Five months into my first job, in 2015, I worked on a small team at TechShop Bangladesh, an electronics and component retailer. The company sold paid training courses on microcontrollers and robotics, twenty seats per course, across different subjects. The courses were never meant to stand alone. They were a way to bring students into the main store. Course projects needed real components, and the courses were designed to turn students into regular customers.
That made every seat count. A course that didn’t fill meant lost revenue from the course itself, and it also meant fewer students walking into the store. None of the rest of the model mattered if the seats didn’t fill.
A Plan Nobody Had Questioned
The company’s plan to fill the seats was simple: leafleting and campus visits. Print, distribute, hope. Month after month, the seats stayed hard to fill, and the money kept going to the same two channels anyway.
Physical marketing is easy to see. You can hold a leaflet, and you can watch a campus visit happen. That visibility makes it easy to assume the work is working. No one had actually checked where our registrants were coming from. Everyone assumed physical marketing just worked for students, and no one had tested that assumption.
Finding the Pattern
I went back through more than 100 old registration forms. One question on the form asked how the student heard about the course. It was an attribution question, already collected for every registrant, and nobody had used that data. It just sat there.
When I pulled the answers together, the pattern was clear. Over 64% of those registrants found us through our Facebook page. Most of the rest came from friends or senior students. It was word of mouth, not leaflets.
The leafleting and campus activation weren’t just weak. They barely mattered to how people actually found us.
Raising It, and Hitting a Wall
I put the numbers into a report and showed it to my supervisor. He didn’t agree. He was upset that I was questioning a plan that was already in motion, and he told me to just do my job, not question the strategy.
That put me in a tough spot. I was still on probation, five months into my first real job. The data said one thing and my supervisor said another. Staying quiet would have been the safe choice.
I didn’t stay quiet. I took the report straight to top management, without my supervisor’s approval.
How Top Management Responded
My supervisor was angry enough that he wanted me fired for going around him. But top management looked at the numbers differently. They didn’t see it as disrespect. They saw it as useful information.
They also didn’t just approve a new strategy on my word. They gave me a real test: fill the next twenty seats using Facebook, or any digital method, with a small budget.
Building the Case, Not Just the Argument
I didn’t have much to spend, so every decision had to count. I built a simple character based on our actual target student, and I used that character in story-style social media posts instead of generic course ads. I added videos of real course projects, so students could see what they would actually build. I updated the course details on our website. And I spent $60 on targeted Facebook ads pointing straight to the registration page.
What the Numbers Showed
Within 15 days, the next course was fully booked. That beat what leafleting had struggled to do over months, and it cost a fraction of the price.
The courses existed to drive store traffic in the first place. Every new registration also meant a related sale, which is exactly what the training business was designed to do, just finally working the way it was supposed to.
The Broader Lesson
It’s easier to defend a plan that’s already running than to check if it’s actually working.
The strategy hadn’t failed because it was a bad idea. It had failed because it was never tested against where customers actually came from. The answer was already in the company’s own forms. No one had looked.
Digital Marketing & Growth Strategist
