APRIL 21st, SUNDAY 1:30 - 4:00
At CREATE Hamamatsu, room #22
Title: School Owners Forum

Panel Discussion, various local school owners in moderated discussion. Q&A time

Abstract: Ever wonder how do you start up a school? Can't decide whether to design a curriculum and materials or purchase them? Interested in information about managing, selling, and buying schools?
These are just a sample of the topics to be discussed with a panel of local area school owners. The panelists represent a wide spectrum of experienced owners from franchise chain schools to small and larger language schools.

The owners frankly and sometimes passionately discussed the ins and outs of running a language school. Most expressed the opinion that keeping client numbers up was a real, full-time challenge, but most seemed to be doing quite well. There were various perspectives regarding promotion, with one or two mostly relying on word of mouth and some flier distribution to others who used fliers quite extensively. All maintained some Internet presence. All in all, from the perspective of this writer, it seemed like running a successful language school was like any other business, operators have to be well informed, forward-thinking and ready to make sacrifices in order to do well.