Thankfully most studios do not do family discounts for extra students in private lessons. But some do and insist they need to. We have never done private lesson family discounts as it makes no financial or marketing sense. It just decreases your profit and adds complications. We know a family will register additional kids whether they get a deal or not. The dentist charges the same whether a family has 2 or 3 kids. Charging less for private music lesson does not increase sales. If it did, you could theoretically double your sales by reducing your prices by 50%. Conversely increasing prices does not decrease sales. All of us studio owners have raised lesson prices before and have also increased our student count. The largest studios running on StudioAutoPilot actually have medium to high prices for private lessons, not low prices compared to their area or the industry averages.

If you already do family discounts don't worry. When switching over existing families to StudioAutoPilot you can do an invite with a custom price discount if you really think you need to, but for new students I urge you not to do it. Just discontinue it for new students. Blame it on climate change. If you don’t make more money, you cannot afford to move somewhere warmer when you retire to change your climate personally. It is giving money away. You don’t pay your teachers less for families with multiple students and you cannot make it up with volume. I used to do a session on the risks of discounting in my seminars. I called it Fatal Subtraction.

Some studios who used to offer a family discount before StudioAutoPilot trusted us and eliminated the discount on their new registrations. A funny thing happened. They made more money.

Please don’t give the farm away on family discounts, it is not necessary.

Most studios, thankfully, do not do every other week lessons. The studios that do offer them only have about 5 students coming every other week. Usually, it’s that adult student who needs to go out of town for their work schedule. Or a legacy guilt registration the owner did years ago when they were smaller. But those 5 students cause a major amount of schedule trouble and manual maintenance for what is the equivalent of getting 2.5 new students. Giving students every other week lessons is like trying to sell someone half a hard-shell taco.

Sure, let me make you a full taco first Sir. I’ll get a knife to cut it for you…. CRUNCH, crap! Want a spoon with that? Is a half taco salad ok?

Remember your time is your inventory, don’t spoil it. Every other week lessons tie up your inventory and give all the upside to the student. Make-up lessons get weird too because most studios just say “just come next week as well”. Bad idea.

We don’t automate every other week registrations with StudioAutoPilot because they are a bad business idea. My advice is to tell the students on every other week lesson plans that your new system cannot support them. Let us be your excuse.

If half of them quit and the other half come every week, like they should, you will be making the exact same amount of money with less customers and a lot less hassle.

Studios who tried to manually juggle those every other week students have told me later they are kicking themselves for not having the guts to say no and end them when they switched to StudioAutoPilot. They still feel obligated to wait until those students quit. Here’s some coaching advice. Call them up or even email them if you are a real chicken, and say our new system cannot do every other week's lessons now, before you even run on our system. I’ll bet you over half will still stay and the ones who leave are probably a pain to manage anyway. Maybe they are super nice pain. Those are the worst pains, and they make you so guilty. (YouTube - When Harry Met Sally – the high maintenance scene.)

We have a finite inventory of times. You must be strategic to sell the most of it. Airlines are very strategic about making sure they fill every seat they can, that is why a lot of our functions are patterned after their booking systems. The most commonly used planes by airlines are the 737 and 777. Those planes have between 126-388 seats to sell. The majority of music studios have between 120-400 slots they can sell. We are strikingly familiar in our booking logistics.

One more thing about lesson fees. When you are going to raise your lesson fees, please just raise them for every student at the same time. If a family started 2 months ago, still raise them to the new current rate. Please do this.

If you tried out a new hair salon last month and they raised their prices this month, they would not say: we will keep the old rate for you because you “just started” with us. Restaurants don’t care how many years you have been eating there. When the car dealer raises the shop rate, it goes up for everyone. Physiotherapists and Chiropractors raise fees for everyone across the board. It’s complicated and ridiculous not to.

Guilty studio owners cause themselves so many unnecessary complications from trying to bend over backwards and by being afraid of their customers. They overreact to a few incidents and put in overkill policies to keep everyone happy.

I used to teach a session in my seminars called Incident vs Pattern. If something is a pattern in a studio, like it happens 20% of the time, then a policy to fix it makes sense. If an issue happens just a couple of times or just once, it is an incident. Do not make a policy to fix it. I see way too many studios do this. One parent mentions or complains about something so now the studio has a new policy to protect against some random incident that is unlikely to ever repeat. It gets worse when you have a meeting with your team about it. More about that in Lie Number 9.

A couple of parents mention that the fees have gone up and the studio owner freaks out. Yeah, it’s called life. Bought gas lately? Do not tiptoe around as the fairness fairy and decree that you need to be taking lessons for at least x months before we raise your fee. For our last private lesson fee increase we raised our price by $6 per hour. One adult violin student sent an email and complained. Fine. I was expecting more people to mention it. No one else said a word and our numbers are higher than they were at the lower price. She would have probably quit by now anyway. If we had overreacted to that one incident, we would be limiting our business. Don’t get misled by incidents.

Fee raising fear and grandfathering fees questions causes us at StudioAutoPilot support problems too. When some terrified studio owner is trying to tiptoe around and grandfather fees for certain people that started here but not this one that started then. They use us as the crisis line. Enough! Charge your fee to everyone and be proud of it. Do a good job to make it worth that new fee. Pay your teachers decently with the money you get from that new fee. Just do it.

Wow, I really do sound like a meanie.