Table of Contents

Overview

• Is this book for you?
• Three factors
• Who is Kris Amerikos?
• First teaching business
• Enslaving myself
• Throwing traditions out the window
• The Non-Traditional Business Model
• Getting the first client
• My transition
• The inception of this book
• My dedication to providing teachers with business training

Teaching Revolution

• Exercise #1: Take action
• Make a decision
• How it happens
• Why teaching?
• The revolution
• The benefits of teaching
• Misconceptions about teaching
• What is a teacher? What is a business?

The Only Three Things You Need

• Becoming a new person
• Let yourself be changed
• Transcend and include
• What your transformation looks like
• Get out of your own way
• Disparity
• Becoming who you aren’t
• The fluid identity
• Flawed human sensory perception
• Change who you think you are
• Trekking across the chasm
• How to become a new person
• Making a full decision to become a new person

Choosing a Niche and Creating an Offer

• Current situation and desired situation
• Why do people buy things?
• The role of the teacher and teaching services
• Focus on one thing at a time
• Exercise #2: Choosing a niche made easy
• Common pitfalls when choosing a niche
• Exercise #3: Creating an offer made easy
• Overview of what we’ve discussed

Getting Clients Made Easy

• Step 1: Ads
• Step 2: Landing page
• Step 3: Video
• Step 4: Calendar
• Step 5: Questionnaire
• Step 6: Sales call
• Sales script
• What it means to be a teacher
• The revolution is now
• Your two options
• The perfect vehicle of change
• My life’s work
• Taking action
• To change your life, you have to change your environment
• Expert help
• Your two options

Overview

Hello to everyone who is reading this book! My goal in writing this book is to provide you with everything you need to start your own teaching business and start getting clients as soon as possible, even if nobody knows who you are and if you have no special skills or experience.

The strategies and methods you’re going to learn here are the exact same strategies that I’ve used and continue to use. And what’s more is that these methods have completely changed my life and allowed me to become free and really take control of things in my life and business. I’ve been able to set up multiple teaching businesses and, using these methods, I can set up and launch and start making money from a new teaching business in under a month’s time. That’s how you know this is the real deal.

I’ve been able to start successful businesses and completely change my life and, what’s more than that, I’ve been able to change other people’s lives as well. And that’s one of the most fulfilling feelings and the source of a lot of personal satisfaction for me. I love my family and the fact that I’ve been able to help them change their lives for the better and get in a better situation financially has been extremely satisfying for me.

But it’s not only about me and my family. I’ve been able to use the same methods and strategies from this book to help improve the lives and businesses of people around the world. I’ve helped teachers from England, the United States, Brazil, South Africa, Russia, New Zealand, Singapore, Taiwan, Zambia, Italy, Spain, France, Germany, and the list goes on and on. At this point, I have a list of everyone and when I add new people to this list I rarely add people to a new country category because I’ve been involved with so many people from so many countries. And that reinforces the fact that this whole process can work for anybody anywhere because, more than anything else, what people usually discover is that they wanted to start a new business and what they really did was start a new life. And that’s really really powerful.

So, here’s what we’re going to cover in this book. First of all, we’re going to talk about why starting a teaching business is a viable opportunity and why it’s actually the best way to start as an entrepreneur, which means, if you’re just getting started in business in general, this is definitely the way to go. Getting your teaching business started right now is your best option for success and it definitely beats opening a franchise of a typical brick-and-mortar business or selling t-shirts online or anything like that.

Then, we’re going to talk about the three things you need in order to start your teaching business and grow it to the point where you are making reliable income and you can really say that you’re making a living from it. And this is really important because there are so many people out there who don’t know what to focus on. They just think they need to be doing a million things all at once and they kind of lose sight of what’s important. So, we’ll look at the core three things that you need to focus on.

The next thing I’m going to do in this book is show you how to make your brain work differently, so that you become a completely different person. A totally new person. And you might be thinking, “But Kris, I don’t want to become a new person. I like who I am now. I don’t want to change.” But this is actually one of the most important things you are ever going to do in your life. It was definitely a game changer for me in my business career and in my life overall. So, that’s really going to help you move forward and get where you are going.

After that, I’m going to show you how to choose your niche and create an offer that people are going to see lots of value in. This one is really important too and a lot of people overlook this, but without a niche and without an offer, you’ll really find yourself without a product. You won’t have anything to sell. And without anything to sell, of course, you won’t be making any money and you won’t have a business.

And then, I’m going to show you how to get your first few clients quickly. And that means how to go from not knowing someone, not having any previous relationship with them to the point where they are paying you for your services again and again and again. I have a proven system that works and has been put to the test of time. It’s tried and true, and I’m going to show you how that works.

After that, we’ll look at how you can go above and beyond the traditional way of doing things and traditional teaching businesses. You know, if you do things the traditional way, you’ll make traditional money. And because you’re here reading this book, I believe that you don’t want to just do everything the way people have been doing it for years and just earn a usual teacher’s salary. No. We want to do something more, something bigger, and we want to be able to live comfortably from our earnings. And all of that requires us to think about things a little differently than we may have done so in the past. And you’re really going to be shocked by how easy it is to do.

A lot of teachers are able to use what they learn in this book to get things started and get their first client, so I don’t want you to think that the only way to succeed is to just keep doing more and more training. That’s definitely not what this is about and you’ll see that even this free book is packed full of value.

Is this book for you?

Before we go any further, let’s make sure that you’re in the right place and this book is for you and it’s actually going to help you. The first group of people this book is for is employees who feel trapped. If you’re working a nine-to-five job and you feel trapped by that routine and you feel like a cog in the machine, then this book is going to show you how you can quit your job and start working for yourself by starting your own teaching business.

The second group of people that this is for is early businesspeople. I call them early businesspeople because they are still in the first, early stages of their business careers and they haven’t really found that thing that’s going to give them long-lasting income and something that they are going to see through to the end. What we usually see with this group is that they love the idea of success and they love the idea of having lots of money, but they aren’t able to start something and finish it. So, if that’s you, then this book is going to show you how to make a commitment so that you can master what you do and so that you can see things through to the end.

Another group of people that this book is for is people who already have a teaching business of sorts That might be a small, one-teacher business or it might be a teaching business where you have other teachers and staff working for you, but for one reason or another your business is having difficulties getting clients in a consistent and predictable way. They are able to get clients, but they don’t have a proven system for doing that. So, if that’s you, then this book will show you how to bring in clients with predictability. 

The last group of people this book is for is university students. Especially those who are aware that the traditional way of doing things, in terms of education and getting a job and all of that, is not the way they want to go. They’ve seen the results it produces and they understand that it’s not for them. They don’t want to get stuck in the deadly cycle of students loans, then taking courses at a university or college that may or may not result in them earning a decent salary, then getting a job that will only provide them with the bare minimum to survive and pay back those loans, and then saving all their lives to buy a house on a mortgage and all of that. So, if that’s you, then this book will show you how to set up and launch your own teaching business and become an independent, self-employed individual, instead of turning to an education system and corporations that will ultimately fail you. 

So, if you’re a member of any of the categories of people I’ve just mentioned, that’s great, and you’re definitely in the right place and you’re going to love what we’ve put together for you here on this book.

But before we really get started, let’s go through some general rules for implementing what you’ll learn in this book. The first one is really simple: this is not a get-rich-quick scheme. I’m not going to be showing you something that will only work for a short period of time or some kind of computer program that you can just turn on and get paid without doing anything. There’s none of that here because that stuff rarely works and when it does, it’s usually highly illegal. But what we are going to be covering in this book is real business tactics that are one hundred percent legal and not sketchy at all and that you’ll be able to use for the rest of your life. The second rule here is that we are not going to be giving you some kind of magical button that you just press to make money because those buttons don’t exist.

Another rule is that what we are going to talk about and present you with in this book is not for those who only care about themselves and are only thinking about how to improve themselves without helping other people and bringing value to other people. So, it’s not for people who just want to get profit for doing nothing and for providing others with nothing. If that’s you, I welcome you to close this book and go do something else. I only want to help people who are going to help others because that’s the only way to be successful and to run a successful business.

And the last rule is that you need to understand that my results and the results of my clients and the people I’ve helped are anything but typical. The people I’ll tell you about and the examples I’ll give you are instances of putting in hard work and effort and how that has paid off. The results you get are one hundred percent up to you.

That being said, those of you who are ambitious and want to get your teaching business off the ground and start getting paying clients and making money need to know a few things first. I never want to waste your time or mislead you or make you think that I work for free or anything like that. I also don’t want you to think that you can just flip through this book and get results. If you do that, the only person you’re cheating is yourself. 

This is level one and this is where we lay the foundations for your business. Without foundations a business will collapse, just like a house. That’s why we start by building foundations. If your business doesn’t have the necessary foundations, then you won’t get far. 

This book is absolutely free and I’m not charging anything for it because I want teachers to know the basics of how teaching businesses should be set up, so that they can make profit and continue to grow the right way. Too many teaching businesses are still following traditional methods that have been used for the past hundred years and those businesses won’t exist soon because they are going to be obsolete. But follow the steps in this book and you’ll become successful because this process works.

Three factors

Let’s take a step back and look at the big picture of what’s happening in the world right now and how that presents us with an amazing opportunity. What’s happening is that there’s a shift in how comfortable people are using technology to get the information and resources they seek, while at the same time a huge increase in our population, and simultaneously a shifting notion of what it means to have a job, to be employed, and all of that.

So, to say that again, a little differently is that over the next ten years the global population will have increased by at least one billion people. At the same time, there are more businesses and independent entrepreneurs than ever before and people have more choices than ever before to choose what they want to do and who they want to work for. And those numbers just keep increasing and increasing week after week, month after month, year after year. Now, combine that with our ever-changing technology and the fact that a larger proportion of our population is tech-savvy and is comfortable working online, studying online, and looking for answers to their problems online than ever before in history. And what does this combination give us? It means that less people are doing things the traditional way in traditional jobs with traditional education and more people are joining this new movement that’s taking over the world.

And when we add teaching businesses to this equation, we can clearly see that with these changes already taking place, knowing that these trends are going to continue for at least the next ten years, but most likely the next hundred plus years, teachers and individuals in general who set up teaching businesses according to this new revolutionary model are almost guaranteed to be successful because as the market continues to expand in the way I’ve just described, existing businesses that follow this model will expand with it, while traditional businesses that haven’t adapted this model will rot away.

There are basically these three huge forces that are merging to create the perfect storm of opportunity for teachers and teaching businesses. First we’ve got a growing population that’s growing bigger and faster than ever before. Then, we’ve got the Internet rising in popularity all the time and a growing population of individuals who will have been born into a world where the Internet has always existed. And then, we’ve got the teaching market which sees more and more people every day turning to online solutions, but not many people turning away from the traditional way of setting up and running teaching businesses.

And that provides you and anyone who wants to have a teaching business with a huge opportunity to join the revolution. That’s what I call it because it’s so new and really revolutionary. Get ready to join the revolution and move away from the traditional way of doing things, which only brings us traditional results, and carve out a place in this new emerging teaching market that will guarantee success and prosperity for years to come.

Let’s face it - thanks to the Internet the traditional ways of doing lots of types of business have changed. They’ve been revolutionized. And our modern technology allows almost anyone in the world to start a teaching business from home or from anywhere, simply by having a computer or device of some sort. And, on top of that, we are now able to reach people on the other side of the world. We can really reach anybody online using resources like Facebook, YouTube, and other great sites for almost no money at all.

This in itself is revolutionary because it’s the first time in the history of mankind that so many people have had these opportunities and have been able to do things so easily and influence so many people around the world. Every day people are starting new businesses online, from their own homes, without an office or staff or qualifications or university degrees or years of experience. It’s literally happening every day. And there’s never been a better and easier time to do this.

The combination of all of these factors together has created, what I call, the perfect storm for teaching businesses. It has created the perfect environment or atmosphere and the perfect opportunity to start your own teaching business.

Who is Kris Amerikos?

You might be thinking something like, “Who is Kris and why is he talking about this and why should I listen to what he’s saying?” And, even if you’re not asking that question yet, I encourage you to ask it because it’s a really good one to ask. You should question everything in this world because there are some really questionable people out there doing questionable things and it’s good to ask questions and get all the information you can.

My name is Christopher Huntley and I also use the brand name Kris Amerikos. I’m a teacher from the United States, which you’ve probably already recognized by my accent if you’ve seen any of my videos. I’ve lived in a lot of different places, which has given me a great chance to meet diverse people and see what different people do in different places around the globe. I’ve lived in Germany, Italy, and Russia, not to mention the United States, where I’ve lived in Ohio, Hawaii, Rhode Island, West Virginia, and Florida.

