Transcript (auto-generated):
Hello, I'm Patrick Sherriff and I just wanted to talk a little bit more about what I wrote last for Free Talk TEFL.substack.com for the bulletin which is number 19, which if you go to the website you can find it all written out.
I don't want to rehash that.
What I was talking about was why I'm a self-employed English teacher and why I believe it's the best way.
Basically, like a good communist, you should own the means of your production.
If you do the work, you should get paid for it, and try and cut out the middlemen as much as possible.
This might seem like a very old-fashioned view, but actually it does go together with modern marketing thought and internet, the way of the internet.
What do I mean?
Well, think about it like this.
The most dangerous number in business and I would say in private teaching is one.
This is an idea from Dan Kennedy, the famous direct marketer.
He can seem a bit sleazy.
Some of his books are just constantly selling his own stuff, but he's good at it, and we can all learn from how to sell your own stuff.
I certainly can, and I'm doing a very good job at it.
But anyway, the main point is one is the most dangerous number.
If you have only one customer,
Well, that's great if you please that customer, but the moment that customer is not interested in what you're selling, you're in trouble.
You don't have any other customers, right?
So that's an obvious point, right?
But that applies, like, if you're working for a company.
Like a good commie, if you, or way of thinking, if you are selling your labor to one company, right, the boss,
It's kind of dangerous.
Okay, if you are having a good time with the company and the company is looking after you and everything is tickety-boo, but the moment you have an argument with your boss or the company's policies change or they decide they don't need to have so many native English speakers or whatever the problem is,
You are out on your ear, right?
So it's not so secure because you relied on one.
One is a dangerous number.
One customer.
And you can take that further.
One source of advertising.
You know, if you only, for example, if you only advertise in the local paper, or if you only give out leaflets at the station,
or if you only rely on, I don't know, Google Ads or something like that.
Relying on one source.
is inherently dangerous for the same kinds of reasons, that things can change and then suddenly if you've built your platform on one source and then it changes, you're in trouble.
For example, like selling books on Amazon, if you do something wrong that Amazon doesn't like, they could just yank all of your books and then you're in trouble.
And if you've built up
You know, a whole business all around just one source of revenue, you know, it just takes one problem for it to all collapse.
And that's true for English teaching.
You shouldn't have just one type of customer, I think.
You should try and vary it so that if the market changes, you can change with the market rather than being stuck
in one place.
Yeah, by the way, I meant to say digital sharecropping.
That's the idea that you're a sharecropper.
You put all of your efforts online onto one site, typically, you know, like social media like Facebook.
If you do all of your communications with students on Facebook,
and then Facebook changes its algorithm, which they do, or decides to start charging you, you're stuck.
You've got to go with them, right?
You haven't built your own website or your own presence or other places.
You could argue the same about Substack.
I mean, I'm here on Substack largely because it's free at the moment and it allows me to build an email newsletter, so I have a way of reaching you
the listeners and the readers of my stuff and that's good because I do actually have access to your emails which allows me some sense of independence if Substack collapsed I could continue sending emails out myself or if Substack decided they wanted to charge some onerous amount of money
So, although I am happy to use Substack and I use Amazon and I use Google and even Facebook, I'm able to move away if I need to and if any one of those points of weakness, you know, becomes untenable, unusable, I can step away.
I did that with Twitter, I had, I did, I used to have, like, I don't know,
3,000 or 4,000 followers on Twitter but since Mr. Musk and the advent of X I just didn't feel comfortable on that platform
So I walked away and it had zero impact on my business because I wasn't focusing my attention there.
So that's kind of the importance of not relying on just one.
That also applies as a self-employed business person.
If I build the business all around me,
Really I've just created a job because if I stopped working suddenly the income would stop coming in and it's not really a business.
You're totally self-employed and totally reliant on yourself and this is where it is risky.
The way around that is to develop your job into a business, into a genuine business where you could replace yourself.
So I could have somebody else teach my lessons and I'm not quite there yet but
Almost.
I have a whole range of textbooks and so on.
There's no reason why a competent English teacher couldn't see what I was doing and take over from what I was doing.
And that's good.
I've sort of made myself semi-redundant.
I could be replaced.
At the moment, I'm still teaching 99% of the lessons with help from my wife.
Now, we are a team, so we team teach.
That's a subject for another podcast, probably.
So I'm not completely on my own, but I mean, yeah, if something happened to me, probably the business wouldn't survive, which tells you it's not really a business, it's just a job.
But I'm getting there.
The other irony, of course, is
It is fun to do things by yourself.
I don't particularly like having to clear everything with a boss, or doing things that I'm not interested in doing, you know.
So, although we say number one is the most dangerous number, it's also the route to satisfaction as well.
I thought, however, on the other hand, everything I do is only valuable if somebody else thinks it's valuable.
If I teach a good lesson, how do I know it's a good lesson unless the students gain from it?
So I need students to teach.
Just like, it's an obvious point, but making these Substack podcasts, well I need a listener.
If nobody's listening to this, I'm just talking to my computer.
It does feel like nobody's listening, but I'm sure there are.
If not now, if not that many now, there will be potentially in the future.
So that's why I keep going.
But that's the point.
It's not just all about me.
There has to be a reader, a listener, a student.
But yeah, it is a philosophical pull between just one and many.
Are you doing this for yourself?
Are you doing this for others?
Just something else to add, I don't know if I ever will have any employees, maybe.
I might replace myself completely, or my daughter might inherit the business if she wants to.
But in the meantime, any profits or whatever that we make, I mostly plough back into the business, but I also diversify by investing.
and investing in what you call it index funds so not any one particular stock just the whole market so it's for people like me who don't have time or knowledge about about investing
You can make a reasonable income and the point is you're diversifying your savings you're not putting everything into your teaching business so if this is again goes back to like the most dangerous number being one if the one business that provides most of my income collapses for whatever reason well I have diversified investments and you could too
I should you know if you want information about that kind of thing I could talk about it but really if you're in Japan and you're worried about retirement and investments and have no idea go to retirejapan.com
which has a wealth of information haha pardon the pun but it's really good and if you if like me about five years ago I suddenly got nervous oh my god I haven't saved up enough for retirement what am I gonna do
Check out there.
It's not selling you anything specifically.
It's giving you advice.
He's not selling you anything.
Not trying to sell you some product and taking a cut.
And equally, neither do I. I make no money from that.
It saved my bacon, so to speak.
and it might be good for you so that's called RetireJapan.com run by Sendai Ben, Ben Shearon who by all accounts is a nice bloke
Right so yeah that's it that's that's the point the most dangerous number in business and teaching is one so whatever you can do to to move away from reliance on one thing or one source of revenue will make you a stronger more successful business and make future brighter
Right, that's it.
I've got nothing else to say.
If you have any interest in what I was saying, this is the kind of thing that I talk about every week here on Fridays.
And every Monday I publish a lesson plan that you can use for all different ages.
I mean, I do different lesson plans for all ages.
And on Wednesday there is the bulletin newsletter that I put out.
with information for anybody interested in teaching English as a foreign language, specifically in Japan, but really anywhere.
OK, well, good luck.
Good luck with building your business.
Good luck with teaching.
Good luck with life.
Have a good one.
I'll talk to you next week.
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