January 8, 2017

Meet Leslie Pierce of All-Star Swim Atlanta in Washington Park

Local Stories

Today we’d like to introduce you to Leslie Pierce.

Leslie, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
As a child, I always loved the water. I was the type of child who always thought I knew ‘how to swim’. After a couple of near drowning accidents, my father signed me up for swimming lessons at the nearest swimming pool. After a couple of weeks of learn-to-swim classes, my father registered me for the county swim team where I learned more about the different strokes and became introduced to competitive swimming.

I spent my summers as a pre-teen swimming for county swim leagues. During the winter I swam for Dekalb Aquatics, a highly competitive year-round swim team in Decatur, GA. I excelled in all the strokes, especially swim competitions year-round excelling in the individual medley and long-distance swimming races. As a teenager, I swam for my high school swim team and worked as a county lifeguard during the summer months.

After high school, I attended Georgia State University and earned a Bachelor’s degree in Mass Communications, with a minor in Business Management. After graduation, I began to work a couple of job assignments in the communications industry. After a job layoff in the summer of 2013, I began teaching swim lessons to adults and children in my community pool to earn extra money while I was in-between job assignments. Since then, the lesson program has grown tremendously. I’ve taught hundreds of people to swim, the number of people that have come through our school is close to about 2,000. I’ve even been invited to a few celebrity homes in Atlanta to teach their kids to swim. My staff and I teach swim lessons all year-round and we also offer a for-hire lifeguard service during the summer months. My instructors and I love to help others overcome their fears of the water. We have plans to continue to grow the All-Star Swim Atlanta brand beyond the Atlanta area.

We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
As a new small business, I’ve experienced the challenge of finding the right people for the job. It’s taken some time, but now I’m confident in my amazing staff and their amazing ability to absorb information and teach the students effectively and efficiently.

So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the All-Star Swim Atlanta story. Tell us more about the business.
I think the biggest thing that sets us apart and what makes our swim program so popular is our adult swim program. Most adults swim programs only offer a beginner level and an intermediate level. Our adult swim program has 5 different swim levels that teach all four stroke techniques in conjunction with different age-appropriate water survival techniques.

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