Tech Tip Tuesday With Clint Salter

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It’s time to fill those classes in 2018 with our very special free ‘New Student Blitz’ training!

If you have got 10 minutes to spare, you don’t want to miss out as Clint Salter shares his hottest tech-tips for dance studio owners in our Tech Tuesday special.

Check out Clint’s Tech Tip for Studio Owners!

Today I’m gonna be sharing with you three tech tips that are gonna help you and your team to increase your efficiency, effectiveness, and productivity to help scale and grow your dance studio.

Whether you like it or not, technology is not going away.

But I think as a studio owner, you should be in love with technology because it makes your job a little bit easier. I remember when I had my dance studio, I started it when I was 16 with a friend. We used to have all the money put in envelopes.

We used to have Post-It with messages.

We were really manual, pen and paper -that’s just how we were doing business.

But now with technology, life as a studio owner is so much easier from that perspective, which means if you embrace technology you can really work in your zone of genius – that might be teaching classes, it might be managing your team members, it might be working on marketing and sales. Wherever your zone of genius is, you can spend more time there and less on the admin overload that happens to so many studio owners.

I want to share with you some tech tips that I think are gonna make a huge difference in your studio.

The first thing is make sure you’re storing all of your data, all of your files, your music, your costume designs, everything, in the cloud. What I mean by that is that you don’t have, for instance, I remember back when I had my studio we had a big clunky desktop computer that was in our office. All of the files were saved there. You would have concert, schedule version one, version two, version three, version four, updated by so and so. You’d have multiple, multiple files.

Now, it’s really easy to arrange and give access to all of your files in your business. We love Google. Who doesn’t love Google? I would suggest to you that everything is set up in G-Suite. G-Suite is Google’s hub for businesses for you, for I, for studio owners around the world. G-Suite is your answer when it comes to storing all of the information, that you have all your files, your music, everything. The first thing you wanna look at is Google Drive.

Google Drive is where you keep all of your files. The best thing is that you can give access to different team members, depending on their responsibilities. This is really dependent on how you set up and name your folders, and then where you put your files. I’m sure you’ve got your own organization system for that. But for instance, let’s say you’re planning recital and you’ve got a list of music choices that you like for your range of styles that you teach, and then you let the teachers go in and pick what song out of the list they might like to use or they can also add their own suggestions.
You can have one master sheet and you can give each of your teachers access to that sheet to go in and edit rather than having emails going back and forth and back and forth, or text messages, or Facebook messages, or no one knowing what songs have gone. It just turns into an absolute nightmare. You can use Google Drive for that. You can use Google Drive with your office manager. You might have an office manager and you have a meeting. You can do the meeting on Zoom. I talked about Zoom last week. You can have an online meeting with them.

This is what I do with my team.

Every Monday night, we pull up our agenda, which is in Google Drive done through Google Sheets, which is like Excel, but again in the cloud. It’s a Google Product. I share my screen and we can all go through and update the agenda as we go in real time. There’s only one file. There’s not a gazillion files depending on who is updating it. The other thing you wanna get on board with when it comes to Google is your email. Everyone should run their email through Google. It doesn’t mean you need to be BettysDance@gmail.com, it just means that you run your email through Google’s infrastructure.

The other thing is Calendar. You wanna run your calendar through Google, as well, that is associated with your email address. The best thing about this is everything links up, which I love more than anything.

It just makes life so easy.

My phone is on my laptop, it’s on my iPad, everything is in the one place, which is really important, especially for you. You’re a busy studio owner. It’s also gonna save your staff a whole lot of time going back and forth. That tip right there could save you 10, 20 hours a week. Imagine if you got that time back. How awesome would that be?

Tip number three I wanted to give you is a quick one and it is to embrace mobile.

Right now, I want you to grab out your cell phone and I want you to go to your website. Type in the URL of your website and I want you to experience what your website is like to visit on mobile devices. Guys, the truth is most people, let’s say you’ve done a Facebook ad. The parents in Starbucks in the line, they see the Facebook ad for the free trial class or the seven-day unlimited class pass.

They’re clicking on it. They’re going straight to your website if that’s where your ad goes. Now, what is it like from a user experience point of view? Easy to navigate? Easy to find information? Is it too small? Can you not touch things? Can I not call you by pressing a call button? Can I not email you? What’s really going on there? You wanna make sure that your website is mobile-friendly and really start thinking about mobile first. Anytime you’re creating, maybe, a landing page for a promotion or a new page for a recital or really anything you’ve got happening that goes on your website, make sure you are looking at it and you’re getting a few team members to look at it on mobile through a couple of devices.

Maybe it’s through an Android, a device like Pixel, or it’s through your iPhone. Test it out on mobile, but make sure you are thinking mobile first. Lastly, it’s an oldie but it’s a goodie, and people still don’t do this and I have no idea why. Get studio software. Get studio software. Whether you have five students or 5,000 students, studio software is going to really help you put some systems and processes in place around the very important things in your business, which are your finances. It’s gonna track all of your student numbers. Some of them can track your retention, your attendance. It’s going to give you all of the reports that you can possibly need.

A lot of them integrate with your accounting software of choice, QuickBooks or maybe it’s Zero. But time and time again, studio owners are saying to me, “Clint, I only have 50 students. I don’t need software.” Yes, you do, because you are still spending all of that time processing manually those 50 students. Get studio software and make sure you have direct debit happening with that studio software. These are all awesome conversations that we have every day inside of DSOA, the Dance Studio Owners Association.

Right now, you can join Clintand our team of studio growth coaches inside our brand new FREE training, New Student Blitz.

Click here to register and get ready to make 2018 your biggest (and best) year in business without losing your life outside the studio walls.

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About Us

The Dance Studio Owners Association is for studio owners who are ready to commit to building their dream studio through taking consistent action while accepting guidance and advice. It’s for new studio owners and experienced studio owners alike. No matter what stage you’re at in your business, you’ll gain valuable information to take your studio to new levels while becoming a go to studio in your area.

DSOA members also have exclusive access to some of the greatest minds in business through our studio admin templates, expert masterclasses, one-on-one mentoring through our member makeover experience, and Q&A sessions that directly answer all your pressing questions about being a Studio Owner.  

Our association is a community. It’s a community of dance studio owners who have seen what Clint has not only produced with his own studio, but his Studio Owner clients and program members over 6 years. They’ve seen the results and they want to be a part of the action!

For more on the Dance Studio Owners Association check out our website at www.dancestudioownersassociation.com or visit our Facebook page