Three Critical Systems Every Education Business Needs To Grow Successfully
Josh Chernikoff
I help companies in education build Lead Generation Engines that book 12-20 highly qualified sales calls a month through my 12-week EdSales Elevation Experience | Milken-Penn GSE Competition Judge | StartEd Mentor
By Josh Chernikoff
Back in the day, I played soccer. Early on, we were just a bunch of kids chasing the ball—what my dad called "swarm soccer." There were no set positions or systems, just chaos and fun. As we grew, we learned to play in specific positions, and the game became more structured and effective. Starting a business is similar. Initially, you’re doing everything yourself, just trying to make those first sales. Eventually, you hire a team, establish roles, and bring in systems. And those systems make your business stronger and allow you to grow and scale.
I’ve started, grown, and sold two businesses and am now on my third. I've faced challenges and made mistakes, but I learned that systems are essential. They are crucial for the success and growth of your business, enabling you to focus on what you do best. And they free up more of your time to serve your clients or just enjoy life!
Introduction
In this blog post, we'll explore three powerful systems your education business must have: an offer system, a lead generation system, and a delivery system. These systems are vital for streamlining operations, attracting and retaining clients, and delivering consistent value. Each of these systems plays a crucial role in ensuring that your business not only survives but thrives…
The Offer System
What is it?
An offer system is a structured approach to developing and presenting your products or services to your target market. It ensures that you have a clear, desirable, and repeatable offer that meets the needs of your clients.
Having a Clear Offer
Most entrepreneurs struggle to clearly communicate their offer. They either waffle and confuse people or have death-by-PowerPoint sales presentations that bore people. When we work with clients, we tell them: a confused mind never buys. That’s why we love using a signature solution because it helps you to clearly communicate your offer and how you help your clients on one simple page. Your clients can see exactly how they will move from where they are now to getting the results they desire. And this signature solution helps to differentiate you from your competitors because it’s unique to you. It's the unique process or method you use to get your clients results.
Having a Desirable Offer
It doesn’t matter if you have an offer that you can clearly communicate but no one wants it. It’s really important that your ideal client wants to buy what you’re selling, which is why it’s so important to also validate your offer. We have a process called the raise your hand process that we follow to do this, but basically, this just means getting out there and talking to ideal clients to see if they’re interested. When you’ve gotten your first couple of sales in the door, you know you’ve validated your offer. And if you aren’t making any sales, you know you have some work to do on your offer to make it more desirable to your ideal client.
Having a Repeatable Offer
When you’re first starting out in your business, you’re focusing on just getting that first client or two in the door. And for those first few clients, that often means changing your offer to fit the client and creating new proposals. This works well at first when you’re refining your offer. But if you stay stuck here and keep reinventing your offer and doing custom proposals, it’s easy to burn out, and it becomes hard to grow your business. This makes it very difficult to put a team and systems in place because what you need is always changing. Having a well-defined and repeatable offer provides clarity and consistency, allowing you to create a scalable, sustainable business model.
When I started my coaching business, I was helping my clients with everything under the sun. It was great when I had two or three clients, and we got a lot of work from those clients. But we couldn’t scale the company easily because I was at capacity with those clients, and I didn’t have a team (other than my executive assistant) or systems to grow. And I couldn’t bring in a team because we were doing so many different functions that it was almost impossible to hire specialists. But once we started streamlining what we offered and getting really good at delivering just that—a powerful lead generation system—it became much easier to scale that, even with custom builds. We have clarity at every step of the process and can build systems around each step (following our signature solution) to get results for our clients.
What Are The Benefits of An Offer System?
The Lead Generation System
What is it?
A lead generation system is a set of processes and tools designed to attract, capture, and nurture potential clients until they are ready to make a purchase.
Why it's important
A lot of founders in the education space don’t have a sales background and it is not necessarily something that they are comfortable with. They don’t necessarily know how important founder-led sales is and they don’t have a lead generation system in place. Instead, they focus on what we call slow-burn methods of lead generation. Things like social media posts, attending conferences, blogging, or buying lists. And that is one we hear all the time—founders spend a good deal of money buying random lists of leads. However, those leads are not a good fit for them, and they don't get that return on investment to make it worth having bought those leads. The slow-burn methods end up costing you a fortune and leave you pulling your hair out in frustration. Slow burn methods can work to supplement your lead generation, but they don’t bring you leads instantly when you need them. Instead, you need a simple system to generate leads and book sales calls with high-quality prospects. When you set this up right, you get quality leads coming in every single week, which means no more wondering when you’re going to get a client—you know what to do to get out there and get a client (without being pushy or salesy!). A robust lead generation system is crucial for scaling, ensuring a steady flow of high-quality, high-converting leads.
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What Are The Benefits of A Lead Generation System?
The Delivery System
What is it?
A delivery system is all about the tools and steps you use to get your products or services to your clients, making sure they get what they were promised quickly and smoothly.
Why it's important
Having a strong delivery system is crucial because it ensures that you can meet your clients' expectations consistently. It helps in managing your workload and maintaining high standards of service.
When you're starting out in business, it’s easy to stay on track with the deliverables for one client, but as you get more and more clients, things get harder to manage. It's easy for tasks to fall through the cracks. Here are some powerful processes you can set up as part of your delivery system: onboarding process, communication process to communicate with clients, a project management system to keep track of your deliverables, a testimonial system, etc.
For example, in my business, we do custom work for our VIP clients, building out their lead generation systems for them, which means we need a strong project management system. But for our 3E EdSales Elevation Group Program, our delivery system changes, and we focus more on onboarding them, delivering the training and coaching materials, checking in on their progress, and having weekly coaching sessions.
What Are The Benefits of A Delivery System?
Implementing and Optimizing Your Systems
The key to successfully implementing systems is to start slowly and get one simple system working for you before bringing in all the bells and whistles. Start by mapping out a simple process. Find software or tools that will help you to achieve that. Follow the process and test it out. Come back and optimize things to flow more smoothly. As you refine your offer, lead generation, and delivery systems, you'll discover what works best for your business. The key is to keep optimizing and improving.
It is also very important to remember that nothing is ever perfect. There will be glitches and mistakes along the way, and these are important too. They help you to learn and grow. They help you to improve. This is something that we are busy teaching my nine-year-old at the moment. Fail means First Attempt In Learning. And you just have to bounce back from this. Embrace the imperfection.
For instance, we recently faced a hiccup during a masterclass promotion. The company we were working with accidentally sent out a test email in the middle of the night, inviting people to the event. We could have panicked, but instead, we used it as an opportunity to show our audience that we’re human. It allowed us to demonstrate how we handle and learn from such situations, turning a potential negative into a positive.If you make a mistake or something goes wrong, learn from it and put a process in place to prevent it from happening again. Remember, your systems will grow with you as your business grows.
Conclusion
Implementing these three systems—an offer system, a lead generation system, and a delivery system—will not only help you scale your education business but also bring more ease and efficiency into your operations. Remember, setting up these systems may come with its own set of challenges, but the long-term benefits far outweigh the initial hurdles.
Want Our Help?
If you're ready to level up your systems and grow your business, book a call with us. We're here to help you streamline and scale your business, ensuring you can focus on what you do best: changing the world through education. Let's work together to make your business and life easier. And let's get you more leads and sales!