Profile · Oak Creek, Wisconsin
Stacy Tuschl
Founder of The Academy of Performing Arts; raised in Oak Creek; 2019 Wisconsin Small Business Person of the Year
$5 million+
Stacy Tuschl built The Academy of Performing Arts from a free backyard pom class into a seven-figure dance school and, in 2019, Wisconsin’s Small Business Person of the Year. The origin is not a ZIP code on a studio lease; it is a south-suburb lawn in Oak Creek and seventeen middle-schoolers who showed up the first summer. After high school, in the summer of 2002, she taught poms for free in the backyard of her Oak Creek childhood home to whoever came. Three years later a hundred kids were enrolled and parents were asking why she was not charging. She incorporated while still at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, opened a studio in 2005, built a custom Oak Creek facility, and in 2013 used an SBA-backed U.S. Bank loan to open a Franklin location. Another SBA 7(a) loan expanded Oak Creek in 2018. By the SBA honor week in 2019 the business was in seven-figure revenue territory, with roughly fifty employees and more than a thousand students a week. She told Spectrum News the backyard was the childhood house. She later wrote business books and ran a coaching practice on the side, including the Foot Traffic Formula brand—a second act after the studio. Employee and student counts wander across profiles; the 2019 SBA-week range is the clean public snapshot. Oak Creek’s claim is the childhood home and the lawn where the academy began, not inventing a high-school diploma year the clips do not confirm.