One of the things you’ll need to figure out as you start your tutoring business is what to charge your clients. Over the next several days we’ll be talking about pricing and some things you will need to know. These tips should help you if you’re starting your tutoring business or already have one.
Today we’re going to talk about surveying your competition. This will give you a general idea of what others are charging in your area. We’ll then use these as guidelines for what we’ll be charging.
1. Create a spreadsheet or use a sheet of paper and write the following columns across the top.
Business – the name of the company
Url – the url of the website
Contact information – email addresses / phone number / physical address
Amount – the amount they charge
Features – we’ll put features of the company here (like online tutoring, pick up / drop off etc.).
2. Next you’ll want to search for tutor businesses in your area. For this we’ll pretend that I’m a Math tutor in Lexington Ky. I would go to Google and search for lexington ky +math tutor. You would search using [city state +subject tutor]. If you get just a few results then you’ll want to expand your results by searching for [city state +tutor]. The plus just tells Google to search for the city state and to include sites with tutor in the results. I have a big list, so I would start working on the list noting  the information I need. Some sites will include that information and others won’t, but they should give you enough contact information to find out.
3. Work on contacting those from your search that didn’t give prices. This should give you a good general idea of what people are charging for tutoring in your city.
Tomorrow we’ll be talking about the Psychology of pricing.