After 15 years of doing it all himself, Jared Giordano let MyStudio "change his whole school"
How a studio owner who spent years processing every payment by hand let MyStudio take it over — and finally trusted his staff, not just himself, to run it. Fifteen years after opening Giordano's ATA Martial Arts, Jared Giordano says MyStudio "completely helped change my whole school."
The challenge
Jared Giordano has run Giordano's ATA Martial Arts for 15 years, since he opened his first school in 2011 at just 21 years old. What started as one school has since grown to two locations.
His reason for opening it is personal. Growing up, Jared was severely bullied in school and struggled with low self-esteem, low confidence, and weak communication skills. At 11, he joined a local martial arts school and fell in love with it from his very first day. "Taekwondo completely changed my life, but it also saved my life." He earned his black belt around age 14 and started learning to teach at the same time — realizing he could turn something that had changed his own life into a career built on helping other people the same way.
As a brand-new school owner, Jared started out using a billing service offered through the organization he's affiliated with. Nobody really taught him how to use it well, so he learned as he went. Eventually that service closed and he was moved to a second billing service — one he had to relearn from scratch.
That second service didn't work out either. Jared pulled out of it as much as he could and ended up handling billing himself: processing every payment and every card, by hand. "It was a big pain in the butt," he said, and it ate up a lot of his time any time a payment needed to be run.
He kept doing it that way for a long time, until his organization began actively promoting MyStudio to member schools. That's what prompted him to take a closer look — hoping it could help him keep track of students, members, payments, and new signups without having to carry all of it himself.
What they did
Jared was nervous going starting with MyStudio. After running everything solo for so long, handing it over to a new system felt like a risk — he worried he'd mess something up or upset his families. That's not how it went.
"It was a little overwhelming in the beginning, but the onboarding process was still very simple, and I was working with Miss Megan and she was absolutely wonderful. She was right there with me to teach me how to do this or that, and she only had to actually teach me once if I ever had a question. After that, I was able to do it on my own... I became very, very thankful. The onboarding process was just fine."
— Jared Giordano
From there, MyStudio handled billing and let him pass processing fees to customers instead of absorbing them, gave families a way to self-serve — download the app, register for events, update their own payment info — and gave his staff enough access that he no longer had to be the only one who knew how it worked.
The results
He stopped absorbing processing fees. With his old billing service — and with running cards himself — Jared didn't have a choice but to eat the processing fees. MyStudio let him pass those fees on to the customer instead. "That saved me a lot of money right there, which I was super, super grateful for."
Setup took time; running it doesn't. The only real time investment was getting everything set up — loading in memberships, setting up retail. "That was the only hard part... but eventually, once it was all set up, then it was an absolute breeze." Families can now download the app, register for events, and update their own payment information without Jared in the middle of it.
He doesn't have to be the only one who knows how it works. Jared checks in on MyStudio practically every day, but he no longer has to run it himself — and he trusts his staff to handle it too. "I'm able to rest easily, knowing that everything will be taken care of accordingly without me having to do it all the time... I can also trust my staff as well, that they're able to take care of things on it rather than just solely me."
"Have you heard of or used MyStudio? They completely helped change my whole school."
— Jared Giordano, on how he'd describe MyStudio to another studio owner in one sentence
He's an advocate without even trying to be. At a World Championships event, Jared struck up a conversation with a family who was on the verge of leaving MyStudio over some difficulty they'd run into. Without realizing that's what he was doing, he walked them through how easy it actually is to use — and the family ended up staying. He also met a fellow studio owner (and, he believes, someone from the MyStudio team) at the same event. "I'm not tooting my own horn or anything, but I'm very happy to be able to introduce MyStudio to anyone... it really helped me, and I think if it can help me, it can help anybody, as long as you give it a chance."