Blog
Admissions, retention, fee collection and staffing - written for the person who has to make the month work, not for a conference talk.
Marketing budgets are usually set by what feels affordable this month. A better anchor is what a student is worth over the months they stay. Here is how to work it out from records you already keep.
8 October 2026
Read itNobody prices make-up classes, so nobody notices that a generous policy can consume a tenth of your teaching capacity.
6 October 2026
Most small schools raise prices too late, then too much, and lose families over a number they should have moved gently years earlier.
29 September 2026
Most owners know what they charge for an hour. Few know what an hour costs them. Here is a model you can fill in with your own numbers in an afternoon, and what it usually reveals.
24 September 2026
Observation is the only way to know what your customers are paying for. It is also, done badly, the fastest way to lose a good teacher.
22 September 2026
Most schools use a placement test to sort students into levels. Its more valuable job is setting the parent's expectations.
15 September 2026
Parents research schools after their children are asleep. Whoever answers first usually wins, and it is rarely about being better.
8 September 2026
An attendance percentage is one of the most useful numbers a school has and one of the easiest to read wrongly.
1 September 2026
Every small school has one teacher families ask for by name. That is an asset and a liability, and most owners only treat it as the first.
25 August 2026
Almost every problem a school hits in week four was already visible, and fixable, in the fortnight before it opened.
18 August 2026
Most schools hire someone to answer the phone. The role that actually pays for itself is the one that owns the follow-up.
11 August 2026
Most schools worry about protecting the data they hold. Fewer ask whether they should be holding it at all, which is the cheaper question.
4 August 2026
Most migrations fail the same way: the school tries to move everything at once, in the middle of a term, and quietly falls back to the old files.
30 July 2026
Almost nobody announces that they are quitting. They miss a Tuesday, then a Thursday, and six weeks later they were never really enrolled.
21 July 2026
Late payment is rarely about money. It is about timing, ambiguity and who has to be the one to bring it up.
9 July 2026
Most school dashboards show you what already happened. These five tell you what is about to happen, while there is still time to act on it.
30 June 2026
Everyone assumes the sheet fails when the school gets big. It fails much earlier than that, and student count has almost nothing to do with it.
18 June 2026
The sibling discount granted in 2023 to one family is still running. So are eleven others, and nobody has added them up.
3 June 2026
Every owner knows small classes are the selling point and large classes pay the bills. Fewer have worked out where their own break-even actually sits.
20 May 2026
Not the money and not the lease. What breaks is that everything held in one person's head now has to exist somewhere else.
6 May 2026
The choice between a course package and a monthly fee is not an accounting preference. It selects your students and sets your cash flow.
22 April 2026
Schools swing between silence and a group chat that never stops. Both produce the same result: parents who do not read anything you send.
8 April 2026
The lesson cover is the easy part. What actually decides whether you keep the class is what the parents hear, and when.
24 March 2026
Most timetables are the accumulated result of individual requests. That is why Tuesday at 5pm is chaos and Thursday at 3pm is empty.
10 March 2026
Hourly, per class, or salary. Every pay model is also an instruction, and staff follow the instruction rather than the handbook.
24 February 2026
Most trial lessons are a normal lesson with a stranger in it. That is why they convert badly, and why the fix costs nothing.
10 February 2026
Import a CSV, build one week of timetable, send one invoice. If it doesn't beat your spreadsheet by the end of the trial, walk away.
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