I Used to Refund Every Missed Lesson. Here's Why I Stopped.

You know you shouldn't refund it. You've told yourself that. And then the text comes in, and you feel the familiar pull, the guilt, the worry about how they'll react, and somehow you end up saying yes again.

This episode isn't about what your cancellation policy should say. It's about why so many of us can't bring ourselves to enforce it, even when we know we should.

For years I handled missed lessons on a case-by-case basis, making decisions based on how well I got on with the family that week, whether they'd seemed annoyed lately, or simply because saying no felt too uncomfortable. In this episode I get into the real reason that happens: the people-pleasing patterns that run deep in a lot of music teachers, the apology spiral that signals to parents that your policy is up for negotiation, and the fear of losing students that keeps so many of us stuck in the refund and reschedule cycle long after we know it isn't working.

I also share the reframe that shifted everything for me around what students are actually paying for, what really happened in my studio when I stopped refunding, and why switching to monthly billing made the whole thing structurally so much easier.

If you've listened to Episode 1 and thought "yes, but I still can't do it," this is the episode for you.

In this episode:

• Why refunding missed lessons costs you more than money
• The key reframe: what your students are actually paying for
• How people-pleasing shows up in your studio policies, and what to do about it
• The apology spiral, and why it's working against you
• The fear of losing students, addressed honestly
• Why monthly billing and a no-refund policy work so well together

Resources mentioned:

• Monthly Billing Transition Toolkit (£12)
• Free Studio Policy Template

Access the show notes here: Episode 3 Show Notes 

Transcript

The Cancellation Text That Sinks You

SPEAKER_00 0:00

You've just finished a lesson with a very bright 10-year-old who is great at practicing and it was a wonderful lesson. The next student hasn't arrived though, so you quickly check your phone and you see there's a message there from the next student cancelling their lesson because they couldn't come. The feelings that you get are that's less income I'm gonna make today, or I don't want to reschedule another lesson, I haven't got time, I haven't got any space to move people around, I really don't want to reschedule. But if I don't reschedule, I'm gonna lose that income. So suck it up and just go find a space for this person. Vaguely, in the back of your mind, you know that you have a policy, but it just lives in your head. You've never reinforced it. You maybe hinted at it once in the first uh consultation lesson with your students, but when it comes to real life cancellations, that just seems really too much to be dealing with, and you justify it to yourself, saying, Well, isn't it just nicer to to reschedule them or refund them if they don't have any spaces available for your reschedule? Yeah, that's easier, that's less confrontational, I don't get anxiety about it, and I just have to cope with the consequences. Does it sound familiar? If so, this episode is for you. I spent years in this exact same position, and I can tell you now that the way I used to handle it was costing me so much in income, and more than just that, my time, my own self-perception as a business owner, it was terrible. So this episode will help you understand how to make that switch from refunding and rescheduling every cancellation to running your business the way it should be, in a way that protects your income and protects your time. So we're gonna cover why you would make the switch from refunding and rescheduling to not. We're also gonna cover actually what shifted for me personally when I did this, and you'll get to understand practically how to communicate it with actual examples, because this is not an easy transition to make. Having gone through it myself, I want to share this with you because it is possible, and what's on the other side is a much calmer teaching life, much more control over my income and time, and more headspace to concentrate on the actual teaching because that's what we want. I'm Victoria. I started teaching piano part-time 18 years ago alongside a career in pharmaceutical market research, and I made pretty much every mistake you can make when it comes to running a teaching business. But today I run a thriving studio from my home on the south coast of England with students I love and a waiting list I'm proud of. I started this podcast because I want that for you too. If you've ever said yes to a reschedule you really didn't want to do, felt your heart sink when your phone buzzed with another last minute cancellation, or found yourself putting off increasing your fees for another year because the timing never feels quite right, this is the podcast for you. I've been there and come out the other side with a teaching business that lights me up every single day, and I'm here to help you do the same. So when I first started teaching, I've mentioned this before, I got a lot of advice from my childhood piano teacher, and she gave me a copy of her studio policy to use as a template, and it was really generous and she helped me understand, you know, the basics of running your own piano teaching business. So her studio policy was that lessons missed by the student would not be refunded, but would be rescheduled at the teacher's discretion. So I thought, okay, yep, that's what she did. So I'm new to this, I'll do that too. And I bet you know what's coming. I didn't enforce my policy at all. It felt, well, I felt massive imposter syndrome to be for for starters, which I'm sure we all are familiar with, even just not just in the early days, but for every time you're trying something new, imposter syndrome, rears its ugly head. And in this case, I thought, I don't have the right to enforce that kind of policy. If they can't make the lesson, I don't want to charge charge them for it. What's my time worth, you know? So I gratefully, you know, used this contract and I had it all set up and I slip it to the potential student, say, this is my policy, too afraid to go into any of the details, too afraid of their potential reactions. If I really spelled it out and said, if your child is sick and they can't come to the lesson, I won't be refunding the lesson. That's really hard to say, especially early on. I mean, it's hard to say at any point, but until you're used to it. So I had this policy that may as well have been invisible. And it resulted in me just reacting to each cancellation as a fresh event with all of these confusing emotions and considerations that really complicated, overcomplicated something that really is quite simple. When you have a policy and you stick to it, the whole decision-making process i is gone. You know, it's that's that's the policy, that's what we stick with, and things are fine. So it was things like uh how well, how well do I get on with the family? How likely are they to be upset if I tell them I'm not going to refund their lesson? That would obviously be, you know, if it was if it was someone I thought was quite strict about things or or didn't didn't agree with the policy at any point, then I'd be much more likely to create a really inconvenient for me lesson slot in order to reschedule that student rather than take the risk of a potential confrontation by saying I I'm not going to refund the lesson. So, in reality, what this looked like was I'd have my schedule planned for the week. It would be the same every week, everyone got the