Building Your School…Ruthless Time Management – How to Get Everything Done!
I call this the Entrepreneurial Curse. It applies to all business owners:
- There’s an infinite number of things to do (or at least it feels like it)
- There’s an infinite number of things that keep getting added to your responsibility (feels like it)
- All of it seems important!
We’re going to cure this curse. To do it, we’ll talk about how time “management” really works and a 3 part easy formula to fix it.
Time Management is Taught Backwards
Let’s start with broken, ineffective phrases, never to use again: “I don’t have time” or “I am saving time”. Truth? You never save time nor have more time.
An example: A school owner I recently talked to said they “just don’t have enough time” to do the grassroots marketing they need to build their school of 96 students. “If I had an extra 10 hours a week, I could grow my school”. They are teaching, getting their bills paid, taking care of their family (single dad, kid in 1st grade) on mediocre income – but “You just don’t understand, Chief Master Moody, I have no time for anything else.”
Then… the water heater in their house broke. Between getting the water heater replaced, getting the contractors scheduled to redo the floor, calling insurance to pay for it, and all the other stuff that had to get done – they spent at least 15 hours on this that week…
…still, classes got taught, bills got paid, family got taken care of… all the tasks that got done the week before still got done.
The difference wasn’t that he didn’t have the 10-15 hours to do marketing; the difference was that marketing wasn’t important. The water heater was critical – both to fix so they could have hot water and to clean up so the walls wouldn’t rot – so it got focus. The grassroots marketing got behind distractions and “life” – sound familiar?
- Watch out for “Tyranny of the Urgent”: Stephen Covey coined this term. We tend to respond to urgency over importance. When the red dot shows a text message, we HAVE to answer, right? (True for leads! Filter them!). The Entrepreneurial Curse makes this worse because the task load can feel overwhelming.
- Establish Hierarchy: Disney is famous for decision making strategy: Safety, Courtesy, Show, and Efficiency. All employees know if something is unsafe, they deal with that vs.whether they stay in Frontierland character. However, if something would require them to remove their Mickey Mouse head for a more efficient process, they keep Mickey’s head on (sorry if you thought Mickey was real.)
- Language: Language matters in your school –it matters here. Replace “I don’t have time” with “I don’t prioritize it”. This is more accurate and honest. You will be focused on what you’re really doing with your time.
- What’s Most Important? This could be first. What is most important for your school’s growth. If you’re reading this article, it’s probably:
- Getting more students
- Marketing
- Getting better at enrolling students
- Getting better at retention
- Teaching Great Classes
- Etc… What is important to you?
- Getting more students
Note: Remember to include your personal life and relationships in your plans. Here we’re building your school, but the main goal is to build your life!
If you are not clear on what’s important, it’s hard to keep the Entrepreneurial Curse from overwhelming or, even worse, creeping up on you. You’ll think you’re busy, yet important things aren’t getting done.
What’s important to you may be different than anyone else. Maybe you already have enough students like many of our clients at Go2 Karate, and the next phase is increasing your income or training your staff – it doesn’t matter to me – establish your priorities and focus. Like the Disney order – safety is what they think of first – what’s your first?
3 Block Time Management for School Growth (3B)
This 3 Block Time Management for School Growth (3B) has been repeated over and over for successful school owners all over (and in my schools) for years. If you’re a multi-school owner, there is a different variant. This process was developed to be simple, obvious, and effective.
3B Time Blocks:
- Block 1: Marketing Morning
- Block 2: Prime Time
- Block 3: Admin
That’s it… Simple right? You may think it’s crazy because, of course, you have lots more to do than just these three things, but let’s see how it all fits:
Block 1: Marketing Morning
This starts when you wake up or whenever you want to start working (remember you’re your own boss, so you should benefit from being an owner) till prime time (30 minutes before classes). This – and this is critical – can only be used for marketing. You aren’t allowed to do computer work, catch up on paperwork, order merchandise, pay bills, delete old emails, etc….
