About Kerri Russell-Channer
For over 20 years, Kerri Russell-Channer has been at the helm of Russell Aquatics Swim School, providing families with exceptional swim instruction and fostering a love for water safety and skill development. Her passion for teaching and commitment to excellence have made Russell Aquatics a trusted name in the community.
Outside of work, Kerri loves spending quality time with her husband, Titus, and their three active children, often shuttling them between various sporting activities. A travel enthusiast, Kerri enjoys exploring new destinations and creating unforgettable family memories.
A fun fact: Kerri has had the privilege of working alongside her sister and co-owner, Kristi Russell, for the entirety of her swim school journey. Their shared vision and dedication have made the past two decades an incredible adventure, both professionally and personally.
Connect with Kerri Russell-Channer: Email | Instagram | LinkedIn | Facebook
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The Transcript
**Please note that all of our transcriptions come from rev.com and are 80% accurate. We’re grateful for the robots that make this possible and realize that it’s not a perfect process.
Sam Demma
Welcome back to another episode of the High Performing Educator podcast. This is your host, Sam Demma, and today we are joined by Kerri Russell. As the co-founder of Russell Aquatics Swim School, Kerri has dedicated over two decades to providing exceptional swim instruction and promoting water safety within her community, working alongside her sister, co-owner Kristi Russell.
Throughout her journey, Kerri has established a trusted reputation for quality teaching and skill development. Beyond her professional accomplishments, she balances her entrepreneurial pursuits with family life, enjoying travel adventures, and supporting her three children, supporting activities alongside her husband, Titus. Kerri, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today.
Kerri Russell-Channer
Yeah, I’m so happy to be here. Thank you for having me.
Sam Demma
I need to be a student of your swim school because I learned in my grandfather’s backyard and I’ve learned that that’s not a good way to learn how to swim properly.
Kerri Russell-Channer
Hey, that’s okay. Did your grandfather teach you or did you get lessons in your grandfather’s backyard?
Sam Demma
It was a soft push into the shallow end.
Kerri Russell-Channer
It was a throw in and sink or swim situation.
Sam Demma
Sometimes an educator has these aspirations to do things outside of their role as an educator in a school building, but it feels like entrepreneurship is a sink or swim situation. Tell me a little bit about what inspired you to start your entrepreneurial pursuits years ago.
Kerri Russell-Channer
So I started when I was 17 years old. So I grew up as a competitive swimmer and I then transitioned to teaching swimming and I was working for the city and I absolutely just loved teaching children. I was, my plan was to go to school to be a teacher.
I was teaching adapted aquatics. I loved how I could make a difference and truly saving lives. And I loved connecting with the children and helping them get over fears and then seeing them succeed and their parents coming in all anxious.
And then you just developed this like beautiful bond as they move through something that they were very fearful of. So I knew from a young age that I just, I loved helping people and I loved teaching. But I also grew up in with a lot of my friends, their parents were entrepreneurs and I loved the freedom they had.
I loved the creativity that they had. I really was inspired young by entrepreneurship and when I, you know, was presented the idea to write up a business plan, a business plan in my grade 12 class, there was because of swimming was such a huge part of my life. I thought, why don’t I start a swim school?
My parents backyard pool. And it was just that simple business plan. I got a grant and I, I started that summer and I never looked back since.
It’s going to be 21 years this June and I’ve loved every moment of it. It’s been quite the adventure, but yeah, there was a lot of times where I fell sink or swim and I still feel like that today. You go through growing pains.
Sam Demma
And there’s an educator listening who has another idea of something they want to do, maybe not in their parents backyard, but their own backyard or a passion project outside of the classroom. But they think that they can’t, they think that it’s not possible for them. Can you walk me through how you overcame your own, maybe limiting beliefs or how other people can overcome their own limiting beliefs when it comes to jumping into an entrepreneurial pursuit?
Kerri Russell-Channer
Yeah, people have a lot of limiting beliefs. You know, it’s just start somewhere and just it’s small steps every day. You know, whether it’s a dog walking business, whether it’s car washing, car detailing, just something on the side.
