Offering a child-oriented service

Working with kids
Developing a business that caters to children is first and foremost checking the year’s calendar. It’s very dependent on the school calendar. That’s how it should be approached, but that’s not what I did at first. I learned over time. It’s somewhat of an unusual business because you can’t “retain” children. Kids, from one day to the next, want to move on to something else, from one moment to the next. It’s a business where you need volume, you need lots of kids for it to work.

Why use a specialized license?
I used the LesMills license because in my eyes it was an established product, high-quality, all-in-one, and ready-to-use. And most importantly, it had already been tested is a number of countries over the 10 previous years. So we had feedback on the product, we knew how to set it up, how to make it work and its advantages for successfully starting a business.

Finding your first customers
I found my first clients via an open-house because lots of people came. I wasn’t expecting so many people. But those customers were transitory because they stopped into the open-house came back in the following month, and then slowly washed away, slowly disappeared. So I needed to find much more sturdy customers and I turned to the corporate sector.

Approaching corporate clients
By corporate, I mean I contacted daycares, youth centers and schools. How did I find them? I used Editus, I picked up phone and called every daycare and school to offer free sessions and get our name out there. That’s how we found our first clients. It’s a compulsory step. If you don’t do it, you don’t feel out the market. A product always needs to be adjusted to its clientele, especially when you’re testing something. Our product was new in Luxembourg. No one had ever tested or used it. So you have to pick up the phone and call around.

The challenge with private customers
Our activity is a service… and it’s hard with private customers to justify the price of a service.