Can You Provide Enough Value?

I worked for a year and a half as an English teacher at a language center in Russia before I opened my own brick-and-mortar (offline) school in Russia.

When I started that first school, we relied on word-of-mouth.

Then we did live, in-person promotions.

Then we went after tenders for corporate clients.

And I worked with companies like Coca-Cola, Citibank, Mitsubishi, BMW, Nestle, Danone, Unilever, and others.

But when I moved back to the States…

And I had to started over from zero…

That’s when I had to learn how to get students online.

So that’s when I learned digital marketing.

And before we started paid advertising…

Before we were getting 90 new students signing up every day…

The first thing I did when starting over from zero was:

• Set up a booker (a calendar)

The link to that booker was my main resource for getting students.

I put that link under every YouTube video…

Under every post…

And before long…

Students were paying in advance and scheduling their own lessons.

That’s how I started selling traditional teaching services online.

But it didn’t take long for me to realize that I was spending too much time delivering lessons and not enough time getting more students.

And if I had got more students at that point, without changing anything, then I wouldn’t have had enough time to teach all of them.

So the model had to change.

I also realized that I was basically teaching the same things over and over again…

The same rules, the same concepts…

I was getting bored…

From my first business I already had a team and understood how I could sell their time instead of my own.

But the traditional model of 1:1 lessons wasn’t scalable.

It wouldn’t sustain me long-term.

So I had to create a new model.

And to do that, I asked myself this important question:

“Do I provide enough value that someone would pay me $50 per month?”

I imagined what that might look like…

If I only had one student, I could dedicate all of my time and energy to getting them the results they want…

So the answer was 100% YES YES YES.

And then it made sense…

If I get 100 people to pay me $50 per month…

I’m making $5,000 per month.

So the question then became:

“How do I provide 100 students with MORE THAN $50 of value every month?”

Out of that line of questioning we surpassed 100 students per month…

And that’s when things really got interesting…

Because we ended up having 4,000 monthly students…

And then we increased the price to $100 per month for new students…

And they kept joining.

Now the price is $197 per month and they keep coming in…

Because they get MORE THAN what they paid for it.

But we would have never been able to do any of this…

Without the first student who paid $50 per month…

Who I personally went above and beyond to serve.

So if you’ve been hesitant about getting your own students…

Just know this:

All it takes is one student to get the ball rolling.

Before you know it, you’ll have thousands banging on your door.

To your success,

- Christopher Huntley