If you aren’t growing, then you’re stagnant. Or worse, you might be headed towards closure!
Attracting new students should be a big part of your team’s focus. Otherwise, you’ll always be just a few quits away from having shut down.
Sure, we want to keep the students we have. But no student stays forever. Some stay for a while. Others quit after just a few months.
But as long as you have new faces coming in the door, then you will always have the opportunity to transform more and more lives.
We hope you enjoy this episode and that it helps YOU grow your team, and grow you business.
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0:00:05.5 Tyler: Welcome to the next episode of the TeacherZone Podcast, with Chris and Tyler. How are you, Chris?
0:00:13.0 Chris: As always, any time I’m with you, Tyler, I’m awesome.
0:00:16.9 Tyler: Well, you know what, I’m feeling attracted to you today, so I think we should get into the topic. So those of you… We just released a framework, right, Chris, recently? A really powerful framework called “the transformation formula”, and it has four pillars: Attract, convert, deliver and transform. And these are pillars that rotate through your business through its whole life. But today what are we gonna discuss, Chris?
0:00:49.8 Chris: Yeah, so the transformation formula, if you haven’t watched the webinar yet, we have it on our website, you can get it, and then in the formula there’s also a framework, there’s a worksheet. So you guys can use this to basically give your team tasks and stuff. So today we thought we would start breaking apart, the next four podcasts we’ll break the framework, ’cause it’s basically a quadrant.
0:01:12.0 Tyler: Right.
0:01:12.5 Chris: And the four parts of the quadrant in the webinar that we discussed, Tyler, are, the first one which we’ll talk about today, is attract. And I’m attracted to you too, man.
[laughter]
0:01:22.9 Tyler: And the attract principal, it’s funny, the word “attract”, I’ve had personal coaches in the past, one in particular, that talked on a personal level what attraction principles were. And there was a few attraction principles, and it was so enlightening to me. Like “desperation”, not attraction principle. “Calm, certainty… “
0:01:46.9 Chris: Attractive.
0:01:49.0 Tyler: “Security”, a lot of fear that we have, because owning a business can be scary and sometimes it’s stressful, and like let’s say you just lost a bunch of students and right now you’re like, “Oh my gosh, bills are gonna get scary for a second”. The big thing with attract is that if you come from abundance and you’re always sort of working on attracting others… This isn’t something that you should be doing just every now and then. The framework that we built… And just give you the four items: Attract, convert, deliver, transform. Attract, convert, deliver, transform. That is our business. If you own a teaching business, that is what we do. We attract people into the business, we convert them into being students, we deliver or prove to them what we told them we would, and then we transform their lives.
0:02:39.9 Chris: Right.
0:02:41.2 Tyler: Yeah.
0:02:41.8 Chris: So that’s the preface of the next four episodes, but go find that webinar and you’ll have fun with that as well. But the “attract” we’re gonna talk about today, I know I’ve mentioned the personal one, this one is, “Why are they drawn to our business like moths? Can we make them draw to the… Are we a light in the darkness?” And we’re gonna discuss, but the main principle we wanna touch on is the fact that the transformational formula of “attract”, that part of the pillar, we want to apply it practically…
0:03:15.9 Tyler: To our teams.
0:03:16.1 Chris: In a practical manner to your teams, today. So the attract principle of getting the people to come, and go “I want that”, but applied to team framework, right Chris?
0:03:28.0 Tyler: Yeah, and if you haven’t listened to our transformation… Not the webinar, but also our leadership one, that one’s important too, because we talk about transformational versus transactional leadership. And the big part about getting you to actually get some sleep and not have stress as an owner and actually be able to do what you love and keep growing the business and transforming your students, is to get your teams, it’s the key thing. You’ll notice we’re gonna… Short and sweet with these, this one’s gonna, for the next 15 minutes we’ll just kinda go over it, and the bottom line is we’re gonna use our own teams, so just know that this is not the “end all be all” on attract. We could get more and more granular, because the bigger you are, for some of you you have a huge teaching businesses, if you’ve got a giant business your team might be giant, and that’s cool, we’re not about not growing your team, like we talked about in the leadership one, if you grow… What did we say? If you build your team, your team will build the business?
