Speaker 1 (00:08):
Hi everybody. This is Greg Meiklejohn, a co-founder of enrollment resources and our senior VP strategy, Sterling Simpson. Hi Sterling.

Speaker 2 (00:19):
How are you doing?

Speaker 1 (00:21):
Good doing well. Today we're going to talk about how tiny little habits and tiny little oversights can create a difference of potentially millions of dollars in the fortunes of a career school or any school for that matter. You've had a lot of experience with this, haven't you? What are your thoughts on Kaizen and performance improvement?

Speaker 2 (00:48):
Well, I, I'm a big fan of the whole Kaizen principle because instead of trying to go after like the big, well and doing too much, or going after something that might be a far away goal, you're, you're identifying areas where you can improve incrementally and it's lower hanging fruit. So you find a number of different areas where you can improve just a small percentage point, but you add it all together and you get a large measurable improvement. So I find that's a much better way to go after improving.

Speaker 1 (01:18):
Yeah. So in this podcast, we're going to demonstrate some, some examples of that and give people watching this visual on how tiny and perceptible changes can transpire. I've been reading this book, which I've just, it's like hand in glove for our company called atomic habits. And it's a tremendous book that basically the math that was done was demonstrated as if somebody in broad terms improves 1% a day. At the end of the year, they'll have improved 30, 37 times. If they go and improve a bad habit, 1% once a day, there'll be three tenths of 1% after a year. So it's a double-edged sword is the nature of habits as it relates to process improvement. Before we start, I'll just tell a story from this book. It's a story of the British cycling team. And up until the early two thousands, this program, they were abysmal.

Speaker 1 (02:25):
They never won a tour de France. They never won a world cup. They never won in the Olympics. They were horrendous. They were so bad. In fact, that not only would the top bicycle companies not sponsor them, they wouldn't even sell them bikes because they were afraid of that association with such a crappy team. But this guy, his name was Dan Brailsford came along as the new technical director and he instituted a a process called is my language, but it's an aggregation of minimal improvements, minuscule improvements, aggregation of minuscule improvements. And it's again, not 1% per day kind of thing. And so here's some of the things that he did, which initially people found were laughable things like having his cyclists, wearing heated over shorts in order to keep optimize the temperature of their leg muscles and in turn, allowing them to fire it.

Speaker 1 (03:31):
When cycling on the inside of the tech trucks, where they worked on the bikes he had painted the insides painted Arctic white so that they could see dust and dirt and smudges and they could clean it so that it was like an operating room. They had nutritionists and doctors come in and, and which is very common now in pro sports, which is to create an optimum carb loading and, and a nutrition function for the athletes. So there are all of these little, 1% improvements that unto themselves were just really, almost nothing. But when you started to stack them up, holy cow, they started to win. I think last year, the first sprint and forever just won the tour de France. And they, they were meddling heavily at the Olympics and the last two or three Olympics and winning world cups. And it's just all attuned to this 1% phenomenon. So without further ado, let's why don't you bring up your screen and we're going to role play a couple of situations to actually teach people how this works.

Speaker 2 (04:48):
Excellent, Greg. So they're just going to get started doing this loss revenue finder on your beauty school, a three campus beauty school that you have, and

Speaker 1 (05:01):
That's, Greg's beauty,

Speaker 2 (05:03):
Greg's beauty. And so at your beauty school can you tell me how many inquiries do you get in a typical month?

Speaker 1 (05:14):
Oh, about 160 a month.

Speaker 2 (05:18):
Okay, excellent. And so of those inquiries, how many come through internet channels?

Speaker 1 (05:25):
About 80%.

Speaker 2 (05:28):
And how many admissions staff do you guys at?

Speaker 1 (05:31):
I have to between three campuses.

Speaker 2 (05:34):
Okay. Excellent. And how many new enrollments to get in a year?

Speaker 1 (05:41):
Mm, yeah, the three campuses. About 145.

Speaker 2 (05:46):
And what is the average tuition?

Speaker 1 (05:49):
It's a $19,000.

Speaker 2 (05:52):
Excellent. Excellent. Okay. So next step, we're going to look at your admissions funnel. So we won't look at the different steps and the rate that people move through these steps. So if you don't have this information on hand just give me an estimate, give me your best guess. And I can help you work through this to try to come to a number that you feel comfortable with. And always remember, we could go back and populate this with update numbers later. So for now, we'll just do the,

Speaker 1 (06:19):
Well, I can tell you that a frustration of mine is that we get all these internet leads that come in off the website and stuff, and we're in beauty directory and stuff. And the contact rate with these people is really, I'm not happy at all. I just get so angry at my reps for just not pursuing these properly. Maybe one in five we might get ahold of. Oh, wow. Okay.