I’ve set up multiple language teaching businesses over the past few years, which has enabled me to travel the world visiting friends and family, while still maintaining my businesses, paying my bills, and doing the things I need to do to live comfortably and to live life on my own terms. And, I was able to do all of that from scratch. I mean from complete zero. Actually, it was less than zero. It was in the negative, in the red. I was thousands of dollars in debt and at one point I couldn’t even afford to eat a normal meal. I was just eating an apple three times a day. That’s not something I’m proud of, but it just goes to show that I definitely wasn’t privileged and wasn’t a trust fund kid or anything like that. If that’s you, I have nothing against you for that, but that wasn’t me and I was still able to do the things I’ve just told you about and achieve the things I’ve been able to achieve.

I’m just a normal guy, who has had his problems in life and had to overcome them and that didn’t happen overnight. I’ve tried lots of different things and just kept trying and trying. I eventually stumbled upon something that changed my life and now, of course, I’m so glad that it happened. But you shouldn’t think I’m some kind of genius. I went to school for twelve years just like everyone else in the U.S. and then I went to university and then I got a job, so my life up to that point was quite typical. And all that time that I was doing those typical things that so many people do. I was living and thinking just like everybody else. I thought if you study and get good grades, then you’ll get a good job and be successful, and then you’ll work for the rest of life to have a house and car and kids and all that. So that was the path I was on.

Then, in 2009, I got my first teaching job. I had travelled abroad to Russia as a tourist and I was interested in learning more about the country, the culture, and the people. Plus, I liked languages, so it was a win-win. I got to teach my language and learn Russian. And teaching my own language to Russians in someone else’s business seemed like an easy job to do. My whole life I thought that’s what I was supposed to be doing. I thought since I’d finished university I needed to find a job and if I did my job everything would go according to that plan - the plan that everyone my whole life had told me about.

And that’s when I decided to go for it. I got a job teaching in Russia, even though I didn’t speak the language and didn’t really know anybody there and even though I’d never taught English or taught anything really. I just went for it. I had to do a month of training in Moscow first, which was probably one of the most trying periods in my life because I was a recent university graduate, who had just got a job overseas, who thought he knew everything about everything and really knew nothing at all.

I went through that training about how to teach English, even though I thought I already knew how to do that. I thought you just speak to people enough and correct them when they’re wrong and they learn the language, right? Absolutely not. There’s a lot more to it than that. But, of course, I didn’t think so at the time and that was part of my problem. I thought I knew it all.

During that training program I was sleeping on the couch of the one and only guy I knew in Moscow in a small, one-room apartment. It wasn’t even a one-bedroom apartment. It was just one room. And Moscow is rather expensive, so it was that guy and his roommate living in a one-room apartment in Moscow. I didn’t even have a couch to sleep on really. It was just half a couch that I had to share with another guy. And, to make matters worse, my luggage had got lost at the airport on my way in, so I literally had no clothes at all. Luckily, the guy I was staying with was really nice and let me borrow some of his clothes, but I was basically walking around in the same clothes for weeks.

I wasn’t rich or anything like that. I told you that before, but I’m serious when I say that. I don’t want to say I was poor, but at that time, I was the poorest of the poor. I was basically homeless. I had half a couch, no clothes, and I really didn’t have any money because that month-long training in Moscow wasn’t paid. So I literally didn’t have money for food. When the other teachers in our training course would go out for lunch, I would buy an apple every day for lunch and eat that. I still don’t know how I survived that period of my life, but somehow I got through it and I ended up getting to Yekaterinburg, Russia, which is way smaller and more provincial than Moscow. That’s where my job was.

So there I was, teaching English in Russia, working a standard job, without a real plan for the future. And one day it just hit me. I was like, do I really want to do this for the rest of my life? Do I really want to work for someone else forever? Do I want to make this amount of money forever with very few prospects of moving up in this company or increasing my income? I thought to myself, no way. There’s no way this is it. There’s no way that this is what life is supposed to be about.

First teaching business

It was at that point that I started putting a lot of thought into what I could do and what I could start in order to change the direction my life was moving. I remember discussing it with another teacher at that time and I said, “If the owners of this business were able to set up a language center here in Russia, then I can do that too.” So, that’s what I set out to do. The people who I was friends with at that time and the people I worked with  thought I was completely insane because I didn’t speak Russian and I didn’t have any business experience. And one teacher told me that he would hate to be an owner or manager and how he loved just being a teacher because his responsibilities were limited and every day was more or less predictable. Still, I knew I had to give it a try because, otherwise, I would never know.

So, that’s what I went through just to get started. I set out to open up my own language teaching business in Russia - a traditional, offline language center in the same fashion as the one where I was working at that time. It was a huge risk because I knew that at any point I could get fired from my job and if I got fired I wouldn’t have a visa to stay in the country and all of my plans would be ruined. I would have done it all in vain. Luckily, that didn’t happen and I was able to set up my first business. But there was definitely too much risk involved for very little return. It was not a smart move on my part. I really had no idea what I was doing. That’s how my first business went for the first three or four years. There were lots of mistakes and lots of hit or miss. There were lots of painful experiences that I had to learn from and persevere through.

Enslaving myself

Looking back, I can see that I had fallen for the same trap that so many teachers fall for, which is to think that a teaching business has to be offline and has to include some kind of physical, one-on-one, in-person, instruction in order for it to be successful and to get results for students. I had convinced myself that people wouldn’t buy anything else and that traditional teaching products were the only things that worked. And that’s what I did. I started building the same business that I had seen other teachers build or the same business that I had worked in before and that business is called Kolumb Language Center. I can’t say that it was a complete failure or anything like that, but I also can’t say that it was a complete success because it didn’t bring me to where I wanted and needed to be at that point in my life and it didn’t change anything for me really.

At first I thought it was awesome. I thought I was doing something amazing and I thought I was amazing for doing it. But really, I hadn’t created any freedom for myself and what I had done was I had created a new type of slavery for myself. I didn’t run the business – the business ran me. I had built myself into every aspect of how the business operated and that meant instead of just working as a teacher and doing what I was passionate about, I had to become the owner, manager, accountant, marketer, salesman, teacher, teacher trainer, and everything else that the business required. And that took up an enormous amount of time.

In the beginning I was working 70-80 hours a week and making the same money that I had been making working 30 hours a week for someone else. It wouldn’t be fair if I left the story of Kolumb Language Center there because I went on to develop the business more and more and to learn from my mistakes and to make improvements and that business was an important stepping stone for me. But it took such a long time to get it to the point where the business worked for me and not where I worked for the business that I personally consider it a failure of sorts. But, you know, in every failure there’s a little bit of success because you learn how not to do things in the future and you learn from your mistakes so that you don’t repeat them.

That sums up my first 3-4 years of operating a teaching business. It was really painful and full of lots of mistakes and it was one big learning experience. So, there I was again, in Russia, working a job where I was making very little money. In terms of American dollars, I was below the poverty line. And now, since I’d had this genius idea to start my own business, I was working double the amount of hours that I would have been working at another company and earning the same or less money. In the first couple years I thought I was the boss because it was my business and I had some kind of control, but the reality of it was that I wasn’t the boss and I had no control. The business was the boss of me and it had complete control over me and any client could dictate any aspect of my business because I was so desperate all the time. That’s no way to do business. Believe me.

Throwing traditions out the window

After several years of going through everything I’ve told you, feeling stressed, not having any free time, not being able to travel back home and see family, going through every day exactly the same, and letting my business and my clients control my future, I finally woke up and realized that I had the power to make changes to my situation and that it was time to do so. I realized that I needed to make fundamental changes to the way that I had set up my business, the way I thought about my business in general, and the way I viewed my life and who I was as a person.

Anyone out there can look at a traditional teaching business and copy the basics that apply everywhere and get something that looks and feels like a business, right? Alright, maybe not everyone. But lots of people have done it. And a lot of those people have ended up in the same place I ended up - with a business that requires more time and more work, while earning less money than if they just went out and got a job. What I realized after years of suffering, struggling, and thinking that I had created something amazing, when really I had just enslaved myself to my business, was that the traditional way of doing business and the traditional way of setting up a teaching business was not the only way possible.

The traditional way of doing things tells us that we need to create a great product and then present it to the market. Then, if it’s great, people will buy it. But I thought I had something amazing and when I presented it to people they were usually like, “Well, this is the same as everywhere else. How is this different? How is it unique?” And truthfully, it wasn’t unique or different at all. It was just the same thing that everyone else in the market was doing and I’d added my own little twist. It wasn’t revolutionary. It wasn’t amazing. It was boring.

To really revolutionize things I needed to change the way I was thinking and change the very first steps of my process. That meant not creating the product and then selling it to people, but instead, going to the market, asking people what they wanted, selling it to them, and then creating it. That’s something very different from what most people out there are doing, even today. And when I started doing this, it was a complete game changer for me.

The Non-Traditional Business Model

This is an entirely foreign idea to many people. “How can I sell something that I haven’t created yet and how can I sell something by just asking someone what they want and then getting them to pay me for that thing?” I understand where the doubt comes from because most people can’t imagine that something like this would work. But it’s a good thing that I stopped doing what everyone else was doing and stopped believing that I had to do things the traditional way. Otherwise, I would never have come to this revelation and I would probably be working at McDonald’s right now.

Seriously, why create something and spend lots of time and effort on it and then go to the market and ask if people want it. Instead, you could just go to the market from the beginning, find out what they want, and then give it to them. That’s going to be much easier and better for you and for the people you’re selling to because they will actually want to speak to you and want to hear what you’re offering. When you do it the other way, it’s backwards and causes a lot of stress for everyone involved.

So, that’s what I did. I started asking the market and asking people who were out there on social media platforms and forums and websites and even in real life what they wanted and what it was worth to them. Then, I took those ideas and concepts and really thought about how to solve them. I wanted to make sure that I was actually going to be able to solve their problems and provide them with solutions before I claimed to be able to help them and before I took any of their money. That meant I needed to master the market and I needed to master the niche I was focused on.

It’s amazing how when you ask people what their problems are and what solutions they need, they open up and share that information with you. When you’re not trying to sell anything and you’re just genuinely interested in learning about their current situation, people are honest and they want to share their feelings with you. You’ll quickly find out that a lot of people out there are struggling to reach their goals, solve their problems, and get to where they want to be. They know about all the traditional routes and the traditional ways that businesses and teachers and everyone have been offering as a way to solve things, but now that the world has changed and more and more people are online and want an easier, simpler, more convenient solution, they aren’t sure where to go and how that is supposed to work.

And even though you might have no idea whatsoever as to how to solve their problem and how to take them from where they are now to where they want to be, you just need to remind yourself that this is a market, a group of people, with a real problem, a serious problem, and if you knew how to solve their problem, then you would have a great business and you would be making a lot of money doing that. That’s where I started out and I didn’t know how to solve the market’s problem when I first started because I didn’t have any skills that would enable me to do that. So, I started reading a variety of books from different authors on different topics and I started learning how to solve the problems that the market had told me about when I had asked.

Getting the first client

There came a time when someone was telling me about their problem and I said, “Well, you know what, I can help you with that.” And they were like, “OK! Great! How much is it going to cost me?” It really caught me off guard because I wasn’t expecting them to think that my help was worth money or that they would want to pay me for my help. So, I just stated my price. I honestly don’t even remember what that price was, but I said what I thought was fair at that time. It was completely off the top of my head without any analysis of who else was doing similar things or what the going rate on the market was. And they said yes.

That’s how it all started. I was shocked. I was like, “What just happened? Did I just get a client? Did I just start a business?” And the most interesting part of that whole process of landing the first client was the fact that up until that point I had been doing all kinds of different activities to try to generate leads and get clients and make money because I wanted to have a business that made lots of money. But when this happened, when I landed my first client and saw how easy it was, everything came full circle. Everything made sense. I got that client because I was sincerely interested in helping them reach their goals and solve their problems.

It’s proof that you don’t need to spend tons of timing planning what you think is going to work and then testing it out. Instead, you should be doing the complete opposite. You should go to the market. Ask what people out there want and need. Find out what problems they have and what solutions they want. And then provide them with the thing they said they wanted and honestly help them. That’s really how you can transition from not having a teaching business or any business at all to starting up and having a business.

My transition

That’s what my transition looked like. I got a job like everyone else I knew. I was completely broke, eating an apple for lunch because I couldn’t afford anything else. I was sleeping on my half of the couch in a one-room apartment with several other guys. And then, I decided to start my own business and it was painful and long and difficult, but I started it and I moved forward and I was able to get some clients. I struggled to understand what role that business played in my life and my role in that business. When I had figured that out and started doing the things that I share with you in this book, things just took off and I started making a lot more money, getting more clients, and living the life that I wanted to live, instead of being a slave to my business.

And then came the T.V. and radio interviews, thousands of followers and subscribers on different social media pages and channels, and much cooler stuff that’s been able to boost me forward to where I am today. One of the coolest things that’s happened is that tons of people write me out of nowhere. They’ve found me on different sites, but we’ve never met before and they write me messages like, “Hey Chris, I saw your video and I really want to know how to do what you’re doing. Can you teach me that?”

