Why The Cost of Living Crisis Isn't Yours To Fix

Something happened on social media recently that I haven't been able to stop thinking about.

I posted about why music teachers undercharge, and the comments that came back stopped me in my tracks: teachers who hadn't raised their rates in years, defensiveness, and one comment in particular that I keep returning to: "I think you live in a very different socioeconomic area to me."

This episode is the extended version of that conversation.

Because the cost of living crisis is real, and the financial pressure on families is real. But somewhere along the way, music teachers decided that pressure was theirs to absorb, quietly, alone, without anyone asking them to. And that decision is costing them far more than they realise: not just in income, but in resentment, unsustainability, and the slow erosion of the joy that made them want to teach in the first place.

In this episode I get into where the guilt around charging actually comes from, why we're almost always wrong about what our students' families can and can't afford, and what your frozen rates are really saying about how you value your own expertise. I also address the fear sitting underneath all of it: that raising your rates means losing students, and why the evidence for that is much weaker than you think.

In this episode:

• Why music teachers have been absorbing inflation long before the cost of living crisis
• Where the guilt around charging comes from, and why it's costing you
• The assumption we make about our students' finances, and why it's usually wrong
• Why your value is not determined by how little you charge
• The fear of losing students when you raise your rates, addressed honestly
• What a sustainable, professional approach to annual rate increases actually looks like

Resources mentioned:

• Monthly Billing Transition Toolkit (£12)

