WOW. What a week! I just returned from a great experience in Ft. Worth, Texas – the AAHPERD (American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance) national convention.

I had lots of fun learning more about this domain in education, and wanted to share special insight I received from Ryan Lee in his session “How to earn extra income doing what you love to do.” His advice was wonderful and the real benefit of his talk was his amazing enthusiasm, personal experience, and  concrete list of advice and ideas.

The basic things I took away from Ryan’s suggestions for budding entrepreneurs (applicable to PE or any other area) were these:

1. Align your business with your passion. Decide what it is you LOVE doing, then develop your business idea around that. Life is just too short to work outside your passion zone!
2. Commit to quality. If you provide excellent content to your audience, you can succeed.
3. Identify your customer. Don’t start with your product idea. Rather, decide who your customer is, and what problem you want to solve for them.
4. SUB-identify your customer. Establish a focus, or ‘niche.’ If you want to provide a training to older adults, decide to focus on men or women. The more focused your customer target, the more valuable your offering.
5. Specify your customer’s problem. Your offering or product must solve a real problem for your audience. Maybe it’s helping older women become more flexible, or lose weight. Maybe it’s helping math teachers with ideas for teaching fractions. Be specific!
6. Go digital. Create a video of what you do best, that will help your audience. Then add powerpoint slides, some handouts, reports, activities. Sell these separately or as a more expensive ‘system.’ Remember that by ‘going digital’ you make money even when you are not actively working! That’s the difference between a ‘job’ and a ‘business.’
7. Stay connected. This is where a network like WeAreTeachers can help. Blog. Create forums. Create a circle of interest. Get connected online with WAT, LinkedIn. Get all your friends in your network. This viral connection is your best bet for getting your good work promoted and SOLD.

SO THANKS, Ryan Lee, and all the other great PE and Health folks I met this week. Awesome to get connected to this domain area, and keep learning!

Story for this Post:

I met Cathy Hill this week at AAHPERD. Cathy is one of the TOYs (Teachers of the Year) for the National Association for Sport and Physical Education – NASPE. She has also just joined the WeAreTeachers community, and is just full of ideas about how to re-start her career using this network. So watch out, world. Cathy is about to reach out to you online!

In my last entry, I explored the importance of the arts in education – both as a way to develop cognitive skills, and as a real ‘value add’ to our lives and the lives of students in general.

In this post, I wanted to address another ‘non-traditional’ arena in education – Physical Fitness. And since WeAreTeachers is ALL about promoting teachers as entrepreneurs, I’ve taken the liberty of ‘borrowing’ a book title from one of our partners, Mariah Burton Nelson.

Mariah is an amazing author, public speaker, and the Executive Director of the American Association for Physical Activity and Recreation (AAPAR) . Her newest book, * “Making Money on the Sidelines” provides a step-by-step guide for those fitness professionals (including TEACHERS!) who want to continue to promote physical fitness, and at the same time earn extra revenue.

Mariah and I met through a mutual friend – Diana Everett, who is the Executive Director of the Texas Association of Health, PE, Recreation and Dance (TAHPERD) — another great leader in this arena.

And in the spirit of the ever viral world of connections — Mariah has asked us to sponsor the keynote speaker at the upcoming AAPHERD and AAPARD national conference in Fort Worth. The speaker is the amazing Ryan Lee – a wonderful leader in the world of physical fitness and entrepreurism. Ryan is an avid blogger, and author (“The Million Dollar Workout.” ) His keynote address is designed to help Mariah and the AAPAR folks launch this new ‘Sidelines’ program – to help physical fitness professional learn more about how to leverage their important skills to financial, as well as professional, rewards.

What intrigues me about this energy with these outstanding educators is this: In the arenas of both physical fitness and the arts, I’m finding a growing sense of entrepreneur-ship. That is, these teachers have long done private lessons, run fund-raising programs, and offered summer camps. Many teach in our public schools because they love kids and love the work. But more and more of these leading edge professionals are also learning that they do NOT have to sign a vow of poverty to practice their craft. More and more of them are finding innovative ways to create content and sell it, utilize technology to manage their private teaching or training business, and many are also finding ways to utilize the Web 2.0 tools available to super-charge their reach, and their impact.

So hats off to these teaching entrepreneurs. We welcome and embrace you at WeAreTeachers. But most important, we hope these great leaders will inform and instruct us as we go on this journey together.