2 Small Steps for Big Savings!

featured, Founder Friday, Manage, Quick Tips — By Poornima Vijayashanker on August 5, 2011 at 1:28 pm

I know that cost is a major concern for studio owners. But the other important element to building a successful community is time! Over and over again I see people sacrificing their time by adding up receipts, sifting through note cards to track attendance, and tallying up classes taught by instructors. The amount of time, paper, and energy put into each of these tasks is actually quite a lot, and it could have been better spent enjoying a yoga class or a relaxing dinner!

But change is hard for many. Think of when you went to your first yoga class, then the second, then the third, and eventually you had a regular practice! You fell in love with the process of yoga that you decided to invest the time and money to open a studio and spread yoga to others. You essentially bought into a system. That system was a series of postures that transforms the mind and body, and yields benefits in terms of stress reduction, improved healthy, and mental clarity.

Now its time to change the way you’re doing business!

Hiring isn’t the only answer

Many studio owners think they can just hire someone to help out. Yes its true an extra pair of hands does make things go faster. But remember paying someone cuts into your budget, and you need to train that new hire on how to interact with customers, get them to understand how your business operates, and of course you need to find someone who is reliable! All of this takes time.

Start Small

So if you’re stuck and can’t afford to hire and train someone what do you do? First, figure out how much time its currently taking you to do routine tasks such as counting the number of classes instructors taught, tracking down students with expired memberships, and seeing how much money you’ve made each month. Now think, is there a way to improve one of these processes?

Perhaps instead of putting students membership on paper try Excel or a document so you can search their name faster!

Instead of wading through attendance sheets, create a schedule on an electronic calendar. Make it public so that instructors can edit it for substitutions, and at the end of the month you can add up the number of classes each one has taught to handle payroll.

These are just a few tips to get you started. Keep thinking about how you can create a system that will help you cut costs and save time to so that you have more time to teach and take yoga!

If you’ve already got a system in place that has been working for you, and given you more freedom we’d love to hear about it!

Poornima is a software engineer and entrepreneur. She was one of the first engineers at Mint.com, a startup, which was acquired by Intuit. She graduated from Duke University with double major in Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science. Poornima has been a devoted yogini for the past 6 years and competes in Bikram Yoga. Through consulting with local studios looking to improve their management practices, she decided to create BizeeBee. Learn more about BizeeBee