0:04:30.0 Chris: If you build your people…
0:04:32.0 Tyler: The people will build your business. And so we’re also gonna let you guys know too, and then we’ll get into it, we’ve extracted this data for not just our company. We’re gonna discuss our teams today, but the framework was created based on the top 20% of people, of business leaders, in the lesson business industry, that we’ve been extracting data from for years.
And some recent polls too, to create the framework. So the attract principle today, we wanna come from a perspective of a founder/owner who sets the standards, mission, vision, value. There’s three things we want to think about while we discuss what the teams are transformed to do, and that is… Chris and I, we’re gonna use this as an example, are in charge of vision, people, and the finances, or money. That’s it. Vision…
0:05:24.8 Chris: Or resources. However you wanna define it. “Money” is an easy way to say it, but it’s finances and also resources of all kinds, because your resources might be your database, your resources might be your customers as referrals. So resources in general is part of a leader’s job. People and vision. And so it’s your job, as the leader, to constantly be hitting the vision home, to help the people get the resources that they want, and to make sure that you have the right people on the bus.
0:05:56.9 Tyler: I got a question. If I am taking two hours a day for 10 days in the middle of everything else and trying to learn how to do Facebook retargeting, am I concentrating on vision, people, or resources/finances?
0:06:17.6 Chris: Neither. None of them. What you’re doing is you just made yourself the king of the marketing team. Now, let us be clear: As a small business owner, as we go through the next four episodes, you have lots of jobs, there’s 12 jobs, and in those 12 jobs you can have full teams. You can give yourself some of them, just make sure you’re giving yourself the ones you’re good at.
0:06:41.5 Tyler: Right.
0:06:43.4 Chris: So in other words, don’t make yourself the Facebook marketing expert if you hate Facebook or if you hate marketing. Not a good idea. It’s a path of misery, it’s why you stay up late, it’s why you’re stressed. So anyways, let’s get into it. So, “attract”…
0:06:56.0 Tyler: Let’s go with the number three.
0:06:57.4 Chris: So “attract” has three basic solutions that most people use, including us, that are succeeding in this world in figuring out how to get out of our own ways. And that is, number one… Write this down if you’ve got it, or it’ll be in the footnotes of the podcast, “clear messaging”, what’s our clear message? Number two is marketing and outreach with that message, obviously. And then, lastly, is “follow-up”, what systems do we have in follow-up, Chris? So why don’t we get into the clear messaging aspect first and we’ll barrel through these three items.
0:07:29.8 Chris: Okay. And guys, we again… Just one last reminder, in the webinar, the transformation formula webinar, we actually go through these elements as elements. So go watch that if you haven’t, or listen to it. But with regard to today, we’re gonna talk about the team members within the attract element. So with “clear message”, alright, clear message is the first element of attract. It means that people know what the heck you’re offering.
0:07:55.4 Tyler: Right. So, our team lead on our clear messaging, we hired Brad Alexander, who is from a firm of a story brand expert marketing firm who is just a wiz at helping define our clear messaging after talking to Chris and I for a few minutes. And then all of a sudden he just spits out magic, because guess what, Chris and I are great at messaging but we have to concentrate on vision, people, and resources. So seeing…
0:08:25.9 Chris: And you know, it’s funny, as leaders, a lot of us we’re good at a lot of things, often it’s why I became a business owner. But, sorry, you’re limiting your ability to impact more and more people the more jobs you give yourself. Technically, as leaders, you do not have a job, so if you’re the owner, let me just… Tyler and I give you permission to fire yourself from a job, because your job is to basically keep everyone safe, with the three things we talked about: Vision, people, resources. So, clear message, Team Lead, Brad Alexander. He’s our clear messaging expert. We also have other people on that team, we have Drew Storey, who’s our web person, and our brilliant dear friend that is just like…
0:09:13.5 Tyler: Smart beyond web design, that’s for sure. But he’s a big fan of what we do and has been a help since day one in 2010.
