How Persistence Pays In Hard Times In Business

Photo by Austin Walker on Unsplash

Right out of college, I worked for a forestry company that specialized in milling cedar logs into cedar roofing products, shakes, and shingles. When I started work, the country was deep into a recession. Not as many people were building or roofing houses, so the cedar shake and shingle industry was in the tank. I was expecting a Shortage of Work layoff notice, but the long-term employees told me not to worry.

You see, rather than shutting down the mill, laying off employees, and waiting for the next bump in the market, my employers saw it differently. They knew that although “fewer” folks were building homes, many still were. A decline did not mean zero.

So, here is what happened at the start of that crisis:

• My employer’s competitors, as per usual, shut their mills down and laid-off their workers.
• My employer did the opposite: they suppressed their pricing enough to keep their mills running and everyone employed. They made no profit for… nine months.

Nine months later, the downturn receded and housing demand picked back up. Here is what happened:

• The competitors scrambled to find seasoned workers, then had to fire up their mills and then tried to reestablish sales relationships, then tried to sell again. After almost a year, things finally got up and running again.
• My employer was already operating full-on, selling shingles and shakes left, right and center. The product sold for top dollar and they had a clear run of the market for at least a year. They made gazillions of dollars in profits by embracing their current reality and aggressively preparing for the recovery. The employees were super happy.

Given this COVID mess, we advocate adopting an attitude that will allow your School to move into the market with gusto when this Corona crisis inevitably recedes.

• Learn, really learn, how to sell Distance Ed. You might find that post-COVID, a blended learning platform might be ideal (think University of Phoenix).
• Take this time to understand what Career Education is really all about. Business aside, it is about helping people get more congruent between what they love and what they do for a living. It’s about helping people get a leg up in life.
• Market really hard, but do so using low- and no-cost tactics. The term was coined Guerilla Marketing years ago by Jay Conrad Levinson and that basic work largely holds today.

The Continental Army defeated an army thirty times its size by having two advantages within a dire environment. First, they held to the cause. Second, they used deceptive, sneaky low- and no-cost military tactics. They whipped the Brits big time.

What We are Doing to Help our Career School Clients and ‘Almost Clients’

Remote Admissions Pathway

We’re in this together; we’re here for you. We have developed a software platform called Remote Admissions Pathway. It will get your Admissions team running best-practice quickly in a remote environment. This will really help. We’ll give this away to you, first come, first served until this COVID mess blows over.

To get the software, contact:

Sterling Simpson at [email protected]

Scott Spitolnick at [email protected]

Tom King at [email protected]

Or call us at 250-391-9494 and we will patch you in.