Before the explosion of the microschool movement, I often saw a lot of teachers on community discussion boards asking for advice on how to transition out of the field. It made me sad, but I could understand it. Even if many of us see this job as a calling, sometimes the system just asks for too much and the public critique that piles us all into one group is vicious and exhausting.
It also made me so sad to see all those talented teachers sell themselves so short and talk about themselves with such blindness to the actual value and skills they bring to the table, to any table.
Now I’m grateful to see that many of them are deciding to continue teaching but on their own terms. With a courageous and entrepreneurial spirit, many former classroom teachers are now building microschools and other innovative, truly child-centered learning models. Not hampered by politics or bureaucracy or rigid policies that take years to change. Some of them are even becoming consultants and coaches who help other educators.
But I’m also seeing a problem that I hope this article will help alleviate at least a little bit. Though running our own education businesses has allowed us the freedom and flexibility to pursue real solutions in a more timely fashion, a lot of our endeavors are also unnecessarily wilting from lack of clients and students.
The problem isn’t necessarily that the education is bad (and yes, there is a true funding problem). But more often than not, the problem really is just that not enough people know about the good we’re offering to the community. We carry on, tending carefully to the work and the students right in front of us.
Sometimes it’s not a worry. Our classes are full and we can rest and relax.
But spring comes and a family moves on, a student graduates, and in such a small model, the departure of even just one student makes a considerable impact on the kinds of services we can offer. Every spring (or winter, for some of us who may be a little bit more forward thinking) becomes a mad dash for advertising: community flyers and endless Facebook page and community posts advertising our enrollment openings.
What a stressful way to live!
But did you know that we, as teachers, actually already have the skill set to stop this maddening cycle?
Enter backwards planning and knowing your students.
You know that thing teachers automatically do before they start lesson planning—thinking about the exact students they will be teaching and already making adjustments in their minds for those specific students?
It turns out those two habits transfer remarkably well to business.
1. Backwards planning
When I was teaching, backwards planning didn’t start with Monday’s lesson.
It started with the whole year.
We had pacing guides, of course, but I also had to think through where I wanted my students to be by the end of the year. What did I absolutely want them to know? More importantly, what skills did I want them to leave with?
Then I had to work backwards.
The year became quarters. The quarters became units and months. And because there was never enough time to teach everything I could possibly teach, I had to prioritize.
How long could I realistically spend on this unit?
Which concepts deserved more time?
Which skills needed to be introduced early because I knew we would need to practice and reinforce them throughout the year?
What absolutely had to happen in October if I wanted my students capable of doing something much more difficult in April?
And then, of course, we did the same thing on a smaller scale.
Teachers don’t usually walk into a classroom on Monday morning, open the textbook to a random page and think, Well, let’s see where this takes us.
At least I hope not.
We start with some idea of where we want our students to end up.
What do they need to know? What do they need to be able to do? When will they need to be ready to do it? Then we work backwards again.
If the assessment is on Friday, what needs to happen Thursday? What needed to happen Wednesday for Thursday to work? What foundational thing did they need two weeks ago that will make all of this possible?
For whatever reason, when many of us enter business, we forget that we know how to do this.
Instead, we arrive in February or March, realize enrollment is not where we want it to be, and start posting.
A lot.
We make a flyer. We put something in a local Facebook group. We post that enrollment is open. Maybe we boost a post or finally decide we should probably figure out Instagram.
And then we hope the right family happens to see it at exactly the moment they are ready to make a fairly significant decision about their child’s education.
But think about how strange that would seem to us in the classroom.
We would never expect a student to encounter an idea for the first time on Thursday and demonstrate mastery on Friday.
Why do we expect families to do essentially the same thing?
Choosing a school, hiring a consultant, joining a program, signing up for tutoring—these decisions usually have a runway.
People need time to discover you.
Then they need time to understand what you actually do.
Then they need enough exposure to begin trusting you.
They may need to hear you explain the same idea several different ways. They may quietly follow you for months. They may watch a video, read something you wrote, ask a friend about you, attend an event, forget about you for three weeks, and then suddenly come back when something changes in their life.
Teachers understand this better than almost anyone.
Learning takes repetition. Understanding develops over time. People very rarely move from complete unfamiliarity to deep understanding after one exposure.
Neither do your future clients.
So I think we need to plan our marketing much more like we planned our school year.
Start with the year.
When does enrollment actually happen? When do families tend to make decisions? When does your consulting program launch? What do you need the business to look like six months from now?
Then work backwards.
What would someone need to understand before they felt comfortable making that decision?
What questions are they probably asking three months before that?
What are they worried about six months before that?
What ideas will probably need to be reinforced more than once?
And, just like our old pacing guides, what deserves our limited time and what doesn’t?
Because most education entrepreneurs I know do not have forty hours a week available for marketing. Nor should they. They have schools to run, students to teach and actual work to do.
The point isn’t to become a full-time content creator.
The point is to stop waiting until you desperately need enrollment to begin communicating with the people who may eventually enroll.
A little intentional work throughout the year can prevent the frantic, exhausting burst of promotion when you suddenly need five new students in three weeks.
2. Know your students
The second skill might be even more natural to us.
Teachers are constantly making little calculations about the people in front of them.
You know you can explain something one way to one class and the lesson works beautifully. Then you try the exact same thing the next period and it completely bombs.
Same content. Same teacher.
Different students.
So you adjust.
Maybe this group needs an analogy.
Maybe that student needs to see it visually.
Maybe they’re not ready for the question you’re asking yet because you’re assuming knowledge they don’t have.
Maybe they’re tired.
Maybe they’re anxious.
Maybe they’re fifteen years old and absolutely no one cares about the fascinating historical background you spent forty-five minutes preparing last night.
We learn very quickly that what matters is not simply what we want to say.
We have to understand the person receiving it.
This is also marketing.
And I think this is where a lot of educators become uncomfortable because marketing can feel self-promotional. Sometimes it is self-promotional. Sometimes it’s manipulative and obnoxious and everything we hate about it.
But it doesn’t have to be.
Good marketing, especially for an educator, can look a lot more like good teaching.
Who is the person in front of me?
What are they trying to understand?
What problem are they experiencing that I know something about?
What misconceptions might they have?
What would help them make a wise decision—even if that decision ultimately isn’t me?
That is a very different posture from standing on the internet yelling, “Enroll now!”
And if you’re building something genuinely good, I think you have some responsibility to learn how to communicate that good clearly.
Because the family who needs your school cannot enroll in a school they don’t know exists.
The teacher who desperately needs your consulting cannot hire you if she doesn’t understand how you can help her.
The parent who would immediately recognize that your approach is exactly what their child needs cannot recognize it if all your website says is that you offer “innovative, individualized, student-centered education.”
They have to be able to see themselves in what you’re saying.
Teachers already know how to do this.
We just have to learn to apply the skill outside of the classroom.
And maybe that is the part I want other former teachers building businesses to understand most.
You are not starting from zero.
You don’t suddenly have to transform yourself into some slick entrepreneur who loves selling, posting every day, networking with strangers and talking about yourself all the time.
I certainly don’t want to.
But you do have to widen the scope of what you are tending.
Your work is no longer only the students or clients already in front of you. Part of the work now is making sure the next person who needs what you have built has a reasonable chance of finding it.
So, start where you already know how to start.
Know who you’re trying to help.
Know where you want them to end up.
And plan backwards from there.
Turns out, you may have been practicing marketing for years without realizing it.
