When he was 15, his mother jokingly told him that she wanted to go to the United States. Perez urged her to go but she was hesitant about leaving him in Colombia by himself.
The two eventually reached a compromise: She would go move to the U. The Zumba co-founder soon found a job dancing at a club. The owners of the club enjoyed his dancing so they gave him a business card and asked him to teach classes through an agency. One day, he arrived to his aerobics class and realized that he forgot the music that he normally used for the class.
Luckily, Perez says, he would often record music from the radio onto a cassette tape. Just like many others, he had it in his mind to find a way to live the great American Dream, and with his new form of exercise class, there was an opportunity for him.
In , Perez moved to Miami in search of a new life with bigger and better opportunities. His first act of business was to start teaching his aerobic dance class in his new neighborhood. The first fitness center he approached was the Williams Island Fitness Center, where he got the director, Brenda Anderson, to agree to promote his aerobic dance routine.
It went well, but Perez wanted more. He then reached out to Alberto Perlman and Alberto Aghion , for financial and technical assistance with boosting his aerobic dance classes to greater success. In they formed a trio that set out to make their new dance class better known — and it really worked.
It demonstrates or sounds like the fun, high-energy, fitness class that it is linked to. It was in , with Aghion and Perlman, that Perez released his very first televised infomercial on Zumba. Once the infomercial was out there, many workshops resulted — all of which were based on Zumba routines. The workshops were taught by means of DVDs, which the trio sold, and soon the international following was booming. The organization was to ensure that anyone wishing to teach Zumba was officially trained and presented with a license to do so.
The company also distributed Zumba workshops and training DVDs. The result of the infomercial and the formation of Zumba Fitness LLC is that over 15 million people all over the world actively practice Zumba on a regular basis today.
The class was an immediate hit, he says, with everyone having far more fun than usual. So he decided to stick with the Latin sounds and rhythms. There would be lines out of the door of people waiting to get in. Word travelled fast. This was the beginning of Zumba. From that start Beto eventually went on to launch his business Zumba Fitness.
Today the Miami-based company is a household name with a reported 15 million people across countries attending Zumba exercise classes every week. It is a far cry from his impoverished childhood. Born and raised in Cali, he started working when he was 14 to help his single mother. One year later she moved to the US on her own to start a new life.
She emigrated after she was struck and injured by a stray bullet, and Beto wouldn't see her again for 10 years. Initially he did a wide range of jobs; packing groceries, construction work, selling ice cream and working in a coffee shop. Yet his love was always music and dancing, and he became an aerobics teacher.
Subscriber Account active since. But Zumba isn't just about fitness — it's an entire franchise that turns dance instructors into entrepreneurs selling apparel and CDs. A decade ago, Alberto Perlman decided to launch Zumba so that he could sell the classes as VHS tapes on late night infomercials. In , Zumba was named "Company of the Year," by Inc. In , Alberto " Beto" Perez was teaching an aerobics class and forgot his music at home.
He had to use whatever he had, which happened to be a fun dance mix incorporating a variety of dance moves, including hip-hop, salsa, martial arts and even Bollywood style. In , he moved from Colombia to the United States and continued to teach. Perlman became intrigued when his mother told him that the instructor had a way of integrating "the Saturday night feel" into an exercise class.
When Perlman visited his first Zumba class, it wasn't called Zumba yet and there were " people packed in like sardines," he told Leigh Buchanan at Inc. The year-old Perlman thought that he and his childhood friend Alberto Aghion could start a company that provided infomercials and that Zumba could be their first featured product. So Perlman and Aghion teamed up with Perez to create a demo tape and license the brand to sell on infomercials.
Perlman told us it wasn't long before people from all over the country started calling the call center — which mostly went directly to Aghion's cell phone at the time — to inquire about getting more involved with Zumba.
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