07 - How you can make the most of back to school with Cerys Keneally

Get ready to kick off the school year with a bang! In this episode of the Guided Growth Podcast, James is in conversation with Cerys Keneally.

James and Cerys discuss the bustling back-to-school season, a crucial time for children’s activity providers looking to expand their reach into schools and nurseries. 

Discover strategic insights on how to make your mark in educational settings right when decision-makers are setting their budgets and planning for the year. 

Cerys, an expert in educational partnerships, shares invaluable tips on initiating contact with schools, delivering impactful demos, and capitalising on the start of the academic year to set up lucrative collaborations. 

Tune in to transform your approach and ensure your services are top of mind when schools are ready to spend. Todays episode is filled with actionable advice to propel your business forward this September!

Stay tuned for more insightful episodes from Steps2Success, where we help you navigate the challenges of running a children's activity organisation with practical advice and expert insights.

Created with pride by LoveAdmin

Edited with finesse by Making Digital Real

Transcript

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Hey everybody, this is James, Strategic Business Manager at Love Admin and you're listening to the Guided Growth Podcast where we'll be taking you through the basics of growing your children's activity organisation with real insights and real actions you can apply to your organisation. Welcome to the seventh episode of Steps to Success, giving you the ideas and inspiration to take your activity business to new heights in bite-sized chunks. This week I'm with Cerys Keneally discussing how to make the most of the back-to-school period. Cerys has worked with thousands of children's activity providers to help them get a foothold in schools and nurseries and grow their organisations. Cerys, welcome to our podcast, thanks for joining us. Let's kick off by talking about how crucial September is when it comes to children's activity businesses. Hi James, thank you so much for having me on your podcast. Yeah, September is really is a crucial time. There's so many, there's a few kind of key points in the year really and September really is a key one, particularly in my world for anyone that's looking to get into schools and nurseries because it is a time where key decision makers, like new key decision makers, are in new roles in September and it's when a lot of the teachers are, although they'll do some of their planning before the summer holidays, a lot of plans are still being made at the beginning of a new academic year. So for any children's activity providers that are kind of looking to use schools and nurseries to grow their business, it is a fantastic time to be contacting schools definitely and anyone who's got multi-academy trusts in their area, it's the start of their new financial year so they're actually making spending decisions at that point too. Yeah, so from my point of view it's a great time definitely. Yeah, I think that point on budgets is a crucial one because you really want to get into those organisations while their wallets are full and they've not already decided to do forest school or any other type of outdoor activity, so getting in there quick is really, really important. So how far ahead of September do you feel that people should be planning for September? Is September too late to start going out to schools to make sure you land that period correctly or actually do you need to wait until then to make sure people are in the right frame of mind? Yeah, it's an interesting question. It's one I get asked a lot because if you are starting to contact schools in September, invariably you can't really expect to be making sales straight away and in fact for a lot of the cases if you're looking to get regular work in in terms of clubs for example, a lot of schools are working a whole term in advance. So I'm a big advocate of going out and delivering demos and showcasing the value that you can bring to schools. So I would say that your September campaign wants to be making an offer with a view to getting your regular work in for January. Now that said, it might be that you are making sort of preparations towards that. So with my members in the Approaching Schools Academy for example, I help them adopt this consistent approach to contacting schools all year round so that we don't fall into that trap of having to wait a term and also because of the marketing lag where you can really expect what you do right now to be benefiting your business in three to six months time, so a term or two's time. So actually for the providers that started contacting schools just after April, they've already got the ball rolling a little bit and whether or not they manage to get any paid bookings in, in sort of the summer term, the schools have already started hearing about them before September. So they're almost on that momentum. So you almost want to be thinking about having that, you know, yes, if you haven't started contacting them, reach out to them now, but also we're kind of restricted with term time settings to contacting them in term time. But you know, now is still a fantastic time to start. Yeah, I certainly agree with you. And do you think that the style of approach that you go into schools with determines when you should go after them? So for example, with some of our customers, we have provisions with schools and nurseries where they literally just supply the coach and then the school deals with absolutely everything or, and this is sort of the route that I think is best for children's activity providers, is they provide the end-to-end element of it and the school literally just provides the students. Yeah, the thing is, I think that's a great selling point for schools. So when we're looking at providing clubs, whether that's lunchtime after school or whatever type of extra curricular provision it is, if you're able to provide like the booking system, for example, and do all of the admin, you know, you are saving teachers and other school staff