Is there a Market for Tutoring Where I Live?

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Today you’ll learn: Is there a market for tutoring where I live.

Hope you had a wonderful 4th of July holiday. We had a great picnic with friends and family and then had some fireworks.  The picnic is traditional and usually some mishap occurs. One year the fireworks caused a brush fire, another time the launcher was tipped over and one ended up going through the garage door. No mishaps this year.

We would like to welcome our new subscribers. We had an excellent note from one of our readers and the entire newsletter this week and probably next is based on that question. We encourage you to send your questions and we’ll be happy to work on finding you an answer.

Notes and Reminders –

1. You’ve probably heard of Google + – Google’s new social media platform. If you haven’t gotten an invite yet we will send you one. Just reply to this email – please change the subject to invite please and include your gmail address. Google + isn’t ready for business sites just yet but when they are we’ll make sure to add the how to’s to our guides as well as send you some tips.

2.  We’ve been working hard on getting the next piece of our guide completed. This portion will focus on online tutoring. One thing we’ve found it’s not as expensive as you may think it is. This guide will focus on videos – with worksheets and mindmaps. One reminder – if you purchase (or have purchased our guide) you’ll get these free. You need to make sure you place your order before August 1st. You can use this link to order.

http://www.cleverapple.com/howtostartatutoringservice.html

Here was the question –

I was curious…I am a teacher and I would love to start tutoring in the summer time, but how do you get kids to want to tutor in the summer or even during the year when kids are already staying after school for free?  My sister wanted to tutor, but no one was interested in her small town due to the fact that kids often stay after school to get tutored.  I would love to tutor kids on how to type, write documents such as resumes, cover letters, create presentations on PowerPoint, etc.  Any ideas?  Is there really a demand?  Thanks so kindly.

You need to figure out a few things first –

1. What age groups are you going to tutor.
2. What classes are you going to tutor.

Let’s say I’m going to tutor Math for 7th and 8th graders.

How many students do I want to tutor? How many hours do I want to tutor?

My goal is 4 students – 2 nights a week.

Is there a market for tutoring?

If you see advertising for tutoring services on TV and in your newspaper, then there is a market.  If this advertising has been around for awhile then there is definitely a market and demand otherwise they wouldn’t have the money to advertise.

So what if you live in a small town and you haven’t seen any advertising. We’ll need to dig a little deeper. I’ll be using my town as an example – it is super small. If your town is small you’ll want to use your town and county – or nearby towns to.

1. See if you get any hits online – type in (with the quotes) “my town state tutor”.

For me I found 3 tutors – if you find 15 or 20, I would say there is a market – so you can stop. In my case I’ll need to go a bit further.

2. Find your states department of education site. Somewhere within the site you’ll find information about school districts. What we want to do is find out the number of students we have living in our area. I found a list with the schools, their enrollment and their contact information. We’ll want to save the school information for later reference.

Here’s what a listing looks like –

Grades K-08
Est. Teachers 20   Est. Enrollment 300

We’ll guess low – so for each k-8 school we’ll use 10% to get 7th and 8th grade. So that school gives us 30.

We total all of the schools (with 7th and 8th grades) and get 421. A very good number of potential students. I use 1% of that number, which would be 4.21. My goal of students to start is 4, so I would be good to go. If I wanted 6, then I would need to expand my thinking – either add a grade – or expand my area of service to include another county.

Like I’ve mentioned before, getting the first student is always the hardest. 90% of our additional students come from referrals.

Next time we’ll answer – find out about the competition, to see if we should start our business.

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