0:09:22.5 Chris: So he’s perfect for the clear messaging part because he’s not only a Jedi when it comes to anything tech, but he also helps us keep things simple and clear. And he also helps us get our website in order whenever we need it. So those are our team for that, and then those guys help us handle website, email campaigns, landing pages for ads, overall messaging. So that’s the clear messaging team. The next team’s a bigger team.
0:09:50.1 Tyler: Right. And by the way, what we mean by “email campaigns”, that is also pre-set drip-type campaigns, where the copy is written ahead of time so that you kinda got it done already. So you come up with this clear message, that’s the title, then you come up in ways to solve people’s lives and make them the hero, then you turn it into a few different little white papers or little one-liners for marketing, and you have this little playbook of your messaging, and it’s sitting there but that’s not the end, it’s just sitting there. We gotta get it out there. We’ve got where…
0:10:24.2 Chris: I think what Tyler’s trying to say is coming up we have… One of our team members that handles are on-the-fly messaging, which is different… So, those guys handle our clear messaging, then the next step is actual marketing or outreach. And so if you’re not running ads, start today. You can start from two bucks a day, guys. It’s really that simple. And what you can do is you can actually be all these team leads initially, if you’re smaller, and then slowly buy your time back. I love that phrase, our coach uses it a lot. Buy your time back by, as you grow, hiring or elevating some of your current teachers or people into these roles. So the next one, marketing outreach, Tyler, who’s our leads on that?
0:11:10.6 Tyler: So Matt Raminick, he runs… He’s one of our partners, and he is in charge of… I mean, his company does it all. They will create the content even if you want to, but we kinda handle that on our end, and then they break down Google pay-per-click ads, retargeting, and Facebook ads for us. So that’s Matt’s company. And then he works hand-in-hand with Spencer Hayden, who’s on our direct staff, and Spencer will save a… And a mixture of our own referral families are that outreach branch and outreach team.
0:11:49.5 Chris: Do you guys realize that your customers, your current and past customers, are part of your marketing team? You know? So that’s the whole team, would be Matt, Spencer, we have a gentleman, Will, that handles… He basically records really cool snippets and stuff for social media for us, and we never…
0:12:10.5 Tyler: By the way, tell them how often Will comes. Will… We have rehearsals and shows every four months, so three times a quarter, sometimes scattered here and there, he shows up, sets up, gathers content, and he’s out and we pay him by piece.
0:12:22.5 Chris: Oh! Marius is on that team too.
0:12:26.5 Tyler: Yeah, Marius is our photographer.
0:12:29.5 Chris: We have a photographer that helps us produce some beautiful content that allows for more marketing outreach. So what’s the team up to? Well, the team’s never stopping, guys. Remember with the attract part, this whole framework “attract” is something that never ends, so you wanna create basically an engine, a growth engine. And so, as part of that growth engine we’re doing paper click ads, like Tyler said. So social media ads, that includes YouTube, Google, Facebook.
0:12:57.8 Chris: We also are doing… We’re not currently doing TikTok and stuff, but we might one day, who knows? We’re doing newsletters, so we’re sending out consistent newsletters to past, current, and prospects. We’re sending out emails. So Spencer Hayden sends out a really cool email to prospects that’s everything like “Our lessons make you smarter, our lessons help you have more friends”, all sorts of fun stuff, right?
0:13:26.5 Tyler: Right. And he’s on autopilot, we do not… In the beginning we gave him some ideas and now Chris and I don’t talk to him anymore about those emails, they just happen.
0:13:36.9 Chris: As we’ve talked about on previous podcasts, Tyler and I were basically the entire team back in the day. It started with Tyler being every single thing, and then he and I had all these roles. And what we’ve basically done is fired ourselves from all those roles as we’ve grown, and we’d advise you to do the same, because you’re buying your time back. So…
0:13:58.6 Tyler: Oh, here’s today’s, Chris.
0:13:58.8 Chris: “Have you heard about our live program?” That’s the subject line. Right?
So sometimes when we get away from it for a second, brilliancy happens, I’ll tell you what. Your team, when empowered, when you’re just there to help them transform, our only job is to keep reiterating our vision to everybody, to make sure our people are happy and talented, and we have the right people on the bus, and then lastly, get them what they need, folks. Make sure they have whatever tools they need, whether it’s software or whatever, make sure they have the budget they need, and it’s not always.
