3 Tips to Expand Your Online Tutoring Business

Congratulations! You decided to become an online tutor, and now you’ve hit the place every private tutor aspires to reach: you have more people coming to you for tutoring than you have time to help. You’ve probably already started to consider hiring other people to assist you. Perhaps you’ve even gone onto Craiglist or Facebook Marketplace to post a few online tutoring jobs. If that’s so, here are a few tips to help you grow your online tutoring services!

1 Tip #1: Hire on Fivver or Upwork 2 Tip #2: Correct Issues Quickly 3 Tip #3: Less is More

Tip #1: Hire on Fivver or Upwork

When you hire locally or through spaces like LinkedIn or Glassdoor, it is difficult to tell what kind of work a person has or hasn’t already done or whether their past clients are satisfied with their work. Websites that lack robust feedback systems make it hard to determine how good a person is at their job rather than how good a salesperson they are.

I recommend using an online freelancer marketplace that allows businesses to post jobs and hire freelancers.

While it can be more expensive due to the fees that marketplaces charge, in return you can see people’s work history and reviews before you hire them. You also have a system that will act as a mediator if you have any complaints.

So, rather than hiring someone who says they’re an excellent private tutor, you can post your online tutoring job on a marketplace and review candidates with years of reviews before deciding who you’d like to entrust your clients with. The review system keeps people accountable and helps ensure that they take your jobs seriously.

Tip #2: Correct Issues Quickly

When I first started offering online tutoring services, I had a tutor who was regularly a few minutes late. I did not address this because I thought the tutor was having software issues and did not want to come across as difficult to work with. However, being three minutes late became ten minutes late, and I soon received a formal complaint from the parent. Eventually, the relationship soured, and the parent ended up working with a different company.

That’s why I recommend that business owners avoid letting issues fester. Whenever you hire someone, whether for online tutoring services or building your website, it’s important to address shortcomings immediately.

For example, let’s say you set up an interview with a private tutor. If they’re 1-2 minutes late for the meeting, it’s good to bring that up as part of the initial discussion. While it’s not a big deal if someone is a few minutes late occasionally, it is not professional which makes your online tutoring services look unprofessional, too.

As you work to expand your tutoring business, finding contractors or employees who will uphold the standards that you’ve set for your business is key.

Give underperformers formal warnings, then fire them if they fail to improve. Your time is too valuable to waste it on someone who isn’t invested in their own success.

Tip #3: Less is More

When you start posting online tutoring jobs and interviewing people to join your company, don’t be too eager to hire. Finding the right person can be the difference between success and failure, particularly for a new company.

When you do find someone you like, you want to have the work available to keep them interested and eager to work for you. As such, it is better to give a few tutors 15 to 20 hours of work a week versus having a larger group of tutors where each receives 1 to 5 hours worth of work.

It’s always exciting to grow your business. However, there can also be a lot of pitfalls. By working with Helppo, you can set up a system that helps you easily manage other private tutors even as you expand the online tutoring services you offer!