Laura Munkholm:
Good morning, everyone. Hello. Hello. Thank you all for being here on time this morning. Uh, welcome to our WALO webinar series. And as we're waiting to get started, we've got a little less than a minute before it's go time. So if you wouldn't mind, those of you that are here live, would you just pop into the chat and introduce yourselves? Um, I know we've got people from all over the country, uh, maybe all over the world here today, so thank you for joining. Um, if you wouldn't mind pop into the chat and just introduce yourself, your studio, and where you're coming to us from. My name is Laura. For those of you I haven't met yet, I am the founder and president at WALLA here, and I reside in San Diego, so Southern California. Hope everyone is enjoying the last week of summer. If you're watching this on record we are still basking in the beautiful August weather, um, and getting ready for Labor Day. So, thanks for joining me this week before we have a long weekend. Alright, we are going to jump right in. Today's WALLA webinar series is all about your instructors, and in my opinion one of the most important relationships you have in running your studio business. Um, when we think about and hear about instructors in today's landscape, we often hear how challenging it is to find teachers, um, how hard it is to keep them happy and to keep them engaged, and ultimately keep them on your team and maybe loyal to just you. Um, you know, I know there are plenty of teachers out there who are working at multiple studios. Maybe this is a very part time gig for them and they have a corporate job, and so this is kind of something they do on the side because they love it. But whatever the case may be, your relationship with your teachers and your ability to communicate effectively and set clear expectations and standards across the board is one of the keys to truly successful studios. Thank you so much everybody for saying hello in the chat. We've got lots of you here today. Um, we will be engaging throughout the conversation, um, and if you have any questions, there is a q and a button on the side. I love when you use that for your questions, if you wouldn't mind, because then I can mark them as, uh, answered, and it just helps me when I'm doing this solo to be able to monitor everything and make sure I get to everyone's, um, questions and ideas. Alright. We'll go ahead and dive in. So when we're thinking about the next forty five minutes together, I just wanna be clear about what we're gonna be offering and what you can expect. So we're going to be really diving into what metrics equal instructor and hopefully your bottom line success. So we'll be talking about specific KPIs, specific metrics that you can measure and that you can communicate with your team, um, how to structure that communication and really offer those clear standards to your team so that they're not guessing. I often hear, uh, studios talk about, you know, how do I answer teachers when they ask for a raise, or when is it the right time to put more classes on the schedule or offer more classes to a specific teacher? How do I make those decisions and feel confident about them? So this is going to be providing those answers to you. Um, I'm going to be sharing what I believe is the number one key to teacher retention and loyalty and keeping your teachers around long term. And then also just a quick little snippet on some recent data that shares what team structure is most proven to equal profit or or that we see more profitable studios engaging in this specific structure. Okay. So first thing I wanted to call out is this kind of twenty twenty four piece of data that I I think is really important and essentially looking at engagement. So engaged employees report getting feedback at least once a week. So this is something that I I find is really challenging in studios because often we're light shifts in a night and we're not seeing each other regularly, maybe you're in the studio and you never on weekdays and you never see your Sunday afternoon instructor, or your manager who's running the studio has different hours than the early morning teachers. So finding ways to communicate that aren't necessarily in person is going to be really critical to keeping engaged employees. And what we see here is that disengaged employees don't get feedback regularly. So one of the ways you are, you know, surefire going to have disengaged employees that are not necessarily loyal to you and really aren't as interested in your business as they are in their own success is by lack of communication. Okay. So here I just like to kind of few key tenants. Instructors really are the backbone of a successful boutique studio, and the reason for this is they are the ones interacting with your clients on a regular basis. They're the ones having the vulnerable conversations, seeing your clients in those really important moments in the journey, maybe when they're struggling to get through a class or they just accomplished something they've never done before. It's not you standing in front of the client at that point. It's the teacher. So there's a a physiological, a genetic, a DNA response to trusting people that you move and breathe with. And it's been studied over decades, and we know that your instructors are the ones that are face to face with that interaction. So how do you make sure that they understand what role they're playing in your business and that they know how to not just land