Hey Teacher Friend,
If pricing your music lessons makes you suddenly question every life choice, please know you are in very good company.
You can be a fantastic teacher, run a thoughtful studio, communicate well with families, and still sit down to set tuition and immediately think:
- Should I raise my rates?
- Am I anywhere close to what I should be charging?
- Is this too much?
- Is this not enough?
- Will families understand?
- Will everyone leave?
- Will people think I am greedy?
And then the very tempting thought appears:
Maybe I should just copy what the teacher down the street is charging and call it a day. Or worse, keep undercharging to keep everyone else (but me) happy.
But here is the thing.
Your tuition number needs a backbone, as in you are naturally confident in that number.
What I mean by this, is that you need to be SO confident in your number and have SO much clarity, that it isn’t even a question.
It needs to be a number that you understand, can explain, and that supports the actual studio you are trying to run.
Meaning, your tuition should be built from the actual pieces of your studio:
- your income needs
- your expenses
- your capacity
- your teaching model
- your billing model
- your calendar
- your energy
- your goals
Because if your tuition only works when you underpay yourself, overteach, squeeze admin into the cracks of your life, and quietly resent your inbox, the number is not actually supporting your studio.
And sometimes pricing stress is not just about the number. Sometimes it is about the fact that the number is disconnected from the studio you are actually trying to run.
This is a common conversation I have with teachers and this seemed like a great time to put these thoughts into a podcast episode along with a blog post.
Inside, I walk through a simple framework for thinking through tuition using:
- costs
- capacity
- customer value
- reference prices
- value proposition
- price execution
- evaluation
Because the goal is not to find a magical number that makes every parent thrilled and every spreadsheet sparkle (although, that would be pretty amazing if did).
The goal is to build a tuition number you understand, can explain, and can actually implement.
You can read the full blog post here or listen to the podcast episode here:
And if this is the exact kind of thing you want help sorting through for your own studio, I’ll also be walking teachers through how tuition, policies, calendars, and real teaching life fit together in the Policy Triangle & Calendar Workshop.
You can find that here:
www.scrappypianoteacher.com/scrappysessions
Cheers to an awesome last week of May!
Speak soon,
Jaci
