20 - Baskervilles School of Gymnastics - Jess and Katherine

Today, James sits down with Katherine and Jess from Baskerville's Gymnastics. 

🤸‍♀️ Dive into their journey of juggling 2,500 gymnasts and how a big leap to Love Admin transformed their chaos into choreography. 

They spill the secrets on managing massive changes without breaking a sweat and keeping everyone in the loop from coaches to parents. 

Ready to see how communication can make or break your big moves? 

Tune in and take your children's activity business to new heights with insider tips that are anything but routine! 

Stay tuned for more insightful episodes from Steps2Success, where we help you navigate the challenges of running a children's activity organisation with practical advice and expert insights.

Created with pride by LoveAdmin

Edited with finesse by Making Digital Real

Transcript

Hey everybody, this is James, Strategic Business Manager at Love Admin and you're listening to the Guided Growth Podcast, where we'll be taking you through the basics of growing your activity organisation with real insights and real actions you can apply to your organisation. Welcome to episode 19 of Steps to Success, giving you the ideas and inspiration to take your children's activity business to the next level. This week I'm with the team from Baskerville's Gymnastics, looking at how you can manage big changes without fear to help your organisation be more efficient.

Katherine and Jess, welcome to our podcast, thanks for joining us. Let's kick off by talking about Baskerville's. Tell me about how it all started and the journey you guys have been on so far.

Hi James, thanks for letting us be part of this. So to give you some background, Baskerville's Gymnastics was founded over 40 years ago by Robin and Barbara Baskerville. We employ over 80 full and part-time coaches, you have a wealth of experience in gymnastics.

Robin and Barbara's three children, Emma, Vicky and Paul, manage a team of professionals who provide a stimulating and educational environment for all ages and abilities. As well as our main hub centre, we run weekly gymnastic classes in a number of locations in and around Bath. We offer preschool, school-aged, freestyle and adult gymnastics and also fitness classes.

We currently have approximately two and a half thousand gymnasts attending a class with us every week. So just to give you a bit of an idea, I've been working at Baskerville's for 14 years and Jess has been working here for almost nine years and I think we can both confidently say that a lot has changed since we both started working at Baskerville's, especially in terms of admin procedures and recognising what customers want and expect when booking classes for their children. An example of this would be that when I first started at Baskerville's, our invoicing procedure was to print an A4 paper copy of an invoice and hand it out to each gymnast for payment and payments were marked off manually. 

Now we didn't have as many gymnasts as we do now but we still had a lot, so that was a loss of admin time. And our class numbers have increased over time, hence why we've opened up different satellite centres to accommodate more gymnasts. And the reason why we've come together with Love Admin is after doing a lot of research, we decided to move to an online admin system, not only to save on admin time but to also make systems more efficient, streamline and up to date with other companies running similar businesses.

Love Admin really helped us work through all our concerns and questions and the big transition over to the new system which we did in April 2022 and we haven't looked back since. So that gives you some idea of the background of Baskerville's and where we are and what we do hopefully. Yeah I think it's great to hear the the scale that you guys operate at and two and a half thousand gymnasts is certainly no mean feat. 

So tell me then, with the fact that you guys are operating at that scale and you've already come quite a long way in terms of getting things set up, what do you find most difficult about planning and making a change at that level of scale? I think communication is probably the hardest thing, not just with parents but also with the team to make sure that everybody's on the same page and that people aren't accidentally giving out the wrong information to parents. So we don't all overlap with each other which makes it really tricky to try and make sure everyone knows what's happening but also making sure that the parents are like reading their emails. So like we'll email them something that's big that's happening and they're like you never told me and you're like well we did but I'd say for me I think that's probably the trickiest bit. 

What do you reckon? Yeah I would agree with that. I would say for us it's communicating yeah whether or not it's in-house with like the admin team communicating with each other but also the admin team communicating with the coaches and the managers, making sure that everyone knows of any changes so that when you have those parents asking you don't get anybody in-house saying I don't know what you're talking about either. So we need to be able to give our parents the confidence that we know what we're doing and we know what we're talking about. 

