New Business New Life

Schani Cave trained in Dance at Bretton Hall College University, but unfortunately, after a brief career as a dancer, he suffered 2 strokes in January 1999 and thought that he may never be able to dance again.

However, Schani was undettered and after a lot of hard work and determination, he was once again able to work as a dancer and start to develop his idea of providing a dance service for disabled people.

"I had done some freelance work with Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire Councils and realised that there was a gap in the market for someone who could offer dance services to people with disabilities, so I devided to investigate the possibility of setting up in business."

Schani started going to various workshops about starting up on business and saw an advert in a newspaper, which caught his eye. The advert was for the New Business New Life Enterprise Show at Castle Donington.

New Business New Life is an East Midlands Development Agency (emda) initiative created to encourage and support business start-ups across the region. The campaign is delivered by the regional Business Link network.

Schani attended the show in 2003, where he met the Business Link team, who worked with him to develop his idea and put him in contact with other people working with disabled groups.

"Meeting with Business Link was very good for me, " said Schani, "because the biggest problem I had initially was developing networking skills and making contacts with people who could help me."

Schani's business has gone from strength to strength and he now works with a variety of disabled groups in the East Midlands. He was worked with internationally renowned dance and disability specialists and is also an ambassador for The Arts, Continuing Education and Disability, and was chosen to run a leg of the Queen's Commonwealth Baton in June 2002.

More recently, Schani has taken up a mentoring role with So...!, a learning disabled dance company based in Northampton, and has choreographed their most recent repertoire piece - 'When Harry met So...'

His advice to anyone wanting to set up in business is simply - "Go for it, give it a try!"