Increase Profit and Simplify Your Dance Studio Pricing

Hello friends, I'm Amanda Barr and I'm Rebecca Lou Brennan, and welcome to Dance Principles United, the podcast.

Together we are passionate about helping studio owners with the business of running their studio.

Join us as we talk everything from marketing, systems, studio culture, motherhood, life, and everything in between.

This is the Dance Principles United podcast.

Well, hello friends, it's Bec here from the Dance Principles United podcast. I am twinning today with the incredible Nathan. How are you, Nathan?

Good, Bec. We're just both talking that we've both got our glasses on, so we both look super intelligent. Yeah, if you want to check it on, on the YouTube channel, then you can definitely jump across and see how intelligent we do look. But always good to be back in the studio with you, Bec, recording another podcast.

But we're also twinning with our jumpers.

Oh no, oh absolutely, we've got that.

This is just— it's important. I know Amanda made them for us.

Yeah, she did, she did. That's why we bring her along, um, for the merch. And a few other things as well. Gosh, I hope she doesn't listen to this. But what's been going on, Bec? It's— well, look, we're recording this around school holiday time. What has been happening in the land of Bec and Paws?

We've got lots of workshops happening this week. K-pop is still popping off. Can you believe that? Yeah, it's the gift that keeps on giving.

Yes.

We've got a circus acro workshop and then we've brought some choreographers in. So we're doing a workshop with that. And then we have our first comp on Sunday. So I was just at the studio rehearsing my 8 and unders. That was a long 3 hours, but we got there.

Yep.

Bless them. So, you know, first comp of the year for us.

Yeah. And you still do some classes during holidays as well?

We do our preschool. Yeah. But I really am thinking— I was just chatting to you about this— about next year doing classes through the whole of school holidays, all the classes, because I just said to the 8s— so one of our SGC members has just taken that on and she's crushing it. And I just said to the 8s, do you want to do class in the holidays? Yeah. And then I'm like, do you love dance? Yeah. Like, they're so into it. I'm like, why am I stopping? Because, you know, my revenue from stopping— have I told you this? No. What do you reckon it would be?

As in how much you're giving up by stopping in the holidays?

Correct.

So it's between term 1, 2, term 2, 3. So like at least 6 weeks, I'm going to say 220K.

I think it's closer to 300 because I'm doing, we're on 43 a week.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

It's a lot, right?

It's a lot. It's a, and you know, and I think I was talking with this, I was talking to this before about, you know, that it's important as a business owner to take breaks because we need to make sure that we're filling our cup and that we're not burning ourselves out. Um, but on the flip side of that, it's also important to make sure that you're making enough money. And you know, if you're an employee for somebody, you get 4 weeks holiday a year.

Yes. That's what I said to our members this morning on Monday Motivation.

Yeah.

4 weeks is normal.

Yeah. I know that we work really hard as studio owners, but so does the rest of the population generally. Yep. And they get 4 weeks holiday a year. So if we, want to be maximizing the profits and the revenue in our studio, then maybe that is in some way, shape, or form something to look at.

And I know a lot of people do it because they want to spend holidays with their kids.

Yes.

You still get to spend from 9 AM till 3:30 with your kids.

Yes.

Like, it's just, it's really a no-brainer. And you know what else came up this morning, and this will sift into what we're talking about today, is one of the members said, well, we just do that because it's what we've always done.

Yes.

And I was like, exactly. It's because we've always broken in school holidays, so therefore we always do it that way. Or what we're talking about today, because we've always done the pricing that way, then we just keep doing it that way and we're too scared to change things, which in any other business would be ludicrous.

Yes.

But for some reason in dance, we want to keep all the things exact same as they were in the '70s.

And look, no, but that is, that is true. And look, sometimes If you are ever giving the reason, I do this because it's the way we've always done things. I'm not going to lie, sometimes every now and again that justification does hold, but big but, most of the time it doesn't stack up anymore. Yeah, there are people still doing things the same as they did in 1996. And guys, 2026 is a really different time. 2026 is a really different time to 2016 even. Than 10 years ago. So whilst it's always important to keep consistency in some areas of our business, it is also just as important to make sure that we are constantly looking with a fresh lens through things like what we were gonna talk about today, which wasn't school holidays, but it is about the biggest thing that studio owners can do to increase the revenue and the profits in their studio. And that is get your price list right. It's something we're super passionate about with everybody that we work with and every studio owner that we talk to, right?

