A business model that will work a treat for your English school
The Bulletin (Issue 17)
Maybe you found your way into teaching English for yourself because you like the teaching part, or you like the speaking-English part, or you (actually I’m talking about myself here) really like the having-no-boss part, whatever. The fact remains that whether you are freelance, self-employed, shilling for a corporation while you work on your own gig, you need a business model, a way to structure what you do so that you get the maximum bang for your buck.
I, of course, didn’t know that when my wife and I started out along the eikaiwa road and muddled through the best we could, wondering if we’d ever get to make as much money as we did in our pre-teaching salaried jobs (we do now, but it took a few years). Over time, I realised that we had stumbled upon a business model without knowing it. Marketers already knew all about it. They call it a funnel.
Don’t worry, it’s not complicated and doesn’t require you to knock customers over the head with offers that they can’t refuse. It’s just a matter of re-arranging how you think about what you do.
Picture pouring homemade wine into a kitchen funnel into a wine bottle (I asked the substack AI picture-generating tool to do that, and it came up with the above crappy image. Just use your imagination). At the top, it’s wide and easily accessible. At the bottom, it tapers to a thin neck where little can get through, but what does make it through the funnel is focused and if you direct it well, goes into your bottle, and not all over the floor.
Well, in this clumsy metaphor, the funnel is your business, the wine is your potential customer flow. Make your cheapest, most accessible products or services as widely available as possible with the aim of attracting as many potential customers as possible. Then you offer fewer but more and more valuable services or products towards the base of the funnel — you’ll get fewer takers but they will be of higher value.
What does this look like in practice for an English conversation school? For us, it meant a one-coin-entry playgroup with free trial lessons for all — the playgroup made a little money, but more importantly it got large numbers of people through the door. Then there were progressively more expensive lessons depending on age groups, then gradually more specialised offerings that commanded considerably higher fees — day camps, a three-day Shakespeare camp and at the end of the funnel a week-long study trip to London.
If we’d tried selling our study trip to London to folk at the brim of the funnel, we’d have had no takers. But we weren’t marketing it to newbies, by the time study trips were on the agenda, we were dealing with the handful of students who had been with us for years who were eager (and financially able) to follow us to London.
How could you get a potential stream of students into your school? What’s the highest value product or service you could offer?
Thanks for reading, have a good week,
Patrick Sherriff
Teaching tip
Try the Shopping List Memory Game as a warm-up, or a filler game if you find yourself with a group of kids and five to 10 minutes to kill. Say the lesson involves food vocabulary. You start “I went shopping. I bought an apple.” The next person has to repeat what you said then adds “and I bought a banana.” Keep going through the students and the alphabet until it’s not fun anymore. Use the format for any kind of vocab, eg country names (I want to go to America, I want to go to America and Barbados), boy’s names, girl’s names, animals, you name it. For ages 10 to 15. Requires zero prep and works online too.
Recommendation
I’ve enjoyed reading writer and artist Austin Kleon’s free Friday emails for years. You might do too now he’s on Substack. Here’s his latest:
