Friday 28th August 2015

With children back to school next week it is now time to start organising and promoting your October half-term holiday courses. To help you, we have new and unique Halloween leaflets and merchandise available from 1st September on the Irongate store.

Check out the new design here.

How to order your Bespoke Halloween Holiday Leaflets...

The marketing team have ensured the new October Half-Term leaflets and merchandising are available earlier that they ever have been in previous years. Order yours now via the IronGate platform.

In August, the finance team processed a whopping £455,584 of your payments.

Since last week’s Weekly News Update we’ve had a further six business owners pre register for the next Social Media course.

If you haven’t yet pre registered and need convincing, here are 10 ways social media marketing will improve your business:

1. Increase brand recognition - Every opportunity you have to share your content and increase your visibility is valuable. Your social media networks are just new channels for your brand.
2. Improve brand loyalty - According to a report published by Texas++Tech University, brands who engage on social media channels enjoy higher loyalty from their customers.
3. More opportunities to convert - Every post you make on a social media platform is an opportunity for customers to convert. When you build a following, you’ll simultaneously have access to new customers, recent customers, and old customers, and you’ll be able to interact with all of them.

The marketing team have created 15 Support Packages all designed to compliment your business in the short and long term. These are guaranteed to support your marketing strategy and prices start from as little as £39.

Check out this excellent graphic titled ‘Business Growth Power Schedule’ created by PPA’s Creative Director, Frankie Worthington.

Did you tune in to the Finance ‘GoToMeeting’ session this week hosted by Steve Girling? If you didn’t get a chance, please follow this link to view the session now. Please note, given the size of these video files, you will firstly need to download them from Dropbox.

Monday’s session will focus on Marketing and you’ll be joined by Marketing Director, Luke Miles. To book onto Luke’s session, simply email James Jennison.

The marketing team have invested time looking at the customer journey this week and how we can enhance this through a series of automated communications to parents. We’ve already begun investigating how these will integrate within the current BMS database and all the possible variants within the system. Watch this space!

Do you have questions about the new apprenticeship scheme with Creative Sport & Leisure? Skills & compliance have put some FAQ’s together to help support you with the new process. These can be found on the Resource section of the BMS, under Recruitment and titled ‘Apprenticeship FAQ’s’.

We are delighted to announce the completion of the Finance Operations Manual which has now been added to the BMS - Resource - Finance section.

Like all of our operating manuals it can be accessed by all franchisees, licensees and business managers, whether they are new to the business or just want a refresher. This manual covers bookkeeping, cash flow, profit & loss, balance sheets, budgeting, forecasting, VAT and financial analysis.

Accompanying the manual will be a brand new E-Learning finance module that will be going live next month. Finance Director, Steve Girling will also be hosting a finance webinar every term to cover any questions or queries you may have around the subject.

We’d like to thank you for submitting your feedback in the Weekly News Update survey. If you haven’t, it’s not too late; it will take just five minutes to help us take the newsletter to the next level.

We’re always striving to make sure we provide you with relevant information to support your business, so your feedback is invaluable.

As September is quickly approaching, it’s important that you have put the correct plans in place in order for your business to grow quickly and efficiently. Frankie, Creative Director for PPA has put together five helpful tips on how you can do this with minimal disruption but maximum impact!

1. Satisfy your current customers
   This reduces customer turnover (churn), meaning you no longer have to find new customers to replace existing customers that have stopped buying from you due...

On researching the phrase ’40 days and 40 nights*’ Glenn Hoy from TIME Associates was left a little disappointed to find out it just means, ‘a really long time’ and nothing more significant or profound.

For PEG business owners it’s the time between the schools broke up and today’s newsletter.

Glenn explains more...

‘In truth this is probably the most significant period of time in your business calendar for your strategic, tactical and operational planning for sales. I’ve been very impressed that I’ve had more communications this summer about up-selling in existing schools and thoughts on getting meetings at prospect schools. We can help you grow your business in September, give me a shout”

We thought you would find it useful to create a Weekly News Update archive housing previous newsletters from this academic year.

‘Read more’ to catch up on any news you may have missed.