into your business and be an employee, but grow with you and meet slash exceed expectations on a regular basis. So my thought, thanks to Brene Brown, is clear is kind, and that is always going to be my number one advice when people ask me about leadership. Every time you can have a very clear, very defined way that people know they're going to be successful in your business, that's when you find the most cohesion in a team. And lastly, thankfully, we live in an era of data now. So you have the ability to, like, layer data as the foundation of that relationship and use that data to educate, use that data to structure your communication, and find ways to engage with your team that is backed by something black and white. So I know we all live in businesses that are very passionate, emotional, lots of feelings happening, lots of interactions on a day to day basis. I don't know about you guys, but when I was running my studio, I felt like I essentially had a college dorm, uh, that I was I was like the RA in a college dorm. The the relationships were always very volatile, and it's a lot to manage those. So whether this is you or whether this is your studio manager or somebody who runs your like a lead teacher that runs kind of your instructor engagement, there has to be somebody who is in instructor engagement, there has to be somebody who is in charge of this type of communication and monitoring, managing the data. Alright. So let's talk about what what actually matters to your bottom line. And I can tell you when we were building Wuala, um, one of the things that was most important to me was making sure there were clear data points for your instructors. I I have, um, a very vivid memory of when I was running a studio. You know, I had been asked by a teacher if she could add more classes to the schedule, and I was maybe eight months pregnant at the time. And I'll never forget sitting on my exercise ball in my office trying to run report after report and, like, export them into Excel and try and figure out how to run a pivot table so I could actually understand how much money this teacher was making me and if it really made sense to add her or one of my obvious high performing teachers onto the schedule. And I was just at the end of the hour, I was trying to sit there, you know, going back and forth in reports, and I finally was just in tears. And I'll never forget the, like, teardrops on my giant belly below me. And that was one of those moments before starting WALLA that I was like, okay. There has to be a better way for this. So for those of you on the call who are on WALLA, you have access to all of this data that we'll be talking about here. And for those of you that aren't yet, you'll certainly find ways, whether it's exporting to Excel or, um, kind of bouncing back and forth some reports in your system. And if you ever have questions, you can pop in and talk to us. Um, but I like to break it down into four categories that are, like, a little more theoretical, and then we'll back it by data. So the first thing is consistency, and the reason consistency matters so much to your teacher performance and to your business is this is what supports the brand. You have a brand standard. Your your studio, your company has a reputation and is talked about, and your brand is ultimately how people refer to you, think about you, discuss your business, and see your business online in person. So if you have a schedule that is constantly changing, that is really you know, they don't know what they're gonna get when they arrive, uh, it it may be challenging unless you set that expectation upfront with your clients. If your brand is you get the exact same experience no matter who's teaching, no matter who like, what time of day you show up, the class is gonna be exactly the same like Starbucks, you know what your pumpkin spice latte is gonna be like, great. That's fine. This metric is not quite as important to you then. You've layered consistency from the programming perspective, and the whoever is standing at the top doesn't really matter quite as much. But for most boutique businesses I see, teachers have their unique flavor. They have a very different way they connect with clients. There are always going to be more popular teachers. There are always going to be people that seem to speak to your audience better. And when they are consistent about their appearance on the schedule, there is whether it's a daily consistence or a weekly consistence or a Monday, Wednesday, Friday at nine, that matters. And if your teachers are getting subs all the time or constantly bouncing on and off the schedule, that's jarring to the consumer and can impact your bottom line. Quality is next. Does your actual service that the teachers are providing, right, the class, the appointment, the experience, um, does that match what you are promising in your messaging, in your marketing? And, ultimately, does the consumer walk away thinking, okay. Yeah. Those two things connected. What I walked in and expected to get, I actually got. And the teacher was outstanding, delivered it. I feel happier, healthier, stronger, more confident. Whatever the words are that you are promising as your, you know, brand promise, the teacher is delivering. So quality is really important, and you'll you will see that reflected in data very clearly. Lastly, volume. So do you have enough space? Do you have enough classes on your schedule? Can people consistently find you when they need