Hey mate,

Saw your post in Japanlife and wanted to message to try and get some more info.

Backstory for myself. Moved to Japan with my Japanese wife last January to open a school. She has 7 years in the industry and I had none previously. We live in a city with around 60,000 people and two big chain Eikawa (both of which don’t have a native English speaker at all).

We started later than expected and opened in July. We created our own flyers and had them printed on nicer glossy paper from a site that delivered them to our house. We ordered 10K and think it cost less than $200. Didn’t manage to hand them all out going door to door, believe we managed around 6K and the rest were inserted into local newspapers for around $100.

Results weren’t great. We created a free website with Jimdo and updated it biweekly with blogs in Japanese and English. After 6 months we managed to get 13 students, between 4-11 years old. We hosted Halloween and Christmas parties with unique games and decor as well.

As of now we are gearing up for Spring and the new school year that we missed last year, wife says this is the best chance to get new students so we are doing new special based flyers and more inserts, only 6K this time haha.

What’s your situation? Are you an experienced teacher? Do you have a different job and this is a side gig for you? Are you a resident or on a specific visa?

Any ways, best bet in my opinion is printing out color flyers from a company and putting them in peoples mail boxes before the new school year. Feel free to fill me in, really would like to help as it will let me brainstorm ideas :D