Building a team without losing the heart of the business – Cari Weston, BilinguaSing

There comes a point in lots of class businesses where the problem isn’t demand. It’s capacity.

You’ve got schools asking for sessions, nurseries wanting you in, families wanting more classes and opportunities popping up faster than you can physically fit them into the week. That sounds like a lovely problem to have, until you realise there’s still only one of you.

That’s exactly the point Cari Weston, owner of BilinguaSing Bracknell & Wokingham, reached as her business grew.

Cari is a finalist for Team-Led Business of the Year, sponsored by Kelly Reynolds Socials, at The Class Business Awards 2026. She’s been teaching BilinguaSing classes for around seven years and took over the franchise in 2021, building a business that now reaches children through schools, nurseries, preschools and language clubs across her local area.

For the first couple of years, though, it was all Cari. She was delivering the classes, doing the admin, marketing, finance and everything else that comes with running a business, right down to cleaning the props between sessions. As demand increased, it became obvious that growth couldn’t keep relying on her squeezing another class into an already full diary.

When saying yes to everything stops working

Like many business owners, Cari went through a stage of saying yes to opportunities because they were there.

Some sessions were profitable. Some were enjoyable. Some simply filled the diary. But eventually she realised that doing more wasn’t automatically making the business better.

“I suddenly realised that there was lots of work I could do more of, but I couldn’t fit it in.”

There was also a personal boundary she wasn’t prepared to lose. One of the reasons Cari runs the business is because she wants it to work around her family, so weekends and endless after-school delivery were never going to be the answer.

That meant there were really only two options: keep the business limited by her own hours, or start trusting somebody else with the delivery.

The scary bit is handing over your reputation

Building the team wasn’t just a practical decision. It was emotional too.

Even though BilinguaSing is a national franchise brand, Cari knew that locally the business felt very tied to her. Families knew her, schools knew her and the reputation had been built around the way she delivered.

Handing that over to somebody else felt risky.

But when Cari recruited her first teacher, she quickly realised that the goal wasn’t to find someone who could copy her exactly. The real strength came from finding someone who could deliver the same values while bringing something different.

That first teacher was brilliant, and before long Cari added another team member too.

Today, she has teachers with different backgrounds and strengths, including a former primary school teacher and a native Spanish speaker. One brings deep classroom experience, another brings cultural and language knowledge that Cari doesn’t have herself.

That doesn’t dilute the business. It adds to it.

“I really do think you still add yourself into those sessions.”

That’s such an important lesson for anyone building a team. If you recruit people and then spend all your energy trying to turn them into mini versions of you, you miss the very thing that made them worth hiring in the first place.

The team should make the business better, not just bigger

Cari’s teachers deliver differently to her, and that’s intentional.

They’ve had the BilinguaSing training, they understand the structure and they know what the customer experience needs to feel like, but within that framework they’re trusted to bring their own personality into the room.

That gives children a richer experience and means the business can serve more people without everything depending on Cari being physically present.

It also means Cari can start thinking like the owner of the business, rather than only the person delivering it.

That shift has become even more important as she’s started looking more closely at where her time is actually going.

Income and headspace aren’t the same thing

One of the most interesting parts of our conversation was Cari’s decision to pause her community classes for now.

She loved them.

The families loved them.

There were tears when she stopped.

But when she looked at the numbers and the mental load, something didn’t add up.

The community classes were bringing in roughly 20% of her weekly income but taking up closer to 40% of her headspace.

That’s a big difference.

Cari had already experienced what it felt like to teach 26 classes a week and knew that simply filling every available hour wasn’t sustainable. By the end of the week, she was exhausted and knew she wasn’t necessarily delivering her best work.

So she made a decision based on where the business was strongest.

“I can design a setup that works for me, that plays to my strengths.”

For now, that means focusing more heavily on schools, nurseries and preschools, especially the younger children she most enjoys working with.

Stable income can change the way you grow

Cari is refreshingly practical about the finances too.

She knows where the reliable income comes from.

School clubs often give her longer-term bookings, families are already in the setting and there’s less need to constantly chase new customers every few weeks. For some schools, BilinguaSing also adds something distinctive to their offer, with parents even choosing schools because younger children can access Spanish earlier.

That stability matters because Cari doesn’t want to spend every weekend on the marketing hamster wheel trying to refill community classes.

She wants a business that gives her an income and still leaves room for her family.

That’s why she’s become much more willing to make decisions based on both commercial sense and personal capacity.

For Cari, that means looking at:

• where the most stable income comes from
• which work takes the most mental energy
• where her team can deliver brilliantly without her
• which age groups and settings she genuinely enjoys most
• what the business needs to look like for family life to stay protected

Those aren’t always easy decisions, but they’re the kind that make a business sustainable rather than simply busy.

Visibility still needs a human face

There’s another strand to Cari’s work that’s becoming increasingly important too: face-to-face events.

After noticing that many local events had disappeared or changed after the pandemic, Cari and another class provider decided to create the kind of event they wished existed themselves.

The result was a local Baby & Toddler Showcase that brought together activity providers, families and more than 100 people through the door.

Families could meet class leaders, try taster sessions and see how their children responded before committing to anything. Providers got to have proper conversations with potential customers, and some made back their stall fee within an hour.

Cari is passionate about this because she believes face-to-face visibility matters enormously in children’s activities.

Parents might see a reel or an advert, but the thing they often remember is the person who connected with their child.

And instead of treating every other local provider as competition, Cari sees events as a way to bring the sector together and make everybody more visible.

Growth doesn’t have to mean doing more yourself

Cari’s journey is a really good example of how a business can evolve once the founder stops being the only route to growth.

The team has allowed BilinguaSing to reach more children without Cari having to sacrifice the family boundaries she set from the beginning. At the same time, looking more honestly at the numbers has helped her decide what deserves her time and what can be paused, changed or handed over.

That’s the real shift in a team-led business.

It isn’t about removing the founder completely.

It’s about making sure the business can keep growing without requiring more and more of the founder every single time.

Watch the full interview

In our full conversation, Cari shares how she moved from doing everything herself to building a team, why she’s paused her community classes, how school and nursery work has created more stability and why she believes face-to-face events could become a powerful marketing tool for class providers.

👉 Watch Cari’s full finalist interview here.

Cari is a finalist for Team-Led Business of the Year, sponsored by Kelly Reynolds Socials, at The Class Business Awards 2026.

Cari will also be exhibiting at The Class Business Live on Saturday 10 October 2026 at the National Conference Centre in Solihull, where providers can chat to her about using local events to build visibility, connect with other businesses and bring their communities together.

The daytime event runs from 9:00am–3:00pm, before The Class Business Awards & Afterparty begins at 6:00pm.