Start small
Many people dream of opening their own English School and Japan makes it extremely easy to start a business. Here, the costs associated with starting up an English School can be minimal.
My first piece of advice: KEEP your current job. Grow student numbers/the school in free time.
For us, that meant opening up two lessons (1 kindergarten and 1 elementary) on Thursday nights and 2 lessons on Saturday morning.
When those 4 lessons became full, we opened up more lessons on the same days. Finally, when we couldn’t add more to Thursday we started opening lessons on another weekday.
When we were making more money from the school than Dave’s job, he quit the YMCA. I had already quit because I had had our first baby.
Even if we started a new school now - we would STILL just open up 2 days (1 weekday and Saturday) and grow the school the same way. It’s reasonably safe to assume that within a year you could have 4 days open and within 2 years, 6 days open. This is the advantage of gradual progress - the timelines remain variable.
My 2nd piece of advice: Keep Initial Costs Low.
At first, your biggest expense will be rent. If you can begin in your house or in community centers, your costs will be minimal. Take us as an example - when we moved house we KNEW we wanted the option to open a school and we kept that in mind when looking at places to move. We made sure to specify in the contract that opening a school and/or running lessons was OK.
Dave and Amy English School began in the community rooms at the bottom of a 35 story apartment building. We lived on the 22nd floor and as residents, could rent the rooms by the hour for 700 yen an hour. No-one else used the rooms so we could easily schedule as we wanted. We grew from 2 days a week to 5 by the time we left - thrown out (that's another story and another blog!).
Again, when we moved from the 22nd floor to a house, we told the real estate agent we would be living there and running a business. We moved a 20 minute bike ride away and used the opportunity to open the 2nd location of our school.
Naturally, although we recommend STARTING out in your house or a community center, it’s impossible to stay there if you really want to step up growth. You can stay of course, just realize that growth is limited. It’s all up to you and there are lots of positive and negative points for both.
As for us, 3 of our schools are now in commercial premises 30 seconds on foot from the station with BIG signs outside. The 4th school is the corner apartment on a busy road with it’s own separate entrance opposite an elementary school. Being in good locations with easy access and signs means we don’t spend money on advertising - so even in a growing state, there are areas you can still save money and use that elsewhere.
Currently we’re pouring a lot of time and effort into the back-end of the business, our image, the brand, the look. The next level of growth for us is stabilizing what we have to be rock-solid. In fact, the current outward-facing project is updating our signage to match the new look! See the accompanying images for examples of the current state of the facades of the schools.
