Foreword The education and training industry has relatively low technical and financial barriers to entry, but the market profits are huge, so it is recognized as one of the most 'money-prospecting' markets. Therefore, a large number of entrepreneurs have poured into this market in recent years, but do entrepreneurs really know how to open a teaching aid institution?

Being an education and training institution is like opening 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. Opening a school with hardware is easy and can be solved with money, but there are some problems that cannot be solved with money. The ups and downs along the way in the education and training industry are surging in my heart like a wave. Today I will give you a share.

To open a training institution, you first need to think big and start small. Consider your own industry management quality and financial strength, and secondly, the operation of the campus. Although the sparrow is small, it has all the internal organs. When you are a training institution, it is exactly the same as being a company. Thinking at a macro level, first you have to think about what kind of brand of education and training institution you plan to build. As shown in the figure below:

Secondly, at the macro level of running a school, we must think about the direction. If the direction is wrong, no matter how hard we work, it will be in vain. The education industry is now gradually becoming more mature and segmented.

Please do not use tactical diligence to cover up strategic laziness. If the macro strategy is wrong, no amount of money invested will be in vain, and not even a ripple can be seen.

When you have figured out the above macro-level issues, that is to say, you have solved the strategic-level issues, then you must now solve the tactical-level issues.

Now you need to understand these things: site selection, fire protection, decoration, and approval by the Industry, Commerce and Education Commission. These things are all objective processes, and they cost money. As for applying for the certificate, you can do it yourself locally or save time and find an agency. Today I will focus on sharing more than these. I will focus on sharing six key points that you need to think about during the preparation stage. Let me first share this picture I made:

I have shared my closed-loop operation theory with many friends in the education and training industry:

Enrollment is money, teaching is life, and service is It is the root, the continuation is the foundation, the reputation is the brand, and the introduction is the fission

Behind the simplicity is the ultimate concentration. This picture seems simple, but behind every link is huge systematic work. I repeatedly emphasize the keyword "system" in every training lecture, because the system is the ironclad foundation of campus operations.

Many times I see some principals and education investors who have good ideas and work hard, but they fail to achieve the desired results. The reason is to do things in an "open loop" rather than a "closed loop" way. Strictly relying on the system to achieve goals is a closed-loop approach, while not relying on the system is an open-loop approach. All successfully established training schools have achieved a closed-loop business model and are less dependent on luck; while most failed training schools have not achieved a closed-loop business model and are highly prone to chance.

The vast majority of education investors hope to make more money, but only a handful of them can truly realize that what they actually want to do is to build a closed business loop for training school operations and continuously iterate and upgrade, so they can There are very few educated investors who consistently make big money.

Now I will share 6 key points that you need to pay attention to when preparing to open an education and training institution. Understanding these 6 key points is equivalent to avoiding 6 big pitfalls.

The six key points are:

1. Franchise or create your own brand (borrowing power)

2. Site selection (geographical convenience)

3. Enrollment promotion (marketing)

4. Recruitment (human resources)

5. Course product positioning (teaching research and development)

6. Financial issues (advance collection management)

Here are the six key points analyzed one by one as follows:

Franchise brand or self-created brand: Franchise is essentially a business with a very high threshold

This can be operated in stages as appropriate. The contract period of the franchise is generally 3-5 years.

If you want to join, I hope you will think twice before doing so. If you need a course system, there are many of them now. The main reason for joining is to leverage other people's brand and management experience support.

Franchising is a business, which is essentially no different from other businesses. Franchisees need to use their own resource advantages to solve problems, rather than just sitting back and enjoying the benefits after obtaining brand authorization. Don’t think that joining a brand means you can become a hands-off shopkeeper.

Doing business is a way to monetize resources. Franchisees are just a local channel for the brand. Without resources and experience, you will have to pay IQ tax, and the failure rate is very high.

