If you love to learn new things and enjoy teaching others about your new discoveries, then opening your own home-based tutorial business may be a perfect entrepreneurial match for you.
Qualifications
If you have an undergraduate, graduate, or post-graduate degree, or a teaching certificate, then you are fully qualified to start. If, however, you still need some academic credentials, you can always get an online education degree.
You will have little in the way of startup costs and once you decide where you will work from in your home – for instance, making a spare bedroom into a study — and then decide on a schedule that fits in with your family’s activities, you are ready to start your business.
Specialization
Your business will flourish if you can specialize in a niche. When it comes to specialization, there are three ways to market your service: by age, by subject, or by exam. You can also combine one or two of these specialties, like specializing by age and subject.
Let’s take a look at each one in turn:
- Age. You can tutor little children, high school children, college-age student, or even adults. Each age group has its own set of challenges and rewards. Choose the group you feel most comfortable with.
- Subject. The subject you choose will depend on your interests, knowledge, experience, and skills. The highest demand for tutors is in in reading, mathematics, and science.
- Exams. There is also a huge market for helping students get ready for a standardized test.
Profitability
When it comes to deciding on profitability, you should teach something that is in high demand and people are willing to pay a high fee for. Because of the high stakes involved in passing a standardized exam, this is the most profitable niche.
In this niche, students need help with either exit exams or college prep exam.
- Exit exams.
In states like California, Florida and others, students have to pass an exit exam to get a high school diploma. Anxious parents are eager to hire a tutor to help them pass these exams because they play a huge role in determining their child’s educational future.
- College prep exams.
This is another lucrative niche.
While there are a number of college prep exams, the most lucrative ones to focus on are the following:
- SAT
- ACT
- SAT Subject Tests
- AP Program exams–Advanced Placement Program
- IB exams–International Baccalaureate.
Competition
As a business model, the field of home-based tutoring is wide-open. This is a huge, overlooked opportunity for someone who wants to create their own profitable home-base business.
There are two reasons for this unique situation:
First, most academics prefer to teach in a school or university.
Two, most entrepreneurs are more interested in selling products or offering business-oriented services.
Three, most tutoring services offered by schools and many private college prep companies are too busy to offer one-on-one private tutoring.
Because of these three reason, private tutoring is very appealing to students who need one-on-one attention to do well academically.
Getting Started
Naturally, before you start this business, you need to be clear that you have the right qualifications and that this is a business that fits your passion. If you feel that you have no problem committing to this business model, then your next step is to go through the formal process of legally establishing your business and complying with local laws on starting a business in your home.
While you will need to take some initial steps to market your tutoring business, once the word gets out among parents, you will probably not have time to do much marketing.
If your business grows beyond your time available for each student, you can always scale up your business by hiring other tutors to work for you and even moving out of your office and starting your own tutoring clinic.