Yeah, absolutely. And, and I think like we're going to go through a few tips today on how to do that.

Yeah.

But I think the number one thing that stops people from doing this is that they're scared that parents are going to have a SPAC attack and go, no, I can't believe you're changing it, that's so unacceptable. And I want to start by saying you will have 2 or 3 parents that do that. Yeah. Because You will. You just will.

People don't like change, right?

People don't like change. But I guarantee you 99.9% of your parents will not care at all and in fact will prefer it. And also the few that complain are probably going to complain about everything you do in your studio. And they're just complainers. That's what they are. And you've got to just learn to not worry so much about that confrontation.

Yes. And we work with— we've worked with hundreds of studio owners. In getting their price list sorted out and getting their price lists to work better for them. And in zero of those couple of hundred have we ever made a studio owner's price list more complicated. Okay. Just like putting that out there straight off the bat. We have never ever recommended, you know what, your price list is not complicated enough. Let's make that more complicated for you. Right. And like you said, parents appreciate when you make things easier and simpler for them.

Yes, that's the thing. Yeah, that's the main thing, right? So what's the first tip we want to give everybody?

So the first tip we want to give everybody is to please stop parents having to do maths. Okay. Nobody— sorry, nobody besides me in the dance studio space really likes doing maths that much, right? I've got a degree in maths and finance. I've worked as an accountant. I like doing maths and numbers, right? However, when we present options to parents, we know that that saying, a confused mind never buys. So we want to make sure that price list that we're presenting our parents or potential parents is as easy and as simplified as possible.

Right.

Things like 5% discount for 2 or more classes, 10% discount for 3 or more, And stepping up discounts and making the parent do the maths. Okay, so they're doing 5 classes here and then their sister's doing, so they get a 15% discount and then there's 3 classes over there for the sibling. So they get 10% discount. Then we get the 5% family discount, but nobody can do that maths.

And Nath, I want to just say to everyone out there, if you're thinking this is you, this was also me. And I had for years the most complicated pricing structure you could ever, ever have. With all the discounts and all the things. So I feel you, I get you, but it actually is way, way worse for parents.

Yeah, because like I said, it's that notion when people have to do that much maths, they default to the easiest option. And the easiest option is to just do less classes, even though they might want to do more. They'll ask you for the first, like, and they'll talk about, you know, you'll give them a price for 3 classes. And then, and we've had this happen, like Amanda actually had it happen with a studio owner the other day. Somebody that was new to our world that we're working with, Amanda saw their price list and she's like, cool, I want to bring Gigi to 3 classes starting next week. Can you explain to me how much that I'm paying? And, and this isn't uncommon, guys, but the studio owner spent 10 minutes trying to explain it, ended up confusing themselves, ended up confusing Amanda. Right. So the person that should know the most about the price list, the studio owner, and another person that knows more about studio price lists than pretty much anybody else going around, were both super confused. So what does that tell you? That the price list is good or not so good?

Okay. So you're telling us how not to do it. Don't do discounts and blah, blah, blah.

Don't do convoluted discounts. Yep.

How should we do it?

Yeah. We all know that it's an accepted part of a dance studio, right? Is that we do want, you know, students doing more classes because that means that we get better dancers and all those kinds of things. So we get it. So by no means are we against discounts, but instead of doing 5%, 10% and making people do maths, we just want to say things like, okay, if you do one class a week, $23, if you do two classes a week, $44. Yeah, 2 classes a week would have been $46, 2 times $23. But we're just telling them it's $44. Most people can do that basic math. They're like, hang on, 2 times $23, $46. Oh, it's a bit cheaper. And then if anybody asks the question, oh, is there any discount if I do multiple classes? Like, yeah, absolutely. You actually get a couple of dollars off if you do the second class.

Yep.

