Facilities

24 Dec

Readying Your Studio for 2012

At the top of my list of to-do’s over the holiday break? Whipping my studio into shape for the new year. It was badly in need of reorganization after the end-of-semester frenzy — and I’m pretty sure mine isn’t the only one!

That, of course begs the question: is your studio ready for 2012?

I started to feel a little overwhelmed as I wrote down all the tasks involved, but actually tackling them one by one was surprisingly enjoyable. The very best and most satisfying part was crossing them off the list, which looked like this:

06 May

How I get things done. Finding tools and using them.

by admin

in Facilities, Performance, Staff Management

Comments

FourHourWorkWeek I have just finished reading both Tim Ferris’ book, ‘The Four Hour Work Week’ & Michael E Gerber’s, ‘The E Myth Revisited.’ They are both wonderful reads for generating new and interesting angles on how to manage your studio or school. Today I wanted to discuss some of the tools I have implemented, based in part on Ferris’ suggestions, on getting tasks done for my music school, the Brooklyn Music Factory.I use an iMac desktop, an iPad, and an iPhone regularly everyday so I need all applications to be Mac friendly and I really want them to support all three devices (though they don’t always do it equally well.)

Tool #1:
Studio Helper
I use this daily to track all clients and outstanding balances due. I encourage all clients to use the Paypal ‘make a payment’ link and so all payments flow easily into Paypal and then into Studio Helper. Essential!

Tool #2:
Paypal App
I have the Paypal App on both my iPhone and my iPad. I regularly use it to quickly withdraw funds from my Paypal account and deposit them into my Citi business account. It takes less than a minute and can happen from anywhere I happen to be in the world.

Tool #3:
Evernote
An absolutely essential tool for me that I use to basically capture any and every idea I have about how I can grow my business. For example, recently I was on the hunt for a new commercial space to hour our school. I walked the neighborhood and snapped photos on my iPhone (in Evernote) of anything I saw I liked. I then added any text notes concerning details about each property (though the contact info was already usually in the photo). I finally made a single ‘notebook’ within Evernote that included all the photos of properties and my text. After synching with my iMac at home, I could organize and decide which properties seemed worth following up on.

06 Nov