We measure the level of sales not only by numbers on bank accounts, but also by stories of changes in the lives of our students, which have happened thanks to us.

When a business is created within the office, it has a completely different aura than our business, which is created in a family with 5 children. This difference is noted by all our students and staff.
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This article will deal only with numbers, but please keep in mind that everything is based on family and the maximum time is spent on training and raising children. Her husband also works at IBM. And business is allocated only the time that remains.

Figures for 6 years

• turnover of 350,000 euros per year;
• 2,000,000 visitors to the site per year;
• 11,000,000 video views on the YouTube channel;
• 200,000 followers;
• > 1,000,000 installations of our mobile apps;
• about 5,000 students;
• We had 4 children.

Start

First article

For several months we have been working on product development, without investing anything at all. The first money we invested in the purchase of the domain eustudy.ru - 99 rubles. To create the first site design - $ 5 (five dollars). These were the only investments in the first 6 months.

The first student appeared after 8 months.
We reached the turnover of 3,000 euros per month 1.5 years later.
The site has always worked on self-sufficiency without attracting investment from outside.
Our investors are our students.

All the work at the initial stage was done by my husband and I at night when the children were sleeping. I then jokingly called this time the “second shift”.

If they could not do something on their own, they would look for the cheapest freelancing contractors. This in itself is still an adventure, so I will touch on this topic in more detail in one of the following articles.

The fact is that when you need to make money on the development of a project, the question of the budget plays an important role. And here it’s not a desire to save money or not to pay extra, but to find a performer who will not cheat 400% of his profit for his work just because he lives in Moscow or because he will take three times his job. more time because he can not do it quickly (not enough experience).

When you yourself raise a business from scratch, in most types of work and hours spent on them you are well guided, as you did them yourself. Therefore, already at the stage of discussing the budget it was clear who you were dealing with.

I do not know who has it, but we were scared to give someone a part of the work and pay money that we had difficulty getting, not to ourselves, but to someone else. Plus, we have repeatedly faced deception and theft from teachers and freelancers.

For the first 3 years, we immediately reinvested all the money we earned into the business, without taking anything out. Fortunately, my husband worked at IBM and there was money for his family.

From our personal money, we paid for business training in the Richdad company of Robert Kiyosaki. The training was about $ 7,000, when the site brought only 500-600 euros per month and it was completely incomprehensible how to develop further.

The money invested in the training paid off in 2 months, to our unspeakable surprise. We simply selflessly performed all the tasks that were in that difficult training course.

From that moment on, we realized that it was impossible to save on our training, and now always, when we reach a certain point of development and we do not have enough knowledge and experience, we turn to professionals for help. For paid help.

We were able to talk about a stable cash flow and profits only after 2 years of hard work.

And the matter is not so much in our inability to conduct business as in the development of a fundamentally new product that was completely absent from the market. Plus a change of consciousness of potential customers. It takes time.

But not money.

Costs

Here I will only indicate our main expenses.

Employee salaries

They take about 60% of the turnover.

We simply cannot remove the human factor in our work. We work with people and initially created the project “with a human face”. The basis of the communication with each client personally. For this purpose, the site has language support, technical support, a student relations manager, teachers (Russians and native speakers).

Plus, absolutely all the materials that are on the site are our own developments. We have been constantly paying for methodical work for the past 5 years.

To the last article in the comments there was a question how, with a turnover of about 30,000 euros per month, you can contain 40 employees.

First, not all 40 people work at the same time.

Secondly, by developing systems (and this is exactly what we are doing), you do not depend on the person and his requests.
Having developed a system once, our hands were untied. We have ceased to be dependent on the degree of professionalism of a teacher, on his requests and his place of residence.

For example, we basically do not work with Moscow and Kiev. Previously, St. Petersburg was on this list, but now we have several adequate people from this city. Adequate - this means that they deduct the cost of their services not from the cost of living in their city, but on the basis of their skills and work performed. The position of teachers who work with novice students is suitable for a person from a provincial town, if he understands what he is doing.
For example, we gave preference and give it to people from small towns.

We tried and we try not to take the Russian-speaking teachers who live in the European Union, because the cost of an hour of their work is not determined by their skills, but by the level of living expenses in their country. For example, food, transportation and renting an apartment, which we pay in the form of wages, are very different in London, Moscow and Mariupol.

The salary level is influenced exclusively by the employee’s living environment.

A person who moves from Mariupol to Moscow will not acquire new skills, but his salary request will increase once every four months.

From my experience 100% I can say that the key to successful teaching and learning is the ability to feel the student and the desire to help him. Most often it occurs in people who are not fixated on themselves and their regalia. Here you need not to advertise and promote yourself, but to help a person.

Therefore, people from small towns are more suitable for us. It is inconvenient for us to work with the capital not only for financial, but also for moral reasons.

