To be an education and training institution is to start a company. The most important thing is not money, but talent. To put it bluntly, it is whether you have the ability to form a team, manage a team and lead a team. School hardware is easy to open and can be solved with money, but some problems can't be solved with money. The ups and downs of the education and training industry are surging in my heart at the moment, so I will share them with you today.
To open a training institution, we need to focus on the big picture and start small. Consider your own industry management quality and financial strength, and then consider the operation of the campus. Although the sparrow is small, it has all aspects. When you are a training institution, it is exactly the same as being a company. To think from the macro level, first of all, you should think about what kind of brand education and training institution you intend to be. As shown in the figure below:
Secondly, we should think about the direction at the macro level of running a school. If the direction is wrong, no matter how hard you try, it will be in vain. The education industry is becoming more and more mature and subdivided.
Please don't use tactical diligence to cover up strategic laziness. If the macro-strategy is wrong, how much money is basically wasted, and even a ripple can't be seen.
When you figure out the above macro-level problems, that is to say, you have solved the strategic problems, then you should solve the tactical problems now.
Now we need to know these knowledge: site selection, fire protection, decoration, and approval by the industrial and commercial education commission. These things are objective processes, that is, things that cost money. As for the application, you can do it yourself locally or save time to find an intermediary. Today, I will focus on sharing more than that. I will focus on sharing six key points that you need to think about in the preparation stage. Let me share this picture I made first:
I have shared my closed-loop operation theory with many friends in the education and training industry:
Enrollment is money, teaching is life, service is the root, make up lessons is the foundation, word of mouth is the brand, and introduction is fission.
Behind simplicity is the ultimate concentration. This picture seems simple, and behind every link is a huge system engineering. I repeatedly emphasize the key word "system" in every training lecture, because the system is the iron camp of campus operation.
Many times, I have seen some principals and educational investors have good ideas and work hard, but they have not achieved the expected results. The reason is to do things in an "open loop" rather than a "closed loop" way. Strictly relying on the system to achieve the goal is to use a closed-loop approach, not relying on the system, but an open-loop approach. All successful training schools have achieved a closed-loop business model, relying less on luck; It is quite accidental that most failed training schools are unaware of the closed-loop business model.
Most education investors want to make more money, but only a few people can really realize that what they have to do is to establish a closed-loop business operation of training schools and upgrade them iteratively, so there are very few education investors who can make a lot of money continuously.
Now I will share six key points that need to be paid attention to when preparing to open an education and training institution. Knowing these six key points is equivalent to avoiding six big pits.
These six points are:
1. Join or create your own brand (borrow)
2. Location (geographical location)
3. Admissions promotion (marketing)
4. Recruitment (human resources)
5. Course product positioning (teaching research and development)
6. Financial issues (advance payment management)
Here, the six key points are analyzed one by one as follows:
Join the brand or create your own brand: joining is essentially a very high threshold business.
This can be operated in stages as appropriate, and the contract period for joining is generally 3-5 years.
If you want to join, I hope you think twice before you do. If you need a curriculum system, there are many now. The main reason for joining is to leverage the support of other people's brands and management experience.
Joining is a business, which is essentially no different from other businesses. It requires franchisees to give full play to their resource advantages to solve problems, rather than obtaining brand authorization and enjoying the success. Never think that joining a brand will make you a cutting shopkeeper.
Doing business is a way to realize resources. Franchisees are just a local channel for brands. Without resources and experience, they all pay IQ tax, and the failure rate is very high.
I suggest you go to the affiliate website to search and check. There are many educational affiliated brands. Common keywords are: zero experience, nanny support, easy to be a boss, returning home in one year, getting rich through education and entrepreneurship ... What I want to say is that you can't believe all these. If this educational project is so simple and easy to copy, and so profitable, why should people give you the opportunity to make money? The success rate of joining is 80% in educating investors themselves, and it is necessary to be hard to strike while the iron is hot.
90% franchise advantages are deceptive. A franchisee should first look at your own resource advantages, not the so-called advantages of joining brands, because almost anyone can get it as long as they pay, so this thing is not an advantage.
Joining is essentially a very high threshold business. It is foolish for a person who has no resources, no funds and no professional knowledge to join the company with his hard-earned money and lose a lot in the end.
Joining this industry is a mixed bag. I used to need a magnifying glass to make a judgment, but now I need a microscope, and I will make a mistake if I am not careful.
