The Choice Most Athletes Never Consider

When a decorated Olympian decides to open a gymnastics facility, the fastest path is obvious: license a proven brand, follow the playbook, buy your way into an existing system. It's the same choice most former athletes make when they turn business owner. Buy the model. Skip the years of trial and error.

Dominique Dawes chose the other path.

Twelve years after retiring from competition and roughly a decade after founding the Dominique Dawes Academy, her business operates eight locations — the newest opening in Spring, Texas on August 22, 2026. Every one of them carries her name because every one of them is hers. No franchisor. No FDD. No territory agreement. No brand standards owned by someone else.

The Résumé Behind the Brand

Before the academies, Dawes was:

  • A three-time Olympian — Barcelona 1992, Atlanta 1996, Sydney 2000
  • Part of the "Magnificent Seven" — the 1996 U.S. team that won the first-ever Olympic team gold in American gymnastics history
  • An individual Olympic bronze medalist and multi-time U.S. national champion
  • The first African American woman to win an Olympic gold medal in gymnastics

That résumé matters here for one specific reason: it is exactly the kind of personal brand that franchisors court. Any number of youth-fitness or gymnastics franchisors would have written her a check for her name. She chose to build the brand herself.

The 8-Location Footprint

The Dominique Dawes Academy's expansion has moved in deliberate waves — first anchoring the Maryland/Virginia corridor near her hometown, then a run of Houston-area openings in 2026:

  • Jersey Village, TX — Houston's first Dominique Dawes Academy, opened May 2026
  • Spring, TX — the eighth location overall, grand opening August 22, 2026

Programs at each academy blend traditional gymnastics with ninja-style movement training. The stated philosophy: "empowering kids through the joy of movement, confidence-building, and character development," with a focus on positive coaching and a safe, supportive environment.

The leadership structure reflects the maturity of the business. Dawes is Founder; Adam Zeitsiff serves as CEO. That split — founder-face plus operating executive — is a common arc for independent brands that outgrow their founder's bandwidth without losing their founder's vision.

Why This Story Belongs on AboutFranchising

AboutFranchising is a franchise-education platform. Dominique Dawes never signed a franchise agreement.

The reason her story lives here is that choosing whether to franchise or build independently is one of the most consequential decisions any prospective business owner will make — and most candidates never really compare the two paths side by side before they commit. A serious education platform has to show what the other choice actually looks like.

What She Traded Away by Not Franchising

  • A proven playbook — franchise systems package operations, hiring, marketing, and site selection into a system you can execute. She built all of that herself.
  • Field support — no franchisor visiting to help her troubleshoot her first location's staffing or her fifth location's expansion.
  • Faster ramp — franchise brands often have marketing awareness and templated openings that get a new location profitable months sooner.
  • A validation pool — she couldn't call existing franchisees to ask what her second year would look like. She was the existing operator.

What She Kept by Not Franchising

  • Total brand control — her name, her curriculum, her coaching standards, her hiring bar. Nobody licenses her identity from her.
  • No royalties — every dollar of location-level profit belongs to the business. Over a decade at eight locations, that is a substantial amount of retained economics.
  • No territory constraints — she opens where the market and the community fit, not where a development schedule says she has to.
  • Freedom to evolve — the gymnastics + ninja programming, the character-development framing, the coaching philosophy — all of it can shift as she and her team learn, without a franchisor to negotiate with.

The Path She Represents

AboutFranchising groups business-ownership paths into distinct tracks. Dominique Dawes's track is Starting Your Own Business — the path for people who want to build a brand, not license one.

Independent building is not the right path for everyone. It typically requires:

  • A unique concept or a personal identity strong enough to carry a brand from a standing start
  • The patience to grow slower than a franchise system does, especially in the first three to five years
  • Comfort with problem-solving without a playbook — every operational challenge is yours to solve from first principles
  • Capital, or a network capable of providing it, without a franchisor's introductions

Dawes had all four. Most candidates weighing this choice do not — and that's a critical thing to understand before you sign anything (or refuse to).

The Bigger Question for Anyone Choosing

Every prospective business owner faces one version of the same choice: Do I want a proven system, or do I want to build my own?

There is no universally right answer. There is only the answer that matches your capital, your risk tolerance, your identity, and your timeline. Dawes's eight-location academy is what the independent answer looks like when it works. Franchise stories on this site — Ed Treacy at 22 Domino's, Kayla Seely at 36 Dogtopia locations, Peter Cancro building Jersey Mike's — are what the franchise answer looks like when it works.

The educated candidate makes that choice with both examples in front of them.

Explore the Independent Path

For readers interested in building outside of a franchise system, AboutFranchising's sister platform EBNBizIntel.com is built specifically for entrepreneurs launching and scaling their own businesses. The Starting Your Own Business career path outlines what this decision requires — and what you give up when you take it.