you? And this is partly a reflection of the teachers, partly reflecting reflection of your physical space. Do you have the space to do what you need to do? But I like to just call that in because it's an important, like, layer in the teacher metrics. And then lastly, which is a little less tangible, but I think we can surmise from some of the data, is belonging. Do the clients feel like they are a part of a community? Are they coming back time and time again? And often we see that, which I'll go into in the data, because they come to a particular class every week, every day, every other day, where it's the same group of people generally that are coming together. So we can see that in a couple of the data points, but all of these things equal revenue for your business. And I'm not gonna use the word profit because your pricing has a lot to do with whether or not all of these things make you profitable, and and that's a question that we're not gonna dive into deeply today. But if you are nodding your head through this entire presentation saying, like, check. Yep. We do that. Yep. We do that. Yep. We do that. And I'm still barely profitable or I'm breaking even, then I would flag pricing as the potential indicator of, you know, something needs to change there. So just just wanna kind of set that expectation as we go into the discussion. Alright. So we're gonna talk about just quickly the consistency metrics. I'm I'm gonna blow through these slides, and then we'll dive into WALLA. But the the two metrics that I look at for teachers to say, like, okay. Yes. This is a teacher that is matching the consistency metric for my brand is reliability. Are they showing up to teach the classes that they say they're going to teach, that they're on the schedule and supposed to teach on a regular basis? In my mind, more than 90% of the time. So I know some people have different standards for that, and, obviously, there are different seasons during the year where there might be some variability. But to me, my metric was always you teach 90% of the classes you're on the schedule to teach. I understand sometimes people get sick. There are vacations. That's being human, but we want you to be there. And then lastly, class count. You have to be on the schedule regularly to build a regular client base, and I I know there are sometimes teachers that have one class every Saturday morning and that's all they teach at your studio and it's jam packed. I would argue that that person is more of an individual brand sometimes than actually representing your brand. So just something to keep in mind as you're moving through kind of evaluating your instructors. The quality metrics, the the things that we really look at for is the teacher delivering on the promise that we've put out there as a brand, are retention and utilization, specifically retention. So are people coming into the studio for the first time and saying, oh, wow. That's exactly what I expected to get out of this business that I saw on an ad on Instagram or that I heard about from my friend. Yes. That teacher delivered the quality experience that I was expecting. Cool. I'm gonna come back. And then utilization, how full are their classes? If they're consistently delivering a quality experience that people feel fantastic about afterwards, they are going to have fuller classes across the board. Next, volume utilization plays into that. Are they do they have enough classes, or are they on the schedule only once or twice and their classes are jam packed and you really need to add more? And then also average clients per class. So this is just, like, obviously the more bodies in the room, the more opportunity for money. And then lastly, the belonging metric, which again is a little bit intangible, and I will say this is the one where it is totally fine to use feeling words here in any kind of reviews, but the popularity metric in Walla, which I'll show you momentarily, is a really helpful one here because this not only shows are people coming back after their first visit to that client, but are they coming back two times that month, three times, or more that month? Is that someone that is really drawing a community together and bringing a group in that feels like, gosh, I wanna be here every day. These are my people. And I'm gonna jump into Walla actually before we go into the teacher report card, but let me, um, share this tab instead. So everybody got it? You can see my screen now? Thumbs up? Okay. I think so. Looks like it on my side. Thank you. Just give me give me a vote of confidence there. Alright. So when we pop into Walla, I'm gonna head right into our report center, and I'm going to head to classes. So I'm sure most of you guys have taken a peek at the teacher ranking report in here, and this is something that you may regularly look at, but I'm I'm bringing this up to date in the context of those four things that we just talked about. So we have consistency, we have quality, we have volume, and we have belonging. So if I look at last month in my business, and I encourage all of you guys to pull up your Wallace site right now on the side, maybe just open this report, and you can take a peek at this side by side with me. So first things first, we're gonna look at the, um, reliability, so the consistency aspect. And you can see here I'm in a demo site, so most of my people show up to teach their classes. Um, if I look at a different month, I'll look at August right now. So you can see I've