The Key to Effective Learning Center Management: An All-in-One LCM Platform

Learning Center Management

Operating a learning center presents a wide range of challenges on a daily basis. From managing staff and students to completing administrative tasks and creating a valuable curriculum, it can be difficult for managers to keep up with the demands of their facility.

This creates a great deal of stress, friction, and headaches, which can compromise the quality of education your center provides for its students.

These problems are exacerbated by filing systems and software programs that don’t work together or flow seamlessly from one function to another. Through my time working with educators, I realized that most learning centers use multiple different programs to perform their day-to-day tasks.

• They have one software program for scheduling classes and tracking staff hours.
• Their accounting department has their own software for managing the budget and completing payroll.
• They use a separate learning management platform to create their curriculum and share it with stakeholders and parents.
• And they keep track of student progress and communicate with parents through insecure and inconsistent online or offline documents.

The reality is that this kind of operation is expensive and unsustainable, and it prevents these learning centers from scaling up.

Even for the most seasoned educators, navigating all of these programs and processes can be a nightmare. 

After reaching out to 147 learning center operators to get some feedback on their current system, I noticed three common pain points amongst different facilities.

The responses were quite enlightening, and they illuminated more issues that learning centers are experiencing due to disconnected internal systems.

These are some of the replies that shed light on the issues faced by learning center operators:

• “I feel that there’s a lot of paperwork that business owners have to complete. Thus, not having the ability to effectively manage the center. Additionally, as a business owner, I am always trying to discover new and innovative ideas to increase profits.”
• “Misinformation from school counselors who seem to think supplemental instruction is a waste of family investment or school evaluators suggesting the help will throw off their data if in the assessment process or while involved in a reading program at school…as if data collection has more value than seeing the incredible results we have been able to inspire.”
• “My largest concern is silos. Every department tends to operate within their own silo, frequently with their own system. We need to have systems that span the campus, allowing easier data sharing.”
• “All of the above, especially one and three. Corporate has no fully integrated operating system that talks to QuickBooks or offers any real solution to financial management and profitability. This makes real time data and corresponding business decisions almost impossible.”

So, what does this tell us?

After breaking down their respective responses, I narrowed down four common pain points experienced by learning center staff and stakeholders:

1. Staff and managers are spending too much time on manual processes to manage their learning centers.

Many learning centers require their staff to employ multiple systems for simple tasks such as tracking student progress, scheduling classes & staff hours, managing class budgets & payroll, and communicating with parents.

Since these systems are not connected, the manual effort to complete these jobs takes up a great deal of time that would be better spent on high-leverage tasks. Without a proper system in place to manage all of the different aspects of learning center operations, time will continue to be wasted on manual administrative efforts, which makes it impossible to scale the business.

2. The lack of visibility on student progress is causing them to lose clients, and the school system does not see the value of supplementary education.

Overall, the top priority of any learning center is to provide enhanced education opportunities and supplementary learning for students. If educators don’t have the ability to clearly communicate student progress to their parents, it becomes difficult for them to prove that their services are providing valuable learning opportunities. This causes many parents to withdraw their students from learning center programs.

To build a scalable learning center that is both profitable and provides high-quality education, educators must be able to clearly track, assess, and communicate student progress. These programs should work with schools to complement student learning, rather than being used to fill in education gaps, but the first step is gaining clarity on student progress.

3. Every department is using their own processes and programs, resulting in data silos that make collaboration and communication difficult.

Learning centers are plagued by data silos that isolate crucial information and data, making it virtually impossible for multiple departments or stakeholders to communicate and collaborate with ease.

Instead of having different systems for tracking student progress, creating the curriculum, managing budgets, and training staff, an all-inclusive platform facilitates fast communication and offers easy-access to all pertinent data. This minimizes the time staff spend tracking down information and waiting for responses.

4. They do not have a robust solution to run the business efficiently while improving profitability without compromising the quality of their education.

Because of the cost of operating an education facility, many learning centers end up being forced to choose between providing a high-quality education and keeping their doors open. They lack a robust solution for running and scaling their business with confidence.

Instead of creating proactive solutions to issues, managers are forced to deal with stacks of paperwork and must put out fires on a daily basis. This puts a great deal of constraint on their budget and prevents them from being able to scale.

Unfortunately for most learning center leaders, their efforts to improve their operations can create more problems than they solve. 

Based on the responses from our survey, many managers seek out the wrong solutions, creating more headaches down the road.

Here is a breakdown of the two most common solutions that simply DON’T work:

1. Choosing a LIMITED solution

Whether they are unaware of their own needs or are simply patching together systems to solve their list of problems, many managers opt for the quick-fix solution of choosing a learning management system software that includes some — but rarely ALL — of the features they need.

They start down the path with one company and one software program, hoping it will solve their operations issues. Unfortunately, by the time they realize this system doesn’t include all of the features they need, their facility has already made the transition to the new program.

The result is an expensive, inconvenient system doesn’t solve their problems and that can’t scale with them as they grow. For many managers, the headaches caused by limited solutions are more expensive and time-consuming than their previous system.

2. Building their OWN solution

Alternatively, many learning center operators opt to build their own solution. The idea is that — if they build it in-house — they can create a system tailored to their specific needs. With that goal in mind, they hire a team of tech experts to design their custom platform and sink a ton of time and money into the project.

