How to effectively arrange your students, and cater for pupils who do not want to come to your home for guitar lessons.
In this post you are going to learn about the various positive and negative things to consider when deciding to travel to your guitar student’s home. Some of the areas covered in this article are outlined below:
– The financial benefits of traveling to your students home. Students usually pay you more for coming to their home (only if you mention it).
– The financial loss of only teaching from your home in the early days of your guitar teaching business. You may lose out on the extra business if you decide to only teach from your home or teaching studio.
– Weather conditions – You have to put up with the weather conditions in the winter months if you do not drive.
– Make lessons at your students home work for you by arranging them smartly to cut down excessive travel time. (After work lessons on route to your home, creating a route from 1st session to final session so that you don’t have to travel more than you need.)
Financial Benefits of traveling to your studentâs home
Understanding when it is a good idea to just take the business that comes your way, and when to start becoming more analytical about your customer flow, is a hard thing to tackle. In your early days as a guitar tutor you should just be happy to be getting potential new customers. However, over time once you have learnt a bit about running a private guitar teaching business, you should look into how you are arranging your students, your home lesson to travel out ratio and the amount you are charging for travel out lessons compared to home lessons. As well as this you should be aware of the price you are charging as your expertise develop and your service grows.
If you charge £20 for a one hour lesson from your home, then you should consider charging students that wish to have lessons from their own home an extra £5 more per an hour at least. This is a win win situation for you as the tutor, as you can charge more for your service per an hour on travel out lessons, and there is an incentive for the student to travel to you if you make them aware of the difference in cost per an hour when learning from your home. If you teach from your home and your guitar lesson enquiries are coming through regularly, you will find that you will have lessons back to back and earn more than you have ever earned before!
Losing extra business
If you decide to solely teach guitar from your own home then you are either working smart or you are turning down business. If you are working smart, then you will have likely incentivised lessons from your home for your students, with the long term thinking of the financial benefit for you. By this I mean you understand that you are able to get one student arriving at your door as one is leaving. If this is managed well then you are working smart and you should be reaping the rewards. The hours people want guitar lessons are limited unless you break specific markets, so maximising the window of time you have to teach is essential if you want to make money teaching guitar.
However, if you are turning down lessons on the basis that you will have to travel around your local area (and you are not keen on that), then you are likely not thinking about the potential benefits in grabbing that business and making them long term clients.
Something to consider – one guitar student can provide you with £2000 in 2 years. When you say it like that, it makes you consider how you can make any customer happy in return for business, and that we shouldn’t turn down guitar students for our fear of expanding or the extra effort involved in taking them on.
Essentially it comes down to your demand, and the one message I can give any start up guitar teaching business is to take anything that comes your way initially, make them a happy guitar student and then be analytical about the way you are running the show.
Downsides of traveling to your student’s home – weather conditions
So by now you have already learnt about a few of the downsides of teaching guitar lessons from your students place. But there is another point to mention.
As I am writing this post it is late November of 2012 and snow is on the horizon, and sure to be with us in a matter of days. Depending on your resilience to the winter, walking out through town to get to the lessons is not exactly ideal for many guitar teachers. I personally like to mix it up with a balance of lessons from home and away from home for the exercise. Living in Brighton I have great public transport to whizz me around the city if it is a particularly cold or rainy day.
If you have a very high demand for lessons you could consider hiring another tutor who is based in a different area of the city. The benefit of this is that you can easily access different areas of the city as a business without using all your time traveling. Also worth mentioning is the fact that many students will cancel lesson in the winter due to weather conditions. If you can still serve as many of your clients as possible by offering to travel to them yourself (as a team), then you will keep business ticking over throughout the coldest of winters.
Creating Routes
It is smart thinking to know to create a logical route through your city to make guitar lesson slots work for you. Many guitar teachers travel to lessons after their day job and with a little bit of organisation you can arrange the students to make your journey make sense as you meander through your city or town.
It is a simple idea but but with a little bit of communication on the availability/flexibility of your students, you can save so much time on the road!
This has been a post all about making money teaching guitar and I hope it has helped inspire you to be the best guitar teacher in your area. There are plenty more posts on this subject on the site as well as a complete ebook guide on how to be a guitar tutor available here.
How is your guitar teaching business going? Leave a comment and let me know.
(Image credit to London Attractions Guide)