Someone tells you what you need. A proper website. Decent photographs. Somebody who understands search. You agree with all of it.
Then you look at the number and that’s the end of the conversation.
I’ve had this exact exchange more times than I can count. The question is always some version of how do I afford it, and for me that’s the wrong one. The sticking point is almost never the money. It’s the frame.
When to use this
- When you’ve agreed you need something and stopped because of the cost
- Before taking on debt for anything to do with your teaching
- If “I can’t afford it” has been the answer for more than a year
- When you’re weighing a spend against a term’s takings
Resources and resourcefulness
Most people, faced with a good idea and no money, stop. I’ve got the idea. I haven’t got the resources. Resources meaning money, time, equipment, help.
The ones who get somewhere aren’t handed more resources. In my experience the single difference is that they get resourceful instead. They find a way to fund it, borrow it, share it, or earn it — and they don’t treat the absence of money as the end of the sentence.
That sounds like a slogan until you do the arithmetic. So let’s do the arithmetic.
One Saturday afternoon
Say the website is £500. You’ve agreed you need it. You haven’t got £500.
Could you run a workshop? Three hours on a Saturday, ten people, £50 each.
Most teachers, asked that, say yes without hesitating. It’s a normal thing you already know how to do.
That workshop is £500. The website is paid for.
Now the website is working. People find you who couldn’t before. So the next workshop has fifteen in it.
Fifteen at £50 is £750. That could go into being found properly in search — the thing you were told about and parked.
More people find you. The next workshop has twenty.
Twenty at £50 is £1,000. Which is a serious budget for reaching people who’ve never heard of you.
Look at what’s happened. You now have a website, a findable one, and a growing list of people who come to your workshops.
And not a penny of your own money has gone into any of it. It cost you three hours on a Saturday afternoon.
Why this is different from just spending
Two things, and both matter.
Each round pays for the next. You’re not buying a website. You’re buying the thing that fills the next workshop, which buys the thing after that. Every step is funded by the step before it.
There’s no debt and almost no risk. If the first workshop only gets six people, you’ve made £300 and you buy a smaller thing, or you wait. Nothing has gone wrong. Compare that to £500 on a card in January.
Where it stops working
Worth being straight about the limits.
It needs something you can genuinely sell in an afternoon — a workshop, a short course, a series of privates. If you haven’t run one before, that’s the first thing to build, not the website.
And it needs the spend to actually return something. A website that brings people in works. A logo doesn’t. Be honest about which is which, and start with whatever puts people in the room.
Action steps
- Write down the one thing you’ve been putting off because of cost, and its price.
- Work out what you’d need to run once to cover it. People × fee. Do the sum on paper.
- Put a date on that one thing.
- When it’s paid for, decide what the next round buys before you spend the money.
Related resources
- What an hour of your teaching actually costs
- Who is this actually for?
You may look at that and decide you’d rather not run the workshop, and leave the website where it is for another year. That’s a real answer. Plenty of good teachers have made it. Just make it because you’d rather not, and not because you thought there was no route.