When you started your dance studio, you probably did it to share your love of dance with children. You didn’t dream about burying your head in paperwork and spending endless nights manually collecting your tuition, scheduling your classes, maintaining your website and marketing your studio.

It takes time, patience and a lot of coordination to run a successful dance studio. That’s why we’ve put together 4 of our favorite tips to help you build the dance studio business of your dreams.

4 tips to help you run a successful dance studio

Ever find that the effort it takes to run your studio takes up so much time that actually teaching classes and getting to know your families seems impossible? When your studio was new, you had your finger on the pulse of everything. Now, you feel like you don’t have the total control that you’re accustomed to.

Your question may be: “What basic things can I do to get things under my control again?”

We’re not oversimplifying. There are 4 things that will help you run a successful dance studio. 

1. Track your success by capturing metrics 

Numbers, numbers, numbers! Numbers are what matters when you want to know exactly how healthy your dance studio is. 

Numbers can tell you so much – especially when you have the ability to pull reports that compare or combine data. Or reports that allow you to determine trends, peaks, valleys and gaps. These numbers not only create a clear picture of your business but give you a view into what efforts are driving them. You can turn numbers into bar graphs and pie charts, for example, for a single year or year over year and understand exactly what it will take to run a successful dance studio. 

Metrics are entirely necessary to accurately track how well your business is performing.

Metrics can be leveraged for every area of your business where you collect data – from enrollment to profit. It’s really handy for owners and managers to have tools like cloud-based dance studio management software dashboards that show what you consider to be your key performance indicators (KPIs) in visuals that are quickly comprehended by everyone – even those who aren’t accountants!    

“The Enrollment Detail Report is invaluable to us. At first it can be overwhelming because of the sheer amount of information it contains. But it’s critical to be able to use it to make decisions that will help your gym to prosper.” Jump Gymnastics

2. Make your studio operations more efficient 

How are the hours in your day consumed? Do you do everything manually? Or have you learned to leverage technology to streamline and automate the tasks that are a true time-suck on your day? 

The beauty of cloud-based dance studio management software is that things like collecting tuition and applying payments to accounts, class attendance and registration/enrollment can be automated. A cloud-based dance studio management app does many things for you, but these are the key benefits to remember:

• Saves you time by eliminating time-consuming tasks from your to-do list.  
• Makes tasks that you couldn’t delegate before good candidates for others to take on.
• Raises the accuracy level of your data because software doesn’t make human errors.
• Gives parents the modern technology they expect from those they do business with.
• It eliminates most of the paper from your office.

Overall, your business becomes more professional and modern – and your office simply looks neater.  

“Jackrabbit provides the tools that have effectively transformed our studio operations into ones that help us and please parents.” Steps N Motion Dance Studio

3. Use time saved to grow your business

Where in your schedule do you squeeze in teaching now that your dance studio has grown enough that the sheer amount of work overwhelms you? The very thing you’re passionate about, the very reason you started your studio, has been replaced by office work, Excel spreadsheets, processing credit cards and chasing non-payments. 

As you wrapped those pointe shoe ribbons around your ankles years ago, you would have never imagined it would come to this.

Enduring operational tasks and being the absentee instructor simply doesn’t have to happen. Technology can give back to you the time you once enjoyed on the dance floor.

Not only is there the leap to efficiency that your entire office will celebrate, there is flexibility of working in the office or from home (or the cruise ship) that you will enjoy, and the extra time that you’ll have to use as you’d like. 

Your extra time gives you the perfect opportunity to:

• Dust off that marketing plan and implement it. 
• Get out in the community and meet your peers.
• Go to conferences that will help you understand whats, hows and whens of growth strategies. 
• Be the entrepreneur you want to be.

You can do so much with the time that cloud-based class management software saves you. Because you’re not concentrating on carving out thirty minutes here and an hour there, you can plan the significant time that leading and growing a dance studio takes. 

“Jackrabbit is easily grasped – even by the computer novice. My staff can master the functionality needed to do their tasks. I’m free to grow the business yet manage it from wherever I am.”  Temecula Dance Company

4. See your business thrive

It is important to see the changes in your dance studio and understand where the successes are. When you understand the numbers (see #1) you can enter your dance studio and see where those metrics fit it. You have a much better understanding of how improvements impact your operations, your staff, your students and their families. 

Thriving enables you to add the “extras” or expand into new territory. If you never recognize that you are thriving, you may never pull the trigger on something that could make your customers ecstatic, add a game-changing differentiator, or boost your growth. 

Thriving also exposes your gaps.  When the great things you do are obvious, the not great things are too. And once identified, they can be addressed with specific planning instead of using troubleshooting guesswork.

This is also an emotional thing. Seeing your business thrive gives you and the team that has participated in the success a grand opportunity to be proud. After all, we all like to bask in our glory!

“Jackrabbit saved us from an inefficient software system and has provided us with control over our processes and insight into our information. The value it delivers makes the cost of our previous software seem unjustified! I’m very impressed and pleased that Jackrabbit is willing to improve their products as I grow and improve my business.” New Orleans Dance Academy

Leverage your time

Your time is incredibly valuable to you and to your dance studio. Doing what you can to get the most from every moment makes a huge difference in your happiness with your studio’s success and your life. 

Look to technology for help – even if you’re not tech savvy. Good cloud-based dance studio management software is designed for you – not the tech guy down the street.