How to Raise Your Fees and Secure Your Studio For September Without The Guilt

If the idea of raising your fees makes you feel slightly sick, you're not alone. Most teachers I speak to have either avoided it for years, or they've done it once and vowed never to go through that stress again.

But here's what I've discovered after doing this every year for the past 4 years: raising your fees and updating your studio policy for September, done properly, doesn't just protect your income; it removes the uncertainty of not knowing who's coming back in September, it eliminates the quiet disappearing act that happens when students drift away over summer without a word, and it actually strengthens your relationships with the families who stay.

In this episode I walk you through the process I use every June: how I calculate my annual fee increase, how I check my studio policy wording for anything ambiguous, and how I communicate all of it to families in a way that feels professional and straightforward rather than awkward.

I also tackle the three objections I hear most often: the fear of losing students, the worry about appearing too businesslike, and the worry that asking families to re-sign each year is encouraging them to leave.

If you've been putting this off, this episode is your nudge to get it done. And if you do it this side of the summer holidays, you'll be able to start the new academic year safe in the knowledge that your studio is secure and all you need focus on is welcoming your students back.

Resources mentioned:

• Monthly Billing Transition Toolkit (includes the fee calculation tool)
• Free Studio Policy Template
• Focus Sessions (one-to-one mentoring)

Connect with Victoria:

• Instagram: @victoriaclarkpiano
• Facebook: @victoriaclarkpiano
• Website: victoriaclarkpiano.com

Access the show notes here: Episode 5 Show Notes

Transcript

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Every September, without fail, there were one or two families that just didn't come back. No message, no notice, no explanation. They just quietly disappeared over the summer. And it meant that I also had no idea what my income was going to look like in September because I had no idea who was coming back. Since that time, I have fixed both of those things. With one simple process I do every June, and that's what this episode is all about. And don't worry, if the idea of raising your fees makes you feel slightly sick, stay with me because I'm going to make that feel a lot more straightforward than it probably does right now. This episode is about the annual review of your studio policy and fees, why now is exactly the right time to do it, and how to communicate the changes to families in a way that feels professional and straightforward, removing all of that awkwardness that none of us want to have. The first time I increased my fees, I felt terrible. I thought about the email for ages, I reworded it so many times, I felt really awkward and guilty and uncomfortable, even though I knew I needed to increase my fees. But since making this an annual change in my studio, it's completely taken away all those horrible feelings. It's just part of what I do every year in June, and my students and families know to expect it, so there's no surprises, there's none of that fear of losing students or having people shocked by the fact that the fees have gone up, it's expected, and it's just part of my natural year. 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 up until four years ago, I never did an annual re-signing of my studio policy agreement. It had always been for the trial lesson, I would give them the studio policy agreement to take home and read, and if they wanted to start lessons with me, they'd sign it and return it. And then that was it. We'd never go back to it. The problem with that is your studio policies become something in the past, easily forgettable. It also doesn't allow for increasing your fees in a regular and predictable way. It also suggests that your fees are going to stay the same and never change, which is not something that we want. Even if that's the way you were, that's where I was too. It's okay. And it's alright to want to stay there, to feel comfortable with your rates the way they are, even if they've been the same for a few years. So here's why it matters: reviewing your studio policy on an annual basis, including your fees. If you haven't raised your fees for several years, you're essentially working for less. Your spending power is lower than it was in each previous year because of inflation. The price of everything has gone up for everyone, down to groceries and bills, electricity, gas, all the bills, everything's gone up. But if your teaching fee has stayed the same, you're effectively earning less. So that's point number one. That's a really important one. If your families and students don't receive a new agreement every year, that information just gets left in the past. They won't hold on to that agreement or they'll file it away somewhere and forget where it is. And that leaves you more open to all the things that we don't want. If you have a studio policy where you don't reschedule lessons and your lessons don't follow over into the next term or the next month, you have nothing to support you against these requests when parents and students come and ask for reschedules or to pause lessons during an exam period or any of those things. So having a signed agreement re-signed every year, updated and re-signed by each student or parent avoids having these difficult situations later in the year. Because you've got the agreement, you've got the copy, they've got the copy in their recent memory. It just makes everything so much easier. It's also a great opportunity to read through your studio policy wording again, as