The Stage

The show business - Stephanie Manuel of Stagecoach Theatre Arts

Published Thursday 1 June 2006 at 14:15 by Nick Smurthwaite

Stephanie Manuel became a millionaire building Stagecoach Theatre Arts, the world-leading part-time drama school. She tells Nick Smurthwaite why her company soared where others failed

When actor Paul Manuel, currently playing Danny in a UK tour of Grease, was growing up in the Thames Valley, his mum spent hours ferrying him around to various classes - music, dance and drama - in the hope that one day it would all be worth it. Well, it was and not just for Paul and his younger sister Fleur.

All that time behind the wheel was not wasted on Stephanie Manuel, a stagestruck single mum pushing 40, stuck in a boring office job to make ends meet. She began to evolve the idea of a part-time stage school in which the three music theatre disciplines were combined.

At first Manuel was refused a start-up loan by her bank because she did not have a business plan. But her luck changed when she met a former bank manager at a party. David Sprigg fancied branching out on his own and Manuel had a business proposition that urgently needed his expertise. Sprigg put up £8,000 of his own money and Manuel quit her job in telesales to concentrate on setting up Stagecoach.

In April 1988, having recruited 80 young people from their first advertising campaign, Manuel and Sprigg launched the first three Stagecoach schools in Richmond, Redhill and Woking. Then as now, the formula was small classes, three-hour sessions, tight discipline and equal attention to drama, dance and music.

“They took off immediately and we were into profit from day one,” recalls Manuel at the organisation’s handsome Georgian headquarters in Walton-on-Thames, a former magistrates’ court that was once a royal residence.

Eighteen years on, Stagecoach is the largest performing arts network of its kind in the world, with 570 schools in the UK, 40 overseas, offices in Minnesota and Nuremburg, as well as other offshoots such as Sportscoach, of which there are now 38 in England and Wales, ten regional choirs and Interact, which offers free weekly workshops to disadvantaged children.

From its modest beginnings in the Thames Valley, Stagecoach soon found a number of joint venture partners in the regions, led by an actress friend of Manuel’s in Peterborough, and by 1993 Manuel and Sprigg were masterminding 24 schools, run by other people, from a small office in East Molesey. Because the administrative burden was becoming so great, they turned to franchising, with each franchisee paying an upfront fee, plus 12.5% of the turnover.

The franchising went so well that in 2001, Manuel and Sprigg floated the company on the Alternative Investment Market, raising almost £3 million to expand the business. As part of the deal they took £800,000 each for themselves and kept a combined stake of 31%. The company’s turnover, including franchise income, is £21.9 million.

So what is the secret of Stagecoach’s success? Why has it prospered and flourished where other companies, notably the national agency operation Showbiz UK, have not?

Manuel believes it is to do with quality control. Despite its preternatural growth and the fact that all the franchises are independently owned, Manuel and Sprigg have been rigorous in maintaining standards and structures common to all. Class numbers are restricted to 15, everyone else has to go on a waiting list. All the schools are independently inspected at least once a year and criminal records clearance is mandatory for anyone involved. “We have 33,000 children coming to us weekly for our classes, so that is a top priority,” says Manuel.

In 2002 they faced a mini crisis when the government threatened to introduce the new Children Act, aimed at people looking after under-eights in a childcare environment. The staff to child ratio was so high that, had it been passed, Stagecoach would have had to employ twice as many teachers. Manuel led the way in lobbying parliament to have it amended to exempt a whole swathe of out of school activities.

Clearly Manuel has a flair for picking the right people as franchisees, be they drop-out professionals or performing arts teachers wanting to work part-time. In the beginning, franchisees were nearly all women but as its reputation has grown, more men have come forward, including Manuel’s actor ex-husband Richard Linden. They are all vetted during a long interview process.

Amazingly none of the franchises to date have failed to the point of closure. “This business is full of wonderful professionals who are not working and many have an awful lot to give,” she says. “We have never been precious about saying our teachers have to be qualified from the outset.”

To this end, Stagecoach has recently inaugurated its own foundation course for would-be teachers who must, of course, be well versed in all three disciplines - drama, dance, and music.

Manuel is insistent that all children who enrol in Stagecoach classes must do all three. There is no place for boys, for example, who may fancy the music and drama but balk at dancing. As well as performance skills, there is strong emphasis on discipline, timekeeping and commitment to the task at hand.

“Activities such as drama and singing have been squeezed out of the school curriculum because of the pressure to improve literacy and numeracy,” says Manuel. “Most of our parents have seen that and come to us because they want their children to have a chance to develop their confidence and self-esteem, poise and articulation, through our activities. The skills we teach are for life. I like to think that our children come away from the classes more confident and better able to communicate.”

Manuel is keen to stress that Stagecoach, unlike TV shows such as Pop Idol and The X Factor, is not about making young people stars, nor even preparing them to enter the world of showbusiness. Indeed she is positively disparaging about the show-offs or “Footlight Fannies” as she calls them, though she is justly proud of the ones who have gone on to land stage, film and TV roles, the most notable being Jamie Bell - aka Billy Elliott.

While Stagecoach runs a thriving agency for young performers - some 4,000 kids from the schools will be on its books at any one time - Manuel takes care to stress the perils of the business, having seen them at first hand through her son and ex-husband.

“We are definitely not in the business of training thousands of children for a life on stage. The vast majority will not go into the business. The first thing I tell the parents is that, chances are, they will wait three hours at each casting session only to be told their child is an inch too short or too tall and has the wrong eye colour. This is an industry in which rejection and disappointment are everyday occurrences.”

What it does offer, however, is a bridge between school and full-time training, a useful alternative for parents of youngsters who are neither ready nor willing to commit to full-time stage school. It is a way of testing the water to see if a child has what it takes to go forward to professional training.

Since their stock market flotation in 2001, Manuel and Sprigg have embarked on a massive £3 million expansion programme, with Sportscoach spawning 36 outlets in England and Wales in five years. As with Stagecoach, franchisees are encouraged to keep classes small, rotating between traditional team sports, individual sports and team building activities to achieve collective goals.

Each year Stagecoach produces a big show, with kids aged eight to 17 coming in from branches all over the country. This year it is the musical Annie, which will be staged at the former Thorndike Theatre, Leatherhead, in August. There are also plans to open more UK schools, at a rate of roughly one every two weeks, as well as more in Germany, which has taken to Stagecoach in a big way.

A multi-millionaire on paper, Manuel no longer has to work but as is often the way with self-made entrepreneurs she can’t quite walk away. “I don’t suppose I shall ever really let it go,” she says, “but I’m getting to the point where I’m only doing the things I want to do, like training up the teachers. Basically I like coming up with ideas to take us in new directions and then handing them over to someone else to implement.

“My role has always been to improve the business. David keeps the operation flowing smoothly. We’ve always said, he is here to make it bigger and I’m here to make it better. It’s a business partnership made in heaven.”