It is recommended that you search on the franchise website, which is filled with a large number of education franchise brands. Common keywords are as follows: zero experience, nanny-style support, easy to be a boss, one year return, and education and entrepreneurship to get rich. ..... What I want to say is that none of this can be believed. If this educational project is so simple and easy to copy, and so profitable, why would they give you the opportunity to make money? The franchise success rate is 80% in educating investors themselves, and they need to be hardworking.

90% of all franchise advantages are deceptive. A franchisee must first look at your own resource advantages, not the so-called advantages of the franchise brand, because almost anyone can get it as long as they pay for the franchise brand. So this thing cannot be considered an advantage.

Franchising is essentially a business with a very high threshold. A person with no resources, no funds, and no industry expertise will use his hard-earned money to join the franchise, and end up losing everything. It is very stupid. .

The industry of joining is a mixed bag of good and bad. In the past, you needed to hold a magnifying glass to make judgments, but now you need to hold a microscope, and you can make mistakes accidentally.

Think about it: Xueda, New Oriental, and Xueersi are so powerful, why haven’t they expanded 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, and what’s more interesting is that it is an industry that values ??both process experience and the output of educational results. The products of the even more bizarre 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 operations as the core and brand reputation building as the key.

The education and training industry is a long-tail market, and the market share of the top five leading companies currently only accounts for about 5%. This shows that the market structure of the education industry is "big market, small workshop".

So once you choose to join a franchise, you have to weigh your own resource advantages. I have seen many brand franchise schools that when they reach a certain scale in the local area, they basically become independent by local warlords, break away from the headquarters, and change their banners. Educational investors with a bit of business acumen end up building their own brands, and in turn, they start recruiting investment and franchising. This phenomenon has become commonplace in the education industry. As far as I know, several chain education brands in the domestic education industry currently have this kind of relationship.

The education and training franchise industry has developed in China for the past 20 years, and current standardized operations are not yet particularly mature. New Oriental, which is as powerful as the education giant, also tried to join in the early years, but later only tried it briefly.

In the "slow" industry of education, the advantage of the franchise model is to achieve rapid scale at extremely low cost. With considerable investment, the expansion efficiency of the franchise model can often be several times higher than that of direct operation. However, the high difficulty of management and quality control also brings a lot of problems.

Since the development of the education industry, "direct operation to generate income and franchise to enclose territory" has become a development model that has been verified by many education brands.

For franchisees, in the absence of industry resources and operational experience, franchising is a feasible solution to lower the threshold and increase the success rate. The headquarters' guidance on site selection, sales, course content, operations management and teacher training has a huge impact on whether a new franchise store can start smoothly.

In terms of specific cooperation methods, there are subtle differences between different brands. Currently, the mainstream education franchise contracts on the market can be roughly divided into buyer-seller relationships and superior-subordinate relationships.

Business-seller relationship: Franchisees purchase the right to use the brand and the corresponding "management, teaching, and marketing standardized solutions" in the form of franchise fees. The brand does not impose too many restrictions on the operation and management of the franchise stores, and does not participate in the sharing;

Superior-subordinate relationship: In addition to providing brand usage rights and solutions, the brand will also hold shares or hold shares in the franchise stores. Dividends are distributed on revenue, and this model also places higher demands on the “management services” provided by the brand.

The franchise model still has many limitations today. Joining a mature brand can indeed play a certain positive role in recruiting students and publicity in the early stages of starting a business. However, due to the low threshold of the education industry, the support provided by brand owners to franchisees is actually very limited, and in many cases it even becomes simply "selling brands."

The franchise model that can expand quickly is more suitable for products rather than services. For example, in industries such as catering and retail, product quality is controlled by the brand, and there is a strong and unified supply chain. Franchisees are essentially just channel vendors. However, the education and training industry places more emphasis on service, and the core of service is teachers. Too low a degree of standardization will inevitably lead to uneven quality.

A large amount of fixed costs will be incurred in the initial stage of school establishment, and poor enrollment will greatly affect the cash flow of franchise stores. It is almost a common phenomenon for education franchises to provide too little operating assistance to franchise stores. Many franchisees who have failed to invest believe that insufficient support from the brand side has left the franchise stores in a state of self-destruction.