if you were a parent or a student reading it for the first time, to sense check it, to see if it makes sense, to see if there's any ambiguity. You could also get a friend to read your studio policy agreement and get them to give their honest opinion. Do they understand what each of the clauses mean? Or is it so convoluted that there's something to be done about it? This is the perfect opportunity to do that. Because if you have any ambiguous wording, it just opens the door for disputes because you'll read it one way, parents or students might read it another way, and then you get into the really uncomfortable conversations of misunderstanding, miscommunication, and disappointment on both sides. So it's a really important way that we can avoid all of those things. Making these changes at this point in the academic year is really helpful for avoiding this last-minute communication where families might feel ambushed. If you're changing your rates and you're changing your policies, if you do it at the last minute, they don't have time to absorb it, make the decision about continuing, it just feels a bit too pressured. It also comes across as slightly unprofessional as well. So giving them a good amount of notice for any changes that will take place before the summer holidays is respectful and it's professional and it just makes life easier for everyone. The summer holidays are not a time to expect parents to do admin. There is always a last-minute flurry in the last couple of weeks of the summer holidays, where speaking as a parent myself, is when you get around to doing all those things, like working out your schedule so you can decide which days you're going to be able to collect your kids from clubs or signing them up for lessons or for swimming lessons or music lessons or sports events or things like that. You don't want to be in that position in the last two weeks before the autumn term starts, not knowing exactly how many students are going to show up in that first week, not knowing who's on board, because don't forget, in the summer we need to do our planning as well. And yes, we need to have a break, and yes, we get to those last couple of weeks, unless you're super organized. I applaud you if you're super organised and get it all done at the beginning of the summer holidays. But I don't tend to do that. I get my head back into my teaching mode towards the last couple of weeks of the summer holidays, and I'm reviewing each student. I'm thinking about their journey, their goals, what I want to help them achieve, certainly in the next academic year, but also the next term. So I'll be ordering books, I'll be preparing materials, all the rest of that. So knowing exactly who's going to come back makes that activity much easier, much more straightforward, and less of a headache. We don't want to have all of this uncertainty right before we start a new academic year. We want to go into it feeling confident and refreshed, and this annual review in June is the way to do that. This is how you're going to get that lovely peaceful start to the new academic year in September. So my studio policy annual review looks something like this. We get to the summer term, we have half term, and during the half term, which is as I'm recording, we're just at the end of our summer term, half term. That's when I go and open up my studio policy agreement. I read through with as fresh a pair of eyes as I can to be objective and really understand how the wording would come across to a parent or a student, whether that's a new student or an existing student. I do this review at the same time of year every year as a routine. So it doesn't become this big looming thing where oh, I know I'm supposed to increase my fees and I need to check through my wording and think through my policies again. And this is where, if you're not quite established in the mindset of being a professional music teacher, those little doubts, self-doubt and worries can sneak in and get you to change your wording and make things more open and uh ambiguous. So you have to be careful when you're editing your studio policy agreement to not be in the frame of mind of, oh, we'll just let things slide, you know, that's not gonna work. So by making it a regular thing at the same point in the academic year every single year, families come to expect it, and it stops being a big deal for for both for you inside your head and for your students. They they come to expect it. In fact, in the last couple of weeks before we stopped for half-term, one of my students, one of my adult students, said, You're going to be increasing your fees soon, aren't you? That's going to increase in September. I'll hold off setting up my standing order. So without me even mentioning it, she knew it was part of the process because she's been with me for a few years now, and that made me feel so good because it with there was no judgment. There was it was nothing to do with oh, you're increasing your rates. It was the practicality of I was just about to set up my standing order, but I won't I'll wait till your new fees are are in and then I'll set it up for September, which is great because they're on board with the automation side of this monthly billing. So that was quite a nice uh unexpected mini conversation we had at the end of her lesson. And that shows how beneficial it is to have this as a regular annual update on your studio policies and your fees, because when everyone expects it, it completely removes any lingering doubt or guilt that you might feel about increasing your fees or tightening up your policy. So, this window, this sort of late May to June window, is ideal for a change that comes into effect in September because you give your families enough notice to take on board the changes, which I'll talk about how