I just had another conversation with someone who finds it impossible to understand what we are selling. How peculiar. Peculiar because our value proposition is incredibly simple.
Traditional language teaching technique work for most hard working students. Those techniques can take someone from zero to conversational Spanish (B2) in 1200 hours. I met a great example of this. An American lady living in Spain who worked hard and passed her course. We had a nice chat, she is undoubtedly capable of conversational Spanish – so the conventional approach clearly does work for some people. Why does the Total Fluency System even exist if conventional learning works?
If she had studied Spanish using our system – the Total Fluency System – she would have reached the same level of ability in around 100 – 200 hours depending on how well she followed our approach (this is not a guess, we know this from client data we track). At the least she would have saved 1,000 hours. And that is what we are selling people – 1,000 hours of their life back. 1,000 hours of hard work saved and the same degree of fluency accomplished and with a greater probability of success. What’s that worth? Well, that depends on you and the value that you or someone else places on your time. The only way this sort of improvement in efficiency could have no value is if a person’s time had no value. Does that sound like it is ever true for anyone?
I have now worked out – finally – how to apply our system fully to the learning of Thai. If I could have worked that out earlier, I would have saved myself more than £2,000 and 500 hours of misery and frustration and been really good at Thai 2 years ago. You see learning a language is fun for the people who succeed at it and just a horrible experience for the people who do not achieve the level of success they desire in the time they have available to try. What would I have paid to be guaranteed to skip all that horror and TIME? I’d be comfortable with £5,000 looking back (I am being a “cheap Charlie” as the Thais call it – because that only puts my time at £10 / hour). Fortunately, it costs a lot less than that to become a client and blast through a language and succeed and know every day that you are on the winning track instead of what happened to me, which was not quite being on the winning track and suspecting that and fearing the worst and feeling frustrated. And in all that time, I was still making much faster progress than is the case using traditional techniques.
So what are we selling? Time. Happiness. Well-founded Confidence. Success.