318. Don’t be a bottleneck, lend support, allow mistakes if you learn from them

Unlock the secrets of operational efficiency with insights from our corporate business success coach, who's been pivotal in transforming our franchise locations, including ours. This week, we're shedding light on past practices that kept our team in the dark and showing how a culture of transparency can empower staff with simple, yet crucial, skills — from managing member birthdays to handling billing with ease. You'll hear firsthand how we're dismantling the unnecessary complexities imposed by former staff and creating a more informed and capable team.

Join us for an intriguing discussion as we tackle the ongoing saga of ex-employees trying to access company emails through unconventional means, highlighting the importance of following proper protocols. Despite financial challenges stemming from managerial transitions and one-time costs, we're setting our sights on a profitable month ahead. Listen as we navigate the daily operations, prepare for upcoming meetings, and maintain an optimistic outlook for our studio's future success. Our story is one of resilience and growth, and we invite you to be part of this journey.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:31

Alright, happy Monday. We're starting off the new week strong. Well, some positives is we have someone from corporate my franchise, business success person. He's on site for a couple days. He's checking in on several studios, not just mine, and he's helping everyone get up to speed and figure out how they can be improving their different locations along the way. That's great. It's really helpful and valuable and meaningful, and I'm really glad that he's able to help train up my manager and get up to speed on our software, how things work and how things ought to be running.

Speaker 1: 1:06

I'm learning more and more, like to see like how controlling the former staff was in terms of not training, not sharing information, keeping people hidden in the dark and just trying to be the only person that knew how to do anything. One person wanted to look. Just a simple example someone wanted to look up the members' birthdays for the week so that on our whiteboard of weekly announcements we can say, hey, happy birthday person. One person. Two, person three. Board of like weekly announcements we can say, hey, happy birthday person. One person. Two, person three. The former staff did not let anyone even figure out how to pull birthdays so that we could celebrate someone's birthday. That only they were the only person to know how to do it. And so just something goofy like that it wasn't even proprietary or high value information, but something as simple and basic as that was being throttled and bottlenecked left and right, and that's just ridiculous. There's no way. That makes any sense and that's just mind-blowing to me, because now, like, the other staff are having to get up to speed on how to pull birthdays, how to find memberships that are members that are underpaying, members that are not bill being billed correctly, like only it was intentionally being bottlenecked so that only one person knew how to do any of that stuff and they were pretty slow at figuring out how to do some of that stuff. And so now other staff are like, well, this is easy, I just click three buttons and I'm done. Like yeah, absolutely, and I'm sorry that you were gaslit for three weeks. That like, oh, we'll figure out how to do that thing later. And, lo and behold, it should have been learned how to do it from the get-go. So that's been kind of an eye-opening reveal.

Speaker 1: 2:45

Uh, I also caught up with the guy from, or the yeah, I guess the guy from corporate, my franchise success coach. We're just talking a little bit and it's like hey, like thank you for helping me with the wrapping up with some of my staff members and I know it wasn't quite easy on anyone, but you know I'm glad we're turning over a new leaf. He said, oh man, yeah it's, it's been wild. Uh, they're still like texting me trying to get access to the company email. Like wait, what for real? He's like, yeah, they even like got found out like some other phone numbers for corporate staff, if sort of like texting and calling people saying hey, don't get access to the studio email. And people are just like who is this person? What are they doing? Like, if you need access and talk to your, your, your boss, your former boss, and if they're not going to give it to you, then like escalate it through the proper channels. But what are you doing? Like you're acting like a crazy person here. Former employee Like oh boy.

Speaker 1: 3:42

So, anyhow, things are picking on the up and up. We're going to have a profitable month sooner than later. This month is going to be probably in the red because there's going to be excessive staff pay from the manager leaving out the manager coming in. There's going to be too much on the payroll side of things. So it's going to be an inflated number, and that's fine. There's going to be some lock changes and some one-time expenses that are no longer going to be a thing, and and that's okay.

Speaker 1: 4:14

Now I'm heading home. It's three o'clock. I'm heading home to continue working the day job. I've been working on it most of the morning and I need to be back on that and juggling all the balls all at once. I still need to do a little bit of prep for some meetings tomorrow. Tuesdays and Thursdays are my really busy meeting days and I need to be working on some of that stuff and not just the gym. The and I need to be working on some of that stuff and not just the gym. The gym is a big time constraint right now for me because I'm trying to get someone up to speed. They're highly motivated, highly energetic, highly engaged, so we'll be getting them up to speed sooner than later. So that's where we're at, that's where we're going. We're going to rock and roll.