Sightreading lifeline
Improve your sightreading simply by changing HOW you practice.
Promoting your teaching studio
Setting the right
fee (cont.)
Reinvesting your gains
Charging appropriate fees has a powerful benefit that goes
well beyond first impressions of quality. The higher fees represents additional
resources, which, if invested back into your business, will help your studio
grow at a much faster rate than you ever would have thought possible.
Reinvesting your time
By extra resources, I don’t just mean extra money. If your
fees are 25% higher than you first intended, then you would only need four
students to bring in income that you used to need five students to
produce. Doesn’t sound so exciting in a studio of four students, but if there
are thirty two students in your studio,that suddenly means additional
income from eight students that you don’t actually have to teach. I’m
sure you’ll have no trouble thinking of how you could spend the four spare
hours you would have each week.
Still not convinced? In the course of a forty week teaching
year, those four hours add up to 160 hours of additional free time—only a few
hours short of a whole week! It’s enough time to pursue some extra
qualifications, or write articles for newspapers, or any of the dozens of other
more time intensive promotion activities outlined later in this book. So while
you’re welcome to use the extra time lying in a hammock, sipping drinks with
umbrellas in them, you should think about reinvesting a substantial slice of
that time into promoting your studio.
Reinvesting your additional income
The other way of looking at higher fees is not in terms of
extra time, but in terms of the extra income it represents—and to then look
at investing that extra income straight back into your business. So instead
of looking at lifestyle improvements from your higher fees, use them to purchase
exciting new facilities for the studio itself, or that high impact Yellow Pages
ad you thought you couldn’t afford.
In this way, your additional income translates directly into
an improved capacity to attract new students—helping ensure that your studio
continues to grow for years to come. In this game, like any other, success
breeds success, and the pain of investing into your studio will be quickly
forgotten when you see the impact it has on your future student numbers.
And remember, if your studio grows enough, you are in a
strong position to put fees up again, and so the cycle continues.
