If you haven’t watched the video yet, I recommend it, as this post will refer to the material we discussed about there.
Christian contacted me asking for advice, because his business is doing reasonably well, but is not producing the value he wants or makes him feel confident in his business. He owns a private tutoring company that prepares students for the SAT and ACT tests.
For your reference, here’s some basic info about his business:
- Founded at 2011
- 1-2 employees currently
- Target market: parents of 14-17 years old students
- About 5th largest in the field, at his city
- Good quality product
- Around 6-10K visitors to the website each month
- Existing email list
- Not enough profits (not making ends meet)
I decided to not even address the financials of the business, because there were enough issues, that revenue optimization is not even relevant yet.
Change in Mentality
Christian told me that he thinks that there’s no more business opportunity or room for growth in his city. I pointed out that his firm is fifth in size locally, so there are four businesses that there are bigger players in the field and therefore must have more business. While the field may be saturated, if his product is of higher quality, there’s more room to grow locally by converting business from other businesses.
Major Issue – Online Marketing
We focused more on the online part of the business, which currently doesn’t really exist. Christian has a significant email mailing list, but he doesn’t try to sell them anything and he doesn’t have any online products.
This is the first issue we tackled. His current sales process is as follows: people go to the website, register for the mailing list, and hopefully they live in the area so they can go into his office, where he might close on a tutoring program. That’s it!
He doesn’t have any services or products to offer to those who don’t live locally, so those leads are wasted.
In addition, Christian’s is a time sensitive service for his potential customers. If that student has passed the test already, Christian’s services will, obviously, no longer be needed. Upon receiving a new potential customer’s email address, he must follow up on the lead as quickly as possible, to avoid missing out on that business.
Grow Online
I suggested the following basic flow:
- The “online course” will be offered, it will include all of his sessions, along with previously recorded group tutoring sessions with Q&A.; This will be his major focus and the best product, which he should actively promote. It will create passive income and will no longer force him to give the private lessons in order to keep his business alive.
- The “crazy deal” is his current business – private sessions with the student, either in the office, or through skype if the student is not local. In the new plan, it will be the most expensive service on offer, since this is a premium service and will require Christian to invest his time to teach the student.
- The “book” will be an eBook at an appealing price point and will be the fall back or supplement for those who will not take the online course or private sessions.
- New subscribers to his mailing list will be presented with the online course offer
- Whatever a customer chooses to buy, continuing to provide him with good content through the mailing list and promoting the product or service at the next price point (if he purchased the book, offer the course, etc.).
With this method, he can reduce the amount of time that he allocates for private lessons and focus on creating even higher quality content for his online customers. He will be able to extend his reach beyond his current city and will create much more revenue from his current leads and customers.
I will update you on Christian’s progress in the coming weeks.
See you in the next post,
Dekel