3 Mistakes Trade School Owners Can’t Afford to Make (But Most Still Do) Part 1

If your calendar is full of admin tasks, endless emails, and answering the same 5 questions on repeat… congrats.

You’ve officially become your school’s most overpaid assistant.

Here’s the hard truth:
Most trade school owners don’t own a business.
They own a 90-hour-a-week job with no PTO and a very needy boss (aka, themselves).

And the biggest culprit?
Failure to automate or delegate the “busy work.”

You should not be:

• Responding to payment issues manually

• Uploading student docs one by one

• Chasing down email replies

• Scheduling calls on sticky notes

Use tools like:

• Zapier to connect platforms

• Calendly for scheduling

• Slack/ClickUp/Asana for team comms

• And most importantly, delegate low-level tasks to your team.

This frees you to do what actually grows the school: 👉 Partnerships, outreach, strategy, and innovation.

Stat check:
A 2024 report showed that small business owners who automated 25% of their back-end admin work increased their monthly revenue by 37% on average.

Real talk:
You can’t scale while doing $10/hour tasks.
You’re the CEO — not customer support.

Summary:
Stop being the bottleneck. Automate and delegate like your sanity (and school growth) depends on it — because it does.

Next up:

Why most owners don’t coach their teams enough — and how it’s costing them 6-figures a year, here’s to making moves!

Until next time, control what YOU can control, take action on something, and don’t forget to smile.

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