AI-generated transcript: Hello, just listen to me and today I will teach you how to 10x your English teaching business.
Imagine making 10 times more money than you do right now.
It's easy if you follow me.
Yeah, right, something like that.
Actually, of course it's not as easy as that, but in a way maybe it is.
What am I talking about?
I don't know.
I'm talking like this because I just got an audiobook called 10x is easier than 2x.
I haven't finished listening to it because it's kind of annoying.
It does have some really good, useful ideas.
I don't know if you've listened or read in many business books.
I've read quite a few recently.
I don't know, more than 10.
I'm beginning to see a pattern.
Basically, a lot of these business books, they have one good idea and then it's padded out with a lot of jargon and inspirational BS.
Well, I won't give you any of that.
I'll just cut to the chase.
Anyway, the idea is that 10x-ing your business, in other words, making a massive change, is in some ways easier than making
I think this does apply actually and when I think about it everything that I've been writing at freetalktefl.substack.com is really just a sort of a 2x thing.
I'm teaching how to improve your business marginally.
If you're doing all the best practices and all that stuff, you know, all the things that I write about and talk about, I think they're largely sound information.
I certainly think so.
And they are certainly helpful and you should do all of these things.
But even if you do all of these things, we humans are limited by time.
And there's only so much you can do in so much time.
You know, a 2x change is a quantitative change.
You're changing the quantity.
So if you work twice as hard or twice as efficiently, you can expect maybe to double your money.
Hooray!
That's pretty cool.
Necessary.
But even better would be an exponential change.
would be better.
How can you do that?
Well, it's where you remove the concept of time, man.
You know, so that, for example, if you write a textbook, you've got to put a lot of hours into writing the textbook, but once it's written, the work is done, and then you can sell it potentially a thousand times, right?
So the hours that you've put into that textbook are now exponentially
expanding your reach and your income and so on so it's this kind of idea anyway I just got thinking about it and I think the first 10x the first giant leap in quantity quality rather than quantity the first giant leap is to remove yourself from paid employment and to become self-employed that is your first big 10x it's not that you're making 10 times what you were before but it's a
A quality change, a step up.
Whereas before, in my previous life working in newspapers, you'd go to the boss and you'd have to tick all those little boxes, you'd do those yearly box ticking exercises about where do you see yourself in 10 years time and how do you challenge yourself and all that nonsense that you have to do.
And then no matter what you tick,
At the end of the day, they say, well done Mr. Sherriff, we can offer you a 1.5% pay raise.
By the way, can you hear the cat mewing in the background?
I do apologize.
Sacko's on the prowl.
Anyway, yeah, so that's what you'd get.
You'd get like a maybe, if you're really good, you'd get a 2% pay raise.
Recently, maybe the pay raises are going up because of inflation.
But you know, it's that kind of ballpark figure.
Hooray!
Every month you get an extra, maybe if you're lucky, 50 quid.
Maybe 100 quid.
Hooray!
I can go out and get drunk one extra Friday and maybe a meal on a Sunday.
You know, it's that kind of level.
Once you're self-employed, you don't think in those terms.
You think in terms of, oh great, we've got
Five new students have signed up.
What does five new students mean?
Well, if you're charging, you know, for argument's sake, 8,000 yen per month, that's 40,000 yen per month you've increased your income.
You've just had a monthly salary increase of like 10%.
A month, not a year.
You know, so it's that kind of big difference.
I think that's
A lot of what I've been preaching, if you like, at this website and these podcasts is to make that first big leap to get over the hump of working for somebody else and to get into the mindset of working for yourself.
And the reason is because you're 10xing your potential.
Yeah, it's frightening and there's lots you've got to learn to get it right.
But it's not rocket science.
You can do it.
If I can do it, you can too.
And then you're in the really interesting position that I think I'm finding myself in.
How do you then 10x again?
So I've made that jump into self-employment.
But it doesn't stop there.
You can move on to the next challenge.
And I don't know what that is exactly.
And I don't know quite how to get there.
That's what I'm working on.
So I haven't imagined, I imagine in my thinking that the one thing that I can really, has potential to completely change
The trajectory of my teaching career is through books or making materials.
I'm not exactly sure how that works and so I can't sit here telling you, oh this is what you should do but it looks like there's potential there and for you it might be something different.
It might be online teaching or you know that's got a lot of potential to be
You know, you make your lesson and then you can sell it a thousand times doing videos and stuff.
I'm not really up there yet, but I can see that that could be a direction to go.
Maybe as a 52 year old I'm a bit too old for that, for internet stardom.
That's fine.
I'm not really interested.
But I am interested in writing and publishing and that's my possible route to 10x-ing again.
Yeah, watch this space, we'll see, we'll see if I get there.
But it's something to think about, you know, how can you qualitatively, you know, change the quality of what you do, rather than the quantity?
Removing yourself from time is money to a different concept, where most of those kind of buzzwords like scaling, how can you scale what you do?
Because it's just as much effort to make a
Make a cover letter to go to every school as it is to make a cover letter to go to one school, for example.
So you're not actually doing that much more work, but you're having an enormously wider reach.
I'm battling.
I'm not quite sure exactly how it all works out, but I think that's something that you as a self-employed person should think about.
If you're not a self-employed person, think about doing it because that's the great thing is the potential upside is unlimited.
We all have the same potential downside.
We can lose our job or lose clients.
There's no change there.
What's different is the upside is kind of limitless.
Yeah, there you go.
Was that uplifting and inspirational?
I don't know, I hope so.
Something to think about anyway.
How can you 10x your business and your life?
That's the next challenge for me and for you.
Okay, have a good weekend and yeah, don't sweat the small stuff.
See ya.