Think about why Xueda, New Oriental, learning and thinking are so powerful, and why they have not been extended to third-and fourth-tier cities, including your districts and counties. Because the core of education is teachers and teaching products, and teachers are the core. The education industry is a labor-intensive industry. More interestingly, it attaches importance to both process experience and the output of educational results. More exciting products in the education industry are virtual, and customers and users are separated. These characteristics determine that the education industry is a very heavy service industry, with teaching operation as the core and brand reputation construction as the key.
The education and training industry is a long tail market, and the market share of the top five companies is only about 5% at present, which shows that the market structure of the education industry is "big market, small workshop".
Therefore, once you choose to join, you must measure your resource advantages. I have seen many brands affiliated with schools achieve a certain scale at the local level, and basically they have become local warlords, leaving the headquarters and changing their flags. An educational investor with a little business mind will eventually become his own brand and in turn join in business. This phenomenon is not uncommon in the education industry. As far as I know, there are several chain education brands in the domestic education industry.
Education and training has been involved in this industry for 20 years in China, and the standardized operation is not particularly mature at present. Better than the education giant New Oriental, I tried to join in the early years, and then I just tasted it.
In the "slow" industry of education, the advantage of joining mode is to achieve rapid scale at very low cost. In the case of the same investment, the expansion efficiency of the franchise model can often be several times higher than that of the direct operation. However, the difficulty of management and quality control also brings many problems.
Since the development of the education industry, "directly generating income and joining the enclosure" has become a development model verified by many education brands.
For franchisees, joining is a feasible scheme to lower the threshold and improve the success rate without industry resources and operating experience. The guidance of the headquarters in site selection, sales, course content, operation management and teacher training has a great influence on whether a newly-built franchise store can start smoothly.
From the specific way of cooperation, there are also subtle differences between different brands. At present, the mainstream education franchise contracts in the market can be roughly divided into buying and selling relationship and superior-subordinate relationship.
Buying and selling relationship: franchisees purchase the right to use the brand in the form of joining fee, and the corresponding "management+teaching+marketing standardization solution". The brand side does not impose too many constraints on the operation and management of franchise stores, and does not participate in sharing;
Parent-subordinate relationship: In addition to providing brand use rights and solutions, brands will also hold shares in franchise stores or share out profits, which also puts higher demands on the "management services" provided by brands.
The joining mode still has many limitations today. Joining a mature brand can really play a positive role in enrollment promotion in the early stage of entrepreneurship. However, due to the low threshold of the education industry, the support provided by brand owners to franchisees is actually very limited, and many times it has even become a simple "selling brand".
The rapidly expanding franchise model is more suitable for products than services. For example, the product quality of catering, retail and other industries is controlled by brands, and there is a strong and unified supply chain. Franchisees are essentially only channel providers. The teaching and training industry pays more attention to service, and the core of service is teachers. Too low standardization will inevitably lead to uneven quality.
A lot of fixed costs will be paid at the beginning of school, and poor enrollment will greatly affect the cash flow of franchise stores. It is almost common that there is too little management assistance for franchise stores. Many franchisees who fail to invest believe that the lack of brand support makes franchisees in a state of self-destruction.
The negative events of education joining are frequent: rapid expansion is a double-edged sword. As soon as you join, it is as deep as the sea. Since then, the headquarters has become a passerby.
A word of advice: if you know operation management, you just need to find a good product system, and there is really no need to spend the initial fee. If you don't understand operation and management, a layman will have to pay tuition if he spends the initial fee.
At the same time, it is also related to the region. Parents in first-and second-tier cities attach importance to brands and teachers' teaching. Third-and fourth-tier parents don't care about brands, but pay more attention to teachers' teaching and cost performance. This is why extortion organizations in many places are doing so well. Many big brands are unpopular everywhere, and it is difficult to crush local local local strongmen.
At present, it is meaningless for many headquarters to give you only one brand authorization. If you are in the third-and fourth-tier areas, it is actually not helpful to your development, and sometimes it can be said to be flashy.
No matter what kind of education and training institution you join, you should go to the headquarters for a field trip to see your qualifications. At least 10-20 training brands with direct schools must be selected. You must look at the real financial data of the schools directly under the headquarters. Be sure to visit three or four campuses that have joined, and be careful.
At present, many educational franchise projects do not have physical direct schools, selling brand authorization to make money, and there is no actual operational support in the later stage. This requires great care.
Joining is risky and investment must be cautious.
In order to expand faster and enhance market influence, most education and training brands on the market now accept joining. For education investors, they can have the right to use the brand only by paying the initial fee, including the curriculum system, teaching materials, teacher training and publicity materials. Of course, this set is very expensive. According to the value of the brand, it ranges from 100 thousand to 1 million, and the content is also very different. In order to attract franchisees, some institutions provide a very low threshold for joining, but the later management support, teacher training, publicity materials and so on. All need extra money. Therefore, when signing a franchise contract, we must ask clearly what the fees paid include and estimate how much investment is needed in the later period.
