Going From Teacher To Buisness Owner (with Ed Dudley, Jake Whiddon & Peter Liu)

TEFL Training Institute Podcast

Going From Teacher To Business Owner (with Ed Dudley, Jake Whiddon & Peter Liu)

Visit our website: www.tefltraininginstitute.com

Support the show - buy me a coffee

More about studying the Trinity Diploma in TESOL with Ross

More from Ed Dudley

More from Jake Whiddon

Peter Liu from Owl ABC on starting a start-up

Ross: Peter, you started your own business a year and a half ago. Before you tell us about what it is, what made you want to start your own company?

Peter Liu: My current co‑founder and I, we've been good friends for several years. He's also in education. He's got 15 some odd years of experience. We saw this trend of thousands of Chinese kids going abroad to study.

There was a study done several years back that showed 25 percent of Chinese students going to an Ivy League school fail, 25 percent. When I read that statistic, that blew my mind.

There's a gap in skills that Chinese students have, who are attending school abroad. There are tons and tons of services that help kids in China improve their English. They can help with their test‑taking of the IELs and the TOEFL. It only ever seems to go as far as your first day of university so you can get into school.

How do you actually stay in and succeed? I've been working at this education technology startup. We built a whole bunch of fancy tech. I worked very closely with the product and the engineering teams. I had a little bit of experience building an online product.

Ross: This is almost like working in a startup prepared you to start your own startup?

Peter: Yeah, you could say that.

Ross: Did that take some of the fear out of it, as well?

Peter: It's that and also our product is not technically that challenging. We're not building a technology company. We're building a services company.

Ross: How has what your company does changed from what you originally visioned, compared with now?

Peter: The biggest change was our business model. Originally, we were focused on a B2C model, basically, selling our services and our content directly to consumers. We quickly found that we don't have the local knowledge of how to message, how to create marketing channels to reach these consumers.

We made the decision to shift our focus to B2B, licensing our content and our teaching to other education companies so that they could do the heavy lifting of marketing directly to their students. They already have students who are, perhaps, learning English from them, but who need to build their critical thinking skills. That's where we come in.

Ross: Can I ask you a question about money and stuff? Let me give you an analogy here. I remember once climbing a mountain. When you're climbing a high mountain, it's a little bit dangerous. You have a turnaround time. If we don't get to the top by four o'clock, we're going to turn around. Because if we're walking down in the dark, it's really, really dangerous.

Do you have that with the business where you're like, "If we're not starting to make money, or if we're not able to break even within 12 months or two years, then I'm going to quit this and go back to teaching English." How does that work?

Peter: It depends what scale company you're doing, and also how disciplined you are with finances.

[laughter]

Peter: Basically, how much money do you have in the bank, and how long can that sustain you? What is your burn rate? How much money are you spending?

Ross: Cool. Can I ask you then what would you say if there's one thing I really wish I knew or I paid more attention to when I first started this, I should have done this. What do you think that would be?

Peter: I'm a big proponent of the lean startup methodology which is, basically, applying the scientific method to operating a business. You form a hypothesis. You run tests to either validate or invalidate that hypothesis. Then you either proceed if you validate your hypothesis or you change course.

I wish we'd applied that methodology a little bit more rigorously to the early stages of our product development, because of the business environment that we're operating in. We were very cautious in marketing, and putting ourselves out there, and putting our product out there.

Ross: In case someone stole the idea.

Peter: Precisely.

Jake Whiddon on starting your own school

Ross: Hi, Jake.

Jake Whiddon: Hi, Ross.

Ross: You started your own kids' school recently. You've been involved in TOEFL for about 15 years. What made you want to open your own school now at this point in your career?

Jake: Honestly, I felt that I had worked for long enough for big companies. I wanted to have some control over the output of what I was doing. I felt I reached, not a ceiling, but a point where there was nowhere else I could go with what I personally wanted to do with education. That's the reason.

Ross: Jake, how did you choose the people to go into business with? There's so many people you know, but why did you choose the people who work with you now?

Jake: It's really interesting. For a long time, I'd always wanted to start a business with another one of your ex‑guests called Dave Welleble. I realized that we were too similar. We were very similar. What I had to do was find someone who could complement my skills. I've got some skills that come up with creative ideas in trying to have operations experience.

I needed someone who knew how to network, do finances, work with people, and communicate better, and then that person came along. It's someone I'd worked with 10 years ago, and they just came out of the blue and said, "Hey, by the way, I'm actually looking for someone who can work together."

I think the best decision was finding someone who I knew well but can complement the way they work. That old adage of never work with your friends, I don't think that that's true. I think that you should work with your friends.

A point a friend was making to me the other day was, I met this person through working with him, not through being a friend. I knew I could work with him. I think that's worked really, really well.

