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Starting a Tutoring Business: To Franchise or Not?Before starting a tutoring business, whether from scratch or buying a tutoring service franchise, you must honestly assess two different areas of your life...your personality and your finances. Each of these areas will give you clues as to whether you should buy a tutoring service franchise, or by starting a tutoring business of your own. What is a franchise? Please click here for the answer. Neglecting either can mean disaster, so the key words here are HONEST assessment. For information about buying a franchise, please click here. Whichever path you choose, you must be disciplined in your approach, and never forget that it's a business.
New entrepreneurs usually have a misconception that business ownership creates more freedom to do as they please. Realistically, starting a tutoring business is harder, and more time consuming than working for someone else.
The Right PersonalityIn the beginning, you are the boss, tutor, secretary and janitor. Later, you can put it into auto-pilot, but first you have to assess what your personality is better suited for. To see if you have the personality for franchisee success, please click here. And if you don’t fit the franchising mold, maybe you’re better off starting your own tutoring business. For the correlation between small business success and personality, please click here.Financial ReadinessThe second question is how financially ready are you to start a tutoring business? Do you have money set aside (or can you get financing) to purchase a franchise? For information on the cost of buying a franchise, please click here. The great thing about setting up a tutoring business, is that you decide the startup cost, depending on how complex and involved you want to begin. Please click here for the cost of opening a business. If you pass both the personality and financial resource tests, then, and only then, should you start the planning process. For a brief description of how I became an educational entrepreneur, please click here. Most small businesses fail within five years. Why? Well, it's always harder than you imagined, more time consuming, less profitable, more costly, the list goes on. But I believe the number one reason is failure to plan, or poor planning which includes not knowing where you want your business to go. For general information on starting a small business, please click here.Remember Alice?Remember Alice in Wonderland? Alice in Wonderland contains so many great business parables, but here's my favorite.Alice: Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here? The Cat: That depends a good deal on where you want to get to. Alice: I don't much care where The Cat: Then it doesn't much matter which way you go. Alice: …so long as I get somewhere. The Cat: Oh, you're sure to do that, if only you walk long enough. ~Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll~ The Business PlanWhich leads us to the business plan.If you're thinking about starting a tutoring business, make sure you complete a business plan. Before I started my business, I worked on a business plan for two months. If you plan on obtaining financing from a bank, the bank will want to examine your business plan to see if you've thought this out, and to see if your expected returns are realistic in your market. For me, working through the business plan was the best thing I did. It forced me to think about cash flow, projections, costs, fees, scheduling, etc., because it DID matter where I wanted to get to. Return from Starting a Tutoring Business to TutorTrend Home Page |
