Tulsa Guitar Lessons | Traveling to Lessons
This content was created for Curtis Music Academy
One thing that Curtis Music Academy offers, although we do not advertise is driving to your house for lessons. And the reason we don’t advertise it is because we don’t want this to be a every student type of deal. We don’t want to drive to every single student’s house. But one of the things that this allows is for our schedule to accommodate more students. Surprisingly, even though you might think that if we offer driving lessons, we would be reaching less students because of the drive time. We’re actually able to reach more. And the reason for that is because we are not using our own facilities and our own studio space and our own bathrooms to accommodate this student. So the way that we do driving lessons is we will schedule a student and we will stack up all of the driving lessons for the week on that one day.
Currently we drive on Mondays and Wednesdays and that’s it. And so if the schedule allows for it, what happens is we charge just a little bit extra to accommodate for the drive time and for the gas to get to the student’s house. And then through the course of the day, what ends up happening is the extra amount that is charged to the student for gasoline and drive time, it actually doesn’t break even in the time lost of teaching a potential other students. So if you think about it, if we drive to one student’s house, that’s essentially 30 minutes of drive time, cause it’s typically 15 minutes. But if we have two students that we drive to, it’s not double the me, the amount of drive time instead of 30 minutes for a one 30 minutes for the other, which would in turn turn to be one hour of drive time.
It’s actually just 45 minutes. And the way that this would work as it would be 15 minutes to the first lesson, 15 minutes to the second lesson, 15 minutes back home. And it’s not obviously that perfect of a time difference. But as you can see, the more or lessons that you stack, the less drive time that is required, especially if you’re stacking your lessons so that the students that you’re driving to are actually close in proximity to one another. So sometimes instead of 15 minutes, it could only be a 15 minute drive from one student to the other. And if this is the case, this is where scheduling is key because you do not want to waste time driving and just waiting in between lessons. So this is where scheduling times are going to get very funky, but you should continue to make funky times.
So for instance, one of my students starts that are lesson at four oh five on Wednesday and although that’s a very weird time, I am consistently at their house at four oh five I’m not there at four oh seven I’m not there at four oh two I’m there at four oh five and that’s because the previous lesson ends at four and it takes me about four minutes to get to that house. So I am consistently there right on time, despite a very strange four oh five start time. So start your lessons at a time that makes sense that you can consistently get there on time, but that you’re not just waiting around and sitting in your car or anything like that. So that’s what I recommend. With those driving lessons, it’s going to help a lot stacking them. And so like I said, on Mondays we have about four different students that we drive to and by driving to that amount of students, we are able to reach them in a time
that is effective for the driving. And if you’re interested in getting into different driving lessons and allowing students to enjoy their Tulsa guitar lessons in their own house, the one thing to be careful of is ensuring that you’re still able to end the lesson on time. When you have students coming into your studio, it’s very easy to wrap up the lesson and get the next student into the studio space because the student that you’re currently teaching is observing the next student walking in the door, getting settled and ready for the next lesson. So if you’re currently teaching a guitar lesson and your next student arrives, if it’s the end of that student’s lesson, then they’re not going to want to take the time for the next student and they know that the next student has their time slot and that’s what they’re going to be working for.
So with that being said, it’s very easy to wrap up the lesson. When you are teaching lessons at someone’s house, it’s a little bit more difficult because although you know that you have another student that if you don’t leave, you’re going to be late for a lot of students that you teach in their house are unaware of the fact that you have other places to be an other places to go for lessons. So you have to be very clear that you will be ending the lesson on time. You will have to leave immediately after the lesson. And just as a tip, you certainly should leave a little bit of time just to speak with the parents. Uh, after a lesson. You don’t want to end the lesson with their child. And then immediately as soon as you are done teaching that child, you run out of the room because you have another lesson to drive to.
Now you, you really do have to have a little bit of time where you can speak with the parent and discuss some of the things that you went over in the lesson and then what you will be talking about the next week in the Tulsa guitar lessons. So if you are able to do that, that’s great because then it allows the parent to feel like they’re a part of the lesson and you are not just coming in and running out because you don’t like teaching lessons, which isn’t true. It’s not true. If you didn’t like teaching lessons, you would have no students, at least I hope you would have no students. So that’s what I would recommend when it comes to teaching lessons inside of other students’ homes. And one of the things that is really awesome about teaching lessons inside of other students’ homes is you get to see the neighborhoods that these students are at.
And what you can do is you can start to utilize that student load by finding other students that are also in that neighborhood. So if you teach Tulsa guitar lessons at 11th and Harvard, then you can start to develop relationships with that community of people so that way you can continue to receive other students as well. And this is something that you will find yourself doing as you are consistently teaching lessons in other students’ houses. And the biggest thing about this is you absolutely need to make sure if you are not the one that will be driving to these lessons, if you have one of your instructors that will be driving to those guitar lessons in Tulsa, you absolutely need to make sure that that specific instructor is reliable and that you can put their faith in them, that they aren’t ending lessons early, they are staying for the full amount of time for that lesson and that they are doing a good job. And that’s something that you need to watch out for it. Because if it’s not somebody you can trust, then they could be arriving really late to the Tulsa guitar lessons. And you would have no idea that that’s happening.