that's all communicated in a bit, to take on board all of those changes and to be able to reflect and decide, yes, we want to continue with the lessons, or no, we'd like our child to try something else. Now that might strike fear into your hearts, thinking, hang on, are we inviting them to leave? But we're not, we're we're really not. It's one of those big fears that we have when you start considering doing an annual re-signing of your studio policy agreement. It feels like when you ask families to re-sign, like you're giving them a chance to quit. I'd like to reframe that because it's not that we're giving them a chance to quit, or effectively we are, but that doesn't mean they're going to quit. In my experience, I don't have very many, if at all. The odd one occasionally, who when I send out the the annual update with the new fees, I think I've had it maybe once or twice, but it hasn't been anything to do with the increase in fees. It was only ever a student, it was always children, actually, my young students. It was always a student, a young student who had been struggling with practice for a while, and their parents had already had discussions with me and discussions with them that you know, if practice didn't improve, that we would maybe think about stopping. So none of it was ever a surprise. Having this annual review of the studio policy agreement and getting parents to sign up again, it gives them the opportunity to reflect on is it worthwhile for my child to be doing this anymore? It gives the opportunity for the students who aren't the right fit for you, they're not devoted to learning the piano or or whatever your instrument is. That's okay. If they leave, they're making space for your ideal students. They're not your ideal students, are they? If practice is a real struggle, if they're not making progress, and you know it, you can feel it when um we can all feel it when we have students who they struggle with practice. You can see see they enjoy it, but there's only so much you can do from your side, and the parents can do from their side, especially as they get a little bit older because because preteens want to have their autonomy, they want to be a bit more in control about what they do, what they like, what they don't like. So it's actually quite a useful exercise that kind of yeah, I'll say it, it it strips out the non-ideal students. If anyone leaves, it's those. It's never, it's never the case. In my experience and from everyone I've spoken to, and I speak to a lot of teachers online, it's never been the case that an ideal student has suddenly decided to quit off the back of updating the studio policy. There'll be something up the road like they're changing schools, they're going from junior school to senior school, or they are moving house and they're moving quite far away, and then it becomes less feasible and they'd like to find a new teacher near nearby them, if it's a significant distance from where you live. Or it could be that certainly if it's young students that they want to explore another hobby because as we know, when young students take on too many different hobbies alongside piano, it's just there's not enough time dedicated to the learning of piano or any musical instrument to make it worthwhile. You can't just do a tiny bit of everything, in my opinion, and actually gain any expertise in it. And that's okay. Children need to explore different hobbies and different activities, and there's always the option that they could come back to you or join your waiting list if you're at that point. The other part about making this happen at the end of May, beginning of June is families are in the right headspace for the back to school planning, and it's not right before the start of the autumn term. So when the end of the summer term happens, there is a huge switch off and a well-deserved one at that. Parents have gotten to the end of the academic year, the school run is you know blissfully weeks and weeks away, and they're not in the frame of mind of thinking to September. They're enjoying the fact that they can relax a little bit. So if you do it before you get to the end of the summer term, they're still in an engaged mode where they can think ahead to September and go, yep, we want to continue, we'll sign up again, and that's all sorted out. So it does so many good things having it done at this point in the academic year. Now, the deadline really matters for having the signed agreements returned back to you because the last thing you want to do is be chasing up people during summer holidays. You don't know if they are actually out of the country, they may have, you know, summer holidays is six weeks long, sometimes seven weeks. That's a long time. That's a very easy time for a single sheet of paper, which your studio policy agreement is generally to get lost in amongst all the end-of-term stuff because kids come home from from school often with big bundles of all the work they've done for the year. Certainly my kids do, and it's so easy for that agreement just to get lost in that. So let's avoid all of that mess by making sure that we've got a deadline. So, what I tend to do is I give out the agreement as soon as I can, really, after the summer term, half term, and I ask for it to be signed and returned to me no later than the last day of term, which I specify in several places. So this gives them plenty of time, but it also gives me several weeks of face-to-face contact with the student and all the parents. Gives me the chance to remind them of the agreement and request that they sign it and return to me. That way we're not in the summer holidays when people are not thinking about piano lessons, and we've got September set up and we know how many students are going to be returning. At least how many