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Julian Hebbrecht
- 66, Male
- Ibaraki City, Osaka Prefecture
- Japan
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Julian Hebbrecht's Page
Profile Information
- What's Your Number?
- $ 2,000,000
- What's Your Date?
- April 22, 2012
- What's Your Life's Purpose?
- Find as way to utilize my talents and make money from them so I can stop working nine to five and have more time to travel, do photography, paint and write. I also want to buy a house with a garden, marry my long time girlfriend and have a family.
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Have a think about Brand, USP and Customer in developing your new importing business. The hardest of all of them is USP.
This of course encompasses the whole proposition of your intended business not just the product. It could go to your before and after sales service. What freebies you might throw into the mix. Actually it's almost anything that makes you unique in the market.
A point of caution though. The customers must think it is valuable.
In our own business we found that something we hardly valued was highly valued by the majority of our clients. Our clients use a web service where their numbers are loaded so they can get a better read on how their business is performing. We had lots of trouble getting people to load up their numbers which we thought was incredibly easy, however lots of them simply forgot or didn't get around to it. We now remind them, collect their information and load it all for them. Yes we charge a fee for doing that but clients don't mind paying for something they simply didn't want to do.
So sometimes we mis read what is valuable for client. Often some of the easiest things for us, are difficult for a client.
If I was starting again, I would ask lots more questions than I did at the early part of our business journey. Find people who are in the market and have cups of coffee with them. Most people are very generous with their time and can often help you with the real practical parts of a business. (The pieces we often forget and then find ourselves in a bit of trouble)
Nah, ignore the celery peeling....just the YouTube feed on the right is what I was directing your attention to....
I'm a newbie to the group and read a couple of the threads regarding trying to monetise your opportunity teaching english in Japan. ( Not an easy task!!)
I run a business monetising financial education which is also a very crowded and difficult market. Every time we try and go forward we come up against businesses way bigger than ours such as financial planning groups, banks and fund managers. We had to do something different to even get a look into the market
One of the useful ways I have found in thinking about our business opportunity is to think about three things and see if I can bring them all together into a coherent strategy
1. Brand Name and Brand Promise
2. USP Unique Selling Proposition
3. What a good customer looks like
These three things when brought together can help get clarity on what you're trying to do.
The Brand name and promise could simply be the name of your business. People get to know you simply by your name.
Your USP can be worked out using a simple formula
i.e. You know how .... Well what we do is .....
e.g. You know how its really hard to get a pizza hot and on time
Well what we do is deliver on time or your money back (DOMINOS PIZZA)
The last one is sometimes the hardest but probably the most important. Good customers value our USP and the best way to work that out is to see whether they negotiate you on price.
I don't know if this helps but if you would like me to elaborate any of the three points or how they go together I would be happy to.
Although even this little exchange between us is moving the discussion on a bit, allowing you to declare how the landscape looks, so hopefully other Numberers may be able to join this discussion to possibly suggest clever ways forward.
That could be a task for all members of this community - look at your descriptions of how things are in this particular sector, and then think about, and hopefully suggest possible routes forward.
I don't know your particular market at all (as I've already proved!) but it can be useful to have dialogue with people who are uninformed because they can help you form and record your own insights, and being naive, can sometimes inadvertantly suggest things that practitioners who are in the midst of it, might not consider or haven't seen.
So at the risk of being wrong again, is there a market for those who live too far from those powerful schools or can't afford the fees? If a poor, distant Japanese person wanted to make a start in learning English, are there routes they can take to make a start?
How about school-children? Are they obliged to study English? Are their text-books and syllabus brilliant, or do they find it difficult to make progress because its poorly taught, or helpful books are not readily available?
I'm thinking here of Shakespeare books for children, where the olde English (the original Shakespeare) is on the left page, and the modern English version is on the right page - such a model could be useful for showing the Japanese script on the left, and the English text on the right. This of course concerns written Japanese to English.
Then there is the issue of the spoken English. Are there rhymes in English that they could chant, or even English pop songs with the English explained both in English text, and maybe a summary in Japanese script?
As I say, the purpose of this dialogue is to help you formulate where the brick walls are, but also possibly help to suggest where the gaps in the wall may be, that your business may be able to exploit and dominate.
But maybe you don't want to pursue such a dialogue, which is fine - but it is one way that this community may be able to help you see more clearly where you believe you are, and where it might be lucrative to try to get to.
This is just an idea - you can run with this "let's explore potential business avenues and roadblocks" given your situation, or not. Of course it's entirely your choice about whether this will be valuable or useful to you. I will accept your decision, whichever you choose.
