Do all of your Members have a photo?

Who cares if students have a photo on file or not?

If you don't care about this yet, you're missing out on some of the cool features in Zen Planner (the Faceboard, the Zen Planner Staff App, etc) - none of which are any fun when you don't have photos. And, by the the time you recognize the need for them, you may be too far behind to catch up.

It might seem complex at first glance, but the steps below are actually pretty simple and will take about 15-20 minutes to set up.  After the initial setup, you'll want to spend 5 minutes every so often to clean up your database to ensure that everyone has a photo.  Are you with me?

Let's do this.

Systemizing your New Member Process

In this article, I'm going to show you what we do when a new student enrolls. We want to ensure that we are delivering a consistently awesome experience.  To us, this is important because it establishes our relationship, communicates our brand, and ensures our culture.

Top 5 Reasons Why I Switched to a Zen Planner Website

Why I decided to look at yet another website template option

There are obviously tons of web design companies out there that offer template based websites for small businesses, and there are numerous Wordpress templates available that would work nicely for most gyms. There are even a few companies that "specialize" in martial arts and fitness studio websites.  So, this begs the question: why would I think there needs to be another option?

First off, over the last 14 years I've tried all the other options and more.  I coded our first website in html, hired a pro for our 2nd site, switched to Wordpress, and then experienced a handful of different template sites in recent years. As a Zen Planner user, I could not be happier that Zen Planner has expanded into this space.  Here are my Top 5 reasons for wanting a Zen Planner website...

How to Send Emails in Zen Planner

There are a bunch of ways to send emails in Zen Planner, and in this article, I'll be quickly covering how to:

1. Send email through Zen Planner automatically
2. Send email from your Document Templates
3. Send email from a Contact's Profile
4. Send email to the contacts in a specific report

How to Remind Your Staff to Follow Up - Automatically!

In this video, I walk you through how I send automatic emails to my staff regarding students within Zen Planner.  You can use this same technique to remind staff members or yourself about so many things including:
 - Members who are passed due
 - Members who are injured and need to be checked up on
 - Members who need a congratulations for something
 - Members who have birthdays (Have staff make a phone call rather than an auto-birthday email!)
 - and so much more!

Make sure you also check out my 5 Tips on Making Automations in Zen Planner article as well!

5 Tips for Creating Automatic Emails in Zen Planner

Zen Planner has a powerful auto-emailer, and although it's not perfect - it is THE BEST one native to a fitness or martial arts crm app that I've found.   Below are the tips that I train my staff to follow when creating automatic emails in Zen Planner.

Comparing Martial Art CRMs

This Blog is Launched!

Hey Zen Planner Users!

My name is Austin - What's up!  I use Zen Planner every day in my business where my family and I teach Martial Arts and Fitness classes in Santa Barbara.  I've created a TON of training videos and documents for our staff because with 16 staff members and 450 students, it's super important that we keep everything systemized.

After a solid year of doing all of this work, I thought - "Hey, why don't I share this with the world?"  Thus, this blog was born.

Zen Planner has made things so much easier for me at my business, that I now have time to do fun things like start a blog for fun!  I hope it can do the same for you.

Lastly, just to be super transparent, I am planning on offering some paid-for services in the future to help other schools set things up as I have.  This may include pre-made templates and white labeled training documents for you to use in your business.  Also, after bugging Zen Planner forever to create an actual referral program, they have!  So, if you sign up for Zen Planner using my link, I'll get a finder's fee.  You'll also get $100 off your Zen Planner membership, so it's a win-win.

Thanks for stopping by, and seriously - ASK ME ANYTHING!  I'd love to help.

- Austin