students, because of course we get new student inquiries towards the end of the summer anyway. So when I'm reviewing my studio policy agreement, I always increase the fee. I check the cancellation policy and any notice periods. I don't offer any cancellation notice periods, as in any cancellations are not rescheduled and not refunded. But also the notice period for terminating lessons, I double check, I'm happy with that. And any other terms that might have changed or caused confusion during the year, I can go back and look at the wording and tweak it. There was a really important change that I put into place after COVID because when we switched to online teaching in 2020, it saved my business really. It meant I could continue teaching without a huge gap. But it also meant that I needed something in my contract so that if there was another lockdown, because of course we had 2020 and then people re-emerged a bit, and then 2021 there was another lockdown. So I decided to add a clause to my studio policy agreement, which is still there right at the bottom, which specifies that in the event of a government-directed lockdown where face-to-face lessons are not possible, lessons will be switched to online lessons. And I had to put that in there because otherwise you get this. I mean, I know it's not a very common situation, but it happened and it could have been really detrimental to my business. If you want to switch people online and they're just not on board with it, they're frightened of it or they don't know how to set it up and they don't want to have lessons that way. So then there's an expectation that because they're not having lessons, they don't need to pay. So it protects your income by putting in clauses like that. That was in a reactive way, because of course none of us could have predicted that, the the scale of the COVID lockdown. But that's just one really good example of why reviewing your policy every year lets you reflect on what may have happened during the year. For example, if you had anyone push back against your policies and look at the wording of your policy and see where they got that understanding from, that's ambiguous language that you then need to fix to avoid that problem happening again in the future. Other things that you might want to update in your studio policy is, for example, I state that I teach 38 lessons every year. You might want to increase or reduce that number depending on how you're feeling and what capacity you have. You may want to introduce a different billing option or something like that. You know, there's lots of things that you could change, and this is a great opportunity to do that, so that it's a clear-cut change for the new academic year and not an awkward middle of the year change that no one's expecting. Also, that no one has the bandwidth to take on board and remember part way through an academic year. So, increasing your fees. A small predictable annual increase is far less disruptive than a large increase after years of holding your rate steady. I normally aim for about four to five percent each year, and it means that families expect it, it's just part of the accepted relationship. So, when it comes to increasing fees, I see lots of questions about this on social media and in our teacher groups where people are asking, how much do you increase by? Now, when inflation went bonkers not very long ago, didn't it get up to like nine or ten percent when everything, all the food got really expensive? That was not a feasible increase that we could all apply to our rates without completely terrifying our students. So no one wanted to do that. But as a general rule, it's good to increase your fees by a little bit every year, even just a small amount, so that you're not staying at the same amount. I tend to aim for about 4%, 4 to 5%, which roughly works out as an increase of £3 per month because I do monthly billing. This tends to work out at about 95p extra per 30-minute lesson. So when you're communicating this fee increase, it's really important to be to be specific about what it equates to per lesson. It's a bad idea to try and mask what the increase is by not giving it in a very clear way. If I just said, oh, the new monthly rate is this, it's not very helpful when you're trying to think about it in terms of okay, how much is that going up per lesson? And it's not very kind to make your students and families do that because lots of them will want to know, some of them won't be bothered at all, but lots of them will want to know, okay, what's that? How much more am I paying per lesson? So be completely transparent, tell them whatever regular interval you invoice at. Uh, mine is monthly, as I said, so I say how much it's increased per month, and I also give how much it's increased per 30 minute lesson because the vast majority of my students do 30 minute lessons. And because it's nice and transparent, you know you're being honest, they can understand clearly what's changing, and it's a much more manageable way of going. Going about making this change. So, in order to calculate my new rate, I created the monthly billing transition toolkit, which I've talked about on here before. It has a calculation tool which is really useful, and that's what I use every year to calculate my new rates. So you just put your whatever you bill at, so I put my per 30-minute lesson rate in, and the length of the lesson 30 minutes, and then the calculator does all of those calculations for you to get you to a nice round number for your fees per month. Now there's a little section where you can increase by percentage. So I just put four in there or five percent increase and see what it comes out as, and it recalculates everything. So you get this nice round number for your monthly fee, and it tells you what your new, it