Past work: local school

Creating workflows, new processes, and database administration at a local karate school

Note: I’ve omitted identifying information about the local karate school I worked at since the vast majority of the students are children, and I am mindful of disclosing any information closely related to their activities. Additionally, any screenshot of my work here will be heavily redacted, again for the purposes of privacy.

As Office Manager at the dojo, I worked mainly with the School Director and the various instructors to ensure office and administrative processes ran smoothly, and also assisted with the sales process, guiding prospective students and their families through our introduction program. Details of some of my responsibilities included:

• Creating and documenting a daily office opening routine

• Implementing Head Office process and procedures and making adjustments and improvements as they applied to our location

• Summer Camp program: creating or improving processes and procedures around registration, drop off and pick up, emergency contact documentation, etc.

• Drafting procedures around documenting and displaying student belt promotions to enhance the sense of pride and achievement among students, their families, and the teachers

• Auditing the process around the introduction program and working with the School Director and instructors in making improvements to ensure that prospective students and families were receiving the best experience and were given proper follow up, and creating a workflow for everyone to reference (see below screencapture image)

A large portion of my focus was directed towards the administration of our student database using an MMS (Membership Management Software). I had no prior experience with this software and was provided with very basic training, which I supplemented by viewing tutorial videos and working with help desk agents. Over time, I started several initiatives, some of which included:

• Overall update of student records: reviewing student status (active or inactive), updating information such as address, phone numbers, email addresses, missed rankings, photos, allergies/medical conditions, etc.

• Creating various reports around sales performances and goals

• Consolidating paper-based prospect information into the prospect or "Leads" section of the database for better organization and tracking

• Creating reports to review, reconcile and update student memberships; regularly pulling reports on expired or soon to expire memberships, following up on membership renewals, etc.

As with the other examples of my previous work, there was no opportunity to benchmark or accurate data to work with in order to quantitatively measure the outcomes of the work I put in place. However, in my casual interactions with the dojo instructors, students, and their families, many appreciated the consistency in some of the new processes around Summer Camp and the introduction program.