Cheap, good and quick results tuition

It is business 101 that between cheap, fast and good any client can have at most two because

· Cheap and good can’t be fast

· Cheap and fast can’t be good

· Good and fast can’t be cheap

if any supplier can provide all three then he/she will dominate the market and turn into a monopoly.

A recent conversation with a parent strengthened my opinion on this.

So said child needs intensive lessons to bump up A Math Trigonometry knowledge while keeping up with ongoing curriculum (Differentiation at the point of contact). But parent felt that:

1. If child join class, won’t be able to get full attention and progress will be slow;

2. Yet when I proposed 1-1 consultation, parent felt it was too expensive.

Now if parent had contacted us during the school holidays, I could have perhaps proposed something more palatable to him/her but here it is a clear case of wanting the cake and eating it. They chose to witter their December period (a golden period to bump up knowledge gap) and only want to start when semester began.

Yes, we have a good track record, but everyone must play their part well, a decent runway is required for anyone to learn, assimilate information and then apply the knowledge at a mastery level.

Of course, tuition is not the only solution to academic problems, but let’s not fool ourselves into thinking one can always get cheap and good without showing consideration to others. Which then leads me to the next topic, pricing.

Price of tuition

Now, how do you judge the price of something? There are 101 ways to price anything from a haircut, stocks and yes tuition too. So, let me just offer two basic thoughts here:

1) Relative pricing

Basically, shopping around and do comparative pricing, so if shop A does $100 per lesson shop B can just follow suite or just to a plus/minus 10% and shop C will do a plus/minus 5% etc. In my humble opinion hairdressing salons fall under this category.

It’s the mode that most people are familiar with, but should you question a shop to price it from the ground up they probably can’t give you a very good answer.

2) Opportunity Cost pricing

Now, ask yourself what is the loss/damage/opportunity cost to you if you don’t get your desired grade? This could mean the cost of you not getting into your desired school, major of choice, scholarship and of course may even dent your starting salary. Of course, I may be exaggerating but it’s your future here, better to over than under count. Now ask yourself is the difference between A and B worth the price you are paying us?

But just let me clarify, AcesMath does not charge any extra fees (deposit, admin, printing, signup), no GST and we bill retrospectively at end of month. There are people who take advantage of the system but we have never thought of changing our parameters as it will only punish the subsequent batch of students.

A quick back of the envelop calculation can simply be

Fee * Max number of students in class

and clearly the lower this number, the higher the value you are getting! Of course, we are inclined to think in terms of the higher the better, so just take the reciprocal and we have an equally good measure.

Track record (which we are proud of) aside, I dare say AcesMath is one of the top value providers around!