Speaker 2 (06:47):
Okay. Yeah. And so of the people you make contact with, how many of them are your reps able to book a tour or appointment with?

Speaker 1 (06:56):
Well, there's so few of them that they do really well. I would say probably three quarters of them agree to come in for a visit or have a second phone call. That kind of thing. Next quarters,

Speaker 2 (07:09):
That side of it. And

Speaker 1 (07:11):
No, no three quarters. Sorry, not

Speaker 2 (07:15):
That's even better. Wow. Too. Very above average. How many show up to these appointments of the two?

Speaker 1 (07:21):
That's really, it'd be half.

Speaker 2 (07:26):
Okay, excellent. And then out of that, half that show up, how many actually ended up applying?

Speaker 1 (07:34):
Oh you know, it's pretty good. It's about two thirds.

Speaker 2 (07:39):
Okay.

Speaker 1 (07:41):
And about 80% of those get accepted because we have really good financial system. Yeah. And almost all of them. We have a six, six week rolling intake, almost all of them. Like 85, 90% will actually be

Speaker 2 (07:58):
Wow, but let's go to 85, just be conservative, but that's still great. 

Speaker 1 (08:03):
Okay. Thank you.

Speaker 2 (08:05):
So this is excellent. So if your school is

Speaker 1 (08:09):
Greg's beauty

Speaker 2 (08:12):
And contact center and we're going to do so, let's see what we got here.

Speaker 1 (08:27):
Well, that's crazy. I don't believe that. Wow. I'm not leaking that much revenue.

Speaker 2 (08:35):
Well, let's take a look at this. So on your marketing side, it actually says you guys are quite efficient because you have exactly the amount of leads you should for the number of reps. You should handle 80 leads a month, and you have 160 leads for your two reps.

Speaker 1 (08:51):
So you're just saying to me, is that they're just not doing a very good job in terms of converting those leads is what you're saying.

Speaker 2 (08:58):
Exactly. They D they have no excuse because they're not being overworked. They have the optimal amount of leads

Speaker 1 (09:03):
Or underworked

Speaker 2 (09:05):
Or underworked. Yeah, that's optimal. So they should just be following best practices. And that will speak to what we got here in the next steps, because, oh, 0.6 million, you may think it's a large number, but if you really think about it, your, your contact rate is so low that if we were able to improve it, there's so much my left on the table here. And we could live with

Speaker 1 (09:29):
What you're saying is I'm going to get, if I improve my contact rate, best practice, I'm going to add 140,000 a month to my revenue for my school.

Speaker 2 (09:42):
Th that is a possibility. But what I like to look at is let's do it incrementally because we don't have to hit that whole thing at once to get that revenue, we could look at chipping away and getting half of that, a third of that in all these different areas, because there's more than one area to focus on too. But yeah, that is how much is possibly available right there. And that's created because it's below best practice. It's actually lower hanging fruit when you want to improve beyond best practice. Like if you want to increase your book tour rate, which is excellent, right. That will be a lot of work because it's a dimension returns to get every percentage point above 75.

Speaker 1 (10:20):
Oh, I see. So what you're saying is get a good chunk of it and well, let's go and can we redo this then and see what we do.

Speaker 2 (10:29):
Okay. And so remember that number 2.66,

Speaker 1 (10:33):
That's a nasty number Sterling.

Speaker 2 (10:36):
So what do you want to test? You want to see what your contact it would be if you were right here on the cusp of best practice.

Speaker 1 (10:43):
So in other words, if I have like a, I dunno, 120 internet leads, I can get like three quarters of them or no, let's say 60%. Let's say two. Yeah, let's do that.

Speaker 2 (11:00):
Okay. Let's see what would happen there.

Speaker 1 (11:02):
Okay. You have some solutions on how I can get there,

Speaker 2 (11:06):
Correct? Exactly. Yeah. Okay. And again, this is just the one area. We could also focus on some other areas of informant, like tour show rate yeah. The appointment or tour show, right?

Speaker 1 (11:19):
Hold on, stop, go back to improving the show rate as well. I heard a somebody say to me that if I send a text message, one to two hours prior to a meeting that that show rate can go way up. That's somebody from a texting company told me that.