You don’t have to go and quit your job and start a business and, you know, throw it all in and say, this is it, start slow. And it’s really one day at a time. But for me, it was personal growth and development.
And I threw myself into becoming a different person. I had to work on my mindset. I had to get over limiting beliefs.
I had to get over, over fear. I mean, I was 17 when I started my business. I didn’t know much, but then I look back and I’m like, maybe that was perfect because I just jumped in and just did it impulsively because I was young.
But I think that like anybody can do that. It’s the story we tell ourselves. And I think we all, if we can focus on ourselves and, you know, podcasts and books and a lot of personal development conferences, this stuff shifted my mindset and really once I started, there was no looking back, I didn’t care what it was going to take.
And I still don’t care what it’s going to take. I’m, I’m going to do it.
Sam Demma
When you think of the conferences you attended, the books you’ve read, the podcasts you listened to, the seminars, are there any resources that have been foundational? Like you, you attended this event or read this thing and it really opened your eyes or do you think it was more a combination of all of the experiences?
Kerri Russell-Channer
I think it’s all the experiences. I think there was definitely certain things that stood out to me and certain motivators that really spoke to me over others. But I, I really think that it’s cumulative.
It’s also the people you meet at those conferences and the network you start to build. Entrepreneurs think different. We just do.
And we gravitate towards each other and you can lean on each other for support. And I thought that like once I, I was actually a, I got involved in my early twenties in a network marketing company and you know, I didn’t, I don’t do the network marketing company today, but the leadership and the conferences and the people I met, there was so much valuable information that I took away that I feel like kind of like really threw me into the next phase of entrepreneurship, um, in my mid twenties. So there was so many amazing speakers there that, um, really just touched me and, and, and moved me forward and motivated me. Um, yeah.
Sam Demma
There’s a author and speaker named Jim Rohn who I was going to actually mention him when you just said that he, he was big in herbal life. And I still listen to his lectures on YouTube and the information is so rich and so valuable and it’s accessible right there. The guy I recently had, well, we had a sink in our, in our basement break.
And my dad called one of his friends, Jimmy, cause they’re not here right now, uh, who has the, the know how to fix it. And I was handing him tools to help. And he looks at me and he’s like, Sam, can you believe that before I came here today, I bought seven books for $3 and 50 cents.
I was like, what? And he’s like, yeah, I stopped at thrift stores and I get books that are like $24 at Indigo online, but I get them for 50 cents and I read like two to three books a week. Honestly, it’s there, it’s there for people, but most don’t have the drive to kind of, you know, crack them open, um, and like dive into the learning, not to make a swimming analogy.
Kerri Russell-Channer
Yeah, but it’s, it’s true. And, and even if it’s not, um, it’s not reading for me, I, I listened to a lot of, um, audibles and I walk. So audibles are massive for me and I just walk and I listen and I get my exercise in and I find that those are, you just have to find what works for you, but all of these books and what you fill your mind with is who you become.
Um, there was a, the email that changed everything for me. Um, Simon Sinek was another one. He was a massive influencer.
He still is. I’ve seen him speak about four times. Um, but when I read the email, I think that really took me into a different level of business.
Um, and start with why it was one of the ones that I, I really resonated with from the beginning for the educator, who’s not familiar with your work today, tell us a little bit about Russell aquatics now.
Sam Demma
It started in the backyard. Um, give us a high level of view of the company now.
Kerri Russell-Channer
Yeah. So Russell aquatics started my parents backyard pool with me as the only instructor with probably about 70 kids the first summer. Um, as it grew each summer, my sister joined me, my best friend joined me and we kind of like grew our, our instructors.
And we started not only teaching from my parents backyard pool, but we rented other people’s pools and we traveled to other people’s homes. Um, we got to a point where we were doing about 500 kids a week in the summer. And that’s when I knew I was graduating teachers college that I wanted to expand this business and go full year.
