With families eager to find new activities for their children and last year’s customers returning, often moving into new classes, this time of year can feel like a whirlwind. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed, just trying to stay afloat until things calm down in November.
But it doesn’t have to be that way! This is the perfect time to seize the opportunities a new school year brings. Feeling like it’s impossible? By the end of this article, you’ll have the strategies you need to turn this month into one of progress and preparation.
Let’s dive in and make this your best year yet!
Step 1: Create processes to deal with the day-to-day
The key to staying organised is setting up clear processes for daily operations. Start the new term with a plan for how your business runs day-to-day. When your admin becomes a routine for you and your staff, you’ll free up time and mental capacity to focus on the future.
Take a moment to assess if your current systems are helping or hindering your organisation. Are you using software to automate time-consuming tasks like bookings, registers, and billing? A good bookings or membership management software should take care of most of the grunt work using automation to ensure things like registers and billing are spot on every time.
Once you’ve got that initial framework of systems around you, look at how you work within it, do you have scheduled tasks for a Monday morning for example? Do you delegate tasks to team members who handle that area of your organisation?
Step 2: Split out your time and be strict
Now that you’ve set up your core structure for the day-to-day, it’s important that the good habits don’t stop there.
To borrow a common phrase, it’s important to assign time to working in your business and working on your business. Working in your business is when you’re in the trenches with the team, interacting with customers and keeping everything ticking along.
Working on your business is time when you’re looking at your business overall, what’s the plan for the next 6 months? What are your goals for the end of this school year? This should be time away from the hustle and bustle of the operation. It’s your time to plan, create a strategy, and focus on what’s next.
It’s important not to let those two areas bleed into each other, you can’t be focusing on how your summer camps are going to look for next year whilst resolving an issue with a customer whose child wants to move up to the next age bracket, you’ll end up doing both things badly.
Step 3: Get planning
At this point, you’ve organised your day-to-day admin, with a software system carrying the bulk of the load backed up by clear and simple processes. You’ve also divided up your time to make sure that you’ve the mental space to focus on the future. Now it’s time to start making the most of that new school year excitement.
Now is the perfect time to plan out how the rest of your year is going to look. What events are you going to hold? When will your yearly competition or gala be? Have you got any special theme weeks coming up to align with bonfire night or the Grand National? What will they look like? Who can take ownership for them?
By getting your school year mapped out now and then communicating that to your parents right away, you’re not letting their child’s initial excitement drop, as well as proving the value to be gained by staying with you for the whole year. Showing that you’re investing in a full calendar of events, even if you don’t have every last detail decided right now, is critical to building a successful year.
Why not get your Christmas activities available to book right now? Filled with their child’s excitement at being back at their favourite club, parents will be much more likely to commit to booking these events in now, ensuring that you don’t allow competitors to book their time before you do.
Step 4: Celebrate your success
At this point, you should be able to take a step back and admire the difference you’ve made to your organisation, with software systems, clear processes, a plan that will draw both new and old customers in, and a feeling of excitement for the year ahead.
The last part of capitalising on this month is to celebrate your success. Parents love to know that they’ve joined a thriving community as well as their child receiving excellent coaching. You can show them in the simplest of ways, a monthly club newsletter could mention the number of new joiners or new classes that have been added since July, or a social media post could outline the social calendar for the next quarter with links to book.
Don’t be afraid to show off just how good your organisation is. Now is where you set the scene for the rest of the year, do you want to continue in chaos or seize the initiative and use the busiest month of the year to be the catalyst for change?
Curious about how LoveAdmin could help you get ahead? Get started today to see the system for yourself.