Negative incidents occur frequently in education franchises: rapid expansion is a double-edged sword. Once you join the franchise, you will be as deep as the sea, and from then on, the headquarters will be a passer-by.

A word of advice: If you understand operations management and just find a good product system, there is really no need to waste money on franchise fees. If you don’t understand operations and management, the franchise fee you spend as a layman is like paying tuition.

At the same time, this is also related to the region. Parents in first- and second-tier cities value brands and teachers. Third- and fourth-tier parents are indifferent to brands and value teachers, teaching and cost-effectiveness more. This is the reason why many local companies are doing well in local areas. Many big brands are not welcomed in local areas, and it is difficult for strong companies to suppress local companies.

Nowadays, many franchise headquarters only grant you a brand license, which has no practical significance. If you are in a third- or fourth-tier area, it will not actually help your development. Sometimes it can be said to be flashy.

No matter what kind of education and training institution you join, you must go to the headquarters for an on-site inspection to see the qualifications. You must choose a training brand with no less than 10-20 directly operated schools. For the real financial data of the camp school, you must visit three or four campuses that have joined the school, and be cautious.

Nowadays, many education franchise projects do not have physical direct-operated schools. They sell brand licenses to make money without any actual operational support in the later stage. This requires extreme caution.

Joining is risky, so investment must be done with caution.

In order to expand faster and enhance market influence, most education and training brands on the market now accept franchises. For education investors, you only need to pay the franchise fee to have the right to use the brand, including curriculum systems, teaching materials, teacher training, and promotional materials. Of course, this set is expensive. Depending on the value of the brand, it ranges from one hundred thousand to one million levels, and the content it contains varies widely. In order to attract franchisees, some institutions offer a very low franchise fee threshold, but later management support, teacher training, promotional materials, etc. all require additional money. Therefore, when signing a franchise contract, be sure to ask clearly what is included in the fees paid, and estimate how much investment will be needed later.

Many brands have just started franchising and do not have enough franchising output experience. The support given to them is very limited. They often forget about it after paying the franchise fee. All the good promises and publicity before have basically come to nothing. , some support plans are false but fail to materialize, and ultimately they have to rely on the investors themselves. Therefore, we often encounter conflicts between franchisees and brands. In reality, this situation often happens.

Private brands are relatively cheaper, but not trouble-free.

If you decide to create a brand by yourself, you will also have to weigh your own resources, create a CIS system, what teaching materials to use, how to build a teaching and research system, how to design courses, how to package products, and the design of trademarks and advertisements, etc. are all very troublesome. Each item requires a lot of time and labor costs, and it is common for these costs to add up to exceed the franchise fee. It’s hard to estimate the cost of self-employment, and it’s up to people to be thrifty.

Site selection: For offline institutions, the main sources of students come from the surrounding 3-5 kilometers

According to different projects, the address requirements are also different. For example, early childhood English courses are generally concentrated in shopping malls and large communities. After-school tutoring classes are concentrated near primary and secondary schools and kindergartens. Site selection is very important, and it is necessary to conduct sufficient market research and investigate surrounding communities, schools, businesses, and transportation.

Currently, national policy clearly stipulates that schools are not allowed to be run on floors above three floors, the school area must not be less than 300 square meters (some places require 500 square meters), and fire protection must be qualified. Only in this way will you be eligible to apply for a school license later. The location selection also determines the operating costs. If you choose a popular shopping mall, the entry fee and rent will definitely not be too low. It will be easier to promote later, because the shopping mall itself has its own flow of people, and more people will come to inquire. , the brand spread will be faster.

If you choose to live in a small community or a commercial area with average popularity, the rent will be relatively cheap, but the subsequent marketing will be very difficult, and you may need to spend extra money on marketing.

