I’ve done flyers and managed flyer teams at many stations in Kansai over the years, and Heidi and I had an experience the other day I just have to share with you. I’m hoping this story will motivate you to increase the revenue at your Smith’s School Franchise. ( スミス英会話 )
Kotoen Station is midway on the Hankyu Nishinomiya-Takarazuka line which runs perfectly north-south between the two major city centers. It has two huge entrances, one on either side of the station and both are connected to the central gate area via a massive overhead walkway.
Doing flyers at the ground level East Entrance is absolutely wonderful. Every third or fourth person says good morning, and while standing in the middle of the safe street in front of the stairs, the two of us regularly plow through 600 flyers in 90 minutes, the kind of sweet numbers I used to expect at Koshien 5 or 6 years ago.
The West Side is more challenging in that several buses unload hoards of commuters within meters of the stairs heading up into the overhead walkway. Heidi and I are overwhelmed by the throng racing for the stairs each time a bus comes by. Working nearby are two older men, one a city bus employee responsible for the smooth passage of the buses, the other a Hankyu railway employee empowered to maintain the safety of the station for the benefit of the commuters.
Any minute these guys are going to say something to us………..
And after an hour and fifteen minutes they came over, not to me but to Heidi, and complained that we were blocking the smooth passage of the commuters between the buses and the stairs. Yup. So Heidi in a polite way asked the two men what they thought we should do.
They consulted each other for a moment, and said, with a chortle, “Why don’t the two of you go up into the overhead walkway and do your flyers up there?”
Now imagine I’m like, whoah, completely speachless for a moment. Yippee! OK, yeah, great idea, thanks!! OK, we can do that, sure! Right on. Now we have a clean, dry place that is completely covered from rain and UV, with a breeze when the humid monsoon sets in, to do flyers in a way that ensures getting absolutely ALL of the bus traffic in an orderly, single-file manner.
And if we feel like being outside anyway, we still have the super-easy East Side to do any time!
The point is that you can never tell what is going to happen or what kind of good fortune you might uncover, and you’ll never know if you don’t try hard to get the job done, the job of getting the students into your school that will get you the income level you seek. One thing you do know is that if that 1.5 yen flyer generates a call to Smith’s head office you probably have a trial lesson coming. That national free dial sales desk and those sales girls who man the head office telephones have a very, very high conversion rate and will do their very best to get you a new student and you know that will bring you much more than 1.5 yen! This result is an absolute boon for the Smith’s School of English in Kotoen. Just watch the sales go up in the months to come!
So order up a nice, big box of flyers for yourselves and get some more students into your school!
Good luck!
Martin Werner Zander, Smith’s Partner
マーティン・ワーナー・ザンダー
Owner, Smith’s School in Kotoen
スミス英会話 甲東園校 仁川 逆瀬川 門戸厄神
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