Access the show notes here: Episode 2 Show Notes

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Okay, so last week while reading through the piano teacher Facebook groups, I came across a conversation about keeping your rates low and not increasing them year on year because of the cost of living crisis. So using the cost of living as a as a reason for not increasing your prices year on year. And it really stopped me in my tracks because this is such an important issue, and one of the one of the reasons clearly that piano teachers are not charging what they're worth, charging as much as they should be. So it prompted me to put up a post on my own social pages about this why the cost of living crisis isn't yours to fix. And some of the responses really had an impact. So there was one teacher who said they hadn't increased their rates in seven years and they were perfectly happy. And this issue I think we need to talk about, which is why this podcast episode is dedicated to that. If you saw that post, this episode is the extended version of that conversation. And if you didn't see it, I'm really glad you're here because this is such an important one for all music teachers to be aware of. 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. Today's episode is all about our collective aversion to charging enough for music lessons. So I don't think I've ever met a music teacher who was totally confident in their teaching rates, and how specifically the cost of living crisis has become the latest justification for something that was already happening long before the crisis began. The cost of not solving this problem is teachers are freezing their rates while everything else increases in price, and it's only got negative effects. So despite how the teacher feels, there will be some absorbed kind of resentment creeping into lessons, knowing that, you know, maybe subconsciously knowing in some cases that what they are being paid for lessons this year is actually less than what they were being paid last year because of inflation. Creating an unsustainable practice where you're making less and things have cost more, so you're gonna have to take on more students or teach for longer, teach longer days, and that only leads to burnout, and that is something that's not gonna help your students, and it's not gonna help you, and it's something to be avoided at all costs. So the thing that's kind of uncomfortable about this, which is which is why I think these conversations generate so much engagement on social media, is that there's this uncomfortable truth sitting underneath all of it. Teachers are making this unilateral financial sacrifice, but nobody asked them to make it. It's something that we kind of just take on because for a number of different reasons that we're going to go into. But no one's actually said to the music teachers, please absorb the costs of our groceries going up. Can you, you know, just keep your teaching rates the same so that it doesn't feel so painful when my council tax bill comes in? No one thinks that and no one is saying it. So we need to have it out in the open. Even though this is an uncomfortable topic for many people, I think this is such an important one. I think what's really important to highlight here is actually the longer term impact of freezing your teaching rates for any period of time. How it's not only going to impact your your actual income and your ability to afford daily life, but also how much you value your time and how you carry yourself in your lessons and the and the way that you teach. When you charge less, inherently you might start to value your skills less because it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's not something that is, it's not something that we can just put to the back of our minds, right? It's an it's an important thing that we need to talk about. So uh guilt. That's a pretty common emotion for music teachers. Feeling guilty for charging for doing something that we all genuinely love. We are so fortunate to be music teachers. It feels a bit like cheating because every day we get to do what we love, and so it comes with this sense of for many teachers, it comes with this sense of guilt in charging for it because we enjoy it so much, and I think there's quite a strong uh culture of you know, hard work must feel difficult and and sort of be really, really worth the money that you're paid for it, and that doesn't for the most part exist for us as music teachers. Yeah, we have we have good days and bad days, but on the whole, we do this job because we love it, we genuinely love it, and it brings joy to us, it brings joy to our students. So the concept of charging for it goes against the grain a little bit. There is also this deeply held belief that piano lessons should be accessible to everyone, and it's such a lovely instinct, and if the world was a perfect place, it would be accessible to everyone. But this instinct is being funded entirely by the teacher. There's no society coming together to fund all these lessons, it's not government, it's not any kind of arts funding, and so this belief is quite prevalent amongst the music teachers and the music teaching community. So there's a lot of teachers that hold it as this identity that music should be accessible for everyone, and that's why I don't charge the average rate, or that's why I don't charge as much as everyone around me. And this feeling that charging more would betray who they are as a person in wanting to share music with everyone, and so the these these emotions are well, they're draining, and it's something that we don't need to be feeling. There's there is a really important mindset shift around all of this that I feel very fortunate to be on the other side of, and that's why I'm talking about it so much. And I I want to to help as many music teachers as possible to understand that you don't need to feel this guilt, you don't have this responsibility to make music accessible to everyone. I should caveat and just say these are all my own opinions, and you as the business owner of your own teaching studio are entitled to run it exactly how you choose. But my purpose here is to make you as informed as I can be, to understand all your options and not just go for the default for what you understood was the the going rate or or the way to run a music studio because of what you've been exposed to in the past. So thinking about charging for lessons, in the very beginning, when I first started teaching, so I had just started my I'm gonna say in inverted commas main career in pharmaceutical market research, and for reasons that I probably will never get to the bottom of, I decided to start teaching part-time in the evenings after I got back from work after commuting in and out of London. Sorry, at the time I was in Putney, but it still took me an hour to