional discounts. etc. Dance should not exist behind a pay-wall. Meaning-making and community building should not exist behind a pay-wall. These principles guide all of our business choices.
The operation and offerings have changed a LOT over the past 3-ish years. So we have not yet profited despite how much we need to grow to expand our offerings and accessibility. Our current partnerships are the core of how we stay operational. Profit is necessary to not run an expensive hobby. So, soon we will have to profit or change what we do.

We hope to gain even more partnerships soon, our managing partner’s are our bread and butter. We function as an partner/owner-managed co-operative. All our partner’s gain something from working, and we all work equally to build the next piece.
Closing this out, and bringing us to current day. We are running a bit of an odd and revolutionary business model to promote a niche hobby such as Lindy Hop. Is kind of a tall order, and because we do not take outside funding yet. We need dedicated, serious partners to build the next stage of our co-op. Our financials are open to our managing partners, keeping operational and financial transparency is critical to our basis of operation, We cannot seriously ask someone to dedicate their life and money for something they cannot trust. it builds trust in pitching ideas, and guides mutual agreement on next steps.
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Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Not smooth at all. I grew up poor. Not destitute, But not Disney vacations every year, or even every 5 yeras.
So, starting a business and refusing to take loans. So, not having funding was rough Spent a lot of my wife’s hard-earned money. If I could have had a small, low interest loan of a million dollars, things for our operation would be very different.

Managing expectations, people have ideas about what “Swing Dancing” is already, and when our offerings don’t match that expectation, they get frustrated. So we have had a few people become grumpy for us not doing what they expected. We don’t exist to satisfy current markets, we are focusing on carving out a new market.

Managing pandemic restrictions: we started in person classes while other states around the country still had distance restrictions in work places, we started along-side other businesses in AZ. We didn’t want to deal with the restrictions so we waited till it was more open and safer to begin offering something. Of course, there were still hold-outs, people who did something similar to us who were requiring masks, who were requiring distancing.
We did not want to enforce any of that stuff, not because we didn’t believe it was real, but because this was meant to be something people did because they did not want to be distanced from each other. This is intimacy with your friends and neighbors. So we waited till the writing on the wall said: Remove your masks and get close once more. We didn’t manage this perfectly obviously, some people say we started too early, some say we are still in the pandemic and shouldn’t exist at all. I didn’t have all the answers so I did what I thought was right.

Banning creeps: I’m pretty liberal when it comes to banning people. The dance we do is very intimate. The community develops deep ties to one another. This cannot be violated. Though this isn’t chest to chest grinding. It is more intimate than American’s are used to if you don’t come from a dancing culture already.

If you’re a white person from the US, chances are, you’re NOT familiar with how to hold a person in your arms while both of your feet move in time to music. It’s TOUGH for many people. Not impossible. But tough. Tougher still to get past our US touch aversion we have with strangers. Men, women and every orientation and expression in between wants to touch other humans, many of us in the west suppress it. There aren’t many safe outlets to safely and appropriately touch each other without sexuality being brought up.
So we offer Lindy Hop for people to cure their touch starvation. But, this means, there will eventually be creeps who just don’t know how to touch or speak to strangers appropriately. So, I give them a few warnings, I tell them hey we don’t do “x” thing here, do “y” instead. Most of the time, they elect to not come back after I have publicly corrected them. However, if they persist, and it also depends on what they have done/are doing or what I perceive they WANT to do. I ban them. Sometimes it’s a suspension, sometimes it’s a permanent ban from certain offerings and not others. Sometimes it’s a combination of all. But, I will ban you permanently from all of the offerings if you violate safety protocols and refuse to head calls to change and acknowledgement.

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I never went to university. I took some college classes but most of my adult life has passed me by without that experience. Granted, I did not know what I wanted to do in HS. And I did not think it was wise for me to take out loans to get a degree in something I didn’t know would get me a job that could pay back those loans.
So, I managed to avoid the student loan crisis the world is experiencing now.

I do not think I am remarkable in any way. I wish I could have gone to school and known what I wanted like so many of my peers. But all I knew was that I wanted to travel, read, and move for the rest of my life. I always thought it unfair that I could not be paid to write essays in responses to books I read. (Turns out this is an option I just didn’t know until it was too late.) I want to hike to the tops of mountains and ride bikes along the ocean, and run through forests. I want to fight my friends and strangers for awards, and I want to dance till the sun comes up. And I could fill my days with pottery, gardening, reading, and writing until the night came and I danced until I couldn’t anymore.

My hobby business I run, and my thousand other hobbies are also art and essentially creative. Whenever a song comes on and it compels me to move. No matter where I am. My body and my mind and my heart creates art. I write, (though not well) I read. And I cook.

I have always had a belief that my life was meant for something greater than typing at a desk for someone else to make 100k off my reports for 40 years. I work a day job. and it’s the best job I’ve ever had. As I always have. I have to, as I’m not independently wealthy. Or supported by wealthy parents or grand parents. The dreamers and lovers like me exist in the poor as well as the time-rich of the wealthier among us. I want my day job to take up 20hours per week at the most, so I can have time to read, cook, and bake and write, and dance the rest of the time.
I’m what some people might call a “high-performer” in business circles. But I do not like to hustle. I do not want rushed deadlines to make quarterly profits. I want to dream and sleep and walk and run, and swim and throw clay, write and dance till the day I die. And I think that’s enough.

Do you have any advice for those just starting out?
What you can do depends entirely upon how much risk you’re willing to deal with. And, how much financial support you have. Those who can get “a small loan of a million dollars” will have very different experiences and increased chances of success than those who have 3k in savings and decide to start a revolutionary business for a niche hobby nobody knows about.

Get a lawyer to advise you early on. Pay for it. I know its expensive. But maybe it will stop you from trying. And maybe it will financially prevent you from starting in the first place. And maybe that’s a good thing.

Or don’t, go for it like me. And now you have magazines reaching out to you for interviews, maybe you’ll be on TV. Maybe you’ll change peoples lives. Maybe you’ll make friends you’ll have for the rest of your life.
You have one life to live. Even if you lost thousands of dollars trying. Maybe it was worth it?

Pricing:

• 20 per class. 4 classes a month.
• Pay for all 4 up front, get $10 off.
• Private lessons $60/lesson
• Personal training $60
• Event planning available – prices vary

Contact Info:

• Website: https://coppercityswing.com
• Instagram: coppercityswing_official
• Facebook: Copper City Swing

Image Credits
https://adrienvillelaphotography.pixieset.com/houseofstorygallerypreview/
https://www.adrienvillela.com/