same lesson slot, and I would get everything ready, you know, take the kids to school, get myself ready, be all prepared for the first lesson, and expect people to turn up at their lesson times, of course. And so when it was a mix of either people sending me a message, you know, at the start of their lesson time saying they couldn't come, or just not sending anything and not showing up at all. Those ones hurt the most, don't they? Because you're there waiting, you're all ready, and you're being ghosted by your own student. Thankfully that wasn't the that wasn't the majority of the times, but you know, for some students it was. Looking back, I should have been much more proactive about deciding which students uh were right for my studio or not. But hindsight is a wonderful thing, isn't it? When we look back, with all the uh experience and knowledge that we've gained, uh some of these decisions can feel blindingly obvious. But in that in those beginning stages, and certainly when we haven't been exposed to any other ways of thinking about this, that's all we've got to go on. That and our own self sense of self-worth and self-confidence and doing this thing that we really love to do, uh which is obviously the most important thing. All of this, this pesky admin is just that's you know, it's not as important, but really it is. Otherwise, I wouldn't be devoting a whole episode to just this topic, and many more to come, I'm sure. So there's quite a big emotional cost of this open-ended students cancelling here and there, either expecting a reschedule or expecting to be charged less next term to account for the lessons that they've missed. Because the act of refunding a lesson that you couldn't reschedule for them, or rescheduling a lesson into time that wasn't planned for teaching, it is an act of kindness for us all. That's how we all think about it as teachers. Oh, I'm being really kind, I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna fit them in because I'm a nice person, I'm a good teacher, I still want to teach them their lesson, and they've paid for it so they deserve to get their lesson. But the problem is, in the beginning, if it's just the odd one here or there, and the vast majority of your students turn up every week, it doesn't really feel that bad. But over time, especially when you get students who are serial cancelling students, and you know you've all had them, you get to that day in the in the week and you know that student's lesson is coming up, and you can almost bet your phone's gonna go off at a certain time cancelling the lesson, those kind of students. That's where the tipping point, especially for me, came when you could predict when someone was going to cancel, and reflecting on just how much effort we all put in to guaranteeing that we're going to be here and be ready for their lesson every week, as promised, it feels a bit like a slap in the face. I'm gonna say it like that because I can't think of a better way to say it. It begins to feel a little bit disrespectful, and I don't say that from a haughty point of view, just that we care so much about our students, don't we? We care so much about them and them their lives and what's going on with them, and we want to provide the best lessons we can for them to help them discover the joy of music and all this wonderful stuff. And then if you get someone who cancels a lot, it really does feel like it's not reciprocated. That level of respect and and thought isn't reciprocated to us, and that's when cracks start to appear, and that is not a good place to be. You don't want to be feeling resentment over a student who's cancelled the last six lessons, uh, either with or without notice. It just you can't help it, it just starts to eat away, and we don't want to be in that situation because then you think, Well, I got myself all ready, and now there's you know, it's just uh it's a half-hour lesson, and then I've got another student coming. So it's not really long enough to go and do something meaningful, and you couldn't teach someone else in that time anyway, because it's too short notice, so it's not good. You lose your you lose income, you lose time, it's this situation that none of us want to be in, yet many of us find ourselves in this situation. One of the biggest parts of this difficulty is how we frame what we're charging for. Now, we always charge a per lesson fee. It's very rare that teachers don't charge a per lesson fee, and you know, more often than not, it's for a half-hour lesson or 45 minutes, you know, or an hour if you've got students uh working on the higher grades. But for comparison, you always provide a per lesson fee, and that's where the framing of what you're charging for, if you take that literally, it's very hard to understand why a student would not be given a refund if they missed their lesson. So I'd like you to consider this, and I'm I'm not taking credit for this. I came across this by engaging with piano teachers and music teachers online a few years back when I was refunding every single cancellation or rescheduling them and losing whatever downtime I had. I started engaging with other teachers online and hearing some of them talk about this situation they had where they don't offer refunds or reschedules, and they were very straightforward about it. And I thought, how on earth are they doing that? What how? I just I didn't know where to start. I just how did they get to the point where they were so confident in having a studio that ran like that? More often than not, these were teachers from America, so I don't know if it's a a cultural thing or if it's just the people who were talking about it online or the groups I was hanging out in. But it was such an alien idea to me that I thought, wow, there's no way I could do that. How would you get from A to B? Well, I'm really pleased that I did get from A to B. But one of the biggest parts was reframing how you think about what you're charging for. So, yes, we give a per lesson fee, but that fee does not just cover the half an hour that you spend with that student. And we know this consciously, we know this, but a lot sort of shy away from acknowledging it because then it means we have to think more highly of ourselves. We have to respect our time more, but it's a mindset shift that I believe we all need to take part in for the sake of our own mental health, our own well-being, and our longevity as successful music teachers. So you're not selling the individual half-hour or 45-minute lesson. You are guaranteeing every week, or however however often you teach students, normally it's every week, you're guaranteeing a reserved slot for that student and no one else, okay? And you can't use that time for anyone else or anything else because that time is allocated to that student. And in doing so, you've turned away other potential students who could have come at that time, okay. You're also providing your expertise, which comes from years and years and years of learning and practice and performing or accompanying or whatever else you do. It also covers all the continuous professional development that you will have been doing. And don't worry if you feel guilty about that bit. We'll talk about that in another episode. Even if you haven't gone to a bunch of conferences or courses in the last 10 years or so, it doesn't matter. You are learning every day from everything that you do, especially if you engage with other teachers online. You are learning from them, you're engaging in professional development. So all of these things come under what your fees pay for. They pay for you to go engage in courses and conferences, they pay for