Which Way Do You Go Now?

The game of BodyChance success continues to startle and challenge me.

It’s been 17 years now since I started in 1999, and for the first 15 years we experienced an annual growth of around 17%.

Until we didn’t.

When you have 2 trainees, and you add another two trainees, you grow 100%. That’s easy growth. When you have 128 trainees, and you add 2 more, you’ve barely grown more than 1%! Not so easy.

We are at that place now, and I don’t know the rules.

Which way do we go now?

So there’s another story that feeds into what is happening today…

Back in 2007, a young man walked into the rented studio I was using in Kyoto.

Back in those days, I used to travel down from the mountain with my wife, a skeleton packed into the boot of the car, to deliver an earlier version of our BodyThinking course.* The young man was an American, and we chatted in English at the start of the class. In another corner some of my coffee cup girls were giggling as they looked towards the foreigner – “gaijins” are still a novelty in Japan – when suddenly the young man turned to them and uttered some local dialect in a perfect guttural accent.

The girls screamed, their jaws dropping to the floor.

What??!!

This was not Japanese you learn at University - this was on-the-street, slang-ready Japanese from a true native.

It was Basil Kritzer of course, and the beginning of a historic partnership between us to grow BodyChance into a school 3 times bigger than its closest rival.

And that’s our problem now.

This is a new playing field, with a game whose rules I have to learn while I try to score! Recently, I have not been scoring. One teacher likened BodyChance to a plane that is still being built – AFTER it has taken off!

Yap – BodyChance is a perpetual start-up, a beacon in our profession that says by its very existence: more is possible. You can. We can.

ATSuccess is part of BodyChance, the “division” I built to inspire teachers to get with the game, learn the rules and build businesses that actually work (make money). It’s possible. Basically we teach you what we already know. And yet, there’s more…

What do you do when you get to 150 trainees and then that drops to 128? It’s partly Basil’s doing. Basil is a prolific communicator, writing blogs and emails to his music niche 4 or 5 times a week. Never stopped. And he did it while he was training.

BodyChance is a four year training, so between 2008 and 2012 when he graduated, Basil wrote over 500 Blog posts for Musicians, and continues to do so today. This was a long time to nurture people!

Within a year we announced a new teacher training school – BodyChance Music Pro – and in that year 55 new trainees joined BodyChance. Consider that. In one year we produced a new school larger than any I currently know of in our community. In one year.

Now it’s four years later and those Musicians are slowly graduating, and I am waking up to the fact that we do not have a clear replacement plan. It’s a place many training schools find themselves in today, albeit on a smaller scale.

Our solution? Online education. It’s the future.

You want to know more about that, just watch BodyChance and you will learn a lot. In ATSuccess now we have over a 100 teachers participating online in different ways. We are only beginning.

Recently I decided I wanted to keep my Self, and my constituency of AT teachers and trainees alert. I decided I would start writing every day. Taking a leaf out of Basil’s book.

The ATS Daily. Click here to join it.

I am not worried about BodyChance. I just need better numbers and more focus than I have had in the past. Running a company is no lazy game, that much I do know.

If you want to be successful, you need three things:

1. Happy every day (Happiness leads to success; not success to happiness)
2. Focus and clarity in each moment: what am you doing now and why?
3. I love lists of three! Maybe a lot of love for what you do?

Remember why you are on this planet. JOIN ATS Daily HERE

*BodyThinking is soon to become an online product on sale to AT teachers everywhere. I will keep you in touch with progress in my ATS Daily. Join it here.