Summer is right around the corner and I've been hearing a lot of teacher's concerns for the upcoming student slump. For those of you that aren't familiar, this is THE SEASON of music teacher stress. Not tax season, not recital season... summer vacation.
Every year, our primary source of income flocks to beaches, campgrounds, and conveniently leaves their instruments and us teachers back home to sit and wait in a stew of anxiety about how we're going to pay our bills for the next three months.
I've been a private music teacher for fourteen years and in that time I've been through a lot of tight summers and learned so much about running a business. My hope is that this post can provide another teacher some validation, comfort, and a much needed distraction with ideas to make next summer (and the entire year for that matter) easier!
I started teaching lessons pretty much the same way most teachers do: I was a young college student just trying to make ends meet. I'd been in piano lessons since I was four, so I figured I'd seen how my teachers did it, it couldn't be that hard could it?
Now I'm not going to go into the numerous things about teaching I learned along the way (and am continuing to learn every day). That's a topic for many other posts that I plan to write. But what I am going to talk about is the importance of establishing your studio policies.
I started out just charging students by the lesson. I'd show up at our prearranged time and they'd just pay me after the lesson. If they were gone one week or needed to cancel, I ate the cost. As a long-time student, I just assumed this was how things worked so I didn't think any differently when I moved to the teaching side of the equation. What I found pretty quickly was financial instability and major burnout.
I started tweaking my policies and asked for monthly payments up front. This definitely helped, but I was still allowing a lot of flexibility for scheduling and weeks that students just didn't want to have lessons.
I did this for years before finally getting a reality check from some wonderful teachers in my local Music Teacher's Association (Side note - if you haven't joined your local association, do it! The camaraderie and support is invaluable). They explained to me that students are paying for their spot, not just a piece of my time. When they cherry pick only a couple weeks out of the month, they're basically asking for an entire month of lessons without paying for it because I still have to protect that time slot instead of giving it to another student. Yes, you can technically fit another student into that spot last minute, but you can't regularly schedule anyone else at that time which means you're losing potential students and income.
My policies went through a few more evolutions before I landed where I am today, but what I've found works best for me is a term-based model. I like to break up the year into three-month quarters that line up with the school calendar. The majority of my student's lives are based on the local school calendar, so this works really well with family vacation schedules!
Three-month terms also provide several other benefits: First, this cuts down on changes to scheduling and student dropout because they're committed to the entire term. This means no more students texting me right before a scheduled lesson to tell me they're taking a break and won't be paying.
I also like to explain to my new students that three months is a reasonable amount of time to really give lessons a try before deciding weather to continue. Successful musical growth takes time, so any less than three months isn't really a fair assessment.
Each three-month quarter (September-December, January-February, March-May, and June-August) works out to roughly 13 weeks on the calendar. What I've found is that we end up needing to take about two weeks off every quarter because of holidays (Thanksgiving, Christmas, etc.) so I charge for 11 lessons per quarter and announce which weeks the studio will be closed. These closures almost always line up with school breaks. This solves 90% of scheduling conflicts right there and allows me to get 2 weeks of paid vacation time every quarter. I didn't even know that was possible being self employed!
As for payments, I let students pay either quarterly or in equal monthly installments just like tuition. This was a HUGE change for my financial stability. I used to live for the 5-week months and dread the short months, but now I have a reliable and consistent monthly income!
I've also recently started using an auto-pay system for most of my students and let me tell you, it's GAME CHANGING. I personally use square and yes, there's a fee for using POS services, but the hassle of hunting down monthly payments is gone! The sanity alone is worth way more than what I'm paying in fees. I love this system so much that I offer a financial incentive to students if they use it.
Now I do need to address the dreaded "make-up" or "rescheduled" lessons debate which is especially relevant for Summer. A lot of teachers seem to disagree on the policies around make-ups. Some adamantly believe in a zero-flexibility policy (which is fine if that works for them) where as others believe in being as flexible as possible.
I've never personally subscribed to the first approach because I believe accommodating students lives is a way to support them and let them know that I see them as whole people with multiple facets outside of music, not just as clients. However, I found through lots of tough experience that the super flexible option did not work for me either. I was so worried if I wasn't flexible I'd lose students and would come off as uncaring, but looking back it didn't make any difference in student retention and just left me feeling like something between a doormat and a hostage.
So I landed somewhere in the middle. I ask for at least 48 hours' notice to reschedule lessons and that's subject to availability. The vast majority of my students have been extremely understanding of this and honestly don't even ask for make-up lessons because they know how tight my schedule is and that they made the choice to prioritize something else over their lesson.
Now I will say, I do make exceptions for legitimate sickness and emergencies. It's rare, but the situation has come up several times in my years of teaching and I definitely feel it's best to show compassion when students need it. Frequently these students remember the kindness and end up being some of your best referrals down the road.
The bottom line is every teacher has to figure out what works for their studio. I will say that once I implemented these policies, I saw my student retention and income increase dramatically, like over 50%! And that overwhelmed and under-paid teacher burnout? Gone! Now I actually have some time and money to invest in my studio and my passion for teaching, so it really has been a beneficial system for everyone. I love working with my students every day and they get my absolute best nearly every lesson instead of the old, run-down version of me I used to be.
It was a little scary jumping into more of a business mindset at first. I'm very close with many of my students, so I was afraid they might be turned off by contracts and rules. But what I found was that my policies actually went over really well with most everyone, especially when they saw that a lot of the agreement was about protecting them in regards to teacher cancelations and rate increases. As a plus, my policies have also provided a really good filter for prospective students by attracting the ones that respect me and my time and keeping the emotionally exhausting ones away!
The bottom line: running a teaching studio can be a rewarding career that is financially stable (even in the Summer) if you take the time to protect yourself. I've included a template for the policy agreement I have all my students sign. Hopefully this can be a good reference as you develop your own studio policies.
I'm sure my policies will continue to improve over time. Between inflation and technological advances, this is an ever-changing industry, so I'll be sure to revisit this post and update as needed.
Feel free to comment or reach out if you have any questions. I hope you all have a successful Summer and as always, go make some music!
- Emily
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