Another moment. If we were to hire a mega-manager from Yandex or another corporation, then we would have to attract outside investors only for his salary :) And then, of course, we could write in the press about the fact that our project attracted huge multi-million investments. I will tell about other subtleties of work with personnel in a separate part.

Thirdly, the audience of readers in Habré is IT people, your work has never been low-paid, so you should not start from the figure of 1500-2500 euros per month. In teaching fees are several times less.

By the way, regarding the cost of work and the quality of work of many IT people, my husband will write separately in the section on freelancing and staff. The experience is still the same. Pricing and "professionalism" just terrified.

Bank interest

Here, of course, a nightmare. About 10% of the total turnover goes to banks. For conversions, payment by cards, interest on transfers abroad, payment of salaries, etc. Moreover, banks bite off a little and imperceptibly. But on every transaction. On cheap products, banks take 4 euros out of 7, that is almost 60% of the cost.

Development Investment

The remaining 30% we reinvest in the business and leave in the form of profit. Moreover, investment is always a priority. In the profit goes only what did not have time to master.

For example, the development of a course of seven lessons on any language initially cost around 800-1000 euros. And this material was laid out in free access so that anyone could work with it.

Now, if you count all the materials on the language in the free access (section of grammar, exercises, video tutorials, course of songs, sound processing, layout of materials on the site, mobile applications) - at least another 6000-8000 euros.

That is, the creation of free materials for 1 language costs about 9000 Euro one-time costs. Then, plus support and constant updates of several hundred euros per year.

We consider all our free materials as our business card. Our users and students, who have seen the effectiveness of classes with us, are selling us, and recommend us further.

Of course, it was possible to invest the same money in advertising campaigns (if you add up all the costs for all languages, you get a very impressive amount), but, first of all, we wanted to create something really useful for people, make a quality product and make it accessible to everyone. Secondly, in our practice, the budget just stupidly merges into advertising, without any guarantees and measurable returns. That is, if you invest in materials, it benefits people and remains with us in the long term. If in advertising, then this money is nowhere and it does not bring any benefit to the final consumer.

Paid courses are developed separately, in which our students attend courses on Skype. They entail additional costs.

From what remains after wages, banks and investments in development, all taxes, lawyers, accountants and all the material resources are paid.

Marketing and advertising

Over all these years, we have invested about 30.000 euros in these areas (of which marketing specialists earn around 12.000 euros). All these activities should have brought us students to our paid courses. This is money that has not increased in any way our conversion and the number of students.

Recoil was a little more than zero. We tried different methods, but the result was almost always zero. Paid links, paid articles, contextual advertising, advertising in social networks, site redesigns, blog alterations, webinars - all this did not work in our case.

But due to the fact that it works for us, this is “word-of-mouth”, new products, email distribution that I lead, my articles and videos, free materials on the site and after-sales service for existing students (basically, they come to us for a second tongue).

20-25% of new students are friends and acquaintances of those who have already studied with us. We did not expect such an indicator and it makes us very happy. Purely human. Moreover, this percentage has been stable for the past two years.

For the last six months, we have not spent a single euro on advertising and marketing, and the growth in the number of students is stable. That is, the trend continues.

However, we understand that we need to develop marketing and advertising for sales growth. But so far we have no ideas on how this can be done and there is no person who could organize it for us. That's why we decided to stop the waste of money until the moment when we have a competent marketer. So far we have not found this, although we are looking for a long time. If anyone is in mind - whistle;)

Lawyers and Accountants

In the Czech Republic, they cost us about 4,000–6,000 euros per year, depending on which issues are being resolved.

Registration of trademarks and protection of their intellectual property cost us about 6,000 euros.

Taxes

Income tax in the Czech Republic is 20% of net profit. Not from turnover. We must pay tribute to the financial institutions of the Czech Republic: here all the taxes and all communication with government agencies is built so simply and clearly that we have no problem with this on our own. Practically all questions are resolved by calls and in electronic form. Well, our accountants help us with this.

Profit

The average annual profit of our company is about 10% of turnover. We practically everything that we earn, we immediately reinvest back into the business. This is pure bootstrapping. If you stop the development and just take out the money, you can achieve profits of 10-20% of the turnover. If you go into the “milking” mode, then 30%, I think, is not the limit. But it will kill the business in the long run. I understand that for the Russian economy the interest is ridiculous, but we, as a European company, need to work in accordance with the laws, therefore, we consider the profitability of 10% to be normal.

But there is one more thing that is very convenient for us, as for a family. All expenses for car and travel are paid from company money and reduce the net profit, respectively taxes. Often trips to the restaurant are also carried out as branded expenses. Computer equipment, internet too. We do not spend their personal savings, which can be regarded as an additional family income.

In the next article I will tell you how in 2014 we experienced our first big financial crisis.