When I moved to Denver, Colorado from Atlanta, Georgia eight years ago, I started working for a company that built computers. I began advertising for music students in my home for January 2001 by leaving brochures at a national chain music company, Guitar Center. By April 2001 I had signed up thirty students and had to quit my job at the computer company. I gave the music lessons in the finished basement area of my town home, providing me enough area for a waiting room, restroom, and two teaching studios.
I currently keep between forty and fifty guitar, bass guitar, piano and voice students, as well as teach music full time at a local high school. Most of my private students are referrals, although I continue to leave business cards and brochures at the music store as well as in schools.

There are advantages and disadvantages to having a home music studio. However, the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages of a home music business. Let’s start with the advantages.

ADVANTAGES

1. Working your business from home gives you many tax deductions, including utilities and mortgage interest or rent deductions.
2. You have more control over the studio enviroment verses working as a teacher in a music store. You can design the layout of the studio and use furniture/equipment that works the best for you and your students.
3. There are no music studio rental fees to pay.
4. Parents enjoy the relaxed atmosphere of a home studio waiting room. In a music store, parents usually wait in hallways on metal chairs. Many times parents and students from two different families will run into each other during lessons, not knowing that the other family also took lessons in the same studio.

Disadvantages

1. Wear and tear on carpets, walls, entrance door, etc. Students carrying instruments often put small holes in the walls.
2. Housekeeping needs to be done regularly, such as cleaning the bathroom, waiting room and studio, vaccuming, refilling supplies such as toilet paper, paper towels, and paper cups. And when it snows or rains, students and their family tend to track debris and mud into your home.
3. There is an increase in your utility bills. On some occasions, students leaving the home left the front door open, causing the heat or air to stay on.

Next week I will discuss the layout of my studio, beginning with the Waiting Room. I will show you how I use the waiting room to market my business and handle collections while providing the students and parents a relaxing atmosphere. This is the room where the lessons begin and end.
The studio should work for you, helping you to recruit new students, retain current students, and provide the best learning enviroment for both you and your students.

I look forward to your comments and advice on your experiences in running a music studio business at home. What do you see as advantages and disadvantages? What are your success stories with your home music studio? What are your strategies?

I’d like to call your attention to some very useful ideas about scheduling students using Music Teachers Helper; these ideas were suggested by Tina in response to my post a couple of weeks ago. Take a look at her comments at the end of that post, Tips for Easier Lesson Scheduling. She even has PDF examples of how she does it.

The basic idea is to add your own categories, such as “available”, “makeup lesson”, “group lesson”, or whatever you’d like to track or offer to students–and then color-code them to make them easier to see.

For example, I’ve taken to listing available lesson times More…

One of the most important benefits of Music Teachers Helper (MTH) is that students can look up information at their convenience: they can look up online when their next lesson is, what they did in their last lesson, what their payment situation is–and if you wish, they can look up alternative lesson times in case they need to schedule a makeup.

At this time of year, teachers are scheduling lessons for the fall, and MTH can make that much easier. Who hasn’t had to play phone tag or use multiple emails to schedule a lesson?

I’ve tried a few different approaches with MTH. One was to create events on the calendar that were global, open to all, showing when there were available lesson times. This had the benefit of being easily accessible to students, but the drawback was that most students didn’t need this information very often, and it cluttered up their own calendar, making it harder to view their own lesson information.

What I do now (though we would all appreciate hearing from you about your own experiments–just add a comment at the end of this post) involves a fictitious student named “Just Visiting.”  It works well both for new students trying to schedule a first lesson, and for existing students needing to reschedule. More…

Sometimes I’ll hear of people being struck with fear at the mention of making online payments through Paypal. Most of this is due to having received some malicious e-mail claiming to be from Paypal, with the attempt to steal their credit card information.

This is called “Phishing” and really has nothing to do with Paypal, nor any other financial institution, other than there are people out there who are trying to get that information from you.

So when you receive an email from “Paypal”, how can you be sure it is legitimate?

Take the “Can You Spot Phishing” challenge and see how well you do.