get across London to Baker Street, so it felt like a commute. So, as a brand new teacher, I used the excuse of being a total beginner to only charge £10 for a 30-minute lesson. Now, this was back in 2007, and I thought, yep, that's fine, £10 for £30 minutes, it's a nice round number, it's not that much, and I didn't feel much guilt at all. I just thought, yep, that's fine, that that'll do. Now I I only took on five students because I was working full-time, and that was kind of I just wanted to start teaching and I loved it, I absolutely loved it. And so later, when I learned about the uh Independent Society of Musicians, back then it was the Incorporated Society of Musicians, the ISM teacher fees survey. I then decided to pick the average rate and go slightly underneath it. So the average rate was £18 for 30 minutes when I was looking at it. So I picked £15 for a 30-minute lesson because I believed it reflected my relative experience compared to all the highly experienced specialist teachers and music colleges and everything. And I thought, okay, that's that's fine. I've been teaching for a few years, now I'm happy to increase that rate to £15. Now you might look at it and go, wow, that's gone from £10 to £15, which is quite a big jump. However, understanding what the average was in the ISM teacher fee survey made me a lot more comfortable with just going below the average. Now, I've done other posts and talked about are you an average teacher? No, you're probably not because you're paying attention to your teaching and you're trying to be the best teacher you can be. But that's a discussion for another day. So following that, when I switched to full-time teaching in 2019, I decided, yep, okay, I'm I'm worth about the average now, so I increased it to 18 pounds for a 30-minute lesson and just went on from there. And then I went through the process of switching to monthly billing, which I can go into in more detail in another topic. But then that caused me to look at my rates on an annual basis. So up until that point, it was a fixed rate, and then going through this process of switching to a monthly billing system, put me on this academic year timetable and aligning it with those months so that every year I would increase my rates by a little bit to keep up with inflation. Okay? So that's where all this came from. I'd like to ask actually at this point, when did you decide that your rate was the right one for you? Did you calculate it or did you inherit it from someone else? Did you see the ISM teacher survey and just sort of do what I did and go for the go for the middle? I'd be really interested to know because everyone's got their own history when it comes to choosing your rate. Maybe you looked at what all the other teachers were charging in your area and decided to go for an average or go slightly underneath it if you know you felt like your experience wasn't up there with whatever their experience was. It's a very personal decision and it's a very emotional-based one where where this guilt uh surfaces at the worst times. Okay, cost of living. This has gone up for all of us. Every single person. Music teachers are not exempt from the cost of living having increased. So what you pay for your gas and electricity bills, your insurance for your home and your car, the cost of your piano tuning has probably gone up, the cost of courses for continuous professional development that you attend, your food bill, I mean that's the one that we see very easily. What was it that stood out to me? Olive oil. The cost of a litre of olive oil, Tesco brand liter of olive oil, increased from five pounds to I think it got up to ten pounds. It was it was enormous. All of those costs increase with this cost of living for everybody. And so if you're keeping your rates fixed, what you're charging is not going up, but all of your costs have risen. And that means your spending power has gone down year on year. Every year that you you that you keep your rates fixed and say, no, with the cost of living, I can't increase my rates because I can't put that extra pressure on my music families, my you know, my student families, every single year your spending power has reduced. You're effectively earning less each year. Which means the knock-on effect is you can afford to buy less, you can afford to save less, you need to take on more students or teach later into the evening where our prime time slots are. You get more tired, you have less energy for yourself and for your family. It leads to burnout in its most extreme cases, and this this ultimate result of keeping fixed rates just to protect our student families, often people don't understand the whole process of going all the way to the extreme, but it's true and it's not necessary. It's it's not really helping anyone. You're just if this is something you're doing, it's just it's sacrificing your own income to protect our student families in a way that they don't really need to be protected. Now, something I think that's really helpful is comparing to other professions. I don't think you'd be able to think of any other profession that that would operate in this way, certainly not one that would be around for long. Everybody increases their rates in line with inflation every single year. Plumbers, solicitors, dentists, no one expects them to absorb the inflation. So why do we expect it of ourselves? It comes back to this feeling of guilt, I'm certain of it. This we want to keep our student families happy. Of course we do. Everyone wants to keep their clients happy, and our student families, we have such close relationships with our students and our student families that it causes this blurring in the sense of running your studio like a business is not being unkind to our students. The bigger picture is we're being professional and we are being in the long run kind to our students because we are going to be the best teachers we can be for our students. Because we're not having to teach later into the night to make the same amount of money. We're fresher, we're more balanced, we are enjoying our teaching every single day rather than getting to the end of the week and thinking, I'm really worn out, I love this teaching, but wow, I need a break, you know? And very important point to take on board. The other aspect is this assumption that we're making about our students' finances. So we don't discuss, I mean, certainly I don't, I don't think many of us do, discuss in-depth financial situations with our students' families. We're guessing, and almost universally, we're looking at our families, our student families, and deciding on their behalf that they can't afford anymore. So we're not asking them, we have no evidence to tell us that they can't afford anymore, and usually this assumption is completely inaccurate. Now, I have a caveat here that really is to say, of