Business by Janice

The TEFL sector is dynamic to say the least. A busy school dealing with company and private classes sees their class vacancy list change almost daily as classes are covered and new ones come up. For this reason it’s very difficult to make committments to teachers very far in advance especially mid academic year.  Perhaps it’s related to the recession, but in our case we are receiving applications several months in advance of the teacher actually coming to Madrid. I’m all for planning ahead but teachers often run the risk of their application getting swamped and eventually going unnoticed if they try to secure a post too early.

Even though our applications are filed appropriately it’s human nature to fix our attention on those CVS which just arrive at the time we are ready to recruit.

Even planning for the new academic year, when we know we will need a large number of new teachers can be problematical if we interview too far ahead. People’s circumstances change and on several occasions we have made a committment to a teacher for a full time contract and they have then not followed through.

So what is the ideal time to send in CV for the new academic year?

While we are still in the previous academic year, our attention is on wrapping things up and organising summer intensive courses. Any CV sent before June will just go into the “file” often buried “forever”. My recommendation would be to contact schools in early July with a follow up mail or phone call approximately 10 days later. September is also a good month. Some may think that this is leaving it a bit late but there’s still a lot of shuffling around going on at the beginning of September and many company clients don’t even start classes until October.

One last point, face to face interviews are always the most effective. When teacher supply was scarce last year we promoted telephone interviews because we were desperate to get teachers into Madrid. With the recession the situation has changed dramatically. To be successful in securing a teaching post it is necessary to be here, to send your CV just at the right time and to be available immediately.

For the last two years the EFL market in Madrid has been challenging to say the least.

There has been a severe shortage of  teachers which has led to many without qualifications and working papers getting work. Another effect has been  teachers suddenly dropping classes  as they are offered 2€/hour extra in the academy down the road etc.etc.

But then the famous “crisis” came along. I’m not sure what it’s like in the rest of Spain but here in Madrid there has been a total turnaround in demand and supply. All of a sudden teachers are in abundant supply as multinationals cut their training budgets and hence their demand for language classes.

Ok, you’re saying, this is all very obvious and to be expected, but I was inspired to write this post thinking more of  those teachers coming to Madrid to look for work. What are the implications of the current situation for incoming teachers?

Firstly, if you are non EU and don’t have working papers for Spain, you are going to find it very difficult to find classes. I’ve received quite a few emails from American teachers already expressing this. However, a large supply of legal teachers available in Madrid is not the only reason why non legals are feeling the pinch. In general the Spanish authorities are tightening up in lots of areas which is making schools take a long hard look at the way they are doing things.

To illustrate what I’m talking about, in the last few months we have had the following:

• A visit from the local police to check our “licencia de actividades”
• An inspection from the Ministerio del Trabajo on the correctness of the baja of a teacher
• A visit from the “Departamento de Consumo” of the Town Hall to make sure (and help us get in order-  what a civilised way of doing things!) that we weren’t in breach of the laws governing consumer rights.
• Calls from company clients to ask for the TCS (the document proving that teachers have had a contract) so they could complete the offical paperwork necessary to claim the Government training subsidy.

The point I’m making here is that SPAIN IS TIGHTENING UP. Recruiting non EU teachers without papers is one of the most serious things that an academy can do. Many are no longer prepared to take the risk, and with the market being as it is at the moment, most academies don’t need to.

Another implication of the effects of the crisis is that in general, in order to be more competitive in the labour market, people improve their skills and qualifications. And this, of course, applies to teachers.

The proliferation of short TEFL courses might be ok for getting you a job when there are lots of classes available. But when there aren’t, no reputable school is going to give a weekend TEFL course a second glance. What we want as a minimum is ALWAYS the full 4 week long TEFL (I’m referring to the full time course here). We have always, and will always want this. Teaching is complex and you are simply not prepared for it properly with a mere weekend’s training.

Economic recessions lead to readjustments. Leaving the emotional side apart, of people losing their jobs and houses etc, recessions are necessary, some would say even good, as they cause economies to strengthen and move forward. I have a couple of friends who are economists and when I ask them about the “crisis”, it always strikes me how calm and fatalistic they are.

So where may we see readjustments in our market?

If the current situation stops non EU teachers comng to Spain, it means they won’t suffer not finding work once they’re here and it prevents schools from being tempted to hire them and running the risk of being prosecuted.