you to have your own music lessons as a teacher. Teachers have teachers too. I know it's hard to think about, but we do. It pays for your dedication to that student. The lesson planning. I challenge you to go and find a music teacher who does not spend a minute outside the lesson planning for every single student. It just doesn't happen. We are always, our brains are always on the go thinking about which book could we move this student onto next? How do we problem solve that student who's struggling with this particular type of technique? What extra resources do I need to bring in to help solve this problem? Am I communicating effectively enough? You know what it's like, our brains never stop going. That is active work on each individual student's service that we are providing for them, which is a musical education. All of that is covered by our fees. And unless you've heard someone talk about that, it's actually not it's not very commonly spoken about, and certainly not amongst our students' families. From their point of view, and and there's no reason why they would think otherwise, they get a per lesson fee, and so in their minds they're paying per lesson, so it all adds up, and you pay for this number of lessons. So it's not their fault that they don't realise it covers all of these things, but when you are able to take that on board as a music teacher and really own it, not just oh yeah, well, of course, yeah, sure, it it covers CPD and it, yes, it covers, you know, the£10,000 that was spent on my music education as a child, and it's very easy to hear all that and and not accept it as the truth for you and the value that you provide. This is something that I come across so often. So many music teachers undervalue themselves and what they can offer for their students, and I don't know where it comes from because there is such a huge amount of value that we provide for our students. We care so much about them and how well they do and how how they're feeling and and you know how much joy they're getting from the instrument that we're teaching them. We hard we can't help but not. So let's compare it to other professional services, like physio appointments, or your appointment at the hairdresser, or ballet lessons, or organise sports groups, sports lessons. If you don't show up, you lose your deposit, or you don't get you don't get money back that you've paid for those lessons, especially when it's arranged through schools. You don't get any of that money back, and that's accepted as the norm. No one questions it. But music teaching has always been the exception, and the cost of that lands directly on our shoulders as a direct loss of income or a loss of time when we reschedule, when we find, and I say that in inverted commas, when we find space for that student's rescheduled lesson, we don't find it, we take it from somewhere else. We take it from time that was maybe not consciously planned for downtime or not consciously planned for personal practice or admin time or research or you know, any number of things that fill our time. We took that time from there, which means there was less time to spend on that pre-allocated or unallocated thing. We can't create time out of nowhere. So, but but we feel the effect of that. Now, I always find it interesting when you consider, let's take ballet lessons for as an example. I had ballet lessons as a kid, I had piano lessons and ballet lessons. Now, ballet lessons, more often than not, are done in groups. And it's interesting to me when you really think about it, the vast majority of people would look at that and say, sure, you missed the ballet lesson. Of course you wouldn't get the money back. The teacher had to hire the hall and put that outlay there so everyone pays for their lessons and that money covers the cost of the hall hire plus their fees for teaching. End of story. And therefore, a one-on-one lesson where you haven't had to hire out a hall or any building or get permission from anyone, especially because with a lot of us teaching at home, you haven't had to pay out for anything. And in fact, you have because of all the things that go into teaching from home, but that's another story, that's another conversation. So it's justified that well, you haven't had to pay anything out and you haven't provided the lesson, so yeah, you should provide the refund because you didn't provide the lesson. When really, I would argue it the other way around. It's you provided your time for that student, you guaranteed that you were there, you were there ready at the right time to do their lesson, and the student didn't turn up, but you were still there, you were ready to give the lesson, and you haven't missed it, you haven't gone anywhere else, you still prepared for the lesson, you planned it, your time was spent for that lesson because as I mentioned earlier, you can't reschedule a last-minute student into a last-minute cancellation slot, it just isn't possible. That time is for that student, and whether they are there to take the lesson or not, the lesson is still paid for. Now, it is a bit uncomfortable hearing me talk about this, I'm sure. I was uncomfortable the first time I came across it, and I thought, oh my goodness, these are really bullshy people. And being a typically shy person, I mean it's gotten better as I've been teaching for so long, but it's certainly not the it's not the identity I thought I would have, at least up until a couple of years ago. Up until my eyes were opened as to how how you actually run a music teaching business as a business and and not pretending like it's a hobby. So this idea of well, all the other all these other businesses are you know their proper proper businesses, and you know, with important people running them and doing these things, they've all got qualifications. Whether you've got qualifications or not, I mean I've mentioned before I don't have a music degree. I took my lessons privately and I achieved my grade eight practical and grade five theory and then went off to university to study biology of all things. But it doesn't make me any less qualified to be a piano teacher, and I've been doing it for so long and learned so much since that I'm perfectly comfortable in the piano teaching that I provide to all my students, and as is evidenced by my lengthy waiting list and my dedicated students, there's nothing in there that tells me I'm not good enough. So the point I'm trying to make is lots of us feel like well, it doesn't count for us because it's just little old me teaching piano from my home. It's it's personal, we get to know our students really well, and it kind of goes against the feeling of treating the transactional side of it as a professional. The two they don't tend to go to go well together, or that at least they feel a little bit awkward until you're used to thinking about yourself as a business owner, as a professional who is providing this amazing service of a musical education to your students. But I acknowledge that conflict between the two ideas it's just me teaching from home, but I need to be this professional who is, you know, business like and and strict. About payment times. The two don't easily go well together, which is where a lot of this comes from. And it's it's completely understandable because I've been there. I know exactly how that feels. So I had a situation once where one of uh my students' parents contacted me to let me know that their child wouldn't be available for their lesson. I think it was a couple of weeks in advance, which is great. That's good to know that they won't be available with some notice. But what really flawed me was the follow-up