had a couple people with subs. But the reason we have this average in here is so that you can know if there are people falling below that very quickly at a glance and immediately focus in on them. But the reason this is going to be important is, in in my opinion, monthly is a great way to have, um, monthly or quarterly if you just simply don't have the bandwidth to have conversations with your teachers. This should be one of the first metrics you look at. And one of the ways that if a teacher asks for more classes, if a teacher asks for a raise, this is a very quick and easy okay. In the past, you know, like, month over month, like, August, yes, of course, maybe you were on vacation, but May, June, July, it looks like you only taught, you know, two of your 10 classes or whatever the number might be. There's a very quick and easy yes or no answer, and you set the standard. So I need to see over the next quarter that you teach 90% of your classes in order to be eligible to add another class on the schedule or to get a raise. So one of those very quick metrics that shows, hey. And when a teacher gives a lot of excuses or has a lot of, like, hey. You know, this is what's going on in my life, or I can't because of x, y, or z, you have a very clear thing to come back to, which is consistency for our brand. Our brand makes a promise to our community through our marketing when we speak to people at the front desk, and we have to be true to that promise. We are we have integrity here, and we wanna make sure they are delivered what we said. And part of that is having a consistent brand experience. So I like to always be able to dial it back to the why in these conversations rather than just saying, oh, you failed on this one, or you're doing great here. Okay. And then the next one that we're looking at here is just class count, like how many classes does that teacher have right now on your schedule. And when you look at the number of classes here, just in reliability, this is gonna give you a clear indicator. In the last month, does this person just have one class on the schedule? Does this person have 50 classes on the schedule? We want you make that decision for your business, what's right, but I would argue, you know, at least three classes on the schedule a week is what's going to help that client build a presence, really build a following, and help be a part of your brand rather than just an individual contributor that's kind of living their own brand. So I'll pause there just for a moment and see if there are any questions. I think there are. Okay. How would you use this metric if you have two instructors who share a class? So okay. We pick one and populate the class with her and then sub the other one every other week. Yeah. This this one is not gonna work for you, Megan, because the reliability metric is only going to it only pulls the data if there is no sub. So our our, like, code is looking at sub and flags that as somebody who doesn't. So this one might be tricky for you. Um, let me think on that. I don't have a clear answer on how you can measure that right now, but you can see the volume of classes they taught. So if you see, you know, Sarah has 10 and, you know, Brendan has 10, then you can just see how many of those 10 they actually showed up and taught. It's a little more manual if you're alternating. K. Mark has answered, so I find that. Okay. Cool. Um, so the next one we're gonna go into is quality. And when we look at quality, um, we're definitely looking at retention. And so in our teacher ranking report here, um, you can see first visit retention, and I like to call this out because we get this question often. In this specific view here, First Visit Retention is looking at if they came back to any instructor. So it's not did somebody come for the first time to Alyssa's class and come back to Melissa or Alyssa. It's did they come back to any teacher, which I actually think is incredibly valuable because that is more about the brand as a whole than it is to Alyssa. Of course, we want them coming back to the same teacher, but I'm just thinking from a a brand a bigger picture brand quality perspective. She delivered on what you promised in your marketing that drew that person in the door. So that's what first visit retention is. Um, we often hear the question here on benchmarks. Really, what we see industry wide is that 50% roughly 50% of people don't come back after their first visit to most boutique studios. So I personally would set a higher standard than that if it were my business, but if you want to know what average is, that is average. Um, it's actually just below. It's, like, 48%. Um, so you decide maybe you run that in your first visit report. You can just look at that quickly in your report center. If you look at your, sorry, clients and first visits, you'll always be able to see, like, if you wanna run a certain time period, what percentage of people returned after their first visit. You'll see where you are as an overall business, and then you can balance that with the teachers. Like, okay. Are certain teachers falling significantly below that number or higher, and what is the average? So I would say that's where you can kind of define the the expectation for your teachers based on those numbers. Any questions on that one? I just wanna make sure I I get to them. Okay. Can you get retention stats on both? So you mean back to the teacher. Yes. And I'll come to that one when we get to popularity because that's gonna be focused on the belonging aspect that I I spoke to earlier, Ian. Um, both folks were yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Alright. Great. And then utilization, is there a way any way to remove out of town ZIP codes from the first no. Sorry, Alea. There isn't. Yeah. We're just looking at all clients. But take that into account. Like, you're never gonna have a 100 retention, especially if you happen to be in a city where you, you know, live in a tourism area, your benchmark may be lower than the average studio's benchmark because you're always going to have out of town visitors. Okay. So the other one that we're gonna look at is utilization and just how full your teachers' classes are. So if we go back into the teacher ranking report, um, your average fill rate is going to be essentially utilization. And if you're a business that live streams, you can see that separately here. I just wanna call that out on all of these, um, because if we include livestream, obviously, the livestream capacity can be hundreds, um, but and we didn't want that to impact your fill rate. So here, you'll be able to see the average fill rates, who's standing out, who's not. And this is really just looking at, are they packing their classes? Is the energy there? Is the like, do we know that that's a quality class? We do if it's full consistently. So we've got this ranking here. Um, again, use that average across the board to see um, who's standing out, who's not. But if you wanna look globally at your business, you can also come into your class utilization report, and you can look at this because there may be outlier classes. Right? Like, if you have specific classes that are always gonna be a little bit wonky, like, maybe you've got prenatal classes, maybe you've got, um, different styles of classes that are always meant to be a small group, for example. You can select by class and do a little bit more of a deeper dive, and that way you're comparing them fairly against each other, and you can see this a little bit broader location to location as well. Um, if you've never used this class utilization report before, by the way, I just wanna call out we the reason we flag this is just essentially our kind of talking to industry consultants, industry, um, data analysts. What we find is that once you hit 60% utilization consistently, like we say over a four week or six week period, that's a sign that you should add another class of that style of that teacher to the schedule. So it's kind of the the marker, the indicator that you're doing things right. It's time. You can add another class. If you're consistently falling before 40%, typically that means, okay, we've got to make either some sort of a change. Maybe it's a style of class change, maybe it's a teacher change, but if that's happening over eight weeks or a quarter, it's time to look at that that specific style of class or that class time. Okay. Any questions there? Can the fill rate report be filtered by day and time? It can the fill rate report, morning classes tend to fill less than evening classes, so it'll be helped. Yeah. Right now, we don't have a time of day. I do know that that is on our road map. Um, we've we've actually got a pretty I I don't wanna dive too much into reports outside of teacher ranking because we are on the precipice of releasing a whole bunch of AI related dashboards that will answer a lot of these questions. Um, oh, there you go. Hannah, thanks for the answer there for Aliyah. Using tags for out of towners and then running audiences. Great job. Okay. Did you say falling below 40%? Yes. Falling below 40%. So when you see classes that are consistently below 40%, again, I don't wanna make a sweeping statement because if your pricing is such that you can have utilization rates below 40%, that is fine. Um, but, typically, that means that those classes are are consistently either not profitable or close to breaking even. Um, that's what we see with the average pricing in studio businesses. Uh, Chantel has a question about reliability. How can we see which classes they subbed out? So I think in the sub if you're using the sub management tool, you can go back and look at see if I you can look at your approved. That's all future. Oh, I'm sorry. You can't go in the past. I don't have a quick answer for you on that. Let me see if I've got an answer for you and send you that later, Chantelle. Sorry. Yeah. Past, I'm not sure. I thought we had that in our some management center, but nope. Alright. Feature request. Yeah. Hannah, thanks. Uh, alright. Let's go back into the metrics. So the next one just quickly, volume, I'll go over very briefly, but it's average number of clients and utilization. This one is really more about your specific business and if you have, um, a a capacity problem and if your clients or I'm sorry, if you're you're ready to expand, essentially. So we always wanna see average clients in classes. Again, if you have specific classes that are outliers, that can be a little bit tricky here. But if you're a studio that has standard, like, you know, here are three styles of Vinyasa or Legree, every class is pretty much the same. Pilates, we've got these two styles of classes. It's gonna be relatively similar, um, and you probably have a standard for what makes a class profitable. So are your teachers hitting the numbers that make a class profitable or not on a consistent basis? So up to you to set that based on your expenses, and we'll