It doesn’t mean you have to spend 7 am to 3 pm every day working on marketing. It means that before Prime Time, you aren’t allowed to do anything business related except marketing.
A conservative plan: You might schedule Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from noon – 3 pm and Tuesday from 10-3 pm with a lunch break for marketing. That’d be 13 hours a week, 100% dedicated to marketing. You’d have all morning off most days, all day Thursday till 3 for working out, reading, developing yourself, whatever you like. You can be more aggressive if you want to spend more money for marketing and do less labor or do more labor and spend less.
I reiterate the key point is the time can’t be used for other tasks. This prevents you from falling for the Entrepreneurial Curse. If you can’t think of anything to do – ask Go2 Karate, and we can give you a list of effective marketing or look through our many Go2 Karate resources… don’t allow yourself to do anything else – this simplifies your time.
Block 2: Prime Time
This starts 30 minutes before classes. The objective in Prime Time is only enrollment and instruction! Here is a typical plan:
- All preparation for the classes will have been done the evening before, so once you’re changed and in uniform for classes, do all the confirmation calls (and texts and emails) for the day and the next day.
- Review for day – classes and enrollment, renewal/upgrade appointments (if the appointment schedule isn’t full, plan for filling the appointment schedule)
- Do classes and enrollment, renewal/upgrade appointments.
- Prime Time Rule #1: If there is an appointment time empty, use that time to get another appointment. Nothing else!
Prime Time Rule #1 is the one that’s abused the most. Often a school has ups and downs in their appointment schedule and when there’s a free appointment time, the staff member uses that time as a break or to “catch up” or to help in class. Well, if there was an appointment, none of that break/”catch up”/help in class would have been done, so it wasn’t important.
- Do accounting once a month only. I get a lot of “WHAT!!?!” responses when I suggest this, but it’s not hard to move your bills around, so they are only due once a month. It’s easier paying them 1x a month than whenever AT&T says you need to pay.
- Order merchandise only 1x-2x a month. That takes a little organization and maybe a whole article about this.
- Answer emails/other notifications only 1x a day (or less) unless they’re leads (set lead emails as VIP contacts – Go2 Karate can help with your system)
- School facility projects. If you have to paint, do it on a break or weekend. Think about the water heater lesson. …and more. Figure out what’s going to be done based on putting Importance before Urgency.
Cure the Entrepreneurial Curse
The cure to the Curse is to identify the important before urgency, use the “I don’t prioritize that” instead of “I don’t have time” language, and perhaps the 3B System or another one that makes it easy to keep these straight. Do all this, and you’ll naturally see how other tasks start to not be as important as they once were, and you’ll get results building your school and your life the way you want it!
About Greg Moody:
Dr. Greg Moody, Chief Master Instructor and 8th Degree Black Belt is an expert at a wide range of martial arts business, marketing, and sales in and out of the martial arts industry. He started as an aerospace engineer (he’s literally a rocket scientist) with NASA, then went on to founding multiple small to large businesses, and now has worked with hundreds of various businesses to get them way past where they ever imagined they could. He has a bachelor’s degree in engineering from Arizona State University, a Master’s degree in Psychology, and a Ph.D.. He’s written multiple books, including “The Life Skills of Leaders”, “Stories of the Black Belts”, “The Business of Becoming an Author,” among others and the upcoming “Bullying: Truths, Myths and What to Do!” – the definitive guide to bullying prevention.
He has helped businesses all over the world. Many schools have doubled their business success due to training with Dr. Moody. This is not just due to business advice but because of the complete attention to all aspects of running a school that he offers. He feels everything done in a school must be with extreme client service and a benefit to the students first. All of the other parts of the business will come out of this.
His schools have been nationally recognized as the “Best in the Nation” eight years in a row. He’s been featured on local TV and in newspapers in Phoenix, Arizona, national magazines (Parade Magazine, Yahoo Parenting, and more), and you can see him at his regular podcast at DrGregMoody.com.
