‘I had read about billing companies but found most to be very pushy, aggressive “hard sell” types, only interested in chasing money and who didn’t really care about the students and whether they cancelled.

This put me right off until at SENI 06, when I visited the NEST stand and was hugely impressed with their professional approach and what they had to say. They genuinely seemed interested in me, my business and most importantly my students and wanted to build a relationship based on this.

My initial fears about switching to direct debits were soon allayed, as I only lost 2 very unreliable students and I quickly started to enjoy all of the other benefits a direct debit system offers. The first was the time I started to save.
Previously, I would spend the first 15 minutes of each lesson collecting money and dealing with administrative duties. Now all my admin is easily taken care of and I get regular reports to see how my business is growing.

I have well over 100 students and keeping track of them all was getting more difficult prior to joining NEST, but now I use their business tools to keep records, making it so much easier to set targets for acquiring and retaining students and budgeting accordingly.

I also get early notification (via email) when a student cancels, so I can follow it up quickly to find out why, whereas before I just wouldn’t see them for a month or two and they would fall off the radar and gradually drift away.

Another key benefit is from an income point of view as I was really worried when I first went full time as the money was coming in dribs and drabs, making it easier to just fritter away. With NEST I receive regular payments directly into my account, which is much more like the steady income I was used to.

NEST’s fee is money well spent for the professional service I receive and it is nothing compared to what we were losing with non payments and students ‘escaping the net’. You also need to consider that everything from meetings, reports, use of computer systems, consultancy, admin support and marketing is included in that fee - so it’s a bit of a no brainer really!’