The inception of this book 

Honestly, for the first few years I didn’t help other people set up their own teaching businesses because I wasn’t sure how I would deliver all of the information and I wasn’t sure of my own process for getting the results that I had gotten. I hadn’t standardized my own process and I wasn’t very confident, even though I had amazing results myself. But, eventually, some of these people who were writing me were so persistent. They kept writing and writing and asking me to help them set up this kind of business, even offering me to take 50% of the business they would set up.

After all of this time, I had really developed my business in a lot of different directions and I had lots of people writing me, both clients for my teaching businesses and people who wanted to set up their teaching businesses. I decided that if I was going to help anyone do what I had done, then I needed to break down what had made me successful and I needed to be able to do that again and again, over and over, in a very predictable way that would work for anyone who put in the effort. That’s when I set up my second teaching business and my third teaching business.

I refined my process and presented it to a few of the people who had wanted to set up their own business. I also presented it to a few of the teachers I knew and I watched them go through the process I had created. The results were amazing. Those who had put in the effort and had viewed the whole process as a great opportunity and had done what I’d shown - they started getting clients! Some of them were able to get clients within the first month of following the steps I’d laid out for them. And that’s when I knew that I had something special. I knew that following the same steps and repeating that proven process would allow anyone to be successful and set up their own teaching business.

My dedication to providing teachers with business training

After that, I just kept getting more and more people asking me how I was able to set up my businesses. They asked what they could do to work with me and I started helping more people. I even had to make a rule about how many people I would accept each month. At first it was five people and then it was ten people. I wanted to make sure that each new person who I worked with got big results and that I could really focus on getting them to where they needed to be, which was being able to quit their mundane teaching job working for someone else, becoming their own boss, and having a business that provided them with enough money to live comfortably. 

When I first started, everything was set up using Google Drive. If you don’t know what that is, it’s basically a file sharing program, and it’s completely free. That’s what I used to share stuff with the teachers I coached. It actually grew very quickly and turned into a sort of community where all of the members were working towards a common goal and were implementing similar tactics into different niches and specialized fields. They came together and helped one another. It was really a great feeling for me personally to watch that take place.

At first, I didn’t understand why so many people were drawn to me and the fact that I was just using everything free and doing it through Google Drive. I had basically just shared material that I had created to remind myself of the steps I had used to set up successful businesses in the past. But people told me that they loved it and they would actually tell other people about it and refer people to me because they were getting clients and they understood the tremendous value in what I was doing. They would send me messages like, “I can’t believe it, but everything you’ve told me really works and it’s helped me to get results.”

That goes to show that nobody really cares how something works or what it looks like because what they really care about is getting the result they wanted. Since I had methods and tactics that really worked, not just for me but for other people too, they didn’t care what it looked like and they didn’t care about the format. That’s when things really started to blow up and I saw an increase in the number of people who contacted me about starting their teaching business. I knew I had stumbled upon something unique and something that could help a lot of people.

Being a teacher myself and having started out working in a language center, working for someone else, and then having transitioned and having tried to do things the traditional way for quite some time, I understood just how life-changing the results were that the teachers I worked with were getting. And at the same time it was changing my own life as well. I was able to travel more and go places I’d never been, yet still work and do the job that I loved because my businesses were structured and set up on proper foundations. I had built them in a way that let me turn them on and off with the click of a button. 

I knew that this experience was exactly what other teachers wanted. They wanted to get out of the so-called rat race and they wanted to take control of, not only their lives but also their careers. I knew that they were just like me and they wanted to make a living teaching. They wanted to be able to live comfortably, but more importantly they wanted to help people learn. Some of them wanted to help people learn languages, while others wanted to help people learn mathematics or physics or history or lots of other subjects. And that’s what I was helping people do. As a result, I was helping people help other people. There were even people who came to me wanting to set up businesses as career counselors and consultants and academic advisors. The possibilities were really endless because the method worked.

But still there were some people who went through it and they didn’t really get the full value, at least in my opinion they didn’t. I mean, they went through the motions, but they didn’t take action. They didn’t put everything into practice that was necessary for their success. For whatever reason, they were just stuck somewhere along the way. So, when I noticed that it really struck me and made me go back and reevaluate what I was doing. I wanted everyone to succeed and I knew everyone could succeed. So many people had already succeeded and I wanted to identify what it was that was holding some people back.

So, after working with about 50 different teachers, I went back and refined my whole process. I added some things here and removed some things there. I wanted to make sure that every teacher I worked with felt motivated enough to take the necessary action and to move forward in the same way all of the successful people before them had done. So, I went back to work improving my coaching skills and perfecting the training and support I provided. That’s when I started actively telling teachers that I could help them get more clients and make more money. It was a hit from the very beginning. First of all, I gave free training to those who had already worked with me earlier because that was the fair thing to do. People absolutely loved it and I could tell that it was easier to use. It got every single teacher I worked with motivated. They were taking the actions necessary to succeed.

You might think that I could’ve just stopped there and taken all the money people had paid me and lived happily ever after, but that’s definitely not what I wanted and not what I will ever want. No way. My end goal has always been to continually update and improve my work and to provide the teachers I work with the very best industry knowledge, skills, techniques, and tools to work in the top 1 percentile of teachers in the world. The way I see it, my success is measured by the success of those who I work with and I really mean that. This is my life’s work. It’s the culmination of over a decade’s worth of experience and knowledge that I’ve gained by being out there in the field, doing the work, studying, improving, starting businesses, and trying new things all the time. That’s what has made me successful, so why would I stop now? I’m determined to keep building my arsenal of strategies and tactics that I help teachers implement. I’m determined to grow and work better and better, so that all of the people who I work with improve, they make more money, and their students get better results.

Teaching Revolution

The best part for me is that the way I was helping teachers wasn’t limited to one geographic location or one type of teaching. Even though I had started out as a language teacher that showed people how to start their own teaching business, as I had done personally, I had teachers from all around the world joining and people from tons of different niches and different markets generating amazing results and helping their clients reach their goals and do awesome things. That’s when I really understood that my help wasn’t about me or about teaching languages, but it was about revolutionizing the way the world viewed and thought about teachers.

In a lot of countries around the world doctors and lawyers make a lot of money compared to other professions and a lot of times they are valued more too. Others look up to them and think of them as people who should be respected. They’re very highly respected, but unfortunately, in many places, still to this day, teachers are not as highly respected as doctors or lawyers or professional sports players or politicians even. And what’s worse is that teachers aren’t paid what they deserve. They’re usually paid less than other professions and that’s because teachers are such good, kind-hearted people that a lot of times they just don’t even think about the money side of things. They want to help people. They want to teach people. They want to make the world a better place. And that means they aren’t businesspeople usually. They don’t think about how they can use their amazing abilities to instruct others as a way to start their business.

On top of that, most teachers just accept that they will always make a small salary compared to other professions. They don’t fight it. They don’t resist it. They accept it. They think that’s the way it is and there isn’t any other way that things could be. But, like I said, what I realized was that it was my jobo to revolutionize the way the world viewed teachers. It wasn’t about me and it wasn’t about helping people make money. By working with me, teachers were able to break free from the traditional ideas associated with being a teacher. They could do things their way and make as much money as they wanted and they were able to earn the respect they deserve.

When I think of teachers compared to other professions, I think teachers are one of the most important professions out there. Let’s really think about it for a second. Every society is changing and growing and adapting and the way that happens is by each generation blending together and transitioning and moving forward. Teachers are the driving force behind that transition. Teachers are literally making the world a better place each and every day and why are they undervalued? They shouldn’t be. But if we want other people to respect the work that we do as teachers, we need to respect ourselves first and we need to change the way we do things. We can’t keep accepting the status quo and doing things the way that everyone else tells us. We can’t do it the same way it’s always been done. We have to break away from tradition and we have to become more than just that traditional idea of what a teacher is. We have to make a transition of our own, so that we can educate others and help the world make a transition.

When teachers started working with me to start and grow their businesses, I would get messages like, “Kris, thanks to your program I’ve been able to quit my job and set up my own business and really become a better person overall. Thank you so much!” I really took that to heart and I understood that what the world really needed wasn’t just a bunch of teacher-entrepreneurs out to get people’s money. No. What the world really needed and still needs is teachers who are able to be free and are able to instruct others in an effective way that gets results and cuts through all of the bureaucracy and the red tape and government standards.

I mean, if we trap teachers in a system where they themselves are not free and are not encouraged to become the best that they possibly can be, then how on Earth do we expect that they will be able to deliver top notch results to their students? It’s insanity really. We’ve got teachers working in schools for very little money, with very little freedom, and we’ve got a society that doesn’t pay them the respect they deserve, but we still expect them to do an outstanding job and most of them still do. Now, if that doesn’t sound like a broken, completely unfair system to you, then I don’t know what does, but it sounds completely ridiculous to me and that’s why I’ve done all of this work to rectify it.

So, my work with teachers is much bigger than me and bigger than making a few bucks. This is a revolution. This is a rebellion by teachers and for teachers. We as teachers want to do our jobs. We love our jobs. We love teaching. We love helping people. It’s why we were put on this Earth and it’s what we want to do until the day we die. But that doesn’t mean we have to put up with how society has treated teachers up to this point and it doesn’t mean we have to accept the status quo and continue to do things the traditional way. So, that’s what I’ve really learned by going through this process and helping teachers increase their income, live life on their own terms, and helping them set up their own businesses and reach new heights in their professional and personal lives.

And that’s what teaching has become for me. That’s what it’s become for the people I’ve worked with. And that’s what it will become for you too. It’s a movement that’s changing the world and I simply provide teachers with the framework and the instruction manual for how to make that transition. I help them go from doing things the old, traditional way, to doing things in the new, revolutionary way that will open up so many doors.

And I hope that shows you how I went from being penniless and eating an apple for lunch every day and sleeping on half of a couch that I shared with someone else to changing the lives of so many people around the world and leading this powerful teaching revolution. And I’m not trying to brag when I tell you about what I’ve done and how far I’ve come in just several years’ time. I’m really just trying to give you an idea of the type of transformation that is possible in your life as well. I started out really not knowing anything at all. The only thing I knew was that I wanted my life to be different somehow.

Exercise #1: Take action

One of the things you’ll need to get used to doing is taking action because, without it, nothing happens. Right now you need to take action and you need to take out a piece of paper and a pen or whatever you want to use to write this down. Make sure you’ve got that before you continue reading.

What you need to do is write down a detailed description of where you are right now in your life. You also need to write down what you’re doing for work, what you’re doing for fun, who your friends are, what car you drive, where you live, all of that. And make sure you really take some time to write that out in full. Don’t leave out any details. It might take a few minutes to do that, but it’s an important step, so stop reading and write that down now.

The next thing you need to do is write out a detailed description of where you want to be in twelve months. Where do you want to be? Who do you want to be? What do you want to be doing? What do you want your job to be? What car do you want to drive? Who do you want your friends to be? What clothes do you want to wear? Write all of that out in detail and don’t leave anything out. 

But if twelve months seems like it’s too far away and you’ve never really planned anything a year in advance before, that’s fine. You can do it for six months from now instead. But just write it down and really flesh out those details and those ideas so that you can almost see what that looks like and you can visualize it.

If I could make the transition that I’ve made from eating apples and sleeping on half of a couch to having multiple teaching businesses and helping other teachers achieve financial freedom, quit their jobs, and take control of their lives, then think of what you could do. And it isn’t going to take you as long as it took me because I had no guidance at all and I didn’t have a solid plan until the last few years. Just think of the transition you can make, who you are going to become, and the changes that are going to take place. Take a moment to consider how that’s going to feel.

Make a decision

The next step is the most crucial one of all. This is the step that separates those who are able to make the transition from those who are not. It separates those who are just thinking about what could happen and thinking about changing their life from those who are actually doing it. And that next step is making a decision.

Right now, right here, you need to make the full decision to change your life. This is so important. Looking back at my own transformation, this is where it all started. Sure, I had made decisions before in the past and I had told myself that I wanted things to change, but what I realized is that I hadn’t made a full decision. What I mean by making a full decision is that when you decide to change your life you need to immediately start implementing those changes, otherwise, you haven’t made a decision, you’ve just told yourself a lie. If you don’t start taking action and actually doing the things you’ve just decided to do, then you’re lying to yourself and that’s not a decision at all. A full decision means that you tell yourself you’re going to make a change and then you do it.

How it happens

I still remember how it happened for me. I was in the middle of teaching a lesson and thought to myself, “I want things to change. I want my life to be different. I want to live life on my own terms. I want to take control.” And then I took action. That’s really how it all starts. Your life-changing experience and your transition can’t start until you do the same thing. So, right here, right now, you need to make that decision fully and completely.