In addition, don’t think about the trillions of dollars in education and training market share reported in investment promotion conferences or in the news. Even if there is a full banquet, you will only have one stomach. For those of you who are an offline institution, the main sources of students come from the surrounding area 3-5 kilometers away. Of course, better educational institutions such as Inclusive Children's Ability Training Center will have a wider range of students! .

Recruitment: Recruitment in educational institutions must be regular throughout the year, focusing on the construction of talent echelons

Recruitment is a matter that is N times more difficult than recruiting students. Don’t think that recruitment is simple. Post a recruitment profile, and a large number of people will come for interviews. If you don’t have some connections in the industry, your chances of recruiting excellent and suitable employees are very slim. Bosses with industry experience can also attract some people through introductions from colleagues and friends, while 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 within a month, but in the end no one stayed. Needless to say, you can guess how desperate he felt at that time.

The education industry is a labor-intensive industry. This characteristic determines its dependence on people. Whether a school can develop rapidly depends on whether it can form a capable team during the preparation period. Therefore, during the preparatory period for opening, recruitment, team building, and team training are top priorities.

Four common effective recruitment channels:

1. Introduction by acquaintances

2. Online recruitment (Zhilian, 58, Boss direct recruitment or local talent network)

3. Campus recruitment

4. Headhunting or intermediary

Recruitment by educational institutions must be regular throughout the year, and people must be interviewed every month. Indicators must be given to those responsible for recruitment invitations. When will there be no need to recruit? Unless you want to wash your hands and stop running the business, then you can stop recruiting. In particular, it is necessary for the course consultants and marketing teams to be overstaffed by 10-30 people, because these two positions have high turnover and slow training speed. A dynamic balance must be formed in these two positions, strict assessment standards must be adopted, and the fittest must survive. Education and training schools are never afraid of having too many people, they are just afraid of too many people who are just dawdling around without performance.

Recruitment is a very important and professional matter. The current grassroots working group is the post-90s generation, and in four to five years it will be mainly the post-00s generation. The management style is very different from the post-70s and 80s generation. You interview The process, interview conversation skills, salary system, employee training, employee management... You need to consider it carefully and standardize the process as much as possible.

Market: The enrollment market is a road-building activity, and expenses must be spent wisely, and ROI must be considered at all times

When the preliminary preparations are almost complete, you can start enrollment promotion. It is increasingly difficult to rely on traditional recruitment methods such as handing out leaflets and making direct cold calls to recruit students. In many cities, it has been banned from distributing flyers at school gates, and urban management control. Security guards will be at the school gates every time after school.

The government has also begun to regulate telemarketing. A colleague of mine told me that a large organization has canceled telemarketing as a sales channel and turned to online marketing and subway advertising. But how can a small organization have so much money for Baidu promotion and online advertising? The most common WeChat official account advertisement costs four to five thousand, and it is impossible to predict whether it will be effective.

As the market competition becomes more and more fierce, the requirements for the admissions team are also getting higher and higher. Admissions directors need to develop marketing and sales activity plans according to the location and time. This places higher demands on people.

A training school is essentially a company. A company should have its own marketing department. Otherwise, it will be disconnected from the outside world. Your teaching products and services cannot be quickly delivered to the target customer groups, and there will be a lack of students. The consequences are very serious, and the operation of the campus will be unsustainable and it is on the verge of bankruptcy or runaway.

Now let me talk about my thoughts on the marketing promotion of the campus. I have worked in the campus for 6 years, including 4 years in sales and 2 years in marketing. I have started with the company before. There are more than 20 new campuses. I am very familiar with the market expansion of new campuses. My views are as follows:

Online:

1. Start-up campuses within one year, Please focus your energy offline;

2. If you have the investment, do your best to create a local Moments or Douyin video advertisement, register a WeChat public account for daily maintenance and forwarding and dissemination in various parent communities OK, it can be regarded as an overall brand communication package;

3. In a certain area, if there are one or two campuses, just do a good job in SEO, there is no need to invest in bidding and burn money;

4. If you need to do output, think carefully about local Baidu Tieba, Moments, and WeChat community marketing. It is free, practical, simple, effective, low-cost, and high-output!

