[Allstaff] Teachers - Info for you all

[James Wilford]

Hi

I am following up on an interesting week of comments, ideas and much much more after Nick's email at the start of the week. Despite the email being retracted, it certainly sparked off lots of staff room chat, thoughts, conversations & opinion. I have listened to everything and have decided the staff contracts will be changing in the future. Until then, the same procedures will happen til the end of this term. I will still be making split payments for this month and probably next too while I recover the cash flow from increased overheads from last year, hopefully by Easter. With detailed financial analysis, numbers have been lower since the recession, we had dipped below break even point for a while just as costs were higher, along with the usual issues of operations and chasing fees. Recruitment is going very well and numbers are going up fast. I am working very differently now with forecasts and projections, I hope to crack success once and for all. The focus needs to be retention on students please, especially ones finding things hard that may be practicing less than they should. It is much more cost effective to retain an existing customer and look after them with good feedback/communication etc than to find new students with all the marketing time and money invested. I know I'm talking to the converted as most of you are very good with this, just keep it in mind please. Talk to me if any individual cases need discussion.

Also, please note, I am expecting to be slightly after 30 days from the start of Feb for some second payments but will address this as soon as possible as always. Miracles may still happen this week!

Things to share............
Staff meetings have been requested by many, old crew here know how hard this became!
Lots of ideas have been proposed, some very good.
Many ideas have been proposed that aren't practical or have been tried in the past, however thank you for the ideas and offering your thoughts.
Some ideas are perfect if we lived in a perfect world, which we don't, sadly.
Making up for missed lessons has become quite an issue for some and how these are paid will need to change. Making the teacher's fees correct when students don't claim lessons is up for review.
All staff waiting til 30th of following month is favoured by many to my surprise, but I'm not comfortable with that for a few reasons. Within 30 days from the date of invoice is best business practice. i.e. one day after registers are handed in, invoice is issued with 30 days for us to pay the sub contractor. Compared to some other sources of work, I still feel this is fair. The new contracts will try to address/clarify the situation if months may have cash flow problems.

Ultimately, of course there are many subjects that could make YMS better. I don't claim to be perfect and its an ongoing team effort to make this a happy place to work. I will continue to do the best I can for you all. Thank you all for everything.

James
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