And you don’t have to just read this book and think, “Maybe it worked for Kris, but it won’t work for me.” It’s going to work for you if you do exactly what I’ve just said. It’s worked for other people and it’ll work for you and that’s the honest truth. One of the coolest things that I’ve been able to witness since starting down this path of coaching and mentoring other teachers is how different members of the community we’ve built have been able to help each other and push each other to reach goals. Sometimes we get in a rut and sometimes we don’t understand where we should go or what to do, but having other people to bounce ideas off of and having an accountability partner really helps us get through those tough times. It pushes us to move onwards and upwards. And I still do that to this day. If I didn’t have other people who pushed me and listened to my ideas, I wouldn’t have been able to do so many of the great things that I’ve been able to do.

Why teaching?

But sometimes other businesspeople ask me, “Why teaching?” They think there’s no money or no future in teaching. I’ve been involved with a lot of startups where people ask, “How has Kris been able to do all of this with teaching?” And, “How has Kris been able to start teaching businesses with other teachers?” A lot of people also think that teachers just play with little kids all day and show them how to count from one to ten and make them raise their hand before they ask a question. They think that’s what a teacher is.

My response to those questions is a famous quote by a person more famous than myself - Henry Ford. You might know that he is credited with the creation of the automobile or at least mass producing it. He said that if he had asked the masses what they wanted at that time, then they would have said they wanted a faster horse. You see the horse was the traditional means of transportation at the time and having a fast horse meant being able to go places faster and being able to get more things done in a shorter amount of time. So, the benefit of having a faster horse was obvious to everyone.

The Revolution 

But what wasn’t obvious was that there was a completely revolutionary way of doing things that nobody was even considering - and that was the automobile. So, instead of creating a faster horse or training or breeding a faster horse, he created the automobile and solved the same problem in a much more efficient way. That’s what our teaching revolution is all about. When you are able to get people the result of having a faster horse, which might be in our case learning a language or improving scores on academic exams or learning other skills, when you can do that and you can make an offer to people that really guarantees they will get results, you’re guaranteeing yourself income for the rest of your life.

Just like Henry Ford was able to use the automobile to get people the same result as having a faster horse, which enabled him to make boatloads of money, you can use teaching to get the things you’ve always wanted in your life and to have the time to do the things you’ve always wanted to do. So, while other people might be relying on retirement accounts and saving every penny, you’ll be able to reach the same goals and achieve the same results by simply getting a few clients. You can stop worrying about your next paycheck and if that’s going to cover your mortgage or your car note or whatever it is that’s stopping you from really taking control of things right now.

The benefits of teaching

That’s why we need to look at the benefits of teaching and what makes teaching such a great thing for us to do. The first benefit is that, thanks to new technology, you can start teaching with just a laptop or even from a cellular phone. That’s right. You don’t need extra software and you don’t need any extra products. You can do it all with your cell phone or laptop or computer - whatever you feel most comfortable using. Another benefit of teaching is that you don’t have to build a reputation or a name in the industry over a long period of time. You don’t need to spend years developing word-of-mouth referrals. I mean, we’re going to do that too, but it’s going to happen fast and we aren’t going to rely on that alone.

Another benefit is that you’re going to have clients paying you again and again and the amount you charge is really up to you. But you can charge fairly high amounts for your services and products from the very beginning. And the best part, at least I think so, is that you get to keep all of the money! Now, sure, you’ll need to pay taxes and comply with your local government’s laws and whatnot, but with other businesses you usually only get to keep somewhere around 10% to 25% of the money you bring in. But with teaching, you’ll get to keep closer to 80% or even 95% of the revenue you generate. That’s what makes this type of business much better than others.

Another great thing about teaching is that it builds your confidence like nothing else. When you enter into a teacher-student relationship and someone has paid money to put themselves into the role of the student, you really get to see how you have an influence on other people’s lives. That’s something that can be used for good or for bad, but as teachers we are expected to use it for good and it’s something that makes us feel great about what we do and about who we are as individuals because we are the source of learning and growth in others. I’ve noticed that when the teachers I work with have got their first client, their confidence in themselves and in what they are doing skyrockets. The first client is so important and can really be the source of a ton of motivation. With teaching, we are able to get you your first client extremely quickly.

And perhaps the most important fact to consider about setting up a teaching business is that you can start now, no matter what skills, knowledge, or previous experience you have. You can quickly learn the ins and outs of having and running your very own teaching business. And that’s in addition to the fact that you can work online, which means from your house or a café or wherever you choose. You can make your own hours, set your own prices, choose which clients you accept and which you don’t, and have complete freedom to do things the way you want to do them. 

Plus, teaching is a great business to be in because you’re really helping change the world for the better. In some businesses people can do some really sketchy things. But with teaching it’s all very positive, very straightforward, and very rewarding. You get to see the results of your work in the improvements that other people are able to make, which is absolutely fulfilling. So, it’s a business that’s good for your wallet, but it’s also good for your soul and good for your psychological and moral well-being. That’s something I’ve taken personal pride in over the years. I’m so happy that I got into this kind of business as opposed to others. I’ve been able to help a lot of people and that’s much more important than doing something just to make money.

Misconceptions about teaching

Yet, some people tell me “Kris, I don’t think I’m right for teaching. It’s not me. I’m not the kind of person who can teach people stuff.” Or they think something about business that isn’t true. They might think they need business experience or they need to have lots of money to invest upfront. And that’s usually because they don’t really understand what a teacher is and what a teacher actually does. They think teachers do something different. And they don’t understand what a teaching business is. They think teachers who start teaching businesses have to have a degree from an institute of higher education, or to have a teaching business you have to have an office and a whiteboard and other physical things, or to have a teaching business you need to have connections with other businesspeople. Sometimes they think that a teaching business is all about spending a ton of time teaching one-on-one lessons for very little money or they think that a teaching business has to focus on basic school subjects like addition and subtraction. And, you know what, not only is that stuff really boring, but it’s not true one bit. Those are just ways that people have been misled to believe something that’s completely false.

I didn’t believe those things and none of the people I know who have been able to successfully set up teaching businesses have believed those things either. None of those things had any bearing or influence on the decisions we made and on how we set things up or how we operate our businesses now. So, that’s what a teaching business isn’t. Now I’m going to tell you what it is.

What is a teacher? What is a business?

As a teacher myself, when I want to understand a concept at its core I turn to the dictionary as the first place or source of information to get a good basic understanding of what that thing is and what the word actually means. So, in the dictionary it says that a teacher is a person who teaches or instructs, especially as a profession. And a business is an occupation, profession, or trade. Thus, a teacher is a professional person who instructs other people and a teaching business is that person’s profession. What we need to focus on here is being professional and providing instruction. That’s what it means to be a teacher and that’s what it means to have a teaching business.

Honestly, anybody can be a teacher of anything and anybody can set up a teaching business that instructs people on anything. You don’t have to have a registered business and you don’t have to dress up and be formal. In fact, you don’t really have to do any of those things and you can still be a teacher and have a teaching business by simply providing instruction and being professional about it.

If you haven’t completed Exercise #1, then you need to go back and do that before continuing. Don’t cheat yourself. Do the work the right way from the beginning because that’s how you’re going to be successful. Don’t cut corners and don’t take shortcuts. Do it right!

The Only Three Things You Need

A lot of teachers out there think they need to find a job and spend their time teaching in somebody else’s business or in a public or state-run school. They don’t realize that they could be investing that time into growing their own career and becoming financially independent, while also mastering their niche.

There are only three things you need in order for you to really have a successful teaching business. If you have them, then it’s pretty much impossible for you not to be successful and to make money with your teaching business. Most teachers are desperate when it comes to operating their business and attracting clients for their business. I’ve seen it a million times. They start a Facebook group page, and then they start a Twitter account, and then they start an Instagram account, and then they start a mailing list, and then they start blogging, and then they start a YouTube channel and a podcast channel, and they write an e-book, and they go to networking events, and then they build a super expensive website, and then they build a mobile app to go with their website.

They do all of this crap. And it’s really crap because they aren’t able to keep up with everything. They get burnt out and they believe that they need to be everywhere all the time and doing everything all the time in order to be successful and in order to attract clients. But that’s just not true.

All those sites are fun and, when used properly, they can be a great platform that can really attract clients and can be great business tools as well. But trying to do everything all the time is a surefire way to get nowhere fast and to get really stressed out and depressed. If you’re trying so hard and nothing is becoming of it or you’re not reaching your intended goal, then you’re going to feel really bad about all that time you wasted. The real truth here is that you need to focus on one thing, not many things. Focus on one thing or at least don’t focus on more than three things. When you’re starting your business, three is the maximum and any more than that will just end up causing more stress and disappointment than results.

There are only three things that matter in order for you to have a successful teaching business. The first thing you need to do is something a little controversial and I don’t mean politically controversial or religiously or anything like that. I’m saying it’s controversial because when I tell people that they need to do this, most people don’t want to hear it. The problem is that they don’t really consider what it means and why it’s important. The first step to having a successful teaching business is becoming a new person.

You need to become a different person. You might be asking, “Why do I need to change? I love who I am. I’m already good enough.” Or, “I’m already an interesting person. Why do I need to change who I am?” But you have to keep an open mind because this is a crucial part of the next steps.

The second thing you need to do is find a niche and create an offer for that niche that will allow you to deliver value and help the students in that niche. A lot of teachers get stuck here and have a hard time making a decision. It’s really not hard. Just decide what your niche is and go with it. And later on down the road you can make adjustments or completely change things, but you have to make a full decision if you’re ever going to even find out if that niche will work for you or not. If you only test the niche with 50% of your effort and confidence, then you’ll only be 50% sure that it works or doesn’t work 

The third thing is having a process for attracting leads and converting them into clients that’s easy to repeat and that’s proven to work. By having all three of these things that I’ve just told you about, you’ll be almost guaranteed to be successful and have a successful teaching business. You’ll make money and love what you’re doing.

Becoming a new person

Why is it important to become a new person? On top of all the questions that you might have asked yourself and might have wanted to ask me when I first brought this up, you might now also be thinking, “How is this connected to business?” Well, this all has to do with transformation. How was I able to change and go from eating an apple for lunch and having half of a couch to sleep on to owning multiple language teaching businesses, travelling the world, making my own hours, being my own boss, and helping other people around the world make their dreams come true? How did that happen? I had to become a different person, a new person who was better than the one I had been up to that point.

How was I able to do that? I had to become something more than just an individual and more than just me. I had to become more than a teacher and more than some guy who does all the ordinary things. I had to go to that next level and allow myself to change and be changed. I had to get out of my own way. Most people don’t understand that they have this idea and concept of who they are in their minds. They believe that’s who they are. And because they believe that, they make small, subconscious decisions on a daily and hourly basis that reinforce that idea of who they are. They become even more of the person who they claim to be. When I was telling myself that it’s OK to eat crappy food and it’s OK to have no money and it’s OK to work 80 hours a week for next to nothing, I was causing myself more pain and cementing myself in a place that I didn’t want to be.

Let yourself be changed

Even though I wanted bigger and better things, I was stopping myself and holding myself back. I wasn’t allowing myself to become the type of person who actually had those things. It’s nuts! If you want to do something and you want to be the kind of person who has the things you say you want to have, then why do you keep doing things that prevent you from having them? You know there are things you have to do to reach your goals and you know that people who do those things and have those things you want - they do those actions. But for some reason you keep saying you want them, but you don’t do anything about it.

For example, if you want to be successful, you can’t be afraid of talking to people. If you want to sell to people, you can’t put off taking calls and responding to messages. If you want to start your business, you have to take action and do stuff. It’s common sense, but so many people, like myself in the past, keep doing the complete opposite of what we know we need to do to be successful and to get the things we want.

And using logic doesn’t solve our problem. You can ask a million people for advice and read self-help books and see a psychologist and none of that solves our problem. No matter what you try and where you go it’s not going to be solved until you understand one key thing: you are causing this. You are the problem. That person who you think you are. That’s the person preventing you from achieving what you want. 

I’m telling you this because there is one simple thing you have to do if you’re ever going to be successful with your teaching business or with any business at all and that’s making a transformation of who you are, what that person does, and how that person thinks. You must become a new person if you are going to transcend yourself, who you are now, and what you have now. To go to the next level, you must become someone and something new. No one who has become successful in business or in life for that matter has ever stayed one hundred percent completely the same. They’ve always changed and become a different person.

Transcend and include

When we transcend something and when we move to a higher level, we don’t just leave everything else behind or forget about it and never use it again. No. What happens when we transcend something is we transcend it and include it. That means, even though we are becoming a new person and becoming a more successful, better person, we still have all of those things from our past and from who we used to be. Those are all part of our new self and our new identity. But now we have reached a higher level where we are able to achieve more and we understand that this new person we’ve become does things differently and incorporates different behaviors. We transcend and include.