request to add on five minutes to the end of the next six lessons, which would add up to a 30-minute lesson, to account for the lesson that they were going to miss. And it was such it was such a specific request, it really took me by surprise because if ever there was an example of being seen as a by the minute kind of fee, there's one for you. And after the initial surprise, I I think it was all communicated by email, so I took my time processing it and thinking, hmm, how am I going to reply to this? And this was, I should say, this is after I had made the switch to actually standing up for my policies and having a no refunds, no reschedules policy. And I said thank you for letting me know that she won't be available for this lesson. I'm not able to extend her lesson by five minutes due to my schedule. So it will have to be taken as a missed lesson. And that's it. Nothing else. No over-explaining, no justifications, none of it's needed. And although it still gets my heart rate up a little bit as an anxious, as a person who tends to be fairly anxious, um, getting better with it as I get older, but this sort of potential confrontation feels not very nice, and I'm sure you all understand what I mean. You kind of want to run the other way, if at all possible. But I'd made the switch and I'd fully stepped into my role as a professional business owner who supports their policies and runs a runs their music studio accordingly with a much happier life. So each time I respond to these requests, it does get easier. I have to tell you that it really does get easier. And the response was just accepting, you know, okay, thanks for letting me know. And it was fine. And we moved on. And it's often before you experience that entire interaction from start to finish, how easy is it for our brains to just go and catastrophize and just play out this whole back and forth role play where we say, sorry, I or not even sorry, we shouldn't say sorry for it, I cannot re I cannot refund the lesson, I cannot reschedule the lesson, I cannot extend their lesson uh for five minutes for six weeks to account for that. There's no room in my schedule, or it's it's just not possible. And then you imagine the the comeback, you you know, you think they're going to you're gonna get an angry message back from a parent, and then you're gonna feel like a small child who's being told off, and then you're gonna lose your student, and then they'll tell all their friends what a terrible teacher you are, and then your your studio will dwindle, and then you'll have to go back and find some other work because it doesn't it doesn't work out in the end. I mean it can go to the complete to the the complete extreme in our heads, can't say, and it's so easy to fall into that trap to think that any pushback, any boundaries are going to result in us losing our students, but I'm here to tell you it doesn't that it just doesn't happen like that. Okay, I am a people pleaser. I have been aware of it for a long time. It's something I've been working on for a long time, but I've also become aware that it is there is a big correlation between people pleasers and music teachers. It's not a character flaw, it's often what makes us good teachers because we care. We care so much about what our students think and feel that we want to do everything to help them have a good experience and learn their instrument and enjoy it. But the downfall of being a people pleaser is we often downplay our own needs. We have a lot of guilt about things. I mean, I've spoken to a lot of uh music teachers engaging online where they feel guilty for charging at all for the lessons, and it still surprises me, even though I do remember in the distant past feeling like that as well, especially when I came from a corporate job and then I was doing part-time piano teaching on the side, thinking I get to do this and people pay me for it. I wasn't used to being so happy in the doing of the job that actually getting paid for it felt like cheating, you know. But that's where it comes from. So we have a lot of this guilt around taking money for doing something that we love so much. So when we have this guilt, it causes us to accommodate things, to make exceptions. And when you make exceptions for any student, for that student, that exception becomes the new rule. It becomes the expectation that they have, whether they're conscious of it or not. If you give a refund because they were away on a school trip and they couldn't possibly attend the lesson, it'll mean that every single time they have a school trip on a lesson day, they'll expect a refund. Do you see where it goes wrong? And then even if you thought, oh, just this once I'll I'll give them a refund because you know I want to keep the relationship nice and I want them to know how much I care. Yeah, I don't really care about the money, I care about their their child as my student, and I want them to do their best. It can very quickly turn to resentment when you you did it as a one-off, they then became expect expectant for this refund situation, and then you, when they question it, you you know, you don't want the confrontation, so you go, Oh yes, of course. Sorry, yeah, it's a school trip. Okay, I'll refund like last time. That becomes resentment, even if you don't want to acknowledge it, or it's buried deep down, you don't want to acknowledge that's how you feel because we don't want to resent our students or their families, of course not, we love them, but it's there because you should be paid for your time, and you've kind of slipped into this unplanned situation that feels like you've fallen in a bucket and you can't get out with straight steep sides and there's no way out. There is a way out. I'm pleased to tell you. Listen to the end, listen all the way to the end of this episode, there is a way out. But that niggling resentment can erode the joy we have for our teaching. When you have a student who comes to their lessons, and you know in the back of your mind they have missed, I don't know, three out of the last ten lessons. That income cut is painful. It can be painful, or if you didn't take it a hit on your income, you're so strung out because you've been rescheduling lessons so much you literally don't have any more free time left for anything else, and it starts to take over, and that's not a good place to be either. However, much we love our teaching, we do need breaks. It's very important to maintain that level of enthusiasm and excitement for teaching our students, and you just can't keep it up if you use every last moment for rescheduling lessons rather than recuperating and reflecting. So you get this apology spiral by being a people pleaser, everything starts with, I'm so sorry, I know this might seem harsh, but I I don't refund lessons. The apologising really tells the parent that this is something to negotiate about. It's something you feel bad about, so you can be won over by, oh, don't worry, just this once, it'll be okay, you know? And I'm I'm a bad one for this. I apologize a lot, and it's taken some real, real retraining to stop it being a default response, which is why it's great when someone cancels by text or email, you then have time to consider your response, write it and then send it rather than in the moment. That's the harder one to do. If someone tells you face to face they won't be coming next week, they don't ask for the refund or the reschedule often. They'll say so-and-so can't come for their lesson next week. They haven't actually asked for a refund or a reschedule. You automatically offer it because it feels uncomfortable, you think it's expected. And in some cases it won't