So I think for us as a business it is the communication and making sure that everyone is aware of any changes whether they're small or big so that we're all yeah know the same thing and know what we're doing. And do you find that the issues with sort of communicating both internally and externally stops you from doing certain things because of sort of a fear of how complicated it could get? It can do, it has done. I think since having the Love Admin system we've been more confident at making changes and being able to do those changes knowing that we are communicating as much as we possibly can with parents. 

I think in-house we've got a lot better at making sure that we have weekly meetings that not everyone attends but you have different sections of the business that have weekly meetings so everyone is informed. We have WhatsApp groups as well so that you know even if you're not in the office you can read the messages and keep updated. I would say if you asked me that question five years ago then maybe I would say yes we have stopped ourselves from maybe making some changes because of the concern of how do we let everyone know. 

But I would say since we now have Love Admin we know that our communication is so much better especially with parents and our customers that we are confident that we can do that. Do you see that transition to a software system and being able to send emails in bulk really easily for example, do you think that was kind of a key turning point actually across the business in terms of your ability to manage change or do you think there's been kind of a cultural shift as the clubs matured? A bit of both. I mean you said, you did say didn't you that you found being able to send emails much easier.

Yeah much much easier. It used to be quite laborious to do it before whereas now it is like I'd make a little template, I send the template, it's done. You know it is much easier in that sense. 

It is and I would also say the great thing is that we've got the communication tab so I think what's really helped us is when we get parents saying well I didn't receive an email or can you resend it. It's so much easier to be able to go onto that account and say with confidence well actually we can see that you did receive that email and actually you opened it on this date on the earliest time but also it has meant that we can resend information so even if like some of our admin team don't use the system as much as others they know how to resend a message or how to even copy and paste it and send it to someone so that they've got the information. I would say it's a bit of both. 

I would say that culturally I think parents have got more used to knowing and I think it's probably through all the school communication and everything that you have as well as a parent that you know that you must check your emails pretty much at least once a day because of all the communication that's coming through from your school in terms of you know pee this and this trick. It helps that everything's much more digital now so we all know that we've got to keep our tabs on that and it's sort of our responsibility as parents to be checking what's being sent to us from loads of different places so that I think that shift culturally everywhere has really helped. So you'd say almost that aligning with how people expect to consume information is sort of the biggest thing in terms of getting confidence that customers are going to be informed to do the right actions when you need them to. 

So actually having the ability to communicate in the same way that their school communicates with them and their football club communicates with them and all of that type of thing if you're able to communicate in the same way then you're able to actually make a change happen much more easily. So would you say on that basis then that the biggest restrictor of making kind of considerable change is actually a technical piece or do you think it's more around an appetite for the business to want to change and the technical bit is just just an afterthought? Well I think the change that people don't like change. You know you've always got to hold that in balance like people love having a ready routines they know what they're doing so if you change too much it really messes with people and they're more likely to stop. 

So I think it's like holding that in balance with everything else. I agree with that and I think we're so much more aware of that as well in terms of you know sometimes we have meetings and discuss about doing a change but we recognise actually we've only changed that class three months ago so let's leave it as it is for now and look at changing it because we recognise that even one small change for a parent's schedule in terms of their weekend you know even if we change the time of the class it can affect it has such a role on effect for everything. So I agree and I do agree with the fact that you know no one does like change and it's making sure that you pick the right time to make that change and that it has been fully communicated before any changes are made and that we're confident that what we're doing is going to work not only for the business but also for the you know the customer the parent so that we've got the best of both worlds really. 

