How many students do you need?

"I don't know how many students I need, but I know I need more."

I hear the above phrase a lot from school owners, teacherpreneurs, solo teachers, so I decided to dedicate this post to it. 

What is the problem with wanting "more" students? 

It's simple. If you don't know how many people you need, you don't know how much effort or money it will cost to find them and turn them into students.

You don't know whether you need to hire someone to help you get those students. You don't know if you're going to be able to start your next season with the peace of mind to just onboard the people that already signed up or with the immense financial pressure of not having enough money to pay your team. 

When preparing your year, you can and should run precise estimates and prepare a clear action plan. 

If you prepare a plan each year, but reality seems far off, run a quick simulation to check if your plan is realistic.

>>> Are you planning with 140 students by early September? And now you only have 90. That means you need to get another 50. How long and how much does it take you to get one student? Ads, landing page building, posting on social, discovery calls, explaining the conditions, signing up. How realistic is it that in the next 4 weeks, you can get 50 students on? 

If it's not realistic, you should move those 50 to October in your financial plan and increase the price for them to cover the lost month, or you need to change the number to 65 as they're already starting later. 

The more realistic you can be, the better your chances that it will all work out. 

If you go for "more" students, the chances are that you won't even get the minimum you need to generate profit, as in case you are not aware of the effort and time it needs, you will start putting in that effort late. 

I hesitated to draw up that plan even in my 4th year as a school owner, as I was too afraid to see that maybe my numbers don't work out.

But over the years, it became one of my favourite activities.

I finally realised how much better it was to understand in April that I will fail in October if I continue this way. 

By drawing it all up that early, I could change my price scheme on time to save a potentially catastrophic year. 

This is why knowing the number of students you need is so important. 

Just like knowing how much money you want to earn, or how much profit you want your school to generate, so that you can survive the holiday months, give to charity, or save for that dream software you want to buy or that dream building you want to rent for your classes. Or your own dream house. 

If you're ready, come and tell us in the School Owner Club how many more students do you need right now so that we can cheer for you in reaching that number.