This is little comfort to you, but trying to think of ways of making money in such a difficult market would be a valuable case study for fellow Numberers, so it could be a most useful learning situation.
And indeed, without pre-judging how this discussion might turn out, if all Numberers come to the conclusion that English tuition is an impossible business model in Japan, then suggesting completely different areas, e.g. exporting Japanese carvings or whatever, could suggest very alternative ways of making money from where you live.
But I would guess you'd want to fully explore the English tuition landscape first, and be sure that all potential avenues in that area have been examined and found to be wanting.
Or how about turning the whole business model on its head? Australia is spear-heading Japanese learning in their schools, given they're more in the Asian sector of the world than the English-dominated West, so how about becoming a contact in Japan for Australian students who want to spend some time in Japan to improve their Japanese? Maybe you could have a list of budget places they could stay, details of low-cost air fares and Japanese train fares, and setup conversation practice with your own Japanese students - they speak English in the morning and Japanese in the afternoon! Again, it's just an idea - and it may be something you don't want to get into, or maybe it's worth examining.
As you say, KC, it is a way to 'trap' the knowledge that you have and decide what can be 'monetized' (is that even a word?!).
Julian: sometimes, the key to our financial future is right under our noses ... it can be the very issues that you feel will STOP you from turning what you do into a 'real business' that become the KEY to creating something unique.
No need to 'dump' your existing clients; look for something that you can take to a new (or similar) audience ... can be live, internet, book, video, etc.
As an intro to that, I will tell you that it is a demo of three songs and there are three teachers but it will be obvious which one is leading the demo. The audience is also participating and this is what makes the video so truly memorable and worth watching over and over (other than just wanting to learn the choreography (something teachers would do). You can also go to www.zumba.com and get a little more info about teachers in your area (they are international, but I'm not sure about whether they are some in Japan). My blog is at http://luvs2zumba.blogspot.com
(For another good video, scroll to the link or post on "Carlos Man of Love" or search on YouTube for that and find the three young asian men who have posted their rendition of this. Aren't people amazing? LOL)
Your are in a unique and very powerful position because you know so much about teaching English to Japanese people. Unfortunately, when you are in a particular situation, you often take it for granted, and can't appreciate just how much you do know. So I would say that a good first step would be to enter into a dialogue with someone who knows absolutely nothing of the subject, so that in the to-and-fro of e-mails you end up trapping what you know in words.
It would become something like a treatise on teaching English in Japan, and touch on recommended books to use, tapes of spoken English, etc so that you'd effectively be trying to determine what a concise website would contain, if someone wanted to get a good handle on what was available. Imagine what the perfect website would hold, if you did a Google search on "teaching English in Japan" and "learning English in japan" so you can address teachers and potential students.
Just an idea of how you might proceed to monetise your knowledge, not through growing individual tuition sessions, but through using your knowledge to develop an online source of income.
I was looking over something you left on Adrian's comment wall about living and working in Japan. Here is what you wrote:
"Japan is great to visit as a tourist but living here is another thing all together. I have my own small English language school for adults. I make a living from it but cannot image getting rich or even saving enough money to retire any time soon. "
I loved living there, but did not have to make a living when I did. Is there any way that you could hire people to do what you do? I think that is the basic premise of the E-Myth Revisited books - to create a process whereby others can do what you do -- as best they can of course, the creative genius, the personal touches will not be as duplicable, but things can be a bit different.
I am a Zumba instructor and the creator of Zumba, Beto Perez, had to do this with setting up a network whereby others are trained to do what he does. I have only seen one instructor (a master instructor who is allowed to train other instructors) who has some of the j'n'sais quoi that Beto brings to his classes. BUT I enjoy going to almost every other Zumba instructor's classes. So, he was able to replicate something that allows others to duplicate what he did (and he created a stream of income (subscription for the music, marketing, plus) that pays back him and his two partners (the ones who funded the enterprise going "public" as it did - perhaps it was THEIR vision that it could be profitable if expanded.)
I assume you are managing the school - are you still teaching all the classes as well?
If you don't have the specific details still to hand, then just tell the general story, e.g. "they claimed I could make $100 a week by blogging but the instructions were inadequate and I could see I'd have to spend $400 to get it set up...." or "I followed the plan and after 4 months I only got one visitor..."
What would be particularly interesting would be to spell out what they seemed to be offering, why it seemed reasonable in the sales blurb, and why it didn't delight you when the details were revealed.
This is just an idea - if you don't want to write about it then that's fine. Cheers, KC
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