see that below here in the profitability and revenue. So all of these metrics essentially drill down and and feed into whether or not somebody has high revenue and actually is profitable for your business. Um, but just know this is really here. Obviously, we only have the teacher payroll in this profitability metric, but this is here to flag, like, goodness. Jeff is or Heather is losing us so much money. There's gotta be something here. This can't happen month over month. Um, so some sort of coaching has to happen there. Alright. I have a fun little offering for you guys here, which is something that I found to be particularly helpful, and I know many businesses out there that have kind of structured teacher development programs use a type of report card. You can call it what you want, teacher development card, teacher feedback, um, summary. I'm just using a quick and easy term here, but I have a link to it here, and I'll share that in the, um, in the the comments right now so you guys can have this. It's a read only Google Doc, but you can make a copy of it and make it your own. But, essentially, what I've built here is an instructor report card that you can decide on how you want to kind of rank them, score them, but this is where you can put a studio average in or an expectation. So you can when you edit this, you can put, like, studio average or teacher expectation. And you can fill this in monthly, or if you'd like to do it quarterly for your teachers, where you have their fill rate compared to the studio average and how they're ranking or how they're scoring. I've seen people kind of put it in buckets where if they're above average, they're an a, if they're at average, they're a b, if they're below, they're failing. You know, like, you can decide how you want to score that. You can be as, you know, intense and tough as you want. You can be as compassionate and give them, like, a flower if they're if they're killing it and maybe, like, a helping hand if they're not. Um, But, anyway, the goal here is to really have it be clearly black and white. So we've got a few of those metrics that we about. Um, oh, I didn't show you the popularity. Sorry. Let me stop sharing and go back to the other tab. So I wanted to quickly pop into the popularity metric because this one oh, she's not a good instructor. Sorry. Let me find an instructor that has some people that come back to their classes. Um, okay. So you can see when you go dive into the teacher specifics here, um, you can see their popularity, how many unique clients came to their class, how many came once, twice, or three or more times over that month period. So this is really where you start to see the the individual instructor shining. Right? Like, if they have 50% of the people that come to their classes come back three or more times, you know you've got a teacher that is really doing a good job at retaining their team, um, or their team their, uh, their clients. So this is where you can just pop in. And for for the Hannah, I think you were the one that called this out for me. This is really helpful if you're doing quarterly or annual reviews. You can look at a date range here, a full date range. It's not just monthly the way we do in the full overall rankings report. So if I wanted to look at a custom range of maybe this time last year to today. Um, this is gonna give me a very different picture. You know? Like, you can see here, 70% of her clients only came once to her classes, and she needs to work on building relationships with her clients. Um, Yeah. And then you can see all of these metrics dialed down for each individual teacher. Alright. Let's go back into the report card. So the last piece of the report card, uh, or I shouldn't say the last. The next piece of the report card is our Love Languages at Work, and this is truly what I say is the key to teacher retention. If you're anything like me, if you're anything like most humans, you appreciate being recognized for your contributions. And, um, um, I'll say everybody's different. Just like how we have our personality types in WALLA, um, you may end up using the personality types in WALLA as your gauge for this rather than using, like, a love languages at work quiz, but it is a fantastic way to have a team building event or have it as part of your onboarding to develop relationships with your team. You can all take, if you just literally Google it right now, Love Languages at Work quiz. There are lots of free versions of it. There are definitely paid versions where you can kind of go into their programs and look at how to be a leader to different types of love languages and how to support them and make sure they feel appreciated. But you can give people all the black and white metrics. You can share the data. You can give them education programs. But if you're not speaking their language when it feels to or when it comes to feeling appreciated and rewarded and also just valued as an employee, that person's not gonna feel loyal and connected to your business. I absolutely promise you, if you dedicate yourself, your time as a leader to understanding your people and how they feel loved and appreciated, you are going to keep people longer. It is so simple to do, and the vast majority of the time, it makes your life easier. Because you're not spinning your wheels trying to think of ways to, like, oh, maybe we should put together a staff event or, um, I need to give this person a raise. And maybe that person just wants