Many brands have just joined the company, and they don't have enough experience in joining and exporting, and the support for joining is limited. They often pay the initial fee and leave it alone. All kinds of beautiful promises and propaganda have basically failed, and some support programs are fake and empty, and ultimately they have to rely on investors themselves. Therefore, we often encounter things that franchisees and brands tear, and it often happens in reality.
Self-operated brands are relatively economical, but they are not easy. If you decide to create a brand, you should also weigh your own resources, make a CIS system, use what teaching materials, build a teaching and research system, design courses, package products and design trademark advertisements. Each item needs to spend a lot of time and labor costs, and it is common for these 7788 to add up to more than the franchise fee. The cost of self-employment is hard to estimate, and those who have money and thrift are left to the people.
Location: offline institutions, the main students come from the surrounding 3-5 kilometers.
According to different projects, the requirements for addresses are also different. For example, English classes for children are generally concentrated in shopping malls and large communities. Extracurricular tutoring is concentrated near kindergartens in primary and secondary schools. Site selection is very important. It is necessary to do sufficient market research and investigate the surrounding communities, schools, businesses, transportation and so on.
At present, the national policy clearly stipulates that it is not allowed to run schools on floors above 3 floors, and the school area should not be less than 300 square meters (500 square meters is required in some places), and the fire control must be qualified. Only in this way can we apply for a school license in the future. Location also determines operating costs. If you choose a popular shopping mall, the occupancy fee and rent will certainly not be too low, and the later promotion will be easier. Because the shopping mall itself has traffic, more people will come to consult and the brand will spread faster.
If you choose a small community or a popular business entity, the rent will be relatively cheap, but the later marketing will be very difficult and you may need to spend extra money on marketing.
In addition, don't worry about the trillion market share of education and training in chambers of commerce or news reports. Even if a table is full of Han people, you only have one stomach. For you who are an offline organization, the main students are all from the surrounding 3-5 kilometers. Of course, better educational institutions, such as the inclusive children's ability training center, will have a wider range of students! .
Recruitment: The recruitment of educational institutions must be normalized throughout the year and pay attention to the construction of talent echelon.
Recruitment is n times more difficult than enrollment. Don't think that recruitment is easy. Send a job profile and a large number of people will come for an interview. If you don't have some contacts in the industry, the probability of recruiting excellent and suitable employees is very small. Bosses with industry experience can also attract some people through the introduction of colleagues and friends, and those without can only rely on social recruitment. The success rate of social recruitment is relatively low. I once knew an investor who interviewed thirty or forty people a month, and none of them stayed. Needless to say, you can guess how desperate he was.
Education is a labor-intensive industry, which determines its dependence on people. Whether a school can develop at a high speed depends on whether a team with fighting capacity can be formed in the preparatory period. Therefore, in the preparatory period of opening, recruitment > enrollment, team formation and team training are the top priorities.
There are four common effective recruitment channels:
1. Introduction of acquaintances
2. Online recruitment (Zhilian, 58, Boss direct employment or local talent network)
3. Campus recruitment
4. headhunter or intermediary
The recruitment of educational institutions must be normalized all year round, and someone must come for an interview every month. This must give an indicator to the person in charge of the recruitment invitation. When can you stop talking? Unless you want to wash your hands of it and stop running, then don't recruit people. Course consultants and marketing teams, in particular, need to be overstaffed by 10-30%, because these two positions are highly mobile and slow in training. These two positions should form a dynamic balance, strict assessment standards, survival of the fittest. Education and training schools are never afraid of too many people, but they are afraid that too many people will muddle along without performance.
Recruitment is a very important and professional matter. The current grassroots working group is the post-90s generation, and it will mainly be the post-00s generation in four or five years. The management style is very different from that of post-70s and post-80s. Your interview process, interview dialogue skills, salary system, staff training and staff management ...... you need to carefully consider and standardize the process as much as possible.
Market: the enrollment market is a road-building activity, so the expenses must be spent on the cutting edge, and ROI should always be considered.
When the preparatory work is almost done, you can start enrollment promotion. It is becoming more and more difficult to rely on traditional enrollment methods, such as distributing leaflets and directly calling unfamiliar phones to enroll students. Many cities have banned the distribution of leaflets at school gates, which are controlled by urban management. Every time after school, there will be security guards at the school gate.
