“Don’t Know Much About Geography….”
“I am the king of all that I can see!” declared Ralph, a school owner I know, as he crossed his arms over his swelling chest, posed in front of his martial arts training center in Wellington. “I, and I alone am the certified instructor of Lipma in the Tri-cities metro-plex!”
Lipma is the official course of Tartara in middle Europe, a country that has been at war for decades. It is said that every man, woman and child Tartara knows Lipma. It is a super commando, self-defense system. (Ralph did recently bump into and talk with some Tartarians at the airport and neither had ever heard of Lipma. Also some Tarter soldiers told him that Lipma was about as popular as oh, say something like Shotokan karate in Tartera, with no official connection with the Ministry. But Ralph didn’t let that interfere with the larger marketing strategy.)
Ralph had recently traveled to Ohio to Lipma headquarters and spent no less than $10,000 to become certified to teach Lipma and become the Metroplex franchise owner. He bought the required Lipma t-shirts, vitamins, jock straps, running pants, gloves and so forth to sell to his new, eager Lipma metro-plex students. He carefully applied the giant Lipma decal logo on the front window and began advertising in the newspapers and yellow pages.
“LIPMA and my karate classes will help make me rich! They will journey from far and wide to see me!” King Ralph decreed.
So on Tuesday and Thursday nights from 7 pm to 9 pm the Lipma classes started. He got a few calls from afar. Three guys called from Bay City, just 30 miles southwest of the school. They tried to get to the classes but there was a factor not calculated in all of Ralph’s conquest planning-Bay City was a 30 minute drive away at 2 am, but between the 4 pm and 7 pm the Tri-Cities rush hour was bumper-to-bumper, crippling. The three guys gave up when they discovered the trip took two grueling hours! Just getting to Wellington in time at night was impossible. This exclusive thing wasn’t working out because folks just outside Wellington couldn’t get there after work.
Through time, Ralph discovered that hardly anyone could get to Wellington due to traffic. When he counted his shillings at the end of the month, he had the same few adults and only a few new adult students that came right from his immediate neighborhood. $10,000 later, he had signed on six new students. These six do not cover the monthly tithing and yearly franchise fees. He complained to me about his woes.
“Well why don’t you do Lipma seminars on Saturdays or Sundays?” I asked Ralph. “You can avoid rush hour and raise extra funds.”
“I can’t,” he said, “Only Lipma instructors from the Lima headquarters can do seminars.”
“Can you rank test and promote your people to get some operating monies?”
“I can’t.” he said. “Only Lipma instructors from headquarters can promote people. I have to bring them in for an expensive seminar and then they test my people.”
Look,” I said. “I have seen Lipma. There’s absolutely nothing new in Lipma. It’s the same old stuff. In fact, it has some serious mistakes and problems. Quit Lipma!” I suggested.
“ I can’t. I have already spent too much money with Lipma to quit now. And in January the franchise fees come again. They are also pressuring me to have at least 10 students in my Lipma class.”
"Did they show you how to get these ten people?" I asked.
"No, well, they told me to buy a the Tony Robbins Success DVDs," he said.
Instructors and school owners can be land-locked several different ways. One is operationally, by the system’s organizational rules themselves. Before you hook up and invest in the Lipmas of the world, you had better try to calculate all these unforeseen factors.
Also, simple geography has always had a knack of getting in the way of world domination.
<> A small school in a small city only has a limited draw from its population.
<> A big school in a big city also has a limited draw too! Rush hour!
<> Simple and easily overlooked elements like rush hour traffic can turn your big city location into a small town operation and put your dreams in a financial retreat.
<> If you want to draw travelers, are you near a big airport?
Oh yeah…Ralph is still with Lipma. His karate classes, made of students living mostly from three square miles around him, keep it all afloat. Lipma headquarters is none to pleased with Ralph. He can’t seem to get enough students. The Bay City guys eventually bought the Lipma videos and are working out together in their garage. They hope to raise enough funds to become Lipma instructors themselves....so they too, someday, can be like Ralph.
Win-win for Lipma. Loose-loose for Ralph.
Ralph you see, in the end, is a sucker for fads. And there is a sucker born every minute. Not a king. A sucker.
Hock
Author
Topic: Geography (Read 621 times)