Krav Maga Seattle armours up with Deputy to fight scheduling headaches!

Krav Maga Seattle is a premium self-defense and fitness studio located in downtown Seattle. Owned and operated by Chau and Catherine Le, they have seen rapid growth in the four years since they opened. KMS currently has over 500 active members who love to train hard and train often in their Krav Maga and fitness classes. “Most people come in for our combination of self-defense and fitness classes,” says Catherine. “In addition to Krav Maga, we also offer kettlebell, heavy bag, strength and conditioning, yoga, and other classes.”

In 2017, to accommodate their growing member base, Chau and Catherine added a second training room, expanding their gym from 4,000 to 6,500 square feet. With the new training room and a more extensive class schedule also came the need to grow their team. In less than a year they doubled their staff, growing from 9 to 18 rockstar team members.

In their first three years of being in business, Chau and Catherine used Excel spreadsheets and Google calendar to manage and track the team’s schedules and payroll. “We were doing everything manually, and it became a lot more labor-intensive as our gym and team grew,” Chau explains. “We now have about 40 classes per week and a much larger team, so scheduling became an issue.”

“It was difficult for us to keep track of which team members were available and unavailable on Google calendar. Employees had to email us their unavailabilities and we had to manually input that information into the calendar. It was error-prone and time-consuming,” said Catherine.

Chau and Catherine also had to do a lot of manual checking to make sure they were not overloading or underutilizing any team members. “It happened a few times where one instructor would have a heavy teaching load while others were not being sufficiently utilized and we would have to go back and redo the instructor schedule to correct for this.”

Timesheets were another battle. Every two weeks they had to manually fill in a separate timesheet for each individual team member, using Google calendar as the information source. This was another labor-intensive and error-prone process.

As our team grew and our monthly scheduling and bi-weekly payroll processes became increasingly complex, Chau knew that there had to be a better solution.

Searching for answers, Chau researched scheduling solutions on Google. “We read a lot of reviews for employee scheduling software and Deputy kept coming up on top.”

Once they rolled out Deputy, they immediately experienced increased efficiency and productivity. “With Deputy, we can easily see how many hours each instructor has, and we can see when our team members are available. We also love that our staff can request time off directly via the app,” says Catherine.

Catherine also utilizes the timesheet features which drastically streamlined their payroll process. “Being able to export all of my payroll data into one spreadsheet is a game changer. We went from a laborious, error-prone payroll process to a streamlined, accurate one.”

Chau and Catherine agree that Deputy has been imperative to their ability to scale and grow their business. “We saw a 75% decrease in time spent doing schedules and payroll. Thanks to Deputy, we can now spend more of our time focusing on providing the best classes and services to our members, which is what we love to do!”