Evan Carmichael tells Abel, who runs a private education business, that charging more lets you hire staff and escape daily tasks. A salsa school that raised prices, delegated teaching, and automated admin work grew from 300 to 5,000 students. Test a 30% price increase and delegate gradually.
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You need to charge enough for your products or services so that you could take yourself out of running your business and focus your time on building your business. Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael, your friend in all things entrepreneurship, and today I'm answering a question from one of my readers, Abel, who's in the private education business and has been teaching people with her business since September of 1998 and wrote in asking how she can get more money to grow her business. Thanks for the question, Abel. I know with this kind of business it's very time-intensive, right? It's you going in and teaching, and I know it can feel like you're spending all your time in the business and teaching and not able to do things to grow the company, and money would solve a lot out of that problem. This kind of business can be bootstrapped, and you've been doing it and you've been surviving since '98, so congrats to you. But really, if you go out and try to find money for this business, it's going to be your full-time job. It's going to be hard to do. You're not going to get the terms that you want, and your best bet is to try to do it yourself. And I really feel that with this company, You're not charging enough. You're not charging enough for the value that you're providing. And if you're going into these, you know, classrooms or homes and doing your teaching, you need to find a way that you can make enough money, charge more, so you can afford to hire instructors to go in, reduce how much time you have to spend on it, so you can actually focus on building the business. I want to give you a quick example. The salsa dance school that I'm involved in here in Toronto, it's kind of similar. It's private education. We're not teaching kids, but it's teaching adults how to dance salsa. And when I first met the owner, she was doing almost everything herself. She was doing all the admin work, almost all the teaching. 7 days a week she was teaching. And you can imagine, you can only do that for so long before you go crazy and you burn out and you start to hate your business. And so I helped her delegate that work, automate some of that work, where now she's teaching 3 days a week and handed off a lot of the admin tasks. And she loves it a lot more. And the business has been able to grow. When she first started, she had 300 students every semester, which would be every 3 or 4 months. 300 students. She was renting from different locations, and now she'll get up to 5,000 students and has her own central location as well as satellite locations that she rents from. And the business keeps growing, and she's able to spend more time building the business instead of being in the business teaching. And it comes from making sure that you have a model with your company that you can afford to spend that time growing your business. You have to be able to charge enough for whatever you're selling so you can afford to hire people to go in and do the work. You can't do all the work yourself if you want to grow a successful enterprise. You've gotta find people to help you, and you've gotta make sure that you're paying them appropriate wages, and that comes from having higher prices for your business. Most entrepreneurs don't charge enough. You gotta test your pricing. You could probably increase your prices 30% without having a massive impact on your business from losing customers. But it'll definitely help your top line. So I encourage you to try to check that out. Increase your prices, look at ways to delegate some of the work, look at ways to automate some of the work so you can spend your time working how to grow your business and running it instead of just spending all your time in it. I know it's hard and it's not gonna happen overnight. It is a process. It could take a little bit of time to get going, but start, start small. Test it out. Try one thing and then try another one thing and another one thing, and eventually you'll start finding you have more time to keep doing these things as you build your team around you. Good luck. Keep me posted. I want to hear about your progress. For those of you watching, if you like the video, if you agree, please give it a thumbs up below. I always love seeing those come in. And I'd love to hear what you have to think about this video or question for your own business. Feel free to leave it in the comment section below. I always read those. One of the first things I do when I open my computer, see those comments come in. So I appreciate it and I'll see you on the next episode.