Speaker 2 (11:38):
Exactly. And it also gives them the opportunity to reschedule if they aren't able to make it, which then again, prevents a no show as well.

Speaker 1 (11:44):
So what if I put that into play? That's an easy thing to do. What should the, that should improve?

Speaker 2 (11:51):
Correct? 

Speaker 1 (11:54):
Well, let's just

Speaker 2 (11:54):
Say let's just improve it 15% 65. So it's a modest improvement. It's about half of what's there to get you the best practice and

Speaker 1 (12:04):
See what happens then

Speaker 2 (12:04):
Just even more on the table. So,

Speaker 1 (12:09):
Whoa, whoa. That's like a $1.7 million improvement per year saved. Oh, that's like $140,000 in additional revenue a month drive into my school system. So I could, I could do a lot with that. I could do some online teaching. I could have bursaries for kids who are tight for money. I could man, there's a lot I could do. I could add in that massage program. Wow. Sterling, this is amazing.

Speaker 2 (12:53):
So as you can see, because you're a cap for reps, this also gives you enough revenue. If you work to increase your lead flow, you could hire another rep with this and be able to constantly improve upon these efficiencies.

Speaker 1 (13:08):
What about hiring a missionary rep, somebody who will set appointments for my two reps.

Speaker 2 (13:16):
That's great. Especially if I'm able to find someone who you could really specialize at that who's excellent on the phone and they could just load up your other reps who can then focus on actually doing interviews and billing quality rather than having them do as much of that reach out. So yeah, that's a great way. Anytime you can specialize in your admissions, you're going to have people who become experts and they'll improve their core task on the core numbers.

Speaker 1 (13:43):
Okay. So now folks we've completed this a little role-play, but, and, and this is just done with in a very simple dozen or so fields, but surprisingly, this is accurate. We've seen this hundreds and hundreds of times where we, this is the pretty, fairly accurate amount that school will leak. So all we have to do for your school is you can put in your own inputs. And so below this podcast, we're going to have a little paragraph supporting the podcast and a link that you can go and you can just mess around and try different scenarios and to see for yourself, if in fact you're leaking enrollment revenue. And if you want some thoughts on how we can close the gap, one of our experts on process improvement can sit with you on the phone for a bit, give you some ideas to run with them. We can kickstart a relationship, perhaps. So Sterling any final thoughts we say farewell?

Speaker 2 (14:53):
Yeah. one thing I love about this is you could look for areas to improve, but it's also good just as a diagnosis, it can help you understand what you're good at too. And so you might be looking at increasing your lead flow or spending more money in an area, and you do this. You might learn that, that isn't the area you actually need to focus on. Your resources could be put better into another area. And a lot of people really neglect the low-hanging fruit. It's a little, it's a really easy to improve something that is below best practice than something that's already above that. And most schools don't know what best practices. That's a great way to learn that.

Speaker 1 (15:28):
So what you're really saying is that the majority of these little gaps people can handle on their own without the need for a guru or an ad agency or a sales trainer, they're just little things they can do themselves to go and improve their revenues. So I, I like that idea too, because you know, not people don't need fancy gurus. They can do a lot of this themselves. So

Speaker 2 (15:58):
It's just that they don't know what they don't know. Right. So once they learn, these are the areas that I can improve. And what is the earth the most available to improve? Then you could focus on the right areas and put your resources in there. And,

Speaker 1 (16:12):
Yeah, exactly. So you can take a land on a couple of little habits and like atomic habits, the book, which I highly recommend you guys get you can chip away at those habits. Here's a habit. Can I share a habit before we jump off right now? This is new age. Okay. Sterling. Okay. okay. You, you can, you bring your client-facing people together and you and I and others within your school and you, you brainstorm together on all the ways your school can help. People help students, help employees help the community, helping players, and you build out a list of around 2020, and then you just type it out on just something, this size, little piece of paper. And, and then you tape it onto the corner of everybody's desk. And then you invite them to just look at that list of 20 things every day habit for a month.

Speaker 1 (17:20):
And my prediction is, is if you do that, you will increase your enrollment revenue by 10% within two months. Now you might be saying, Greg Sterling, you guys are crazy. That's so, so easy. Well, here's the thing is if I'm wrong or I'm partially wrong, nothing bad will happen to your school. Except people will be much more self-aware as to how they can help people. Right. Then, you know, you guys might be buying Sterling or I a beer at a conference. So with that Sterling I guess this podcast is over and hopefully this has been, has been helpful to people. Who've watched it. Excellent. Excellent.