Business by Janice

It surprises me how many people are fearful of competition.

If competition didn’t exist where would we be? - Every company would function in the same old way (a bit like funcionarios actually - although I have to admit I’ve seen quite a few changes here in Spain over the last 20 years!)) and we would become bored by a lack of challenge and lack of satisfaction of achievement.

Competition motivates us to do the best we can - to look for the best teachers, to go that extra mile with the customer, to look for ways to motivate and retain our best staff. And if we’re doing the best we can with a viable business model there’s a good chance that our business will be successful.

But let’s go one step further - collaboration with your competitors is EVEN BETTER!

As soon as you form a relationship with a competitor any sense of insecurity, fear or scarcity between you disappears and you can take advantage of exhange of best practices, mutual contacts etc which can help to grow your business. It’s all about the sum being greater than the individual parts.

I’ve had experience of this recently in our sector and it’s proved to be very positive.

We share teachers with some of our “competitors”. If a contact rings up looking for a teacher for a specific time and we’ve got one free, if the teacher is interested in the class, great. We’ve done a favour for the teacher and helped out another school. With the current teacher shortage in Madrid, there’s no point in trying to keep hourly contracted teachers to yourself as they’ll find classes themselves within a couple of days anyway.

Every company has strengths and weaknesses. if you can partner up with a school that has opposites strengths to yours you’re in a win-win situation. We recently spent some time with another school who were very strong on marketing and sales but weak pedagogically, our situation was exactly the reverse. We’ve exchanged information on telemarketing companies, scripts, databases, sales techniques, level tests, training, teacher interview questions and lots more. Both our companies have benefitted. If that happened between more schools I’m sure the sector would become more professional.

Just imagine how the whole sector could be improved if schools got together to pool their knowledge and we adopted best practices in the areas of:

• teacher sourcing
• teacher interviewing and selection
• pedagogic systems
• teacher training
• remuneration packages which were mutally beneficial to teacher and language school
• administration systems
• contractual policy with clients

and I’m sure there’s many other areas you can think of.

Whilst we’re all working in isolation we stick to our own way of doing things because basically we’re all creatures of habit with our particular perceptions of the world.

If we’re confident that we’re doing a good job running our schools why should we be afraid of competition? It’s much more interesting to get to know other academy owners, share experiences and ideas and know that other people with the same or a similar job are having to deal with the same issues as you.

If you run a school here in Madrid and share my point of view, let me know, as a group of owner/directors have been meeting up recently to get to know each other and share ideas etc as described above. We’d love to see some new faces.

The demand for English Language training in Madrid is huge, there’s enough business to go round for everyone if you’re providing a quality service. Competition is necessary and acts as an impetus for us to get better and better. As stated in many business books - if your business is not growing it’s dying.

However when competition is viewed as a collaborative, learning opportunity then it’s win win for everyone.

In the first few posts I’ve talked a lot about teachers mainly because they are at the sharp end of our business and without good teachers we can’t provide a quality service.

But due to the nature of our sector teachers will come and go making it difficult to depend on them for sustainable business growth.

We do need to be able to depend on our people back at base however, our managers, especially those in charge of class coordination, client relations and teacher training and support. These people are the backbone of a successful language school and it’s therefore essential to make sure they are the right people- people who share the vision and values of the company and are eager to transmit these values down to the teachers and through to the clients.

I’ve always believed that the most important resource a company has is its people. I recently read the book “From Good to Great” by Jim Collins and identified totally with a sentence from there which was “Get the right people on the bus” . Then when these types of people are on the bus, you can more easily plan your jouney. The point being made here is that if you recruit people with the right attitude, people who are adaptable and keen to learn and move forward, then whatever journey you take your company on, those “right” people will adjust to the twists and turns and ultimately contribute to its successful completion.

Being in a service industry, people and relationships are paramount, so it’s even more important for us to “get the right people on the bus”. You may have the bad luck to lose two teachers in two months with the same client and due to the teacher shortage in Madrid the class may be uncovered for a couple of weeks, but if the person coordinating the classes has done an excellent job looking after the client up to now and has built up a great relationship, there will be enough trust there to see the problem through.

Time and time again our company has been in a situation where we’ve wanted to recruit someone at senior level as we’ve identified potential, but we’ve felt we didn’t have enough budget, and time and time again we’ve bitten the bullet, recruited them and our investment’s been paid back several fold.

Every group in society is made up of people and is nothing without them, so it seems obvious that this is where most of our attention should be put.

To finish I’ll leave you with a question for relection - are you investing enough money in your people?