be expected because some students' parents are or are all up together with you know paying for things termly or monthly or or however often they pay for them, and if appointments are missed, the money's gone, the money's already spent. So I'd like you to really consider something. This this reframe. When you genuinely care about your students, you want to be the best teacher for them. Being the best teacher for them means protecting your time by not rescheduling into every last minute of the day, protecting your income so you're not having to take on more students to make enough money to make ends meet. No one wants to be in that situation so that you have the downtime you need to recuperate and explore your own musical instrument development, your own practice. Explore new composers, new new books that you can then share with your students. If you don't protect your time and your income, do you see how you can be damaging the quality of the teacher that you can be for your students? It can be a little bit hard to get your head around it in the beginning, but it's very true. If you don't protect your own time and your own income, it can chip away at how good you could be as their teacher. So it's in everyone's best interest to keep everything running smoothly. Refunding yourself into burnout is not in their interest. It actually took us getting to quite a difficult part in our lives personally as a family to push me into acknowledging how valuable my time actually was. Now I'm not saying you have to have something really difficult happen in your life, absolutely not, but I'm just explaining that's what happened for me. And looking back, I'm realizing I shouldn't have waited for things to be so desperate to actually make a difference, but that's how it worked out for me. So all of this was pulled into sharp focus when my time became extremely limited. So my daughter is autistic, and a few years back, she was diagnosed in 2022, and for a two to three years, possibly a bit longer, we were in a really difficult period where school pickups were very unpredictable. Even though their school was only half a kilometre from where we lived, walking wasn't an option for various reasons. I mean, she has hypermobility, but it was the emotional dysregulation that prevented her from actually being able to walk with me to and from school. But I was needing to be very careful about my time, scheduling my lessons with enough of a buffer after school to allow for the fairly frequent occurrence of her having meltdowns at school that could take anywhere between one and three hours to run their course to get her to a point where I could convince her to allow me to carry her to the car to get home, the half kilometre home, to then be available to start teaching. And of course, I'd very rarely be in the best state for teaching after helping my daughter through that, but that became the reality. And when my time became so I don't want to say precious, because all of our time is precious, it it really is, but it became even more obvious that if people wasted my time inadvertently by just cancelling lessons and then I I couldn't teach them and I wouldn't make the money for that lesson, I had a limited number of lesson slots in the day due to the unpredictability of our home life for a while. So it became really clear that in order to actually keep my business going and be able to teach effectively, I had to get strict with myself on my policies and get really clear about them, communicating them and standing up for them. The number one fear that we all have as music teachers when we consider either introducing policies like these or tightening up on our policies is that we're going to lose our students. And it's it's a very extreme fear, uh, but it's a very real one. And because no one wants to lose their students, it's our source of income. Without students, we don't make any money and then can't support our families or or our lives. But when you think about your fear of losing students, if you put yourself in your students' positions or your the parents of your students, if you consider so if you have children and they go to clubs or if they've or if they have indeed have music lessons, the relationship that you build up between the student and teacher is not an easy come, easy go relationship often, it's a cultivated bond that allows for effective teaching. Music lessons, more often than not, provide a place to escape the stresses of school. After a difficult day at school, going to your music lesson can be and often is fun, it's engaging, it's rewarding, and the one-on-one relationship between the teacher and the student is a very valuable one. Now consider you're on the side of being the parent of your child who goes to music lessons. If you're the teacher, if the music teacher decided to change their policies, where you know, if we use this the same example, if they'd previously refunded every time you miss a lesson, and then they tightened things up and said, Okay, as of next September, the pol the new policy will be missed lessons for any reason are not refunded. You are highly unlikely, unless you were already going to leave anyway, you're highly unlikely to go and look for a new music teacher because that bond has already been built and progress has already been made, and you understand that you can't just pluck your child out of lessons with one teacher and shove them into another environment and expect everything to go smoothly, you're not very likely to just quit lessons because of a policy change. It's not even that the rates have gone up, that's a different change. This is just that your policies have changed, that mean you don't get any freebies. So it's very it's very easy to stay in our bubble of being the music teacher and thinking the worst is gonna happen that when we change our policies, when we tighten up our policies, all everyone's gonna leave. Well, I'm here to tell you from experience and from speaking to lots of other teachers that that doesn't happen. Okay, I did not lose a single student when I introduced my policies and made it made it clear that I was going to stand up for my policies. No one left. In fact, more inquiries started coming in, and before long I'd filled my studio and had started a waiting list. So it's not a coincidence that all of those things happened after I made my policies clear and stuck to them. I am certain that the act of standing up for my piano teaching business helped me change my self-perception and identity to being a professional piano teacher. To feel like a professional piano teacher, not just someone who learnt to play the piano, loves it, and wants to show other people how to do it. It's not a hobby. So to reassure you, I want to help you understand if this is holding you back, a fear of losing students when you introduce new policies, it it's an unfounded fear. Now that's not to say you wouldn't lose any students. So there is obviously a non-zero chance that you know the odd student here or there will leave as a result of you implementing some studio policies like no refunds or no reschedules. But what's important to understand about that is those students who leave, they're telling you something really important. They're telling you that they're only there for the convenience, not really the teaching. And to be honest, is that really worth your time spending all your professional energy on? I don't think so. These are not going to be our long-term students, these are not going to be students who are dedicated to practising, they won't be prioritizing music lessons above other things, which means they're not your ideal students. And there are plenty of ideal students out there for us all, but these ones who happen to have fallen into our lap because of word of mouth recommendations or they just they found you on Google and you live close by, it doesn't necessarily mean they're your ideal students. Now, ideal students is a is another big topic that I'm going to be talking about on another episode, but it's worth considering that if you think of all of your students, they they can't all be our ideal students. There is no such thing as that, really, even in a perfect world which doesn't exist. But to acknowledge that if you part ways as a result of tightening up your policies, you haven't lost out if a couple of students quit. Because they're not your ideal students, they're actually making space for your ideal students who are out there, who will find you, who will be attracted to your business because the mindset shift into being a professional music teacher will attract them. You will be perceived as professional when you believe you are professional. