I’ve worked with BodyTonic Pilates in Brooklyn, NY in one way or another since 2005. In college, over the span of about two years, I went from a part-time desk helper to office manager, responsible for hiring, payroll and literally writing the manual on how to do my job. I grew to love the people I worked with, and especially loved working with the owner, Jennifer DeLuca.
So, when she came to me with an ongoing problem she was having with the studio, I was happy to jump in and use logistics to help in any way that I could. After years of following the same system for paying instructors, she wanted to make a fair change that would offer the instructors stable pay while allowing the business to continue to flourish. But the task was daunting, because the pay structure (as it was) was not straightforward. It was based on paying flat fees for services provided, a certain amount for hourly work, that sometimes involved things other than Pliates, upcharges, discounts .. you name it. There was no clear way to objectively look at what teachers were earning and compare it to any proposed new system.
So, I got to work on a massive spreadsheet. I pulled weekly payroll data for seven instructors for the previous three months and dropped it all into a spreadsheet. I then broke that out by service type, hours worked, total pay, PTO earned. All the important markers. From there, I looked at the scenarios that Jennifer was considering for a new pay structure, and laid that over the existing three months of services, hours worked, etc, to see what the instructors would have been paid. I pulled all this data together, along with the revenue those same payroll weeks generated, and made a main summary sheet that showed the changes in percentages and actual dollars. I also added some simple spots to play around with the options, to allow for adjustments once the changes were all calculated. This led to the implementation of a new pay structure for the studio, that simplifies the invoicing process and allows the studio to thrive.