Judi Sheppard Missett

Missett was a jazz dance teacher in Evanston, Illinois who noticed that her students wanted to work out, not train as dancers, and turned her classes into Jazzercise in 1969. Moving to California, she trained other instructors to teach her routines, using videotapes to reach them, and began franchising in the early 1980s, which spread it to thousands of locations without her running each class. The teaching was hers from the start; franchising was the business she had to learn. She is now executive chair, with her daughter Shanna Missett Nelson as chief executive since 2022.