Briar

Today we are talking about dance studio metrics. And when it comes to metrics, a lot of us kind of cringe or shy away from talking about numbers or measuring how things are going in our studio.

But this is such an important part of the Clockwork system. And Lia, I know that for our studio, we have set up sort of a one page dashboard to help us capture and track our metrics.

So do you want to talk a little bit about that today? Because I think it's really helped us at our studio simplify metrics and make them not so daunting.

Lia

Yeah, so one of the key things that you said there is it's a one-page dashboard and this is really important. We want to keep our metrics simple and clear and easy to read. I think people often will dive into metrics almost too far. It's like either we shy completely away from them or we go too far. It's like we need all this data. We need to track all these things. It's really important. We have all these different dashboards, all these different pages. We want to keep it simple and we want to keep it concise and we want to make sure we're choosing the metrics that are going to help us make decisions.

So this is really important. If the metric isn't going to help you make a decision for your business, then it doesn't need to be on your main dashboard. You might still want to track it, but it doesn't need to be on your one page dashboard, which is going to be the snapshot of your business.

You want to be able to look here and say, is my business healthy or is it not healthy?

Briar

Yeah, I think that's a really important note there because yes, we can get really overwhelmed looking at or we truly love metrics and spend way too much time on them.

All right, so I agree, Lia, and I love to, you know, especially for the dashboard at our studio, you know, each team member who's responsible for that section of the dashboard will be implementing those numbers.

So this doesn't always fall on one person either to be tracking all of the metrics, right? Am I right? 

Lia

You're absolutely right. So, for example, in our studio, Briar, you are the marketing manager. So it doesn't make any sense for me as the finance manager and business manager and business manager to be putting in marketing numbers into our dashboard. That's something that you keep track of that you want to make sure you know and you know those numbers top of mind because that is directly tied to your specific lane in our business.

So certainly this doesn't need to fall on one person. This can be split up to whoever is the most appropriate person to put in those numbers each week.

Want to make sure you, yeah you probably want to be doing it weekly. There might be some that make sense to track on a different schedule than that but mostly we track weekly of things and that's something that's going to be you know nuanced towards your specific studio and what specific numbers are important for you to track.

Briar

Yeah and I love our one page dashboard specifically because, like you said, not all of the numbers relate to my role, but seeing the other numbers helped me make decisions about my role.

So as marketing manager, I'm working on and deciding what ads we might be running, or what we need to do social media posts about, and seeing our dashboard and knowing, okay, we need to push registrations for our four to six year old classes, for instance. I can easily see that that's a need by looking at our dashboard and knowing how many actual four to six year olds we have versus what our target number is, and going, oh yeah, okay, I can see that we need to push those specific social media posts.

So, it can directly relate to my job, even though those numbers aren't my, it's not in my role to track those numbers.

Lia

Exactly, and that is a really great example of how you are using the metrics in our dashboard to make decisions for your job.

And so, you know, tracking, so I'll just give you a little snapshot of our dashboard. We are tracking our inventory. This is how many units we have to sell. And we track them in different categories. So we're tracking by age.

As we know, like Briar said, we have a big hole to fill in our four to six-year-old age group or a 13 to 15-year-old age group. So that helps Briar make a decision, right, on what she needs to do in the marketing. So that's one really clear example.

So I'll take you a little bit more behind the scenes of our dashboard. So outside of the inventory that we're tracking there, we're tracking by age.

We also track our different events. We have a few events throughout the year that we do consistently year over year. So we want to track our numbers there and how many we've sold. 

We also just track our student numbers and our overall units to sell. By units I mean, we have 10 spots in this class. That's 10 units to sell. So we're going to look at all of the units we have across all of our classes. So we know how many we've sold. How many, what percentage that we're at in terms of selling our units. And this is really important because it helps us make decisions the following year for our schedule, right?

If we've only sold 50% of our units, we've overscheduled. If we've sold 100% of our units, we maybe want to start looking at adding more classes in, right?

So that's a really good way of how our inventory helps us make decisions for marketing, but also for scheduling.

In Clockwork, the main categories we want to track are what we call the ACDC. So that's Attract, that's the A, Convert, that's the C, Deliver is the D, and then Cash or Collect is the last C. We track those things in our dashboard. 

So our attract, this is primarily Briar's marketing efforts, so whatever marketing initiative we have at the time, if it's postcards or door hangers going out to our community, if it's Facebook or Google ads that are promoting maybe trial classes, those types of things. So we're going to track those things and how they're performing, whether we're getting clicks on those ads or whether we're getting inquiries from a postcard that we sent out to our community, that's what we're tracking in that attract phase.

