27. Burnout, Motivation and Progress

I am going to be speaking directly to how to organizing a horseback riding coach or instructor’s schedule here, so it will include barn setup, tack organization, ally placement as well as scheduling lessons and training slots but most of these concepts could be used for any appointment based business.

This post will also include the extra organizational steps I have taken post COVID-19, to ensure everyone is safe and has peace of mind while still keeping the flow of lessons relatively the same.

Before I start I want to make a little note for the new instructors and coaches out there. People are always going to complain, you will always have someone that thinks you should customize your entire company structure to fit their needs, I see this so much in this industry. Because clients see us as individuals more than a “school” they respect rules and systems a lot less.

Find what works for you, and stick to your guns. People will adapt. If you want to make changes to an existing client base, do so gradually and warn them about it, be open to feed back but also don’t scrap ideas that you know will make things smoother for you just because one person complained.

Here we go!...

Scheduling App and Online Shared Calendars

There are many calendar and schedule apps out there, but one major down fall is quite a few of them have some pretty bad glitches when it comes to recurring events.

All of my lessons used to be on a week to week basis, meaning clients would call me, or I would call them to setup a new lesson each week. Do not do this! It seems fine when you first start out but you will start to burn out fast on all of the stress of constant schedule changes and lack of consistency, not to mention the shear amount of time and energy it will take to manage that kind of schedule reduces your business unprofitable very quickly. Don’t forget when you are working for 2 hours while watching Netflix on the couch you are still technically “paying” yourself, so if you only made money of one 1 hour lesson that day, your profits just disappeared when you spent that extra time working.

The best app I have found so far is Google Calendar, it offers a stable mobile app and web based version, it can be integrated into your website, used with other apps and is easy to share with others.

It is also stable for reoccurring events, now my schedule consists of weekly or bi-weekly recurring lessons that repeat automatically in my calendar.

My calendar is also shared on my website on a private page for my students, and they can add it to their own schedule using an invite I provide them.

I have 4 different calendars that I maintain within Google Calendar for my business, which seems like a lot but it makes my life and work so much easier. The first is my own personal work one, all lessons get scheduled with in it, I mark the student’s name, and the first 3 letters of the horse’s name, as well as the address of the barn.

The second calendar is for my On-site students, which includes the same information as above, except no address and I add when the preparation time starts, as the scheduled time is always the start of the “arena” time.

Paper Planner

Ever since I experienced a bug with iCal (before I moved to Google) and lost all of my appointments I have been using a Paper planner backup. I use the Simplified Planners (Weekly version) from Emily Leah which can be found on Amazon.

Each week I fill out what’s in my digital calendar and add any to-do’s for the week as well. As most of my appointments are weekly this gives me an extra level of security in case my data is lost.

Scheduling System Chart

This is an important one, even if you only us a paper planner or digital calendar and not both, you absolutely need a Scheduling System Chart to keep track of where lessons are.

Now a little caveat here, do not, under any circumstances take personalized appointment times! This will make it so hard to organize and optimize your time and people will constantly expect more and more flexibility from you. I did this for my first 3 years of teaching, and the bigger I got the more of a nightmare it became.

Instead now I have scheduled class times, I have set days, and time slots that students can pick from. I do get new clients sometimes complain that there isn’t one that works for them, but that is ok. The majority of people think it makes perfect sense, because this is how it works everywhere else in the world.

I have a chart that displays the empty chart without who is scheduled in it for insult ration purposes, then I have another that has everyones name in the slot they chose. This is not a schedule, but rather an organizational chart so I can see where everyone is supposed to be if they happen to have a lesson that day. This system is great after a long break like we just had from the confinement....