I had a student come to my school when we started up, because we were much closer to his home that The Other School was. He told me he had around 15 hours with them, and had been told he was nearly ready to go solo.
I took him out, and he couldn't hover, couldn't fly straight and level, had no idea of how to fly a stable approach, NFI at all. But he was keen, and worked in the money industry, and he gave us $25,000 up front to do 2 weeks solid ground school, with an occasional training flight to consolidate the ground school, before hitting the flying big time.
He was tragic at theory, and took multiple lessons to understand the most basic stuff. His flying was equally tragic. At the end of ground school, I gave him some trial exams, he failed dismally. A few more flights, and I told him he was not going to make it through the course within the $25k, and rather than reach that point where there was no money left and he didn't have a licence and he would get really angry, I gave him back $13,000 and suggested he stay with banking.
He thanked me for my honesty, and drove off in his Beemer.
Two weeks later, he rang to say he had gone back to The Other School, and had passed his theory exams with an average of 85%. Shortly afterwards, he passed his commercial licence test with them.
Two months after that, he landed at our heliport in a B206, took on a full fuel load, then added 4 big passengers, 5 sets of golf clubs, and started up. Getting airborne took a lot of runway, and off he went to land at a golf course 3000' amsl.
The beating that JetRanger took that day was horrendous, not just from being grossly over weight, but mainly the way he flew it. The owner of that machine subsequently found out that The Other School was pulling the circuit breaker for the hour meter, not logging the maintenance, not paying the owner for using his machine, and over stressing it like crazy. They are still in business....