By Danni Levy
Originally from Tamworth, UK, Emma Slater has firmly secured her place on the most famous dance floor on the planet. And when she’s not Dancing With the Stars, the budding entrepreneur is planning her next property deal or dreaming up her female fashion empire.
“I’m filming at the moment and my celebrity partner this series is country music artist Jimmie Allen,” says Emma. “His schedule is so crazy. As his professional dance mentor, it’s my job to travel with him and train him for three or four hours every single day.
“On a formal filming day, we’ll start at around 7 am and be on-set for up to fourteen hours. You never switch off when you’re working on DWTS. You have to juggle rehearsals, wardrobe fittings, creative consultants with the producers, and then choreograph outside of that too. I’m constantly pitching ideas and thinking up steps. The choreographing takes a really long time for me, because I’m a perfectionist and I tend to overthink. Sometimes when I’m trying to plan the ultimate dance, I’m actually making it worse by spending so long on it. Right now I’m trying to simplify and streamline that process.”
Emma’s impressive yet feminine physique comes as no surprise given the (quite literally), thousands of hours she spends dancing. And yet adequate nourishment doesn’t always come easily.
“Getting decent meals in is really difficult when I’m filming,” she says. “I don’t like junk food, I don’t like fast food. I’ll often go to a supermarket and get an organic rotisserie chicken I can take back to my hotel room, rather than go to a cafe and grab calorific comfort food. I really like smoothies, so I’ll go find a smoothie place, or a little salad place, but it’s so tricky when you’re traveling.”
“On a formal filming day, we’ll start at around 7 am and be on-set for up to fourteen hours. You never switch off when you’re working on Dancing With The Stars”
Having dreamed up big business from an early age, Emma has planned her steps way beyond her next foxtrot.
“Ever since I was a young kid, I remember thinking, ‘I want to own a lot of property and I’ll build an Emma-pire,”’ she says. “I wanted to name the business ‘Emma-Pire Properties’.
“Long-term, property is definitely something I want to move into professionally. I recently earned my real estate licence and I want to continually create passive income so that I can be mortgage-free. I’m obsessed with podcasts like Bigger-Pockets and YouTubers like Graham Stephan who constantly talk about their property hacks.
“Ever since I was a young kid, I remember thinking, ‘I want to own a lot of property and I’ll build an Emma-pire”’
“My husband and I have begun to purchase properties without the help of an external agent. I have a great mentor who helps me through new negotiations and tactics. As a dancer, I’m used to putting in the work and it’s really competitive. That’s given me a good grounding for selling property, because you have to work really hard to get leads.
“Once this dancing season is done, I’m going to go on tour until the end of March, then I’ll step into property full-time. My dream is to do a flip. I’m hoping to do that next year. I invested in a project for a friend and I got to see the rehab of the house. After six months I got my money back, plus interest. It was great to witness that growth and I really want to do that myself without the use of other people flipping for me. My husband and I have renovated a couple of places already. I actually have seven units in Pittsburgh, and I use them for passive income. Some of them I’ve not even seen. I have a contact out there and I’ll purchase them, crunch the numbers and do the analysis. If things add up, we rehab them and put tenants in there, then they just pay us passive income. It’s such a good strategy. I’d really recommend it to everyone. You just have to do a lot of research.
“The ultimate goal for me is to have my own home flipping show, or a real estate show with my husband. I actually danced with Drew Scott, from ‘Property Brothers’. He was such a great guy. We got to the finals, so we got to spend a lot of time together and he inspired me to get my license.”
“I’m obsessed with podcasts like BiggerPockets and YouTubers like Graham Stephan who constantly talk about their property hacks”
Dancing, property, is there anything this girl can’t turn her hand to? It would appear not! I mean, why not throw in a female fashion line?!
“As a passion project, just for me, I need to create a line of blazers too,” says Emma. “I live in blazers. I think they’re such a powerful, tailored statement for a woman to wear and I find it so difficult to find nice ones. I want to go a little bit rock and roll, a little bit punk with it. Very femme, business, boss. I love a little bit of the Oxford flavor. I love so many different flavors. The eighties, the nineties. I want to make women feel like bosses.
“I live in blazers. I think they’re such a powerful, tailored statement for a woman to wear and I find it so difficult to find nice ones”
“Dancing’s not going to last forever and I’m thirty-two at the moment. If I want to have kids, if I want to look after my body and think about those things that we women have to think about, I’m probably not going to be dancing for that many years. I just want a comfortable lifestyle. I want to have the leisure to be able to go to the beach with my family and never have to think about a nine-to-five job. I want to provide for my kids, give them an education, and set them up for whatever they want to do. I’m so in love with finding out what I can do that will best make my money work for me. I want to pass that onto my kids, so that they can be financially fit too. And that’s a state of mind.”
@theemmaslater
Dancing with the Stars is airing now on ABC.
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