If you’re interested in finding out more about the book “From Good to Great check out the following links

http://management.about.com/cs/beforeyoubuy/fr/GoodToGreat.htm

http://www.bizsum.com/articles/art_good-to-great.php

On occasions in the past I’ve had “autonomo” teachers scoff at what we pay, saying that they “don’t get out of bed” for less than 30€/hour etc. This doesn’t happen very often however, as most autonomos understand that a school has its overheads to cover and that we provide an administration service to the client which they, operating via a school are relieved of.

I’ve never worked as an autonomo teacher myself so can’t really speak about how difficult it is to find and maintain classes. However, it seems quite logical that a good autonomo can charge a higher rate to the client than a school can. Why is this so?

As a school we provide a service, that service is to provide classes to a standard that allows the students to progress in the target language. To provide the service effectively we need systems in administration, communication and coordination and we need a teaching methodology. And finally, the most crucial part - we need teachers who know how to teach.

Now, however rigorous your recruitment process is - the teacher has TEFL, has experience, has good social skills, you’ve checked references etc, at the end of the day, that teacher is a human being and as such, is different to all the other teachers. No two teachers given the same class plan will teach in the same way. The quality of the classes imparted by different teachers will inevitably vary.

So the client is paying the same price for different quality classes. It therefore stands to reason that they are going to pay a rate in line with what they think the AVERAGE quality class provided by the school is worth.

With an autonomo teacher, the client is assured of the SAME quality, and such a teacher who consistently delivers top rate classes can charge a top rate for their class. Here there is hardly any variation in quality, so the client is prepared to pay more per hour than it would to a school.

Perhaps this is a simplified vision, but I know it happens and it makes alot of sense to me. In fact one of our own teachers has told me that he has been approached by one of his students (a client of ours) and offered more per hour than what they are paying us.

So now when an autonomo tells me they can earn 40€ an hour independently I say I understand perfectIy, congratulate them on obviously doing such a great job and tell them to “go for it”.

I’m sure you autonomo teachers out there will have something to say about this point of view, do you agree? Let me know. And what are the advantages and disadvantages of being autonono? This would be very useful for those teachers currently working with a contract and who are thinking of going freelance.

Right from when we took over Windsor Idiomas 9 years ago we’ve always strived to invest in our teachers and do our utmost to attract the highest quality teachers possible. When you’re just starting out as a language school and don’t have any sort of reputation, the quest for teachers is an uphill struggle. It’s also difficult to attract teachers when your volume of classes is low and you don’t have many block classes to offer.

So you constantly have to go the extra mile and LOOK AFTER your teachers, and in fact, that’s how it should be however old your school is. Looking after your teachers means you are assured of a constant supply in the long run. Let’s get this clear - you might win a large contract but if you can’t find teachers to cover the classes what’s the point of winning the contract?

We have a product - classes. But what do we need to produce that product? - teachers and a reasonable infrastructure back at base. Now if we were producing the oh so famous widget, we would buy the raw material needed, programme the machine to work and we would produce the number of widgets ordered by the client. Easypeasy. But we’re not dealing with things, we’re dealing with people and people are somewhat unpredictable and more difficult to manage. It takes a lot of hard work to build up a reputation as a school to attract our “raw material” which seems to be in such short supply here in Madrid.

What are the sort of things schools should be doing to ensure they build a good reputation with teachers?

The basics are:

• Pay as well as you can and be clear about what you pay and the conditions of the teacher’s contract
• Pay ON TIME
• Be honest and sincere about what classes you can offer - don’t make false promises
• Offer some sort of pedagogic support - SOMETHING fo god’s sake, even if your set up is really small and it’s only your own wisdom and experience
• COMMUNICATE with your teachers, we’re all people and we all want to be listened to
• Make sure you have an efficent way to communicate cancellations to your teachers, there’s nothing worse than turning up to a class only to find that the company had cancelled it with the school several hours ago or even the day before!
• Praise and acknowledge those teachers who do a good job
• Be firm and deal with those teachers who step out of line, eg. not turning up to class, not handing in evaluations etc. If you don’t, you’ll soon lose the respect of the other teachers and you’ll end up on a downward spiral
• Try and match the profile of the teacher as closely as possible to the profile of the class. This isjust common sense, but is often ignored by some schools under pressure to cover classes at any cost.

I really can’t understand those schools who don’t take their teachers seriously, who don’t help them or provide them with the necessary tools to do their job and who don’t consider the profile of the teacher when assigning classes.

Again and again we come back to quality and integrity and in any service industry it is usually these characteristics that set the leaders apart from the rest.