Ross: How did you go about getting an investor then, because, obviously, opening a school requires a lot of funds?

Jake: You don't find people to invest in your school, they find you. There's a lot of people in China with a lot of money that they don't know how to spend. They need to spend it on something, whether it's a gym or a hairdresser, or something they want to do. For us, it was someone who knew they wanted to do something in education, but they didn't know how to.

They came to us and said, "Can you guys do something with education for us?" Which is what I find most people say. On saying that, though, people are still looking for investors.

The way it happens in China is you're just constantly networking. You never know why the person that you're talking to might be the person who can invest money in you one day. That's something to remember.

Ross: What skills do you think you've learned in other parts of your career that helped you the most in running your own school?

Jake: Well, none. No, I want to say none. No, I say that as a joke. It's amazing how little I knew. I mean, I ran five, four different schools as a [inaudible 08:20. I ran 12 schools as a regional manager. I ran 40 schools as a national manager. I controlled budgets of two million dollars. You know what? A lot of those skills didn't help me at all.

What they helped me with was operations. They helped me with efficiency. They helped me with things, like knowing that you're using classrooms at the right efficiency. You're using teachers at the right amount. You're utilizing people in the right way.

It didn't teach me how to run a business. With all the experience in the world, I have learned more in the last eight months of how much I didn't know.

Ross: What have you had to learn when your started your business? Is there anything that you've never experienced before, or something that you felt, "Oh, this is something brand new to me, and I have to start learning"?

Jake: I'm learning that without a big budget for marketing, for example, we can't go and afford a math/science and blanket. You have to think everything we're thinking. We have to flip it over and think about it from the bottom up. That's probably the first one. The other one is people don't want to work for a company that no one's heard of.

People want to work for big name companies. Who wants to work for a place that has only one school? Lastly is how much relationships matter. The relationship you have obviously with the customer but also mainly with everyone around you, everyone. The Fire Department, the Visa Office, everyone you have to have a relationship with.

You're constantly having to deal with each of these people. We talk about bureaucracy, but bureaucracy might be a good thing because, at least, it means there's some bureaucratic process. Here, it all comes back to relationships.

Ross: Finally, Jake. What advice do you have for teachers thinking about starting their own school?

Jake: Remember, that's my last advice. The industry is never as caught up as you are. Whatever you're thinking, the market is probably two steps behind you. The market needs to be educated to get to where you are first.

Ross: Thanks, Jake. Bye‑bye.

Jake: Bye, Ross.

Ed Dudley on going freelance

Ross: Ed, you obviously started off as a teacher teaching full‑time. Do you want to tell us about how did you go from teaching full‑time to becoming now a freelance teacher trainer and author?

Ed Dudley: You're right. I began teaching full‑time. Then very gradually, I began to be invited to speak at local conferences and to do, perhaps, weekend events for teachers in the local area. Then gradually I was invited to do more work, which involved going to another country for a few days to do some teacher training. I would balance that with my school work.

I would rearrange my classes, or I would get colleagues to cover my classes in my absence, which was, again, a difficult balancing act. There was no masterplan there for me. I simply did it slowly and incrementally over time. The amount of teaching that I was doing gradually reduced. The amount of training and materials writing that I was doing gradually increased.

Ross: There are a lot of teachers considering becoming a freelancer. Are there any tips or recommendation for this group of people?

Ed: It has the potential to cause sleepless nights if you're going to suddenly do it cold turkey. I was in a position where I could try out freelance work, freelance life with a safety net. I tend to have the philosophy that if you focus on doing a good job on what's in front of you, then that will lead to good things in the future.

I've always remembered that it's important to be aware of what your strengths are. If I'm asked or invited to do something that I don't think is aligned with my strengths, then I say "no" to that. It can be tough when you're a freelancer to say "no" to something.

There's a lot of pressure on us to take every opportunity that comes our way. It is important not to bite off more than we can chew as well, and to make sure we do a good job by saying "yes" to the things that we're confident we can do well, and "no" to the things that we don't think we can do well.

Ross: What do you think are the advantages of the freelance life?

Ed: The key advantages, that if you have the mentality or you have the personality that can deal with the uncertainties of the freelance life.

In other words, if you're not too freaked out by the fact that you're not quite sure what's going to be happening 12 months from now, then that gives you an awful amount of freedom. It gives you a chance to focus on your own professional development.

I find that I'm able to do a lot more reading. I'm able to find time to plan my work with much more freedom and less frazzledness than when I was balancing my training work with my full‑time job. It gives you a chance also to make last minute decisions as well.

Very often, you'll find that an opportunity comes up at very short notice to travel somewhere and do some work. You have this really exciting opportunity to go somewhere you've never been before, to work with people you've never met before. That's an incredibly stimulating and enjoyable way to work.