The government has also begun to control telephone sales. My colleague told me that some large organizations have cancelled telemarketing as a sales channel and turned to online marketing and subway advertising. But how can a small organization have so much money to do baidu promotion and burn online advertisements? A most common WeChat official account advertisement costs four or five thousand casually, and it is impossible to predict whether it will have an effect.
Because the market competition is becoming more and more fierce, the requirements for the enrollment team are getting higher and higher, and it is necessary for the enrollment supervisor to make a marketing activity plan according to local conditions and time. This is even more demanding for people.
A training school is essentially a company, and a company should have its marketing department, otherwise it will be isolated from the outside world, and your teaching products and services will not be delivered to the target customers quickly. The consequences of insufficient students will be very serious, and the operation of the campus will be unsustainable, on the verge of bankruptcy or running away.
Now I will talk about my thoughts on campus marketing promotion. I have worked on campus for 6 years, including 4 years in sales and 2 years in marketing. I started more than 20 new campuses with the company before, and I am very familiar with the market expansion of the new campus. My views are as follows:
Online:
1. Start a campus within one year, please focus on offline;
2. If you have investment, do your best to be a local circle of friends or shake audio and video advertisements, register a WeChat official account, and maintain the forwarding and dissemination of parents' communities, which is regarded as the overall brand communication package;
3. In a certain area, if there are one or two campuses, it is enough to do SEO well, and there is no need to spend money on bidding;
4. If you need to make an output, thoroughly consider the local Baidu Post Bar, friends circle, WeChat community marketing, free, practical, simple, effective, low-cost and high-output!
Offline:
Many investors and friends of the principal are asking how start-up schools recruit students. Generally, I would tell him to "do a good job in the 3 ~ 5km push of Fiona Fang". When there is no goods in hand, the channel cooperation is zero; If the product is not verified, the brand promotion is zero.
Start-up campuses rarely contact elevator advertisements and outdoor advertisements, burn money, and can't see output at all in a short time. That can be done with a certain customer base. Many big brand organizations do all kinds of outdoor advertisements with brand exposure as the ultimate goal. Start-ups should calculate output for every penny invested and create cash flow, and "millet plus rifle" will eat into the market first.
At present, the mainstream ways of enrollment in educational institutions are: push, community and cross-industry cooperation channels.
Educational institutions that have just started will basically choose to push because it is a low-cost and fastest way to accumulate seed customers. It is also essential to promote the campus after it has a certain scale, which is the best way to brush the brand presence.
Market expenses must be spent on the cutting edge, open source and reduce expenditure, and always think about ROI.
Market positioning of curriculum products: curriculum products without clear positioning = cheap goods.
We must do a good job in regional customer demand analysis and research, and don't blindly set courses. After choosing courses, we must make a good analysis of regional competitive products and have a good positioning of our own institutions and courses. The education market is so big that you can't cover everything. It's really unrealistic to treat all your customers as your dishes. The market in China is so big that there is a weak water supply of 3,000 yuan. Just take a spoon to drink.
Now I take the shampoo category as an example, please think carefully:
Each brand of shampoo has its own clear market positioning, and the course products of our training institutions are the same.
In fact, the target customers of some educational projects are not as widely publicized. For example, early education generally promotes 0-6 years old, but the real students are mostly concentrated in 1.5 years old to 2.5 years old. After the age of 3, children basically have no time to continue early education, and they all learn English, draw pictures and dance Lego. And children's English is generally advertised as 3- 12 years old. In fact, most students are concentrated in the age group of 3-9. In the third and fourth grades of primary school, they were all changed into exam-oriented remedial classes. Even if you learn English, you will learn courses that are synchronized with the teaching materials, rather than children's English classes that focus on interest and oral English. There are also some quality education courses. The students are all between 3 and 9 years old. /kloc-Generally, children over 0/0 will continue to study art, piano and dance, unless they have a strong personal interest or plan to take the road of art major in the future ... 90% will basically give up quality education and choose cultural courses for training after 10.
Our national conditions determine that the way out for children from ordinary families to learn quality education is not as wide as learning culture well and taking the college entrance examination. The college entrance examination is a dragon gate for most family children, and many family children are ready to jump over it.
Financial problems (management of advance receipts): advance receipts are liabilities, equivalent to parents' interest-free loans.
