Anybody want to open their own school?

Just saw this and thought it would be a great topic for everyone with more than say an ounce of ambition.

It seems that most of us go through the phase where we think it would be a good idea to have our own school. A few do pretty well out of it, but most seem to give it up as not worthwhile eventually - or else get badly burned. I was lucky, the finance fell through and I got to play at being manager until the owner found a new buyer. So I found out how awful it was without having to risk any of my own money.

Anyone else have stories, opinions, questions for tomthorne?

I would also like to know about the ins and outs - which thread was this quoted from?

thanks

I’ll have you know that my school is still profitable old boy. Just not profitable enough to justify the ridiculous workload and shedloads of crap my wife and I have to deal with.

right

so… more info would be good - what kind of crap

are you your own brand or are you a franchise…?

Im interested since both my wife and I are teachers and its seems on the surface a better exchange of our labour if we could open a highly personalized one-two classroom school maybe run out of a base operating business, ie, open cafe and run school from inside, cafe pays rent, school has two classrooms that we dip into for class - or is this a BAD business plan?

I’ve just got to go to meet someone, so I don’t have much time.

The school isn’t a franchise, ‘Mr. Tom’s’. (Yes, I know…). The main crap is the sheer volume of work combined with competing for students with the chain schools. Their brand carries a lot of power.

You’d probably be better off getting advice from the bushiban owners on here who achieved success and grew their business. The trick as I see it is to grow quickly into multiple schools, otherwise you’ll just be doing all the work. You need a simple curriculum, some kind of unique selling point that the Taiwanese buy into, and the ability to sell.

Upon my arrival on the is island I invested in a school and worked as one of the teachers for a year before I realized that this would have been the case. It was definitely profitable, and would have allowed me a comfortable lifestyle as long as I included the salary I was bringing in for teaching there. But without myself teaching it was not a viable long-term investment so I cashed out within a year for a small gain, but to me it was a loss when I consider all the extra-time I put in. But I guess I was lucky since right after I left there some shady dealing got uncovered and the remaining partner (besides the shady one) got burned completely.

I found this to be the key, however the investment was too large and too risky for me to consider. So instead I put my money and time in different opportunities and it has greatly outperformed anything I would have ever achieved expanding buxibans.

Which were…?

obviously something more legal and less complicated than buxibans…

:ponder:

… investing in the combat zone and selling women for cash?

I have opened two small schools here and since closed both of them due to always having to cut prices to compete. And am currently looking to relocate, keep it small and diverse. Unfortunately there are so many people cutting prices to rock bottom here that it’s hard to turn a profit and the mentality of the Taiwanese people is to get a discount for everything. Sometimes I want to get out of the business and just sell food because they are always hungry haha. :laughing:

I also feel that foreigners who come here and teach for almost any low charity fee are just screwing up the market big time. The minimum for private lessons should be NT500-600 but closer to NT800. They pay NT1,000 or more for music lessons etc. so why should we be any different, we work hard and besides they need English a lot more than piano lessons. The locals cut our prices because they know they can. Personally I have no respect for people who want me to teach them or their kids for almost nothing, because them cutting the prices so much shows a disrespect to me.

The thinking here is to always get the best deal for these services and then turn around and go buy a BMW. BS, but we somehow just gotta put up with the tightness and arrogance. Remember, Taiwan is actually a quite wealthy market, the demand is high because they have to speak English. Life is a beach. :sunglasses:

You have described the situation accurately. If I was you I’d look at doing another business if you could since you are in Taiwan but you could also teach in your spare time.

I think it’s probably more profitable to just freelance or teach on-site, whether that’s running a group class at someone’s place (you would need to be careful about running them out of your own apartment), at a company or as some after school programme at schools. The overheads and lease commitment in a small buxiban would mean you’d need a large number of students to make what you could working for someone else or doing something like what I suggested. The downside to on-site work is travel time.

I think the buxiban model as it currently stands (including buxibans run by Taiwanese), is only feasible in the long term if wages continue to fall at, or faster than, the drop in fee expectations of parents; 2) foreigners and parents don’t start to realise in larger numbers that they can set up their own private group classes and cut the laobans out of the market. I have run these classes myself, and I know others who do. It’s my intention to do a lot more of this in the future when I’m married and my current contract expires.

Take an example where you have eight students and charge them 150NT/hour each. That’s a very low rate, but let’s run with it for this example. It’s a lot cheaper than a lot of buxibans, so it’s a plus for the parents. At 1,200NT/hour, it’s as much as double what a lot of foreigners make here (and there would be precious few who would earn anywhere near that working for someone else), so it’s a plus for them. How long is it before enterprising parents start setting these up, even if foreigners don’t have the initiative themselves? Like I said, I know parents who have done just that. Actually, they’re even smarter because they don’t offer a rate per student, they just offer a flat rate that is a bit higher than what a buxiban offers. A foreigner could have an ARC job for the bare minimum number of hours and then make up the rest this way. You’d be looking at buxibans losing probably 50% of their customers this way. Could any buxiban afford to lose about 50% of its students? Highly unlikely, even for the really big chains.

I’ll repeat: the buxiban model is a dinosaur.

but, you’d be on shaky ground visa-wise if you didn’t have an APRC/JFRV. There is also the problem of parents making life difficult for you if piss them off in some way. Especially if they are rich and have friends in high places.

Funk500: You wouldn’t be on shaky ground without one of those visas. Your chance of getting done by a spot check is absolutely minute unless your neighbours saw dozens of kids coming and going every day. That’s why I said you’d do it elsewhere.

As to pissing parents off and them doing something to you, firstly, I don’t think that situation would arise if you agreed about a whole lot of things at the outset and pretty well stuck to them. Secondly, if you were really worried about it, you could give an alias. Thirdly, how would anyone prove it? I really think it’s a very, very tiny chance, if only because it would ruin it for them – if they burnt one foreigner, word would get out like wildfire and they’d find it very hard to get a replacement. In 99% of cases, this would be win-win. Anyway, like I said, by the time I really start to make this kind of thing my focus (and I’d be looking at a rate of more than 150NT/student unless we were talking large numbers, and I certainly wouldn’t accept a flat rate of less than 1,500NT/hour for a group at an absolute stretch), I will be married.

Married or not. You’ll attract attention with kids coming in and out. Someone somewhere is gonna get pissed off sooner or later. Jealousy, loss of face whatever they want to call it. What happens if you get called on a safety inspection? no fire alarms and so on?

I’m not saying don’t do it. I’m sure many have had the same idea before but you would need to be very very careful.

Funk: That’s why I keep saying you’d do it at someone else’s house, at someone’s company or even set up an agreement with a school to run an extra-curricular programme. I wouldn’t run it out of my house. Not only could that cause problems with neighbours, it would also mean my students definitely would know who I am and where I live, and it would also mean that I’d have to keep my place a lot tidier!

No one is going to give a toss if eight kids and a foreigner arrive and leave twice per week at a local’s house (or better yet, for the upstairs/back room of their store), especially if all the kids live in the same apartment complex. Let them take care of the guanxi.

My wife and ran a small school out of our house for about 9 years. It was nothing too big. We never had too many students coming and going at one time. We, too, didn’t want to bother the neighbors with all the scooters arriving and leaving the small lane. It’s good to get a couple of the neighbors as your students and be on good terms with them first before you consider opening something in your own home. As well, your home is no longer your home, it’s a place with people coming in and out on a regular basis. About charging 150 per student: I think that’s too little. Charge them more and give them more: smaller class sizes, interesting curriculum, and personal attention to the parents. One of you has to be the PR person to deal with parents. It was a good experience and gave me a lot of opportunities to try out new teaching methods and be creative. We decided to close the classes at home in order to have more time to spend with our kids in the evening. I had a good time and would recommend it.

If only that were true…

Thanks for the information. I was merely offering an example that even at a very low price it would still work out better for everyone concerned than going through a normal buxiban. I used to charge 250NT/hour per student and did indeed provide more as you suggested. I think there are two roads to take: quality or quantity. Interestingly, they probably both work out about the same in terms of money unless you can run large, low-cost after school programmes.

I’d be interested to know how the economics and logistics of it worked for you. How much did you charge? How many students (per class, and in total) did you have? What sort of money did you make overall from this, and how many hours were involved (for the two of you)? My future wife would most likely act as the PR and/or I’d use contacts within the education system and businessmen contacts I have, plus cold-calling/marketing directly to a lot of companies. What sort of curricula did you teach? I’m fairly ambivalent about using a textbook as I think that’s largely been done to death and there’s a certain fatigue from students in that respect. For kids, I was thinking either specifically of some sort of reading programme with activities based around that, or maybe teaching a topic in English (for instance, social studies as that was one of my methods as a teacher before I came to Taiwan and I have a lot more interest in history and geography than English in and of itself) or possibly integrating some art into the curriculum somehow as my fiancee has a background in design. For adults, I was thinking largely about corporate training with a kind of focus on their particular field or general business English and/or conversation.

funkymonkey: Okay, maybe not no one, but if the parent whose house you used had a good relationship with her neighbours, you’d be fine. I know people who do this and have been doing it for some time.

There is always one neighbor who enjoys ruining other peoples lives…

This conversation has become very interesting people and it’s cool to hear your different views. A few years ago I opened my home to all kinds of students and have had a couple hundred in the door. Adult group lessons 6-10 people, kids 8-10 in the group. Very few problems with neighbors because we keep a good rapport with them.

However someone did call the cops eventually and they showed up at our door, thank God they didn’t come when the place was full of kids and parents. My wife just denied everything and they took off, haven’t seen them since. We think it was a local school that called.

If you keep the groups small you can do it almost anywhere. My problem is that most of them come from our immediate area which is a limited market. To travel and do the group thing isn’t cost effective if the fee is too low. This summer I’ve had groups contact me from all over Taipei county but they want a super low fee. Well, I have to pay for transportation, parking, time etc. so I declined. One woman wanted me to go up Yang Ming mountain but she doesn’t want to pay squat for it. People here can really be selfish. They don’t think about the foreigner, just their cost.

Anyway, there are many different scenarios for teaching under the radar and it’s good to be flexible with the location if possible. Key is keeping the overhead and travel time-costs down. :sunglasses: