You love skiing and you love teaching, which has naturally led you to be a snow skiing coach or instructor. That’s great! What isn’t great is that now you face all of the struggles of time management that coaches around the world experience.
How do you engage with your clients, build your client base, while taking care of administrative tasks, and negotiate your downtime? It’s a lot to juggle!
Booking Clients and Keeping Them
Unless you’re working purely with a resort and not taking on private sessions, you probably won’t have to spend a lot of your time focusing on booking clients. The downside here is that as soon as your resort decides the season is over, so are you.
However, in areas like California, and Colorado, the season could go on for much longer after the resort has decided to cut back on staff. What do you do? You start booking your own clients with a time slot booking web app and now you’re in the same boat as the other coaches.
Clients continue to book based on how satisfied they are with their first session. They are usually pretty consistent afterward unless there is a particularly bad experience. So always be on your toes to correct struggling clients gently and positively and never lose your focus on safety!
Time Slot Pro
Using an app for your clients to book appointments with you makes it easy on them but also frees up your time. The less time you spend bent over an appointment book and being on the phone is more time you can spend with clients. It also means that this is less time you have to delegate towards administrative tasks.
Get Paid with Time Slot Pro
Time Slot Pro offers another great feature; it lets your clients pay you through the app. After setting everything up it is easy for your clients to log in and pay you. For you, this means that you aren’t spending a ton of your time writing invoices and logging them into a software database.
Prepare for the Time Slot!
If there is anything you can do to get the most out of your coaching sessions, and help your clients get the most out of it too, prepare. Before showing up for your session ensure you have anything you could ever need. Extra first aid supplies, sunscreen and any of your personal tools you use to help a beginner or experienced skier.
Next, get to your location early. Be sure you are easy to see and keep an eye out for anyone who looks lost. Although your repeat clients will likely know where to find you as they increase in skill level you will likely want to train with them on different runs or trails. You don’t want your client to lose time they paid for because they couldn’t find you. This is one source of low client satisfaction and can lead to fewer bookings!
Keep Time Available for Questions
It is easy for beginners to feel like their questions are stupid, but experienced skiers you might be working who are trying to improve the skill level or form can be equally quiet about questions. Why? Who knows? What is important is to start each session with a five or ten-minute window for questions.
Then negotiate another five minutes at the end of your session also. Explaining when the time for questions is will put a bit of pressure on your clients to actually ask before you get going. This means fewer stops in the middle of instruction to answer a question they had before they started.
Use these methods for proper time management for snow skiing coaches in practice sessions and to increase your bookings!