time and effort, and you're potentially saving the school money in some cases as well. And wherever you can be saving them time, money and effort, you're onto a winner. And it's a good opportunity because if you're managing all of the bookings yourself, you're then able to potentially upsell to your customers, you know, you've got the parents details, if you've got other things going on in the community, like I was a dance teacher, and I might have been running a dance show or something like that, I could invite the children that took part in my clubs to that show because I had all the parent contact details, because I'd used a booking system. So it's kind of, you know, when you are able to take that load off the school's hands, not only is it great selling point, but it might help you increase your average order value as well. Do you see that as the biggest opportunity for children's activity providers who aren't currently making the most of schools and nurseries? Or do you think that there's a bigger, like if a children's activity provider has not gone into a school or nursery at all yet, and they're looking at this blank canvas and looking for the low hanging fruit, looking for that biggest opportunity? Do you think that's it? Or do you think there's something else out there that trumps it? There is, there is more. And I would say that that is part of it. So very, very often, clubs are a great way of getting your foot in the door with a school initially, but actually what you want to be doing, and this is dependent on, you know, your business model, it's dependent on maybe any team you've got delivering for you, and depending on what your work schedule is, but it's a fantastic opportunity to get daytime work in schools for either you or your team. If you can then upsell them, either workshops, so enrichment workshops, depending on what subject you deliver, specialist subject lessons, perhaps PPA cover, which is an opportunity to cover teachers' non-contact time. There are so many ways you could be getting daytime work in schools that's going to give you, you know, again, it's about increasing that customer value. So if you can get paid to deliver work in the day in a school, and then naturally, a lot of those children and families are going to also gravitate towards your other classes elsewhere in the community, you're getting paid to get paid because you're getting to promote what you do and get paid for your time that you spend marketing those other activities. So you can start to operate a really, really nice funnel for your business by going out into a school or a nursery and kind of essentially attracting more children into your other classes as a result, and more opportunities come to you that way. Word of mouth spreads quicker for your business that way, and you know, in some ways, some of that will be indirect, and you might not realise exactly where all these children are coming from, and in other ways, you'll be able to directly see, okay, that family was referred by that family because that child went to that club, and now their siblings want somewhere to go. You're not offering a club in that sibling school, but you do have a class in the community that you could direct that parent to. So it can be a huge opportunity, and I've got clients right now in the Approaching Schools Academy who are adding an average of £2,000 per month revenue to their business with this strategy. Yeah, I think certainly it's one that organisations don't make the most of in terms of looking at all of the available options. I think it really also highlights the importance of having a brand, a real easily distinguishable brand within that, because actually if you don't, and particularly organisations that simply supply a coach or an instructor to a school, you're really missing out on all of those bits that you described where you pick up those waves and strays along the way, and actually that really snowballs it into something quite sizable. Yeah, that's it. So yeah, no, I think that's great advice, and I think for people that haven't engaged in the back-to-school process and really making the most of it, that is definitely the way to go, because it will feed other aspects of your business as well. So if the organisation only had time to do one thing, and we all know that children's activity providers are short of time perpetually, if they only had time to do one thing to grow their business in that back-to-school period, what would you recommend that they do? Yeah, for me, from my point of view, because I'm all about providers working with schools and nurseries, it is just to make an offer to your local schools and nurseries this term. So if you predominantly work with early years, check out all of the kind of nurseries, preschools, children's centres, that sort of thing in your area. If you are predominantly working at the moment with kind of primary age children, then obviously it's the primary schools in your area, and older children as well. But you want to make them an offer, because what you need to remember is that in September, all of your competitors are also probably marketing to schools and nurseries too. So you want to make an offer that stands out, you want to make an offer that demonstrates how you would deliver impact for that school or nursery, because they need to see how you're different. They need to see how you're different to any other provider that might do something similar to you, but that's not even your greatest competition. Your greatest competition is actually anything the school or nursery could deliver themselves in-house, cheaper or for free, without even getting you in. So it is time to definitely make an offer where you're going in, you're delivering a demo, maybe that's like a 20-minute demonstration of what you do in a nursery setting, maybe it is a mini lesson that you deliver during curriculum time where the teachers can see what you do. Or if you are looking to get clubs in first and foremost, assemblies are fantastic for that, because you can get lots of children seeing what you're doing, and also potentially lots of teachers at the same time, who will then advocate for you to the senior leaders