From a Side Project to a Global Dance Community
Bachata Week Cádiz began as a passion project. Co-founders Yenny Otero and Andreas Bovens have spent over a decade building one of the most established bachata festivals in the world together.
It started in 2014, when Yenny and Andreas began organising trips to Spain so friends could train with the artists who had reinvented bachata into the modern style now popular across Europe. The artists brought the dancing, while Yenny and Andreas took on the event organising, logistics, money management and legal entity, running the company from day one.
What started as a side project quickly outgrew its origins. Demand now regularly outpaces capacity many times over: the event caps out at 400 spaces but receives well over 1500 applications.
Last year, Yenny and Andreas took full ownership of the festival after parting ways with their original partners, a complicated rebrand that meant rebuilding trust while bringing in a more diverse line-up of artists.
Building Bachata Connect
Today, Yenny and Andreas are extending the festival into something bigger under the name Bachata Connect: evolving it from a single week each year into a year-round online community, complete with a web app where members build a profile, connect with other dancers and stay engaged between events.
It's a deliberately premium model in a notoriously thin-margin industry. Where competitors might run a class of a thousand people, Bachata Week Cádiz caps classes at 60, paying instructors the same regardless. That keeps quality high, but it also means the business needs a lot of participants before it turns a profit.
Bachata Week Cádiz isn't Yenny's only venture. By background, she's a computer engineer with 20 years in customer experience and strategy, including senior roles at high street banks such as TSB and Vanquis, where she helped implement consumer duty standards. Alongside the festival, she's also building a separate startup that uses behavioural psychology and AI to help first-time job seekers build a better relationship with money, and is completing her MBA, putting much of that theory into practice through her own businesses.
Running an Event Across Borders
The original company was based in Norway, where Yenny and Andreas first lived. When they relocated to the UK, they needed to set up a new entity there, one that could handle both the company's formation and its books going forward.
Because the event itself takes place in Spain, the business also has to navigate VAT obligations there. Osome's support covers the UK side of things, but VAT registration and filing in Spain fall outside its jurisdiction, so Yenny has had to act as her own accountant for that part of the business, filing the paperwork herself.
Why Accounting Was the Kryptonite, and How Osome Helped
As the festival grew into a registered company, Yenny ran into a familiar founder problem: managing the books without a finance background.
It's a challenge she understands a bit better since being diagnosed with ADHD. She describes it as part of what lets her move quickly across multiple projects at once, but accounting, in her words, is her "kryptonite." She's open about sharing it, seeing conversations like this as one small step toward normalising ADHD and neurodivergence, especially with her own daughter's future in mind.
Yenny found Osome through a Google search while looking for somewhere to register the new UK company. Other providers added friction: some competitors lead with free company registration as a hook, but offer little beyond that one-time service. Osome offered something more complete: a single process that combined registration with ongoing accounting, in one payment, with a team Yenny could actually reach.
The onboarding itself was smooth. Yenny says she has only good memories of getting set up, though her one piece of feedback is that it would help to see the bigger picture earlier on: a visual overview of how accounting works in the UK, the deadlines involved and what she was signing up for, almost like "the rules of the game."
The People Behind the Process
Yenny singles out two members of the Osome team by name: Nafisa, her dedicated accountant, for her patience in following up on expenses, and Muhammad, who walked her through salary and UK tax strategy in detail during a recent call. Her one suggestion: it would help to have something in the app that introduces the team she's working with and explains each person's role, since it isn't always obvious who to go to for what.
The team also helped put safeguards in place around deadlines. After a couple of missed deadline fees, rather than waiting until the last possible date to file VAT, they now submit everything as early as possible, staying ahead of the game instead of cutting it close.
Day to day, the process is simple: a photo of a receipt, shared through the app in a couple of taps, and it's done.
The hook for us was that in one payment, we could register the company and have everything else handled; that was one less thing to think about. What we didn't expect, but is the real reason we've stayed, is how easy the ongoing accounting has been. I take a photo of a receipt, press a couple of buttons, and it's done.
The Time and Stress Bachata Week Cádiz Has Saved
For Yenny, the most immediate impact of working with Osome has been time and peace of mind.
If she had to manage the books herself, Yenny estimates it would take two to three hours a week, close to 12 hours a month, on top of the mental energy of making sure everything is filed correctly and on time.
Valuing her time at roughly £ 100 an hour, a conservative estimate given her day rate as a consultant runs considerably higher, that works out to around £ 1,200 a month, or close to £ 14,400 a year, of founder time Osome's team now handles for her.
But, as Yenny points out, the hours are only part of the calculation. There's a separate one for the "painful hours": the stress and mental load of admin she doesn't enjoy and never wanted to become an expert in. Outsourcing it gives her something money alone can't measure: peace of mind.
If I had to do this myself, it'd be about two to three hours a week, close to 12 hours a month. At roughly £ 100 an hour, that's about £ 1,200 a month, or close to £ 14,400 a year. But there's a different calculation for the painful hours: the stress, the mental load, knowing it has to be done properly. Having that taken care of is what really gives me peace of mind.
What Yenny Wishes Osome Showed Off More
One piece of feedback Yenny offered unprompted: the kind of dedicated, human support Osome provides, a real account manager who knows your business, is the same model premium banks charge a fortune for. Most customers don't realise it's part of the offering until they're deep into using it, and she thinks Osome could surface that more clearly, especially during onboarding.
Find the Right Partners: Founders' Advice
For Yenny, one principle stands out: as a founder, finding the bigger picture is on you, because no one hands it to you. She describes the early days of running a business as a kind of ocean of disjointed advice: banks, accountants and advisors each holding a piece of the picture, with little to tie it together.
Her advice is to focus on what only you can do, and find the right partners for everything else, whether that's accounting, technology or any other skill outside your own wheelhouse. Through her MBA programme at Warwick and her work with Oxford's Female Founder programme, she meets founders facing exactly this problem regularly, and is happy to point them toward partners that have worked for her, Osome included.
It's been almost impossible to see the bigger picture: there's this ocean of disjointed advice from banks, advisors and accountants, and you don't always know where to start. Find the right partners for the things you're not good at, whether that's accounting, technology or anything else, so you can focus on what only you can do.
For Bachata Week Cádiz, the goal is to turn one sold-out week a year into a community that lasts all twelve months. For its founders, the focus hasn't changed: spend time on the dance floor, and let everything else be handled.
