Today we want to talk some about long range planning for your tutor business. I am a big fans of goals. My Dad always told me if you reach for the stars, you may not get one but you won’t come up with a handful of mud either…. how true is that.
Every business is different so I don’t want to tell you how to play your business – just giving you some things to think about, then I’ll give you an example.
1. What is Your Long Range Plan – think about 20 or 25 years down the road. What do you want your tutor business to be. Are you going to want to sell your business, give it to your kids, or keep running it even after you retire. Don’t laugh… my Dad retired for a total of 4 weeks, and he was miserable, so he went back to work doing what he loved (he’s a minister).
How much money do you want to be making? We’ve talked about this before so we won’t go into detail. I use a general rule of $2500 / student / year. Again that is a rough estimate and takes into account some expenses.
2. Use where you are now and where you want to be and break things down a bit. How much will you need to improve each year to make your goal.
3. Think about where your tutoring now – and where you want to tutor in the future. There is nothing wrong with staying small… but if you could dream where would you want to be.
A fictional example to get you thinking.
We want to have a 100k tutoring business in 20 years and then sell it.
Currently we have 10 students – no employees – tutor from our home and make about $25k a year.
We’ll want to move to a spot where we can have 4 student sessions going at a time. Since we want to sell our business we’ll want to either build or rent a place.
So if we grew by 10 students every 5 years (or 2 students every year) then we should meet our goal. We would need to retain / get new students to replace those lost.
Again just an example but it should give you something to think about.
DON’T FORGET – stay tuned on Thursday for a Surprise.
On Tuesday we’ll also be outlining what we’ll be doing in September. We’ll be starting a series of how to tutor articles.