What your transformation looks like

Who you are now is not who you will be when you achieve everything you wrote down in Exercise #1. I asked you to write those things down because that, in written format, is who you want to be. You’ve already described it and you’ve started putting it into practice. And I’m sure some of you haven’t written anything down. You might not have even taken out a pen and piece of paper. That blank piece of paper or that emptiness where the piece of paper should be - that’s what your future self looks like right now. That’s your transition. It’s as empty as that sheet of paper or the space on your desk. We have to take action if anything is going to happen for us. That requires change. Don’t let your current self and who you are now overcome and conquer who you want to be. Stop killing your own dreams!

You are actively killing your own dreams and creating roadblocks and barriers to your own success. Who you are now is not who you will be when you become successful and when your teaching business becomes successful. We need to accept that as a fact of life. We need to transition and accept our new identity. When we do that, we will be able to take action and do things that we haven’t done before. It will allow us to reach goals and achieve things that we haven’t achieved before.

A lot of people who try to start their own business freeze up at this point because they know what they want, they know that they need to take action, and they know they need to start behaving and thinking differently, but they can’t do it. They have an internal conflict going on between who they believe themselves to be now and who they want to become in the future. They don’t yet believe themselves to be that person and there’s a very good reason: They haven’t done anything that would make them or anyone around them believe that that’s who they are.

If you ever want to get over the feeling of being frozen and not being able to move forward, then you need the person who you want to become, the successful person who has started a profitable business, to beat the person you are now. Your future self needs to win, take the lead, and become real. Then, you have to allow yourself to be changed and allow your current idea of who you are to lose.

If you don’t do that, everything you do will feel wrong. For example, if you tell people that you are a professional teacher, but you don’t have any experience, you haven’t taught a day in your life, and you really don’t believe that you are a professional teacher, then you’re going to feel bad about yourself. You’re going to feel like a scammer or a fraud because you don’t even believe in yourself. You don’t believe in your successful future self and that’s going to cause pain and conflict for you.

Get out of your own way

People who are stuck on their current self exhibit signs of their obsession with who they are right now. One is when they always talk about stuff that’s happened to them in the past as a way to justify why they are where they are right now. Another one is when people feel they aren’t good enough or don’t deserve to be respected or don’t deserve to be making lots of money or don’t deserve the attention of other people, even their students. Another one is when people just sit around and don’t do anything and make excuses for it. They say something like, “Well I’ve got plenty of time to do stuff, so I’ll do it later.” They usually make excuses, such as, “I worked all day today.” Or, “I’m really tired.” These are their excuses for why they won’t take action now. Or another one is when they say, “That’s just not me. I don’t feel comfortable calling that person or selling things.”

When teachers tell me this I know that they are stuck focusing on who they believe themselves to be right now. They truly believe it. I used to be just like that. I thought, “I do these things and that’s who I am and that’s why I don’t do other things. I like these things because that’s who I am and that’s not going to change because I like who I am and that’s just the way things are. I’m different and I’m unique and I like that.”

That’s fine. Be unique and be different, but don’t let that be it. Don’t let that be everything in your life. How are you ever going to get anywhere and achieve anything more in life if you’re always going to say that who you are now is who you will always be and you’ll never change? You won’t change. So, you won’t achieve newer, better things and you’ll stay right where you are now.

Disparity 

I went through that period too. I was always looking back towards my past for an understanding of who I was and not forward towards the future. I was always putting things off. I always had something better to do than the work that needed to be done in order for me to achieve my goals. And what I needed to do was let my future self kill my current, present self. My future self needed to be sociable and positive, so that I could get along with people. That’s not who I felt I naturally was. Not at all. I hated meeting new people and trying to impress them. That wasn’t me. At least that’s what I had been telling myself. I needed to be able to call people I didn’t know and have a conversation with them that ended with them buying my product. That was something that scared me because I didn’t want to think of myself as someone who did that. My future self needed to feel successful and eating apples, sharing a couch, having no money to your name, and having a mountain of debt didn’t make me feel very successful. I needed to be able to take action immediately, not in a few hours, not a week later, and not a month later. My current self was the biggest procrastinator in the world. No joke.

So, there was a big disparity between who I currently was at that moment and who I wanted to become in the future and who I needed to become to really get the things I dreamed of having. There was a huge chasm that seemed impossible to trek across. It was foggy and the other side wasn’t very clear, so it made me feel doubtful. That was the chasm between who I was and who I needed to be. You probably feel that chasm too. It’s dark. It’s sad. It’s weighing you down. How do you overcome it and reach the other side? How do you become someone who you aren’t right now?

Becoming who you aren’t

I can tell you that I’ve become a new person more than once. I had to change who I was if I ever wanted to stop sharing the couch I was sleeping on and get my own place to sleep. I had to change if I wanted to be able to afford more than an apple for lunch. I had to become someone new. That guy wasn’t able to have multiple teaching businesses, be successful, and travel the world. So, how did I go to the next level and become a new person?

When I set up my first business I thought I had achieved something spectacular, but now I understand that my first teaching business was a baby step. Then, I made new realizations and had to become a completely different person again. Here I am writing this book, having become a different person. And being able to do this has helped other teachers to change who they are and become successful too.

The fluid identity

Our identity and who we are isn’t rigidly stuck in one place. It’s fluid. It’s constantly changing. It’s constantly developing. It’s a really simple concept, but most of the time we don’t think about it.

We are always transcending and including. How else do you explain how you went from being a child to being an adult? That child didn’t disappear. No. You transcended it and became an adult. That child is still in there somewhere, right? How do you explain going from being a person who associates himself or herself with the age they are? In the past it was so important that you were twelve years old or fifteen or eighteen and then you transcended that age. You started thinking differently, like, “I’m twenty and I need to focus on something different.” Or maybe you came to this realization when you reached thirty years old or maybe forty. It doesn’t matter what the number is because what’s changing isn’t really the number. What’s changing is your self-identity and how you think about who you are.

Even though we tend to think of age as something that rigidly changes from 18 to 19 or 20 to 21, that’s not what’s happening. We trick ourselves into ignoring what’s really going on, which is that every second of every minute of every hour of every day we are developing and transcending our previous selves and including that into something bigger and better. The answer to the question of how we become someone who we are not or how we become someone different than who we are now is that you are already doing this all the time, every day, and the only thing that really needs to change is your perception of your own reality.

What you believe to be true right now has a huge influence on what you become. If everybody told you that a year was only six months long instead of twelve months, then you would associate a different number with who you are now. You would also associate a different number with being old or being young. You would start thinking that 35 or 36 is when most people finish school. Instead of going to school for 12 years, you would go to school for 24 years because the concept of a year would be different in your head. Even the concept of how long a year is has changed several times throughout history. It’s nothing more than a concept or a construct for our minds. It’s not a real thing.

What you believe to be true has an enormous influence on what your current reality, which influences who you are becoming. We are all becoming someone. We’re becoming someone new and different. The only difference between believing that you get older every twelve months, instead of every six months, is that you perceive it to be true.

Flawed human sensory perception

It’s important to study psychology. I still study it because it’s important to understand how people think and how the brain works so I can help my students and clients get results. Every teacher needs to know a little bit about psychology. When we start thinking about perception and how we perceive the world around us, it becomes painfully clear. Our brains are flawed and our whole sensory perception system is flawed. That’s just natural. It doesn’t mean that there’s something wrong with you or something wrong with me. It’s just a natural part of being a human being. We have flawed senses and a flawed perception of the world.

It’s all just a series of neurons firing and sending messages along neurotransmitters from one sensory input source to a sensory analysis center that we call our brains. Our eyes, ears, nose, mouth, skin, etc. receive signals from the world and from our environment and then our brains process those signals to give us what we perceive to be true. Whatever our brains perceive to be true, we believe. We trust our brains and we go through the world believing everything our brains tell us. But this is the most important part of the entire equation because we can step in here and change things.

There’s another step, an important step, between when our brains receive signals from our senses and when our brains believe those signals to be true. Whatever our brains believe to be true has an influence on how we perceive things in the future and the signals that our senses send to our brains in the future. If we believe that 36 is the right age to graduate from school, then when someone tells us that they are 36, we think they are just starting their adult life. 

Let’s look at another example: beauty. Over the years there have been different standards of beauty in the world and in different societies. For a long time, in many cultures it was believed that being large and having a lot of fat on your body was more beautiful than being thin or slim. It was associated with survival and a rather fat person at that time was a person who had enough food and had the kind of lifestyle that meant they didn’t have to struggle, while the thin people were the ones breaking their backs and taking extreme risk day after day. Later people started to value something different and have a different concept of what it meant to be beautiful. Then, society identified other problems like anorexia, bulimia, and eating disorders. People started thinking that being too thin or too skinny was a real problem and it wasn’t beautiful. But that’s just a result of what we believe. If we believe that fat is beautiful or skinny is beautiful, then we see it and think it’s beautiful, which reinforces that idea for us.

However the same stimulus or seeing the same thing, hearing the same thing, or feeling the same thing can result in different signals to our brains depending on what we choose to believe about those signals. That’s where we get to make choices and where we have control. We can step in at this part of the process and we can influence what our brains believe to be true, regardless of our prior perceptions of the signals we are receiving.

You can see that the person who you think you are, isn’t really who you are. When you tell yourself that you work in a kindergarten and that makes you a kindergarten teacher for life, or you eat pizza three times a week, or whatever it is that you associate with being who you are and being this thing that you refer to as “yourself” - it’s just not true. What’s true is that you’ve allowed your brain to believe that this is your reality and this is who you are. It has been reinforced over and over again and it has influenced how you perceive the signals your senses provide to your brain.

Change who you think you are

The only thing stopping you from becoming who you need to become and doing the things that you need to do - is you. You are holding yourself back by continuing to believe that you are this thing that you call yourself. I have to go back and remind myself of this all the time. Otherwise, I would get stuck and wouldn’t be able to move forward and make more progress. I always have to allow myself to be changed and I have to adapt my perception of who I am to fit the things that I want to have and the person I want to become. If you try to achieve your goals by remaining the exact same person you’ve been up to this point, you’re going to get stressed out and frustrated and it’s going to be very painful. I can tell you that because that’s what I went through and it really hurt.

Trekking across the chasm

If you try to behave, act, and do things like someone who you’re not, then it’s going to cause you a lot of pain. Remember that chasm. There’s a giant chasm between where you are now and where you want to be in life and the things you want to have. Who you believe yourself to be at this current moment is stuck in your current situation. You’re trying to trek across that chasm. Your desired situation, your dreams, and your ambitions are on the other side. You’re trying to trek across the chasm, while remaining yourself – that thing you’ve convinced yourself that you are. That’s what causes most people to fail.

In order to survive, make it through that trek across the chasm to the other side, and achieve your dreams, you need to first become a new version of yourself that is better suited for that type of journey. Think of it like this: you’re wearing sandals and shorts and you’re sitting on the beach, but you want to reach the top of Mount Everest. You know it’s completely possible to reach the top of Mount Everest. We know that because other people have done it and you can listen to their stories like you’ve listened to mine. You might go to their Facebook page and see them on the beach wearing shorts and sandals and you might think, “That guy looks a lot like me and he was able to go to the top of Mount Everest. That means I can too!” And that’s right. You can too. But first you’re going to need to change out of your shorts and sandals because trying to go to the top of Mount Everest in shorts and sandals is a death wish. I’ve never tried it, but I don’t recommend it.

To reach the other side of the chasm you need to change and become a new, different person who is equipped to make the journey. A person who is not only going to start the journey, but someone who will see it through to the end. Instead of struggling to the top in your sandals and shorts, you need to get some gear and get off the beach. You need to become a new person and do new things, so that you are able to achieve the goals you’ve set for yourself and so that you can do it easily, without breaking a sweat. That old person you believed yourself to be and told yourself that you were - that person can’t reach the top. You need to become a new person who can.

How to become a new person

You’re going to become a new person by asking yourself some questions and answering them in detail. Then, you need to allow those answers to sit with you and resonate with you and for the logic behind those answers to influence your life by you taking action to really change things. Let’s go back to that piece of paper where you wrote everything about your current situation and that description of who you are now. We know that it’s only who we believe we are now and that’s not the true reality of things. You also described where you want to go and who you want to be. That’s where you wrote your dreams and who you want to become. We’re going to flesh that out even further and really understand what that person looks like, what they do, and everything about them, so that we can become that person entirely.

Look back over what you’ve written and don’t be afraid to add more details to it. Use these strategies to generate more details:

• “Who is …”

Add your name there at the end.

So, if I asked myself, I’d say, “Who is Kris Amerikos?” And then I would write it out. This doesn’t have to be a long answer. You should just focus on the main points. Include something about what you do and what your business is about. Include something about where you live, something about how much money you make, and something about how much time you spend on different activities. Include your hobbies.

