Following a recent FB post about getting fewer students since Qualiopi, I thought I’d share with you how I got my students in Q1 and Q2 of 2022.
Qualiopi was supposed to make sure that only “quality” training organisations were able to provide CPF training, but in reality, it’s been a massive administrative load that’s very difficult to manage for small organisations, and we all know that CPF factories are providing low-quality training but have the admin staff to make all the paperwork look good.
In my opinion, if you try to compete with those CPF factories, you will get nowhere. They are offering a lot of e-learning time (I have no idea what their platforms are like so I won’t comment on that) with a few hours of teacher-time, usually with a badly paid teachers, who may or may not be experienced or good at what they do.
As you can’t compete with these big CPF operations, you shouldn’t be competing on price alone. (By the way, I know that many of those CPF factories are not even that cheap when it comes down to what a student actually gets for their money!)
Marketing and positioning are both key to be able to grow your business, distance yourself from all the CPF noise, and get the prices that enable you to make money: making money as a teacher is not wrong by the way! It should be a priority.
You are running a business, not a charity.
In my business, I work really hard on marketing: I have to be consistent and I've had to be patient. Growing a business doesn’t happen overnight, it takes a long time. What you do now will yield results in 6 months time, and if you continue, you will see those results cumulate.
Here’s an overview of my 2022 Q1 & Q2 turnover breakdown by source so you can see exactly how different clients came to me.
By far the biggest chunk is from doing workshops or webinars. These are free mini-trainings, that showcase what I do and what it’s like to work with me. I have done them in-person and online and I am still getting work from the very first one I did.
Next you can see referrals: I don’t actually have a specific referral scheme in place, although I think it might be a good idea to do a promotion for my former clients, to get them to refer me.
You can see that company is another big chunk: these are my corporate clients, most of whom I’ve worked with for several years. They tend to send their employees to me for CPF training, as well as asking me to do other training that they pay for directly.
Linkedin is small part of this chart, but can I see in Q3, that the number is growing steadily.
As you can see, most of the revenue comes from active marketing, rather than people just stumbling across my training programmes on the CPF site or on Google.
This chart doesn’t tell the whole story: for example, a big chunk of the workshop revenue this year came because someone I met at a networking group asked me to do a workshop for a group she’s a member of, which led to an HR manager who attended the workshop signing up to my email list and following me on Linkedin, which resulted in a huge contract 6 months later.
Other people find me through a referral, follow me on Linkedin, sign up for my lead magnet and get on my email list, and eventually sign up for a training. All of these marketing efforts - workshops, networking, referrals, Linkedin, lead magnets, my email list - are connected.
In case you're wondering, the teacher section is revenue from my teachers’ courses. It’s a tiny portion of the total income, but I really believe in helping other teachers build their own businesses so that we can offer something better than those big CPF factories.
If you’re interested in doing my lead magnet course to help you build your email list, instead of 97€, you'll pay only 67€ until the end of August with the code SUMMER22.
And if you’d like to join the "Kickstart your teaching business" programme, where you’ll dive into marketing tactics, how to find corporate clients, how to leverage the training system and lots more, click here to get on the waiting list and I’ll let you know next time I open it.