What is the problem of being a very good teacher?

The biggest problem is that there are only so many students you can teach and not just that, they even need to physically reside close by and also, belong to a certain socio-economic group (so that they can afford you).

A good teacher is an extremely valuable resource, an engine which can propel innumerable mini engines and his effectiveness being curtailed due to geographical or economic or any other limitation is a terrible waste.

From students’ perspective, every student who is willing to put in the effort deserves the best available guidance irrespective of his locational or monetary disadvantages.

Now, the challenge is, how to connect a very good teacher to willing students across geographies and make this process cost effective too.

Online tutoring in its current avatar (as done by eTutelage ) works very well in the Indo-US or Indo-UK context. Exchange rate and cost differences make one on one tutoring extremely affordable for the student and the availability of the requisite hardware at the student’s end is never a problem. Geography has already been taken care of by the process itself.

The question of intrigue is whether this model can be extrapolated to a one to many situation - a model where the expertise of a great teacher is made available simultaneously to many more students than in a traditional class room setting and whether the richness of a class interaction can be preserved while keeping the costs minimum. It can have very interesting applications both from a business as well as welfare point of view.

Incidentally, the essence of this model has been very beautifully captured in this Idea Cellular TVC.

The challenge is, how to operationalize it in a business-sustainable manner.

Time for your typical consulting assignment kind of analysis - all the data captured throughout the whole of last year pertaining to every activity that lends itself to be captured in numbers being put on the table and thought about in every conceivable way. Plans for next year including growth financing, marketing, recruitment, product launches everything being put in place.

They say you already know all that there is to know. It’s amazing how almost every answer you seek is already there with you - some of them may be quite evident while some may be hidden and disguised in the layers of numbers and spreadsheets and charts that capture the story you have been.

Last year has been one of frantic activity and essentially, validating a lot of our practices, processes and beliefs in the market. The almost fanatic focus on customer satisfaction has served us very well resulting in zero dropout - Our first customer and everyone who enrolled since then has been associated with us. It is a testimony as well as our biggest asset. It delights us as well as alerts us to be extra cautious while scaling up to preserve the customer orientation even as the numbers increase.

Rigorous recruitment process has really helped, being there for the teachers has really helped, liberal compensation policy has really helped and above all, our passion for what we do has really helped. From the content team to web team to teachers to accountants to marketing - the sincerity of effort borne out of passion to make a mark has been a constant thread throughout and this has been our most powerful propeller.

The second year begins with new challenges. Growth is happening, we need to manage it and expedite it. Robust systems and structures need to be put in place to handle the demands of increasing scale. Systems need to be up and running to make activities less individual dependent and more scalable. New opportunities for greater growth need to be generated and exploited and the pursuit of defensible differentiation needs to be taken up in right earnest.

Opportunities, challenges, excitement - that’s what the second year of an entrepreneurial company entails.

Oh yeah, the secret sauce, the silver bullet, the magic mantra. But actually, like most of the things that work in life, its no magic at all. Infact, reams (or, more recently, GBs) have been filled with gyan extolling the virtues of this magic pill. Every business professional swears by it, though that’s not always reflected in the way things get done. The idea is so simple, we miss it becuase of just that.

Let’s keep the fun going for a little longer, let’s keep the secret sauce, a secret for a little longer. First, let’s take a look at how we buy stuff.

I will be using the word “product” to mean both products and services. Of course, both can be as different as chalk and cheese depending upon the context, but for the purpose of this post, they essentially work similarly as vehicles of value delivery.

If it’s a repeat purchase, we draw upon our previous experience with the product. Typically, we buy from someone we’ve had a significantly positive experience before. The marketing razzmatazz by a competitor has limited value here, unless there is some significant additional value on the offer in which case, it becomes more akin to a new product purchase.

In case of a new product, something we’ve never experienced before, we try to draw upon the experiences of those we know and trust.

Thus, we tend to go more by positive experiences, whether our own or of the people we trust, rather than being completely taken in by carefully designed communication coming out of marketing departments.

In case of a new product or service, positive experiences of innovators and early adopters create the ripple effect which galvanizes the majority to adopt the new offering, and, a new product reaches its profitablity potential only when the majority adopts it.

The only case that’s left now is of such a new product which does not have enough users, a very new offering. There too, marketing campaigns focussed on creating awareness will create a critical mass of earliest adopters which would subsequently drive the adoption by the majority making the product innovation successful.

Thus, the strongest theme in the purchase process across the board is the positive experiences with the product, which, when shared with customers feeling the need generate the bulk of sales.

In other words, it’s an army of happy customers that’s your strongest marketing tool. Yeah, so much of ado for just this little thing.

Let me now trade my analytical hat with that of a hard nosed entrepreneur leading a start-up. You have to see the quickness, ease and cost effectiveness of a new sale driven by a happy customer’s referral to believe it. Nothing that you read or analyze will get you to really appreciate the magic that happens here.

However, what’s interesting is that so few of the businesses realy internalize this truism and pursue it as a strategic goal.

I am not talking about customer delight being a part of the vision and mission statements; not even about it being a part of an yearly employee training program. I am talking about customer delight being pursued as a strategic objective of the organization as a whole, infact, strategic objective number one. Marketing, Operations, Support, Management - everybody has a significant role in this.  

The other instruments of marketing should facilitate the positive experiences of a few being shared with many and in turn, many more.

That’s what your worldly wise billionaire uncle (if you had one !!!)  will tell you - make your customers happy. If you are in business, that’s the only way to be happy.