This is just a brief overview of the life you want to have. It’s describing what success looks like for you. You have to be realistic and productive here. Some people write silly stuff, like, “I spend all day being pampered by models in swimsuits who feed me grapes and serenade me.” That’s not what successful people do because successful people understand that they need to keep moving forward and developing. Sure, that might be nice for a day, but that’s not what you want to spend your life doing. Don’t write that. 

• “What six qualities describe me?”

List six adjectives that describe your personality or character. Remember, it’s not your current personality. It’s the personality of our successful, future self. Those adjectives might be intelligent, outgoing, polite, punctual, etc. etc. We don’t just arbitrarily choose these adjectives. If we say that we are going to be punctual, it means we make a full decision and we are always on time. It means when we meet our friends and family, we are on time. When we have a call with our clients - on time. When we do independent activities on our own, we do them at the exact time we’ve planned to do them. So, you should really think about which six character qualities describe the successful person you will be and how that ties into your behavior and changes that you’ll need to make. If we take these simple steps our plans can become a reality, not just words on a piece of paper.

• “Who are my friends and what do I spend my free time doing?”

It’s amazing how many people don’t understand that the people around them have a huge influence on who they are and the choices they make. If you’re going to be a successful person with their own business, there might be some people you call friends who will not fit into your life. That’s a hard reality to face, but it’s the truth. Some people just aren’t ready to accept the fact that you are successful and they aren’t. Even if you try to help them improve themselves and gain success for themselves, there is no way for you to guarantee that it will work because it’s a choice they have to make. Some of your friends may even start to resent you for gaining success because you’re able to do things you’ve always wanted and they aren’t. Or maybe your relationship with them in the past has been one where they’ve been kind of superior or they’ve always made decisions about the activities you do together or they’ve always been “the alpha” in the relationship. It’s going to be really hard for them to accept that now you’re the leader, you’re in control of your life, and you’re successful.

I’m not telling you to forget all your friends. And I know for a fact that you’ll probably have at least one friend who is really supportive, really wants you to succeed, and will be happy for you. The same goes for family members. There are some people who you already know will be supportive and some who will be haters. It’s important to be strong enough to ignore the haters and stay focused on our goals because those haters aren’t going to help us. They’re only going to keep us down and prevent us from getting to where we want to go. So, when you ask yourself who your friends are and what you do in your free time, really analyze that. If you sit around and drink beers with your friends or you watch your favorite T.V. show or whatever you do right now, really think about if that’s what a successful person does. Is that what a person who has their own business does in their free time? And then make a full decision about that. 

Then, you want to ask other questions. You want to ask, “What do I look like?” “How do I dress?” “How often do I vacation and where do I go?” “How often do I do physical exercise and what do I do?” You could even go as far as asking questions like, “How many hours of sleep do I get each night?” or “What gifts do I get for my family for the holidays?” The more questions you ask and the more you answer them, you think about those answers seriously, and you make full decisions about what you want for your future self, the more you’re going to see the disparity between who you are now and who you need to become. You are looking into that chasm and it’s looking back into you. You’re realizing that trying to make that journey as you are now, in your sandals and shorts, well, that isn’t going to work. That’s when you’ll equip yourself with all the necessary tools to transcend yourself and take on the qualities of your successful future self. That’s how you’ll be prepared to start your journey to the other side and that’s how you’ll make the journey a lot easier for yourself.

Making a full decision to become a new person

Making a full decision to become a new person and taking action to make it real for you - that’s the first step. A lot of people out there think this isn’t important and they say, “How can it all start by changing something in my mind or by convincing myself of something. That sounds like B.S. That could never work.” And, you know what, it’s not going to work for that person. Their perception of who they are and who they will be has already been decided. Not by me. Not by their parents or friends. Not by the world or by society. They decided it themselves. They’ve decided that it won’t work before they’ve even tried it. They’ve decided to end their future before it’s started and they’ve decided not to be successful. That’s the truth. You need to get out of your own way and you need to allow yourself to be changed. You need to become a new person. That’s step one to having a successful teaching business and being successful in general.

My work with teachers has been amazing. I have become an agent of change for teachers who need to find more students and earn more from teaching. And I’ve even seen results with people who don’t want to start a business because everything I help them with changes their perspective and changes how they think about the world in general. If we never change our perspective and we always stay the same, we might be determined to do something that doesn’t make any sense. The world is changing around us and we need to change with the world.

Here’s an example: if you want to travel from Europe to North America, sure, you can take a boat. You might save up your money just to have enough to travel across the ocean. Plus, the voyage itself will take a long time. But, if you changed your perspective and opened yourself up to new possibilities and opportunities, you would find out that airplanes have been invented! You don’t have to spend so much time and money traveling to North America. Don’t be that person who still hasn’t realized that there is a new way to do things. Allow yourself to be changed.

The teachers I work with learn so many new ways of running a teaching business and new perspectives on sources of income, services for clients, and so much more that it’s like they’ve just discovered a new mode of transportation. It’s like discovering teleportation really. It feels like all your life you thought you had to ride around in a car and, all of a sudden, you’ve discovered teleportation. That’s what it can do for you and your career. It can teleport you into the future.

Choosing a Niche and Creating an Offer

It’s extremely important to follow the steps of this book in sequential order because this is what has worked for thousands of teachers around the world. Some people always want to do things differently. They convince themselves that they need to put their own unique spin on everything. Well, if you are one of those people who feels the need to do what I’m telling you differently than how I am telling you to do it, then I have a question for you about that. Why change something that works?

I’ve got this down to an exact science and following the steps I lay out for you is your proven path to success. If it works, then why do it differently? It’s like riding a bicycle. I’m showing you how to put your rear end on the seat, feet on the pedals, and hands on the handlebars. I’m sure there are people who can ride a bike with their hands, instead of their feet, but most people who try it that way are just going to fail, get hurt, and look like an idiot along the way. You know that doing it the way I’ve described works because I have multiple teaching businesses and the teachers I’ve worked with have successful, profitable teaching businesses, so why even risk doing it another way?

This book is level one. It shows you the proper way to get up on the bicycle and get positioned for success, so you don’t fall flat on your face. Some teachers go to level two and ask me to show them how to push the pedals and how to steer, so they get moving forward to where they want to be. I also have a complete level three business framework where I show you how to do tricks, flips, and all that cool stuff. But before you can do any of that, you have to know how to get up on the bike. That’s where you are right now with this book and you’re almost ready to start pedaling on your own by finding students and growing your revenue. These steps are really easy to follow and they’ve worked for me and lots of other people. They’re going to work for you too. 

Creating value is one of the most important things you’ll ever need to do in business and it’s really the essence of doing business. If you don’t have anything of value to give people, then people will never buy anything from you. That should make sense because if people don’t want what you’ve got, then they’re not going to pay money for it. Right? We pay money and we buy things because we want them for some reason and that reason is valuable to us. That’s where value comes into play here. Any successful business is able to create value.

Current situation and desired situation

There’s no need to complicate things here. Every person, no matter who they are and where they are, has two things going on: They have a current situation in their life, which is the way things are going now, what they are doing now, what they have now, etc. This is their current life situation. They also have a desired situation that they’re trying to reach. Some people try harder than others, but everybody wants something and they want to achieve something. They want more. That’s just a fact of life. Every person has a current situation and a desired situation.

Between those two situations there is the chasm that we talked about earlier. We already know the chasm in your life, between your current situation and your desired situation, because you’ve written it down. You, like everyone else, have those two things and there’s a disparity between the two.

People spend their lives trying to trek across that chasm and reach the other side. They work, travel, meditate, eat, spend money, do exercise, go to university, get married, and so many things throughout their life trying to go from where they are now to where they want to be. They want to become a better version of themselves, even if they don’t consciously understand that. That’s why people do the things they do and behave the way they do. And that’s our first step to understanding how to create value.

Why do people buy things?

Why do people buy services and products from teachers? Why do people need our help? Can’t they just do it themselves? Why do people buy teaching services and teaching products? Why do people learn stuff from teachers?

First of all, they buy these services and products because they’re not sure how to do it on their own or they think that they can’t do it on their own. Secondly, they buy them because they want to get a specific result faster than they could on their own and that’s what the teacher or the product will help them do. And thirdly, they want to follow a system that’s guaranteed to work. They want to follow instructions from someone who has successfully done this thing or reached the goal that they want to reach.

You probably know somebody who has tried to learn something, such as how to dance or how to write code for computers or maybe even someone who has tried to learn a language. For whatever reason, they tried to do it on their own, but it didn’t exactly work out for them. And then they tried it again and the same thing happened. They got really frustrated and they just couldn’t figure it out. Even if they finally figured it out, it took a lot longer than if someone who had all the answers would have shown them how to do it. They made mistakes and went through a lot of unnecessary hardships and obstacles just because they wanted to do it themselves and they had never done it before. But when that person pays a teacher or a coach to help them through it and to get the result they want, they get a system for achieving the result that would’ve taken a long time otherwise or might have never happened at all. That’s why people pay teachers and coaches and they buy teaching products and services.

The role of the teacher and teaching services

As a teacher or as a teaching business you want to find out what your potential client’s current situation is. Then, find out what their desired situation is. And then position yourself and your offer as a means for reaching their desired situation. You and your offer will help them trek across that chasm and make it to the other side. That’s what a teacher is. Right? A teacher helps students go from not knowing something to knowing something by way of their product or their knowledge. That’s teaching. And that’s how you create value. You help take them from where they are now to where they want to be.

The best way to lead them across that chasm and to reach the other side is to focus on a very specific area or a very specific thing that you can help with. That’s what your niche is. You can’t help everyone because, let’s face it, you don’t know everything about everything. I don’t know everything about everything either. But when we focus on one specific niche or one area or thing, we can help people get amazing results. And we can do that over and over again. It’s impossible to be the best at absolutely everything all the time, but it’s very possible to be the best at one small, specific thing.

Focus on one thing at a time

Throughout history people have become famous and world-renowned for particular things, not general things. In music, we’ve got famous singers who are popular for a specific genre of music, not just for doing all kinds of music and being the best at music in general. No. They are the best at rock or rap or techno or jazz or another genre. They have a niche. The same is true about doctors, lawyers, accountants, and any profession you can think of. They all have a niche and that’s how they become the best. On top of that, when we sell to a particular group of people, which we can call our niche audience or target audience, the words we say to them have more meaning and carry more weight because they can relate to the particularities of what we are saying. It’s as if we’ve customized our messages for them specifically because they are part of our niche too. For people who aren’t in our niche, it doesn’t sound interesting and it’s not important, but for our target audience it’s extremely interesting and very important.

That’s where you can make serious money with your teaching business. When you find a niche and you become the best, meaning you’re an expert in the niche, that’s when people want to pay you more money for your work. That’s when you can really take your business to the next level and play by your own rules. Plus, there are so many different niches and sub-niches available in the teaching industry. Even in the language teaching market there are tons that haven’t been tapped yet. There are too many for one person or one company to really cover. I’ve even created a huge outline of all of the different niches that I’ve discovered, but the possibilities are truly unlimited.

When you’ve got a niche, you’ve mastered the niche, and you’ve mastered your market, you don’t even have to go looking for clients anymore. They are going to seek you out and find you and almost beg you to work with them because they know you’re the best and you get results. Why would they want to work with anyone else? They definitely don’t want to work with people who don’t have a niche and who just focus on all the same general stuff that everyone else focuses on. They know that you get results. They will even pay for your advice and for sharing information with them. That’s the power of having a niche and mastering it.

Exercise #2: Choosing a niche made easy

When you understand this process and what it means for your business, you’ll clearly know how to not only set up not one business with one niche, but how you can infiltrate multiple niches over time and really benefit from it for life. But first, let’s go about it a simpler way. Take out another piece of paper or find a blank space to write down the next three things: 

First, you need to write down areas of knowledge that you are already familiar with and that you would feel comfortable teaching about right now. This usually comes from your past experiences and what you’ve done in your life. So, you might already be familiar with mechanics and how cars work, or you might know a lot about geography compared to other people, or you might have knowledge of chemistry or biology or another hard science. You might also write here different groups that you know, such as children having trouble with mathematics or teachers who have a problem separating their personal and professional life. Write down at least five of them. Remember at this point we are just choosing our niche, so it doesn’t matter if you think you are good at it or that you can do something revolutionary there. Right now that doesn’t matter. Just write them down and move forward. 

Second, you need to write down what the market wants or needs. This is usually going to be a problem or a solution within the areas of knowledge that you’ve already written down. For example, people who are learning languages have a hard time remembering lots of vocabulary, so you might write that down for this part. But we don’t want to just write down what we think. We need to actually do market research, go to the market, and ask them what they want, what they feel, what they think, so that we can really get in their heads. There are lots of ways you could contact members of the target market that you are focused on. You’ll know that you have collected enough information from the market when you can describe an entire day in the life of a typical member of that audience. When you can do that, you’ve collected enough market research, but if you can’t do that yet, you need to go out there and collect more.

