I thought I would right a short update on where things are at with my GFRF experiment while I have the chance.
So… following on from previous posts. I did go ahead and put password protection on my qigong courses from the third week onward in each course. And, as you would possibly expect, this has led to a greater financial return for the courses. I have also started a new business with a friend that operates using normal financial arrangements.
This leaves me rather… … … stretched.
The new business takes up more than a full time effort, as businesses often do when you start them, and I am also continuing with running the qigong courses, which could easily also be a fulltime or more than fulltime effort as well, which I try to squeeze into all the gaps at night and on weekends etc. And of course all the other regular things that need to be attended to in life continue as well.
I have been doing this for the last six months, and well… I have been managing to do it. But… it is constant. As soon as I finish work on one thing there is just more work to do, with very little chance to just take a break once in awhile. Of course this is inherently unbalanced and unsustainable. I can do this for awhile, but I can’t continue like this forever, or even too much longer I think. So at some point I will need to make some changes.
The new business is a financial necessity for me at the moment, but the qigong is more of a passion, and an area where I believe I can make a unique and valuable contribution to the world. While I have managed to keep the courses running over these last six months, I have not been able to put the necessary time into creating new additional courses and upgrading existing course material in the way I would like to. I’m treading water and managing to keep afloat – but not being able to make progress with my qigong teaching.
I have had the opportunity recently to focus a bit more on qigong. I had the opportunity to come and teach qigong at a hotel in Mauritius for a few weeks. It coincided with the holiday period when my new business in New Zealand would be closed for awhile anyway, so I have been able to take this opportunity without leaving my business partner running things by himself for too long. As well as spending some time teaching qigong, I had hoped that this would be a good opportunity for me to move ahead with some of the work on new courses while I am here too. For the first week and a half or so, as well as my commitments at the hotel I did write whenever I had the chance, but then I just ran out of energy… I needed some time just not doing anything much. So… of course I have continued with my teaching here, but I have not progressed my course development nearly as much as I had hoped.
My time in Mauritius is almost over, this is why I have a chance to do some writing now, there simply won’t be enough time when I am back in New Zealand and taking care of all the things I need to do when I am there. And moving forwards I am faced with a choice (not one I need to make immediately). I can either continue doing what I am doing, running the business and teaching the qigong the way that I am – and not make a lot of progress further developing the qigong teaching. And realistically, this would also mean eventually pulling back from putting as much time into the qigong teaching as I do at the moment, because I won’t be able to keep up this level of time and energy commitment for the long term. Or I will need to find a way to free my time up sufficiently so that I can do the development work for the qigong. This will mean that somehow I will need to make the financial side of that work better as well.
It has been interesting that each step of further restricting access to my qigong training has led to better financial returns. First requiring registration to go through the courses increased enrollments and increased the level of donations. Further restricting the courses by putting passwords on the content increased enrollments and donations even more. At this stage it still is not at a level that balances with the amount of work that goes into running the courses, or a level that is viable for me to live on financially. I suspect that further restricting access is likely to further improve the financial returns, and – as I see it, that next level of restriction basically means putting prices on the courses in the normal way.
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Clearly I have been very reluctant to do this for a very long time, but aside from some miraculous development over the next little while, if I want to be able to return to putting more of my focus and time into the qigong teaching, I need to make the finances balance for it.
Somewhat ironically, I don’t think this is a change I can just make immediately. For me to be able to run the courses in this way with standard pricing mechanisms, I will need to do a lot of work restructuring the courses, and I just don’t have time for that right now. Also, having made a commitment to my friend in starting the new business with him, I am not going to back out of that immediately. I need to continue with that business until we achieve what we set out to with it, and then I will be able to exit having fulfilled my commitment. That will be the point that I can refocus more on the qigong and put the time into restructuring and further development.
So… all of this is a bit ahead of any actual change. For now I will continue with the new business and running the courses the way they are currently run, which includes them being GFRF…. but its just not sustainable like this for the long term. So it seems perhaps inevitable that I will need to move to pricing my courses in the future if I am to continue offering them. In a way that could be seen as a completion of the GFRF experiment. Having gone through many iterations of it and tried many different things while using GFRF, to return to using normal pricing and compare that as well. Hmmm…
Well, that’s the update. I figured as there had been some changes using the passwords, I should report on what the result of that was, and also just how things are going overall. Also it had been about six months since my last post, and I don’t know when my next chance to do some writing like this will be, so I should take this chance while I have it.
I guess we will see what comes in the future.