March 20, 2021. The day started out like any other. I checked my calendar to scan the horizon of the day ahead and planned my approach to various items that popped up. I admit I was surprised at how easy the day seemed and though I felt a vague unconscious question rising around the fact of this particular Friday including only one private studio session, I quickly explained it away with my usual go to: Time is elastic under Pandemic Pause.
It wasn't until evening when I got around to checking email that I discovered what had occurred.
Due to an error in the creation of an automated system for scheduling and tracking student appointments, almost an entire day of private sessions were missed. The result? Several students in my private studio found themselves logging on to our private Zoom meetings and watching the time pass as they waited for a teacher who would never show.
As my high school drama teacher was fond of saying: Not good people!
Well, that's all very interesting Roland but why bring this up?
As my dear friend Mary Hood was fond of saying, God is in the details.
To unearth some lessons from this snafu, it might be helpful to begin at the beginning, with the problem I was in the midst of solving in the running of my business.
Over the past few years I've been steadily building relationships with artists working on new works of theatre and film. And as it happens, over time, I find that there are creative people who return to me from time to time, either to address a new pressing issue that's popping up for them in their work or for specific help on the completion of a project.
It's been gratifying to discover I really can help some wonderful artists overcome obstacles getting in the way of their success. As a result my schedule fills up pretty quickly and I was noticing that I was devoting an unsustainable amount of time on emails related to the nuts and bolts of scheduling my own private working sessions.
So when I discovered that Squarespace had introduced a scheduling component, I jumped right in.
But the good news is, I jumped in using a 2-week trial period to give folks a chance to book their own appointments using the interface and flag any problems of questions that might pop up.
So far (fingers crossed) there's just been this one snafu, which was entirely avoidable and my own damn fault. So I think I'm now ready to pull the trigger on switching over to that system entirely.
If you're reading this and you have thoughts about how I might further streamline the back end of my business, please send me a note. And if you're interested in the RT Private Studio, I'd love to hear about your current project(s) and how I might be able to help.
