Now, first of all, I want to get this out in the table. Right now, if you are teaching more than 20 hours a week as a studio owner, you deserve a gold medal. You are amazing. You probably also deserve a sleep-in as well because I don’t know how you’re doing it.
Truly, teaching that much face to face as well as sustaining running a business is really hard. And I just want to say that you really deserve a huge round of applause for everything that you have been shouldering by yourself. I think it’s enormous and says so much about your passion and commitment to your studio.
That being said, that kind of a teaching commitment is just not sustainable long term. I can totally understand why you feel compelled to put in those kind of hours in those early days because I felt it myself. It’s that fear of giving over your students to someone else to teach and whether they’re going to do a good job. Then there’s the financial element.
But the main driver that I want you to think about is that as long as you are doing the lion’s share of the teaching in your studio, there will always be a point where your studio gets maxed out. There’s always going to be a point where you can’t grow the studio.
Here are two reasons why.
Number one, everyone is going to want to be in your class, and we know how that’s going to end up. You just can’t sustain and make everyone happy.
But the other thing is that in order for your studio to grow, you have to work on the business. We need to give you more time to work on your marketing, on your systems, on getting your administration all nice and tidied up. That’s really hard when you’re giving so much effort out to your students.
Do you ever come home from a day of teaching and try to swap hats – from teaching hat to business hat. It takes awhile for you to transition and start really getting into the swing of things. And then the next day, you’re back wearing your teaching hat again. It feels like you’re always torn, like you’re always living two lives, trying to grow the studio but then also loving your students and wanting to teach.
The struggle is real my friends. The struggle is real.
So the first step to overcoming this fear of reducing your teaching hours is first of all just to decide to set a date and a time of when you’re going to drop your hours and how many hours you want to drop them to.
So you might decide, “Come the beginning of next year, I’m going to reduce my teaching hours by half.”
This might differ for each of you, but my opinion is that as a studio owner, we really shouldn’t be teaching more than 8 hours per week. I break that 8 hours into two days per week of teaching four classes each day, a minimum of four hours a day.
That allows you to have three dedicated, devoted days to work on your business. Take a minute and just imagine what that kind of a schedule could do for you and your business.
Imagine if you had three days to work on growing your studio. This is how we’re going to overcome the fear, my friends.
I tell you that when you have three days to work on your business, you will be astounded at the progress you can make with marketing, at how the quality of connection improves so that you can reach more inquiries to enroll students, how you have the time to then mentor your teachers and then be able to improve your retention.
The moment you decide to shift from being in the classroom so much to growing this business, magic happens because you suddenly have the headspace to be able to do it. Right now, you are on the hamster wheel. You are just trying to keep ahead of the pack every day of the week and it’s always consuming.
By reducing your teaching hours, you free yourself to bring in so much new energy into your studio, to enroll new students, and to find an absolute renewal of why you started this studio in the first place — which was to reach more students.
But one of most confronting things that can happen is that you might get some flak or feedback from your teachers that, “Oh, you’re not working as much.” Isn’t that interesting?
So your teachers are kind of saying, “Well, you’re not teaching as much anymore so you’re not working.” It’s okay — there’s a lot more in running a studio than just the face-to-face teaching hours.
I want you to hold strong and value the work you’re doing behind the scenes on growing the business. It’s equally, if not more important than the face-to-face teaching you’re doing because you are building a leverageable, profitable business that’s going to reward you for years to come.
Just hold your head high and know that your teachers’ mindset will shift in a couple of months. It will cease to be an issue anymore.
As you want to grow your business, our first shift is to help you transition from being a teacher to a leader. That starts with freeing you up to be able to lead this business and make greater decisions to grow and strategize on the expansion of your studio.
Even though you still retain some of your teaching hours which make you happy and give that connection with students that’s really important to you, you will very likely find that this whole entrepreneurial and strategy side of running the studio is actually something that you really love and enjoy. The more time you have to be able to invest into your studio business, the more excited you will be at the possibilities and potential of your studio.
That shift from teacher to leader, from educator to entrepreneur, is one of the most critical things that can happen in your evolution as a studio owner. And that’s what we’re passionate about helping studio owners to do here at Studio Evolution
We cannot wait to watch you step into a whole new era of leadership in your business.