And so with that in mind obviously you guys have kind of built up experience over the years of making those changes and I'm sure you guys are actually really in tune with your parents and built good rapport with them but what advice would you give to another gymnastics club a drama school and just another children's activity business that was looking you know kind of interested in making what would be quite a big change so maybe changing the way in which they bill or changing the way in which their classes are set up but are reluctant to do so not confident to do so worried about doing so what what would be your biggest piece of advice that you could give to them? Allow plenty of time more than you think yeah more than you think it's always more than you think so add on an extra however many weeks or a month or whatever onto the the time frame and yeah allow more time for in-house to process the idea and get used to the change and to learn if there's a new system or you know for them to learn it and also make sure that it is fully communicated to whoever the change is going to affect in terms of parents customers and don't just do don't just do one email and think that you've communicated it and therefore you don't need to do anything else I would say one of the things we do is as well as emails we do call outs after every class so the coach will greet the greet the parents and say as well as saying this is what we've done in the in the session today they'll also say if there is any changes you will have received an email about this but just to let you know and then they'll give details so it'll flag again with the parent oh did I get an email I must check my emails and have a look through and coaches will even say if you haven't received the information do go and speak to reception or give us a call and ask but I would definitely say allow more time than you think I agree with that and make sure that you have communicated it more than you think is necessary to the parents customers whoever it you know the change is going to affect and and you mentioned there about getting coaches on side um in terms of briefing those those call outs at the end of sessions and you also then mentioned earlier on about how difficult it is to communicate internally what kind of skills or tactics have you picked up in terms of being able to deliver actually it sounds like it's a pretty kind of critical part of um how you guys manage changes is that that flow of communication from coaches to to parents how how do you make sure that happens consistently every single time for every single class so I wouldn't say it happened you know most of the time it does happen how we want but sometimes we do have now coaches not totally sure but I would definitely say the weekly meetings that the coaches have and if there is anything that's big myself or Jess would even go into that meeting and update everyone so that we know that we're the ones that have given the information because I know sometimes we find that if it's kind of passed on to a few different people that actually by the time it gets to the person that you need it to get to they heard a totally different version and so I think we find it important to make sure that it's one of communicating with the main team we have also I mean when we moved over to Love Admin during the summer it was the first summer that we moved over we held little mini workshops in-house where we kind of had the tablets and we got the coaches to try it out and to test it and to ask questions and even then we were finding that coaches were actually teaching us things that they found on the system when they're using the tablet to take the registers that we didn't even realize the system did so it was great to have a bit of fencing ideas but I would definitely say that as long as we know that we've communicated it in the admin team so that we all know and then the main people in the admin team communicating communicate it to the main coaches then we are 99.9% sure that the correct information has got got out across the board and then they usually bet on the whatsapp groups to make sure that everybody's seen it and you've done videos before you've done yeah yeah we've done like screen grabs and stuff to send out to all the coaches so that they can see how to do something like for example we've got a competition soon and I did a screen grab so that people could see how like from a parent's perspective how you enter the competition which was I think quite helpful. Yeah I think the element there that you mentioned around the sort of structure that you've got with communication so setting up the the weekly meetings and making sure those lines of communication are consistent so people know that if a change is coming this is how they're going to receive that information I think can often be missed particularly when a business is or a club is scaling and getting bigger that the kind of structure and the order of things tends to go out the window a little bit so it's it's interesting to hear that that was kind of a critical element for you guys because I think that that's quite a common piece that clubs can can work on is is that ability to have a regular moment in time where everybody stops and receives information on what's going on in in a team meeting I think they're really really underused within gymnastics clubs and actually can be really helpful to make sure everybody's on the same page and ask questions other people wouldn't have even thought about so it's great to hear that those they seem to be working pretty well for for you guys so talk talk me through let's um kind of dive into one particular example and kind of see how see how it worked and and see what sort of potential lessons there are for the future so talk talk me through a kind of big change you made recently and and despite all of the good stuff that you guys have got in place the the problems you ran into yeah I think we were gonna talk about um moving to monthly direct debit payments because we used to always do it termly with our classes so every six weeks and I've set up new schedules um and then we'd send out the invoices to the parents and they'd have to log in and then they'd have to pay like process their payments and then we'd send them reminder emails and then then we'd wait a bit and then we'd send them another reminder email and then another reminder okay and then we'd take them off the class