I started renting out of hotels, gyms, anywhere where I could get a pool all season long. They weren’t the best situations. I didn’t love the facilities, but I knew I needed a way to expand the business and push through that.
And about seven years ago, now we built our own 6,000 square foot custom facility with an in-ground pool. And now we teach about 3000 kids a week. And we have a staff of over 70 part time.
And I think we’re at five or six full time right now. And we’re just seeing those growing pains again. Now looking for another location, looking to expand.
Um, and it’s not always easy. I run through a lot of challenges trying to convince a landlord to put an in-ground pool in their unit. It’s not the easiest thing to do.
Um, but you know, we, that’s where we are now. So we are hopefully going to expand to multiple locations around the GTA. And, and we’ve grown this like beautiful team of people and this beautiful community of people who love Russell aquatics.
And we saved over hundreds of thousands of lives. And a lot of these people I’m still very close with today. I started teaching their kids when they were babies at the city and now they work for me.
Sam Demma
It’s such a beautiful facility filled with amazing human beings. I enjoyed meeting some of your staff and, uh, just seeing students and families so excited to show up and swim and learn. Can you walk me through how you attract such amazing human beings on your team?
There, there might be a superintendent or a principal listening who wants to get more, uh, enthusiastic staff in their organizations, but I’m not sure how.
Kerri Russell-Channer
Yeah, I think, um, we live and breathe our core values and, you know, Christie and I, Christie is my sister. We’re not at the facility every day now, but we work a lot with our leadership team to resemble the kind of leaders that we are. And we lead with passion, integrity, love, care.
Um, and really like we put each other first and we put our customers first. And it’s like, how would you treat family? How would, and that has to be in your, the back of your mind.
We do a lot of customer service training, um, white glove service. And we just really, I think at the end of the day, when you lead with love and passion and integrity, the rest of your team want to lead the same way. And that is a culture that you create and we’re big on our culture in our swim school.
So whether it’s our team, whether it’s our families that come to us, we want people to feel a sense of belonging. And we want them to experience having a certain type of experience that we’ve curated for them. And that all starts with putting others first and really leading by our core values and our integrity as a company.
Um, and yeah, we’ve been super, I mean, I want to say we’ve been lucky, but we’ve worked hard and we’ve held people accountable and we’ve, you know, just created this culture and family that everyone just wants to be a part of. And it’s, it’s being like such a beautiful journey.
Sam Demma
I think it’s something you’ve attracted. Jim Rona always says success isn’t pursued, but attracted by the person you’ve become, and it sounds like you and Christie and the team, role model, the behavior you wish to see in the staff you bring into your facility and then hold them accountable to those core values in education, there are unhappy customers, which are usually parents calling to speak to a principal or to speak about the way their teacher handled a situation, and it’s the same or very similar in a swim school. If you have an unhappy customer, it’s a, it’s a parent of a young person.
Um, what is your philosophy around dealing with those challenging conversations when someone’s expectations are not being met or they have a challenge or an issue?
Kerri Russell-Channer
Yeah. And I’ll just quickly to go back to what you just said as well about Christie and I and emulating, um, and then people following lead by example. We also bring our leadership team to a lot of different conferences.
So we expose them to that greater sense of leadership from experts. And we’ve done that for our staff as young as 17. Um, and we bring a lot of people in to have those talks with them.
So I think that’s really important. If you’re not helping your, your team get better. We always say, even if you leave Russell aquatics one day, you’re going to leave better, you’re going to lead, lead, leave as a better leader than what you came in as, and that’s the impact we want to have on your life.
So I’ll just say that quick. And then handling difficult clients, it’s not easy. People management’s hard.
Um, and you can’t, not everybody’s going to love you, unfortunately, but we listen. And we try our best to come to resolutions. And we own up to our mistakes when we’ve made them and we make, and we try and do things right.
We don’t deny when we’ve made a mistake. We take every complaint, every feedback very seriously. And we have internal meetings and when we need to change our processes or change the way we’re doing things, then that’s what we do.
We pivot, we learn, we go, we’re not stuck in mud. Um, we’re not afraid of failing. We fail forward and we learn and we listen and we move forward.
