Owning a business is one of the most rewarding and challenging jobs in the world. Finding a balance between these are a huge part of an owner’s responsibility. Every swim school operates differently, but if our simply swim team had to pick, these are three big challenges that most swim school owners have faced over the years that may relate to you.
Keeping up to Date
As a swim school owner, I totally advise you to make sure you are keeping up to date with the latest technology to make running the admin side of a business easier. Before, swim school owners are having a hard time and not convenient to adapt in today’s digital age. But after they experience our swim class software simplicity and easy interface they already know that they did the right/easiest way to manage their admin tasks.
Finding Qualified People
Training and maintaining quality staff in an industry is one of the challenges as a swim school owner. Finding well-qualified people is not as easy as popping out of a course, don’t get me wrong the ones who have just popped out of a course are good as you can train and mold them, but sometimes you need to get them to hit the floor running. Everyone needs experience, but you need to also have some golden oldies as well.
Stay Relevant
To stay relevant but not at a cost of their program or business. Swim school owners are competing with more and more sports and extracurricular activities, a time-poor society where people want convenience not necessarily the best, a generation of children whose physical/cognitive/social/emotional development seems to be behind previous generations in terms of their capabilities, but they want it all now without the consistency and effort to achieve the results and their parents are largely disengaged (for many reasons).
School owners are competing against ourselves instead of uniting as an industry with flashier facilities, integrated school management system, higher staff wages and incentives, free giveaways to clients, free baby programs that have huge numbers, and often not the most highly qualified and experienced staff (because it’s free) that don’t give off the best first impression to new parents beginning their swimming journey.
No matter what business you’re in, there will be challenges. How you adapt to those is where the success factor comes into play! What challenges have you faced? How have you handled them? Share your story in the comments.