course, if you know that one of your student families is struggling financially, that's a conversation you have with them privately. You don't use it to halt all your fees across your entire studio because it's damaging, it's damaging for everybody. But if you genuinely have a student family that is struggling, you have that conversation with them and you work it out in the way that that suits. So we know that our student families, you know, they have their they're living their lives. You see them going on holidays at half terms and school holidays, and you hear about it from your students. Oh, I've just got back from a cruise and I went to Florida for two weeks and I've been, you know, wherever they've been, they've had a wonderful time. They're going on holidays, so they they are not hard up financially. They're not on the edge, you know. But there's so many teachers still holding their rates frozen for these families when it's not needed. I think there's definitely an element of forgive me, but wanting to find reasons to avoid increasing fees because of the fear that comes with increasing fees, which I'll talk about in a minute. But this idea that using this imagined financial pressure as a reason you haven't raised your rates for the past four years, for example, when you don't have any evidence for it, it's a very easy thing to think and say, nope, it's okay, I'm protecting them from this fees increase because no one really wants a fees increase. Of course they don't, but it's the way the world works. Everyone increases their fees, costs go up every single year with inflation, and you're part of that. You're part of the whole thing. But I really want to make the point that I'm not suggesting that financial hardship is not real. It is, but you have that private conversation with that student or that family, and you work out how to help them. It's not a reason to freeze your rates for your entire studio because it's just not needed, and it's damaging for your business, and it's damaging for you, and thereby therefore it's damaging for your students. If they are without you as a teacher because you've done too much and burnt out, they're going to be suffering as well because they want you as their teacher, they value you, that's why they come to you for lessons. Okay, so let's talk about the fear. There is this real fear that sits underneath the guilt. The guilt is the surface emotion, but underneath that is the fear of losing students when you increase your rates. We've all felt it, lots of us feel it every single day, and it's a whole deep complicated psychological situation going on to do with our own perception of self-worth and imposter syndrome, which again I I have not met a music teacher who has not experienced imposter syndrome at some point in their life, and it's it really is an understandable fear, the fear of losing students when you increase your rates. But in practice, in my experience, and lots of people I've spoken to who have increased their rates and they and they increase them on an annual basis, this fear is rarely accurate. Most teachers who raise their rates don't lose students. I haven't lost any students anytime after increasing my rate each year. Not one. Now, don't get me wrong, I really had that dread. Each time I decided to increase my rates. Certainly making it an annual thing was a little bit scary, even though that was the smallest increase that I've done. Going from £15 to £18 for a half-hour lesson, I managed to choose to do that because I justified it in my mind and my own sense of self-worth that I was not a below average teacher. I was an average teacher because of the ISM fees survey, which by the way, isn't the be all and end all. This is self-reported teacher fees, and that comes with its own biases of teachers possibly undervaluing, underestimating what they charge, perhaps, because no one wants to be the one who is the most expensive teacher. So if we think about that for a second, no one wants to be the most expensive teacher. And the fear is because you expect students to come and line you all up and choose the cheapest. Now, this is not real life. This is not how it works. It's certainly not for choosing a music teacher. Sure, if you're choosing oranges from different shops and they're more or less the same, yeah, you're gonna go and pick the cheapest. But for something like a music teacher, which has to be the right fit for each student, not we know that not every teacher is right for every student, just as every student is not right for every teacher. The connection has to be there, the relationship has to be there, it has to build, has to be comfortable, you have to have communication working both ways, and that kind of cultivated and established relationship, most music families would not walk away from lightly. It's music teaching and learning to play a musical instrument, as we all know, is not a short-term journey. So why would we put ourselves in the same position and say we're just gonna be chosen on price? It's it's just not how it works. So, when it came to increasing my rates when I had switched to monthly billing and therefore was setting this this for the first time, setting this annual increase in my teaching fees, I did have a lot of dread. I thought about how much to increase the rate, I read as many posts as I could, I did the research online, I thought, well, I'm not just it's not like a stab in the duck, it needs to be relevant. However, at the time, inflation was so high that just saying, oh, increase it by what inflation is at the moment would have been an astronomical increase and one that I certainly wasn't comfortable with. And so I think I resorted to it was something like an increase of maybe three, four percent, maybe five percent. And that was after doing a lot of research, and then when it came to writing the email to announce this proposed increase that was going to take effect at the start of the next autumn term. So I think I sent it in about May time, part way through the summer term here in the UK. I deliberated over that email and the contents of that email for ages, ages and ages and ages, because I had this enormous fear that they'd see this increase and go, oh well, that's not worth it. The fear that we all have that uh that our students will just see us as run-of-the-mills, run of the mill teachers, and we're all the same as each other, so let's go for the cheapest. I put Put into that email as many benefits as I could think of for the monthly billing side of things, but also explaining what the increase was and how much it equated to per lesson. But I put it forward in a way that was minimally shocking, I suppose. It was a very difficult, very difficult email to write, and I had all the fear that we all experience. And I sent it thinking, well, if a few people quit, you know, that'll be