Your ability or willingness to take the time to communicate with your customers, your swim lesson parents, can make or break your swim school.  Keep in touch with them via email, and use social media like facebook, twitter, and LinkedIn.  Here’s an example of a recent message I posted on our Swim Lessons Company Facebook [...]

A great New Year’s resolution for swim school owners may be to simply plan better than the year before.   Like Santa Claus, I’m making my list and checking it twice!   So what am I doing right now?  Here’s my first draft of my “To Do’s” for my 2012 Learn-to-Swim season: 1. I email my current [...]

I really enjoy traveling via Amtrak.  Traveling in their View Liner suite is great, and I prefer it any day over flying or a long drive.  But Amtrak is really “missing the boat” on their customer service and their “policies” on their Amtrak Guest Rewards system.  Suddenly they are reminding me of the airlines.  My [...]

New customers are great.  But no customer is more important than the ones you have today. So my first tip in this week’s blog is to make sure that you keep your current customers happy!   Never argue with a customer, and always go above and beyond their expectations so they will tell all their friends [...]

What measures can you take to improve your swim school business?  As the unexpected first place San Francisco Forty-Niners Coach Jim Harbaugh said after yesterday’s win:”WE SPEND A LOT OF TIME ASKING QUESTIONS.” Swim school owners must do the same.  What questions should you be asking?  Here are a number of good ones to get [...]

As the American Red Cross raises it’s fees for swim lesson programs and it’s Water Safety Instructor certification, the interest in an alternative swim instructor certification is on the rise.   One of those alternatives is the Swim Lessons University Swimming Instructor training program. Barb Limbo, Aquatic Director for the Rapid City Aquatics Recreation Department in [...]

How Can You Make Your Swim Instructors Smile? Dear Swim Professor: How would you encourage, insist, demand, or coax an excellent instructor into smiling and quit frowning?  I have tried everything.  He loves what he does… he just doesn’t and cannot display pleasant facial expressions, and has a natural “concerned” look most of the time.  [...]

Are you discouraged when you have swim lesson classes with openings? Are you discouraged when parents only enroll their children in one set of swim lessons a year? Are you discouraged that your learn to swim advertising isn’t working? Take advantage of the SOCIAL BOOM and use FACEBOOK to help increase your swim lessons enrollment.   [...]

The article posted on CNN.com and posted on the USSSA Owners group by Ria Mackay, What Teachers Really Want to Tell Parents is a fabulous article.  Every parent and teacher should read it… I agree, with first hand experience, that many parents take it way too far–exactly as this article points out.  Sadly, when parents [...]

Well our Swim Lessons University Swim Instructor Conference is Las Vegas in the books, but the New Orleans Swim Instructors Conference is just around the corner!  Of course if you missed these, we will hold two more conferences this spring, one in Orlando in February and one in NY in March. As in the years [...]