to have coffee with you and hear about the business because they're interested in that. Or maybe that person would appreciate you cleaning the mirrors for them one day and that would feel like the greatest thing in the world. The point here is individualizing your instructor relationships makes a big difference, And I say this to many of you as business owners, it might not be you that's the one, you know, filling this role. It might be your studio manager. It might be your lead teacher, but it has to be somebody in a leadership position in your team that is, you know, really, really invested in understanding the individual. Um, I bring this slide up here because the BFS, uh, industry survey that just came out for 2024 showed that businesses that have a manager presence are much more likely to be profitable than businesses that don't. So when you think about the structure of being able to deliver these reviews to, um, you know, have these conversations, do the love languages quiz, be dedicated to leading your team, Having a manager in place can relieve a lot of that stress. And I know many of you are just like, gosh. How could I afford a manager? Some of you have managers, and it's the best decision you've ever made. This is one of those roles that adding to your business, maybe it starts as something that has commission attached to it or a profit share, but this is what can drive your business to profitability. It almost instantly will have an ROI, whether it is, you know, somebody who's responsible for helping you sell, so you'll see that in conversions and membership sales, but also in instructor retention in the context of this conversation right now. This is a great person to own that responsibility and that relationship. So I wanted to call that out as just something that now we have some hard data behind. Um, businesses have businesses that have over a 20 profit margin, 67% of them have a manager. So pretty significant majority. Okay. Alright. So as we think about our action steps today, actually, before I dive into that, I am going to just quickly take a peek and see if we have any questions. We do. Um, our room's pretty big, and on busy days, people squeeze in tightly. On normal days, 50% of that number is good. Is there a way to accommodate for that? Um, so, Brent, the only way I would accommodate for that is I would maybe change the capacity on your classes on the not busy days. So if you know, like, you're never gonna hit capacity on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursdays, You can change the capacity on those classes in Walla to, you know, maybe the room fits 80 people, you change it to 60, or you change it to 40. So that's an option. You can always overfill a class in Walla from the front desk, and if you see that they're starting to get more full and more full, you can always change it back. But I would say that's the way to accommodate that from a reporting perspective so you can really be comparing apples to apples. Alright. Love language quiz. Is this specific to business or a general one? So there's the the love languages book and quiz that you'll see online. Um, there is specifically one called love languages at work. So that's the one to to Google and check out. When you say manager, are you saying someone different from an owner? Yes. I am. In in terms in in this context, yes. I am saying that there is a dedicated role that is not the business owner. It is a a specific manager of the studio. And it's up to you what they're responsible for, but I would say the the general, um, kind of theme of what I see responsibilities wise is managing the instructor schedules and, um, running payroll. Sorry. My dog is having a sneeze attack behind me, uh, if you heard that. Sometimes responsible for sales, so calling leads, um, being responsible for communication with an intro offer period, but, yeah, actively managing the team. Great conversation for our Facebook group. So if any of you guys after this webinar want to carry this into the Facebook group and talk about what your managers are doing today and what you find to be to have the best ROI or what you wish you didn't have to pay them to do, uh, I'd love to see that conversation, and and it would be nice to see you guys, uh, share ideas. Okay. So action steps from today, I would say, first things first, review your current benchmarks and set a standard for yourself. So that that report card is only helpful if you say, okay, our instructors need to have a 90% reliability rate, or, um, you know, we wanna see 50% plus capacity or utilization on our classes. We want our retention rate to be at 65% for first timers. So start to think about that. Look over maybe go back in your reporting over a year period and kind of look at seasonality if that changes dramatically, but start to define for yourself what is the expectation and how can we make sure our teachers understand that with that layer of context I just gave you, consistency, quality. Do we have enough for our clients to take advantage of, And is there a layer of belonging on top of all of that? So you can always come back to those specific, um, metrics. Alongside that, start to draft. I I put this in here, use chat GPT. You can put all of those benchmarks that you have and start to write out what your teacher guide to success looks like. Brain dump it in via a voice note or a thoughtful, you know, bullet pointed out. Here's what our ideal instructor expectations. Here are the nice to