really sad, but I can cope with it. Not a single person did. No one responded even to say anything about it, other than okay, thanks, that's great. I'll sign the next year's agreement at the next lesson. There was no pushback at all. No one had any problem with the increase. And so after that first experience of increasing for an annual change, it settled a lot of my fears. One point I'd like to make here is the concept of living in different socioeconomic locations. So this was a a point made by someone in response to my post, and it's making a different point. So it doesn't matter how well off our students are or the area that you live in. The point I've made about this is that teachers are freezing their rates out of guilt, and they're doing it at the expense of their own livelihood. So you've got all sorts of different families, but it's how much they value what you offer, how much they value having piano lessons with you. And it's up to them to decide how they spend their money. It's not a reason to not increase your rates because you get different types of students everywhere. Your ideal students are not defined by their income, they're defined by how much they value piano lessons. So this fear of increasing your rates because you're going to lose students really doesn't have anything to do with what socioeconomic status they they have. It's how much they value the lessons, and your ideal students will be everywhere. Okay, so the last point that I want to make about this is the fact that your value is not determined by how little you charge. In fact, it can indicate the opposite. There is a widespread and damaging belief that affordability equals accessibility, which equals kindness. But price is a signal. When you charge less than your experience is worth, you're telling families that your time and expertise are less valuable than they are. So if you use the example, if you go and search for a trade online, I don't know, you need a an electrician to come and fix something for you. I don't know about you, but I genuinely don't go for the cheapest when I'm selecting someone to come and sort something out. Something important, like your electrics, you don't want them to do a bad job. And how much they charge does reflect, it does impact your perception of how they value their skills. So if you find someone ridiculously cheap, there's not a lot of trust there that they would do a good job. So in choosing an electrician for something like that, I would go not the cheapest, not the most expensive somewhere in the middle. Obviously, it's not exactly the same as the sort of relationship we have with our students as music teachers, but I would argue that if you are charging so little that people are surprised by how cheap your rates are, that's probably having a detrimental effect on the public's perception of your value as a teacher. People aren't necessarily going to say, Oh, isn't she kind or isn't he kind for charging such a small amount because they just want to make lessons accessible to everyone. That's not what the vast majority of people are thinking. They're thinking, wow, they're not charging very much. I wonder why. If maybe they don't have many qualifications, maybe they don't think they're very good. Which is obviously the complete opposite of the intended effect of having low rates. So I would urge you to consider how your fees are received by prospective students. If you have had more than one say, wow, that's cheap, or wow, you're the cheapest in the area, it might be worth rethinking because you don't want to have you don't want to have this perception that's actually damaging for you. No one wants that. So when we think about charging what your experience is worth, it's quite a difficult thing to do, especially in the beginning. So as I referenced earlier in the beginning, as an absolute beginner teacher, of course, I'd learnt everything I'd learnt up until that point, and I was you know comfortable understanding repertoire and all the rest of it, but the actual teaching that I was brand new to, I was perfectly comfortable charging a really, really low amount. Just a side note, if you're charging £10 for a half-hour lesson, please, please rethink your rate because it's extraordinarily low, and it's actually this idea of charging a low amount. If lots of us did that as experienced teachers, you actually bring the entire expected going rate down, which is damaging for all of us as music teachers. So back to the point, teachers with waiting lists are not usually the cheapest ones. And that tells you something. They're in demand, they're in demand for a reason, because not because they're charging more than others, but because they are perceived as valuable, their teaching is perceived as valuable, and it probably more than likely plays out that way. They have waiting lists because their students stay with them, because they are good teachers, because they are good communicators, because they adapt to their students and they keep them going. There's all sorts of reasons why you'll have a full studio and waiting lists. It's not because you are the cheapest. Very, very rarely is that ever the case. So, for example, I charge nearly £47 an hour, and I have just over 50 people on my waiting list currently. And yes, I'm active on social media, so people come across my page and I'm searchable on Google, but I have a continuous influx of student inquiries, which I now direct through my Google form to collect uh their availability and data that way. So I'm certainly not the cheapest in my area. It's not something that I wanted to be. I I recognised early on that undercutting the rest of the teachers does not place you in an advantageous position for getting students. It puts you in this situation where your credibility is under question. So because I've I've mentioned that fear that I did have in the beginning about when I first started charging, of course, for lessons and then increasing my rates, all the fear of losing students, it was really real. But I recognise I have had a mindset shift since then. And for me, the bit that really made it click, recognizing the need to increase my rates every single year, really came from the example I gave you earlier, looking at our food bill for our weekly Tesco shop. We do it online, so you you know you can order all the same things every week, and seeing how much that consistent food bill had then gone up by buying the same things really brought it home to me that yes, we're all paying more for all the things that we need to live, all the things that keep our houses heated and keep the water flowing and keep the food coming in and allowing us to live. All of that cost has gone up. So it really sunk in then that absolutely, if I don't increase my rates every year, I'm doing my family a disservice, I'm giving money away, basically, by