School based swimming lessons are an important part of many leisure centres and swim schools revenue base.
As managers of school based lessons are often engaged with managing the day to day operations little time is left to focus on increasing the profitability of this key area.
This article focuses on some simple ways you can grow and increase the profitability of your centres school based swimming lessons program.
- Add value by increasing feedback
Most providers of school based swimming lessons provide little feedback to parents. A child may receive a participation certificate but the parent will not receive any information about their child’s skill level or where improvement is required.
By providing feedback to parents through some form of “report card” you can differentiate yourself from the competition. Such a differentiation can be used as part of your sales and marketing process to stand out from the crowd.
This can be achieved by assessing each student and recording this information on a report card or certificate.
The time required to complete such a process may seem too much of an effort however later in this article we will review ways in which you can make this process extremely quick and simple.
- Provide historical feedback to parents
Once you have a school as a customer of your school based swimming lessons ideally you want to make them a customer for life. It is much easier to keep an existing customer than continually trying to find new customers. The last thing that you want is to lose a school to a local competitor as you will likely lose them for at least a couple of years.
To create a customer for life you need to make your school based lessons “sticky”
In other words, what can you do to make it a hassle for a school to switch to their school lessons to another centre?
The best way to make your school based lessons sticky is to provide parents with an ongoing history of their child’s progress. As part of the feedback we discussed earlier in this article, what if you compared a student’s results from the current year with their previous year?
This would provide parents with context for how their child is progressing from year to year as they move through primary school.
If you collect this data, you will develop a historical progression for each child at that school. This data becomes valuable as it will be an asset your centre holds and provides you with the competitive advantage of being able to provide an historical perspective of a child’s progress from one year to another.
Another benefit here is that specific feedback and sharing progression information with parents can act as a funnel into your standard swimming lessons program. If a child has received poor results from their school swimming lessons assessment, this could provide motivation for a parent to invest in outside school lessons at your centre.
- Reduce admin time
One of the biggest hassles of running a schools based swimming lesson program is the sheer volume of administration work required. A huge amount of time is spent on things such as collecting student lists, allocating students to classes, writing out class lists and writing out certificates.
What if these admin process could be automated or greatly reduced. Imagine if you could collect all student information electronically including their recommended starting class level, imagine if you could assign students into classes and print off class lists with a couple of mouse clicks, what if you could automatically generate certificates for students including the students name and completion date without having to write them out.
Being able to automate such tasks would likely reduce hours and hours off your administration time and associated costs each month and potentially hundreds of hours each year.
All of the suggestions we have made above can be implemented using our new SwimDesk schools program. This paperless approach to managing school based swimming lessons can help add value to your lessons, help retain schools as long term customers and significantly reduce the administration time required to implement a new school into your program.
Stay tuned for more information on the official launch of this exciting new program
If you would like to receive updates about the launch of this program please email info@greenedesk.com or call 1300 181 665.