who are the decision makers. So that's what I would recommend, is put together a campaign for your local schools or nurseries that makes an offer to showcase what you do before you ask for the sale, basically. Yeah, I think there's one bit that I'd pull out of that, from working with a lot of our customers as well, that perhaps is the most important starting point to unlock those bits, is confidence. So many children's activity providers that I've seen and worked with have fantastic propositions that will make such a difference, both from a sort of educational point of view as well as a fun point of view, but they don't have the confidence to really go out there and sell themselves because they're still a small organisation. And that phrase of a small organisation really is kind of meaningless to be honest, because all you're doing is taking away in your own mind the value that you can give to people, whereas actually if you can be confident and go into a school and really wow them with the value proposition you've got, then who cares what size you are? It doesn't matter whether you take 50p or half a million, if you've got a good product you can sell yourself. Absolutely, and I think there's something to be said for not trying to appear like a big organisation if you're not, because I think schools quite like working with local members of the community just as much as they would like to work with a big brand. So I think there's a very personal side of marketing yourself as, if you are a one-man band, having more of that personable approach, or if you are a small team but your brand isn't very well known yet, it's about kind of looking at why, explaining to that school why you've chosen them, and they can see that you're someone trying to do good in your community. And I think that goes a long way and sometimes you can actually trump the bigger brands by having that personalised approach. Yeah, I think actually in this whole world of having no time, just taking the time to be yourself is almost the most important thing you can do, and actually you don't need to put a whole heap of work, and I say that with a massive caveat because you need to do some planning, can't be winging it completely, but you can also overwork these things and then take away from kind of the personality of what you're trying to do. And I think where schools, more so than nurseries, but with EYFS, with nurseries as well, they have a structured curriculum, they want something that's a bit out there, they want something that's a bit different, a bit more lively, that gets people up and moving and doing something different. So certainly that personality piece, confidence and personality are the two things that are that are yours, that have real value, that nobody can take away from you. Yeah, and I love what you're saying about the value as well, is that if anyone is feeling underconfident about the selling side of things, just remember that it is a conversation about how you can continue to add value as a longer-term partnership, and you have to have these conversations, but if you've gone in with the approach where you've gone and showcased what that value is, it should just become the next logical step. It should simply be a conversation about how you can continue to add value in their setting, and hopefully that makes it feel a little bit less daunting. I like to kind of put together a process for my members where it actually kind of feels good to do it this way, because you don't have to feel icky about sales or really overcoming objections, because you've kind of done all of that, either with a great offer and then delivering an amazing demo in a school or nursery. That's all the stuff you should feel good about, and then being able to have a chat about what they need next should also feel quite good. So hopefully that gives people a bit of confidence as well. Yeah, and I think certainly from what I've seen, and I'm sure you've seen far more cases as well, schools are actively looking for people to deliver these extracurricular activities, so to an extent you're pushing against an open door really, that they should be trying to sort of woo you as much as you're trying to get in with them and get the contract with them. You are right there, and also if we are talking about providers managing their own kind of bookings and having that end-to-end approach with a school, you've got to remember in many cases you might be making them money as well. You might not like to hear this, but if you are going to be hiring their hall for example, it's another great opportunity because you're making the school money and the school is more likely to want to help you fill those clubs and do a bit of the marketing on your behalf and certainly let the parents know that you're there, because in the end it's a value exchange for them and there's something in it for them, and we know that schools are strapped for cash, and if this is a good way that you can form a partnership with that school, it becomes a win-win situation. Yeah, I think that's definitely right, and I think how you frame your overall organisation really adds into that. Actually the back-to-school period, almost what I'm getting from what we've discussed so far, is that the back-to-school period is the culmination of all of this stuff, and that actually back-to-school is a year-round activity, but you just clinch it in September. That's it, that's absolutely it, yeah. And I think actually using your existing business to to fuel that as well could be quite a useful angle, you spoke about earlier around how you can get your advocates, but actually you do already have some, and using that pupil power almost of give everyone who's at that target school you want to target a free t-shirt with your brand and logo all over it, that when it's the next non-uniform day or school disco or whatever, they're all going to come in wearing this branded stuff, or they're going to have their, whenever they go swimming in primary school, they've all got their branded bag that they're wearing, and soon people will start to take notice of that, the fact that there's this organisation that's having a real impact. Obviously