Put Your Music Studio on Auto Pilot
If you’re bogged down in scheduling and teaching and billing and paying the bills and sending out email reminders, you’re not doing the things that you should be doing. You’re not doing the things that will help you grow your studio and take it to the next level. Now, look, you might be a one person operation and I get it. I’m a one person operation. It is possible to teach your music studio to run without you.
Do What Only You Can Do
Systems will allow you to set yourself up for growth so that you can ultimately shift out of these more mundane tasks and get into what only you can be doing and the two things that only you can do. Create a marketing message and a marketing strategy for your business and creating the systems to support your business, and to support your marketing as well. Both systems and marketing are an on going effort. They’re constantly changing, constantly evolving, constantly getting better.
No one is as passionate about your business as you are. The people who work in your business, they’re passionate about their job. You didn’t hire them to be passionate about your business, you hired them to do a good job. You, those systems that you put into place will enable those people to do a good job. It will enable you to better run your studio without systems in place. You’re constantly flying by the seat of your pants. You’re constantly in a state of panic.
Systematize Your Music Studio
Most business owners understand the value of creating systems, but I think the problem that a lot of studio owners run into, or a problem that they create is by thinking that they’re going to have to spend a lot of time creating and writing systems and an operations manual, and I’m guilty of that.
I would say maybe 10 maybe 12 years ago, I read Michael Gerber’s, the Emyth. He talks about the, the value and the importance of systems. So I said, okay, I’m going to sit down for a couple months in right instruction or I’m going to write an entire operations manual that will detail out every little move, every nuance of my business in order to give my business the directions and the instructions. It needs to run by itself. Great idea. Right?
What I wound up with was something that read like a boring novel on how to run my music school. It was helpful, don’t get me wrong, I was able to use that for years and add to it for years. But then about five or six years ago, I took a much different approach. I focused more on detailing or defining the task in my studios and jotting them down as they happened.
Make Your Studio Run Without You
There are different types of of tasks in your business. Some are reoccurring, some are daily, some are weekly, some are monthly, some are seasonal. Take a recital for example. That’s a seasonal thing. How many little steps and emails in forms need to be sent out? I’d have a hard time sitting down and thinking that through prior to the event, but what I could do is maybe two months before the event, start thinking about it and making a list. Keep adding to that list without necessarily all the details of it.
The same applies to hiring a new instructor. That’s purely a situational type of a deal. You don’t think about hiring a teacher until somebody quits or if you have to fire somebody or your business is growing and you need to add onto your staff. That’s the time to then think about, okay, I need to map out this process for how I’m going to hire somebody. Yes, it’s going to create some work for you in the moment. It doesn’t have to be too labor intensive, and you’re going to save yourself a ton of time and you’re going to give yourself peace of mind next time you have to hire somebody because you’re going to have a set of instructions as how to do it.
SHOW CREDITS
Intro music: Dusted by Fojimoto
Transition music: Levi Simon
Outro music: Rain and Revolution by City Breathing
