| Friend,
Quick, tell me this... and no peeking!
How many of your students missed class during the first half of this week?
Not sure?
Then you're probably not tracking attendance, or you're not reading your attendance reports.
Tracking attendance and reading your attendance reports is not just something you need to do at the end of each month - oh no.
It's something you need to be doing daily, preferably at the end of the night before you shut things down. Here's why...
When attendance goes down, attrition (drop outs) go up. These two stats very nearly have a direct correlation, in my experience. And that's because people who don't come to class don't stick around for very long.
Moreover, people who stop coming to class generally stop paying their tuition. No matter what sort of iron-clad contract you have them sign, if someone isn't using a service, they are very unlikely to continue to pay for that service.
And here's something else to think about... WHY aren't these people showing up for class?
In the rose-colored world inside our heads, we tend to assume that they're just busy, or maybe they got sick, or something else. We RARELY make the assumption that it's our fault.
However, it often IS our fault. Many times students stop attending class because of something we did. We dropped the ball, and they decided to bail.
And you'll never know what happened or how to fix it (until it's too late) if you don't track attendance in your dojo... and then follow up on MIA students with an action plan for getting them back in class.
Now, as far as HOW you track attendance, I don't care and I don't think it matters all that much. In the past, I have been somewhat overly fond of using the simplest solution. Which was, for a long time, using color-coded attendance cards.
However, today's technologies make it incredibly easy to track attendance. One of the instructors in my MAbizU.com Facebook group swears by the front desk software he uses.
It allows him to set up an iPad for students to check in at his front counter, which strikes me as an extremely efficient way to take attendance (and if you don't want to spend big $$$ on a new iPad, just do what I did and get one used from this site).
And there are other ways to do it to. Smartphone apps, checklists, bar code scanners, etc. So, there's really no reason for you to avoid taking attendance and reading your attendance reports each night.
Now, tomorrow I'm going to talk about attrition, and why it's so very important to the success of your dojo to track it. Obviously, it's very closely tied to attendance, and now you know how the one impacts the other.
But when you see exactly WHY it's so important to the future of your dojo to track it, it's going to blow your mind...
Stay tuned for that.
Until next time,
Mike Massie MartialArtsBusinessDaily.com
P.S. - I used to hate tracking attendance. Then, I started tracking it and doing all the things I suggest in The Profit-Boosting Principles book, and my enrollment jumped by about 20% in six months. Trust me, it's worth it to track it. | 