your branded merchandise has got to be good, because kids are known to be unashamedly honest with these things, but I think using that angle to start to really feel out where the opportunity lies is quite a risk-free way of doing it, whilst also giving your existing customers that little bit extra as well. Yeah, yeah 100 percent. So when, you alluded earlier to the fact that you used to run dance schools before, doing what you do now, so when you were running your activity organisation, what was the checklist of things that you would want to achieve to be ready for back to school? We've talked about it as if it's a year-long thing, but as you're counting down to that September period, what's the things that were top of your to-do list? It's a really good question, because I think some people run out of time at the beginning of term and think, oh my goodness, I've got to put a campaign together, and then they don't know what to say, they also haven't organised their day space or their contact list yet, they haven't prepped appropriately, so I think you need to set aside some time in your diary for what the preparation work would be. So for me in my dance business, I was predominantly working with schools and nurseries, but we also did other things, we also had, you know, community classes and things like that, but if I was really looking to grow and get the brand out into more areas of the community, I would be looking at schools and nurseries to do that, and one of the things I felt I needed to do to prep was to refresh and add to my school database at the beginning of an academic year, because so many I mentioned at the beginning, they're very often new decision makers in new roles, and unfortunately, and it's a state of the times, you know, I was a primary school teacher and I left the profession, so many teachers are leaving the profession, there is actually a high turnover in schools, so you may very quickly find that your database, even if you created one a year ago, it might now be out of date. So, you know, it's always in your best interest to be able to personalise any communications you send to schools and nurseries, so just make sure you've got the right names, you know, the email addresses might not have changed, but the names that you want to contact might have done, there might be a new headteacher, there might be a new PE lead, for example, so you want to find out those names, refresh your database, add to it if you can, you know, are there ever, I mean, if you're working with nurseries, new nurseries popping up all the time, especially new private nurseries, also sadly, there's some nurseries closing as well, so you've kind of got to get a handle of that in terms of having a refresh, but also adding to it, because you might be able to increase your pool of contacts and gain interest from any kind of new, new multi-academy trusts, new free schools, new nurseries, for example, that you may not have realised were within your territory area that you can now pop on your list. So, that's a good thing to prep at this time of year, obviously upgrading any kind of administration processes that you have in place is, I just always find it's a good time to prep for it, because it's when it's kind of, when you're thinking, right, I need to get all my policies in place, I need to get all my procedures in place, I need to get my admin sorted, so if you're looking to upgrade any of your systems, it's a good time to do that as well, and those were kind of the main things, it was like getting prepped and ready to make sure that I hadn't, you know, if I was going to do a letter campaign, have I spent time getting the envelopes and getting the stamps? It sounds really simple, but it's so easy to run out of time when it's a new academic year, and especially if you've got other community classes going on, and maybe you're running free trials, and you're getting parents signed up, and you're having to chase them, so much going on that it's really, really easy to let things like getting new schools and nurseries on board slip, so it's just having, I would say, at least a two-week period, where you make sure you know what date you're going to launch your campaign, and what you need to do it, i.e. is your contact list in place? Is it refreshed and updated? If you're doing letters, have you got the resources for that? Do you know where you're going to go and print them, or are you able to print them at home? It's those little things that sound simple, but if you don't prep for them, they're not going to happen with the best will in the world. Yeah, I think using that almost August period, which can be a bit of a lull once your holiday camps, if you're doing them, are all set up, is using that period, having it really neatly planned out in terms of what you want to go and achieve, and I think it's a great point that September is also a really busy time for your other core classes, and you've got to fit in going into schools and nurseries fresh on top of that, so anything you can do to smooth out those lines of workload will certainly be beneficial there. Yeah. Cool, and then we spoke a little bit around admin and a booking system, and as part of that checklist, how important do you think it is to have a really smooth admin system, a really good booking system when it comes to hitting that back to school period? Yeah, for me it's just about efficiency. Ultimately, even if it takes you a bit of time to set it up, and again, August being a great time to do that, once it's in place, it's like an absolute dream compared to trying to use a spreadsheet, trying to use a tick list, or anything like that. If you can just be taking bookings reasonably automatically, it's just about fine-tuning your processes, really. For me, it was fantastic when I had team on board and I was sending team into schools, or I had team running community classes for me. For them to be able to see in real time who the new children were that were taking the trials and things like that, without me having to send them a load of emails saying, you've got this person joining, you've got this person joining, you've got this person joining. They could just see it at a