The Monday Read

Busier than ever Edition

Coming up to being unemployed, my wife’s school is (for the third year in a row) getting a lot fewer trial bookings/enquiries than usual, and yet I find myself busier than ever. Methinks this might be an internal problem.

You will mainly notice it in the lack of blog posts and short Monday Reads.

Have some big exciting projects lined up for this year though, so hopefully we’ll have some more content for you soon!

The Forum

The Forum is doing well (19,485 posts to date). Here are the latest active threads:

This week’s books

I continued with my Reacher streak: Die Trying is good, Tripwire I like a lot, and Running Blind I hated a lot less this time (I think the central thing is nonsense, but I feel less certain of that now). Just started Echo Burning.

I think my disappearing into pulp fiction is mainly stress-related. When you see a more balanced list of books here things will have gotten better 😉

  1. Wonderful short interview with Mohnish Pabrai (YouTube)
  2. Mark vs. battery salesman: Discharging of a Salesman
  3. Not great: Japan GDP Ends 2021 Near Pre-Covid Level
  4. This is fine: World spends $1.8tn a year on subsidies that harm environment
  5. Seems fair: 65 things you should never do in life and business
  6. Of course Amazon sells ads too: Amazon’s $31B ad business, explained

What do you think? Anything interesting in there?

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6 Responses

  1. I wonder if fewer enquiries at your wife’s school is related to your decision to raise prices by 15%? I know there are different opinions on this, and it depends on each owner’s situation (whether they hire teachers, for instance), but personally I think this is a bad idea. We haven’t raised our prices since we started 19 years ago, and probably never will (meaning: hopefully I’ll retire before we need to raise prices!). Continuation rates are always high and we usually have more new enquiries than we can handle, without having to advertise. Pros and cons I suppose.

    1. Well, we’re raising prices from May (and grandfathering in everyone who joins before then) so I wouldn’t have thought that would make much difference (in fact, it should help).

      I think it is just the pandemic. 2020 we had to close in the middle of trial season, 2021 there was a big wave in trial season, this year omicron wave in trial season…

      We had decent numbers throughtout the year, Covid just keeps killing our spring recruitment. It is understandable that people aren’t going out doing trial lessons during the pandemic (local public schools keep closing for a day or two due to outbreaks).

      1. Yeah, it sounds like bad timing. And you’re right – securing the current price before May should be a good incentive for them to continue or join.
        We don’t do trial lessons until April, partly because the slots aren’t available until then (we wait until the 6th grade elementary students move up to the evening slots). We probably lose some new enquiries to the schools who do them earlier, but that’s OK.
        Actually all children’s classes have been online for the last four weeks due to the Omicron wave (schools and/or classes closed on and off every week here). Don’t fancy doing online trial lessons though! Let’s hope the situation improves soon.

        1. We are also just coming up for 19 years and have never raised prices. We haven’t advertised since maybe our second or third year but enquiries have been fairly steady throughout. The notable exceptions have been the year of the big quake, and (so far) this year. But we don’t want to do any trial lessons right now and so are quite glad, really!

      2. We’re having our worst recruitment period on record thus far. I’m sure it’s 100% due to Omicron. We got our first email in a couple of weeks for a sample lesson yesterday and the mother stated in her email comment “I’m worried about Omicron at the moment but my child really wants to study English. I’ve been holding off doing a sample lesson, but Omicron doesn’t seem to be settling down, so I thought we’d give it a go”. I thought this really summed up the way potential students would be feeling in general. When and if Omicron settles, I’m quietly confident they’ll still come in.

        1. That is more or less what happened last year. Dismal formal recruitment season (Feb to Apr for us) then slowly through the rest of the year we completely filled our 3rd and 5th grade classes.

          Hoping for something similar this year.

          In the meantime, polishing up our website and social media so that people are at least aware of us.

          Fingers crossed for us all.