In the convert phase, we're going to track things like trial class attendance, so if someone's signed up for a trial class, do they attend or do they not attend? And once they attend, do they sign up or do they not sign up? So, we're going to track things like that, whether we're able to convert them from a prospective client to a client.

We also are going to track our registrations year over years or our clients right now. Do they register again for next year? Are we able to convert them from one year to the next year? So those are some of the things we track in the conversion place.

In our delivery section, one of the key things we're tracking is drops. We want to know how many people are dropping out of their classes.

If we have too high of a drop rate, we're clearly not delivering on our service very well and it's something that we need to address.

So we want to make sure we have that number front and center so that we can keep our eye on it and know we've gone into a place that's not healthy now. There's certainly a healthy amount of drops, right? And this happens. We are dealing with children. Children change their mind, right? decide to answer it for them. They want to do soccer instead or they want to do gymnastics. I know that it has happened a lot this summer with the summer Olympics and kids seeing the amazing gymnastics that are happening and saying actually mom and dad I don't want to do dancing anymore I want to do gymnastics. So there's a healthy amount of drops and then there's an unhealthy amount of drops that means there's something going on in the classes that's not right and we need to address.

Briar

I need to quickly interrupt there Lia so I just want point out with all of these numbers we have our target number and we have our actual number so that we know what we're working towards in every single one of these categories and I think that's really important too because we're not just tracking what's happening we have a target that we are working towards and we can see the percent of our goal that we are at every single week we go over this dashboard every week when we meet with our leadership team so we are all very aware of these numbers and where we are at and can make tweaks to our daily routines or the things that we're doing as we are going through our year because we know these numbers.

So I just wanted to throw that in before you talk about our last C.

Lia

Exactly. That's really key is not just putting the numbers in here, but actually reviewing the numbers. And this is where having a one pager is really amazing for a business owner, is that you can step out of the day to day operations of your business and just come and look at this one page and say, whoa, my business is off track. I need to reach out to my management team or my leadership team and find out what's happening, right? Or you can check in and say, okay, everything's looking great. I can continue doing what I'm doing and not have to step in my business and see if I can help out, right?

So this is really great to have at one page and it's really great to have a regular cadence that you're inputting the information and a regular cadence to review the information.

So really quickly before we wrap up, our last C is cash, for us particularly this year, we are tracking something very specific and that we have some areas of our business that we're trying to address in terms of revenue coming in as well as reducing expenses.

So we have some specific things in here to track. This is going to be very different for each business. Maybe you're trying to build up your emergency funds, you're going to be tracking that. Maybe you're trying to pay down debt, so you're going to be tracking that.

So those are just some examples of what you might track in the cash. You might want to track accounts that are unpaid if you have parents who haven't paid accounts that you need to keep track of.

So that's going to be really specific. All of these are going to be really specific to your business. This is just a little bit of a back side of what ours looks like at our studio.

And then finally, the last area that we do want to track is our QBR, that queen bee role that we keep talking about. So what are the actions that you're taking to deliver on your big promise? That's your queen bee role. You want to make sure you have a way to track that to know if you're doing that or not doing that. So it can be a simple yes, no thing, but you want to make sure that you have some sort of tracking there.

So that's a little bit of a snapshot of our metrics and sort of metrics in general. Briar, do you have any closing thoughts? 

Briar

Just that if listening to Lia go through all these things that we're tracking felt overwhelming to you, we want you to pick one area to start with and making sure that you're tracking that one area.

So Lia, out of all of those things that you just spoke about, which do you feel is the most important thing for us to be tracking and using our metrics, if we haven't tracked anything, if we're not doing any metrics at all. Where would you suggest somebody starts?

Lia

I would start with your QBR, because we want to make sure that we're doing that QBR, right?

Briar

I agree 100%. And it could be, like you said, as a really simple yes or no, we're doing it.

That still counts as tracking, right? That still counts as tracking. And you could have one metric for your QBR or you could have two or three metrics for your QBR, depending on what your QBR is.

Lia

Yeah, definitely keep it simple and start with whatever you have the capacity to start with. Whether it's one thing or two things or three things, just choose where you're going to start.

Briar and I are happy to help you set up your dashboard and your metrics. So reach out to us if you want some support on that or if you have any questions about this.