If the current situation encourages new teachers to get a better TEFL qualification, it means we will be sending better  teachers to clients and the quality of the sector in general will improve.

This is what we are crying out for in Madrid - BETTER QUALITY LANGUAGE TRAINING.

And finally, looking at this whole issue from the business side of the school, what implications do we have there?  That’s easy. If there is less demand for classes, those schools who are not offering a good service need to get their finger out and start offering one, otherwise they will go out of business.

What are we talking about again?  - BETTER QUALITY LANGUAGE TRAINING.

I’ve been in Spain a long time now, yet I find it incredible that we (companies and individuals) still get misinformed about very important information and procedures.

I’m thinking in particular of the famous NIE (Número de Identidad Extranjero).

Now at the mention of this, I’m sure lots of you out there (especially in Madrid) are thinking “I’ve got a tale to tell about this one!)

And yes, this topic was debated heatedly at the last meeting of our academy owners networking group. It was discovered that for some of us, our gestorias are saying that if the teacher doesn’t have a NIE number they have to pay 25% income tax as they are regarded as a tourist not a resident, whilst for others, gestorias were processing contracts and appying the normal tax rate of a resident.

According to our gestoria, if a teacher is issued a contract on their passport and will obtain the NIE number within the same fiscal year then there is no problem as we just need everything to be in order when we present the yearly  tax return relating to employees in December. But what if a teacher starts work in October and doesn’t get an appointment for their NIE until February of the following year?  What do we do then?

And what if we give a teacher a contract with the normal rate of income tax as they have their appointment to get their NIE,  but they suddenly disappear? This has happened to us and means that our tax return in December is incorrect as we’ve had a “non resident” working for us at the normal tax rate instead of 25%.

As I write this, teachers phoning for NIE appointments are being given dates in May here in Madrid. If things continue in the same way, recruiting a teacher in February will mean that they will be unable to get their NIE within their contract period. It’s incredible.

Some people have the knack of seeing things really simply and clearly. The lady who works in our admin dept. is such a person. . On relating this whole issue to her, she asked me “Have you ever thought of going to Hacienda directly and asking them what the correct situation is regarding the 25% income tax?”

What a brilliant idea!

So, we went and asked. The person “knowledgeable” about this subject in the tax office we visited, wasn’t available at the time. We left our details and were told they’d get back to us. We’ve contacted them several times and guess what? Two months later we’re still wating for an answer!

¡Viva España!

Try as I might I can’t get away from hearing  the word “crisis” at least 5 times a day, even though I deliberately DON’T watch any news. It’s getting to be a more common topic of conversation than the weather ever was!

I must say though, I’m thinking about the sales and budgets forecasts for the second term for company classes and attempting to balance my always overflowing positivity with the “reality” that’s out there.

Yes, it is proving hard to find and get new business (although there’s still lots to be had) so I got to thinking that it’s even more important to look after the clients we already have.  I read an interesting statistic on a marketing web page the other day - apprarently 68% of clients stop buying because businesses don’t communicate with them. This statistic is probably higher in a service industry such as ours.

So what can we do to make sure we retain our customers and even possibly get more business from them?

If you’re a business owner ( or a freelance teacher in fact), here are some ideas you may want to think about:

• Just phone. All of us are guilty of not speaking to our customers enough. Just pick up the phone to ask how everything’s going and thank them for their business, they’ll be very pleasantly surprised as very few people do this.

• Send a postcard. Send a postcard with a compelling offer that ADDS VALUE  to your current service. In times like these it’s VALUE that we have to be promoting, so that customers feel confident that their expenditure is an INVESTMENT.

• Reward referrals. In fact referrals is often something we don’t concentrate enough on. If your current cusotmers are really happy with you, encourage them to refer your name to others and offer clients an incentive to do this.  If you got two referrals from each of your current clients, just think what a difference this would make to your business.

• Send a gift to your best customers. How would you feel if you received an unexpected gift from a supplier? Would that increase your loyalty to them. Just the gesture of a small “detalle” as a thank you for their business goes a long way. (I reckon this is more effective outside of Chrismas time though).

• Offer your expertise. What one piece of information or knowledge about your business could help your customers save money, make their life easier etc?  Write a personal email and share it with them.

