It is an important fact that swim schools rely heavily on their Make-Up Policies to remain viable as a business. That may sound silly or a bit over the top, but let's break it down a bit.
We are a family run and family based business. Like all businesses, we need to maintain important income and expense boundaries, otherwise we couldn't run our business.
Swim Schools are expensive to run, we have a lot of fixed costs that we need to cover whether we have 1 lesson swimming a week or a thousand.
Think about it, we've got to:
Heat our pools
Sanitise our pools ready for use
Rent our facilities
Use electricity to run our pumps to keep the water clean
Maintain our phone system to we can contact you
Pay our highly qualified staff so that we can deliver the program
The only way this can work is that we take into account how much it will cost to pay all of those fixed costs, then we estimate how many bookings we need to book to cover those expenses, then we make the decision to go forward from there.
If we have a certain amount of bookings in place, we have to roster staff to be here to do their job, heat, sanitise and clean the pool and maintain all the other expenses based on being able to operate our facility and program. If we were not to have a Make-Up Policy, and instead just gave a credit for the lesson, we run the risk of having a dramatic drop in the income we need to pay all of our expenses.
Now, we all have families and we all know that there are time pressures impacting on our lives every day, we are all the same. We also know how little sicknesses/cold and flus etc can spread through the family unit. So this is where the Make-up Policy of a swim school comes into play.
By utilising a Make-up Policy, we can still meet our expense responsibilities and run the program. The customer's lesson is not lost, just done at another time. We cannot however, use that missed lesson as a credit in a future program, because the expense incurred to have that lesson running and available has already been incurred. Just as the expense of making the future lessons available is yet to be paid.
Certainly the arrival of CV19 created extraordinary circumstances. One major situation was the program closure on the 23rd of March, finishing that program 3 weeks earlier than scheduled. We have enabled families to accrue those missed lessons as make-ups on their account. We have done this because we still incurred many of the fixed expenses that we would have had, had we been still open and running. The pools still had to be cleaned and running, we supported many of our employees before JobKeeper started and even some team members who didn't qualify for JobKeeper throughout the entire close down period. Crediting those make-up classes to a future program would not have been possible.
What we are planning to do, is make it a lot easier for you to book your make-up. Soon, you will be able to book your make-up online! Also, we will be putting on special make-up classes to GREATLY increase make-up availability. These make-up classes will be available to you during our P320 program and continue to be available through to the end of 2020.
We understand this can be a contentious issue, however we feel we have always had the most flexible, 'Family Friendly' Make-up Policies available in this region and since the CV19 pandemic, we have made them even more flexible.
As always, we are happy to chat to you should you require any further assistance. We thank-you for your patience and understanding during this challenging time.