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Now, if you have a waiting list, making these changes is less scary than if you don't have a waiting list because your waiting list obviously is a pool of potential students that could fill any slots that open up as a result of changing these policies. But if you are one of those teachers who doesn't yet have a waiting list, who has more spaces to fill in their studio, it is a bit more scary when you make changes to your business. But I guarantee you this is a positive change. This will help your studio become a more sought-after studio because you will be inhabiting this role of the professional music teacher. You will you it I think I I don't think I'm over-exaggerating this when I talk about the effect that this change has had on me as a part-time piano teacher who just did it on the side because it was fun, to full-time piano teacher who loves this and absolutely doesn't want to do anything else for their career. That this really is an important thing to me. Doing these changes to make myself to allow my business to run more smoothly has also turned me into seeing myself as a professional. And it has made a huge difference. The way I interact with students and parents, the confidence I have when I make decisions about progress and different pathways to take with different students, recognizing times when students are not progressing and highlighting it to parents because you know what's good for everyone, which is not to let students drift. All of these things have come from taking charge of my studio and the way I run it, and it's all been really positive. So if you don't have a waiting list yet, yes, it's a little bit more scary, but actually implementing proper policies, it's part of how you build a full studio. It's how you get to the point where you have a waiting list. Clarity and professionalism attract committed students. These are going to be more likely to be your ideal students. You will stop attracting your less than ideal students. And there's so many factors that go into that, but we can talk about that uh at another day. Okay, so now we're actually going to talk about how to go about making this switch. So there's a number of different things to consider, and I'll talk you through what I did and why it worked so that you can understand the process. So, first of all, timing. This kind of shift. From either no policies being enforced or loose policies and lots of exceptions and all of this kind of uncomfortable stuff to strict policies that are adhered to and making sure everyone's on board takes a little bit of time on the lead up with lots of notice. So I would generally recommend to aim for if you teach in the academic term times to go for the start of a new academic year. So here in the UK, that is for starting in September. It's a fresh start, it's it feels easier to make that kind of change and to get everyone on board. Or if you teach per calendar year, you could make the start in January after Christmas in the new year. When lots of uh New Year's resolutions take place. Giving enough lead time to make an informed decision, giving parents and students the information up front saying this is when the change is going to take place, a couple of months is ideal. So I sent out information in June, which was just after the half term in the summer term, with notice that I would be sharing a new studio policy that needed to be signed and agreed to before the end of the summer term so that I didn't have to worry about chasing people through the summer holidays, and that it would come into effect from the 1st of September of the next academic year. The benefit of giving this lead time gives parents and families enough time to make an informed decision. It prevents the awkwardness and potential confusion of changing the policies midterm. Now, when it comes to communicating all of this, several routes is optimal. Don't just send an email and hope for the best. Email is the first one I would recommend. That's what I did to give the advanced notice and to really make it clear in that email in the subject line that a response is expected, just to acknowledge that they've received it. Also giving them a printed out paper copy during the lesson and verbally mentioning it during the lesson, either at the beginning or the end, just acknowledging, oh, did you get that email about the policy changes coming into effect from September? Having the verbal interaction avoids the situation where you get a parent or an adult student who claims to be ignorant of it, and they may well be because there are some people that just don't get on with email. So you've got to send by email, a paper copy in person, and mentioning it in person, and each form of communication reinforces the other one. Now, when it comes to how to actually make the announcement itself, less is more always. To be clear and signal confidence, you need to be very matter-of-fact of just informing families of this change, not asking for their opinion, not apologizing, certainly not apologizing. So if you consider a confident way to announce this would be something like, Dear student and parent, I am letting you know that effective from the 1st of September 2026, my studio policies will be changing. The main changes are blah blah blah blah blah. Please respond to this email to confirm acknowledgement. A new annual studio policy agreement will be given to you in the next lesson for signing and returning before the end of the summer term. Something like that. So it's really straightforward, really clear, assertive, polite, no room for misunderstanding. Compare this with the over-explaining version. So that could be something like dear student or parent, I have thought long and hard about this and I have decided to make some changes to the studio policies that I have for my students from the 1st of September. My new policies will be da da da da da. This decision hasn't been taken lightly. I am very aware of how much time you will dedicate to your lessons, and I value you as students, and I don't want to seem harsh or unfriendly, but these are things that I really need to have in place for my studio to run effectively. Your lesson fees actually go and cover lots of other things outside of the lesson, as such as my time spent lesson planning and all the other things that I do to become to be a good music teacher. You know, do you get my point? It's so easy to go on and on and on and on and on explaining and justifying why this is okay. You don't need to. You don't need to justify it. It's your business, it's your choice. Of course, we as music