• Ask a great question. Phone your clients and ask this one simple but extremely effective question: “What are we currently not offering that you would like us to?” Quite often we concentrate on what we THINK clients want without ever asking them. This very powerful question could set you off in all sorts of interesting directions!

I know I seem to be concentrating on marketing quite a lot lately, I must say it’s a whole new area for me which I’m learning about and in fact is more than relevant in these times of (sorry, here it goes again…) crisis. For those companies who focus mostly on corporate clients, we ARE facing a challenge, but as I mentioned in my post “Let’s say NO to the Recession”,  we must maintain positive, imaginative and pro active to combat this situation.

Again I want to thank Chris Cardell for most of the marketing information contained in this post: http://www.cardellmedia.co.uk

I’ve just returned from Seville. No frilly flemenco dresses in sight though as I was there to attend 2 conferences related to our sector. The first was the FECEI conference on Friday (Federación Española de Centros de Enseñanza de Idiomas) aimed at academy owners and the second on Saturday, the ACEIA conference (Asociación de Centros de Enseñanza de Idiomas de Andalucia) aimed at everyone related to the sector. What a buzz to see  the place full of over 350  teachers willing to give up their saturday to learn something new, seeking inspiration and motivation via the speakers at the workshops.

But you know, there’s only around 80 schools in Andalucia. In Madrid we have over 300! Where’s the buzz in Madrid? Just think what could be generated in our capital city? So what’s going on in Andalucia?

The energy in Andalucia is coming from the President of FECEI, Richard Johson and a small team of incredibly ENTHUSIASTIC academy owners who belong to ACEIA who have realised how much more productive (and fun) it is to collaborate. They have discovered that collaboration leads to creativity, learning and improvements in the way we do things, which ultimately leads to IMPROVEMENTS IN OUR SECTOR, a subject which for those of you who regularly read my blog know I’m passionate about.

Richard told me some time ago the story of ACEIA, how there used to be loads of cowboy schools in Andalucia and how gradually standards have improved leading to better contracts and conditions for teachers, more professionality in the managing of the schools and a better service to the customer.

Collaboration is also a passion of mine, and attending these conferences made me realise exactly how much power there is in relationships. Apart from what I learnt from the talks about running an “exemplary” school, tips  for recruiting and retaining teachers, how to manage our offcial funds for training and what’s happening in the EFL market at the global level, I came away with ideas for marketing and positioning a section of our company, concrete contacts to introduce different products and lots of other things.

In fact I was invited to talk about the advantages of collaboration, and there are two sentences that stand out for me from my talk. The first is that “no industry has ever developed or prospered by its businesses operating in isolation”. Apart from myself, there was only one other school from Madrid represented at the FECEI conference, that was Hyland.

What the hell is going on in Madrid?

The answer to that is easy - nothing. We’ve probably got the most acute issues of the whole country (don’t need to list them as they’re all to found on the other posts on this blog), and nothing is happening to try and address them. I’ve held a couple of informal meetings over the last year  with a group of around 10 school owners to try and get something off the ground, (it’s still early days), and do you know how many emails I actually sent out with not even a response? 80!

It’s great to see lots of blogs by teachers but where are the academy owners? Are you that apathetic? Don’t you care?  There’s so much we could do if we just started building a relationship  with each other. When an industry is having problems it’s very difficult for an individual business to soldier on alone.

The second sentence from my talk which is always on my mind is, “the greatest resource is a relationship because it opens the door to every other resouce you may need”. I owe this to the author James Ray, from the Book “Harmonic Weath”, (recommended reading).  As a  school owner, when you’re not sure if your gestoria’s doing the contracts properly, when you need help improving the format of your level test, when you’re not sure what to include in a company client’s contract, if you’ve built a nework in your sector of people you like and trust, you can always find the answer to what you’re looking for.

Power really is in relationships. It was great to see that exemplified this weekend in Seville and I encourage anyone reading this post to reflect on that. In fact it’s motivated me to organise a third networking meeting here in Madrid, (just in case it ocurred to anyone to comment saying, that’s alright Janice but what are YOU going to do about what you’re writing about!)

Hey, talking about relationships, you can start (or consolidate) a relationship just by commenting on this post. I would love to get more feedback from other language school owners. What do you think? Have I got a point or am I being unrealistically utopian?

