Seven Thousand Dollar Tickets
Teaching and managing my student’s math potential comes easy and naturally for me. Maybe it’s because I struggled myself when I was young or maybe I can hear the unspoken questions in my student’s mind. Whatever life ingredients are in the art of teaching math, I’ve breathed them in.
Running a small business, especially marketing, now that’s an entirely different task. I’ve yet able to wrap my arms around the whole concept of “word of mouth marketing” or “permission marketing” or the “guerilla marketing” before another current trendy marketing wave crashes to the shore. So imagine my shock when one of my 9th graders announced to me “just buy me a pair of movie tickets and I’ll tell all my soccet teammates about your program.”
“A pair of movie tickets?”
“Yeah. I like going to movies and without your help in math, I’d be grounded for failing math in the first place.”
Now you realize that for the past seven years I’ve been paying on average seven thousand dollars per year on marketing with limited success at best. And a pair of movie tickets costs less than thirty bucks.!
So my point is this: what have you been paying in your life when it comes to your kids that is also 7000:30 or 233 times less efficient? Is it really the $400 iphone that your kids must have? Is it really the $7000 ski trip? What are your kids really asking for?
And did I take my student’s offer? You bet!