uh so it was all a bit of a headache so we've moved to monthly direct debit payments which has mostly I'd say been great there's still quite a few parents who are quite on board with it don't understand but on the whole it's been great we test runics obviously we've got so many gymnasts so we did a small test I think you might have recommended it James or maybe Luke did but we did it with two of our groups um fast track and intermediate classes which are a little longer and they're more likely to continue so we set it up with them about six months in advance and test ran how it works with them and it went so went really well actually didn't it it's great which gave us the confidence to go ahead and do it on the big scale I think the hardest part was getting parents to understand that they didn't have to do anything but they just couldn't comprehend that like well that's a bit harsh I'd say lots of them did understand but there was a like a I don't know 10% who just couldn't wrap their head around the fact that they didn't need to log in anymore that they didn't need to approve payments and that if they wanted to stop they had to let us know that they were stopping even though we'd sent emails explaining exactly what was happening we'd gotten so many people to check the emails like you wrote it Katherine wrote it I checked it my other colleague Zoe checked it we've got all of management team to check it like so many people read these emails and like made little changes and we made it as clear as we possibly could gave step-by-step instructions tried to keep it brief but informative and still parents just couldn't get their head around it you know they couldn't and I think one of the things as well is they thought that they were going to be charged more you know we reassured them one of the first things we said was you're not being charged anymore we're not increasing the prices the price is staying the same which it just means that you're paying on a monthly basis rather than a yeah between eight and ten week term yeah which hopefully you'd actually prefer and we recognize that a lot more clubs do doing that rather than doing it on a termly basis but I think they thought because we were making a change we were therefore going to be charging them more to meet a monthly direct debit so yeah it was I think Jess is right we we felt that we did everything we could internally to make sure that our communication was as clear as possible but we still had that percentage that didn't understand and just yeah it didn't get yeah and there's still some who don't have a direct debit mandate set up with us and we have to call them every month and take payments which is very annoying but it's getting there so do you think there's there's anything you would do differently next time based on the learnings from that obviously you know you guys went through all the communications planned everything out but still kind of ran into some issues do you think that's an inevitable part that you are going to run into some issues and you just got to deal with those or do you think there's any any differences you would make to your approach for the next time you have to do a quite seismic change on on the level of moving all of your billing over I don't know I'd probably uh switch off the phone line please send an email and then not be oh I'm joking I think I do it's difficult because like I said I think we thought and were confident that we had done everything we possibly could in terms of making it as clear as possible we even had posters up around our different centers with like an explanation of everything so even if they hadn't read their email they could refer to that and have a look at it and like there's just an amount of parents that send emails back being like what does this mean and you're like literally copying and pasting so you're like you just read your email please so I felt like that wasn't anything that we could improve on in that way but maybe we could have I think if we were smaller we could have held seminars like open meetings or something but we didn't have the space or the capacity to have over 2,500 parents come into the gym so do you think it's actually realistic and should kind of be factored into kind of project management of change I guess you could call it that you are going to have customers who don't understand and actually that's okay and it shouldn't stop you from completing a change in fact you just need to kind of plan accordingly and make sure you've got the time to respond to those people yeah you just need to expect it I think people no matter what you do some people are just not going to understand or they're not going to take the time to understand it because they're too busy and you just plan that into your life and like we knew as soon as we send the email we've we've always had it planned in that like Zoe would come in early one day to help with the emails and the phone calls you know we you're just always going to get that do you think previously that level of disruption would have sort of put you off introducing an innovative or kind of radical idea into the club and do you think sort of now your mindset has kind of matured I guess in a sense do you feel more confident in introducing a kind of radical or innovative idea regardless of the disruption of course I would say yes I would definitely say yes I think I think one of the things that I've always said to the team before as well is as long as we're confident even if we're like internally feeling a bit like still not sure as long as we show confidence yeah to the parents then that definitely works I also think the reason why we're more willing to make these changes is because of the fact that love admin has freed freed up a lot so much time that actually we can think about how can we improve these things how can we make the system even quicker how can we help the coaches with what they need to to do on love admin and because we have more admin time we can actually sit down and go through things go through things like that with your help and calls and things that we have with you to discuss ideas but it's like Jess said we were able to make sure that we had extra staff in to be able to so when we knew that email was going out we got extra staff in to make sure that they could take the calls they could respond more to the emails well you know before we had this system it would have been all hands on