Why I'm sharing the systems behind my studio.

Nobody teaches you the business side of running a dance school. You learn it the slow way, one term at a time.

I've spent twenty-five years in dance, and a big part of that has been running The Dance Pad in St Peters. The teaching and the shows are the part people see. Behind them sits a lot of admin: enrolments, fees, teacher pay, rosters, volunteers and feedback. For years I built my own tools for all of it, mostly spreadsheets and checklists, fixed a little more each term until they worked.

Now I've started sharing those tools with other studio owners as The Studio Owner's Toolkit. These are the documents I actually use, with my studio's details taken out.

Which classes are paying the rent?

At The Dance Pad some students pay by the term and others pay a weekly membership. That makes headcount misleading. A full class of members can bring in far less than a half-full class of term students, and most studio software won't show you the difference.

The Class Profit Forecast does. You enter your fees, teacher rates and overheads once, then copy in your enrolment numbers each term. For every class it shows what comes in, what the teacher costs and the class's share of rent and overheads. Any class losing money turns red.

It gives you two numbers. One shows whether a class covers its teacher. The other shows whether it covers its share of the whole studio. A class can pass the first and fail the second, and that's the one you want to know about before you set next term's timetable.

Shows run on volunteers

Every show we put on depends on parents and friends giving up their time, and I've learned that how you look after them matters as much as how many you find.

My process now is simple. I email asking for help, people reply, and I add them to a WhatsApp group for that show so everything is in one place. New volunteers fill in our policy form first. Working with Children Checks are needed only for the roles that put someone in contact with the kids. After the show I ask everyone for feedback, not just the volunteers, then sit down with the right people and turn it into a list of what to do better next time.

The Show Volunteer Kit is built around that process: finding your volunteers, organising them and thanking them properly.

Why share them at all?

Because I wish someone had handed me these when I started. Every template has been through real terms and real shows, and I've checked each one against how I run things today, not how I ran them five years ago.

There's more on the way. I'm working through the rest of my systems one at a time and will add each one to the toolkit when it's ready.