Guitar Lessons in Tulsa | Scheduling Strategies
This content was created for Curtis Music Academy
When it comes to scheduling lessons, it can be very tricky trying to figure out a schedule that would be most beneficial for the instructor. And as I was first teaching guitar lessons, one of the problems that I encountered was trying to make everybody happy and I would consistently ask what was the best time for them to take lessons. And all though, this is still a question that we ask because it is important to find a time that is convenient for the student. If it’s not convenient, then they’re not going to want to take lessons for a long time if they’re constantly trying to adjust their schedule to accommodate our schedule. But we want to find out what’s best for them. But the truth is we’re only going to be able to open up a few slots to maneuver a new student. And when I was first starting to teach lessons, I would consistently have a very crazy schedule because I was just excited to have a new student.
So I didn’t really worry too much about getting a student on a current day that I taught. So I would teach two students on Monday and there would be a random hour gap in between students and then on Wednesday I might teach for students and there might be 30 minute gaps in between students. And as I continued to grow as a guitar instructor, one of the things that I worked much more diligently on was scheduling students in a way that would allow one student to walk out of the room and another student would walk into the room. That way I was optimizing not only the amount of time that I was able to receive income, but also I was able to efficiently schedule students so that I didn’t have to work as long and even if I wasn’t technically working on one of the 30 minute breaks, I was taking time out of my day to wait for another student. And so that’s one of the things that you want to make sure you’re doing if you’re scheduling your own guitar lessons in Tulsa is scheduling your students back to back. And probably after about a year of teaching lessons, I was able to pretty effectively get my students to be in a schedule that I would allow myself to work for about four hours straight, which was amazing. The funny thing is it used to be very time, time consuming and a little little bit challenging for me as a guitar instructor too.
Teach for four hours straight that would be eight students back to back to back and as I continued to do it I was more efficient as a teacher and it actually helped me to teach better because I could practically teach them in a shorter amount of time, which allowed myself to be more free during the day, which allowed my brain to be more focused on teaching lessons when I was indeed teaching lessons. So that was something that was very helpful as I began to get better at scheduling and get better as an instructor, if you are having a difficult time scheduling students back to back or if you’re noticing that you don’t have enough time slots to allow for new students to be back to back.
What I recommend is start a new time slot where it’s not back to back. Even if you have four hours that you work on Tuesday and then you have a random 30 minute lesson with one student earlier in Tuesday, say nine o’clock in the morning on Tuesday, and then your four hour stretch starts from three to seven and you have a student that wants to get scheduled for 9:00 AM on Tuesday and you’re thinking, well, that’s not a good idea because if I work at 9:00 AM then I’m going to have to not only show it to work at nine I also have to come back and then start teaching at three but the fact is you should not refused to teach that one student at 9:00 AM because what you’ll find if one of your students is willing to meet at 9:00 AM you will absolutely receive another student later that’s willing to meet at nine 30 you will meet another student that’s willing to meet at 10 and then pretty soon that random 30 minute time slot that was making you wake up earlier making you teach lessons earlier. That was completely random, is now starting to be a very nice source of students for you on a Tuesday morning from nine to 11 or however long it is.
And then you have a solid amount of students that you can teach in the morning that justifies you getting up early. But then you have a nice solid break in between your morning lessons and your evening lesson. And so this is something that I encourage you to go ahead and do if you want to continue to teach more students, but you’re apprehensive about attempting to start a random student at an early time where you’re not teaching students, well just go ahead and do it. Teach that 9:00 AM students so that the remainder of your students that continued to contact you will have somewhere to be placed. And this is something that I do when I am even scheduling the instructors that work at Curtis Music Academy.
So not only do I implement this strategy for scheduling myself, I also use this strategy when I am scheduling our instructors. So for instance, we had about four students on Mondays that took guitar lessons in Tulsa. And they were scheduled from four 30 to six 30 so we had four students over a two hour period that one of our instructors was teaching. And as we continued to get interest in people filling out forms to take guitar lessons in Tulsa, what we noticed was Mondays we’re actually a great day for a lot of students to take lessons. And so as we received these inquiries about guitar lessons, I would give them two options I would say. What do you think work would work best for your schedule? Do you think? Four o’clock on Mondays would work? Cause we also have six 30 available on Mondays and then what would happen is we would give them two different options, four o’clock or six 30 on Mondays.
And typically because you’ve given them two options, unless Monday is just absolutely no way they’re going to be able to make that work, chances are one or the other will work. And so by, by giving them specific times on a Monday, we were able to make that instructors student load on Monday from four to five without really making much more of a time commitment. Because it was immediately before or immediately after. And now that instructor, through using this strategy, he is now teaching guitar lessons in Tulsa for a solid five hours each Monday. He starts at four and then he ends at eight, so I guess it is four hours. But anyway, that’s a solid amount of time for this instructor to teach and that’s how we were able to get that many students for him. And so we do this with all of our instructors. If they teach on Saturday, we want to give a time slot that would work for that instructor without causing them to stay much later.