deck just to do the day-to-day running of everything that we wouldn't have had the capacity to be able to say oh yeah can you come in and do that and you're you can just focus on that because there would have been so many other admin things that needed to be done for that and I think that possibly is one of the another reason why we haven't done changes before having this system but we've actually been able to look at the bigger picture and make the most of how it would help us so do you think actually it's a and and I think this is perhaps applicable across the board that people will often feel less confident about making making a big change making an innovative or radical change because their foundations aren't solid in terms of like their cooperation so they'll kind of blame their blame all of that on the change itself and then just not do it whereas actually it's it's a case that once your cooperation is running smoothly and is as efficient as one can kind of hope for actually that's the key to unlocking a confidence to then go okay well what what radical stuff can we can we do different and make a stand out definitely I think you know businesses it's hard enough just keeping going with the day-to-day running of a business sometimes and actually you lose focus on being able to think about moving things forward and how how you can kind of grow the business because you're just trying to keep it going every day and I think the more that any business can get you know get more time to be able to focus on other things and start thinking about that the better and I think that is definitely something that for us we have been able to do more of and also recognize that so many more businesses are doing that moving to online systems and allowing parents to be able to access a system and look at spaces in classes whether it's 11 o'clock at night or six o'clock in the morning before the kids have woken up that actually having something like that rather than having to wait until nine o'clock in the morning when they can ring to speak to someone so I think it's a bit of both it's recognizing that things change and we need to adapt to that and also yeah the fact that we have had more time to be able to sit and think okay how what can we do what changes can we make to help us as a business but also help the parents in terms of how they use the system yeah I think you make two two really excellent points there one being that change isn't optional and you kind of have to because if you stand still then you are actually falling behind and actually the bigger the change you do the the better really and and I think as soon as you realize that it's something you've got to do you you kind of naturally build a little bit more confidence in the fact one I've got to do it so I'm going to find a way rather than just putting your head in the sand and and then I think the second point again goes back to making sure that your cooperation is solid to enable you to kind of take that step away and it's it's it's a phrase that is I've overused massively is the split between working in your business and working on your business and I think when you can get to a place where you don't need to be in your business the entire time and you can start to focus on your business then that's that's where you can really start to start to drive those those improvements and kind of keep keep things moving forward because as much as parents do hate change I think they'd also hate things just standing still because they'd feel like it was just going backwards absolutely and I think one of the things I mean we're very fortunate that the majority of our parents are willing to accept change and I think that this that was proven when we moved over to the love admin system in the first place yes we had those that were pushing it and I know I don't want to do this but I would say the majority of our parents were on board and accepted it after you know the communication we had and I think going over to direct debit I would say again a very high majority of our parents were actually sending us emails saying this is great this is brilliant this is how my son's other clubs work and it just makes it so much easier I don't have to think about anything like we're thinking about it but you don't have to think about it your son's class will just keep running until you tell us that you want it to stop and I think they loved that they were on board so much more with that and it's one of those things that you always think why didn't we do this sooner but it it comes back to what we said near the beginning of this is recognizing that too much change too quickly actually then you put people off because they're like whoa hang on a minute I've only just got used to this and now you're telling me we're doing this what does that mean but yeah it worked so well that once we'd done it we were like why did we not do this sooner which I think is is great and it's it's a good sign so yeah yeah and I think the key bits to take away as we come to the end of the episode is that change doesn't need to be scary if you plan it and you're sure and you're kind of fixed in in terms of what you're doing changes need to be scary as long as you have a structure to pass the information out to people particularly internally and making the most of group forums where people will ask lots of questions and ask different questions that everybody gets the benefit of hearing the answer to but then also not being afraid of your parents and not just assuming that they won't like something just because it's different but just giving it a go anyway and not setting the unrealistic expectation that it's going to be a hundred percent perfect and that the only bar for success is no disruption no questions only good things which is never never going to happen and that doesn't mean that it's been a failure just because some parents haven't haven't got it it's the overall big picture that is that is most most important well thank you very much guys it's been a really fantastic discussion really enjoyed chatting with you and hearing about all of your experiences and I know everybody else listening and will take take great value from from those things as well listen in next time for our next step because podcast or if you want any more information head to loveadmin.com step to success where you'll see loads more information on how you can join our program thanks very much bye