 Hey, what's up guys, welcome back to the channel. Today I have an awesome interview with Coach Theo. Theo is based out of the UK. He has an after-school program that he group from zero to over 250 students. Watch this interview, implement a lot of the stuff that he talks about, and I know if you're interested in starting an after-school program, or if you're just looking to grow and scale your current business, this interview is really going to help you out. See you soon. What I want to do at the beginning here is kind of just give everyone like a one-minute background on who you are and what you do. So my name's Theo and I was a fencer in the Great British team for about three or four years. And before that I was training for about seven years. So until I was about 11 years as a fencer and I took my experience coaching fencing and training younger fences. And of course, like doing a lot of sport and transferred that to teaching children initially locally and now in schools across London and Surrey. And for those who don't know, Surrey is like a surrounding county. Gotcha, very cool. And I remember the first time we talked, you're the first person I've talked to that's in fencing that's ever kind of reached out. And I think the big reason why I wanted to bring you on today's show is so you can kind of go into depth on the after school programs that you started and like how you got connected with the schools. So I kind of want to start there. So when you got started with the business, I know you mentioned to me in the past, like you would kind of call schools and try to get your program in front of them. Walk me through the process, like the first school that you've got to work with, like how was all of that set up? So it's, when you're dealing with schools, it's very much a numbers game. So it's not a particularly glamorous process. It's about calling as many schools as possible, sticking to a script that you know is successful and isn't too intrusive, isn't too pitchy and trying to get your offer out there as much as possible. So the first school was a school called River House School in Greenwich and Southeast London. It's essentially calling them up, pitching our idea, keeping it as short and sweet as possible, sending a follow-up email or two and then getting your provisioning from there. Cool. So I wanted to bring this up because a lot of the coaches that I've spoken to over the last seven years now, they will tell me, and this is, I would say more of these coaches that I've spoken to are in the U.S. when I'm saying this, but a lot of these guys will be like, yeah, I try sending an email out to the schools and they just don't get back to me. And I'm curious, why did you start to call first instead of just email? Schools receive, I don't want to guess, but maybe thousands of emails a week. Right. And it's so easy to get lost in there in once. If you come across as friendly, yet you come across knowing what you're talking about, they will remember you much more easily. They'll be able to put a face or at least not face a voice to the email and they'll be much, much more inclined to reply to you. If you, I've done this before as well, unsuccessfully sending out a tonne, a blanket of just cold emails, and their success rate is so low. So it's an uncomfortable process really, picking up the phone and calling a complete stranger or sell them something. But it's one which is, it's much more effective than just hiding behind an email. And it's much more effective if you're personizing an email as well. So even something as simple as, hey, X, like I'm putting the name in, I'm putting the name of the school in as well, it's much more effective than just a blanket, hi, comma, you're at school. People can tell when you're sending them a cold email and when it's at least the last minute. Yeah, yeah, I personally like calling to so much better because I can get results faster. Like if I talk to the person and they say, no, great, I can move on and I don't have to worry or think, oh, when are they gonna send me an email back? Because that's a waiting game. And I like things to be done quickly. So I have feedback faster. So I really like how you explained that. So you got your first school and once you got in there, like how many kids were part of that initial program? So a couple of times, that was about a couple of times when I had two schools in first one had 11 and in another school I had about 18 students. And then, well, from there, from this time, so from April to July, it's been much bigger, it's been 17 schools. So I've really tried to take what was successful from the first time and ramp it up. You know, using the same process that I used that was successful in cutting out ones that weren't and trying to ramp it up to achieve some sort of scale. Right. And how much easier is it now for you to pick up the phone and call someone versus when it was like your first call? So much easier. So much easier. It's a complete difference. Like for my first school, even though I had nothing to lose, I was nervous. Yeah, yeah. It was like stammering over my words. And just, I was unconfident but once you get practice, it becomes a lot easier. Right, awesome. And how many total students are you serving like up to this date now? So for the time just gone by, we did 285 students. Amazing. And actually that, we did a couple of extra days towards the end. So that number's probably a bit north of 300. Yeah, working in 17 schools and we also did four or five one-off days with schools as well. So over 300. Amazing, awesome. And I know when we talked last time, you kind of broke down how you have people obviously that are going in to run the sessions for you. You're not like going to 17 different schools yourself, right? So you have a team. How many people are part of your team now? So at the moment we've got 11 coaches. Gotcha. So they're all part-time workers, right? Because our programs take place after school. So extracurricular after-school programs as well. All of our school classes are at the moment. So I have 11 different coaches running 17 classes. The most classes that one coach was doing was four and we've got a few coaches so we're just doing one class. Gotcha. And as far as like the logistics, do you have everything set up to where are they bringing the equipment to the schools or is it already there? Like how do you guys handle all of that? So it's a bit of a mixture. For the majority of schools, the vast majority, we have a kit assigned to each school. So that's a decent amount of upfront investment but the thing with fencing is there's a lot of equipment. So it's very challenging to find a coach who's willing to take kit and constantly ship it across London. So most schools have their own equipment assigned to them and for a couple of coaches who've got bigger cars, they drive to the session and I don't think they need to go for each of their sessions. Right, okay, great. And how long have you been doing this business? Like when did you start? So I started actually on a really, really small scale just over two years ago. Gotcha. The way I actually started was just as a part-time thing while I had a job for a bit and I was working on other projects. I was doing this like straight after lockdown, I was doing outdoor sessions in my neighbor's garden. So my company is called Fence Club 43 and the reason for that is sessions started at number 43, so next to our neighbors. And it was literally just me, my neighbor, my other neighbor where we were running one of the classes, they're two kids and three other kids from the neighborhood, just their mates, just running the sessions in a back garden. So that started two years ago and then obviously we're running those classes in a hall now, but and I was doing that and then the time before I got a couple of schools and then now I'm doing it properly for the last three or four months or so in 17 schools. So yeah, it's been, it was a steady progression and then I saw that it was continually successful, it was consistently successful. So I thought this can be achieved, this can be done at scale. Mm-hmm, amazing. So let's say you sign up a new school tomorrow, is it the school's responsibility to promote it for you once you're in there? Like how is that set up? So again, every school does it differently. So some schools, it's my job to go in, run an assembly or run a taster session or create a video or write a blog or do a poster. Other schools, they just completely handle everything. So it's really anything from a big introduction to just letting the schools do it. Gotcha, so that varies from school to school. Okay, okay, great. And this is a question I thought of before we got on this call, but obviously you're the way you're scaling right now is you're calling schools, you're just getting into more and more schools. That's all free, right? Like you're not like having to pay for advertising with this business. It's more of just like you're calling the schools to get in, correct? I haven't paid for any advertising with school classes at all. All the posters have been done by me, assemblies, everything. Taster sessions done by me, calling is more than seven pound a month from O2 on your network plan. Right, right, right. Gotcha, yeah, that's amazing, man. And reason why I ask that is like a lot of coaches that I talk to, they might have, they might be in a different type of market. So they might not be doing after school programs at schools, but they have like their own training program where kids are coming to their sessions. And a lot of coaches that I talk to, they I think they have self-limiting beliefs that they can't train more than like 50 kids or they can't bring on an assistant coach because they have just too much control and they don't wanna lose control of the business. And so I'm curious with you, what was your experience like when you brought on your first trainer that was gonna kind of come on it and help run things like with you? Was that an easy process? Was it rocky? Like what was that like for you? So the initial process was slightly rocky. So when I was getting my first coach involved, it was difficult because I'd never trained anyone to be a school coach. I'd never really transferred my knowledge, even though I had a ton of knowledge from just years and years of fencing, I'd never really transferred that in a way that was 100% understandable to someone who didn't have as much experience as me. So the initial training wasn't as good as it was now. It was a bit makeshift and I had to really go to his sessions a lot to support him. So for the first, maybe his first four sessions, I was there with him, making sure, okay, is this okay? Do you understand this? And giving him help for his class. But again, as I mentioned earlier, it was about finding what was successful in that process, repeating that and refining on that. So now when I train coaches, it's very process driven. So it'll start with videos that I've made. Then it'll be an in-person training day with syllabus, lesson plans. And that training day will have everything encompassed in it from behavior management, fencing technique to teaching styles. And then it will be in-vigilation for one, maybe two sessions before I know that, okay, you know, they're good to go. Obviously that doesn't mean I don't check that they're still doing well, doing engineering class well, but it's a lot more smooth now. That's amazing. So you have a system now. So system in place to where when someone wants to work for you, they have to go through a series of things to learn exactly what you want them to do. So when they go run the session, you know, it's running the same way in one school as it is in another school with different coaches. Okay, cool. So I'm really curious in asking you, just kind of shifting gears here, but obviously you probably make a lot of phone calls, right? I mean, I would think you probably spend a lot of your time as far as like growing the business, doing that and bringing on other coaches that work for you. So how do you, I guess, how do you train yourself mentally? Like let's say you have a day of calls and everybody says no. Like what do you do personally? Like what's your routine like to like get over the hump when stuff like that happens? Cause like I have my own routine and I haven't really talked about my own routine on YouTube before, but like what do you do to like stay confident? Yeah. So the thing with say when you've got a day of sales is you have to go in and you have to be honest, cold calling isn't fun. It is in my opinion very monotonous. Yeah, so it's about, for me it's about toughing up inside and just be like, okay, look, you've got to