You can be honest with your team too, “Hey guys, it’s gonna be a tight month, we need you to stretch the budget.” Okay? So, and then let’s get back into the last one, which is “follow-up”, so it goes “clear message, marketing outreach team, and now the follow-up team.” So for our follow-up team, we have a lead that happens to be two people that are part-time callers, so…
0:14:52.8 Tyler: And they’re sisters!
0:14:54.8 Chris: Yeah, so Alexa and Taylor basically call all our leads that come in. They’re our very first contact point. And I think we’ve heard some, like Danny Thompson in the past, talk about how he had an actual…
0:15:05.8 Tyler: A messaging service. He had a messaging service.
0:15:07.7 Chris: Yeah. Like a true outsource. So just know there’s lots of options. We happen to put them directly, they’re actually on our staff, but they’re part-timers. And they call every lead that comes in. Also on the follow-up team is Spencer Hayden again, you heard his name on the marketing team as well. So Spencer handles all our social media and emails, but because Spencer does some of those follow-up emails.
0:15:30.8 Tyler: The neat thing about the follow-up part, when you’re segmented tagging and your CRM starts to get really tight and clean, there’s so much data you can read, it’s like The Matrix and Neo. You can start to see what’s going on, and all of a sudden, the girls, they will know, because they do three touch points per line item: Text, email and a phone call or voicemail, depending if they get them or not, to get call to actions to actually happen. Well, then they change all the tags and then every week Spencer can pull a new CSV from the CRM… I know it’s a lot of acronyms here, I hope you know what these are, if you don’t, learn. We all had to start somewhere. But then, he’ll pull cleans CSV files and then he can do a more pointed email to a certain type of customer that maybe hasn’t been contacted yet, or has, was very interested, disappeared. And so on and so forth. So that follow-up machine can turn into “Actually, it’s kind of fun.”
0:16:33.3 Chris: Right, and then you could do things even like we have Grasshopper that we use for our voicemail system, and we have pipeline deals that we use for our CRM, we use social media Agora polls for our social media, you can actually schedule social media and stuff like that, we have segmented email blasting that Tyler just talked about, we also do SMS that we do currently through Grasshopper, but we’ve paid other services to do it in the past. So what’s really cool is that you can… There’s all sorts of tools in your toolbox that you help your team utilize to give them more velocity.
0:17:07.3 Tyler: Right. And by the way your team…
0:17:08.4 Chris: By the way, you guys, I’m sorry, I gotta get on a soap box real quick. If you’re worried about costs for a lot of these tools, get over yourself, my goodness, a lot of you are so worried about nickeling and diming costs. Guys, listen, you know what I told our marketing, Brad Alexander, he’s our clarity expert, he basically tells Tyler and I what to help lead the teams on. I told him yesterday that my goal is for us to get up into millions and millions and millions of dollars in tools and marketing. I’m talking about costs, I want us to be spending… I told Brad my goal in the next three years would be that we’re, Tyler and I, are spending millions a year. What is your…
0:17:51.5 Tyler: Right. Let me clarify.
0:17:53.4 Chris: If it goes to cut, my mind is…
0:18:00.8 Tyler: So, not millions at the Los Rios Rock School marketing budget, but Chris and I, as you guys know, we own two companies.
0:18:04.4 Chris: But tens of thousands at Los Rios, right? It’s still not…
0:18:05.9 Tyler: Yes, but goes to tens of thousands of dollars for Los Rios.
0:18:10.8 Chris: Right. A month. So we’re talking about hundreds of thousands a year. Guys, what I’m saying is that a lot of you have stinking thinking, as my wife says. You’re so busy trying to say 50 bucks that you’re not realizing that you are hurting your staff, you’re hurting your family, you’re hurting your business, because you’re so busy trying to save money rather than realizing that, “Wow, velocity… ” you can stack money on top of itself to create velocity, okay? So that’s what…
0:18:39.3 Tyler: And we’re talking to founders here, so it’s not like this is foreign to you guys, you’re entrepreneurs. So if you’re listening and you’re a founder, owner, entrepreneur, then you’ve already got a gene in you that is not like a lot of people that are willing to take risks and solve problems. Yet all of a sudden now it’s time because we got a little bit of comfort to not spend again and get something to fix and grow.
