As an aside, I start with three simple things. First, I fix their pricing. Second, I fix their Intro-Enrollment Conversion Process, then third, I open the flood gates and show them how to generate more students in a month than they’ve often seen in a previous year. My clients have started to refer to that as “drinking from a fire hose.”
Now, let me go at all of this from a different angle. My team members Bob Dunne, Chief Master Greg Moody, Grand Master Jeff Smith, and I have talked with many, many school owners in the last 18 months who really let things TANK and are in a panic trying to rebuild.
However, the reality is that in essentially every case, these are established school owners who grew a great school before “the crash,” had gotten there slowly. They have no idea how to bounce back QUICKLY. They were usually operating at what they thought at the time was an incredibly high level (let’s say $25,000 a month or $30,000 a month) with little vision that they could and should be taking home a personal net income of more than their total gross (you know before those minor expenses like rent, payroll, taxes, utilities, phones, etc., etc.)
My old friend Greg Silva asked me about one such client asking what I did to “light a fire under his ass” to get him to go from being very happy at $30,000 a month (before THE CRASH) to now being dissatisfied at $60,000 plus a month on the way to a $1,000,000.00 a year single school.
My honest answer was that I felt most of the credit went to THE CRASH. It scared him so much that he dusted off an old book of mine (“The Way of The Mile High Maverick”) and was motivated to call and see if I could help him. Once he made that decision through fear, now inspired to take action, his next growth was inevitable. See, what happened is that suddenly he began to interact with my clients who were taking home more than his previous record gross.
Said another way, he would have been excited to get back to $30,000 a month until he saw example after example of schools in no better a location than his, with owners who were no more intelligent or more accomplished than he that were grossing $92,000 a month, $123,000 a month, $97,000 a month, and some who had gone in rapid pace from $30,000 a month to $55,000 or $65,000 a month having just implemented a few of my team’s suggestions.
Now back to the pace of recovery. Stated again, it’s easier to kill your school than it is to put the pieces back together.
But another consideration, of course, is that if you built it the first time over 10, 15, or 20 years, do you REALLY want to go back out and do what you did the first time to get back to where you were? If you’re 45 now, do you want your school to be back to where it was before THE CRASH when you’re 60? Well, I, for one, would hope not.
Ultimately that’s the point of what I accomplish with schools in that situation.
I walk them through every step of the way, getting back to where they were in 90 to 120 days. In 3 or 4 months, not ten or more years. Then OFTEN, I’d even say, almost always get them up the other 50-100% above their ALL-TIME RECORD with 12 months?
In this admittedly rather short book, I’ll give you the outline of how this gets accomplished OVER AND OVER AGAIN with ecstatic school owners.
However, as much as I wish it were so, there’s no “magic pixie dust” that we sprinkle over our clients. There’s no “magic pill,” which seems to be what most people want. You know, lose weight, take the red bill, get in shape, take the blue one, etc. We all know that the real world doesn’t work that way.
By the way, we screen and reject more school owners than we accept. The biggest misconception that they tend to have is shown by the question: “what’s the one thing I should be doing to get more students?”
Well, as I’ve already discussed, although nearly always, they do need more students. And, there isn’t ONE THING they should be doing; there’s a “Parthenon” of marketing systems they should be implementing to generate consistent student flow every month and, usually, add a “drinking from a fire hose” few months to jump-start things.
However, in almost every case, they think: “I’m already charging as much as I can in my area because…………..” (by the way, the reason is almost always ridiculous and frankly is unmitigated BS anyway.). They also say to us: “my students love me; obviously, my student retention is great. I’m just not good at marketing (or I just need more new students every month.)
I’ll talk more about both issues again later but let me dispel a couple of industry MYTHS perpetuated by the “BOZO EXPLOSION” of 2nd and 3rd tier “coaches and consultants.”
They say, among other things:
1. Oliver claims that they have schools doing over $1,000,000 a year; that’s a myth he’s making it up. (I dare you to go watch a bunch of the client interaction videos that I’ve posted for all to see on YouTube and elsewhere if you think that’s true.)
2.All he does is tell you to “raise your prices,” and that’s not going to work for you because…. (well, in most cases, I do look at your tuition structure, the way you structure things, whether you have a renewal program, how much a new student pays to get started, etc.) but the vast majority of what creates hugely profitable schools is not just “raising the prices.” And, frankly, to do so in most cases requires raising the real or perceived VALUE.
3.He’s just a “Marketing Guy,” that teaches schools to create “McDojos.” Well, that’s laughable at every stage, but I’ll just point out that my team has well over 150 years of martial arts training among them. One’s a retired World Kickboxing Champion, for instance. Again, go to the previously mentioned YouTube page and see what my clients have to say about that “accusation.”
– Stephen Oliver, Success Tips, Go2Karate Magazine
