M02.04 Niche Communities

In 2008, at the first Congress in Lugarno, I remember sitting on the grass with Pamela Blanc, wondrously sharing my recent discovery at BodyChance of creating a membership system. In fact, anyone who would listen faced a barrage of excited biz talk from me at that Congress: hastily convened meetings that many an odd passerby decided to join. I didn't care: "Pull over a chair!" I had a story to tell to anyone who would listen… (and I am still at it today!) My story then was this: get them to stay. Sign them up for a year. Don't compromise, be brave. Well – it turned out I went chicken. Shortly before 1 am Monday morning (New York time), on September 15th, Lehman Brothers Holdings announced it would file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and over in Meguro Tokyo – a few months later – an Alexander experiment crashed to ground. In March 2008 I had made the courageous decision to shut out people from BodyChance. Shut out? I simply raised the bar on what we insisted: this was a one year program, and you signed up for that long, or you went someone else. It worked. People signed up. We went from 10 members to 60 members in the space of 6 months., and the money poured it. I actually started to get my salary for the first time ever. Then Lehman brothers crashed, people got scared, and by January 2009 we also were getting scared. No-one stayed. They left, most after three months, some even earlier. Our most sacred and successful product had been one-to-one individual lessons – the mainstay of most Alexander Technique practices today. Which was odd for me, given that one reason STAT refused my first application to run a school (they refused my second application too) was because I only taught in groups. Yet here I was advocating a system of individual lessons. However, there was grace to be found in the collapse of our business that year: one category of students stayed. Remarkably, hardly any of them left after the Lehman Brothers collapse, and I discovered an eye-opening truth that changed the course of BodyChance's business, and it will change yours too if you truly let it sink in… The people who stayed were the ones whose membership involved group classes, not individual lessons. It was the same monthly cost, but most people chose the individual lessons. However, a few wanted to attend groups – and most remarkably, as all the people enrolled in our individual lessons ran screaming from our studio, our "group" people kept quietly returning month after month. Remarkable? I thought so, and marveled at this new discovery… It was around that time I read Made to Stick and started to think differently about developing BodyChance. Most Alexander Technique teachers are obsessed with finding new students, not too many are obsessed about methods to keep the ones they have. What I stumbled upon after the Lehman Brothers collapse was a system to do just that: build a community. Now that will be hard, but not impossible, if you only teach one-to-one lessons. I will be digging down into this a lot more when we get to Step 4 about your Service Product, but for now you need to choose a niche that will happily conjugate together. Again – we are talking the ideal strategy here. Not everyone can accomplish this, and if you can not there are other things you can do. This blog is about achieving the impossible – building a business from scratch with hardly a dime to your name. Big, dumb companies have money, so they don't need to be clever. You do. And clever means picking the niche that has the built in advantage that people within it like to talk to each other, hang out together and yes – study the Alexander Technique in groups.