go through this for the next few days. You just got to do it. When I feel like, oh, I'm getting rejection, rejection, rejection, rejection, I realize it's a numbers game. Yeah. The numbers don't lie. So if I've got, I believe I targeted around 120, 130 schools last time and I got about 14, 13 of them came from, came from just cold calls. So about 10%. Now I know that that's a big enough sample size to know that there is a market for it. Yeah, absolutely. So even if 10 schools say no, there's likely gonna be one that says yes. And even if it's not today. Right. Or three might come tomorrow. Right. So it's just about, it's about not taking it to person as well. Yeah. That's where, that's something I've learned. Like I don't do a lot of cold calling right now. But when I was, I would say earlier on in my training business, I would always try to get in front of club programs or organizations that didn't know me. And I would try to call them and get in touch with them to try to do something for free as a way to get in front of their audience. Cause I knew their audience could potentially be clients of mine. And I remember it's funny at the very beginning, I was just too afraid to call. So I would just, I would just email. And nothing, like nothing happened. And my cold emails were terrible back then too. Like the whole email was about me. It was nothing about them. And then I realized I was like, man, I just, I have to force myself to call people. And I remember how uncomfortable that was at the beginning. But like one of those connections, literally, like there was one point where like one of those connections was responsible for like 70% of our business year after year. And it was because like, I just, I literally just picked up the phone and called them. And like, and it's funny because I know a lot of coaches that are in a position to, whether it's a cold call or it's just a normal call. People just put it off because it's just so much easier to email or text. And that's the faster thing to do, but it's not the best thing to do. I think people are often under the illusion that it's quicker to email as opposed to, now I think in business, when you think about saving time, you're thinking about saving money. But if you're not actually earning the same money, you're not getting the same returns on your cold emails as you are with cold causes. I think it's time to reevaluate. Right, right. Yeah. Absolutely. So what are your plans coming up in the future? Like are you, like, where are you looking to take this business? Now that's a good question. That's what I've been thinking about a lot of these last week or two or so because a lot of classes have been finishing for some holidays now. Now, one thing I definitely am going to do is I'm going to try and double this for starting from January. So the next sales drive will be over September and October. I'm going to try and double it across London and Surrey. Beyond that, whether it's expansion to other parts of England, internationally or other sports, I'm still working out. But one thing I'm going to do in the short term is expand over London and Surrey and use the same things that I've been doing which has given me success in the past. Right, that's awesome. Have you tried training anyone yet to do the cold calling or is that all, that's just 100% you? That's going to be coming as well. That's going to be coming. I haven't started on that yet, but that's going to be coming from about September. Yeah, man, I think that's going to make a huge difference because you'll be able to double the volume of calls and that person could end up just doing that every single day. Like when you have to focus on other tasks, I think that piece is going to be, it's going to make your business scale a lot smoother, I would say, just because you'll have a consistency of calls that you can rely on every single day that that person is doing. Absolutely, absolutely. Very cool. Now that I've got a bit of revenue coming in from my classes, I can afford to start thinking of how to do something stuff like that, other administration as well. I'm definitely looking to add to the team in September. Very cool. So last question I have, most of the time when I do interviews, I try to ask this, when you had your job and you were looking to start your business, and I know you kind of started it to where it was like a side thing at the beginning, but what was that feeling like when you just fully committed to your business, when you stopped the last job that you had? What was that like for you? Because a lot of people that watch our channel are a lot already have a business, but there's also a lot of people that they want to have their own business, but they have another job and that kind of restricts their time and they sometimes don't make the jump into their business. So what was that transition like for you? Good question. So the way I transitioned into doing this full time was I transitioned over as I knew that workload was going to rapidly increase. So I didn't leave it before I'd made any progress on this. I was cutting down whilst scaling up the fencing business. So the transition actually felt quite comfortable because I was able to do it at a time when I knew the revenue was going to come, because I've been doing the cold calls alongside my job. I was fortunate enough to be able to have a job where I was able to work flexibly and I didn't have so I could call schools in the data. So that transition was relatively comfortable, but because of the expansion from two schools to 16, 17 schools is a very big transition. There was a lot of fear because, again, I had a lot of new staff coming in. I had a lot of schools were starting over a different schedule. So I had schools starting this week, this week, this week, this week, and it was really ongoing, a constant flurry of schools starting. And there was a lot of unknowns as well. I wasn't 100% sure on the numbers for a lot of schools because they didn't give me. And there was a lot of other uncertainties as well. I had some coaches pulling out last minute and had to find last minute replacement. So it was a bit hard, a bit far, but I knew that if a disaster happens with this school and a disaster happens with that school, I've still got plenty of other clients. Thankfully, no disasters happened. Everything was right. Two