How Tappy Toes has supported franchisees through pandemic

Considering a new career?

Have you thought about franchising? If you’re considering a new career, and possibly a franchise, make sure you find a franchisor that will support you through the tough times!

How did we support our franchisees during the pandemic?

Tappy Toes is a dance syllabus created for babies, toddlers and pre-schoolers. Being ordered to ‘lock down’ was absolutely gutting for our franchisees. Here’s how we led them through the crisis…

Think Outside the Box

Not being able to offer in person classes or be allowed to deliver our nursery and pre school sessions basically meant no income whatsoever overnight for our franchisees. However, we weren’t going to lay down and die! We had to come up with a plan… and super quick! So here’s what we did…

Online Classes

Immediately established a way to offer our sessions live and interactive via zoom. We arranged a video call with all franchisees and talked them through the process of setting up their online offering.

We agreed a new pricing structure and monthly membership plan. Updated all CRM systems to allow for this and set about marketing our new offering!

We made sure our new online classes were bookable via all children’s activity booking systems including Happity and Hoop (who’ve sadly not made it through the pandemic!) to make it super easy for new customers to discover us.

Monthly Payments

We immediately cancelled our franchisees monthly payments, including their advertising levy… although we didn’t stop the advertising spend!

We organised Facebook live free demo classes, joined forces with Whats on 4 little ones weekly showcase classes, Upped our fb and google ads and managed to sustain 15-30 students in our online sessions.

New Revenue Streams

We launched our props bags, so parents had their own little bag of tricks to use at home with our online classes and could subsequently use them when we restarted our in person classes to avoid sharing props. These were so popular we sold out within a week!

Reopening

We organised covid 19 safety courses for all teachers and put new systems in place ready for reopening.

Again, we chatted to our franchisees to work out the best way forward with regards to our lesson plans, and came up with adapted structures that prevented any contact between our dance students.

We put measures in place to re open safely and sent guidance to all franchisees regarding this.

• Reduced classes sizes
• Sanitising props
• Spot markers for distancing
• Adapted lesson plans

During all of this we had a new Franchisee launch her business! We supported her as she set up her online offering, having never taught an in person class before! And we are still supporting her now as she transitions into studio classes.

Waiting Lists

Now that classes have resumed, our dance families are returning in their droves. We have satisfied our customers that our classes are well thought out and safely planned inline with government guidelines regarding Covid 19. Our reduced class sizes has meant that many of the classes are fully booked with waiting lists and we’ve had to open additional classes to keep up with demand. What a great position to be in when we can resume standard lesson sizes.

New Franchisees

We also welcomed 3 new franchisees, who launched at the end of October! We trained them up via zoom throughout the lockdown and they couldn’t wait to get going… Alex Turner, our London franchisee launched with 120 children booked in!

Lockdown 2.0

No sooner had they launched, when Lockdown 2.0 hit! However, new Government Guidelines revealed that the government are aware how valuable these classes are to parents and their little ones, and have allowed us to continue. So currently, we have a mixture of online and in person classes, depending on local venues and restrictions. Having this Government recognition has given us even more confidence to know that Tappy Toes can withstand anything the world throws at us! Although 2020 has been a year to remember, in not so fond terms for many reasons, as a business, Tappy Toes has come out stronger and better than ever!

Conclusion

So, if you are looking for a new career right now… perhaps you’ve been made redundant and want to safeguard yourself against that happening again! Maybe the lockdown has made you realise you don’t want to work a 9-5 anymore… or you enjoyed more time spent with family and have decided you want to continue that work/ life balance… or do you just love working with little ones and are passionate about their development…

Whatever your reason for considering a new career, we hope that you will consider Tappy Toes, and we’d love to arrange a video call to tell you more! You can also view our franchise prospectus for further details.