#27 – 80/20 Principle

Attract More Families

Discover how to get more done by focusing on what gets you the best results. Private School Marketing Made Easy!

Length: 6m 56s

Well, hello. This is Devin Murray with Attract More Families, your source for private and independent school marketing ideas and help.

Today I want to talk to you about a principle that guides so much of what I do and enables me to get the results that I get, for both myself, and for my clients. This is Pareto principle, otherwise known as the 80/20 principle. Essentially what this law states, or this principle states, is that 80% of your efforts produce 20% of your results. The flip side of that is that 20% of your efforts then produce 80% of your results.

If you look at this, this is one of those principles that just really applies all across the board. If you’re looking at the work that you do as a school leader, 20% of your results come from 80% of what you do all day long. You work all day long and that work is the busy work, it doesn’t produce a whole lot of results.

The other side is, there’s that little bit that you do every day that’s really important. It’s 20% of your day that does 80% of the good for your school.

This also applies to parents. 20% of your phone calls come from 80% of your parents. Whereas 80% of your phone calls, come from that small 20%. Same way with complaints, right? 80% of your complaints come from 20% of your parents. And so on and so on.

This is a great principle, but how does this apply to your life? It’s about figuring out, what is that 20% that you’re doing that produces that 80% of the results.

If you’re a school leader and you’re sitting there, and you’re busy all day long doing that 80% that only produces 20% of results, look at how much you are worth. Look at how much loss you’re getting there. Think if you were … focus on that 20% that you do that gets 80% of the results, and outsource some of that other stuff. Hand it off to other people who might even be better at it.

That’s where the 80/20 principle really comes into play, is looking at what’s working. What is that 20% that you do that creates all the results, and then focusing on it and growing and doing more of that.

Now let’s talk about this in a marketing standpoint. Not just productivity, but marketing. As a marketer, the same law applies. 20% of our results, 20% of our enrollment effort, is coming from 80% of what we’re doing. 80% of our enrollments are coming from a small 20% of our efforts.

The point is to figure out what is that small 20% that’s giving us all of these results and let’s start doing more of it. The way we figure that out is by tracking, by looking at the numbers and figuring out, “What are the numbers? What is actually getting us enrollments?” Because that’s what really matters.

Not just getting us phone calls. Not just getting us inquiries. Not just getting us people that are showing up at open houses. What are the things that are actually leading to enrollments? Let’s find out what that is and do more of it because it’s getting us all of the results anyway. That 20% that we’re doing in marketing is getting us 80% of our results. We can look at the rest of it then and go, “Even if we shed that other 80% of stuff that we’re doing, we’re only going to lose at most 20% of our results.”

So if we’re enrolling 10 kids, about 20%’s getting us eight of those kids. That other 80% of our efforts are only getting us, two kids. Think about that for a second. If we dropped that we’d still add eight kids, and I would have 80% more time to work and focus on other stuff.

It’s about figuring out what is it in our marketing that is getting us those results, and maximizing those results moving forward.

That’s really the 80/20 principle. I’m going to take it one step further, as I love to do it, which is the 80/20 of 80/20, which is the 95/5%. If you take the 20% and actually do it 80/20 on that top 20%, you end up with a 95/5 concept. We find that this applies very equally, too.

Which is that 5% of your results come from 95% of your efforts, and 95% of your results come from 5% of what you’re doing. If we look back at parents who call you, you have that 5% of parents who are doing 95% of your parent communication that you’re having with. They’re the ones that are calling every day, if not twice a day. Weekly. And they’re taking up a lot of your time. It’s only that 5%.

If you have 100 students or 100 families in your school, that’s five parents that are doing 95% of your parent communication time, asking those questions, complaining about things.

Just take your 80/20 and take it a step further when you can, and go, “What are the marketing results that are getting me 95% of my results?” It’s probably going to be a 5%. 5% of what you’re doing, and you can focus on those.

It might be that all of your things are coming from social media, or Google AdWords, or whatever. Focus on those. You don’t need to be doing Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest. You don’t need to be doing all of those if they’re not getting you the results.

Go ahead and feel free to drop them. Focus and do a really great job on that 20% that’s really getting you all of the results.

This has been Devin Murray with just another quick productivity and marketing tip with attractmorefamilies.com, your source for independent school marketing ideas and help. Feel free to give me a call if you’d like to know some more. Please check out the blog, which I post information like this. I try to once or twice a week, try to get some great information out there for you all to be able to use.

Take care.

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