- January 9, 2025
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Jamie Van Cuyk, founder and owner of St. Pete-based Growing Your Team, a consulting firm that works with small businesses on recruiting and retaining employees. She founded the firm in 2018, after previously starting a software company. A University of Tampa graduate, Van Cuyk worked for Catalina Marketing in St. Petersburg before she started her own businesses. Growing Your Team, she says, works not only with clients — usually that have five or less employees — on hiring people, but on fine-tuning what the company needs in each position so the founder can focus more on growing the business, not being in it.
Aerial hoops. It’s a form of dancing — hanging from the ceiling in a steel circular device that looks like a Hula Hoop. Van Cuyk, 40, takes a weekly class for aerial hoops at the A&G Dance Academy in St. Petersburg. During the classes, under the division A&G Aerial Arts, instructors teach a bevy of moves, dances and tricks, such as a bird’s nest or a crescent moon.
Dance party: Van Cuyk grew up dancing, both for fun and in competitions. “I never wanted to stop,” she says, adding she especially enjoyed dancing with “passion and emotion.” She kept dancing during college, where, at the University of Tampa she says she “spent 20 hours a week in the dance studio just for fun.” When she graduated in 2007 and entered the work world, she felt a void, saying, “where do I go now to take my dance classes?”
Hang high: A friend told her about aerial hoops and silks and she decided to give it a try, 15 or 20 years ago, she says. “A lot of my friends said ‘you’re crazy — you don’t have any upper body strength,’” Van Cuyk recalls. That motivated her to do it. “It was really hard,” she says, “but I really wanted to do this so I just told myself I would figure it out.”
Mark it down: She did figure it out, but also, after a little bit, she stopped going to classes when work and other parts of life took over, including having two daughters. She rediscovered the discipline a few years ago. Now she treats her weekly classes like a can’t-miss meeting with a VIP client. “I don’t allow that time on my calendar to be booked,” she says. “It lets me put myself first.”
Work it out: Van Cuyk takes the 9 a.m. class every Monday at A&G. It runs until 10:15, and includes a 45-minute warm-up, which Van Cuyk calls more like an intense cardio session, with exercises geared toward the tricks and moves being taught in the class.
Work time: Most of the other class members at the Monday session, says Van Cuyk, are other women in their 30s and 40s, many of them running small businesses like her. That’s led to networking opportunities. “I’ve definitely gotten some business,” from going to A&G classes.
Family ties: Van Cuyk has taken her daughters to classes, and they have taken some sessions on their own, including week-long summer camps. Beyond the actual physical work of the classes, Van Cuyk likes that her daughters get to see her in action. “As a mom and a business owner, it’s really easy to put yourself last,” she says, “so it’s really important to me to show that I can do this.”
Move it: Van Cuyk is active in other ways, too, in addition to aerial hoops. She works with a personal trainer on some muscles and also goes rock climbing in St. Petersburg with one of her daughters. But nothing pushes her like getting up in the hoop. “I found as I get older, I’m getting a little sedentary,” she says, “and this is a really good challenge.”
In the zone: There’s a positive mental health component, too, she says. “When I show up for a class, I have one million things going on my brain and I’m thinking I don’t really have time to do this,” she says. “But once I get up there, literally everything you’re thinking about is holding yourself up so you don’t fall.”