What do you do for the summer? If you’re employed in a school system, how much summer vacation time do you take? If you teach privately, do many of your students continue through the summer, or do many of them cut down or take the summer off entirely?

From the post about Payment and Cancellation Policies (which has some new comments from teachers, by the way), it’s clear that some teachers set up annual tuition rates that include at least a portion of the summer for lessons. There is, however, always that pressure not to push students who want to take some summer time off. No one is at their best if they are always pushing and never taking a break.

As much as we’d like to regularize our income, we are also working with students as instructors and mentors, and can’t reduce this relationship entirely to financial transactions. We offer more than a commodity and expect students to respect us more than they respect a store or a salesman.

A number of my students continue through the summer, but maybe a third of them take a break or cut back. It’s a financial hit, but other events such as teaching at music camps or extra gigs tend to pick up the slack for me. What about you? I’m sure I’m not alone in being curious about the summer experiences of other teachers.

We all know that if someone wants to make progress in their playing, they need to More…

Back in March, I wrote a post about how we handle student payments and policies about attendance (Collecting the Benjamins). Because of the interesting responses from teachers, I thought it would be good to review two aspects of this subject again–payment policies and cancellation policies, and to summarize teacher responses. We would all appreciate it if you would be willing to “add a comment” at the end of this post, reflecting on your own thoughts and experiences. This is one topic we all deal with and are happy to learn more about from other experienced teachers. Below are summaries of responses from teachers writing about the earlier post, as well as ideas from my own experience.

(By the way, thanks to Valerie for her recent comment about the Music Ace free demo; see her comment at the end of the post about Online Music Games.)

1. Payment policies.

Betty: Teaches a year-round schedule and students either pay annually, semi-annually, quarterly, or if monthly, she divides the annual rate into 10 parts and they pay this amount monthly for 10 consecutive months. Students can leave with 30 days notice.

Jan: Charges a flat monthly rate based on the number of lessons in a school year divided by the number of months. It’s basically a tuition payment rather than directly relating the payments to the number of lessons in a given month.

Tina: Students pay for the lessons in each month at the first lesson of each month. She has Music Teachers Helper send invoices the first of each month, which works for most students; some need reminders.

Toby: His students pay monthly tuition.

Joe: Requires signed agreement and payment in advance.

Mine: I teach in two places currently. One place has people sign up for a semester (though some people manage to sign up for less); they pay the office and the office pays me based on lessons taught. Students can withdraw before the 5th lesson; otherwise they are committed for the semester. In the other location, students pay me directly, either 4 lessons at a time, or they pay at the first lesson of the month for the whole month. Student commitment is monthly; unfortunately, someone could drop lessons at the beginning of any month.

2. Cancellation policies.

Betty: With 24 hours notice, she’ll keep the payment but reschedule the lesson. There are 40 lessons in a year, and if they miss some or can’t reschedule, they lose those lessons.Jan: No refunds or rescheduling for missed lessons. She explains that More…

Below are several situations I’m sure you’ve had to face–about ways to collect lesson payments, including for missed or cancelled lessons–I look forward to your ideas and hope you find these thoughts of interest.

Six or 7 years ago, someone introduced me to the expression, “it’s all about the Benjamins.” I suppose it wasn’t obvious to me because I almost never have an occasion to notice whose face is on the hundred-dollar bill, but yes, it’s Ben(jamin) Franklin.

Business people are sometimes stereotyped as cold-cash-minded, but really, any way you make a living is a business. As in any business, music teachers have to attract and keep students (”customers”), collect money, and pay the bills.

Of course, most musicians don’t go into music thinking “it’s all about the Benjamins.” In fact, popular wisdom says that there’s only one way for a musician to end up with a million dollars: start with 2 million!

But we have to learn about collecting money consistently and with respect, and setting up policies that are reasonable but make for good relations. How would you handle some of these situations?

A student called me today to say her son is sick. Policies say she should pay for his lesson because she gave less than a day’s notice. It did create a hole in my schedule but this parent is ostentatious about her poverty and yet considers lessons important enough to pay for them. Would you charge her for the lesson?

More…