Offline:

Many investors and principal friends ask how start-up schools recruit students. Usually I will tell them to "do a good job in promoting students within a radius of 3 to 5 kilometers." When there is no goods on hand, there is zero channel cooperation; if the product has not been verified, there is zero brand promotion.

Start-up campuses should avoid elevator advertising and outdoor advertising. They will burn money and not see any output in a short period of time. That is something that can only be done if there is a certain customer base. Many big brand organizations do various outdoor advertisements, with the ultimate goal of brand exposure. Start-up organizations should calculate the output for every penny invested, create cash flow, and first "millet plus rifle" cannibalize the market.

The current mainstream recruitment methods for educational institutions: local recommendation, community, and cross-industry cooperation channels

Educational institutions that have just started will basically choose local recommendation, because this is to accumulate seed customer costs Low, the fastest way to get results. After the campus reaches a certain scale, local promotion is also essential. It is the best way to increase the brand's presence.

Marketing expenses must be spent wisely, increase revenue and reduce expenditure, and think about ROI at all times.

Market positioning of course products: Course products without clear positioning = street stalls

Be sure to do regional customer demand analysis and research, and do not blindly set up courses. After selecting a course, do a regional competitive product analysis and be sure to have a good positioning for your institution and courses. The education market is so big that you can’t do everything and treat all customers as your favorite. This is really unrealistic. The Chinese market is so big that if you only need a spoonful of water, you can drink it.

Now I am using the shampoo category as an example, please think carefully:

Each brand of shampoo has its own clear market positioning, and the same goes for the course products of our training institution. Same.

The target customer groups of some education projects are not as broad as advertised at all.

For example, early childhood education is generally advertised as being for ages 0-6, but most of the real students are from 1.5 to 2.5 years old. After the age of 3, children basically have no time to continue early childhood education when they go to kindergarten. They all go to learn English, draw, dance and Lego. . Children's English is generally advertised as being between 3 and 12 years old. In fact, most students are concentrated in the 3 to 9 age group. When they enter the third or fourth grade of elementary school, they switch to exam-oriented tutoring. Even if they learn English, they will learn in sync with the teaching materials. The courses, rather than children's English, focus on interest and oral English. There are also some quality education courses, with students aged between 3 and 9 years old. Children over 10 years old will generally insist on continuing to study art, piano, dance... unless they have particularly strong personal interests or plan to pursue an art major in the future... .. 90 people will basically give up quality education after the age of 10 and choose cultural courses.

Our national conditions determine that the way out for children from ordinary families to learn quality education is not as good as the way out for college entrance examinations if they learn cultural courses well. The college entrance examination is a gateway for children from most families, and many children are ready to work hard to skip it.

Financial issues (advance collection management): Advances from accounts are liabilities, equivalent to interest-free borrowing from parents

Finance is a part that many investors ignore. You will not believe it. Many institutions now don’t even know their accounts clearly. Most people are optimistic about this industry because of its good cash flow. They only see that the total course price when parents sign up is thousands or tens of thousands. During the peak season, the school district can collect hundreds of thousands per month, but these are only prepayments. . In finance, accounts received in advance are liabilities. Until the student completes the course, it cannot be considered real income. In the training industry, the real income comes from class consumption, not how much money you charge parents. You need to serve for half a year or even a year for the money paid by parents. If you finally sign up and don’t come to class on time, there is nothing you can do. If parents want a refund later, you have to return the money to them. Cash flow from education and training is very good, but if you don’t know how to utilize cash flow, the advance received in your hand will continue to depreciate.

Today I shared a bloody real-life example that happened to me. The training institution I worked with my friend ended up running away. I had expected this situation, but I didn’t expect the consequences to be like this. serious.