People don't need to know or want to know the nuts and bolts. All people want to hear, that psychological standpoint, is, oh yes, I've got a discount. Yes, I've got a win. And they're happy. Yeah, we don't need to go and be complicated. Let's just step it out nice and simply. One class is $23. Two classes, $44. Three classes, $65. Whatever that ends up being. I can't do my 23 times tables that quickly on the fly on the podcast, but that is how we want to be setting it up. Nice and simple, easy for everybody to understand.

Okay. Now, I know there's studio owners out there right now who are thinking, yeah, but that's really going to put my prices up, or parents are going to really get angry because now the 5 classes instead of being this much is that much. So thoughts on that?

Yeah. And look, we have heard any objection that you're thinking of, guys, as you listen to this podcast. I can guarantee that we've heard it at least 10 times.

Sometimes from me, Nath.

Yeah. Sometimes from Bec. Sometimes from Bec. Um, and it's one of those things that out of the hundreds of studio owners that we've helped with their price list, not one have we heard when they're on the other side and they've got all this extra money coming in, their parents are happier and understanding it, not one has said, gosh, I wish we hadn't changed. Everybody has always been more stoked. Now I've forgotten because I've rambled. What was your question?

So Nath, sibling discounts.

Sibling discounts.

Are you for or against?

Heavily against.

Really? Absolutely. Me too.

Well, I like the feign surprise, but the reason is, is because it is too hard. Again, it's just too hard to calculate. Yeah. And I don't just say everything that we say and that we coach people around with price lists isn't just Nathan's woken up one morning and thought, oh, we should do it this way and tell everyone to. It's by going in and understanding and looking at hundreds and hundreds of dance studios' numbers from top to bottom.

Yeah, right.

The reality is it is impossible. It's just too big a variable. How many siblings do we have to calculate our costs? Because we know that like the key part of what we need to charge, we need to understand our costs, right? And one of the biggest or the biggest variable in our costs is how many students we have, right? If we have more students doing more classes, we'll need to hire and pay more teachers. Like, that's a pretty simple relationship, right? However, so like once we understand how many students we have and how many class placements, we can do a pretty good job of like predicting our expenses. Once we've predicted our expenses, well, then we can come across and figure out what do we need to charge for a class and we can build our little multi-class discount off that. Happy, happy as Larry. No problems with you doing that. However, it's an impossible ripple to try and account for mathematically that if I've got 250 students, oh, but if 40 of them are siblings, well then that'll adjust my— it doesn't adjust your costs at all. You're hip-hop teacher. You're not going to say, oh hey, in I'm the 10's Hip-Hop, you've actually got 3 sets of siblings, so I'm going to pay you 5% less. Is that okay? Because I got a 5% discount on there. You're going to get something that rhymes with duck stuff said to you by the— and fair enough too. You can't ring your real estate agent and say, hey, great news, 250 students, 40 siblings. So can I just have that 5% knocked off my rent, please? Because sibling discount. You're going to get laughed out of every room you go to. So because of that, it's too hard for you to calculate. So please don't make it hard on yourself. And whenever somebody asks, do you have a sibling discount? You can just give a nice, simple, solid answer. No, we don't have a sibling discount, but we do have our discount structure baked into our every class package so that everybody's looked after.

Love.

Absolutely love that. All right, let's move on to when we're talking about people, and we work with a lot of clients like this, and I used to be that person. I keep saying I used to be that person. I want you all to understand that I've been on the other side of this and it is such a game changer. Who give out term paper invoices. Still, I'm still chatting to people about this. A paper invoice.

Paper invoice.

By the term. Okay.