If you’re not sure how to find your market or target audience so that you can contact them, just open up Google or Facebook or YouTube and start searching for words and phrases about that market. You’ll find pages, groups, and sites with information about the market you are focused on. And the more information you find about the market you’ve targeted, the better you’ll know it and understand how they think and what they need and want.

Third, you need to write down the abilities that you already have or that you can easily learn. A really important thing to keep in mind is that you don’t have to already possess all the skills necessary to solve the problem or to get people to where they want to be. You can learn those skills and abilities. If you aren’t sure about something and you don’t know it completely, people would rather you tell them something like, “I’m going to figure out a way to solve this for you.” It’s better to hear that than to hear you say, “I have no clue. I can’t do this.” Then, you have to really go out there, learn it, master it, and help your clients reach their desired result. 

If you focus all of your attention and all of your effort on one thing, it’s surprisingly easy to become great at it. If you focus on solving this one problem for your client and you put all your time and effort into solving it for them, then you’re going to succeed. You’ll be able to help and your client will be satisfied with your work. Choosing your niche is a simple combination of these three things: areas of knowledge you are familiar with, the market’s wants and needs, and the abilities that you have or can easily learn. When you write them down and put them on paper, you get a clear idea of how they all come together. Complete this exercise because it will show you where your strengths are and how you can apply that to what the market wants or needs.

Common pitfalls when choosing a niche

As you try to decide what your niche is, I want to warn you against jumping to conclusions based solely on your abilities. Remember that your niche needs to be an overlap of the three things we talked about. If we have to identify one out of these three parts that’s more important than the others, it’s definitely not the abilities that you have. That’s not what defines a niche. That’s what helps you enter a niche and succeed in a niche. Yes, you need that part. But the most important aspect of the three we’ve discussed is what the market wants or needs. Too many people get caught up with what they’re good at and what they themselves want. They don’t listen to the market. That’s a big problem.

The truth is that business is about helping other people and business is not about you and what you want. That’s a really difficult thing to grasp and comprehend because we always think about ourselves. I was definitely like that for a very long time. I didn’t understand that just because I thought something was amazing and it was a great idea that maybe the same thing wasn’t worth anything to other people. Maybe it was all in my own head and nobody needed that. The market doesn’t buy your product when you’re selfish and only think about yourself because that doesn’t provide value to the market. It only provides value to yourself. No matter what anyone says to the contrary, the truth is that business is not about helping yourself. It’s about helping others. So, you should use exercise #2 to find a niche, then to find a problem that niche has, and then to learn how to solve it.

Exercise #3: Creating an offer made easy

Next, we need to create an offer for your niche. An offer is basically how you explain what you are going to do for them. This is another part where a lot of people focus on themselves and want to list all of their accomplishments and achievements, but we want to avoid that. Your offer can be broken down into three points that we will combine into one, simple sentence that describes what you do:

• Niche (the problem that needs to be solved)
• The desired result
• Your solution

Those three things come together to tell people what you do. You can include them in one, simple sentence to tell people what you do just like this:

1. “I help” + niche
2. The desired result
3. “with” / “by” / “through” + your solution

For example:

1. “I help teachers”
2. “I help teachers set up businesses, find students, and earn more from teaching”
3. “I help teachers set up business, find students, and earn more from teaching with my Teaching Business Catalyst program.”

Just use these three parts to talk about who you are and what you do. When you present who you are and what you do in exactly this way, it shows people that you aren’t just focused on yourself, but you’re focused on results. When they know that, you’re going to be ridiculously successful and people are going to pay you any amount of money that you decide you want to charge.

There are three different exercises that we should have completed. One of them is about your own current and desired situation. Another is about choosing a niche. And this last one is about making an offer. It’s really simple stuff, but it’s powerful and you’re going to use later as you grow your teaching business. This is one of the foundations of our business and we continue building on it. Our niche tells us who to target with our offer. Our offer tells us how to target our niche. Without these things you won’t be able to implement the proven money-making strategies that I’ll give you when we work together. M sure you’ve completed these before moving forward.

And if you’ve come this far in our book, then I want to congratulate you because, in my experience, by this point we’ve usually weeded out more than half of the people who started reading. I’m really happy about that because the people who gave up in the beginning or who didn’t even give themselves a chance and didn’t start doing anything - they don’t deserve to get the instructions manual I’ve used to set up teaching businesses like We-Speak-Business, English for Ladies, Teacher-Talk-Time, English with Kris Amerikos, We-Speak-English, and others.

If you’ve completed the exercises and you’ve read this book fully, then I feel like I already know something about you and who you are as a person. You persevere. You don’t give up. When you want something, you don’t stop until you have it. And those are qualities that I admire about you.

Overview of what we’ve discussed

At the beginning of this book I told you that there are only three things you need to start your teaching business and we’ve already talked about two of them. The first was becoming a new person. Hopefully, by this point you really understand what that means and why it is the first step. I hope you understand why it’s a necessary step for you to take in order for you to be successful both in business and in life in general. You should understand that a teacher is someone who helps people go from their current situation to their desired situation and successfully trek across that chasm we talked about.

The second was choosing a niche and creating an offer that provides value to your niche. You should know that teachers and teaching businesses create value by understanding a group of people’s current and desired situations and by positioning their offer between the two. Your offer will be the vehicle that takes them from their current situation to their desired situation. You should understand how to choose your niche. Your niche is a 1) combination of areas of knowledge or groups of people with a particular problem ; 2) what the market wants and needs ; 3) abilities you have or can easily learn. And your offer is basically a description of who you are and what you do.

Those are three very simple exercises. Right? And doing these simple exercises will completely change things for you. That’s what happened to me. I started focusing on these basics and implemented this into the business I already had. Then, I approached setting up other businesses using the same strategy. It opened up a whole new world for me. And I’ve had other people tell me that doing these simple exercises has completely changed how they viewed the world of business too. It’s helped them get clients, make money, and do things they previously had never imagined were possible.

The third thing you need to start your teaching business is a proven system for turning strangers into high-paying clients. Being able to get one client here and there isn’t going to give you sustainable growth in your business and it isn’t going to give you the freedom that you’re looking for. No. This requires a process that works and can be repeated over and over again. That’s what I do and that’s what successful teaching businesses do.

When teachers are just getting started with their teaching business they tend to face a serious problem: they don’t know how to attract leads and convert them into clients. They don’t have a process that works and can be repeated, so they hope and pray someone finds them and decides to give them money.

Teachers in this situation look like bums to the rest of the business community. I think you know what a bum is. It isn’t someone who can’t work. It’s someone who doesn’t go out and get the work that’s available. And that’s the same with clients and getting clients. There are a ton of clients out there. In fact, there are more and more every single day. But just hoping and praying that they will find you isn’t going to work. You need a system. You need a plan. You need something that works and that you can repeat again and again.

New businesses don’t usually sit around, hope, and pray, but it’s almost the same thing when they don’t have a plan and they just post some stuff here and there on social media. They hear that Instagram marketing works, so they try that. Someone tells them that they got clients using YouTube, so they try that. A person who has never started a teaching business poses as a business coach for teachers and claims to have the answers, but hasn’t used those answers to do the thing they are teaching. Sometimes they get clients, but it never lasts. They go through periods of having lots of clients and then all of a sudden they all disappear and the business is struggling again. That’s all because they don’t have a system, a working system, that lets them get clients on demand whenever they want. That’s what they need! They are trying to survive and they are doing the complete opposite of what’s going to push them to the next level where they can thrive and they don’t have to worry about simply surviving.

Getting clients made easy

How do we implement a process that attracts leads and converts them into paying clients over and over again? I’ve figured out how. Here’s the short and sweet version of my process:

Step 1: Ads

The first thing we need to do is use ads, both paid and free, to push people in our direction. That means we go to a target rich environment and we target the perfect clients for our niche, people who our product or service is specifically made for. If they see what we are offering, they are going to jump up and down, scream, and be super happy because they’ve been waiting for someone to offer this and it’s finally here. The group of people who are going to react like that - we call them our target audience. When we place ads, we need to do so in a target rich environment, so that we attract the right people. You won’t be able to do this if you don’t have a niche.

Next, we need to actually write the ad text or create whatever the target audience is going to see. We need a message that they are going to respond to and resonate with. So, when you present your offer they think, “That’s perfect for me!” We want to get them really excited, having them jumping up and down, and all of that. Here is where we use the market research we’ve done to address the specific problems that our target audience wants solved or to tell them that we can help them reach the result they want to reach.

Step 2: Landing page

After that, we’ve got our landing page. A landing page is where people land after they’ve seen our ad and they’ve clicked a button or a link. The landing page we set up needs to ask people for their email address. We tell them that we want their email address in exchange for useful or valuable content. Sometimes they are called squeeze pages or opt-in pages.

Landing pages sound really high-tech to people who have never created one before, but they’re actually ridiculously easy to create. You can do it really fast and there are lots of tools out there for setting them up. I also offer my help to teachers struggling with landing pages, funnels, pipelines, web design, web development, and other tech issues. Our landing page is another step in converting leads who were interested in our ad. It helps us determine who is most likely to pay for our services. It’s a filter.

Step 3: Video

When they’ve entered their email it means they’ve decided that what we’ve written on our landing and in our ad really speaks to them and we have something that they want. This is when we show them a video. It’s not going to be a huge video. It’s not going to be as long as this - not even close. You want to make it somewhere between five minutes and twenty minutes long. And this video needs to be full of value. It can’t be a bunch of hogwash. It can’t be nonsense. It has to actually give them something that they can use. This video shows them that we know what we are talking about and we will really be able to help them when they become our client.

Now, for some reason, a lot of people out there are scared of making videos. They think it requires lots of know-how. But that’s just not true whatsoever. You can use free software to record a video and you don’t even have to show your face. There’s no reason you can’t do this. You can record your screen, show some stuff on your screen, talk, and make a video that’s basically a presentation with a voice over.

This video should address the target audience’s problem or the result they want to achieve. It should talk about the solution that you can offer them. At the end of the video, we want to include a call-to-action, which gives them the option to find out more about how they can solve this with your help. It should tell them how to get your help. That’s going to lead them into a sales call with you. Your sales calls might take place by phone or via Skype, Zoom, Google, Facebook Messenger, etc.

Step 4: Calendar

When our potential clients make the decision to schedule a call with us, they are going to use a special calendar service that makes it simple for them to schedule a date and time. It will also make scheduling completely effortless for us. People will book these calls with you while you sleep. You will have already entered the days and times that you’re available, so you’ll wake up, look at your calendar, and see that ten people have signed up for sales calls. Now, you just need to do the sales calls and close the leads.

You don’t have to waste any time writing people back and forth, like, “Does Thursday at noon work for you?” “No, sorry. What about Friday at 2?” “No, that’s not good for me. How about Saturday at 7?” “Sorry, can’t do it.” That can go on for days and days. We use this special tool to make scheduling so simple that you don’t even have to think about it. It happens automatically. Best of all, it shows our potential clients how professional we are, how easy it’s going to be to work with us, and how much time we are saving them.

Step 5: Questionnaire

Before we get on a call with anyone, we want them to complete a short questionnaire. Our questionnaire helps us do something we call qualifying the lead. It’s going to make sure that we’ve found our target audience member and our call is going to be worthwhile. Some people think that you should spend time talking to anybody who will listen. That’s definitely not what we want to do. Our time is valuable. We don’t want to waste it speaking with people who aren’t interested, who were never interested, and who won’t become our clients. So, we ask questions about their experience with products similar to ours. We ask what problems they are trying to solve or when they need to have a result by. We ask questions that really tell us they are right for our call and we will be able to help them. In the questionnaire they should tell us about their current situation, their desired situation, and why they feel they can’t make that journey on their own.

Step 6: Sales call

Boom! We have a new sales call with a potential client and we’ve already qualified the lead, so we know that we’re going to be talking to someone who is ready to buy and is ready to go to the next step with us. They are ready to become our client and all we need to do is close. The people I work with know that closing is simple because I have a flawless sales script that I share with the teachers I help. It pretty much guarantees that you close leads on sales calls. It’s completely real and doable. I’ve done it tons of times and so have the teachers I’ve coached.

Our lead generation process makes sure everything goes smoothly and we only get people on calls who are going to close. Honestly, most of the time, the people I get on calls with close themselves. No joke. Sometimes it’s so easy because I’m following the script and the process works so well. Sometimes I don’t even say anything on the call and the potential client walks through the process themselves, closes themselves, makes the payments, and it’s done.

How do we arrive at the point where we have a calendar packed full of potential clients who will basically sell to themselves on the call? We start with the current situation and the desired situation. We need to clearly define what the lead’s current situation is and make sure that we know every aspect of that. Then, we want to get a complete understanding of what their desired situation is. This is how we start our sales call because we need to have a clear understanding, for ourselves, of what the lead’s chasm looks like. We need to understand the disparity between their current and desired situations. We need to understand why they can’t do what they want to do themselves. That’s where our offer comes into play as the vehicle that helps them cross to the other side, trek through the chasm, and reach the place they want to be.