Finance is a part that many investors ignore. You won't believe that many institutions don't even know their own accounts now. Most people are optimistic about this industry because of good cash flow. They only see that the total course price is tens of thousands when parents sign up, and the campus can collect hundreds of thousands every month during the peak season, but those are only accounts received in advance. Financially, advance accounts are liabilities. Students can't really earn money until they finish class. In the training industry, the real income comes from the consumption of classes (cancellation of classes), not how much money is collected from parents. You need to serve the money paid by your parents for half a year or even a year. Finally, there is no way to sign up for class on time. If your parents want to refund the money in the future, you have to give it back to others. The cash flow of education and training is very good, but if you don't know how to use the cash flow, the advance payment in your hand will continue to depreciate.
Today, I shared a bloody real example that happened around me. My friend from the last cooperative training institution ran away. I had expected this situation, but I didn't expect the consequences to be so serious.
At that time, we caught the wind. In the first year of running a local school, inexperienced college students made 654.38+00,000, 654.38+0.50 flat campuses, and a summer school received 300,000. At that time, I saw so much money for the first time in my life, and my heart was a little swollen. At that time, my friends and I didn't have any concepts such as operation management, team building and class elimination. At that time, I just vaguely felt that what we did there was wrong, and I couldn't say anything about it. There was no clear concept at that time.
With the continuous progress of running a school, I persisted in building a full-time marketing team in the second year. At that time, I was invincible in the third and fourth tier cities. I think marketing and marketing can solve many problems. Then our hidden problem came, because all of them were part-time teachers, and our poor management led some parents to refund their fees. At this time, I realized that if the money entered the campus account did not finish the class in time, the later teaching service could not keep up, and the money could be returned to the parents. The advance payment in the early stage is only temporarily retained in the account of the campus, and it is not the real campus income. Realizing this, my friends and I discussed this matter for more than a week. He refused to use full-time teachers and made great efforts to engage in part-time famous teachers. So three months later, I resigned voluntarily.
When I left, I said to him: it is not enough to make plans! Maybe at that time, we were all young and energetic, and we were careless in cooperating and starting a business. At that time, our campus didn't even have industrial and commercial registration.
At the beginning of 20 18, my friend called me and said that I had found a lot of running water in a year, but I just had no money in my pocket. Only then did he realize the problem of suspension of classes and borrowed money from me to lend to the teacher. I refused because I realized it was a bottomless pit. Finally, my friend ran away, and it also appeared on our local news TV station.
The finance of training institutions is really a university, and it is very important to confirm the income after suspension.
Summary: The market will always be for experts to earn amateur money, and there will be room for profit operation only under asymmetric information.
Everything will have ups and downs, and education and training institutions also have life cycles. The direction of campus management in each period should be adjusted.
Education and training industry, it is easier to start than to end. The enrollment of many colleges and universities is not ideal. It is difficult for them to make a breakthrough if they continue like this, and they can't stand it behind closed doors. Because the advance payment has been spent and the class has not been finished, even if the door is closed, I can't afford to retreat, so I can only choose to run. In recent years, we have seen more and more news that the bosses of training institutions have run away from the news. For example, the recent closure of Web English has made it impossible for a large number of students to refund their fees. Everyone who comes to do education and training has some educational feelings. If there is no way out, no one will choose this strategy. Under the pressure of policy, this situation is easy to occur because of rising operating costs, poor management and poor enrollment.
When you are running a school, you will certainly encounter more than the above problems, such as the departure of partners, the loss of core employees, complaints from parents, fire problems, school qualifications, malicious slander or reports from competitors, etc. All these need to be faced with a strong heart.
So since it's so troublesome, isn't it worth a try?
Not really! Doing education and training has a particularly high sense of accomplishment. You must pay attention to the externalization of your reputation and teaching effect. When children make progress and parents are satisfied with their children's support, they feel very comfortable and feel that they are doing good deeds and preaching and teaching to solve doubts. The payback period of education and training investment is generally 1-2 years. After the initial bumpy stage, it is now on the right track, and the income is relatively around 20% without any problems.
Investment is risky, so it is necessary to be cautious when opening training institutions. The market competition is becoming more and more fierce, and the requirements for refined operation management are getting higher and higher. Entrepreneurs with industry experience, especially those who are executives in large institutions and have rich management experience in other industries, have a higher success rate. Most of those laymen who know nothing and have a little spare money are suffering.
Many industries are pleasing to the eye from the outside and devastating from the inside. To do a good job in an industry, two important words are "precipitation" and "cognition". The law of the market is always that insiders earn money from amateurs. Only under the condition of asymmetric information can there be more interest space to operate.
At the end of this paper, the above is my idea of opening an education and training institution, which is more about my personal experience and experience. I hope it can help friends who want to enter the education and training industry. If there are any shortcomings, I still hope Han Hai.