Ummm….I’ll be the first to answer that. YES. I care a lot. 

Whether you believe it or not, parents in your gym are your first customer. Kids are your second customer. If a child wants to cheer, a parent can make or break that decision with a simple yes or no. If a child doesn’t want to cheer, a parent who believes in the lifelong value of your program will encourage their child to keep going.

For that reason, and the reasons we talked about yesterday regarding gym culture, I absolutely care what our parents think of our program and want their experience to be amazing. So, I’ll give you the insider info on what we do each February/March in preparation for the next season.

Coffee & Conversation. If you’re in the Owners Academy, there’s a full system for this, so check it out!

I bring in 6-7 parents from each team and do focus groups. If more parents want to participate, I open my schedule and offer more times, but I like to have 6-7 parents only. This ensures that our quiet parents have to speak up and our louder parents don’t overshadow others because they don’t like silence (that’s me….I get it!) 

The focus group consists of free coffee and cookies in a comfortable room with me and a laptop. I ask them a series of questions relating all the way back to the beginning of the season and how they felt about our tryout process to uniforms, practicewear, the competitions we attended, practice effectiveness, and what they’d like to see for next season. 

During this time, I can usually gauge if a parent is 100% on coming back or if I need to set aside time later to ask them more questions one on one. During this focus group, I ask questions and type the answers so I can think about them later on and debrief my coaches. I don’t really answer questions. If I hear a parent say, “Well, I hated that we didn’t condition at every practice,” I stay quiet. (It’s easy to fire back and say, “Yes we did!” and then others are afraid to speak up.) What you’ll find is, often, other parents say, “Well, you do condition the first 30 minutes, don’t you?” or “You guys gave us tons of homework on Band each week, and we loved that!” If no one sets the record straight, I just make a note to gently follow up afterwards in private so the parent isn’t embarrassed. 

Do you know what a comment like that tells me though? I am not clear on what I’m presenting to the parents! We must not be informing the parents enough of what’s happening at practice, or we need a Tik Tok about our conditioning. I never think, “What a silly comment.” Extreme Ownership says I need to take that comment and think how I can better educate and inform all parents.

Most meetings take 45 minutes to an hour. By not answering questions, I rarely have any drama and usually very little negativity. In fact, it is typically very constructive. 

Could I just send these people a Google Form survey and go from there? Sure. I did that the first season. I sat in tears looking at the anonymous comments and feeling helpless because I couldn’t follow up with uneducated parents or people who gave a problem but no recommended solution. If you’re going to pay me that much each month, I can give you an hour of my time to listen and hear your feedback.

So what happens then? I never say, “Oh, I’ll change that” on the spot (though I sometimes think that.) I always thank them for their feedback, let them know I’ll bring it to the rest of the management team and we’ll present any changes we’d like to make at the Tryout Meeting for Returning Families.

At that meeting, that’s the first slide I go over. I thank them for the time they took to do that focus group the month prior, and I say, “based on your feedback, here are some changes we’re going to implement this season.” Sometimes it’s small like: 

• Pair a new parent with a veteran parent on competition days so they have someone to contact other than the coach.
• Provide a checklist of items needed by which month each season so if it’s out of stock, they have time to order them (white socks, red lipstain, etc.)

Sometimes they’re big(ish) and we had been thinking about it anyway: 

• Leveled tumbling rather than team tumbling.
• Bring back practicewear so they don’t have to think about what to wear anymore!
• Get those cool baseball jerseys everyone else has!

So, whether you do it this way or you’ve had great success with surveys in the past and want to go that route again, I just encourage you to ask for parent feedback. I also recommend you find a way to tell parents when you’ve made changes based on their feedback and thank them for their investment in the program. It will turn complaining parents into those who provide constructive feedback!