So, look, I honestly think that let's, we can talk double-pronged about this. Any paper invoice, number one, like, please, let's put it in the fire and just let it be fuel or kindling as we need it to be. Any paper invoice, full stop. I think the bigger issue is still if we're invoicing by the term. Yeah, I think that is probably the bigger issue here rather than the paper. I can't even start to talk about because I don't know, I'll probably ramble for too much. Please stop doing that, guys. You need to use software. But the term invoicing still is, it's something that we need to shift. And there's especially one big change that's just come in. In the last couple of weeks as we're recording this, Payday Superannuation, right? Payday Superannuation is going to be a really positive thing for small businesses because we're just not that great at budgeting sometimes and we're not that great at setting aside. We used to be able to pay our super or have to every quarter as a business to our employees. And so that means that when we got our big cash injection for once a term, we'd be like, oh, That's right. And the super deadline had come up and you're like, phew, we've got all those term fees so I can cover that. The reality is now we've got to pay it every week or every fortnight whenever we pay our staff. So we need to have better, more steady and stable cash flow coming into our business to meet one of those sort of bigger, more regular expenses that we've got. So because of that, we really need to be getting more and more studios, or you need to be thinking like if you've ever been on the fence, about is direct debit weekly or fortnightly right for me? The answer is yes, 1,000 times yes, especially now.

Oh, and not just for that, for cash flow, because what we find is that they've got lots of money at the beginning of the term, then they get to the end of the term, they've got absolutely no money. They don't know how much is coming in weekly. So when they don't know how much is coming in weekly, they also don't know how much they're spending weekly. So then it's like they're just not empowered by those decisions. And also it's much easier to collect $25 that, you know, potentially gets bounced over $250 that gets bounced. Like, it's much easier to collect that smaller amount. It also looks better to parents. Like, it looks way better to say, I'm charging you $40 a week over I'm charging you $400. Like, $400 looks like a huge amount. $40, meh.

We always want to be transparent. We want people to see what they've been paid. But like Bec said, like, Yeah, and we know our high-end comp families that are spending $100, $200, sometimes plus per week, right? Like on classes. It's sometimes projecting out to them that it's gonna be $2,000 this term is a little bit daunting. We know that it's valuable. We know that it's worth it. We know that our expenses are also significant. We don't have to justify it to ourselves, but yeah, it's just so much easier for everybody And if you're still on the fence about it, please drop us a DM, guys. Please reach out because we would love to help you overcome your objections. Because like I said, with the price lists, if you think we haven't heard it, I can guarantee we've heard every objection to weekly or fortnightly direct debit. And we've been able to talk everybody around. And again, it's one of those things. We've never heard anybody say, geez, I wish I didn't have this direct debit and all this nice weekly or fortnightly cash coming in. That's so much easier.

So much easier. So much better for your time. It's less time consuming.

Yeah.

And you're empowered by knowing how much is coming in.

Yeah.

All right.

So everyone out there, we want you to really think about your price list. We want you to really, you know, go through and go, okay, is this too complicated? As Nate said at the get-go, try explaining it to a friend. And if it's too hard to explain to a friend, then you're in trouble.

Yeah.

And really, we want you to switch over to weekly direct debit. It was a total game changer for me when I did it. Everything's membership membership now.

Yes.

Go to a gym, it's membership. Swimming's a membership. Everything's a membership.

Yeah.

Just do what everyone else is doing. They're doing it for a reason.

One objection I hear, and I understand it because it's something that we at our studio did, like we tried direct debit the first time before it became pretty common practice. We're talking like back, it was before we started Shellharbour. So we're talking back like 2013, maybe 2014. Right. So when that whole notion was pretty new, and we went with what ended up being a pretty bad provider. They were really hard to work with and they provided a bad customer experience for our customers. And because of that, we had a lot of pushback and we had to put it on ice because our customers were understandably getting shit customer service from this third party that we were utilising. So then we had to put it on ice for a couple of years before we reintroduced it and reintroduced it properly. Properly. We did it properly the first time. We just got stuck with the dud. But when we then reintroduced it, then everybody was looked after and it just ended up being a game changer.

Amazing. But we want you guys to really think about that. As Nate said, DM us. We're happy to help. We'd love to help you. And yeah, change it up, guys. It'll be a game changer for you and your business. Thanks so much, Nate.

Thanks, babe.

Bye, guys. See ya. We hope you enjoyed this episode of the Dance Principles United podcast. If you'd love to learn more from us, we have a special offer just for our podcast listeners. Go to the link in the show notes right now to get 2 weeks free in Dance Principles United Tribe. We would love to see you there.