How CoLAB Method combines on-camera craft and mindset coaching
Thomas Adisi is co-founder of CoLAB Method, a Milwaukee acting school offering in-person classes and an online academy for youth and adult actors. Adisi explains how the school combines on-camera craft with mindset coaching, adapted its teaching for self-tapes and learned to be more careful about outsourcing.
Build mindset alongside practical skills, and adapt what you teach to how customers now work. Before outsourcing, try the work yourself and identify a genuine skill or capacity gap.
What’s the short story of how your business started, and what makes it genuinely different from the other options your customers have?
I started teaching on-camera acting at the Milwaukee Rep in 2016, and in 2018 my wife Daniella and I opened our own studio, CoLAB. We’re Thomas and Daniella Adisi, and we train mindset and craft together. Daniella brings a background in psychology and social work and leads our mindset coaching; I lead the on-camera work. So our students learn to handle nerves and rejection, not just hit a mark. And we’re working actors ourselves, so we teach what a set actually asks of you.
How did you win your first customers, and where does most of your new business come from today?
Honestly, our first students found us through raw online searches for "acting class in Milwaukee." It started as a trickle. Then word of mouth took off, friends telling friends, and people kept finding the website. Today it’s a blend of referrals, word of mouth and online advertising.
What’s one decision that changed the direction of your business, and one mistake that taught you the most?
The big decision was pausing in-person classes to build an online academy from scratch. That was a long stretch of building something nobody had seen yet — like cooking a giant meal no one’s tasted and hoping people show up. Now we’re bringing in-person classes back: Friday classes at the Milwaukee Youth Arts Center start November 6, and registration is open at https://academy.colabmethod.com/p/page-e6346dd7. The mistake that taught us the most: we over-invested in outside marketing teams and software before realizing we could do much of that work ourselves with a little self-education. It would have saved us a lot of money. The lesson was to believe in yourself more upfront. Hand something off when scale demands it, when you’ve genuinely tried and found a real skill gap that would cost too much time, or when you truly don’t want to do it. Don’t hand it off just because "these people can do it faster." That assumption cost us time and money.
What has changed in your industry or in what your customers expect over the last couple of years, and how have you adapted?
So much casting now happens through self-tapes, and as Daniella likes to say, Hollywood doesn’t just live on the coasts anymore. An actor in Milwaukee can be seen for a project anywhere if their tape is strong. So we put on-camera skills and self-taping at the center of what we teach, and built the online academy so actors outside Milwaukee can train with us too.
Self-tapes are more accessible now, but often less excellent, because so many more people with less training are doing them. We hold a standard of excellence, internally and externally. Mindset coaching is a critical part of how we teach. What sets our actors apart is skill plus a depth that can seem mysterious and intangible, but it’s very tangible to casting directors, especially in the self-tape "digital room."
If you were advising someone starting out in your industry today, what would you tell them to do first, and what would you tell them to ignore?
First, work on your mindset before your mastery. Confidence on camera starts with how you handle the voice in your head. A book I come back to is The Slight Edge: small things done consistently add up. Ignore the idea that one "no" means you’re done. Don’t quit. One more day of not giving up is often the day the breakthrough comes.
Thank you to Thomas Adisi and the team at CoLAB Method for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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