Get growing
Most studio owners either track nothing or track everything. Both end in the same place: no idea which way things are going.
There is a particular kind of anxiety that comes from running a business on vibes. Last night felt quiet. Is that a problem, or was it raining? You cannot answer, so you worry about it for a week and then a busy Thursday makes you stop worrying, and neither feeling was information.
The fix is not a dashboard. It is four numbers, looked at monthly, written down somewhere you can compare against last month. That is genuinely enough to run a studio well, and it is few enough that you will actually do it.
This guide is deliberately placed before the ads ones. If you cannot tell a good month from a bad one, you cannot tell whether an ad worked, and you will end up spending money to answer a question your own records should have answered for free.
How many people came to you for the first time this month. Not how many classes were booked, not how many website visits: how many distinct humans who had never been before.
This is your front door, and it is the number that answers "is anybody finding us". If it falls for two months in a row, the get-found half of the roadmap is where the work is.
Count it the same way every month, including how you handle somebody who came once two years ago. The consistency matters more than the definition.
Of the people who came for the first time, how many attended again within a month. This is the single most diagnostic number in the whole business, and almost nobody tracks it.
A studio with good visibility and poor return rate is spending money to disappoint strangers, and every additional dollar of marketing makes that worse rather than better. A studio with a great return rate and few new faces has a working product and a visibility problem, which is a much nicer problem.
When these two numbers disagree, believe this one. It tells you where to spend the next month of effort.
Your recurring revenue: what would come in next month if you sold nothing new. Memberships, mostly, plus whatever else renews on its own.
This is the number that changes how it feels to run the place. It is what lets you commit to a room, book an instructor for a term, and take a week off. A studio living entirely on drop-ins restarts from zero every Monday and the owner feels it in their chest.
Growing this deliberately, even slowly, is the difference between a job you cannot leave and a business.
How many members cancelled, and how many regulars quietly stopped appearing. The second group is the larger one and the one no report shows you unless you look.
Growth is arrivals minus departures, and it is entirely possible to have a great month for new students and a worse business than last month. If you only track arrivals you will not see it happening.
The most useful version of this is a short list of names of people who used to come weekly and have not been in a month. That list is worth more than any funnel chart, because you can actually message the people on it.
Followers, likes, page views, impressions, reach. All of them go up when you are busy being visible and none of them tell you whether anybody danced.
They are seductive because they move daily and they are easy to influence. The four above move slowly and are hard to influence, which is exactly what makes them worth trusting.
One exception is worth keeping: the actions on your Google listing, calls and direction requests and clicks to your schedule. Those are near enough to intent to be real.
Same day each month, four numbers, one line in a document. Ten minutes. The value is not in any single month, it is in having twelve of them in a column where a trend is visible.
Weekly is too often. Attendance swings with weather, holidays and school breaks, and reading noise as signal will have you changing things that were working.
When a number moves, resist fixing everything. Change one thing, and see whether next month’s line moves. That is the whole method, and it is more than most studios ever do.
Revenue is the last thing to move and it tells you nothing about why. New students and return rate move first and point at the cause.
Class attendance is noisy. Weekly readings mostly measure the weather and tempt you into changing things that were fine.
Reach is not attendance. It is the easiest number to move and the least connected to whether anybody came.
A month can add more new students than last month and still shrink. Departures are half the equation and the quieter half.
These numbers only exist if attendance and sales are recorded in the same place. Because check-in, class packs and memberships all run through Studio Momo, who came, who came back, and what renews next month are facts in your own system rather than an evening with a spreadsheet.
I run a dance business too, and I have done every step on this page for my own. If you are setting up and something here is not landing, write to me and say where you are at. I will tell you what I would do, whether or not you ever become a customer.
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