Sometimes, this works…

However, for it to be a success, it requires a comprehensive strategic plan that directly addresses ALL of the key issues your center is struggling to navigate.

More often than not, building your own system sheds light on process issues you didn’t even know you had, which ends up requiring a complete overhaul of your facility’s operations.

In the end, you’ve adjusted all of your operations to suit a new system, rather than building the system to suit your needs. This long, expensive journey can still end with an imperfect solution, often making it more effort than it’s worth.

Our Solution: An All-in-One Learning CENTER Management Platform

As a tech expert with a passion for education, I came to the realization that these centers don’t need another Learning Management system — they need a Learning CENTER Management system.

Rather than completing these tasks in multiple different programs, learning centers need a comprehensive platform that can manage ALL of their tasks in one convenient place.

So, that’s what we built. 

Our innovative Learning Center Management (LCM) Platform — known as Calimatic — takes the most time-consuming and expensive tasks involved with managing learning centers and houses them in one intuitive, easy-to-use platform. This platform can be used campus-wide for a variety of different tasks, making it easy to communicate and collaborate with parents, students, staff in other departments, and franchisees.

We identified the top six pain points suffered by learning center operators and built our platform to meet your needs:

1. Class & Event Management

For many learning centers, managing classes requires a huge amount of administrative labour.

Imagine being able to create custom enrollment forms and track attendance while simultaneously processing billing payments and integrating class information with your website — all in the same place.

Our innovative platform combines all of the elements of Learning Management and Learning CENTER Management, blending strategy and operations to create one convenient, all-inclusive system.

2. Student Enrichment

Tracking student progress is a crucial aspect of delivering a high-quality education.

Calimatic lets you create Kanban-style class boards for students, making it easy to track their progress. Whether you are creating online and offline assessments or tracking points systems, our platform makes it easy to identify, analyse, and communicate student progress to parents, schools, and other stakeholders.

This streamlined workflow process removes the need for insecure documents and makes it easy for educators to communicate student information with confidence.

3. Learning Content Management

Beyond the nuts-and-bolts of managing classes and tracking student progress, Calimatic also includes all the elements of learning content management including content creation, curriculum-building, and storage.

An intuitive platform, Calimatic lets you create customized fields tailored to your facility’s needs. This also includes unlimited cloud storage, so you can create and share content with stakeholders at the click of a button.

For franchises with multiple locations, this lets you seamlessly standardize content in real time. With our platform, strategy and operations can exist simultaneously, making it easier for your team to coordinate on learning goals and implement solutions.

4. Staff Management

Managing staff doesn’t have to be a headache.

Calimatic lets you manage and track your instructors in one simple system, which also includes individual staff & class boards and task assignments. By implementing a standardized training and assessment process, you can ensure all staff in your facility meet your standards.

Our platform also includes intuitive staff scheduling calendars for managing time cards, time-off, and expenses while also providing seamless integration to Quickbooks and other accounting software. The result is a team of high-quality staff and a management system that runs like clockwork.

5. Franchise/Center Management

Managing and operating a single learning center can be overwhelming — let alone managing multiple franchises.

Franchise enrollments present their own obstacles, such as ensuring a standardized training and onboarding process that meets your education standards. However, once multiple franchises are operating, inventory management and budget forecasting become much more complex.

Our franchise management software platform makes it easy to share information and communicate with franchisees. By utilizing a single cloud-based platform, you can be sure that all information is up-to-date, so every franchisee is always on the same page. This end-to-end visibility helps ensure the success of each franchise and lets you seamlessly manage multiple locations.

6. Customer Relationship Management

Despite being a customer-facing service, many learning centers fail to effectively manage their customer relationships — they forget that marketing and CRM are crucial aspects of any successful business. Calimatic, an EdTech Software, makes tracking and managing client relationships simple and convenient.

From creating custom marketing assets to sharing them with parents and prospects via bulk email or SMS, all of your marketing needs can be handled in one convenient location. This makes it easier to help leads navigate the buying process and provides a centralized location for all outgoing marketing content.

By combining these six aspects of learning center management in one convenient platform, you will be able to seamlessly manage all aspects of your learning center’s finances and operations.

Through minimizing the headaches caused by using multiple different systems, the time and energy saved can be spent on more high-leverage tasks. This will dramatically increase the quality of your education services.

Beyond that, Calimatic is designed to scale with you as you grow or add additional franchises, so you can increase your profits and attract new customers without worrying about how you can deliver for them.

The bottom line: our innovative, all-in-one platform combines all aspects of Learning Management and Learning CENTER Management, allowing you to seamlessly manage multiple facilities in a way that is sustainable, scalable, and ensures a high standard of education. 

If this sounds intriguing, I’d like to invite you to a brief Platform Demo to show you how Calimatic works. During this call, we can address your needs in more detail and show you how our platform can help solve your most urgent pain points.

For students, parents, and staff, this will revolutionize the way your learning center operates, resulting in enhanced learning opportunities and a healthy bottom line.

Feel free to leave a comment on this article as well if you’d like clarification on how Calimatic can support the growth of your learning center!