teachers can talk to each other about all of those things that I've I just mentioned, but the student and the family don't need to know all of that. As far as they're concerned, they need to understand in a clear, concise way that they are dealing with someone who is a professional in all senses of the word, obviously clearly capable at teaching, but also at running a business and being effective. So don't do the over-explaining one. The other thing is when you over-explain, when you give lots and lots and lots and lots of reasons why this is okay, it really opens the door to negotiation and picking apart reasons and asking about exceptions. When you keep it clear and concise, it really doesn't invite conversation. And that's you don't want to invite conversation. This is you informing your families that your studio policies are changing. End of story. Now, there will always be some who push back. That's human nature. I would be lying if I said everyone would be cool as a cucumber and say, no problem, sure, where do we sign? I mean, lots of them will, lots of them did for me. I'm very fortunate I've got lots of lovely students and families. But you will get the odd one here or there that either maybe doesn't push back at the time but starts pushing the boundaries after the start of the term. So this is something that I had actually, you know, I did everything I've described, I announced it by email, I gave them enough time, I handed out all the paper forms to sign, logged everyone who'd signed when they came back in, and I thought, great, everyone has signed this, they're all aware of the new changes. It's going to be plane sailing. It was a little bit naive to think it would be plane sailing. So September started, and you know, normal lessons, and then within I think it was not very long, it was maybe six or seven weeks, I had a message from a parent or of a student saying, Oh, so and so can't come to the lesson this week. He's wherever he was doing, I don't know what it was, whether he was unwell or if he had a school event or something like that. Can we reschedule for later in the week? And being a rule follower myself, I find it really hard, really hard to understand how people can be aware of the rules and then just choose to forget them or just genuinely forget them. I don't know whether it was intentional or not, but the question was still asked. So it really did raise my anxiety a bit. I thought, oh my goodness, I've told everyone how this is going to work, but there's why is this person still asking if they can reschedule? I was so clear that I'm not rescheduling lessons anymore. But obviously, I didn't say all of that, this was all delivered by text, so I took a few deep breaths and thought, remain professional, remain calm, be clear, don't apologize, and respond with a not a sorry, just something like thank you for letting me know, this will be counted as a missed lesson, as per my studio policies, I'm not able to reschedule lessons. So I look forward to seeing X next week. And that's it. That's all you have to say. And however cringy you might feel thinking about sending that kind of message, it does feel a bit terrifying because the the small or probably not so small voice inside your head is saying, What are you doing? You're they're gonna come back and they're gonna hate you, they're gonna pull pull this kid from lessons and you're gonna lose a student straight away. That's all the fear, the anxiety talking. And that has that is what has been driving your decisions all this time. Fear of losing students, anxiety over the confrontation with the parents, and it's all for nothing because when you stay clear and calm and professional, it works. And yeah, it happened the odd time here or there until things settled down, and I responded the same way every time. Whether it was my child is too sick to come to lessons or they're away on a school trip so they can't possibly come. Could we have uh a reschedule? I don't think anyone directly asked for a re- No, yes, someone did ask for a refund, but in the sense of can you take it off of next term's bill? Although I'd switch to monthly billing by then. We'll talk about that in a minute. It was to take the take the lesson fee off the next invoice. That's what it was. No matter what it is, you just stand firm with your policies. They are there to protect you and your students, to protect your students from having a strung out teacher who isn't paid enough and doesn't have enough downtime, who becomes grumpy and just loses it. Of course, none of us would do that, but you get my point. So, however much it might raise your hackles after you've set this new line in the sand, be prepared for some pushback. And you can have some pre-written text replies so that you don't have to think on the spot all the time. That can also be helpful. Now, in talking to other music teachers, I have come across a fair number who aren't comfortable with being as strict as I am with no refunds or no reschedules, with the exception of bereavement. Bereavement is one of those, it's a human thing, I don't want to charge four lessons where something like that has happened. So that's my one exception, but it is a single exception. But when it comes to deciding what you're comfortable with in your own studio, if that feels too strict, I have come across a number of teachers who have decided to include one rescheduled lesson per term, one makeup lesson per term, but they keep it boundaried in that way to avoid being taken advantage of. So one rescheduled lesson in every term. You have three terms per year in the UK or there's two semesters in the US, and they set aside one week at the end of the term or semester during which those makeup lessons will take place. So it's it's really being careful with your time, only allowing up to one per term, and making sure that it happens during a time when you know you're available. You're not scrabbling to find a lesson slot that you can offer for this reschedule. So it's taking back control over your time, but it is allowing for life that happens, and if it makes you feel more comfortable running your studio like that, I I've seen lots of teachers who succeed in that way. So that's that comes down to personal choice. One thing you might find with students pushing back or parents pushing back is it will tend to be more often than not the same one or the same few every time. And all I can say is treat every interaction exactly the same way, even if it's the third or fourth time this parent or student has asked for a reschedule, and you think, oh my goodness, they're really not getting it. We had this agreement, they've signed it, what's going on? Just maintain your stance on your policies and keep the messages exactly the same, brief and clear and to the point without apologies. And trust me, it does work because before long I didn't have any requests at all. Everyone understands how my policies work now, and everything is so smooth. All the time I spend is teaching and planning for teaching, and then I have one hour a month spent on admin for my invoicing, which is great. I've got a lot of time back that I can spend on more fruitful tasks. So if you have been anywhere near my social media pages in the last six months or so, you will be aware that I am a big advocate for monthly billing. I actually happened to change from terminally billing to monthly billing at the same time that I introduced, reinforced, sorry, started reinforcing my studio policies of no refunds and no reschedules. I did it all in one go, so it was quite a big change. So I had a couple of extra things in my announcement email about switching to