haves. And let chat g p t or whatever AI, if you're using Claude or something else, let them let it define that for you, build it for you, and then you can always iterate and kind of play around with it and make it your own. But I know I can confidently say your instructors, your staff will feel very valued and feel safer when they know there is a road map to success and when they know what to expect going into a meeting with you. Um, this also can give opportunities for education. Right? Like, these are people oftentimes working in studios, like I said, that are part time, and so they are doing other things. You have an opportunity to educate them as a professional, and this is a way that you can do that easily with AI. Um, make your copy of the report card, make it your own. This is just a draft, I wanted to give you guys something to start with. I did add a section at the bottom of the report card for, um, reviews, so if you're using the reviews in Walla, uh, you can filter those reviews by teacher name for a certain window of time. So really nice to highlight their five star reviews, give them some love. Um, these reviews don't have to be a negative thing, and then you can also call out if somebody mentioned something about the pace of their class, or, um, I couldn't hear them, or whatever the feedback might be. It's a great way to great time to share that, um, and then also options or opportunities for growth. So you'll see at the bottom of that just some observations and highlights speaking to their strengths, and then the pathways to growth are really, uh, development goals, if they're eligible for a raise, eligible for a prime slot, if there's anything they're asking from you. Because I would be prepared as you go into some of these conversations. Your good team members are going to ask you for something in return. Right? Like, if you're an a player, you're gonna be comfortable asking for support and ways to grow, so just be prepared for that. Next, send the love languages quiz. If you've never done it, uh, maybe schedule a team meeting, something where you can have fun with this and make it, uh, I mean, anytime we get to do quizzes. We love learning about ourselves. We're our own favorite topic, so enjoy. Um, and then schedule your teacher reviews. So if you've never done this before, if it's been a while, put it on your calendar. I would say as soon as you have that guide to teacher success dropped it up in those benchmarks, this is something to say, okay. We're going into a new season. Perfect timing. Let's get these meetings scheduled by the first October. And just whether it's you, your manager, your lead teacher, have this be a box that you check on a regular basis. And then I put this at the bottom because I I think it's nice to remind ourselves, especially if this is a new practice for you, that you're gonna fail, and I love this quote, failing is your first attempt at learning. So I was actually in an interview recently and somebody said this, and I was like, oh my gosh, I need to put that at the bottom of everything I do. So something might go awry, some teacher might be upset, somebody might have questions you don't have the answers to. That's okay. This is your first attempt at learning how to either have your manager or you be a leader in potentially a very new way. So take in the data, learn from it, and adjust as needed. I know that this is the foundation for a happy community. When you develop a culture that is clear, that is kind to your staff, when you develop a culture that is rooted in quality, consistency, and you can back all of that with some numbers, your teachers will be happier and in turn, your clients will be happier. Oh my gosh, I did exactly forty five minutes you guys. I am really really proud of myself for that. Um, alright. So thank you thank you everyone for being here. Emily, yes. I does anybody can anybody handy pop in the link to the Facebook group that's on there that I know is in the Facebook group? If you just search Walla and Friends Facebook group, um, that'll be quick and easy to find, but if anybody can pop that in and share, please share in the chat right now. Uh, Soleil, yes, this is recorded. All of these webinars, if you go to hellowalla.com, um, we have under the resources tab webinars, All of these are recorded every month, and they live there kind of evergreen for you to use and share. It just requires a, um, an email to register for it. And for those of you that are watching this on record, um, plea if you haven't jumped into the Facebook group yet either and you're a wall of clients, hopefully, we'll have some engaging conversation in there post. Thank you, Brent. I really appreciate it. Appreciate you being my my assistant here today. Alright, thank you everyone. I think I got all the questions answered. Um, what was the stump question that somebody had for me? I've got to make sure I I find an answer to it. Yeah. I'll I'll dive in and look back at the questions and see what I can find. Uh, I'll see you guys next month. Next month, we're gonna be talking about digital marketing for the holidays for, um, Black Friday. We have an amazing digital marketing guy, Zach, from On Brand is gonna be joining us, uh, to talk about the strategy that I I mean, he had some clients make crazy money last holiday season. So he's gonna be peeling that the layers of that away and sharing all the tips and tricks. So we'll see you at the end of next month, and thank you, everyone.

‍