Insights from running a small business in the post-Covid world

I’ve been running Art Beat, an art school for adults and kids in Bangalore. It’s been a couple of years of running a hybrid model of online and offline (in-person) classes. And here are some of the insights in the education and experience space.?

1. Covid insights were as good as dead - A lot of online brands scaled up during Covid and our online classes and courses too scaled up drastically. But the insights we derived from customer behavior during the COVID (WFH era) feel flat. No matter how much you work on the experience, customers want to go back to offline art schools/hobby classes in their area. Employees either wanted to work online or offline. Hybrid was causing more issues in our space compared to any other industry. Acquiring a customer in India was more expensive than acquiring Indians abroad. Art kits that were selling wonderfully well completely stopped since people wanted to touch and see the items before buying them. Maybe another post for this one.?
2. Art was becoming an alternate career - Adults going through stressful jobs looked for outlets in Art schools and studios. People looked at art to create a new hobby or even a life skill. People wanted to learn art professionally to shift their careers from corporate to commissioned artists or art teachers.
3. The leaner the team the better the result - When we downsized the team to half of what we were during COVID, our team productivity increased drastically. People wanted to help other team members, learn new skills and contribute better.?
4. Core differentiator - Post covid we saw many artists spring up in Bangalore and across the country. Most of these new-age artists took up art to use it as an outlet in the tough Covid times. But they also became content creators who gather huge momentum and followers on Instagram. These artists have now started 100s of art workshops in the city. In order to stay relevant and in the market we had to strengthen our core differentiator - Our 10 years of expertise in creating courses, managing adults and kids with various courses. We became known for our quality and beginner friendly and advanced courses for those who wanted to take art seriously or wanted to bring art seriously into their lives. ?
5. Variable pay was the missing variable- At Art Beat, we have a 30% variable pay for all employees. The upside is that our employees can make up to 180% of their variable based on performance that is judged on core values of the brand such as ownership, engagement, etc.?
6. Advertising, a double-edged sword - While it’s easy to set up a campaign as a marketer and pour Money into advertising, we decided consciously in the start of 2023 to cut down drastically into advertising and focus on community building, retention and referral system. In a market where every other artists or art studio just poured money into boosting posts and acquiring new customers. We slowed down to focus on our community, courses, referrals and introduced courses that cannibalized into some of our other courses but were the right things for the customers.?
7. Discontinuing discounts? -? We stopped any and all discounts and chose to focus on experience and quality. This helped us position ourselves as a serious art academy instead of a studio or a hobby space.?
8. Choosing value vs volume - We discontinued some of our high-selling courses (in the range of INR 599 to 1400) that were priced low and had a small ticket size. We had some setbacks, but our higher ticket courses (in the range of 70k to 1L) picked up which resulted in better cost economics for us in the long run.?
9. Internships don’t work - We opened many internships during the year 2023 and it completely backfired. Since we have to train and backfill every time we have a new intern joining, this became a huge problem of Time bandwidth for me and my business partner. Interns who were not serious about career prospects did not contribute much to the growth.?

If you were running a small business or any business and feel like some of these insights were the same for you, then leave a comment. If you know someone who is running a business then please extend your support to them :) Entrepreneurs need all the motivation and support that can get from friends and family.?