Interesting question. I am curious about a couple things. For the schools who aren't using contracts:
1) How many students does your school currently have?
2) What country is your school located in?
I’m in Northern California, US. Ive got two students, and I charge per session. If you attend, you pay. If you don’t show up, you don’t pay.
We are a very new training group, only been working together since about July of this year. I have very low visibility, we train early morning in a city park, I have no signage and no shopfront, but I advertise on the local Nextdoor community and I have a website.
My people are adults with busy lives. Sometimes they cannot attend. Sometimes for weeks. But they are interested in the training (one of them has a kenpo background and was a teacher in the past) and they enjoy it and find it mentally intriguing and they come as much as they can so I keep the door open to them. I am convinced that if I tightened the operation and insisted that they pay by the month, to try to “encourage” better attendance and to guarantee a certain income (I am not breaking even) I would simply lose them altogether. And keeping them is important to me.
I hope the group grows. Other people in the park are taking some notice, and there is the word-of-mouth of satisfied and enthusiastic students. So I think this has potential to become bigger. But I am in no hurry. Things need to grow naturally, not by forcing it.
As I said before, if you offer a quality product at a reasonable price, you will get loyal, repeat customers. Contracts or other structures that kind of rope people into the payments shouldn’t be necessary. If one finds them necessary, then perhaps one needs to re-examine the quality of the product and/or the reasonableness of the price.
www.jetts.com.au
