Top 3 Ingredients of a Successful Language School
The Ukrainian language learning market, especially for English, is growing very fast. Today it has many different players: from small schools (often run by one founder-teacher and 1-2 fellow teachers) to large school networks that set market trends.
Why do some businesses grow and take off, while others stand still or simply close? We decided to look at the recipe for a successful language school and break down all its ingredients.
What does a successful language school look like?
We talked about this with the top managers of Green Country, a network of English schools for schoolchildren that teaches about 5,000 students a year.
Natalia Lototska-Hevko, co-founder and CEO of the Green Country school network:
“A successful language school combines three important components:
- adaptability and flexibility of staff, company structure, learning formats and learning materials. In other words, a successful school should be adaptable and quick to pick up market requests and trends;
- processes built to satisfy two types of client: the external client and the internal client, that is, the team;
- structured and predictable processes.”
Market positioning
Market positioning is the foundation that makes it possible to promote your product and keep developing your school’s brand. Successful positioning lets clients correctly understand the benefits and value of your product and how it differs from your competitors’ products.
For a business founder, it is important to understand who your target audience is, and even better, to divide it into segments and work with each segment separately. But remember the golden mean here, because clarity matters in positioning. It is hard to grow a school that offers too wide a range of services: group lessons, one-to-one lessons, courses for schoolchildren, preschoolers and adults, Business English courses, English for IT courses and so on. On the other hand, if you choose too narrow an audience (for example, English for musicians or English for logistics specialists), there is a risk that growing such a school will be too hard because there is no demand for the product.
A successful language school is a recognizable school. Your corporate style (fonts, colors, logo, slogan) is what lets a client easily recognize you among competitors. For example, think of the ads of Monobank, a popular Ukrainian bank: even if you remove the caption, you will easily recognize their visuals among any others.
Product price is also part of a business’s positioning. A low price can be a strategy in your positioning and can even be your advantage. But remember: if it is your school’s only advantage, it is definitely not the story of a successful school. If, on the contrary, you choose a price above the market average, you need an indisputable explanation of why it is higher. Small groups, a unique program, a unique methodology, or perhaps highly expert teachers?
Inna Ulitko, head of the methodology department at the Green Country school network:
“A successful language school is a school where clients get a high-quality product: a high-quality program, high-quality courses, high-quality lessons. It is a school that teaches students not just lists of words and grammar rules, but how to use the language: to communicate and express their thoughts.”
Product
Once you have defined your positioning and target audience, you can move on to the product.
The product of any successful business (and the education business is no exception) must precisely meet its clients’ needs. So ask yourself: what do your clients come to you for? Let’s generalize: they come to you to learn English. And here we come to a common mistake language schools make. For some reason there is an impression that clients come to schools just to attend lessons, that is, for the learning process rather than the result. In fact, even the answer “to learn English” is not always right, because there is also a goal behind the wish to be able to communicate in English.
So a successful school should take care to package its product properly: not just English lessons, but a course with a clear duration, program, level and price. Your clients should understand how much money, how much time and what method it will take for them to reach the level of English (or another language) they want.
Anna Dorosheva, head of the client relations department at the Green Country school network:
“A successful language school is a school where clients are satisfied and happy. I want to stress that this is not about quantity (a school with lots of clients), but about quality (satisfied clients).”
Team
If positioning and product concern the external client, the team is your business’s internal client. And obviously, you also need to work with the internal client and meet their needs. But here we are not talking about various HR perks, but about structuring and setting up processes in the business, because that is the basic principle of a team working comfortably.
The teaching team. We think every school founder knows the situation: as soon as a group gets a new teacher, students ask to bring back the old one, because with the new one the lessons are not the same, the voice is not the same, nothing is the same. Then you find yourself in a situation where scaling your business depends on having stable teachers. So it is worth working with your teaching team in two directions: training and professional development, and standardizing the level of lessons. Teachers should be able to replace one another easily without changing the program, while keeping lesson quality at the same level.
There are two keys to success here:
- continuous teacher training (in-house or external training),
- a detailed school-wide curriculum that every teacher on your team knows well.
The TalkEn.Cloud online platform and academy can help you with both ;)
The consultant team. The admin team must understand your product brilliantly and communicate information about it, and here we can go back to the section on product, its clarity and predictability, because consulting clients about such a product is many times easier. A client comes to you with their request, their problem, and the consultant is the person with the expertise in how you will solve that problem. In our case, how the student will learn English at your school. So make sure the admin team has not only scripts with general information about the product, but also answers to all the frequently asked questions from clients, and can handle objections (such as “it is too expensive for me”, “this lesson format does not suit me”, “I have been learning the language since school and still have not learned it, so languages are not for me”...).
In summary, a successful language school is a good combination of a clear, high-quality product, a team with well-established processes and successful market positioning. But remember that there is no single recipe, and every business is a living organism that the founder grows together with the team. So every language school has its own success story, with people and their values, character and history behind it.
We recently also discussed the components of successful language schools at one of our regular TalkEn Talks meetings for ambitious tutors and future education entrepreneurs. Watch the recording: we shared a lot of useful and interesting things (in Ukrainian).