fires were put out. Right. No, I like that. I think that's really good advice, too, is you didn't just have the idea and quit your job and then try to go figure it out. It's like you were already working on it. So by the time you quit your job, it was like you were already ready to, like you were already doing it. I think that's a big problem a lot of people have, is they quit what they're doing. They try to go into a thing. It's not really doing anything yet. It's not producing any money or there's no signs of it producing any income yet. And then they have way more pressure when they quit because now they're trying to learn and figure all the stuff out on the fly when they should be working on that while they're doing their other job and then just transition when they're ready. Exactly. The thing is, obviously, when it's a full-time job, it can be difficult to fit it in around the full-time job. So I was fortunate in my position, but it's still 100% possible. It's still more than half hours a day to work on your own projects. Get some traction. Get some feedback before committing to a full-time. Right. Very cool. Awesome, man. Well, is there anything else that, I guess, let's say there's someone watching and they want to try to start an after-school program in their area and they're kind of, like they want to do it, but they're stuck and they might be overthinking, like what is the most simple thing you could tell someone to just go after this thing? Like what would be like a one-good action step? One-good action step. I think if I had to choose one, it would be about making sure, from a financial perspective, you have enough opportunity in that area, enough potential to growth, and then enough potential for growth, and enough potential revenue, really, to replace what you're doing. So the way I always look at things is like financially forecasting and just making sure that there is enough business in that area. If you can forecast that if you have five schools, 10 students in each school, each paying 10 pounds, and you're going to be happy with that income, then commit to it, follow processes, and be disciplined and organized. Right, right. So basically you're saying, if you have another job, the new business that you want to do, does it have greater opportunity to make more money than this job here and dialing in the numbers, like, well, how many kids do I need paying X amount to make more than what I'm doing over here? Yes. Yeah, that's a really good point, man, because I think a lot of coaches underestimate what the potential is, and I think a lot of people just don't know what's actually possible, because they either haven't talked to someone who's doing it or they don't know enough about it, but I mean, this is kind of how I want to wrap our interview up here, but if you think about where you're at right now, compared to where you can take this in five years from now, like how much bigger do you think this opportunity is for you at this point? Like just knowing what you know now compared to what you knew on day one, like what do you think is possible, like for what you want to do with this business? I think this business has huge scalability. I think what I knew before was that there's a big market for it. I believe there was a big market for it. I had a bit of experience in the industry as well, a while back, but now that I'm more aware of it, aware of different regions in the UK, I know there's a demand and the scalability really is big, especially given my previous results of going from two to 17 schools and I think it's such a big growth in revenue and profit. I see no mitigating factors. I see no reason why that can't be reproduced on a bigger scale, given that especially given that I've only targeted so far less than 4% of London and London is a very affluent area. So it's, I see no risks as of yet. Right, yeah, absolutely. No man, that's really cool and at the end of the day, you should be really proud of what you've built so far because it does take, it takes a lot of courage to pick up this stupid thing and just call. It's like the average person will not do that and they won't even try it because they know on the other side of that phone call, there's a lot of failure and people are afraid to be rejected and I think you already know that that's just part of the game and the more calls you take, the more successful you're gonna be. And you have to get used to it, you have to get used to those because even for me, I've got 90% knows and pass out, that's actually really good. Yeah, I mean, that's very good. I mean, if you're targeting schools and there's 20 students, what, 15 to 20 students per school and you get nine times out of 10 know that there's still huge passing in, there's over 20,000 schools in London. So it's just, there's no issues with the know. Yeah, that's amazing. Awesome, man. So this is a non-business question. So how did you, like I know what fencing is, I think most people who watch this know what it is. But how did you go from, cause I guess you were like really, really competitive, like at the highest level, right? Yeah, I was on the under 20 international team. Right, I mean, that's amazing. So during that time, were you thinking about wanting to coach fencing or were you just focused purely on like getting better and improving yourself? In that time, I was doing a bit of both. Well, towards the end, actually, I was doing a little bit of coaching and but I was mainly used to like fund my fencing. So I was 18, I was like training as much as possible sort of doing eight sessions a week, really trying to push and go for it. And I was also doing a bit of coaching on the side. So the coaching sort of like helped me, helped me find my progress. But I was also, whenever I was younger, I was always trying to help out the younger ones as well. Cause there's always younger ones at the club and I'm always keen to give them advice. Very cool. Awesome, man. Well, thanks for jumping on here. And I'm excited for you. And I would love to try to bring you on a couple of years from now and see how much different things are then than they are now. So I think this is gonna inspire a lot of people who are watching to pick up the freaking phone and start making some dials. So that's very good insight from you. So thank you so much. Well, pleasure. Thank you so much.