Sylvan Learning Chief Marketing Officer Amy Przywara on How Sylvan Supported Franchisees Through 2020

Sylvan Learning, the supplemental and enrichment education franchise with 750 points of presence across North America and 40+ years of experience, held an online summit where its chief marketing officer, Amy Przywara, spoke to 1851 Publisher Nick Powills to shed some light on the company’s marketing strategy through challenging times.

Przywara, who has been with the company for 18 years, oversees a department of 13 people who strive to make marketing easy and successful for all of Sylvan Learning’s franchisees. At the summit, where the brand invited its franchisees to tell their stories and hear from leadership, she told 1851 that no matter what someone’s background, Sylvan can make marketing work for them.

“Our goal is to help our franchisees to be successful in marketing,” she said of the marketing team. “We get that when people enter, they may be coming from 20 years in corporate America and may or may not have had any marketing experience. Our sole focus is to try to make marketing easy for our franchisees.”

Przywara and her team accomplish this by creating websites for franchisees and making sure they stay on top of local search results. From there, the task is normally to get franchisees rubbing elbows with local media.

Marketing support efforts

“Education is local. We’re seeing that this year especially,” she said of the need to get franchisees press in their local market. “We create all the creative assets. It’s hard lifting for them but easy for us, and it really gives them time to be out there building relationships with their communities.”

With 2020 gripped by a pandemic, Przywara and her team had to get creative. For Sylvan, this meant switching to online classes as quickly and efficiently as possible. Przywara set about learning the exact needs her franchisees’ customers faced and how to communicate the switch to online.

“We had to change our business to offer online services in addition to our traditional services, and then we had to get the word out,” she said. “A lot of that was digital, but we are really good stewards of our franchisees’ money. So we had to make sure we were spending it when it makes sense to spend it. We had very much a ‘test and learn’ period of seeing what the return would be. It was very overwhelming for parents at the beginning. People weren’t really looking for supplemental options immediately on March 13th, when it began.”

But through it all, Przywara kept the focus on the end user and the franchisee. A “large percentage” of customers quickly took on online classes, keeping the centers in business.

Pandemic opportunities

What may have looked like a disaster for Sylvan actually turned into an opportunity. Sylvan franchisees were able to rely on Przywara and her team to focus on solving the marketing puzzle. Those franchisees remained focused on day-to-day operations while Przywara figured out how to make lemonade out of the pandemic.

“Students may have never thought of Sylvan because they had different needs a year ago,” she said. “I think parents are looking at different options now, too. I think people are looking at homeschooling now who never thought they would. You don’t have to go to homeschooling, you can get Sylvan’s support where you need it.”

As parents across the country saw massive gaps open up in their children’s education as classrooms shut down, Przywara saw an opportunity to forge ahead.

Coming into 2021, Przywara sees a pent-up demand for Sylvan’s services, and she’s making the marketing moves now to prepare for it.

“If you think from a consumer standpoint, I’m a mom for school age children for Sylvan, so I’m living like the parents we’re targeting every day,” she said.

Przywara understands that parents are busy and overwhelmed and reluctant to send their kids back to the computer for online lessons with Sylvan after a long day of online classes at school, but she also understands that parents will do anything for their children and that her market is massively expanding.

“A student that might not have ever had a gap in their entire schooling years might have one now,” she said of the ballooning opportunity for Sylvan. “A student might not understand a lesson when a teacher gives it because there were distractions at home, or maybe the computer froze. We absolutely see that more students are going to have needs that Sylvan can absolutely meet. We have K–12. We have the whole gamut of anything a student could need.”

For this reason, Sylvan represents a sound business opportunity for anyone with a passion not just for education, but for helping their community at large. One thing that makes Przywara’s job easy is the overflowing abundance of success stories from Sylvan’s proven learning model.

“If you have a passion for your community and running a business, you’re going to love Sylvan because we help real people every day,” said Przywara. “I have three kids that go to Sylvan and the impact is just unbelievable. We call it Sylvan moments, we have them every day in our centers. That’s when we see students get into college when we never thought they would, and it fuels us every day. The emotional return that comes with Sylvan refuels you honestly on a nightly basis. There’s another student that’s going to call tomorrow or another student will tell us a success story.”