To successfully start a trade school you need to spend almost as much time learning about the education industry as you do your trade. Teaching is only about half of your school’s daily operations, and the education market can be a lot more competitive than you might think. If you want your new trade school to be a success, you have to be smart and deliberate about your decisions: learn the core aspects of vocational school operations and management: admissions (sales), student services, and regulatory compliance. Getting your school approved to operate is the first step, making it successful is the hard part that requires many skills and knowledge that have nothing whatsoever to do with what you plan to teach… that’s what we’ll focus on in this article.
When someone wants to start a trade school they tend to already be experts at what they plan to teach, but tend to know very little about education regulations and the processes required to get a new school approved to operate in their state, let alone how to run an admissions department and maintain good student services. Start with the most boring: regulations, and don’t take them lightly. Why? Because the process of getting your school approved to operate by the applicable state agency basically forces you to address all of the operations issues a school faces on a regular basis. The process teaches you how to be a school manager, not just an instructor.
It’s true that some people have started trade schools and done very well very quickly. But this is far from the norm. Most new career schools are underfunded, understaffed, and make at least a dozen or so mistakes when it comes to initial approval to operate. The best advice someone can give you is take your time before your opening to get everything done correctly. For every week you spend planning you’ll save 2 months of headaches within your first two years of operation.
How to start a trade school (and keep it running):
Rule One: Education is about the students – even more so than what’s being taught.
If you’re thinking about starting your own trade school, then you probably know everything there is to know about the vocation you’ll teach, but that’s about 50% of what you need to know to run a school. One rule that keeps you on track is to remember that no matter how good you are at the subject, all that matters are the students: their progress, happiness, successful completion of the program, and whether or not they got a job as a result of their training.
If your students are not happy: you’ll shut down. Happy students are the best referral source.
If your completion rate is too low: you’ll be forced to close.
If your job placement rate is too low: you’ll lose federal funding… and probably also be forced to close.
Education is a process. Vocational education is the process from orientation day through to their second month of employment. Trade schools have to help students through that entire process. Simply providing information isn’t enough to be a successful school. You need to create, document, and implement processes. Knowing them isn’t enough, they literally need to be written down and reviewed regularly so that your entire staff is aware, and so you have that information when your school is audited for accreditation.
You and every member of staff you hire and train must be fully focussed on the students as well as reminding yourselves one important fact: simply graduating is not enough – they have to get jobs. This reminds your teachers that a passing rate is not enough, your graduates actually have to be good at the job, get the job, and keep the job. Education is about quality, and if you hold your students to a high standard, then they’ll respect you for it.
Rule Two: Starting a trade school requires more investment than your initial budget will predict.
Trust me on this one. You can create a thousand projections, but you’ll still be off. Your retention rate won’t be as high as you hope, your variable costs will be a surprise, and you’ll always have months where it feels like it’s impossible to get even one student enrollment. Take your highest start-up budget and add 15-20%. That will put you closer to reality about start-up costs and the money you’ll need to carry you though during the smaller enrollments of the first few start dates.
The biggest mistake I see new trade schools make is spending less money when the first downward trend happens in enrollments. We all know why: revenue is down so you have to cut costs. However, you must never – never – cut your marketing or your student services. Make your school more efficient, cut your own salary, do what you have to do, but when enrollments are down, you need to be spending MORE on marketing, as well as doing everything in you power to keep your current students happy so they don’t drop out (student services).
When you open a new trade school, you want to give at least three months of advertising – hard advertising where you’re saturating your market – before your first start date. Every school I’ve ever worked with has pushed back their first start date. Every single one. All because they were too optimistic about how effective their recruiting would be.
Rule Three: Hire the best recruiters you can find.
Admissions is not easy. Admissions is sales, pure and simple. You must find at least one person who loves the thrill of closing the deal; a true salesperson. Someone who is willing to make 100 cold calls every day. My experience has shown that trade school owners and teachers are really good at closing the deal (i.e. school tours and meeting with a prospective student after they first meet with an admissions rep), but they are terrible at recruiting. For a new trade school, it’s impossible to underestimate the importance of a high-quality recruiter. Steal them from another school if you have to.
Also note that a recruiter doesn’t have to know anything about the skills you teach. Not when you hire, them, anyway. You can teach anyone the selling points of a program and a vocation, but you cannot teach someone to be an instinctual and great salesperson. Find the sales skill first, hire them, then teach the natural born salesperson about the product they’ll be selling.
Rule Four: Build a group of industry advisors.
You’ll need to be affiliated with lots of other people working in the industry for a couple reasons. First, because many states require schools to have a board of advisors. If your state doesn’t… get one anyway, because it will make your school better and the school will have a reputation of being “inside” the industry. (Plus you have a queue of guest lecturers if you need their help.)
Industry advisors are also potential employers as well as placements for externships. The more you have, the greater the chance you’ll have an impressive job placement rate. Moreover, these employers can tell you exactly the sort of skills they need in new employees so that you can adapt your curriculum to closely fit the needs of the local industry. If your trade school has the most up-to-date your curriculum, then that’s a selling point to prospective students.
Rule Five: Spend at least 6 weeks focussing on business operations.
Whereas you know everything about the vocation, assume starting now you know nothing about running a school. Even if you have some experience teaching at other schools, just to be safe, assume you know nothing. Now you can start thinking about how you’ll run the business side of the school: marketing, facilities, safety, taxes, local licensure, state reporting, fixed costs, insurance, staff policies, student policies, etc.
The more time you spend documenting and planning how you will streamline the administration and operations side of the school, the less time you’ll spend actually doing it, and therefore, you’ll save money. You need to think about the business of education, not just education.
And don’t forget about assets and supplies: desks, chairs, lab equipment, computers for admin staff, iPads or Chromebooks for teachers in class, projectors, whiteboards, lab supplies, more dry-erase markers than you thought you’d ever need in a lifetime… the list can feel endless. Build your lists, then go back to your initial business plan and cost projections to see if they need adjusting.
Rule Six: Over-prepare your curriculum.
When you submit your vocational training program to your state governing body for approval, they want to see details. They want to see you’re serious. In the end: every minute a student spends in a classroom is costing them money, and it’s your job to ensure they’re getting the biggest bang for their buck.
Prepare every course subject as if you’re preparing for a job interview, because that’s exactly what it is. Students have to want to stay at your school. If you’re providing them with the best education, then they’ll want stay on board.
Over-preparing your curriculum also helps you think outside the box. Not everyone learns the same, and vocational schools are unique in that the age and demographic backgrounds of a single class always vary greatly. You need to be able to teach every student in that class, from 18 to 55. You need more than just lecture notes. You need visuals, labs, hands-on tests and practice, stories, jokes, reading material, hand-outs – heck, write a song if you think it’ll help students learn the material.
If you’re prepared for every possibility and have a toolbox overflowing with teaching techniques for every subject, then you’ll be in good shape. You’ll be able to adapt to what the students need, rather than the students having to adapt to you. In truth, you’ll probably only use 65% of what you prepared for any given class, but the key is having all the tools for when the need arises. Besides, one class of students is never like the other so the next round you’ll use the other 35%. 😉
Rule Seven: You’ll have no life for about a year.
Get used to the idea now. Starting your own trade school is incredibly rewarding, but it will also be the hardest undertaking of your professional career thus far. Buy a couple new coffee makers and dive in.
