It's hard work managing a teaching studio. In the second video in a four-part series about automating your studio and leveling up your marketing, we'll go over automating your teaching schedules and materials.
Are you a working musician, or know any working musicians? Then you might be interested in our article about why you don't need an invoice template for musicians!
Hi, thanks so much for being here. I know that your time is limited and valuable, and I appreciate you deciding to spend some of it here with me, today. I’m Matthew Weiner, a long time web developer and musician, and this is the second video in a series all about using technology to automate your teaching studio.
In the first video, we go from managing your finances with google sheets and venmo, to automating your invoices, invoice reminders, customer payments AND bookkeeping. Plus, I share a strategy that has helped me to truly understand the value of my own time, and how much the DIY mentality can actually cost you time and money. So if you haven’t watched that one yet, definitely go back and check it out. I promise that it’s worth it.
In my time working as a contract web developer and a gigging musician, and helping to run a performing arts nonprofit, I’ve experienced firsthand how many headaches come along with managing schedules, appointment rescheduling, communications, and sharing resources. You take notes and forget where you saved them. You set up a schedule and somebody cancels at the last minute. You have multiple versions of documents saved in different places and spread across ten different emails.
This was true at our non-profit, it’s been true for all the bands I’ve played in, every web development project I’ve been involved with, and, from what I’ve gathered, it’s true in teaching studios as well.
So in the last video we automated your finances, and in this video, we are going to automate your lesson admin. And when we’re finished, I hope you can see that it’s truly possible for you to automate the vast majority of your studio admin work.
First, I want to clarify how I think about the word “automate.” There’s the typical understanding of automation, where you set up a tool that automatically does a thing for you, like using Stripe to automatically send an invoice every week.
But I also think about the idea that we automate the things we do through ways that we do them, and that we can optimize those automations by having dedicated tools and spaces for them. Think about shopping for dinner.
Some people, like myself, have no automation at all in how we think about dinner. I’ll finish up work, then realize that I need to plan dinner for us. Maybe decide on a recipe, or decide to eat out. If I decide to cook something that night, I might screenshot the recipe or just leave the page open and hope I have service when I get to the store (even though I never have service there). I might make a list, or I might not, and I might buy something that’s already sitting in the fridge because I forgot that it’s good to look at what’s in the fridge before you go shopping.
On the other hand, some people, like my partner, keep a running grocery list on the fridge, plan meals days in advance, and then do big shopping trips once or twice a week after checking what’s already in the fridge.
Who’s process is more automated? Obviously, my partner’s. There’s a single source of truth in a single space – the shopping list on the fridge. There’s a specific workflow – plan dinner for the next few days, check the fridge, go shopping.
We can apply this to just about everything, and you can apply this idea to automating your studio. Go ahead and pause this video for a minute, and think about which aspects of your studio are automated, and which are not. Which aspects have an organized workflow, with dedicated places for things and steps to follow, and which look more like how I shop for dinner.
Alright, done thinking? So, how about your teaching materials. Are they in a binder? A few binders around the house? Are some of them paper, others stored in google drive, others in youtube playlists? Now think about how you share those materials with your students. Emails, photocopies of sheet music right before the lesson, text messages?
You see what I’m getting at, right? You can’t automate the process of sharing your teaching repertoire if it’s all over the place or uncategorized.
My first recommendation is to decide on a single source of truth – that is to say, one place where all of your materials will live – and then put them all there. This means that any time you need to share something with a student, you know exactly where it’s going to be and how you’re going to share it with them. If that’s a physical binder and that works for you, then that’s great. But I’d advocate for, at the very least, getting everything digitized and into the cloud. The simplest way to do this is obviously going to be something like google drive or dropbox, where you can upload your files and organize your materials into different folders. Of course, there are cases where students will have their own books and physical sheet music, which won’t fit into this system. You can decide how to accommodate that based on how you run your studio.
Now, if you want to take things to the next level, and have even more control over how your materials are organized and categorized, you might want to check out something like Notion. A quick way to describe notion is that it essentially provides a way for you to create a database of teaching materials, organized however you want to, using features like tagging and multiple workspaces.
This idea actually came from one of my best friends, somebody I’ve been playing music with for almost 15 years, who is a full time working musician and music teacher. He is deep in the grind, and I decided to start working in this space mostly because I see how much work he puts into figuring out how to automate everything he does, and how difficult it still is for him to do even though he’s obsessed with it. Maybe I’ll see if my friend can put together a tutorial video for how he has Notion set up for his studio and then share it with y’all.
So, if you are technically savvy, and really want to get as organized as humanly possible, Notion will give you the ability to do that. But if you’re just getting started and want the simplest way to start getting organized, go with drive or dropbox. Now obviously there’s the limitation that you can’t add youtube videos to drive, for instance, but that’s just a compromise that you might need to make with this strategy if you use videos in your lessons.
Alright, you’ve automated how you’re storing your materials, but now you need to automate how you share them with your students. We’ll come back to this in a minute after we talk about lesson scheduling, and then we’ll touch on how you can avoid makeup lessons entirely.
To automate your lesson schedules, remember, you first need a single source of truth, so you need to decide on a single place that all of your lesson calendars will live. What you want is any tool that will allow you to create multiple calendars, create recurring events, add information to those events, and share the calendar with your students. I’m most familiar with google calendar, so that’s the example that I’m going to use.
You’ll first want to create a separate calendar for every one of your students. I know this might mean creating a ton of different calendars, but it’s going to be worth it for the organization it brings. Plus, as a teacher, you can view them all at once anyway to get a full picture of your lesson commitments. For one thing, it means that each student can sync their own calendar to whatever calendar app they use, and set up automatic notifications for the events in whatever way works best for them, and that they are familiar with. This means that you don’t need to send out any lesson reminders manually, via text or otherwise. The students and anybody else with access to the calendar can handle it themselves.
Also, since the calendar is unique to a single student, it also means that you can add information for the student directly in the events on the calendar that only the student can see. Do you see where this is going?
If your teaching materials all exist in the cloud – meaning that they can be shared via links – and you can share private information with students through their calendar, it means that you can attach specific teaching materials to specific lessons. And you can also add lesson notes to the event descriptions.
Bringing this all together, it means that you have a simple way to share notes and materials – before or after a lesson – with any of your students individually – and both you and your students know exactly where they can find everything.
You remember a minute ago when I said that I’d help you avoid makeup lessons entirely? Well, we just told you how to do it. If a student cancels a lesson, instead of rescheduling it, you can attach a video lesson for them, or attach teaching materials right on the lesson that they canceled. The student can then reference the lesson information to review the materials and make it up on their own time.
Once you put all of this in place, you’ve essentially automated most of your lesson admin. And if you watched the first video, then you’ve also automated all of your studio’s payments and bookkeeping. And that’s the power that comes from taking just a few tools and connecting them together in creative ways.
But there’s still one glaring issue with all of this, and I’m sure you’ve been thinking about it this entire time. There isn’t a single source of truth or your entire studio.
You have all of your materials in drive, and it’s a bit clunky to jump between that and your calendar app to attach the materials. And you have your lesson subscriptions set up in Stripe, but they aren’t actually linked to the lesson calendars you’ve created.
But. What if I told you that there’s a better way. A way to bring all of this together in a single place? A tool built specifically to let teachers automate their entire studio from a single dashboard. Well, it exists, and I’m going to tell you all about it in the next video. So stay tuned, and talk to you again soon. Bye for now.