From a home English school to becoming a proper business
The Bulletin (Issue 22)
So, my wife and I decided we had to move the business out of the living room. How on Earth were we going to do that? It had been hard enough opening a bank account in Japan, the thought of going through all the paperwork of renting a place, let alone buying a place for the business (our ultimate goal) seemed unobtainable.
But like all things in life, it’s best not to dwell on the difficulties of the ultimate goal and instead concentrate on just taking the next step. So we looked around at possible places to rent in our neighbourhood. There was a nice 2LDK apartment nearby above a sushi place on a main road that looked good, but on reflection we thought our kids would be too noisy for the neighbouring apartments, and there was the ever-present problem of lack of parking.
Why not move the business to one of those places that pop up every other month for rent near the train station? A couple of reasons:
Our bread and butter was teaching English to elementary school kids, so there was no advantage for them in having access to the station, they’d have to be driven in and dropped off by their parents rather than walk to our school as at present.
I didn’t particularly want to teach business English into the night, if I did, then a place close to the station would make more sense.
Rent was relatively high near the station, so the places we thought we could afford were poky and noisy. In short, we’d be asking existing students to move to worse conditions than we were already offering them in our living room. And forget about us being able to afford to buy a place near the station.
Plus we didn’t want to open a school near the station just because everybody always thinks of opening a school near the station, we wanted to be contrary, not because of any business strategy so much as, er, how you say… that’s just how we roll, baby.
We briefly toyed with buying a plot of land off the main road near our house and building a custom-made school building, but got cold feet though a combination of distrust of the estate agent and reluctance to go back into debt after rearranging our life to get out of debt in our pre-Japan life.
Our perfect property — above a soba shop
So, we just kept looking and eventually a different estate agent showed us a property that checked all our boxes. On a main road with space for the Momma-tachi to park and natter? Check. Within walking distance of fairly prosperous, young-family-ish homes and an elementary school? Check. No residential neighbours to disturb? Check — it was a two-storey building split into four separate commercial lettings — a soba noodle shop and stationery shop on the ground floor, and upstairs, the vacant 32-mat space with a single square-ish room, a system kitchen and toilet partitioned off at the back. We would rent above the soba shop and next to a karaoke place above the stationer’s. We figured if there was a karaoke place in the building, no-one could be upset about our kids making a little noise, right?
Wrong, oh so very wrong.
In thinking though the move, we’d assumed the soba shop would be busy at lunchtimes, when we had next to zero students around, and evenings, when we would have quieter, older students. We were correct in these assumptions, but what we hadn’t prepared ourselves for was the making and selling of soba for lunch and dinner required the soba master to “meditate” on a futon during the afternoons in his shop. That’s quite hard to do with eight four-year-olds rocking out to head, shoulders, knees and toes every day three meters above his head.
He complained a couple of times, and we did our best to quiet our lessons down, but there’s little wiggle room between an English school that emphasises speaking up — and a spiritual spaghetti seller whose idea of loud noise is drizzle on a bamboo roof.
By the following winter, we’d only been at the new place for around six months but in that time we had lost 15% of our students, the ones who lived furthest from the new place, and only gained two or three new students. If we could just stick it out a little longer to spring, we were hopeful we could turn things around and finally attract more kids for the new school year from our new catchment area.
Then one January afternoon, the soba shop owner popped upstairs to our place to formally announce he would be taking legal action to force us to leave.
We still had a year and a half left to pay of our rental contract, had dwindling student numbers (our bread and butter) and now were facing a legal threat to our existence.
What were we to do? Hire a lawyer and spend what little time and money we had preparing for a legal battle we would probably lose? Search desperately for somewhere else (there was nowhere else) to move the business to and go into debt for the remaining contract? Move the business back to our house? Give up and find a job in Tokyo? None of our options looked very appealing. Thinking back to that winter, we were facing the darkest days since we had gone into business for ourselves.
What would you have done?
If you want to know what we did… I’ll tell you next week!
All the best,
Patrick
Teaching tip — How to read a picture book to kids
If you are right handed, hold the book in your left hand, with arm outstretched next to your body (not directly in front of you). Then you can turn your head slightly and “read” the book while being able to point at things and turn pages with your right hand (vice versa if you’re left handed).
Of course, you’re not really reading the book, you’re using it as a prop to get the kids to shout out (hopefully in English) what they can see, guessing what’s going to happen next and answering your questions that reinforce language points you’ve been teaching in the class (“What’s this? What’s that? What’s she doing? Why? What’s gonna happen on the next page?”) Feel free to invent dialogue, use silly voices and anything else that purists and other dullards detest, but kids love. We want them to enjoy reading, don’t we? (the kids, not the dullards, there’s no hope for them)
Recommended
I’m not much of a scientist, but I do enjoy reading and listening to smart ones who, due to their age and preeminence, can finally say what they think about religion, trans issues and anything else that we folk who have to earn a living are wise to keep our traps shut about. So, I’ve been enjoying The Poetry of Reality by Richard Dawkins. You, fellow open-minded reader, may too:
I'm hooked.