We’ve been talking some about what to do in your business if you became ill with a short term illness, long term illness or even death. Next we’ll be talking about those things for folks that have a bigger business and / or employees. I thought first though we would talk about how to do decide to get employees for your tutor business. Please note these are only some ideas, for tax purposes especially you will want to make sure you speak with an accountant (which I am not).
You have a tutor business that is doing well, so well in fact that you are forced to turn students away. IMPORTANT: No matter how busy you are, you want to make sure you continue your advertising to get more students. It’s always better to have a list of prospective clients ready, than to find yourself in a bind needing students and not being able to find any.
For our example, let’s say you tutor 5 days a week for 3 hours an evening, on Saturday you tutor for 3 hours as well. Some students you tutor 2 days a week (3), some students you tutor 2 times a week (3), some students you only choose to tutor on Saturday 3.
We’ll say you charge $25 / a session. So you make about $450 / week. We’ll also add you tutor from home. You have a couple of more students you really want to tutor.
Hiring Someone Part time –
A good first step is to hire someone for part time work. We’ll talk some about how to hire good people in a later day – how to train them etc. You will of course want to make sure you have room for them to tutor in your home. Now would be a good time to think about and plan how many additional tutors you could have at home, before you would need to move elsewhere. You will want to ensure you have a space for them that is quite and away from distractions. Tutoring in the same room probably wouldn’t be the best idea since it would lead to distractions.
With one part time person that could tutor 2 nights a week You could have 3 more students or so. Using the same numbers as we did above they would be bringing in $150. If you paid them $10 / hour they would make $60 leaving you a profit of $90.
I would do something like this –
Hire a part time person.
Make them full time.
Hire another part time person.
Make them full time.
Hire an assistant / part time tutor. By this time you would have moved out of your home. You will need someone to be there when you can’t, answer the phone when you can’t, and also help you with the paperwork, billing, and scheduling.
Taxes –
I strongly urge you to check out this articles (all of them) from the IRS, then make sure you check / talk to a reputable accountant.
http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/0,,id=98862,00.html
[…] talked last time about how to get employees for your tutor business. Today we’re going to talk about what happens when you have a short term illness or event […]