CREATING YOUR ANNUAL STUDIO PLANNING CALENDARWith Suzanne Blake Gerety & Jill Tirone

Here’s what you’ll learn:• An easy way to create your

strategic plan to organize your studio calendar and goals

•  The simple tools you can use to manage all of your projects and related tasks

• How to stay on track, focused, and confident in what is possible for you and your team to achieve from one year to the next

• DOWNLOAD the Recital planning master task list and calendar template

What is in a strategic plan? • Your dance studio mission & vision

• Your goals for 1 to 3 years

• The actions needed to reach those goals

• The resources and people needed to achieve the goals

Need a starting point for your mission & vision?

• What is your purpose for being in business?

• What do you want to be known for?

• What can people count on from you?

• What are you committed to creating at your studio?

Keep your mission statement at the heart of your planning

Example Mission Statement

We support and nurture the love and joy of dance.

We provide quality education through a team of professional teachers

committed to inspire, train, and develop

students of all ages and experience.

Create your goals out of your mission and vision

Four questions to ask yourself: • Where are we now? • Where are we going? • How do we get there? • Who is coming with us?

Example of goals createdSCHEDULE & PROGRAMS – FOCUS ON QUALITY EDUCATION •  Create a class schedule that

supports our mission •  Offer varied and relevant summer

dance programs •  Offer classes and curriculum to

foster student development and track progress

GROW THE STUDIO – DANCERS OF ALL AGES •  Increase student enrollment •  Build student retention and loyalty •  Provide ongoing customer

satisfaction •  Cultivate positive word-of-mouth

referrals

BUILD OUR TEAM OF PROFESSIONAL TEACHERS •  Find and retain quality staff •  Create staff training and

development •  Develop an effective and unified

management team

BE KNOWN FOR INNOVATION •  Innovative and cutting edge

technology and systems to run the business

•  Provide high quality dancewear and costumes

•  Performances that leave the audience delighted

The goals create the projects• Projects

•  Create a better class schedule to attract recreational/beginner through advanced dancers

•  Create new summer offerings: Intensives, Camps, •  Develop an advancement track for ballet, modern, tap, etc •  Implement a faculty/staff communication process •  Make better costume decisions – attend UDMA •  Revise our website and marketing to reflect our goals

Create a process for your projects• Projects have ‘mini goals’, some call these deliverables • Ex: Faculty

communication process •  Set up a dedicated

Facebook Group •  Set a schedule for

conference calls •  Establish regular email

communications – monthly •  Create a faculty important

date calendar

Turn your deliverables into tasks•  Tasks are what you should put on your to-do list, the make

big projects more manageable • You can easily delegate tasks • Example – Deliverable: Set a schedule for conference

calls •  Tasks

•  Get a freeconferencecall.com account and phone number •  Set dates in the faculty calendar, email and ask teachers to schedule

them in •  Send agenda items out early and ask teachers to give their input on

topics

The best planning tools are the ones you use!•  If you prefer paper and pen, go with that

•  If you prefer digital, go with that

• Or do a combination of both.

• Just be consistent, it will keep you on track

Suggested planning, project, task tools

What we use at our studio: • Google docs • Podio: is a web-based platform for organizing team communication, business processes, data and content in project management workspaces

• Smartsheet: for our Absentee Notification

• Year at a glance wall calendar

• Other ideas include •  Excel spreadsheets •  Other online resources

such as Basecamp •  Additional tips?

Recital Planning Year At A Glance Calendar •  Start with the big

projects and note the month that you want them started or completed or both

•  Put all of what has to get done out of your head and into a central place so that you can have people on your team help

•  This gives you a track to follow each year and you don’t have to reinvent the wheel

Create Your Recital Planning Master Task List

• List all of the deliverables and the tasks associated with each area

Stay on track, be confident, focus on the positive • You have to create the time for strategic planning, otherwise everything is an urgent fire to put out

• Each week, write down the 5 to 10 things that were positive and that you’ve accomplished

• Be confident with your plan, don’t let one or two problems derail your focus

• Don’t try to fix or change everything at once, pick the top three things you want to work on this year

Thank you! • Download the Recital planning calendar and task list: http://www.dancestudioowner.com/members/Recital-planning-master-task-list-and-calendar-template.cfm

• Model this for all areas: costumes, dancewear, dance teams, music and more