In addition to the balls we have to juggle as small business owners, (see post “Do Academy owners ever get any sympathy from teachers?”) , we’ve got yet another one, and it’s a biggie - the negativity that surrounds us regarding this recession.

Yes, of course the economy is experiencing a downturn, that’s what the economy does, it goes up and down, in varying degrees. But perhaps the biggest danger is not the recession itself , but the FEAR that seems to creep up on people largely fuelled by the media who are having a field day with all the news of doom and gloom.

What is fear?  Basically it is a lack of faith about our ability to influence the future. And what does fear generally do? It paralyses us, it stops us from taking action. If we don’t take action of course we are not going to have faith in the future because we are putting our destiny in the hands of others, and we never know what others are going to do!

I think the first action one should take is to limit one’s consumption of the media. Surround yourself with positive messages from other sources  instead, don’t be sucked down into so much negativity. Yes, businesses are folding and people are losing their houses, that’s very sad, but at the same time other businesses are doing well and many  people haven’t reduced their spending.

Once you really get into the MINDSET that your business can indeed prosper despite the recession, you’ll be inspired to take action that will then enable it to do so.  Those of us who understand how the LAW OF ATTRACTION works know that EVERYTHING begins with a thought. If you think that it’s not worth doing any marketing because nobody’s buying, you’re not going to take any sort of marketing action  and hey presto, all of a sudden, your business is spriralling downwards. Who do you blame that on?  Yourself or the recession?

The most important thing to do in any recession is to increase your marketing, but make sure it’s marketing that WORKS. How do you know if the marketing is working? - You test it, you experiment with different types of marketing and you test. We used a telemarketer last year for the first time over a period of 3 months last spring/summer. With salary and commissions the guy cost us just over 2000€. He got us a contract worth 2000€/month whch runs for 9 months. He paid for himself. That’s simple testing.

And marketing doesn’t have to cost anything. Getting on the phone to clients or sending emails doesn’t cost anything (except your time) but it’s still marketing. However, the attitude with which you do this is paramount. If you’re making calls with the expectation that it’s a fruitless task because “we’re in a recession and nobody is buying”, your task will indeed bear little fruit. Just think, if most other business owners aren’t bothering to contact prospects because they think there’s no business to be had, then you have a higher probability of making contact with those who ARE still buying. No prospecting work is ever wasted, and if you are motivated to do it in the hard times and get some results, just think how easy it will be when the economy starts to move upwards.

To be very simplistic, things happen. That’s a fact. Whether they’re good or bad depends totally on how we view and judge them, so anything can be viewed as good if we choose to think that way.

For those business owners with the right mindset, an economic recession provides the challenge to:

• become more creative with their marketing which then pays off even more when the economy recovers
• analyse their current cost and revenue structure and thus develop in the area of financial budgeting
• learn and grow generally - there’s nothing like a problem to test and stretch you.  Often we don’t realise the resources we have inside us until we are put to the test
• think how we can utilise networking both inside and outside our sector to ceate synergies which may lead to increased business

By advocating saying NO to the recession I’m not denying that it exists, what I’m saying is let’s not succumb to negativity which creates fear and leads to inaction.  This FEELS so bad, and why would we choose to feel bad?  Isn’t it always better to feel good and positive? THAT is the feeling that will be responsible for getting you through this recession because it will inspire you to take the action needed.

Despite the generalisations of the press, there are lots of individuals and companies doing very well, (but of course positve news for the media is not what sells so it’s not of interest to them).  So let’s focus on these companies and individuals for our inspiration, focus on what action we ourselves need to take, and intelligently steer our way through these challenging times to come out the other end even stronger.

Note:  the material for this post was inspired by an amazing marketing and business development coach, Chris Cardell.  Check him out at: http.//www.cardellmedia.co.uk

In a word, there would be chaos.

One of the most frustrating parts of running a business is when there exists an obstacle which hinders you from satisfying a demand and therefore from selling.  I often ask myself, why can’t American teachers get work visas when the demand for English is so huge?

It doesn’t make sense.

I haven’t done a great deal of research into this, I presume the Spanish government believes that there are enough qualified Spanish teachers of English to satisfy demand and that’s why they won’t give any quota on this immigration category.  What the government don’t appear to understand however is our market works; how many times have you heard clients say they want a native? Ok, they might accept a Romanian or Polish teacher (who are usually excellent with grammar by the way),  but a Spanish teacher of English is largely frowned upon.

