It’s been a few days since I’ve written. Nothing concrete has really happened in regards to our business development.
However, we are making a little progress. I met with my supervisor last week, and we started to discuss how our business plan should start to be formulated. SCARY! So, I spent some time last week outlining our first (and very rough draft) of a business plan. It is so helpful to put ideas down on paper. It gives this very ambiguous-feeling business some direction. I think we’ve started to discover our target audience, what we want our competitive strengths to be, and how we hope to craft our desire to be holistically-minded into the day-to-day workings of our business.
But as we puts these thoughts on paper, a big question remains: location. Where would be the optimum location to bring a language school to China? As of now, we are looking to market our services to those in professional fields, such as business professionals, doctors, lawyers, etc. We would like to give them the English vocabulary necessary to be able to do their jobs successfully in a cross-cultural setting.
Question for the general public: Does anyone have any ideas on how to choose the best location for our business, especially when we are located in the United States? I feel at a loss as how to even approach searching for a good location, and the criteria to use to judge the benefits of an area.
Additionally, we would like to move into some of the more concrete areas of developing a business—we’re discussing finances and location and target markets. This also seems like a scary process, since we haven’t been there and are unable to assess locations and financial costs from first hand experience. Does anyone have any thoughts on how to begin to develop a financial outline for a business in the midst of ambiguity?
It’s an exciting process, piecing all the information together to form what we hope will be a transformational business. But scary at the same time. It takes a lot of patience, a lot of trust, and the willingness to take a little risk.
Hmmm, location has been a key issue for us as well. When it comes to establishing a financially viable training center one of the lessons I’ve borne out from our successes and failures is that its often best to shoot for the middle, as in a mid-size Chinese city.
This is especially true if, like us, one of your biggest competitive advantages is foreign native speakers. In the giant, wealthy cities Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin etc., there are already bunches of foreigners, foreign teachers and language centers. This seriously erodes that competitive advantage and unless you’re planning a very large scale operation with a big-time advertising budget, or planning on entering into a partnership with local Chinese university it would be hard to enter that market successfully.
Fortunately there are a bunch of mid-size cities in China. These cities have millions of people, bunches of professionals in all fields, and a huge demand for language training. These cities are growing in wealth and population they don’t (yet) have a saturation of training centers and native speakers are relatively few and in very high demand. This market is much easier to enter.
Look at the three or four top cities in a few Chinese provinces in terms of wealth and population. In the wealthiest provinces maybe the top city has already been oversaturated. In the poorer ones maybe only the top one is viable.
Another thing to consider is that each local government has different rules for setting up and running a business and these are often more complex for foreigners. I won’t pretend to understand the laws of my city but they’ve caused us headaches and this is a must to check out. Hopefully the contacts you’re building know people on the ground that can help you with that. Incidentally, this is where having a Chinese business partner like a university can sometimes make things easier.
Hope this helps. Blessings.
-Tres