Piano Lessons for Adults | Scheduling Lessons for Amazing Students
This content was created for Curtis Music Academy
What I want to talk about today in this edition of the Curtis Music Academy podcast is the importance of scheduling. Now, a lot of people talk about the importance of scheduling when it comes to music lessons, but this is all things that I want to hit on because scheduling is incredibly important. Everything that we do here at Chris Music Academy. So as you all know, like, in fact about this 100 years before, scheduling is incredibly, incredibly important. And if it were not for a good scheduling system, things would be all over the place.
Over here at Curtis Music Academy. So as you all know, like we’ve talked about 100 times, we teach guitar lessons, music lessons, vocal lessons, piano lessons for adults and drum lessons. So between all those lessons, obviously we have a lot of instructors. So I believe at the moment we’re currently sitting at a 10 inch. So as you can imagine, getting 10 instructors for five different instruments is a lot of work and it does take a lot of work. But thankfully, we have a really good scheduling system in place that makes it pretty, pretty easy to schedule our students. Now, one factor that comes with scheduling that people talk about is the space factor. So we would love to schedule as many students at a time as possible because all of our instructors like to back their piano lessons for adults up to one another.
So you don’t have to just come for 30 minutes at a time. It can save hours. So, you know, everyone likes to have their piano lessons for adults packed up. And for the most part, most of our lessons are in the evening because not a lot of people are available during the day, especially kids who are in school, or adults who are at work. So it is pretty awesome that we have so many instructors that are willing to teach. But one of the problems that we run into is not having enough space to teach all the students who want to take lessons with this at the same time. So, for example, between 4:00 and 7:00 in the evening, things occur.
Music Academy is incredibly, incredibly swamped. So we have five or six students at a time or five or six students that will be parked in the back at once. And that’s where things get a little bit hairy in terms of parking. But I’m looking right now, I’d say on Tuesday. Tuesday is crazy for us. So between the hours of 4:00 o’clock and 7:30 at night, it looks like Andrea has 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 students in a row, seven students in a row between four thirty and seven thirty at night. And then we have our meeting right after that.
For example, though, at 6:30 p.m. on Thursdays, we have four students that are taking lessons at the very same time. Now, many of you know that downstairs we actually only have three student rooms that are open at once. So that is a problem. And you might ask yourself, wow, how do we rectify that problem for students and take 6:30 piano lessons for adults on Thursday? Well, what we do is we will put one of them upstairs. So we do have four additional rooms upstairs that we’re not quite ready for using for lesson purposes yet. They’re still kind of unfinished.
There’s not a lot of stuff up there yet because she’s been where we’ve been holding all of the random stuff that we don’t really know where to put, because as you all know, we did recently move into a studio. But we have one piano lessons for adults here up here that we have outfitted with a keyboard in those chairs that it’s actually the easiest to move the guitar upstairs. So if I’m ever shuttling lessons and we have four lessons at one time, if three of them are piano and one of them is guitar, I’ll obviously move the guitar lesson upstairs because there’s a lot more space up there, a lot more space for playing the guitar.
And it doesn’t require a piano. All it requires is the person, the guitar in the chair. So that’s something that’s way easier to move than a piano. So if there’s ever a lot of schooling problems, I will put a guitar student upstairs. That’s the easiest way to do it. So the purpose of a good scheduling system is to make sure that all of our students are scheduled for lessons when they want to be skilled. So we always try to use their first pick when it comes.
It’s good to think of their piano lessons for adults, so I’ll ask them three times. Usually what their first choice is, their second choice and their third choice. And I always try to make sure I can give them their first choice. But obviously that doesn’t always happen when you’re juggling 150+ schedules. It does not always happen. Everyone gets a first choice, but that is always our goal. So the thing about this schedule that we use is that it’s consistently moving and people are always rescheduling their lesson, moving their lesson.
And so this schedule is moving all over the place. And so that’s why we actually needed a system that would be able to be flexible with us as we move our students everywhere. So that is why we have started using Google calendar for all of our scheduling purposes. Now, one of the things that Google Calendar did not have that we needed was reminder text. So I keusch Music Academy. We have so many students in all for the most part. Different families have lots of siblings, lots of activities. So to make sure that we are super accommodating and make sure that they are aware of when their piano lessons for adults.
So people tend to forget things. That’s where we come in. So at Curtis Music Academy, we send out reminder text 24 hours in advance to your appointment. So if you ever have a lesson with us at 4:30 on a Thursday, you will get a reminder text about your appointment at 4:30 on the Wednesday right before. So we want to make sure that we always give you enough time to get that text message that you can remember. You have piano lessons for adults the next day. That’s one thing that we do just to ensure that our students will show up, not because we want them to forget, because if they forget and they don’t let us know that obviously they have to pay for that because they did let us know within 24 hours.