Korean Job Discussion Forums

[meangradin]

Out of curiousity, how many of you are owners of schools?

I suspect that most owners don't have the time to read or resond to threds on Daves.

[moosehead]

oh they're here all right.

and some of them have plenty of time on their hands - too much in fact.

there was one on here a while back who got blasted by the members; something about writing classes - don't recall except he was a jerk.

sooner or later they post and then the cats out of the bag - they crawl back into their holes and just hover - who knows -

[wylies99]

[Juregen]

[T-J]

I think if you want a true sense of how many owners are on the board you should make a poll. M2C.

[Juregen]

[moosehead]

[wylies99]

Many hagwon owners pretend to be teachers or never divulge that they are hagwon owners and FLAME teachers who post about having problems with their schools. Also, they try to muddy the legal advice given to teachers battling their hagwons.

[meangradin]

for the record, my wife and i just bought a hagwon last week. my motivation for posting this question was based on other topics like having a career in ESL/living in Korea for over 10 years and such. None of these topics mentioned owning your own school, and I assume that many long termers have an F visa and can own a school.

For us, it just seemed like the right time and thing to do, as I spent far too much time in my Hyundai, and not in the classroom. Also, my son is now 2, and I want to spend more time with him.

[future]

I have been an owner for 6 years now and we have a daughter and we see her about 8 hours a week and the rest of the time she lives with her grandmother.



I hope for your sake your wife doesn't constantly want the school to be bigger and bigger.

we started with ten students. now we have 170 and forget about free time seven days a week

[jbpatlanta]

[meangradin]

For the last few years I have been leaving at 7am (somedays even earlier) and never coming home before 9pm (somedays even later). Of course, I never saw my son.

My wife and I are hoping to run a school that provides a comfortable income for us, and around 100 students would be perfect. We are willing to sacrifice our previous combined income for a better lifestyle. But we will have to wait and see.

[Cheonmunka]

I am very interested to know in what areas you guys decided to base yourselves. You see, close to my home is not really a moneyed area at all. There are also several little study rooms and schools everywhere in about a 10 mile radius. Seems to be every 200 meter stretch of road has one of some sort. Saying that, did people who decided to set up a school enter in a location where there were already places of English learning - and succeed regardless, or was there a purposeful situation where there were few schools to begin with - and succeed that way.
Also with location, all the good spots seem to have already gone ... the big names have all the main road corners.

[meangradin]

cheonmunka, we bought a block from our house, as we wanted a school close to where we live. I spent the last year working at kindies in our area so that I could build up my reputation and have my name known in this area with the hope being that it will translate in to students for our school.

As for the competition, well, there is always going to be an incredible amount of competition in this industry (heck, in any industry in KOrea). However, in our area, of the 20 or so schools, only a few have a FT and we are the only school owned by a FT.

[T-J]