How To Maximize The Resource and Revenue Potential That Your School Wastes Every Day.
Whether you own your school, lease a space, or are an instructor in need of a place to instruct, you will find solutions in this report to problems that you didn’t even know you had.
It all started when I was visiting my friend, the computer nerd.
His residence consisted of a garage apartment behind his parents’ home which he had converted into his own, private cave by blocking out all sunlight and outside noise. With six, self-built computers named after figures from Greek mythology stacked one on top of the other powering his quest, he spent every waking moment living deep within a cyber-world of which most of us “casual” web surfers only tread the surface.
If computers were kung fu, he’d be a Shaolin Monk.
I ventured into his “Byte-Cave” in hopes of learning the secrets of conquering difficult programs, designing websites, and building computer systems. Little did I know that my exposure to his PC-structured world would lead to a business breakthrough of my own. A breakthrough that martial arts instructors, school owners, and businesses of all types should pay attention to. It is a breakthrough that I will share with you.
A Long Time Ago in a Cyber-Galaxy Far, Far Away…
During the course of my visits with the computer guru, I noticed that he had one particular program always running while he switched between others (he usually had about 10 things going at once). It was called “S.E.T.I. at Home”.
Because of all the sci-fi movies, I already knew that S.E.T.I. stood for “Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence”. So it made me curious as to whether or not he had a satellite on his roof examining the skies for aliens.
At first, he laughed at this question. Then he went into an explanation that changed the way I looked at space and time.
It seems that, in a way, he was actually working for S.E.T.I. at his home. He had volunteered his computer’s “wasted processing time” to help search for life on other planets.
What is “wasted processing time”? I asked him that very same question. Here’s his explanation.
Every second a computer is on, it has the ability to process information. Most of the time, however, the computer’s processor is idle and thus, the potential processing time goes by… wasted.
According to my nerd friend, even active users only utilize about 1% of their computer’s total processing time; the rest goes unused. S.E.T.I. at Home and programs like it, take advantage of all this wasted time. Here’s how it works and what that can mean for your school…
Divide and Conquer.
S.E.T.I. uses their antenna arrays and giant satellite dishes to scan the skies, listening for “unnatural noise”. However, this gives them tons of information to be disseminated, processed, and analyzed–too much information for even the largest, fastest, super-computer on Earth. So they break up the unprocessed information into blocks and send them through the internet to volunteers like my friend.
The volunteers’ computers automatically download these blocks and start processing the information for S.E.T.I.. When the processing is complete, the computers send the results back to S.E.T.I. Headquarters and download another block.
All of this is done automatically and in the “background” of the volunteers’ computers. That means that it only processes S.E.T.I. information during the seconds (or milli-seconds) the volunteer’s system is not processing something else, so it never interferes with or slows down the user’s other computer tasks (games, movies, and internet surfing, in this case).
The result is that more of the volunteers’ computer processing time gets used without affecting their speed or performance. Meanwhile, S.E.T.I. gets the combined power of thousands of computer processors for free.
This same process was used to help crack the human genome in record time (a feat that seemed impossible just 20 years ago). In fact, my nerd friend showed me the recognition certificates he received for all the processing time his computers contributed to the Human Genome Project.
He literally became a part of history while gaming, web surfing, and even sleeping.
It’s a lesson that the rest of us can learn from; a lesson that you and your school can profit from.
Are You Wasting Your School’s Time?
This idea of utilizing “wasted processing time” fascinated me. It made me think of other areas in life and business where “wasted time” goes by unnoticed on a daily basis.
It made me realize how much wasted time there is in most martial arts schools. And therein lies the breakthrough.
Try to visit any martial arts school in any town during the day. I do this every time I’m in a new town and you know what I’ve found? You guessed it. They are almost always closed except between 5 p.m. and 9 p.m. weekdays!
Four hours a day? Four measly hours 5 days a week? So, they’re only open for 20 hours or 1/7th of a week? Do you think their landlord only charges them 1/7th of the rent? Does yours?
If this sounds like your school, that means you’re only using 12%, of the amount of time that you’re paying for week after week, month after month, year after year! In other words, if you’re paying $3,000 a month in rent for your school, then you are essentially throwing away $2,640 every month!
As a school owner (or any business owner, for that matter), you need to always keep the following sentence in mind:
Every Minute Of Every Day, Your School Is Either Making You Money Or Costing You Money! The Choice is Yours.
Now that I have your attention, you’re probably wondering, “So, what can I do about it?”. Well, just knowing there’s a problem is your first step. In a future post, I’ll give you some easy ideas on how to painlessly fill those spaces in your school’s “wasted time”.
Until then, I leave you to contemplate on this dilemma, because the best ideas on how to utilize your school to its full potential will probably come from you. After all, you know more about your school and your particular situation than I do.
Good Luck!
(To Be Continued)
©Copyright 2004 -Larry D. Escher
