Need some help dance teachers? Part 1: Saving you Time
Having been a dance teacher myself for many years I know how hard it can be. Your head is always full of a million ideas and things you want to do from the next show idea to chasing payments, dance teachers wear a lot of different hats throughout the day. Our next 4 blogs are all about dance teachers and making your lives easier.
The first in our 4 part series is about creating systems in your business to enable you to get things done quicker and more efficiently. You may think 'But I haven't got time for that!?!?', I can assure you setting up systems in your business means you can gain back some essential time. The easiest way of doing this is to record a step by step process of how you do something each time you do it. This doesn't need to be a really detailed description or a huge wordy document. Using something such as screen cast-o-matic where you can record videos of your computer screen or yourself of up to 15minutes for free. Store these somewhere such a google drive and label them correctly and each time you get stuck you can look back on the video. How many times have you gone to do something and forgotten how you did it last time so have to go back and waste time in googling how to do it again?
These systems can then be sent to someone else if you need time off. We hate to admit it but even dance teachers get sick and need time off from time to time. Imagine being able to go away and have someone else take care of business. What is this witchcraft I hear you say? I took a month off from my business one summer as I wasn't well and literally slept for two weeks straight, having these systems recorded and my VA (I'll get to that in a second) meant I didn't need to worry that things would fall apart.
I just mentioned my VA which stands for virtual assistant. This is someone who works for you, usually from their own home. You can hire someone regularly for a set number of hours per month such as I do or use something like fancyhands.com for an ad hoc task. Perhaps you need a venue but haven't got the time to scroll though website after website or you need to find advertisers for your end of year show programme, asking someone else to do these lower value tasks is a great time saver for your business. Some other really useful websites are fiver.com and peopleperhour.com where you can literally find someone to do anything! Record a rap song with your dance schools name in it, write a blog post, proof read your newsletter or cut and edit that music that you need for 2 days time and didn't leave a spare minute to do it.
If you have a large group of teachers something like asana or basecamp can be really useful to keep track of everything and everyone. These free (oh yes!) websites let you sign up and add members then create tasks, groups, folders that everyone can manage. You could create one for your show and let everyone upload their own music, costumes ideas etc. This keeps it all in one place and makes your job as the director a lot easier to keep up with.
Join us next time for part 2 all about making some extra money without (much) extra work!
