The educational product
I have been working with ELT businesses for a fair while now. My first task is usually to deal with viability issues and, in specific, to encourage ELT businessmen and women to respect the business side of their school, monitor and measure cost centres, manage human resources, ensure their profit margins and market their identity […]
Welcome Sales
After monitoring a number of school development projects I have realised that there is a word that intimidates the average educator / school owner far more than terms like ‘finances’, ‘business’, ‘profit’, etc. It is the taboo word ‘sales’. When I first started talking about sales to my clients I came across looks of shock, […]
Promote English
Three years ago I started warning my clients and contacts in the field that we’re moving into a new era as far as the character and needs of the ELT field in Greece are concerned. We had already begun to talk about market saturation, institutional changes in the public sector imposed mainly by the EU, […]
Institutional Competition
At the end of the academic year insecurity begins to gather about the September to come. Each school owner is thinking about promotional campaigns, numbers of new students, books and educational materials to be adopted, but also about their direct competition; other schools in the neighbourhood, chain branches, private lessons providers and even, sometimes, their […]
The War of the Worlds – "School owners vs Publishers"
A few years ago, when I took my first publishing course back in Oxford, I came across possibly the biggest revelation of all in my ELT career. Creating books had always been, to my knowledge, a long process that required lots of research. Being a salesperson, then a consultant and later a commissioning editor and […]
A few good reasons against known business consultancy in the Greek ELT
After 3 years in the field of business planning and coaching the Greek ELT enterprise I found out that there are still areas that are open to relative interpretation and subject to diverse approaches. Our kind of activity started filling in a gap in the field and then grew and our needs grew as well, […]
A tale of two parallel worlds
In a small Latin American country, in 1947, a major decision had to be made by the unstable local Government. The country had just gained its independence, thus they had to organize a new National Guard. Typhus, diphtheria and malnutrition were wiping out whole local communities. The National Guard, as a specialized army needed healthy […]
Dealing with adults
Since the beginning of our co-operation with schools it has been pretty obvious that the adult students’ issue is rather a painful one. Adult classes are necessary, but at the same time they are problematic for the same reasons throughout Greece. We started our market research focusing on the adult sector and here are some […]
Issues of representation – Your power is your market
Greece has never had a particularly good reputation for collective activity and representation. All professional fields are represented by their chambers and associations but participation and contribution becomes an issue only in times of difficulty or crisis, which in most cases proves to be too late. Besides, everybody wants to be a president, and usually […]
2004 ELT market research: A guide to creating a client benefit map
For the market explorer who is devoted to discovering what parents really consider to be benefits, market research is the only tool required in order to create a client benefit map. A massive ELT market research project, sampling 3,072 parents and adult students from Ierapetra to Orestiada took place during 2004. At the same time, […]