We would love to employ American teachers, I love their work ethic, they’re generally enthusiastic and hard working but  the risk is immense, it’s one thing to have an inspection and to be found to have some errors in the contracts of European teachers and quite another to be found to be “employing” illegals. The fine can close your business. Is it worth the risk?

Apparently, for lots of schools in Madrid, yes, they feel that it’s still worth taking the risk, although I believe more and more are becoming cautious and  saying no. I’m amazed however by how many American teachers come here to do TEFL and then believe they can get a job when they know they will be illegal.

The ideal situation would be for qualifed non EU teachers to receive work visas of one to two years. Everyone would be happy, schools would have a wider choice of teachers and could therefore pay more attention to finding the right teacher for  a certain profile of class, the non EU teachers would at last be able to work for the reputable schools, clients would get their classes covered more quickly and those Spanish teachers of English whose strong accent gets in the way of giving effective classes wouldn’t be affected as they rarely got assigned classes in the first place!

Does anyone out there reading this know if there’s anything happening about this situation? Does anyone or group of people even have the energy never mind the time to lobby for action in this area?

I know we don’t live in a perfect world, and in fact, the TEFL world is much less than perfect in many respects, but when we have such an imbalance between the demand for English and the supply of teachers who can teach it, surely SOMETHING  can be done.

Firstly, my apologies for leaving it so long between posts, I had a problem with accessing the page coupled with the usual hectic period of September/October setting up courses, recruiting etc.

It’s come to my attention that many prospective new clients are really putting pressure on getting price down which I suppose is quite understandable given the current economic conditions.

Will schools concede on this and will quality be affected?

Margins are really low in this industry to start with and if competition gets any fiercer, we may well see the standard of service decline in terms of communication with the client, mix ups with class organisation etc. It’s very unlikely (if other academy owners have any common sense) that teacher rates will be reduced to rebalance the margin on classes, as we’re still experiencing a shortage of teachers especially here in Madrid. Teachers can choose where to work and they’re certainly not going to, and shouldn’t, work for peanuts.

Time and time again we try to point out to clients that it’s not the PRICE that is important, it’s the COST of classes. A company can contract the cheapest language school in the city, but if that school is employing non qualiified and inexperienced teachers, the cost to that company is HUGE as the students won’t make the desired progress. The company might as well flush their money down the drain.  If budgets ARE tight, It’s a much more sensible to contract fewer classes with a school that guarantees quality, thereby ensuring  a return on investment on those students receiving quality teaching.

In any crisis it’s inevitable that there is some reshuffling of position in the market to maintain  a certain level of business.  Some  schools however, stressed out by fighting fires all day, may decide that it’s not worth it  any more. If you no longer enjoy your workas you have less and less resources with which to run your business and provide a decent service, what’s the point?

Quite frankly I refuse to be pulled into this doom and gloom. I’m not saying that these aren’t challenging times but if we fan the fire with pessimism we just get pulled futher down into “problems”.

I love the saying, “when the going gets tough, the tough get going”. If an economic crisis means you have to be more creative in looking for clients (who’ll pay your rates), so be it - at least you hone your sales and marketing skills. If it means you have to monitor your budgets more carefully, fine, again this experience adds to your business skills.

There is always a positive side to every negative situation and those who ARE positive stand out, they attact good things to them. (For those of you who know anything about the Law of Attraction, you’ll know where I’m coming from, more about that in later posts).

So, will quality in our sector be sacrificed in the “Crisis”?  - Only if you want it to be.

I’m sure many teachers have often wondered what it would be like to run a school themselves.

Would it work out?

Would they be able to earn more money?

Would they get more job satisfaction?

Quite frankly, until you try it you’ll never know. Let’s look at what might be involved.

From a risk point of view we’re in a very fortunate industry. We don’t have to invest in expensive machinery or buy in stock that may never sell. As we get a class, we teach it ourselves or we find a teacher to teach it for us. When the class finishes, the teacher finishes. as simple as that.

Everyone’s story of how they got into running a language school is different. In my case, I was teaching at a school that was already established, the owners wanted to sell and asked if I was interested in buying it. Here the risk was low, as it was already a going concern, students were guaranteed, all that was needed was to work to increase student numbers and company clients.

Many teachers begin by becoming autonomo to be able to take on corporate clients themselves, and then as they become well known and are asked to do more and more classes, they subcontract out these classes to other teachers. Eventually their base grows to such an extent that they open an office and begin to set up administration and pedagogic systems, contract a gestoria etc. The successful teacher is now on their way to becoming a successful business owner and they begin to juggle those balls I referred to in an earlier post. If you’ve got previous management experience and have been trained in such things as time management, leadership, sales skills, interviewing techniques and basic financial management skills you’ll be way ahead of the competition. Let’s face it, to combine general management experience with an expert knowledge of your product (TEFL) has to be a winning combination.

So what happens now?

I believe that the biggest factors influencing the success of a school are focus and vision.

Now you’re running a business instead of just teaching, what do you want from this business? This is the most important question any business owner can ask themselves and the question we always start with when we are coaching such people.

The questions you may want to ask yourself are:

• How big do I want this business to grow?
• Am I prepared to put in the hours the business needs to get established?
• What niche of the market do I want to concentrate on?
• Am I prepared to take a financial risk if necessary?
• Who do I know who can help me?
• What lifestyle do I want?
• What are my strengths?
• What are my weaknesses?

It’s by asking yourself questions such as these that you can formulate your vision and from your vision you formulate your business plan and set your goals.  People and businesses often become confused and lost because they don’t know where they’re going. It’s also often the case  that you see other schools doing different things and you say to yourself, “should I be doing that?” If you’ve spent some time initially deciding what sort of business and lifestyle you want, you will immediately know the answer instead of wasting time debating whether to follow or not.

We’re lucky; we’re in a market where the demand for our service is huge. The downside is that the competition is extremely fierce. If you are offering a good service at a reasonable price, keeping an eye on the financials, know what you want to achieve and by when, you shouldn’t have too many problems. Beware of your weaknesses however.

As your business grows it’s important to recognise the weak areas and find the necessary resources to fill the gaps.

If want to own a large school, one of the most important tips I could pass on would be to keep your head up and look at your business as a whole, don’t get too hands on, don’t get too involved with the teaching and ignore the business development. If you do, you will continue to be a great teacher but you will be lucky to achieve your goal of having a great school.

If there are any teachers/language school owners out there who would like to raise any questions about business development, I’d be happy to answer them and this would give concrete examples to teachers who are thinking of starting up on their own. I don’t profess to be an expert, that’s the great thing about running your own business, you’re always learning. However, we have been running our school now for 9 years and my recent training in small business coaching is contributing tremendously to our progress.

Our market is super competitive to say the least.

I’ve often thought how difficult it must be for those people in companies who have the responsibility of choosing a language provider. In fact I was speaking to someone the other day - the personal assistant of the MD of a property company, (in two minds whether to chase that prospect given the current economic climate at the moment and the horror stories we’re hearing about anything remotely connected to construction), and she admitted how nervous she felt about the whole issue. Basically, if the language school she chooses messes up she gets the blame!

So how do clients choose a school when we all “hire native, qualified teachers, have an effective methodology, have a perfect level system with it’s corresponding testing, do regular student evaluations and feedbacks bla, bla, bla?

Ignoring those companies who choose a language provider based on the cheapest price (now there’s food for another post), the more serious ones should be asking about the following:

• the history and experience of the school - what infrastructure does the school have? what other clients does it have? can references be obtained? How has the school developed in recent years?
• the teacher profile - What selection criteria does the school use?
• teaching methodology - what EXACTLY is the method used? how is it effective? how are results obtained and measured?
• administration - does the school have the resources to deal with the client’s demands in this area?

But the most important (and telling) question the client should be asking is: How is your school different to others? And if you can answer this with confidence and integrity then the contract is as good as yours.

Because that’s exactly what clients are looking for - a provider with integrity who will deliver what they say they’re going to deliver, and on the occasions that they don’t, (and we’ve all had teachers who’ve “disappeared” on us), are professional and honest enough to deal with it and provide a solution to the problem.

Yes, we do all “say the same thing” to prospective clients so we have to work on them trusting us. Given that we provide a very similar service, at the end of the day it’s down to whether they like you and TRUST you.

The following link provides more detailed information for companies on how to select a language provider:

http://www.microsoft.com/spain/empresas/formacion/formacion_ingles.mspx