It’s also important for me to mention that the information I’m sharing with you should always be used for ethical purposes. The process I’ve described to you is extremely powerful - it’s really an effective system for selling almost anything to anyone. And that’s why you need to be very careful and only sell to people who you can honestly help. You won’t last long in business if you sell, but can’t deliver on your promises. Here’s the most powerful part. You separate the current and desired situations from one another and then you position yourself, your offer, and what you do as the agent of change. You and your offer are the key to reaching the desired situation they’ve described for you. Many people have said it before and I will repeat it: 

To be a great salesman and to sell anything in the world, you don’t need to focus on selling an item, or a product, or a service, or a lesson, or a course, or anything like that. It’s not about things. It’s about dreams. It’s about ambitions. It’s about the future that they could have by succeeding and doing the things necessary to trek across that chasm and reach the other side. We’re not actually selling a product or a service. Instead, we are selling a future. The specific future they want to have.

Sales Script

Having a sales script is an important step that many starting teacher entrepreneurs forget. I’ve developed several sales scripts, but I’m especially proud of the script that I share with teachers who come to me for help with their marketing and sales processes. It’s a step-by-step process that has been proven to work over and over again with tons of different nichesю It would be difficult to find a niche that it doesn’t work with. I haven’t found that yet and I’ve sold a lot of things to a lot of people. It’s a step-by-step process that will help you take anybody from any walk of life and turn them into your paying client. And I know that’s a big claim, but that’s how confident I am in my sales script. It’s a game changer.

What it means to be a teacher

At this point, you understand the three things you need in order to start your teaching business. You see how it works and you understand what you need to do. But how much money can you really make being a teacher and having a teaching business? Most people have the completely wrong idea about what it means to be a teacher. The teaching revolution that we are part of is working to alter the image of teachers and teaching business in our society because people don’t give teachers the credit they deserve. That all changes when you are able to make thousands and thousands of dollars each month, without doing crazy amounts of work that traditional teaching businesses and teaching positions require you to do.

The revolution is now

Part of revolutionizing the teaching industry and the teaching business marketplace is changing the way we do things and opening up new possibilities that weren’t available to us previously. I used to think that making $1,000 to $2,000 a month from my teaching business was quite good. I thought that because I could make my own hours, I could choose which clients I took on, and I controlled how much I charged - it was fine to make 1 to 2 grand. People around me seemed to think that was fine too. I had no idea that there was an entirely different way of doing things that would make $2,000 seem like child’s play.

Someone once told me, “Kris, being able to make $2,000 a month is well worth what I paid for your help.” I was shocked and I said, “Wait, if your goal is to make 2 grand a month, then you need to start thinking bigger.” Teachers who never evolve out of the time-for-money model can make between $2,000 and $5,000 a month very easily. I know there are a lot of teachers out there who work really hard to get that kind of money, but I’ve helped traditional teachers reach that goal in a matter of weeks, not months or years.

But I imagine that if you’re serious about starting and growing your teaching business, then you want to make a lot more than that. You need to be ready to completely revolutionize how you think teaching businesses work and what you think teachers do. If you’re stuck at $2,000 a month, then you need to dream more and you need to put in more work. Don’t get me wrong, if you’re happy with $2,000 a month, by all means, stay there and stay happy. But if you want more than that, then I can help you set up your business, first and foremost, but I’ll also help you take your business to the next level, where you can exponentially increase that number. In my opinion, teachers and teaching businesses should be making $100,000 or more per year. That’s around $7,000 to $8,000 per month.

Most teachers never get close to making that much money and they’re lucky if they make half of it. They’re usually working overtime and breaking their backs just to get that much. But when you set up a teaching business using a growth framework, scientific principles, and a value-for-money model, you could make 100 grand a year and feel like you worked a part-time job. No lie. You don’t have to waste your life away doing traditional teaching work and getting very little compensation in return. I know that teaching isn’t all about the money and most teachers are out to help their students, but I want to help you get both: the results and the money.

Your Two Options

It’s really up to you what you want to do next. Since you’ve come this far, I really believe that you want to start a teaching business and you want to be successful. You’re not in it just for the money, but you want to help people get results and help them solve their problems. Consider two options:

First, consider the option that you’re going to go forward after reading this book and getting this information and you’re going to try to set up your teaching business on your own, without help. Imagine what that’s going to look like. I can actually tell you what it looks like because I went that route when I started and here’s what it looks like. Starting a teaching business on your own means you’re going to spend thousands of hours and thousands of dollars trying to figure out the answers to simple questions that other people have already answered. You’re going to get frustrated. You’re going to have a lot of stress - that’s for sure. But that’s not even the worst part. The worst part is wasting all of that time. Remember, I told you it took me years of traditional teaching and having an offline, traditional business before I made any headway and progress. It took a long time to get where I wanted to be. It’s your life, so you might feel like you’ve got time to spare. If you’ve got five years to spare - that’s about how long it took me before things really started working. If you’ve got five years to spare, go ahead and do it yourself. That’s your choice. That’s option number one.

Option number two is to learn the process and learn the system from someone who has already done this multiple times, who has mastered it, and who has helped others implement it. This option means you get to learn from the best in the world. You get to avoid all the pitfalls of traditional teaching businesses. You get to save time and money setting up your very own teaching business with easy-to-follow, step-by-step instructions. I know it might sound like I’m tooting my own horn right now, but when you think about what I’ve achieved, how much I could help you, and all of the value you would get, not just now but for the rest of your life - it’s really a no-brainer.

If you want my help, I’ll show you how to start your very own teaching business and how to get clients. Most of the people I work with land their first client within the first ten to thirty days. I’ll go into detail about everything you need to know to get your business up and running, generating money, and getting results for your clients. I’ve even set up a centralized platform where you’ll be able to access training videos and supporting material so that you have everything you need at any time of day from any location. No waiting. That makes it convenient and allows you to go at your own pace. You get to do things your way. I design my work to help you become a new version of yourself, to change your life, and to free you from the confines of traditional teaching.

The perfect vehicle of change

You have a truly unique opportunity to get my help and let me the perfect vehicle of change in your personal and professional life, as well as in your business. I’m able to draw on my experiences and everything that I’ve been through. I know what needs to change in teachers’ lives to become successful. I’ve got over a decade’s worth of experience, knowledge, and skills combined into a well-refined process that will push you forward and upward to greater things. It’s what has enabled me to set up multiple teaching businesses and become free to travel when I want, work when I want, work how I want, and with the people I want to work with. I didn’t know what freedom really was until I made these changes. As I continue to learn, I shared updated information and strategies from the front lines because I want to help other teachers make the same changes necessary to get the same amazing results, while avoiding all of the pain that I had to endure.

My life’s work

I’ve spent over a decade figuring out what works and what doesn’t work by starting multiple teaching businesses from complete zero and then taking them to the level where I’m making money from them almost effortlessly. I’ve gone back and changed things to make my work better. I’m always improving my work, improving myself, and improving the people around me because I know that’s what winners do. I love winning and if you’re going to be working with me, then you’ve got to love winning too, because being a winner is part of the equation. I’m really proud of what I’ve done here. It’s my life’s work. It’s really powerful and it has helped so many people.

The process that I’ve given you in this book takes people years to figure it out sometimes, but I’ve given it to you in such an easy way and with such a simplified system that you’ll have your business up and running within a matter of weeks No matter what stage your business is starting at, I can help you grow it. I can say this because I’ve taken teaching businesses with an initial investment of $2,000 and turned them into $1.1 million in annual revenue in 2020.

Most teachers want help with the following areas of their business: getting more clients, creating or launching a website, integrating multiple 3rd party programs with their website, choosing a niche, creating a product, creating an academic program, pricing their product, delivering their product, and many others. I work personally with teachers to get the results they are looking for.

Taking action

When I help teachers find students and grow their teaching business it’s important that teachers take action. I hold you accountable because you need to complete certain steps and that’s the only way you’ll be able to make progress. You have to actually take action and do stuff yourself. I answer all of your questions and I guide you through each step, but you have to take action yourself if you want to move forward and you can get things done. It’s pretty much impossible for you to go astray. That’s how teachers I work with are able to achieve more in several weeks or months than most people out there are able to achieve in an entire decade. And that is no joke and no exaggeration.

Most people join training programs, challenges, marathons, online courses, or other programs online and they review the material, but they don’t put it into action. They don’t do anything with what they’ve learned. That’s not the case here. What we’ll do together will not be theoretical. No. It will be completely practical. It gets put into action from day one, so you can move forward and make improvements from the very beginning.

The reason those other programs don’t work and people don’t take action is because they feel like they are going through the program alone. But not here. We’ve set up a community of successful business people who have done this already and who make up a winning environment. It’s a community and environment of winners where you get assistance in making the transformation from your current situation, where you are right now, to that desired situation that you are looking to achieve.

To change your life, you have to change your environment

Most people who try to change their lives do it without changing their environment. They don’t change the people they communicate with. They end up giving up and stopping because it’s too difficult for them. They don’t have the proper support and they don’t have other people who can help them along the way. That’s why I’ve incorporated our community and the change of environment necessary for you to succeed. It helps to make your transition less stressful and much easier. It’s an environment that facilitates success and winning. 

If you’re always around people who drink and smoke, then it’s going to be hard to quit drinking and smoking. The same with starting a business. If you’re not around other people who are starting their own business, then it’s going to be hard to develop new habits and new behaviors. You need to surround yourself with like-minded individuals and people who are moving in the same direction and who want the same things as you.

If you want change to happen, then you can’t just do the same things you’ve always done and be around the same people you’ve always been around. Our community gives you access to people from around the world who are moving in the same direction as you and who are interested in the same things you are interested in. This makes change easier than it’s ever been before. You can ask for help in the community and people are going to respond to you and genuinely want to help you figure it out. You can find other people there to practice doing sales calls or to run your ideas by. It helps to have a second pair of eyes to take a look at what you’re doing, especially in the beginning. You could even find someone who wants to be your accountability partner and someone who is going to make sure you put the work in.

Expert Help

The last element of how I can help you change things and get to where you want to be is access to experts. Not only are there other members of our program in the community, but there are also experts in the community and you have access to them. You can reach them very frequently and ask any questions you have. It’s like having a fully developed business with a marketing department, web development department, academic department, finance department, legal department, human resources department, and more!

You can also contact our teacher success team, which includes experts who have their own teaching businesses and you can write to them any time any day. That’s huge. It’s huge because most people out there don’t have access to people who know what they’re talking about and are ready to help any time of the day. Every so often those experts do live calls with the entire community and take and answer questions there too. It’s my goal to give you everything you need to succeed. This is by far not a typical program or course or training or whatever. There is nothing else like this in the entire world.

Your Two Options 

So, let’s review your options at this point. You could try to set up your business on your own and it would be really stressful, painful, and frustrating. It would take you years - literally years. I know people who started this process five years ago, six years ago, and more. Their business are still in the $500 to $1,000 range. Doing it on your own means you’d have to try things over and over again. You would be doing things that other people already know aren’t going to work. You’d fall victim to traps and pitfalls that could have otherwise easily been avoided. Somehow you would have to change your perspective and make tons of different changes to how you view teaching businesses and teachers, to your own mindset, to your life and your business and you wouldn’t have any direction or any mentors or any reason to change really. And you definitely wouldn’t have access to other experts and real professionals who have been doing this already for years and years. You would be missing out on that or it would take you a really long time to build a support group like that on your own.

Consider the time and money that you would spend doing it on your own. We’re talking thousands if not millions of dollars spent on correcting mistakes that could’ve been avoided. Imagine the wasted time and money spent developing your business in ways that may not even be necessary or may not bring you any money in return. We’re talking about thousands of hours spent doing meaningless tasks that won’t get you any closer to your result and that will just serve to further frustrate you and stress you out. The worst part of all is that in the end you might never reach your goal. You might never have a teaching business that works for you. You might end up spending all that time and money to create a teaching business that becomes worse than any boss you’ve had or could ever imagine. I’ve already told you my story of how that feels and I don’t wish that on anyone anywhere ever. It might take you a really long time and be really painful or it might just never happen for you.

I hope this book has helped you understand the first steps that need to be taken so that you can successfully start or grow your teaching business for years to come. Thank you for supporting our mission of changing the way the world thinks about, treats, and pays teachers. If you’ve read until the end, then I believe you want more from teaching and you have the dedication that it takes to succeed. I would be honored to have a call with you where we can chat about how I might be able to help you with your specific teaching business and in your individual situation. Sometimes my teammates help me with the initial calls, but I make an effort to take as many calls as possible and to personally know what’s going on in each and every teacher’s business. I’m always on the lookout for my next success story, so if you are serious about getting out-of-this-world results, schedule a date and time for a success call today.

Sincerely,

Kris Amerikos