And it’s not always easy because emotions are difficult and people management is difficult. Um, and we’re not, we don’t always do it perfect, but we’re learning.
Sam Demma
You said we listen, we own up to our mistakes and we try our best to make the best decision we can moving forward. I think those are, those are really the keys, you know, you listen to the person intently, you own up to where you fell short, and then you try and make the best decision moving forward. Um, I also think that we improve our decision-making and the actions we choose to take based on the mentors we have in our lives, you know, Luke Skywalker had Yoda and, um, the Karate Kid had Mr. Miyagi and Michael Jordan had Phil Jackson. And, um, most of these high performing people in life had a coach or like a mentor, someone who really helped them. When you think about your career, isn’t anyone who was a really great mentor to you, who played a really significant impact on the way you think about things and the way you show up? And if so, who’s that person and what did they teach you or do for you?
Kerri Russell-Channer
I would probably say it’s pretty cliche for me because it is my parents and it’s my dad and my dad was actually, um, in leadership and development for Hallmark Canada for over 30 years. So from the time we were very young, we were, um, thought about accountability, about leadership, about attitude, um, and about how you just show up. So I think that those lessons influenced my sister and I so greatly that we became these strong leaders from a very young age.
I mean, when I was in grade four, I won this speech contest on an ICANN attitude and, um, if you believe you can, you can, if you believe you can’t, you won’t. And, um, that was ingrained in me from a very, very young age. So I would say that my dad had a massive impact on me becoming a leader and really like believing in myself.
Um, and then I have a community of swim school owners, other swim school owners that have the very similar story to me. And very young in our very early on in my entrepreneurship journey, I reached out to them and I said, this is who I am. I wasn’t afraid to ask for help for people who had already paved the path.
And I think so much of the time we’re so afraid to lean on people in our industry and we’re threatened, or we feel nervous to kind of, to reach out to those people, because we think that they won’t want to help us. But if you do that, you find that you can have built some incredible relationships and those people really, really, really help to propel us into the next phase of business. And also introduced us to a whole network of other owners in the same industry.
Um, so some of the problems that we dealt with, we were able to lean on people who had already done it and were more than happy to help.
Sam Demma
Are you still in touch with many of those people as colleagues now?
Kerri Russell-Channer
Yeah. So I’m a part of the Canadian Swim School Alliance. We actually founded that association in COVID.
Um, so we’re very close there. And then I have a lot of people that I’m friends with and mentor me that are from like Australia, a lot of Australian swim school owners, Philippines, the United States, and we’ve built this like network worldwide throughout our Canadian Swim School Alliances, or not even just Canadian, but US, the International Swim School Alliance. And these people are all owners and leaders and we’re all about mentorship and helping each other and not just helping us as owners, but also helping our teams.
Sam Demma
Tell me a little bit about balance. Um, and maybe it’s not balance, but it’s about, uh, integration between your work and your family life, because there’s an educator listening who is wanting to do more. And the first thought that pops in their head is if I do more, I’m going to die.
Like there’s just, there’s not a space for it. What, what boundaries have you set? What systems do you follow or what things have helped you, um, manage the demands of all the other buckets you have in your life?
Kerri Russell-Channer
Yeah, balance is tough. And that’s something that I’m always working on. I think I’ve gotten a lot better as the years go, have gone on.
But as a mom of three, I can tell you, I’m so happy. I set that foundation, um, when my kids were pretty early, cause the burnout was real and as a woman entrepreneur, it’s, it is very difficult running, um, your business, running your family, being a good mom, being a good friend, being a good wife, being a good leader, and it’s very overwhelming, but I had a mentor in the swim school industry tell me, um, just before COVID, I was really struggling from burnout. My son was one years old. Um, he’s my second.
I had opened our swim school on his first birthday and I was completely burnt out, um, and I was, I was breaking. And he said to me, he had me read the email and he said to me, do you want to be queen or do you want to be rich? And he goes, you have to get out of your business and stop working in your business or your business is never going to grow.
