There are so many “easier” businesses to run than a sports facility, but we do it because we’re passionate about helping our kids, their friends, and other youth in the community become better athletes, and ultimately better people. This noble task can turn into a ton of day-to-day grunt work—finding coaches, figuring out how to pay them, front desk staffing, and programming, to name a few. This is all on top of the other “stuff”—angry parents, double bookings, teams making changes, coaches getting sick…the list seems endless!
What ends up happening is you spend more time on your computer and phone than you do in the cages or on the turf. The fire that inspired you to start is being dampened by the day-to-day minutia.
Now, as the founder of Swift (a facility management and software company), I’m obviously biased, but I do want to share the right attributes that you should be looking for when making a facility software decision, regardless of which tool you choose:
1. Online Booking and Mobile Friendliness
A minimum expectation is that your customers should be able to book and pay on their phones. Tens of thousands of athletes book using Swift every day, and 95% of these happen on the phone. For facilities, switching to Swift’s mobile friendly booking experience has led to a 10-30% increase in revenue from new customers.
2. Reschedules and Cancellations
Your customers should also be able to reschedule or cancel on their own—without needing to contact you. This might seem like a minor detail, but as a business owner, your goal should be to figure out ways to run and grow your facility on auto-pilot. Swift gives athletes and parents a self-serve way to reschedule or cancel their bookings. This has saved hundreds of hours of work (phone calls, texts, emails) at our facilities.
3. Simple and Fast Scheduling
No matter how hard you try to send everyone online, not every customer will do it. At some point, you or your staff will need to be able to enter bookings manually. Make sure that the software you choose has an easy-to-understand calendar view to see your facility’s bookings at a glance, quick drag-and-drop scheduling, a simple way to manage recurring bookings, and a way to collect payments online.
4. Migration and Customer Support
It can be difficult to update any computer software once you’re used to an earlier version. Some of the best ways to make the jump include guided migration, free training, and an easy way to reach out to someone who understands your business via chat, email, or phone. Quality customer service is becoming more uncommon. Be sure to vet for this.
5. Pricing
While it’s important to keep your costs low as a small business, it’s equally important to know where to bargain and where to pay for value. The right tool, as shown earlier, can add thousands of dollars per year to your bottom line, on top of giving you hours of free time you can’t otherwise get back! This is not theoretical—we’ve seen these kinds of “returns” on almost every facility that has joined Swift.
This is the kind of value you should look for. High-quality software should pay for itself, and you should ask for nothing less. At the end of the day, the right software should feel like a superpower. It should help you grow your business, save you time, and most importantly, make running the day-to-day significantly easier and more enjoyable. Investing time in choosing the right one will pay off in spades.
Of course, Swift is designed with all these factors in mind. But regardless of which tool you go with, it’s important to hold them accountable to this criteria.
If you’d like to learn more about this topic, be sure to check out the ABCA Webinar hosted by Swift in the ABCA Video Library. Visit runswiftapp.com or email [email protected].