At that time, we caught up with the trend. College students who had just entered the society and had no experience in running a local school made 1 million in the first year. For a campus of 150 square meters, a summer class earned 300,000. At that time, it was the first time in my life that I saw so much money, and my heart felt a little swollen. At that time, my friends and I had no concept of operations management, team building, class elimination, etc. in our minds. At that time, I only had a vague feeling that what we were doing was not right, and I couldn’t tell you anything specific. I didn’t have a clear idea at that time.

As the school continued to advance, I insisted on building a full-time marketing team in the second year. At that time, we were invincible in third- and fourth-tier cities. I felt that marketing and sales could solve many problems. Then our hidden problems came. Because they were all part-time teachers, we had poor management, which caused some parents to refund fees. Only then did I realize that if the money that went into the school district's account was not completed in time and the teaching services could not keep up, the money could be returned to the parents. The early advance fees are only temporarily retained in the school district's account, and are not revenue that truly belongs to the school district. After realizing this, my friend and I discussed this matter for more than a week. He refused to use full-time teachers and made a special effort to hire part-time famous teachers. So I quit voluntarily after three months.

When I left, I said to him: There is no need for wisdom! Maybe we were relatively young and energetic at that time, and our cooperation in starting a business was also very reckless. At that time, our campus did not even have business registration.

At the beginning of 2018, a friend called me and said that he had calculated his accounts and found that he had a lot of money in the year, but there was no money in his pocket. Only then did he realize the problem of class cancellation and asked me to borrow money to pay the teacher's salary. I declined because I realized it was a bottomless pit. The final outcome was that my friend ran away, and this incident was also featured on our local news and TV stations.

The finance of a training institution is really a college subject, and it is very important to confirm revenue during class elimination.

Summary: The market is always about insiders making money for outsiders, and only under information asymmetry can there be room for profit to operate

Everything that flourishes must decline, and education and training institutions also have a life cycle. . The business direction of the campus must be adjusted in each period.

The education and training industry is easy to start but difficult to end. Many institutions have unsatisfactory enrollment and it is difficult to make breakthroughs if they continue to persist. They cannot close their doors even if they want to. Because all the advance payment has been spent and the classes have not yet been completed, even if the school closes its doors, it cannot afford the refund and has no choice but to run away. In the past few years, we have seen more and more news on the news about owners of training institutions running away. For example, the recent incident of Web English closing down and running away has left a large number of students with no way to get their fees refunded. Everyone who comes for education and training has some educational sentiments. If they were not desperate, no one would choose this strategy. Under high-pressure policies, rising operating costs, poor management, and poor enrollment can easily lead to this situation.

When you are running a school, you will definitely encounter more than just the above problems, such as the departure of partners, the loss of core employees, complaints from parents, fire protection issues, school qualifications, and malicious attempts by competitors. Slander or reporting, etc., all of which require a strong heart to face.

So since it’s so troublesome, isn’t it worth trying?

No! In the education and training industry, the sense of accomplishment is particularly high. You must pay attention to your own reputation and the externalization of teaching results. When children make progress and parents are satisfied and supportive, they feel very satisfied and feel that they are doing good deeds. The investment return cycle of education and training is generally 1-2 years. After passing the initial rough stage and getting on the right track, there is no problem with the income being around 20%.

Investment is risky, so be cautious when opening a training institution. Market competition is becoming more and more fierce, and the requirements for refined operations and management are getting higher and higher. Entrepreneurs who have experience in the industry, especially senior executives in large organizations and rich management experience in other industries, have a relatively higher success rate. Most of the laymen who don’t know anything and have some spare money rush in on a whim. They are all suffering.

Many industries look pleasing to the eye from the outside, but are devastated from the inside. If you want to do well in a certain industry, the two most important words are "precipitation" and "cognition." The law of the market is always that insiders make money from outsiders. Only under information asymmetry can there be more profit space to operate.

This article ends here. The above are some of my thoughts on preparing to open an education and training institution. It is more of my personal experience and understanding. I hope it can help friends who want to enter the education and training industry. If there is anything inappropriate, please forgive me.