A Terrible Horrible No Good Offer

I've been going on and on about how important is your offer to your students. Your "offer" is your product: when, where, how much etc.

Your service involves communicating Alexander's discovery of course, BUT…

People can love your service, hate your product.

My effort has a primary purpose in bringing you to understand the value of investing in your own business education. Success depends on increasing your business intelligence - I started ATSuccess to help teachers do just that.

Anyway.

Instead of going on and on - today I have a sweet story.

ATA - as I wrote previously - was named in honour of the deceased Don Burton, and was the second incarnation of BodyChance. (The first was in Sydney in the 80s). It started out great.

Before I showed up, Bruce Fertman and his Alliance team had been coming to Tokyo giving workshops for 10 years. Trouble is, the right-wing Japanese governments of the time were xenophobic - they do not want foreigners coming to Japan in droves.

It's understandable, given the history.

From 1633 until Commodore Perry sailed into Tokyo harbour with his gun boats in 1853, Japan ran Sakoku (鎖国). Sakoku was such a severe, isolationist policy. A Japanese person could face the death penalty if they even tried to leave Japan!

Foreigners were banned, and those permitted in were restricted to two ports. Wow.

However, unlike the current buffoon in the White House, Japanese are much subtler about these policies today.  However, the spirit of Sakoku lingers. Today, it is hard to even notice. Certainly more gracious. However, the message is still:

Foreigners stay out.

No way was Bruce, Hezzie or any of the other foreign AT teachers of the time, ever going to get permission to settle in Japan.

Unless, of course, you married a Japanese woman.

Which I promptly did.

And the Japanese government replied: "OK Jeremy, we let you live here."

That's how my school started.

12 deeply dedicated students signed on to a full-time training over 4 years giving me an instant cash flow of 10 million yen. About $100,000 USD annually - enough to rent premises, run the school and support my young family.

All was dandy for a few years, then things started to turn. Some of the 12 dropped out, went to part-time, or took time off. I was not replacing them as fast as they were leaving.

Familiar story?

I had the incredible shrinking school, and I was running scared.

I wrote an article in DIRECTION Journal about this period, and I won't repeat it all here. The point today is what happened - MIRACULOUSLY - when I changed my offer.

I had been building the audience of people to whom I made my offer.

BUT NONE WERE COMING.

Why?

I had a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad offer.

It was basically this: pay $10,000 a year for 4 years and don't expect a job at the end of it. Wow. It was amazing I got ANYONE, and not surprising I got so few.

So I changed the offer.

After a lot of intellectual wrangling and writhing, I came up with the concept of THREE courses, instead of one. Each was 2 years, and each could be done separately or concurrently. And each offered you a certificate and a chance to earn money.

The three courses were BodyThinking, ThinkingBody and Teaching Methods. Since then I've added Books Course and CareerThinking/ATSuccess. Now five courses.

At the beginning - because of the work involved in making it a convincing offer - I just launched BodyThinking. It was a 2 year certificate course, and you qualified to run a one day "informational" workshop at the end. In fact, to qualify, you had to organise your own workshop with a minimum of 5 people.

This is still true today.

And it was incredible. People flocked to join the course. The money rolled in, I began hiring teachers anew, we moved to a more central location, and rebranded the school as BodyChance.

Today BodyChance is 3 times bigger than the second biggest Alexander school in the world. And it all started with finding the right offer. It still comes down to that.

And it will come down to that in your practise.

An offer is a complex baby, and on my 60Day course in October, you can start the process of building your business intelligence, to make offers that students actually say yes to.

ATSuccess 60Day Foundations Course

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