back calculates what your per lesson fee is, which allows you to communicate it really easily. So there's no guesswork, there's no rounding errors, you don't have to worry about anything, you just plug in your numbers and it's done. I made this calculator tool because it used to take me ages of sort of trial and error. I mean, I know how to do the calculations, but it just took me such a long time to decide on how much I was increasing by until I got into the rhythm of this, and having this calculator tool just makes it super duper easy. So if you are doing monthly billing and you want to use this calculator tool that does all work for you, it's inside the monthly billing transition toolkit, which I'll put a link for in the show notes. It's a very inexpensive uh product, it's only £12. So if you'd like it, you can use it year on year to help you with your percentage increases. One thing I do want to address here is this fear of losing students over fee increases. I've talked about this in other episodes. We all have this fear that if you increase your fees, you're gonna lose your students. But by doing it in this way, doing an annual increase of a small amount, it's far less likely to cause someone to leave than it than if you did a larger increase after keeping your rate steady for a long time. And I can guarantee families who've been with you for two or three years, they're not gonna be leaving over a 95p a lesson increase. They don't, they really don't. And the ones who leave, we're gonna leave anyway. Like I said earlier, it's the ones who maybe this student hadn't been practicing for a long time and it was a real struggle at home, and they'd kind of lost the enthusiasm for it or discovered another hobby that they wanted to do. It's not because of the fee increase. People don't leave because of that, and the ones that do, they're not your ideal student anyway, but you would already know that you'd you'd be teaching them and it would be a struggle for one reason or another. So once you've got your new fee calculated, it goes in an email to all of your students and families with the new monthly or terminally or whatever frequency that you invoice. The new fee effective from 1st of September, what it equates to as a per lesson increase, also confirming what has not changed, you know, the cancellation policy. For example, you could just reiterate it's a perfect opportunity to reiterate the most important policies, maybe the ones that people forget about or push back against or ask for reschedules for. As a confirmation, these policies have not changed and are still in place. Miss Lessons will not be rescheduled or refunded. You know, it's a really good opportunity to pop that in there as well. You also give them the deadline for returning the signed agreement, and also what signing this agreement means that you are agreeing to the increase in fees and to abide by the policies as they are in place. So your policy wording is really important to make sure you've got it right. I read a post in one of the teacher groups this week, and it was about it was a teacher who was really upset about a parent who had refused to pay the notice period for their child, and it's not unheard of, but it turns out the teacher had a very convoluted studio policy agreement with lots of different time periods mentioned, and there was way too much information in there. So actually, a lot of her the responses to this original post were your policy wording is too confusing. I can understand why the parent didn't want to pay or didn't expect to pay, that was it. They didn't expect to have to pay for a notice period because they'd reached the end of the academic year, and based on the wording of the different sections in this teacher's studio policy agreement, you can kind of see why. So, this is a very important point that I want to put across. You need to be super crisp and clear with your wording in your studio policy agreement, not softened down, not in the way that you would actually speak to the student or the parent. That's not how signed agreements need to work. It doesn't need to be in really high-level legalese, of course not. You need it to be easy for them to understand but completely unambiguous. If you have a policy that is open to interpretation, it's not a policy, it's an invitation to an argument. So reading through your policy, like I said earlier, with a fresh pair of eyes or getting a friend to read through it and try and be objective about understanding what it means. They could relay back to you to you in their own words what they think your policy means for each point, and that will help highlight any areas of discrepancy or ambiguity that you could help correct. You could copy and paste your studio policy into an AI platform and ask it to pick holes in it. That's quite a useful way of using it. Highlighting areas that you might not spot because you wrote it, things that could be interpreted in a different way. That can help you hone down your wording to be as clear as possible. Sometimes you have policies where people have added to them every year but haven't gone back and checked earlier clauses, and then you end up with a studio policy that has conflicting points, that's never a good place to be. You don't want your studio policy to contradict itself. There's also wording that invites interpretation or discussion or negotiation, and we don't want any of those things when it comes to our studio policy. So soften this is what I mean by like softening the language, where if you add things like where possible or in exceptional circumstances, like what does that mean if something you think is exceptional circumstances may not it probably won't line up with what some of your families think are exceptional circumstances. So in my policy, I do have this, but it's clarified. So it's for the missed lessons clause. So I have lessons missed through the student's non-attendants will be charged for unless the circumstances warrant a special concession at the teacher's discretion. Now that last bit at the teacher's discretion is the clarifying point. It's not down to the student or the parent to decide that the situation warrants a special concession. It makes it clear that it's based on what the teacher thinks is a special concession. So you make it really nice and clear that it's not to be interpreted in any other way. This allows me to apply it in the way I choose to, which is bereavement. If there's any bereavement involved in the missing of a lesson, that's when I will refund the lesson directly. I think one of the places that we all trip up, especially in the beginning, when it comes to writing studio policy agreements, is using wording that you wouldn't necessarily use when speaking face to face with your student or the parents. And that feels uncomfortable when you read your studio policy agreement. You think, oh, does this sound too harsh? And that's one of those fears around doing this update. I don't want to seem too business-like or formal, it feels harsh, but it's a necessary way to be clear to avoid the ambiguity. Clarity is kinder than vagueness. If you're vague in your studio policy wording, you're just opening the door to negotiation and interpretation and misunderstandings and miscommunications, and we don't want any of that with our studio policies. So you can still be warm and clear at the same time. And the problem is with all of these chats I see online where these situations arise, where parents have misunderstood the studio policy agreement, it's always down to the wording being too vague to begin with. The way the the policies were communicated was just a bit too vague. And it's not a criticism of teachers, it's just an acknowledgement of the fact that it is an unnatural way to speak. If you read out your studio policy agreement, that's okay. If your studio policy agreement reads in the way that you speak, then there's something wrong with your studio policy agreement. One thing I will point out here is that I at one point did have different policy agreements for child students and adult students because I was trying to people please and accommodate all my students in what worked for them. And so for the adult agreement, I used to have an extra clause that kind of made it more complicated in that at the beginning of the academic year, adults could give me dates of holidays that they had already booked that would then not be counted as missed lessons, and those lessons would be not charged for, so I would be adjusting their terminally invoices because that's what I did back then. And it was just a bit too convoluted because having the concept of you don't have to pay when you go on holiday isn't the same as I will allow holidays that I'm made aware of at the start of the academic year, and then you have to backtrack when that comes up because not many people book a holiday like almost a year in advance, and so it just kind of opens the door to more awkward conversations and discomfort, and actually is in a negative way reinforcing the idea that your time is expendable, and because you can't really fill that lesson slot for the one or maybe two weeks that they're not there and you're not getting paid for it, but that is a story for another day. So I didn't have the separate studio policy agreements for adults and children for very long. I I did away with it and went back to one single clear, straightforward policy, and that is why my studio runs so smoothly. So if you're not sure where to start, I have a free studio policy template you are more than welcome to use. I'll include the link in the show notes. It's structured so that it's based on piano teaching, so there is a grid on there which has space to input what kind of instrument they have at home. If you don't teach the piano, you can adapt that for your own instrument or remove it entirely. It's just something that I wanted to have on my policy agreement so that I would know what my students were playing on at home. But it's only on two sides. The second side has all the clauses, and the first side has the main information on it. So it's nice and clear, it's colour-coded so that you can update the relevant information to suit your own policies, whatever you want to have there. You don't have to use all the policies that are there, it's just everything is available for you to update as you need. But the wording is as clear as possible, and if you read it to yourself, you might read it and think, I can't possibly use this. I would never speak to my students in this way, but that's exactly right. You would never speak to your students in the way that you write your studio policy agreement. It's got to be completely unapologetic and direct and clear. No fluff words, no softening words, nothing of that sort. So if you're if you find it hard to write those deliberate direct statements, this studio policy template will be really helpful for you. So I'll add the link in the show notes, or you can access it at my website victoriaclarkpiano.com forward slash freebie. So once you have your updated studio policy agreement, you're happy with all the wording, you've decided what your increase is, and you've either used my calculator tool or done it yourself manually, you've got all the right figures and information in there. Now it's time to communicate it to your students and families. So the first thing I do is I will send out an email to all of my students laying out exactly what's going to change, and in the subject line of the email, I write studio policy agreement update, academic year 2026 to 2027, and then in block