Help me help a friend - fastlane for English teacher?

[tomzestatlu]

There´s one friend I can thank to for showing me a way how to think about money and business from different point, that I didn´t know before. We have known each other for two years and I have been watching her actions closely and we are discussing her activities a lot.

Her main venture is English teaching. We live in Czech republic, Central Europe. From my experience, I can say that this area of education hasn´t developed well yet. A lot of school teachers use archaic approach for teaching and a lot of them haven´t mastered English language enough (for example they have horrible pronunciation). I don´t have any info about private agencies, because I have never used them. But I would say there are plenty of them on the market right now. The big problem of this country is that a lot of people still don´t speak English. Not only older ones, but also younger ones (because schools are very ineffective and English isn´t part of people´s life enough).

My friend doesn´t work for any agency and her problem isn´t money earned per hour (she is actually very expensive teacher). Her problem is that she is still exchanging time for money. Her goal is to take the opportunity of online world, scale up her business and don´t be reliant on being paid for hourly work.

For last two years, she has been member of some online "women entrepreneur" group. She choose her clients mainly from this group (some of those women made it and have enough money to pay for expensive teacher). She networked hard in this group and also she paid for expensive business coach, who is from this environment. Personally, I am not fan of this group and I see it more like a fraud. It´s literally group of few hundreds women, who claim to help each other. But at the end, they are only earning money on each other, because everything they do is just sell products/services one to each other in the group. And some of them got rich (her business coach).

My friend had already paid enough money to her coach, but I don´t see any utility coming from it. I think good coach might help her, but definitely not someone from mentioned business group. Also she was in some expensive program from some international "woman entrepreneur superstar" with no actual outcome. Her goal was to move from local customers to international waters, but I don´t think she has really succeeded. She had been living with natural speaker for many years and she has got perfect accent, but the fact that she actually isn´t natural speaker might disqualify her.

I think that there are some qualities of her that differ her from other teachers a lot. At first, her goal isn´t just to teach English, but to coach language learning (for example a lot of people are shy with using English and she helps them to overcome it). She has got very individual approach to everybody. Her references are extremely good. I would say that she has a gift of very calming voice and being able to speak with people about their internal feelings, they love to open to her. It almost looks like some people use her lessons as psychotherapy. I think that if she wasn´t a teacher, she could easily earn money as coach.

Things that she actually tried or does:

• She has got good online presentation
• She is active on Facebook in several groups, including her own (which has about 250 members)
• She tried to be active on other social media platforms (she did some reels etc.)
• She has been interviewed several times in business podcasts. Also she hosted few interviews with other entrepreneurs
• She created few online courses (topics were related to entrepreneurship, marketing)
• She created a program to transform local entrepreneurs to international environment
• She created some other programs and email campaigns (her programs definitely aimed some niche, for example lerning with "all senses")
• She doesn´t accept any new students except those who are willing to pay big money for VIP language coaching

What I see as her big advatages:

• Being very trustworthy, calming and enjoyable and also being able to "connect" to different people
• Knowledge of many tools required for marketing
• Knows how to effectively use some social media
• Being actually better teacher than 99% of others in this country
• Wanting to take and opportunity of online world and effort to do her business internationally, not locally

She has been struggling recently, because she can´t find a way how to scale up her venture. She has reached the maximum of what can be reached as a teacher (abundance of clients and really high hourly rate). But that´s not the goal, the goal is to stop exchanging time for money.

Honestly I have been always pesimistic about posibilities of scaling up business in this area. Maybe she could take the advantage of opportinies coming from her other qualities and change the direction of her venture. But her main qualities are applicable mostly on personal level.

I really wish her becoming succesful and I would be glad to find some ideas how to help her. So I ask you for some advices or ideas that might level-up her venture.

Can something be done differently? Better?

Thanks you!

 

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