monthly billing. But it has been the best decision I've ever made getting away from termly billing and moving to monthly billing. Monthly billing and the no refund policy actually work beautifully together because the monthly billing itself reframes the payment model from lessons provided to thinking about it as you've got this dedicated slot every week. You're paying for my time once a week on this dedicated day, and it's not how many lessons you attend. It's these are the lessons that are available to you. So it really helps move away from that per lesson payment idea. And what's really great about it is once you have everyone paying on a monthly basis, which by the way is how we pay for lots of our things in daily life, isn't it? You get monthly electricity and gas bills, council tax bills, broadband bills, it's all monthly. So why not music lessons? It actually fits in really well. And once a family is paying this monthly fee for their reserved slot in your sh in your studio, the logic of not refunding individual missed lessons becomes quite intuitive. It's it's not it's not an area that people keep picking up on. The missed lesson was theirs to lose, not yours to absorb. So because I feel so strongly uh about this monthly billing uh benefit to studios, I created the monthly billing transition toolkit, which is exactly what it sounds like. It's a resource to help you make the change from terminally billing to monthly billing and doing it in a way that is professional and well thought out and well received by your students and families. So it includes a calculation tool so that you can work out what your monthly rate is based on your per lesson rate, depending on the length of the lesson times, and rounds everything off so you get a nice even number. So when you first do the calculations, you get a really odd amount, like£68.76 per month. And it's not very easy to remember, and it looks a little bit strange. So within the calculator is a rounding element so that you you get a figure at the end that you can charge as your monthly rate. It also covers making the calculations for any students that start part way through the academic year, and also those who might leave part way through the academic year, so you don't have to do all those complicated calculations yourself. So that's probably the most valuable bit, one of the most valuable bits. It's also got email templates that you can literally copy and paste into your email and change all the relevant details for announcing the change, uh, following up and communicating everything you need to. And there is also, this is probably the most valuable bit, responses to frequently asked questions when it comes to monthly billing. So there will be a lot of questions because the biggest one that comes up is I'm paying every month, but we're not getting lessons in some of the months like in August. So it covers all of those potentially awkward conversations with responses that you can just look up and give, give to your music families. To help you get through this process of the mindset shift and really taking on board and becoming this confident professional music teacher, I've created a resource to help you through that step by step so that you can feel true to yourself when you're making this change in your studio and not feel like you're pretending to be someone bigger than you are. Because it's got to feel right for you, and you absolutely deserve to not be refunding lessons that people miss because of whatever reasons that happen in their life. You can't take that on your shoulders, even though you have been, and it's something that really does need to change because you deserve to be paid for your time always. So, this is a very low-priced uh resource to allow you to feel confident in making that change for your studio. So, before we finish today, I would like you to try and exercise out for yourself. I'm not saying you have to decide this minute to go and switch your whole billing system around, but to start considering what could be possible for you, what could make your life easier as a music teacher? So, in doing that, I'd like you to have a go at writing down the last three times you refunded or rescheduled a lesson and ask yourself honestly, did you do it because it was genuinely fair, or because you were afraid of the reaction you would get if you didn't refund or reschedule? Really think about how you felt when you made that decision. Were you running away from the confrontation? Hands up, that was me all the time. Or did you truly and honestly believe that that was fair to do? It may be that way, it may not, but considering exactly how you felt during those last three situations is a really great starting point to acknowledge how you feel during these situations, what you might have become used to, and consider that things don't have to be that way. Things can be a lot better when you take control of it. And if I can take control of it, then anyone can because I'm a self-proclaimed people pleaser, inherently shy, avoiding confrontation at all costs. But when it comes to standing up for my business and being able to support my family, these things become pretty clear pretty quickly. I do want to acknowledge that this is really hard for a lot of teachers. It was it was hard for me too, and it took me quite a lot of thinking to get my head around and to come to a point where I respected myself and my time enough to put this put this change into action. But because I'm on the other side now and my studio feels so easy to run, it's all of those confrontations, requests for reschedules or refunds, or taking money off the next invoice, all of that's gone. And it's not taking up space in my brain anymore. I don't have to worry about potential confrontations or having to respond to uncomfortable texts because they just don't happen. Like I said earlier, everything runs smoothly, and I can focus my time and my energy on my teaching and the thing that lights me up, which is sharing music with my wonderful students. And that's what it's all about, after all, isn't it? It creates parent-teacher relationships and student-teacher relationships that feel much more mutual. You don't feel apologetic for charging for lessons anymore. It's a professional business where you are providing a really high-value service of music education to your students, and you understand that you are respected for it and you respect your families in the same way. And you can say goodbye to all of that Sunday evening dread, wondering how many lesson cancellations you're gonna have in the coming week, or the way your stomach drops every time your message pings on your phone to say they're not coming to their next lesson, which signifies more lost income and lost time. You can say goodbye to all of that when you take control of your studio policies. So I will include in the show notes links to the monthly billing transition toolkit. I also have a free studio policy template which can which is available at victoriaclarkpiano.com forward slash freebie. Feel free to go and grab that. You can update it to for all of your own details and the specific policies that you want to have, but it takes all of the formatting time out of it so you can get your studio policy up and running in a very short space of time. So thank you so much for listening to this episode. I hope it has highlighted some really important points for you and helped you to consider a potentially better way of running your studio if you have been feeling trapped, refunding and rescheduling every cancellation. There is a way out of it, and I am here to help you through. Until next time, goodbye.