White Paper: How To Teach & Grow Rich!
By
Dr. Gary S. Goodman ©2016

There is one way you can help the cruelly underpaid teacher you see in the mirror every morning.

 

 

In every occupation there are those that are very well paid. Typically, they represent a small percentage of earners. And then there are the other folks, the ones that settle for far less.

 

Why do they settle?

 

They believe the money-myths propagated by the establishment.

 

 

How many times have you heard this challenge?

 

 

You and I are book-smart. I hold five earned degrees (BA, MA, Ph.D., JD, MBA) from good, accredited institutions, so I’m sure you would agree I qualify as book-smart.

 

But there is also money-smart. This is a different sort of intelligence. Nothing says the two are mutually exclusive. Just as students can learn how to learn, how to study, and how to pass exams, money-smarts can also be learned.

And I can teach you to become money-smart and a highly paid teaching and learning professional.

 

Whatever you do, please don’t succumb to that myth that by choosing to teach you have taken an irreversible oath of poverty.

 

You have not. You add wealth to the world by raising the capabilities of others. There is every reason your wealth should rise, as well.

 

 

 

First, ask yourself these questions:

 

 

Go ahead-dream a little.

 

Better yet, let’s start this way. Take out a pen and paper. Itemize your current budget. What do you pay for rent or mortgage, groceries, your car, if you have one, clothing, and especially student loans?

 

I say “especially” student loans because that expense is a stark reminder of the price of becoming a formally educated person. I hope you feel at least a little negativity about having to pay out so much for your education while you’re being underpaid to educate others.

 

That concern should give you extra motivation to generate enough income to pay off those loans!

 

You need to know exactly where your money is going. Are you dropping five or ten bucks a day on lattes at Starbucks? Put that down, too.

 

How much is your salary or current level of earnings? Compare your income to the outflow. Are you bringing in more than you’re paying out? If you are, by how much?

 

Are you saving anything?

 

A minimum goal is to pay for everything and to save 10%.

 

Are you upside down? Is your income less than what you’re paying out?

 

How are you doing it? Are you borrowing from friends or from family? Are you dependent on the income of someone else, like a roommate or spouse?

 

If you’re using credit cards you’re probably paying 30% interest. Just making minimum payments could keep you in debt for 25 years!

 

Now, you have a snapshot of your financial situation. This is current reality.

 

 

 

Tripling it will enable you to upgrade your housing, your car, your vacations, and your investments. You’ll actually get ahead of the game.

 

 

Let’s say you teach and you earn $40,000 per year.

 

If you itemize all of your “out of pocket time,” and by this I mean the time you prepare your lessons, commute to class, actually teach students, attend administrative meetings, and grade papers and tests, you probably invest 12 hours per day, five days a week. (I’m allowing for the luxury of weekends off.)

 

And say you are that rare teacher that has a nine-month schedule. We’ll estimate you work 40 weeks a year. Working a grand total of 2,400 hours, you are earning only $16.66 per hour, before taxes.

 

That’s barely better than minimum wage!

 

There are some places in the country you can scrape by on that modest income, but not many. And who wants to just scrape by?

 

 

 

You’ve heard the expression “It was like selling coals to Newcastle,” haven’t you?

 

This means we shouldn’t bother trying to convince people that already have an abundance of something to buy more of that substance from us.

 

Or, as industrial psychologist Frederick Herzberg put it, “A satisfied need is not a motivator.”

 

What we need to do is to take our “coal” or our teaching services to people that are under-supplied, to the ones that are under-served.

 

Teachers are a dime a dozen in the minds of most school administrators. And there are few differences among them.

 

So, if one teacher is difficult to work with, replace the person with another.

 

This over-supply of teachers and demeaning attitude keeps wages low.

 

 

Notice, I said, “learning” market. This slight change of emphasis means a lot.

 

 

This is a key question my sage professor, Peter F. Drucker, was fond of asking his clients.

 

The answer isn’t always obvious.

 

Pharmaceutical companies aren’t in the “pill business.” They are in the disease prevention and health recovery businesses.

 

For instance, you might say you are in the “teaching” business. That’s what you do. That’s not what the people you serve get.

 

They learn and increase their ability to function in society.

 

 

 

 

I tell a crucial story in my audio program about how I teach customer service skills to companies. At first, I took my communication training and degrees in that area and developed a seminar that was quite popular.

 

My seminars helped me to improve my income by more than ten times in a period of 18 months. (I’ll help you to develop winning seminars, too.)

 

But there was a limit on what I could charge by the hour or by the day, even if a speech or a seminar ultimately brought me a $10,000 paycheck.

 

As long as I defined myself as a “trainer” “consultant” or as a “speaker” or as a “seminar provider” there was a fairly easy way to compare my billing rates with others.

 

I could simply be undercut and others would get the business, leaving me out in the cold.

 

But I did some original research into the customer satisfaction process at a mutual fund client’s site. It was groundbreaking.

 

 

I noticed if customer service reps followed a four-step path that I invented conversations would become 20% shorter on average. At the same time, the call quality improved, dramatically.

 

Shorter calls meant cheaper calls. In a unit of 100 call center reps I could save companies about $2.5 million per year, through greater efficiency.

 

 

 

I made a small fortune, and I was still teaching.

 

In this case I was teaching something completely original that could not be obtained elsewhere.

I provide other examples of how teachers can earn far more than they’re currently worth in my audio program.

Listen to it today. Then sign up for the limited number of personal mentoring sessions that I’ll be scheduling.

 

You owe it to yourself, to your future and to those you love to make the most of your teaching capabilities.