I hope you have enjoyed your summer and had some vacation time. Before you know it school will be back in session and if you tutor students that are going to school, it’s time to get back into gear. Here are some reminders of things you’ll want to make sure to do.
- Decide how much you want to tutor this year. If you tutored last year and nothing changed, then you’ll want to tutor that amount of time. Do you want to expand? Now is the time to think about hiring a tutor to help you. Do you need to cut back for some reason, then you’ll want to adjust.
I decide how many hours I can tutor in a week.
Example: I can tutor from 4-9pm each day except Friday (20 hours). I can also tutor four hours on Saturday (total 24 hours / week).
How many hours each student will need. Most of my students need an hour a week. So I can have 24 tutor students. - You should have some notes from your last tutor sessions from the Spring semester (or hopefully you’ve tutored them a couple of times during the summer). Create a schedule for your week. Contact those on your previous tutor list. Let them know when school is starting, when your tutoring will begin. Also explain to them any changes, fee differences etc. Then ask them what day and time they want. The best way is to offer them a couple of different times – a good way to begin is start with the time you tutored them last semester. Also explain to them any ‘extras’ you have that they may be interested in. Remember it is SUPER EASY to sell something to a customer you already have. If you think you’ll have some slots left open (see 3) ask them for referrals and offer them an incentive to help you find more students.
- Figure out how many tutor slots you have left over. We’ll pretend we have 9 slots left over, so we need to find nine students to fill those spots. Even though I know we’ll get a few calls during the first few weeks of school, it would be better if we filled all of the slots before school starts.
- Marketing plan – if you browse through our blog you will find a ton of ways to find tutor students. I will list just a couple here – contact the schools you’ll be tutoring at. Find out if they’re going to be having any back to school festivities. Ask if you can sponsor the event – offer to buy school supplies. This gives you some good will for the school and you’ll want to make sure that you’ll get to put up a poster or put out some brochures. Contact the guidance counselors and librarians, and the school teachers that teach your subject. They should already know you so just remind them that you’re still in business.
Do you have any ways that you like to get new students? Let us know in the comments below and we hope you are ready to make this school year the best for your tutor business.