Hey guys,
I’ve been teaching English privately for a while and made the decision to go official a few months ago. I’ve been mostly teaching out of my apartment and hopping around cafes but from February next year, I’ll be doing it out of a proper office/school.
I was hoping to get advice from those with schools or those that used to have one. Small gems of knowledge or things you wish you had known if you were starting again.
I have about 25 students at the moment (a mixture of kids and adults) and hope to get to 60 within the next 2 years. Here’s what I’ve done/will do so far:
– almost completed a website which will launch next month. Working on an online reservation system.
– Set up as a sole proprietor and will file taxes under the blue form.
– Have saved up about 2 years of living expenses. With my current students, I’m just above my break even point (private and business expenses included).
– Japanese wife will handle main admin and dealing with customers/students.
– I have a Japanese friend in advertising who will help promote my school online and locally. We’re making content at the moment and hope to launch the the campaign in December/January.
– I plan to go the city office and other community spaces to see if they’ll allow some sort of promotion there.
I’m pretty confident in my ability to teach, plan to continue improving by taking courses/attending seminars and really enjoy the job. I think the lesson material I’ve prepared will be okay for now.
So any things you recommend doing/not doing? What were the biggest challenges you faced?
Appreciate any help!
8 comments
Get the website up ASAP. Try to rank for *your neighbourhood* and *nearby neighbourhoods*.
Charge more than you want to. It is hard to increase prices later, and people looking for quality are more likely to check you out if you charge more.
Try to figure out a sustainable schedule for your classes so you don’t have to play musical chairs every year: ie we have kindy students at 15:00, E12 at 16:00, E34 at 17:00, and E56 at 18:00. The students know this so we don’t have to spend weeks trying to make the schedule each March.
Don’t give in to pushy customers. It just makes them more pushy, and then other customers want the same treatment. Just say no and most of the time they will accept it.
Good luck! We started in 2003, now have 400 students and three full-time teachers.
Not sure if you’re a member of it already but there’s a great group on Facebook for people in your situation. It’s called ‘Eikaiwa Owners Group and Friends’. It’s a treasure trove of helpful advice.
If you advertise your website with flyers or the like, include the key word phrase that will lead to your website. Have a look at print adverts on the train and you’ll see what I mean. Also, on your landing page, include a huge banner right at the top offering a free demo lesson.
What matters is attracting new students and stringing along the ones you already have. The faster they learn, the faster they stop paying. You need a gimmick to make you look different and your staff has to be entertaining enough to make the clients want to come back. Without those two things, you will fail.
A huge thing that has helped my school is delivering flyers door to door. Design a flyer with decent graphics and info. The more smiling kids shots the better. Include class times, price and lesson content. The design is more expensive then the printing. If you know anyone that can help you design for cheap that’ll help. Print a few thousand, and hopefully you can find a few people to help.
While I don’t have any fucking idea on how to operate a teaching business, /u/sendaiben made a great point about ranking your site. One of the best ways to do this would be to have a blog where you write articles about your area, teaching, your company, etc… utilize SEO techniques and find topics that are under-explored online but may have an audience.
Granted, on top of everything else you do running a blog takes a significant amount of time especially if you want it to rank.
Best tool I’ve used to find topics to rank in is KeywordsEverywhere. You have to pay for it, but it’s worth every penny.
Marketing on Facebook and ig seems crucial as well
I worked at a mom and pop eikaiwa for 3 years, and the guy I worked with bought the place and runs it now. I was in Saitama from 2005-2010. I returned to the US, but my buddies are still there running schools.
Saturday was our kids money maker day. A lot of kids had juku on weekdays, but Saturdays was 10-5, all kids lessons from 10-3 for 3 instructors. Each class had 6 students. One had 10. 3000 yen a student.
Saturdays paid for business expenses and two teacher salaries. All the other days were older kids in the afternoon with adults at night.
Invest in a good curriculum for the kids if they become the main income stream. Teaching kids is tough long term, but if you have a good curriculum, it’s easier to hire other teachers. Its exhausting, but if you’re good with kids, the money is more steady. My school used Pacific Language Schools curriculum. It’s good, and culturally geared toward Japanese kids, but expensive.
Find out if there are any senior groups at the community center looking for an English teacher. You can get a flat rate with the members (300 yen per person per lesson) 10-20 people, and then usually use a room at the community center to teach/do conversation circle stuff. This is a good way to fill weekday AM time slots.
Reach out to other Eikaiwa teachers in your area. Maybe not the ones next door, but mostly you’ll find they’re very helpful.
What prefecture are you in?