How to Staff and Scale a Pottery Studio (Without Losing Control of It)

How to Staff and Scale a Pottery Studio (Without Losing Control of It)

In my last two posts, I walked through how Mud Hut started and how we built four connected revenue streams. This post is about the part that makes those streams actually function: the people and the systems running underneath them.

Growth without systems just means you are busier. It does not mean the business is actually working better. Here is what we built, in the order we built it, and what I would tell another studio owner trying to figure out the same thing.

Staffing: hire for function, not for “help”

I brought on my first hire within the first quarter, because I physically could not run classes, manage bookings, and handle marketing alone. That hire was general support. As the studio grew, the roles got more specific, and that specificity mattered.

We now have four distinct staff functions. Instructors teach the classes, which is the core of what people are paying for and not something to compromise on. Studio techs handle kiln loading and unloading, glaze management, and the physical upkeep of the studio, work that is constant, technical, and completely invisible to most customers, but if it stops happening, everything stops happening. We have a barista who runs our coffee cart during our weekly coffee and clay class, which is a small detail that makes a specific class feel like an experience rather than just a lesson. And more recently, we brought on a dedicated social media manager to handle content creation, posts and reels specifically, because that work had become its own full-time job and was pulling time away from everything else.

The lesson here is not “hire more people.” It is hire for the function that is actually constraining your growth. Early on, that constraint was general capacity. Once we had volume, the constraint became technical, kilns and glaze do not run themselves, and that is when the studio tech role made sense. More recently, the constraint became visibility and content, social media had grown from something we could manage in spare moments to something that needed real, consistent attention, so we hired specifically for it. Look at what is actually bottlenecking you before you decide who to hire next.

Booking systems: one tool, four revenue streams

We run everything through Acuity Scheduling, and it manages all four of our revenue streams: classes, memberships, private events, and walk-ins. That includes package tracking, membership management, and waitlists across the board.

This matters more than it sounds like it should. When one system holds the full picture of a customer’s relationship with the studio, whether they started with a single class, hold a membership, or first came in through a private event, your team can actually see the full picture and act on it. If classes lived in one system and memberships in another, that visibility disappears, and so does your ability to spot the patterns that turn a one-time visitor into a long-term customer.

The transition to a real booking system was relatively smooth for us, which is worth saying because I know that is not everyone’s experience. The smoothest path is choosing the right system before manual scheduling becomes unmanageable, not after.

What I would tell you if you are scaling right now

Hire for the actual constraint, not for generic relief. If you are drowning in everything, you probably need general support first. As you grow, the constraint shifts, ours moved from general capacity, to technical upkeep, to content and visibility, and each shift called for a different hire.

Choose one booking system that can hold your entire business, not just one piece of it. If you are running classes through one tool and memberships through a spreadsheet, you are building blind spots into your own operation.

Do not wait for a breaking point to make the change. We made the move to a real booking system before things became unmanageable, and that timing made the transition far easier than it would have been if we had waited for a crisis to force it.

Small experiential details matter, even in operations. A barista at a coffee and clay class is not solving a staffing crisis. It is making one specific offering more memorable, and that is its own kind of business decision worth making deliberately.

This is the third in a short series I am writing for fellow studio owners on what it actually takes to build and scale a pottery or art studio. If you are working through your own staffing or systems decisions, that is exactly the kind of work I help studio owners with through pottery studio consulting.

Tricia Fox is the founder of Mud Hut Pottery & Art Studio in Riverside, California, which she grew to nearly $900,000 in annual revenue in under three years. She now consults with fellow studio owners on growth, systems, and building a studio business that works. Learn more at triciafox.org/pottery-studio-consulting.