not increasing my rates every year to keep up at least, just really to keep up with inflation because everything else is costing everyone more, and that's what made it click for me. So, my motivations for putting up this post uh the other week on my Facebook and Instagram was really to highlight this area that so many of us struggle with, this fear of losing students because of increasing fees, and this concept of keeping your fees frozen because of the cost of living. I mean it it's it's an excuse for this underlying fear of losing students by them not being able to quote unquote afford piano lessons. So when I read the comment about I must live in a different socioeconomic location to you, it really I mean it made me stop because and made me feel really sad because if this is how music teachers are understanding their permission to charge for lessons that if they live in a less affluent area that they can't then charge a reasonable fee, and certainly that they can't increase their fees every year because they fear that their students may not be able to afford it. It made me feel really sad because there is there's so much that you can assume about a family, but you don't know for sure, and this is where that you know you can encourage your students to reach out to you if they are struggling financially with uh lesson fees, but it's not an assumption that you can make about all of your students because you you don't know the ins and outs of their finances. There's there's so many things that you make choices on what you choose to spend your money on, and there's all sorts of things. Uh you could spend a lot of money on food if that's where you want to spend your money, or you could spend a lot of money on games consoles and games, or you could go on holiday more often at the expense of something else. So all of the income, bar the basic necessities, you know, council tax and energy bills and water bills and all the rest of it, there are choices that every family makes about how they spend their money. And the modest income family who prioritizes piano lessons, they're making exactly the same commitment as the more affluent family. Your ideal students aren't defined by how much money they have in their family, how much income they have. It's it's about how much they value what you offer, how much they value piano lessons. Because they would then make that choice to spend some of that income on piano lessons rather than spending more of it on something else. I think it's such a widely held belief that areas of the country that are less affluent, piano teachers who live there, and sorry, all music teachers who live in those areas feel this obligation to not increase fees every year and to keep their rates as low as possible. But all it does is it stops you from growing, it damages your business, it means you're earning less every year. All the things I've already said, it puts more pressure on your time, makes your time less, I mean, your time is more valuable, but means your income per time spent working, which is not just active teaching time, I might add. Be less and less. It it can cause you to teach later in the evenings, as I've said, spend less time with your family, feel more strung out, reaching burnout, um, not being able to maintain your teaching, having to cut down on students because because you've gotten so stressed out, you have the physical repercussions. Like none of this is something that any of us want to have in our lives. And yes, these are these are more extreme examples, but it's going in that same direction. So valuing your time, understanding that you can't predict your student families, finances, understanding how basic inflation works, just every single person costs increase, so you increase your fees and everyone keeps up together. Everything costs a little bit more every year. I really want to bring this home. Raising your rates in line with inflation every year is not putting pressure on families. It's running a professional business and treating yourself with the same respect that you give everybody else. So if the thought of increasing your fees gives you a lot of fear, it's okay. That's normal. Um, and it's not going to damage you unless you don't act on it. So start small if you need to. An increase that feels manageable to you is infinitely better than nothing for seven years followed by an enormous jump that a jump so large that it feels terrifying to announce. You're not responsible for managing the financial pressures of households who are possibly booking holidays and going about their lives and you know going to the cinema or spending this amount on games or you know, whatever. You're not responsible for running their finances, that's their responsibility. The only thing you're responsible for is running a sustainable teaching practice, one that keeps the main purpose alive, which is to share your joy of music, if that's your main purpose, or to to introduce music into the lives of your students and allow them to access it. That's your purpose, and that's all you need to focus on. Your income matters too, and it's not something to feel guilty about. So if you're ready to look at what a rate rise would actually mean in practice, what it would do to your monthly income if you if you would consider going to a monthly income, how to calculate it, how to communicate it to parents without all the awkwardness. I have a monthly billing transition toolkit which has a calculation tool built in. It's got all the email templates that go with it, it's got FAQ responses, frequently asked question responses, so how to respond to these things that parents and students might ask. The link to that, if you want to go check it out, is victoriaclarkpiano.com forward slash monthly dash billing, and you can read all about that. This is something that has made an enormously positive impact on the way I run my studio and has enabled me to comfortably increase my rates by a small amount every year. This is a feature of the calculation tool. Actually, you can say I want to increase my rate by X percent, and you put the percentage in the box and it does all the calculations for you. It's been a really helpful way to run my studio so that I don't have all of these peaks and troughs with term times and holidays. So definitely worth checking out if you have ever thought about billing in a monthly fashion rather than a termly fashion. So thank you so much for spending this time with me. If this episode made you feel a little bit less alone in all of this or a little bit braver about sending that fees increase email, then it was worth every minute, and I'm so grateful you're here. If you know a teacher who's been putting off raising their rates, send them this episode. It will do them a big favour. And I'll be right here waiting for you when you can play on the next episode.