Prepare to

ClassForKids | Prepare to Comeback Stronger

Getting back to business is something which is on every business owner’s mind. But as with any challenging period in business, it isn’t always straightforward.

Focusing on improving your business operations and implementing long-term changes are crucial for the future of your club. Now more than ever, and given events in recent months, you should be focussed on ways to protect your club’s future.

Strategising will help you improve your day-to-day operations, help maintain healthy growth, provide a better journey for your customers and help future-proof your business.

In this guide, we will be focusing on on areas of improvement:

How to plan to future-proof your club,

how to prepare to get your club back to business

and ways to improve your business performance by streamlining your business process.

INTRODUCTION

01

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Planning is a crucial step in improving your business regardless of the circumstances you find yourself in. Thinking about the long-term strategy of your club will help you as a business owner focus on what works best for you and your customers.

To begin developing your club’s long-term strategy, you should be thinking about what you are currently offering, whether it is right going forward and how to return to make the most of your capacity. You should begin by considering whether you’ll need to adapt your programme(s), revise your pricing, as well as spending time analysing numbers, focusing on areas of improvement.

01 PLANFUTURE-PROOF YOUR BUSINESS

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Areas of Improvement

Take time to build your skills to edu-cate yourself and your staff on new things that can improve your club’s suc-cess. You may have social media channels you wish to develop, have training course you need to update (first aid, health and safety), as well as focusing on improv-ing coaching techniques. Check training recommended by national and regional sporting bodies.

You should also spend time analysing your competitors across the industry, not just clubs in the same activity sector. Competi-tion is healthy and provides a benchmark for your club. Closely monitor their adver-tising tactics, methods of communication and how they are preparing to return to classes to evaluate your own efforts.

Adapting Your Club Programme

Analysing your club’s programme is a good starting point for focusing on the future of your club. Reviewing your programme allows you to ask yourself, “Is what I have currently fit for purpose?”.

In the immediate term, your club may need to offer a hybrid of online and physical lessons. However, it goes beyond choosing to offer online, offline or both - now is the time to make decisions on class content, frequency of classes, the venue setting and class performance.

Analysing Class Numbers

Analyse which classes have performed better and look for areas of improvement by mea-suring their success against criteria such as age, day, time and type to see which have proven most popular. Knowing which classes perform better based on the above criteria will help refine your offer-ings and improve your strategy.

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Revising price

To have a robust and future-ready business, you need to understand your financial situation - what it means to have good cash flow, and what profit and loss mean to your club.

Profit is crucial as it affects your club’s ability to grow. After all, you wouldn’t be able to continue your business if it couldn’t turn a profit. To help you get to grips with profit, use a profit calculator to improve your understanding of your overheads, project profit and better manage your financial forecasting.

When it comes to pricing, analysing competitors from across the industry is good practice. Customers are likely looking at your competitors pricing, so you should be too. It’s also a good reference point to position your club and can help you track where prices change. This will give you better insights to make assumptions of why prices were changed, and help you make decisions that will influence customers buying into your club.

Customers ultimately have the greatest impact on your business and its ability to churn a profit. To balance your books, you need to understand what your customer wants and provide it. To increase your cash flow, you may consider offering 1-2-1 lessons, selling merchandise or offering a premium service that can be charged at higher prices. However, it’s not only your customers that impact your finances - it’s competitors too.

WHAT CAN AFFECT MY FINANCES?

TIP: Looking at the external factors that impact profit and pricing is a good starting point, but you also need to take time to analyse your business. To improve efficiency for you and your customers, you may wish to consider revising your pricing model. Moving from a pay as you go model to subscriptions can help future-proof your business as you can maintain cash flow and spread the cost for your customers.

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Once you have planned how to improve your business processes, it’s important to look at internal readiness for relaunching.

To get started, you should think about what policies need updating, what social distancing/hygiene measures will be implemented, how you’ll communicate your return with customers and how you’ll market your relaunch.

02 PREPARE

GETTING YOUR CLUB READY

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Communicate Your ‘Return to Club’ Material

To get your club on the road to its return, start by reaching out to parents in a survey. This way, you can address their concerns directly in your returning to club material. Your material should be focussed around educating and inform both parents and children.

You can access our ‘Get Back to Business’ pack with free templates here.

Renew Policies

Times have changed. Before reopening your doors, you’ll need to take time to review and update relevant policies to take govern-ment guidance into consideration. You should consider reviewing the following:

•Health and Safety;•GDPR;•Staff Policies;•Sickness and Absence (Staff/Customers);•Risk Assessment.

Implement Social Distancing/Hygiene Measures

•What measures are you putting in place that your customers need to be aware of?•You should be thinking about one-way systems, parent drop-off, hand washing on entry and exit, toilet access, class schedules payments and bookings.

