Built by a dance studio, for dance studios.
Ida OS didn’t come out of a boardroom. It came out of the Gott-Hughton Irish Dance Academy in Calgary — a real, championship-winning studio that got too busy for cheques, e-transfers, and WhatsApp threads, and built the software it wished it had.
Ian is a former World Champion Irish dancer. A natural performer, he fulfilled a lifelong dream when Michael Flatley’s Lord of the Dance: Dangerous Games tour asked him to join the cast. He was later invited to join Riverdance in China but turned it down to pursue a career in finance.
He is a CFA Charterholder and works in financial markets as a Director at CIBC Capital Markets. That mix — elite competitive dancer plus finance operator — is exactly why Ida OS treats tuition, payments, and reporting as seriously as it treats the calendar.
The studio outgrew its own admin.
By the time the academy had dozens of families, multiple class levels, championship training, studio rentals, private lessons, workshops, and competitions to coordinate, the business was thriving — but the back office wasn’t.
Tuition came in as post-dated cheques and e-transfers. Scheduling lived in emailed PDFs and WhatsApp threads. Parent updates went out one message at a time. Competition signups and documents were scattered across inboxes. No off-the-shelf gym or scheduling tool fit the way a competitive dance studio actually works.
So we built the system we needed — payments, a live calendar with private bookings, parent communication, and competition organization in one place — and turned it into Ida OS for every independent studio fighting the same admin.
A track record, not a pitch deck.
The same people building Ida OS are still running classes, coaching championship dancers, and answering parent emails. In a relatively short history the academy has earned Western Canadian Regional Championship titles, Top 10 placements at the North American Championships, and Top 20 placements at the World Championships.