glance. For me to then be able to see, because schools might be contacting me in the early few weeks, asking me about children, and I need to see whether they attended those clubs as well. Just to have it all digital and done for me, as I say, once it was set up, I didn't know myself having gone from spreadsheets and teachers having to print out lists and things like that. I think it helps you from a GDPR perspective, it just makes you ensure that you've got all your data in the right place. Yes, I think it does really help with that delegation point as well, because quite often if you're expanding into schools and nurseries, or you've got a new academic year, so you've got a new venue, just in general where you're starting new classes, you're likely going to have new team members that are going to be picking that up. If you then try and get them to do it the way you've always done, with 17 spreadsheets and five bits of paper, then that might make sense to you because you've been doing it for a long time, but that new person coming in is going to be like ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics and trying to work out how to decipher all these different sheets. Certainly when you're looking, and we're talking about growth here, so making everything you're doing bigger, taking that moment to simplify what you're already doing is really crucial to allow that to happen. Certainly from the clubs I've spoken to in the past, the ones that have done everything on paper before, it's like a new world, it's like they've suddenly got 3D vision or something, with the possibilities that they now have. I think that really helped them in terms of taking advantage of the opportunities that you spoke about in reaching out to new schools and nurseries that pop up. Yeah, and it's like collecting the money as well, isn't it? If you've got less so with the school, because with the school you might have taken the payments up front anyway and collected it from the office perhaps, if they were doing their own processes, but when you're taking charge of that and if you've got community classes on the go where you've got teachers as well, you haven't got to rely on them to take the money and account the right numbers and all of that. It's all just very seamless because you're able to collect the payments centrally and you know exactly where you are in terms of cash flow right at the beginning of the term without having to wait for your teachers to do that admin for you. So I think that helps just clean everything up as well. Yeah and I think all of that stuff can be a selling point for you as well and we mentioned this earlier on when it comes to that whole kind of value proposition and can you make a school's life easier. Actually if you've got the booking system and you're doing everything, you just need their venue, then that's quite compelling compared to someone who's going to rock up late with a folder full of bits of paper that half will nail over the floor not knowing what's going on and then asking a lot of the school to help them administrate it effectively. So with a great booking system you can take all that away and actually it may gain you new business because people will look at it and go yeah you've got everything lined up, you know what you're doing, you're going to make my life easier, you can have exclusive use, let's make something cool happen. Yeah I mean ultimately you need to be appearing professional when you work with these types of organisations and I think it is just about upgrading everything in terms of your brand including those great first impressions and having a seamless administration process that they can be confident that you are going to take care of things and they don't have to worry about parent complaints you know because that's always a consideration when they're bringing a new provider is are we going to be keeping the parents happy with this new decision. So if they can see all that it gives them a lot of confidence because you've kind of levelled up your professional impressions as well. Yeah and I think that kind of goes to the point of your brand is more than just a logo and the colour of your polo shirt, it reaches every single part of your business and schools and nurseries or even just venues that you're hiring, they want to be associated with brands that elevate their own brand and their own standing in the community, they're not going to bring on a brand that is dragging them down. Yeah exactly and there's a huge amount of trust involved I think as well with the schools because essentially when they put you in front of their children they are endorsing you to the parents and so I just think little things like that just go a long way to breeding trust because they see that you're organised, you see that you've got everything together and they're quite happy to recommend you to parents then. Yeah absolutely and that element of trust is so so important from a GDPR point of view, a safeguarding point of view, from a satisfaction point of view, it kind of covers everything and I think when we talk about the back to school period you know kind of circling back to a point I think we've made a couple of times while we've been chatting is that this really is a year-round evolution in terms of how you can develop things and yes it manifests itself in September when you've actually got to go out there and seal the deal with these things but in terms of building your brand, building your reputation and building all of that structure you know really you should just get going with it because it is going to help across so many different areas and you can always tell when someone's rushed it at the end it's a bit like homework. Yeah. Cool well that's all we've got time for and thank you very much Cerys for giving us some fantastic insights and just how easy it can be to make a massive difference to your organisation. Make sure you subscribe to our Step2Success podcast to get more guided growth tips each month and check out loveadmin.com/step2success for more information about how our one-to-one growth consultation service can help you out. Thank you very much for listening and we'll see you next time.