We May Do Away with Paid-In-Fulls!

And even down payments!

Say what???!! Are you kidding me?!?!

Ok, so it's not a final decision yet, but at our staff meeting last night, it became a very tempting solution.

Many in the industry will say to provide the option for Paying In Full. Heck even Fred Mertens philosophy was that Paying In Full was the IDEAL way to collect tuition, because, to quote him, "Everyone quits."

What we've found is that it is important to make SMART usage of your Account Manager.

Our Account Manager was finding that chasing down people after their agreements finished was a tremendous pain.

So we decided to make a policy where those programs would auto-renew. And even when they signed off on all of it, people still got shocked that it auto renewed.

We also found that if we did email notifications of an auto renew coming up, there was a pretty high statistic of people not wanting to renew, or change to a monthly program.

So we decided to email a notifications and get permission to renew. But then what was the point of auto renew? We just went backwards here.

We had another additional problem with people who did Pay-In-Fulls. Since that was the only time we'd accept a check for their tuition, we found that we didn't really have an account with them if they paid that way, so we couldn't automatically charge a belt test fee, or an event night, or a merchandise purchase. We had to get physical payment from them, which was an extra step.

So the key here that we focused on last night was EFFICIENCY. It would save a lot of work chasing people around if we got rid of the whole Pay In Full and down payment options, and may even improve retention.

In fact, I think Melody Shuman does her school purely on Month-to-Month.

I still believe in creating agreements, with a month-to-month option, just because you can offer a discount for greater commitment. It's really more of a mental thing than anything else. The reality is, people can quit any time they want. They can cancel their credit card, or put a stop to your auto-deducts from their bank. And there's not really a thing you can do about that unless you want to pay legal fees to take them to court...or unless Champions Way creates...

A PERFECT COLLECTOR - which is a large WWE wrestler guy who goes and locates people and knocks on their door and shakes them upside down to finish their contract! lol