capitals after that, response required. The reason for putting that in the subject line is it's so easy for people to see emails and go, oh yeah, that's just information. If they see response required, they will go and open it, read it, and then they'll most of the time they do, um, they'll respond to the email. Now you need a response to the email as an acknowledgement that they have received that information. If you don't get that response, it's just another hole that can be left where families or students can genuinely say, I didn't know about the change, if they haven't opened the email, or you know, if they've read it and forgotten it, they can say they they had no idea about the change and blah blah blah. But but we're going to avoid that by having a request for reply to the email that you send out to all of your students. So it gives advanced notice of the change. What you include really needs to be all the all the major changes that are happening. So for me, it's confirmation of the new fee effective from 1st of September 2026. That's what it will be this year. What it equates to per lesson as a per lesson increase. You can also state what's not changed, like I said earlier. It's your chance to reiterate the policies that are still in place, and the most important and helpful ones for to reiterate are your cancellation policies, namely, any lessons missed by the student for any reason will still be charged for and lessons not rescheduled or refunded, and also the notice period for stopping lessons is blah blah blah. That's a really useful time to put that in there. You also need to include the deadline for returning the signed agreement, which I put in as either the last day of term or maybe the week before, basically as soon as they can, really, so you're not scrambling on the last day when you're not going to see them again. And I also put in this email that they will be receiving a physical copy of the studio policy agreement at the next lesson. So the email has the studio policy attached as a PDF file. Always a PDF file, not a Word file. I never understood this before uh years and years ago, but uh the reason you make it a PDF and you don't need a PDF converter, you can literally in Word uh click Save as PDF and you're done is so that nothing can be edited because you don't want any, not that I've had any parents or students who've done that, but you never know. You need to send them something that is not editable, so that's why you send a PDF. Sending the email also creates a paper trail and it's sent with enough notice that it gives families time to think and parents to chat with their children to decide are they enjoying piano, do they want to continue with it? And 99 out of 100 are yes, they do want to continue with it, and it means that there's no surprise when the physical copy arrives in the next lesson. It's just a gentle introduction of the change. So you print out enough physical copies to give one per family, hand it to the student or the parent at the very next lesson. So this is the formal record of it. What I tend to do is if it's parents who sit in on the child's lesson, is I encourage them to sign while I'm teaching their child because they have time to sit and read. Um they've already seen the email with the changes, they can read through and sign, and then it's all done and dusted, and they don't have to remember to bring it back on another lesson because that's just another thing to remember or forget in my case, and then chase up in the last couple of weeks before the end of term. So you can kind of get it all done straight away if you encourage them to do that. You can also verbally mention about the new policy agreement. So maybe if the parent doesn't sit in on the lesson, but they've obviously come to the door to collect the child, you can just mention it in passing. By the way, I've given so-and-so the paper copy of the studio policy agreement. It'd be wonderful if you could sign that and bring it back next week. Just as a we've spoken face to face, and you're not relying on a six-year-old with a piece of paper to get that to their parent and from and for them to know what they're doing in because little bits of paper get lost. I mean, I I always find it funny. I've got I teach about 50% of my students are children. Uh, the youngest is six, I think, at the moment. So I've got lots lots of six, seven, eight, nine, ten-year-olds. And the number of these students who in their music book bags they've still got like certificates from recitals from two or three years ago. They've got Portsmouth Music Festival certificates as well, they've got sheet music from Christmases three years ago, living in their book bags. So you don't want your student studio policy agreement to end up there, you want it to be in the parents' hands. So you can also hand it to them physically if you know they come to the door. That's also another way you can do it. And then what I tend to do is as we get closer to the end of the summer term for the few stragglers, because there will always be some, I might send them a WhatsApp message or a text if I haven't heard back from them by email andor I haven't received the signed agreement. So it can just jog their memory so that you can get the last ones accounted for. That way, by the last day of term, every student who is continuing in September has signed up or you've had the conversation that they're not going to continue. Bear in mind that would require a notice period. That's an important thing to cover as well. Making sure all of your studio policy agreements are signed before the last day of the summer term goes a long way to making a nice smooth start in September. If you're struggling with the idea that asking families to sign up again is just giving them a chance to quit, just