3 Money-Making Tips for Your Tutoring Business

When you’re just getting started as a private tutor, it can be hard to turn a profit. Perhaps you’ve invested in a tutoring website, taken an exam, or purchased supplies. Going from those set-up costs to earning money as a private tutor can be difficult, but the good news is you’re already on your way to starting a tutoring business. Here are three tips to help you make money!

1 Tip #1: Use Free Resources 2 Tip #2: Update Parents to Get Referrals 3 Tip #3 Create a Schedule for Rate Increases

Tip #1: Use Free Resources

When planning your lessons, an easy mistake to make is jumping to buying the latest and greatest textbook.

For example, let’s say you’re a math tutor. There are tons of math textbooks on Amazon that are filled with practice problems. However, there are also a lot of great free resources available for math tutors. Here are two to get you started:

Khan Academy covers a lot of high school subjects
MITOpenCourseware has material for college classes

If you can avoid reinventing the wheel, you’ll save yourself time - and money - when preparing for class and still have professional lesson plans for your students.

Using free resources will enable you to spend less while taking on more students, increasing your income as a private tutor.

Tip #2: Update Parents to Get Referrals

When you’re setting up your tutoring website, it may be worth your time to set up a form that you can fill out at the end of every session that emails an update to parents about their student. While parents may or may not read your emails, it serves as a record and helps you avoid complaints.

You may also be surprised at how many parents read and appreciate the reports, even if they don’t reply.

That being said, this form should be concise and take no longer than 10 minutes to complete. You want the reports to be easily digestible so they’re easy to reference for everyone. For example, as a math tutor, you might want to cover:

Practice problems you’ve assigned to the student as homework
The topics you covered during the lesson
Plan for next week.

While not something that directly earns you money, this type of transparency and above-board communication improves your relationship with clients and will earn you referrals, increasing your earnings. These referrals are key to starting a tutoring business!

Tip #3: Create a Schedule for Rate Increases

As an additional tip, don’t surprise parents with rate increases, no matter how much you need the money. Whenever possible, try to give parents 3 to 4 weeks notice so they can discuss it with their spouse and decide whether they’d like to keep working with you.

As always, proactive communication comes across as more professional and considerate.

When considering an adjustment to your tutoring rate, it’s also important to properly time your rate increase. The most optimal occasions for a rate increase are:

At the onset of a new school year
The end of a school year
Beginning of a calendar year

These times align with periods when students often experience transitions or may wish to establish new educational goals.

While it can be tempting to raise prices to earn more money, a price increase of more than 5-10% will likely be seen as greedy, particularly if you increase your rates regularly. However, if you haven’t increased your rates for several years, a larger increase may be appropriate.

When starting a tutoring business, it can be hard to make money at the outset. However, by utilizing free resources, setting up your tutoring website to automate parent updates, and reasonably increasing prices, you can set yourself up as a profitable math tutor, or any other type of private tutor.