How to Build and Improve a Tutoring Practice: A Guide to Mixing Business and Education

In 2017, I made almost 6 figures through my test-prep tutoring work ($90,189, according to my tax return). In 2018, I’m on track for comfortably over 6 figures. More importantly, I choose my own work schedule, I choose what I want to work on, and my well over 100 clients have been, by and large, delighted to work with me and pay me on my own terms.

Let me rewind a bit. I started trying to support myself solely with independent tutoring a couple years ago, at the beginning of 2016. Before that, I had been working as a tutor and test prep instructor with company in Singapore, and before that I worked as a part-time tutor in college. When I started, I had a fair amount of experience teaching (although it turned out I still had a lot to learn), but I had very little experience running a business.

This book explains what I learned through hard work and a lot of trial-and-error. Essentially, it's a shortcut. If you read and follow the lessons of this book, you won't have to go through all the painful learning processes that I did. You can make the right decisions when you're first setting up your tutoring business, and immediately begin reaping the rewards.

Now, I didn’t create this book to portray myself as a guru, or to try to pretend that the whole world should become tutors. My income, although comfortable, is not anything compared to a doctor’s (as my mom, who is a doctor, likes to remind me). Also, this is far from a get-rich-quick scheme: tutoring is still a job, with cliental expectations and its own forms of drudgery. Lastly, before I was a tutor, I was still academically smart, reasonably social, and a natural teacher. Those were big advantages for me out of the gate, and they won’t necessarily be true for everyone.

However, if you are someone like I was, interested in tutoring but having trouble making the leap to a business owner (which is really what you’re trying to become), this book is for you. This book presents tutoring as a business, and tells you how to structure that business to achieve success. So, that means you’ll learn how to:

1. Design a tutoring website that makes people want to hire you
2. Get potential tutoring clients to look at your website in the first place
3. Convert a tentative email from a potential student into a check
4. Structure your interactions with a student to make them happy to work with you and pay you for a long time
5. Handle paying taxes, getting a website and professional email address, finding a place to work, and all the other annoying practicalities of working on your own.

Essentially, it’s a collection of what I’ve learned to give me the success that I’ve had. It’s what I wish I knew before I started on my journey, and the knowledge that I won through hard work and a lot of failure. I hope you find it worthwhile. Sincerely, Trevor Klee