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Market Your Relaunch

Getting your marketing strategy right is crucial, but it takes time. Start by considering how you currently advertised to customers and whether this will need to change. Your strat-egy should take into consideration that you are returning to business, but now is also a time for growing and developing for your club.

Take this as an opportunity to think about how you’ll reach new/existing customers. Facebook advertising and word of mouth are popular ways of advertising, but there are other methods you could consider. Spend time researching your audience - where they are talking, researching and spending their time. Platforms including Google, Instagram and listing websites shouldn’t be discounted - take time to research viable solutions that may work for your club.

To market your relaunch successfully, take time to improve your strategy by:

•Making a plan;•Analysing data;•Tracking progress;•Launching new advertising streams at a steady pace;•Creating a strong brand;•Analysing how your competitors are advertising.

Get your marketing strategy started with our free marketing series.

Improve your social media strategy with our free guide.

Want to create a strong brand? Get your Branding 101 ebook here.

Facebook is popular across the indus-try for clubs advertising and parents booking, so this is a good time to improve your knowledge of Facebook ads by viewing our blog post here.

Learn how to retain your existing customers with our latest blog.

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Having planned a long-term strategy for your business and prepared for your return, you should make time to review the current setup of your club. This time could be spent transforming how you run the admin side of your club, allowing you to focus more on the community and content you provide when you return.

In line with the government guidance, your immediate focus should be on your booking and payment processes. The government recently announced that where possible, bookings should be taken in advance, online or over the phone while businesses should consider mandating contactless or card payment to avoid handling cash.

For more information on government guidance on returning to play, click here

03 PERFORMSTREAMLINE YOUR

BUSINESS PROCESSES

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Booking Structure

Having an online booking system will help your club both in the future and in the immediate term. Having a booking system will help you with the following:

•Take bookings online in a socially distanced, safe way;•Having class registers for coaches to know who they are expecting to plan ahead;•Give your club the ability to implement a test and trace system (contact tracing);•Foreknowledge of medical issues for children so first aiders are aware of what they potentially may have to deal with;•T&C’s and policies already approved and acknowl edged by parents;•Improving business operations with regards to finances, invoicing, bespoke registration questions and communicating with your customers.

Payment Structure

Based on government guidance and to future-proof your club, you may want to consider moving payments online or setting up subscriptions. This will provide a more streamlined and efficient process for both you and your customers.

Online payments provide your club with the ability to maintain its cash flow during periods where PAYG mod-els wouldn’t. Implementing a subscription-based model can help you achieve the following:

•Allow you to take payments online before the term begins;•Provide a more convenient and affordable way for parents to pay for classes as payments can be spread across a specified term period;•Enjoy the benefits of zero invoice chasing;•Increase attendance from parents and their children.

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Customer Retention

Customer retention is something that your club should be aware of and focused on improving. Once you have a well-developed product or service to offer to your customers, there is the opportunity for growth by attracting new customers. However, retaining your existing customers will cost your business less in the long-term. To improve your customer retention rate, your focus should be on:

•Social media presence;•Improving customer service;•Incentivising classes.

To learn more about customer retention, read our latest blog.To understand how to increase your retention rate, use a retention calculator.

Partnering with Schools

Partnering with local schools is a great way of expanding your audience reach. The Department for Edu-cation recently announced funding worth £320 million to support schools in England improving their PE and Sports provisions.

Now is a great time to try and seek new opportunities. Not all schools will be able to do this, but reach out to them by:

•Sending detailed proposals with some examples of classes you run and your delivery methods. Be sure to get your brand across by sharing some fun pictures and videos that you have;

•If a current customer of yours attends the school, ask the parent to vouch for you and give you a glowing recom-mendation!

Find out more by reading our latest blog post.

Upselling Opportunities

Your club may need to adapt its business models to thrive. Previously you may have relied solely on your classes for income. Now you may find yourself planning to run a combination of online and offline classes and incorporat-ing upselling tactics to increase revenue streams. Tactics you may consider are selling club merchandise, 1-2-1 lessons and birthday parties. For more ideas on upselling, read our latest blog post.

At ClassForKids, we want to encourage you to think outside the box and carefully plan your club’s future. For more ideas and inspiration on ways you can future-proof your business, visit our

RESOURCES HUB

You’ll find content designed to help you carefully consider the next stages for your club and get business-ready for relaunching.

clubs.classforkids.co.uk /class4kids @classforkidsuk @classforkidsuk ClassForKids ClassForKids

ClassForKids is a booking and management system specialising in the kids activity industry. We work with thousands of clubs across the UK

and beyond of all shapes and sizes.

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