We’re taking up where we left off on Thursday of last week. If you missed that issue you can find it here –
http://www.cleverapple.com/blog/preventing-your-business-from-failing/
One other note – we’ve had some crazy weather around here. This past weekend we had an ice storm, we had about a ¼ glaze over everything. The good thing was the power didn’t go out. The bad thing was you could barely walk a step without falling down. Tomorrow we’re supposed to have severe storms and possible tornados. So if you don’t hear from us for a bit, it may be that we don’t have power… after the storms the temps are supposed to drop to the 20’s so we’ll be trying to stay warm.
Another way your business can fail –
Are your margins to low?
What does this mean? If you don’t make enough money to pay the bills, then your business is doomed to fail.
The more products you have the more money you make. The more price points you have, the more money you make.
Tutor example for pitching various products – tutor businesses need to have a variety of products or sources of income. We’ll continue to use an example of a high-school math tutor.
Bread and Butter Programs – tutoring students in math on a weekly basis.
3 days a week – homework hotline after hours and on the weekends.
2 days a week
1 day a week
Additional Programs
As needed homework help – this could be done online or phoned in.
Math test prep / review – additional help for students before big tests / semester exams.
ACT / SAT math prep
Math Camp – summers and holiday – camps held during the summer and winter holidays. You could also have a before school refresher course.
Problems: Customers only buy one thing. It’s important to have recurring income from something. Resell programs. Retention (keeping students you already have), cross sell (selling additional services to current students).
As you can see from the list above we have 3 recurring income programs. This is pretty great for tutors because almost all of the things we sell are recurring. What you also need to do is work on making some additional programs. You can sell these to your current students, but they also make a great way to get new students. This is one of the reasons I like giving summer programs away for free.
We’ll continue the series on Thursday.