And it’s never going to function without you. And I read that book and it was the biggest wake up call for me because what I started doing is I started trusting my team more and we put people in place to help us to run our business so that we could take a step back and not work in our business as an employee. Cause that’s what I was doing.
I was working as an employee within my own business. Um, and I started to work on the business and the business, I took a step back, I wasn’t in the swim school all the time. I, I reorganized my hours.
I reorganized my life and we grew the business probably double within that year because we had the opportunity to get out of the pool and start working on what are some of the issues? How do we market better? How do we communicate?
How do we lead our team better? How do I trust my team? And it was hard because a lot of the years I did everything myself because as this is your baby, you think you can do it the best and you can do it the best, but I needed to trust my team that they could do as good of a job, if not better.
And thank God I learned that lesson because honestly, today with my kids in rep sports, I don’t know what I would do.
Sam Demma
You’d be losing it.
Kerri Russell-Channer
I would be a mess. So I think that that’s, you know, people always say to me like, oh my God, like you have this business and you’re, you have flexibility and I’m like, yeah, I’ve created my business to be able to operate without me. And that’s a huge, huge lesson.
Sam Demma
One of my mentor says a business you can sell is a great business to build. And it hinges on that whole idea that it could exist without you being there. So I’m going to go reread the email. Thank you for the recommendation.
Kerri Russell-Channer
Yeah, the email is amazing.
Sam Demma
I think what’s really exciting about your journey is that, you know, it’s been 20 years or just over 20 years and there’s many more years to come, but you’ve done, you know, two decades of work in this, in this space, at least. And when you think about the time, what are, what is maybe one accomplishment or achievement so far that you’re most proud of and what vision do you have for the next decade?
Kerri Russell-Channer
Oh gosh, there’s so much. We just celebrated our 20th year last year. So I think about this a lot, but, um, I don’t know.
I think having taking the risk of opening that facility was definitely the biggest. I was in my late twenties at the time and it was very daunting and I took out a big loan and it was scary. Um, and I, it was, I didn’t know what I was doing.
And again, it was one day at a time. And I think that’s just knowing the belief in myself to take the risk. Um, the belief in myself when not many other people had a belief in us and didn’t really believe that we could do this or we were making a huge mistake or we are going to put ourselves in debt and the risk and the state, like just everything.
And I think that me just believing, no, this is, I know I’ve got this. I know I can do this and just continuing to move forward. Um, I think that, that definitely is a huge one for me and what the next 10 years look like.
It really is about growing now. It’s not just growing this business for Christie and I. It’s about growing it for our team.
We want to give our team the opportunity to grow into different positions and for them to experience growth with our company. And, um, if we don’t grow, we’re not just doing a disservice to Christie and I, but we’re doing a disservice to the people that have put their blood, sweat and tears into this business alongside with us. And we want it, we want to bring them on this journey.
So the next 10 years we’re grinding it out and we’re expanding and, um, it’s going to come with its own set of challenges, but we’re excited for the challenge. We, we, we look forward to challenge and it, I think that’s what helps us to grow even more. And I don’t like sitting stagnant, so, um, I’m, I’m really looking forward to the next 10 years and those growth opportunities and what what’s to come.
Sam Demma
It’s an exciting thing to witness. I can’t wait to follow the journey. Keep up the amazing work that you’re doing.
Thank you for taking the time to come on the podcast and share some of your entrepreneurial ideas and insights and your own journey. I know it’s inspiring not only to me, but to everyone who’s listening. Um, I’ll see you soon and until then keep up the amazing work.
Kerri Russell-Channer
Thank you so much. Thank you again for having me
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The High Performing Educator Podcast was brought to life during the outbreak of COVID-19 to provide you with inspirational stories and practical advice from your colleagues in education. By tuning in, you will hear the stories and ideas of the world’s brightest and most ambitious educators. You can expect interviews with Principals, Teachers, Guidance Counsellors, National Student Association, Directors and anybody that works with youth. You can find and listen to all the episodes for free here.
