Is your studio stuck in the 1800's?

It's about time...

If you’re still writing down lesson notes on paper, you’re not only wasting your time - you’re wasting your student’s time, money - and talent.

That’s right. I said it.

Here’s the scenario: Your student shows up and you begin your lesson. You know you were working on Crazy Train last week, but you can’t remember if you’ve shown them that opening riff or made it all the way to the verse. So you go fumbling through your notes... By now 5 minutes have gone by before you find what you're looking for. Is that five minutes out of a thirty minute lesson? Let’s say you do that four times a month. Guess what? You just took an entire lesson from that student.

You're waisting time.

When I started teaching full time, there was only one another full time instructor in town. He used to hand draw the chromatic scale for kids every week. Every. Single. Week. I know this because whenever his students would jump ship and join my studio, they all had about 10 copies of a hand drawn chromatic scale. Now I could get really deep in the weeds here and wonder why the hell he was teaching 8 year olds the chromatic scale, but I won’t. I did see an underlying problem though - he didn’t remember teaching it to them in the first place because he had NO record of it.

He was wasting money and time.

Look, we’ve all been there. I started teaching guitar full time in 1999 and I kept detailed notes on paper to keep up with student progress. It was all I had at the time. Shortly after that, I started writing custom FileMaker apps and realized that I could create a detailed database to keep track of weekly student records.

That worked great…. For a while.

I then had another huge problem - my schedule.

About the time Apple rolled out iCal, I adopted it as my scheduler. It worked fine as long as I didn’t have any gigs that conflicted with lessons or students showed up every single week on time and without fail. I know - insanity, right? The issue was simple - calendar programs wouldn’t let me schedule makeups or keep up with attendance, so I started using an excel spreadsheet for attendance.

Then in 2003, I launched my first music studio and hired other instructors.

Now I had a bigger problem. My FileMaker app wouldn’t act as a server and allow multiple instructor entries. The attendance spreadsheets turned into a nightmare. The calendar was overlapping and allowing me to double book rooms.

See where I’m going here?

As a studio owner, I have to keep up with attendance across all of our instructors, maintain lesson rooms, avoid scheduling conflicts, and check lesson plans for every student we serve to make sure that each instructor is putting the same time and effort that I do. I want to make sure they give a damn because I sure do. And I KNOW that their parents do.

After all, it's their money!

One day a parent came into our studio saying that one of our instructors had missed about 12 lessons. I was freaked out. I immediately went digging through all of our excel spreadsheets and the instructor did his job. He kept good attendance records. As it turned out, the instructor hadn’t missed any lessons. It was the student. The mom just remembered that there were no lessons for a while. Her exact words were: “Oh, well I don’t really keep up with that kind of stuff…”. I looked her right in the eye and said: “Well, I do.”.

But still. I was rattled to the core. I realized that while I had some sort of a method for keeping up with student records, it was clunky, cumbersome, and relied on 3 different sets of software just to make it work.

I knew there had to be a better way.

That night I went home and didn’t stop working until 5:00 in the morning.

I developed RosterHound in a fever driven passion for student success. I started out by drawing each screen and how the workflow for instructors. Then I hired developers. Then we tested it for YEARS at our music school (Pladd Dot Music) until we had it right. I leaned heavily on my music education coordinator, Mary Hannah, to give me insight about the trends in parent behavior, booking schedules, and the needs of multiple types of students.

RosterHound isn’t done. I will always be working on it to make it better - just like I do with my guitar playing.

After all, time is money. And talent costs money. And I don't want to be waisting either.