At least once in our lives, many of us have encountered a situation where we had the opportunity to earn money by tutoring. Perhaps, you were in college and needed to earn some money to buy a smartphone. So, you started teaching that one cousin who lived nearby and made a hundred bucks over the next few weeks with minimal effort. Suddenly, you found yourself teaching four of his friends as well. And before you knew it, your maths tutoring had earned you enough even to buy a new powerful laptop.
When you can earn enough with Your Tutoring Hobby, you may ask why not make tutoring a full-time job after college? You finally decide to go for it but don’t know how to begin and scale your new tutoring business. The good news is that we’ve got everything you want to know to make tutoring your full-time profession.
Content Summary
Understand What You’re Getting Into
There is a difference between tutoring as a hobby and as a full-time job. Many people misconstrue what they are getting into and thus end up failing to make it work. While it was easy to make an extra buck on the side when you were doing it as a hobby, you will now have to stabilize your revenue stream and scale your business when you take tutoring as a full-time job. That means putting in more time, effort, and resources into your new career.
So, before you even consider making tutoring your primary source of income, take a step back and ask yourself if it’s something you genuinely like. Is teaching your passion? Do you see yourself teaching 6-8 hours a day for the next 20 to 30 years? If you’re on the fence, you could always ask someone for help. There’s nothing bad in approaching a professional who has been in the field for years. Try to gain as much objective information as possible and use it to start and excel in your new job.
Evaluate the Feasibility
Once you have decided to become a full-time tutor, your next step is to consider your idea’s practicality. It makes sense first to test the waters to see if there’s even a market for your services. What subject(s) would you like to teach and to whom? Are there students in your vicinity, and do they currently have other tutoring options available? For example, if you are the only advanced calculus tutor in a university town, you could expect to be reasonably successful. But if you want to teach high schoolers math in an area where there aren’t too many of them, you can have an uphill climb.
Make a Business Plan
Tutoring full time is a business, so it is a good idea to have a business plan to start and expand your tutoring services. A good business plan starts with goals and objectives. Be sure your objectives are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timebound.
Determine the target income you want to earn with full-time tutoring. And how many hours a day would you like to work? What point would you like to start at, and what is your eventual target? Then you can dive into the specifics on making it work.
How many students can you teach, and how much would you need to charge them to maximize your income without driving them away for being too expensive? Does your business involve overhead costs, such as rent for a classroom or a manager to help manage the finances? Use your answers to these questions to write down your plan but be flexible enough to pivot in case changes need to be made.
Create a Marketing Strategy
Marketing will be one of the most crucial determinants of your success. It all starts with identifying your target audience. Remember that if you want to teach college students, the students themselves will be the target audience for your marketing communication. But if you want to tutor younger students, you’ll have to promote your services to their parents.
Your target audience could change your marketing strategy entirely. It would determine your marketing channels and platforms, marketing collaterals, and the tone of communication. It could be as simple as placing posters on strategically located lampposts. Or you may even need to run an ad or two in the local newspaper.
An online presence is all but necessary in today’s world. It is a good idea to create profiles on all major social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, where you sell yourself. Having a well-built website goes a long way, too.
Your initial marketing strategy will involve a lot of convincing. In 3 short sentences, you should be able to explain the service you provide, why it’s needed, and why you’re the better choice over other tutors. You could also offer early bird deals and discounts to kickstart the process.
Do a Test Run
It would be best if you try your game plan before committing to it completely. For example, you could get a cheap space for rent and keep teaching on the side without quitting your education or day job. Also, debut your tutoring to a smaller audience and see if it works.
Next, find enough students to determine if your teaching translates to a larger group? If not, consider dividing the classes into smaller sections. Is your tutoring fee enough to cover your expenses and still make you a decent profit, or should you readjust? At this point, you can determine whether you want to keep tutoring full-time.
Build Your Brand and Expand Your Business
Once you have created a successful brand and established a steady clientele, you can start earning more money. You could even hire part or full-time tutors and pay them a fixed or commission-based salary as a strategy to scale your business.
Tutoring today isn’t limited to face-to-face, in-person teaching. Virtual learning is a budding field. You could shoot a video series and put it up on sites like Udemy or Skillshare, open yourself up to a much wider audience, and potentially earn more money. Alternatively, you could put out small titbits or select lectures on YouTube and use that platform to turn people to your paid courses online or offline.