0:19:06.4 Chris: That’s where we’re… If that’s you, then just… You could be done with us, but if you know what we’re talking about, we’re trying to give you permission to know that Los Rios Rock School didn’t have all those softwares before. We slowly did got them when we knew we needed them. Yeah. You don’t build the house overnight, you lay one brick at a time.
0:19:27.0 Tyler: Oh, my gosh, I heard about Grasshopper phone system on KFI 640. It was a commercial.
0:19:33.3 Chris: And you know what’s funny? Hold on though, you know what’s funny, Tyler? I just thought… It dawned on me that you still have a little stinking thinking, ’cause you’re worried that I said “millions”. We have customers that spend millions on their lesson business. Why not, right? Like why are you… Who cares? It could be a billion. We could spend a billion on Los Rios, why not?
0:19:50.9 Tyler: Can I know why?
0:19:53.6 Chris: Because I’m thinking a lot about TeacherZone right now, that’s why.
0:19:54.9 Tyler: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
0:19:56.0 Chris: But you know what I’m saying? Like there is no limit to any of our businesses, man.
0:19:57.6 Tyler: Chris wants to have us take over the old mall that closed down and move the school over there…
0:20:02.4 Chris: Why not?
0:20:02.5 Tyler: And I’m like “Yeah, sure, go for it, buddy. Yours.”
0:20:07.0 Chris: [laughter] You know what I mean though? It’s like we all get it in our own ways, is the bottom line, guys. And we’re not saying you have to be this giant company if you don’t wanna be. What we’re saying is that if you’re not leveling your staff up and leveling your teams and getting out of your own way, buying your own time back, then you’re probably creating more stress, because ultimately “attract” will give you more of what you desire.
0:20:29.2 Tyler: Those of you who teach in person have a finite amount of space and many of you aren’t even close to filling it. If you put these systems in place and trust some people and slowly layer that and get that greased, you will get to a waiting list. And then at that point, ask yourself, “How would that feel?” And then work backwards from that. What would that look like on a MRR, monthly recurring revenue? And have fun with it. Do the math right now, pretend your school’s full. Do the math and reverse engineer back and then build your teams and ask yourself, “What would that buy me?”
0:21:07.4 Chris: Mmm, what does that look like? Would you be able to travel more? Would you be able to be a little bit less stressed? Would you be able to recreate better facilities, would you be able to…
0:21:16.9 Tyler: So…
0:21:17.4 Chris: Yep. So and then, as we end, I just wanted to say one thing on budget. I think a good rule that I’ve heard over and over, over the years, is a minimum of 5%. So depend upon your revenue. So if your revenue is 100,000, 5000 a year on marketing, 500, 400 bucks a month. If your revenue is a half a mil, now you’re going up, right? Now you’re at 25,000, now you’re at 2000 a month on marketing. Right?
0:21:49.4 Tyler: Right. By the way, let me add this right now…
0:21:51.4 Chris: That’s minimum, by the way. You could spend more than that if you’re profitable.
0:21:55.4 Tyler: And if everybody’s like “No way, there’s no room”, go look at your P and L. Go right now and find out why you think you can’t afford $500 in the grand scope of things. Because if you think you can’t, go look and you’ll find there’s probably four items every month that that marketing could replace that is just frivolous. It’s there. The 500 is there. Start there, you will be blown away. It’s gonna work. So Chris, that’s attract. Guys, go watch the webinar, go check out the transactional leadership versus…
0:22:35.4 Chris: Transformational. [laughter]
0:22:36.1 Tyler: Transformational, at our previous podcast.
0:22:40.0 Chris: Yeah. Transformational is a big term that we keep using, guys.
0:22:43.4 Tyler: Yeah, you’ll see, you’ll get the gist. And then part two, three and four are coming up, we’ll get those out soon. And again, thank you all for tuning in to the TeacherZone with Chris and Tyler. We love you all. Take care. Bye Chris.
0:22:55.4 Chris: Bye Tyler, thank You.