remember that if students were going to leave, they were going to leave anyway. This just makes it more formal. This stops the quietly disappearing over the summer and never turning up again, leaving you with an empty slot at the start of September and then a scrabble to fill the space. Even if you have a big waiting list, you need to then contact them and wait for them to come back and remember who's available on which day and all the rest of it. It avoids all of that hassle. The ones who stay and sign up again are actively choosing to stay, and that's a really good thing because it reaffirms these are the right students for you. I feel like it helps improve the bond and connection you have with your students and their families because you have this touch point at at least this one touch point every year. Now we have more touch points in my studio because we've got the festival and we've got the summer recital and then other points along the way where I'll make videos of playing the duets with the students and send them to the parents, and it's lovely, and we can share their progress in that way, or just to send a message to parents to say so-and-so has been trying really hard lately. I just wanted to acknowledge that and and give them a pat on the back. So it's it's a really nice way to know that they want to be your student. It's a good confidence boost for you as well to remind you that you are providing something of value. You're providing this music education to them and they love it, they want it, and they want to stay with you. So it does lots of things having this annual re-signing up again. On the more pragmatic side, the signed agreement does protect you if anything goes wrong later in the year. For example, if I don't know, something suddenly happens and they want to quit without notice, or I don't know, it doesn't really happen anymore for me because all of my families are on board with my policies. But if you got sort of a text out of the blue where a parent is asking to pause lessons during exams, I used this example earlier because it's been coming up a lot lately because of students in GCSE years taking exams. That's another topic for another day. But this kind of weird situation that appears to be becoming more commonplace to just stop all music lessons during the exam period. It never used to be like that. In fact, you know, in our teacher groups we have lots of conversations about this. How we all remember continuing our music lessons all the way through whatever exams we were doing, really because it was a wonderful relief from revising, from trying to memorize all of the chemical names for things, or you know, when I did biology and chemistry and all the rest of it, having the music lesson was just a good way to let your brain have a rest or engage your brain in a different way and to have fun and do something enjoyable. Anyway, like I said, that's a discussion for another day. So, as I like to do with most of my podcast episodes, is to give you something actionable to do straight away, something small and achievable. So, what I'd like you to do this week is to sit down and do the fees calculation, work out what a four or five percent increase looks like for your studio, just the one step. Once you have the number, the rest of it just falls into place because you're not second guessing yourself for three hours about what your new rate should be. You stick to a percentage increase and you look at it and you go, yep, that's okay. That equates to this amount per 30-minute lesson or 45-minute lesson or whatever you teach. And then you're ready to start putting all the other steps into place that we've talked about. If you want to look into switching to monthly billing, the monthly billing transition toolkit is exactly right for you. This is a good opportunity to make that switch as well. You can do the whole switch. This is what I did in 2022, switching from termly billing to monthly billing at the same time, obviously, changing the fee to reflect what I was charging from the following September. It's a nice clean break. So that toolkit gives you everything you need to make that change. It also includes answers to frequently asked questions, email templates for announcing this kind of change, so you can copy and paste all of that as well, and a timeline, which obviously starts about now. So that's available uh on my website, and I'll put a link in the show notes. The free studio policy template that I mentioned earlier, if you just want to review your current studio policy and the wording, you can have a look at that and see if you you know you can make use of any of the clauses that are in there to update your policy to make it be super clear and say exactly what you mean it to say. I also offer one-to-one focus sessions online if you want any support working through this. So there'll be a link for that too, where you can book an hour with me. So I hope this has been a helpful episode for you. If you are still on the fence about whether or not you should increase your fees or whether you want to do this annual update of your studio policy agreement, that's okay. Just listening to this episode and getting ideas is the first step towards making those changes. So don't feel like you have to overhaul your whole studio in one go. I would encourage you to read my blog posts which go into more detail about how to handle all of these things, like cancellation policies, finding your ideal students, and so on. Because I just want to help as many music teachers as possible. And if you're stuck or if you're feeling paralysed by fear of losing students, we've all been there, lots of us hang out there a lot. I'm here to support you, so do get in touch. I hope you have a lovely day and look forward to seeing you in the next episode.