appeal to adults. For elementary school students, the benefits must appeal to the parents. For teenagers, the benefits must appeal to both the parents and the teenager.
Let’s go back and summarize. When figuring out what you have to offer, ask yourself four questions:
1. What image do I want to project?
2. What tangible things project that image?
3. What are the features of my school?
4. What benefits do those features offer the prospective student?
Once you have answers for these questions, once you have a clear view of who and what you are, you can pull together the necessary information to build a marketing identity.
Develop Your Marketing Identity
Go through your lists—image, features, and benefits—and pick out the five to ten most important points. Choose aspects of your image you can project convincingly. Include the feature-benefit combinations that are likely to be most important to your prospective students.
Remember: this is your marketing identity. It is an identity that will convince prospective students that your school is the right place for them to study. What can you offer them that no one else can? What feature-benefits are so attractive that they would be tough to say “no” to? What part of your image says, “Come study with me, I can make your life a better one.”
Turn these five to ten points into a single paragraph that expresses the best of who you are. Once you have the information in place, rewrite the paragraph to make it personal. It should sound as though you are talking to a potential student: friendly, personal, informative. This paragraph is your marketing identity.
What do you do with a marketing identity? You build your business communications on it. It is the basis for your brochure and all the rest of your advertising. It is a part of your business plan and loan applications. It helps you choose a location. It helps you sign up new students. It helps keep you focused when serving your current students. What do you do with a marketing identity? Let’s just say that marketing your school successfully without one would be tough. A marketing identity expresses who you are and why people should choose you and your school.
Choose a Name That Reflects Your Image
Large corporations spend big bucks choosing names that make people want to buy their products. You probably don’t have that kind of money to throw at a market research campaign. Nonetheless, you must choose your school name carefully. What you name your school does make a difference.
Choose a name that fits with your image. If you were a parent looking for a place for your shy seven-year-old to study self-defense, would you choose a place called Bloody Tiger Gym? If you were a young adult looking for a traditional martial arts teacher, would you even darken the door of Little Dragons Karate School and Day Care Center? Your name should capture your image.
Your school name should be partly descriptive, partly inventive. The descriptive part tells what you do as a business. It identifies you quickly to potential customers. For example, let’s say you want to call your school “Eastern Treasures.” In your mind, put that name on a storefront sign. Now drive by and look at it as though you were unfamiliar with the business. What do you see? A martial arts school? An import shop? A jewelry store? If the sign, however, were to say “Eastern Treasures Wushu Academy” you would know what happens inside. Part of your business name must state what you do.
The other part of your business name should be inventive. If your name is purely descriptive, you cannot protect it from others who might want to use it. So for example if you call your martial arts school “Shorin-ryu Karate,” and if another school down the street opens a school that teaches the same style, they too could call their business “Shorin-ryu Karate.” Why? Because “Shorin-ryu” is the name of a style of karate. Like the names of specific objects, the name of a specific martial art or specific martial arts style cannot be protected as a trademark or service mark (unless of course the art is something entirely new and invented by you). A better name would be “Golden Leopard Shorin-ryu Karate.”
How about a name like “Dave Smith’s Taekwondo Academy”? A business name that incorporates your own name can be legally protected. You should, however, think of the wider consequences of using your own name. If your school doesn’t succeed, will you want your name associated with a failed business? If it does succeed, but you want to open another business of a very different kind, could there be image problems if the one business is associated with the other? What if the business is successful beyond your wildest dream? If someone comes to you to buy the business, including the name, would you sell? Would you want someone else controlling a school bearing your name? Using your own name as a part of your business name has its disadvantages. If, however, your name is highly recognizable or a central part of your school’s image, using it can be a savvy marketing decision. If using your own name as a part of your business’s name will draw in business from your target market, you may decide the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.
Choose a school name after you’ve put together a marketing identity. Naming a school before you’ve determined its identity is like naming a baby before you know whether it’s a boy or a girl. Your school name must project your school image.
Your marketing identity affects everything you present to the public: your business name, your brochure, your posters, your selling approach, your tour for prospective students, and all of your mass-media advertising. It states who you are, what benefits you give to your students, and why you are different from your competition. It helps you to focus your strengths and minimize your weaknesses.
Later we’ll show you how to build on your marketing identity to create your mission statement and to secure financing for your school. We’ll show you how to turn your marketing identity into effective advertising, and how to use it to bring in and sign up new students. You’ll also need a clear picture of your marketing identity to choose the right location for your school. You’ll need it to help you set the right fees for your services. In short, if you don’t have a clear marketing identity before you begin putting the pieces of your business together, you can waste a lot of time and effort. Spend some time putting one together now.
CHAPTER TWO:
FINANCE YOUR NEW SCHOOL
Starting a new business is not cheap. With the privileges of being your own boss, you will also be taking on the financial risks of being your own boss. Small business statistics show that those risks are great. But they can be minimized by careful advance planning.
The tool you use to do this advance planning is called a business plan. Putting together a business plan involves making accurate estimates of income and expenses, profit and loss. It involves setting financial and personal goals for the business. It involves choosing a legal form for your business, setting up a preliminary marketing strategy, assessing your competition, and charting a path for the next several years of your business life. A business plan can help you obtain start-up financing. It can help you see where your own business skills may be lacking. It becomes a framework for future action. But most importantly, it can help you get a realistic picture of the financial risks and rewards inherent in owning your own martial arts school.
Start with Estimates
The first step in putting together a start-up business plan is making estimates. Estimate how much money you will need for start-up costs. Calculate your break-even point. Then make some financial plans for your first two years in business.
Start-Up Capital
Start-up capital is the money you need to set up your business. To put it another way, start-up capital is the money you will need to spend before you can open your doors to do business.
Unfortunately, no simple formula can tell you how much start-up capital you will need. The only way to come up with that figure is to list all your expenses. As a start, consider these costs:
