How I Built a Million Dollar Tutoring Business - Lessons I've Learnt
all right this is going to be a juicy video i'm going to be talking about the things that people just don't talk about when it comes to running a business including bad reviews what to do when employees aren't happy with you what to do if you have no idea what direction you want to head in in your business what you're doing in general because let me tell you these are all the things that you will be experiencing when you start a business this is going to be a pretty long video so i'm going to leave time stamps for you to jump through the sections you're interested in but i think overall if you can watch the entire thing because i'm going to really focus on giving you valuable gems of advice in each section so that if you're somebody who wants to start your own business or you're just curious about what it's like to be a business owner and behind the scenes then yeah this video is going to be a good one in case you don't know me i'm lisa this is my cat mesa who's super high on energy at the moment so i'm just gonna let her run around and do her thing so the first thing i want to talk about is how you don't have to be at the very top to succeed as you guys probably know i achieved an eta of 97.25 which is essentially the score you get at the end of your high school life in order for you to get into university now the very top score you can get is 99.95 and i didn't get that duh but i always had this sort of insecurity that because i didn't get the perfect mic no one would really want to listen to me people would laugh at me or scoff at me or even look down on me for just not being the very best and so because of that i actually focused more on my english scores for a very long time so my best subject was english i ended up scoring in the top 2 of my cohort which is still not the top 1 you know but i was like top 2 surely people would think that's good enough and it really was and it's only until actually kind of recently that i've started sharing that i did achieve an eta of 97.25 rather proudly as well because i think what a lot of people don't realize is yes the best score out there is going to be the most interesting and probably the most marketable but if you're somebody who has done well to some extent in whatever field you have if you're somebody who knows just that little bit more than somebody else and you don't have to be the most expert in that field that's more than enough for you to get started with a business that's more than enough for you to share your advice because it's still more than what somebody else would know this is particularly relevant when it comes to education oh my cat's sitting on my lap oh you're so cute okay sorry can you see her i don't know if you can see her okay so yeah i'd say with this point is never doubt your own accomplishments and if you're happy with what you've done and you feel like you've got something to share then that is absolutely worthwhile to share because people will definitely come and listen and i think for me if anything the benefit of not achieving that perfect score is that perhaps i'm actually more relatable i'm somebody who has kind of gone through the trenches worked hard at it was not naturally talented or gifted in a certain thing and so i think that means that what i've been able to achieve people look at and go hang on a minute i think i could do this for myself too so that's number one people will come to you if you put out good value number two is stick with what you believe i think when you first start out of business especially when you were as young as i was i essentially started this business when i was 19. it didn't turn into a business and generate money until i was like 24 25 but essentially i started a blog all the way when i was 19 and so at that age i had no idea what my values were i had no idea what i wanted to do in the world and i was still figuring out a lot about myself and so often i think when you first start a business you don't know what you believe in and as a result you're not 100 sure what type of business you want to create or how you want to go about that so what i mean is when i first started out in business i sort of saw everybody running along beside me who started their own business at the same time and i had a friend at the time an ex-friend actually scandalous no i'm just kidding but we both offered private tutoring and he just hired more and more and more tutors and then at some point he had 800 tutors and then just i don't know how many students and i just felt this inconsistency with what i wanted and i knew looking out at you know news articles there's always those amazing stories of this entrepreneur 18 year old entrepreneur has made a million dollar business overnight and you know these are the stories that you're always hearing about and it almost makes you feel like you need to do the same and it's taken me a very long time to realize that that is not what i wanted and that was okay so the whole reason why i left pharmacy to run my own business to own my own business is because i wanted more flexibility in my lifestyle i wanted to dictate my own hours but more importantly i wanted a lifestyle to match it so i didn't want to grind myself into the ground doing 80 hour weeks that was not what i believed in and although i couldn't articulate it that well at the time i can now and it has taken a few years for me to really realize this so for my business we've actually grown a lot slower i believe than if i was to press hard on the accelerator and really really push for growth but that just wasn't what i wanted and i think to be able to say this now so with such ease and just such happiness tells me that i know i did the right thing in the end at the end of the day your business is yours so you need to run it in the way that you think is best for yourself because you're the person who's running this company and if you're not in love with your business then it's going to be a tough one to grow two you want to look after employees as well which i'll talk about a little bit later and so to summarize this point i'd say don't be afraid to go against the grain for me it's taken me several years to build my team up from zero to 50 people in meanwhile i've seen other people actually i have one company that i know about who we were friends me and the owner and she was talking about how she was doing great they were turning over like two million in revenue and they had 800 shooters but guess what they went into liquidation at the end of two years ago and i was just like what the [ __ ] because she made it seem like she was doing so well for herself so believe in yourself it's super airy fairy but it's very important when it comes to running your own business number three is i want to expand upon going against the grain i think it's really easy when you're in business to start looking at competitors and start seeing what other people are doing and to feel like you need to emulate them or do the same thing so for example when it comes to tutoring companies particularly in melbourne so many crop up year after year after year new students come out and you could be one of them who's starting your own private tutoring company so i'm telling you this now as somebody who's been in the space for over five years everybody thinks that their private tutoring company is going to be the one that stands out and does amazingly and is different but the problem with private tutoring companies is that it's very hard to market yourself as different because at the end of the day it just boils down for a lot of people on what are the tutors marks what subjects do they teach and where do they live it's very hard to showcase a shooter's personality online and so you'll see that a lot of tutoring companies will default to those facts because they're easy to put online and easy for people to just sort of gauge on whether or not they want this tutor or not and i haven't even figured this out as well i'm still figuring out how to market my tutors in a particular way that makes them stand out from everyone else who's in the space and believe me there are so many people in the space but my way of going about things differently was i established branding and i really focused on branding with myself as the head of the company so it's called lisa's study guides which means that i'm sort of directing the personality of the brand the type of advice we give and the way in which we deliver that type of advice and by being so public about it by having youtube in particular i've been able to attract a certain crowd of not only potential students but also tutors as well and just that branding itself has really helped me in bringing together the right type of people who i want to serve in my business so that's just something for you to think about something else that i did that was going against the grain was i have purposely said no to tutoring in other subjects so people will always ask oh do you treat a math do you treat a science and i'm just like no we only specialize in english and that's because i wanted to have a differentiating point between me and other tutoring companies but moreover i knew that if i expanded into all types of different subjects i'd probably only be able to do it half-assedly because i just don't have the time to create resources to train all the tutors in the different subjects there's just so much work that goes on behind a tutoring company that people don't think about and so i think for us really specializing in english only has been just such a great decision for me and my business in the long run so that's something for you to think about as well like don't feel like you need to go into and expand into all subjects just because someone else is they might not even be doing it well you know what i'm saying all right let's talk about competitors so it's easy to get sucked into looking at what other people are doing and feeling like your business isn't keeping up or on the other hand to look at a business and be like they're basically just copying my business which has happened to me which really frustrates me and i'm okay about it now but you can probably tell that it's still like frustrating to some extent i think when you've been in business for a while you will start to see other businesses copy some of the things that you do perhaps it will be the actual writing in itself it will be like what you put on your website the actual words and sentences you use they pretty much will just copy and paste that into their own i know that there's this company out there who's literally just copied the entire format of our website including the branding colors including the types of illustrations and i'm just like get your own man but i think how i rationalize it and what i tell myself is yes although it feels super threatening that somebody can just so easily go and take what you've really spent a long time diligently building up and you know you're the one who thinks about what colors go into your branding you're the one who made the decisions on okay what type of animations do i want how do i want to advertise my study guides and when you see someone else just doing the same it's super defeating what i do to remind myself is that these people they don't have that insider knowledge that you have they don't have the why as to why you did certain things they don't understand that you chose to advertise your study guide in this particular way because it actually links up to your overall branding somehow but they can't see that because obviously they're not you so yeah somebody can copy your work but they're only going to be able to copy it so far and at some point they're going to have to figure it out on their own because copying somebody else's business long term is just not a recipe for success and if we flip this on its head it's like you looking at somebody else and going oh [ __ ] i need to do what they're doing no you don't you don't need to do what they're doing focus on what you're doing and why you're doing what you're doing don't get distracted by all the noise of other companies around you because it is literally just noise and i can tell you as somebody who's been in the business for over five years is that private tutoring companies i know i'm talking about pirate shooting companies specifically but i think this would apply for any sort of field they come and go new ones start new ones go and really it's only the ones that stay on for year after year after year that you should be looking at and tracking and just monitoring and seeing how they're doing but it doesn't mean you need to copy them so i think that leads very nicely into what happens if you have no idea what is going on okay so i've never talked about this before but in the years of 2017 through to 2019 i had no idea what i was doing with my business and i think the reason for that is because i've been very lucky in my journey my business has pretty much just grown on its own like i didn't just come into this going yep i'm gonna turn this into a private tutoring and study guide company i went into this at 19 years old going oh i somehow did well in english i want to share some of the things that i learned along the way let me start a blog and through that i had people start messaging me about private tutoring and then because of that i started hiring my first few tutors and then that sort of just snowboard over time and then before i knew it i had 50 shooters in my team and that wasn't sort of the vision that i had started this business with and actually because of that it put me in a place where i felt extremely at a loss i wasn't happy with a lot of what i had built and i've talked about this before in another video which i'll link for you i wasn't proud of what i had accomplished and that made me really sad for a very long time and i think a lot of it came down to i didn't have an overarching sense of purpose i didn't have a why as to why i wanted to have this business i felt like it was something that i had created over time and sort of built a prison around myself which sounds super dramatic but kind of true it almost was pulling me along as opposed to me pulling it along with my vision and so it took a whole bunch of existential crisis a lot of self-development and really just thinking about what i wanted out of my business i know this isn't like the most glamorized part about this video and i don't really have like a three-step sort of formula for you to figure out a solution for it because it's something that truly takes time because i think as the head of a business like your own identity your beliefs are very important in formulating how you want to create a business and what type of business that is and if you don't have that then your business is just kind of going to be more easily molded by competitors as we were talking about before by recommendations from your staff or from your investors so yeah it's just something that takes time i just wanted to share that with you just to let you know that you're not alone that people do go through it even if they don't talk about it online everyone shows their highlight reels but people don't want to talk about not being sure about where they want to take their business obviously because they want you to believe in their business they want you to have a connection with it and feel like the business itself is headed in the right direction you know all right so now that i'm sort of going into the section of i wasn't really sure what was going on i was unhappy with my business let's talk about employees being unhappy with you i think i could you know reword this section as just like employees in general and talk about all the highlights because there are absolutely highlights when it comes to people working with you and the people that you meet over the years but i guess the more juicy and the more interesting part is what happens when people aren't happy with working for you and what does that feel like because it is inevitably going to happen i think as a business owner especially as a young business owner you don't realize that you need to do people management skills and you have to develop those over time and i think when you're young as well like you don't have the maturity and the capacity sometimes to have that leadership i would say again it's just something that you learn over time but i think a good example for me was a few years ago when i first started my business i had hired a girl to work for me to basically do she was basically like an assistant so she was to do anything that i asked her to do like a little bit of marketing a little bit of customer service i hadn't really figured out what that role was going to be yet i just knew that i needed someone to help out just with everything behind the scenes and so i think that was probably the first fault not having a really clearly defined role for her and to expect that she'd be able to do everything that i was able to do because obviously i'm the business owner i'm going to do everything but somebody else who comes into your business is probably not going to be as interested in the marketing section as they are in the customer service section for example and i think it's important to recognize that blurry roles are a no-go for everybody i think with her there was sort of fault on both ends i realized after a few months of working with her she kept handing in pretty sloppy work because we're an english tutoring company i needed all of her writing to be perfect in terms of punctuation and grammar and she was an english tutor first before she came to worked for me as an assistant so i expected that of her but she was kind of sloppy let things slip through and as a result i had to like redo a lot of her work which started to get me annoyed at you know just her as a staff member and then what happened was she had a grandma who passed away understandably we said that we'd have a break and i offered her you know one month for a break and she was really grateful for that so i felt like i did the right thing by her at the same time i thought in the background that i'd use this time to figure out what i wanted to do with her in her role did i want to let her go did i want to change things up a little bit set new standards again so that we could work better together and so after the one month she gets back to me and she says hey i'm ready to work again but it's just so happened that i had just moved to bali for a month at that time just to do a little bit of digital nomading i wanted to try that out and because of the upheaval of the moving of the setting up over there i hadn't had the time to actually think about her role so i got back to her and this is the part where i feel like i did her wrong was i said hey i'm really sorry can we extend this break i just need to figure out a few things and i'll get back to you and we'll get started again i think the issue here was that one i wasn't clear on when we were going to get started again so i was pretty much leading her on but also too i was giving her the false impression that we were going to get started again what i was potentially thinking about letting her go i know it might sound really obvious on camera but i think when you're sort of just starting out in business and you're doing these things some of these things just happen and they happen because you're just so busy you're running a business you've got your own life that you're trying to sort out as well and so the business can take over and just lead you to be sort of more abrupt and for me anyway i think less empathetic in some sense so i wasn't really thinking about it from her perspective anyway so a couple of weeks passes and then she sends me a really long email titled termination of contract and she basically just writes out this entire essay about how she's been incredibly unhappy with me she thinks i've been really unprofessional with the way that i've handled things over the past couple of weeks and yeah that just really sucked like i think a lot of the time when it comes to this sort of stuff if they've got unhappy employees or unhappy customers there tends to be a little bit of responsibility in both parties you know like one party will say that it's completely other person's fault the other one will say it's complete the others but i think the thing that i've learned over time is that one there's always something for you to take away and learn from it and if you can learn from it then that's gonna be the best result of all of this experience because it's always a [ __ ] experience you never enjoy making people feel crap or having people not like you like that's really [ __ ] and so i wanted to share this with you because it's something that is inevitably going to happen but when it does happen i want you to know that as long as you can take something meaningful away from it learn not to repeat your past mistakes then that's going to be better for your future employees and customers as well okay so let's talk about bad reviews now that we've moved into customers pretty much the same thing as before but i'd say that with reviews everything is public so the way that you deal with employees is very much behind the scenes whereas when it comes to reviews it's all public and so everyone can have a look at what's going on in your business and i think although we get so many positive reviews after positive reviews it's the bad nuggets that come in that make you feel really crap and make you kind of question the way that you're doing things and so one thing that i'm very aware of is we are definitely priced in the more boutique sort of end of tutoring so we're not dirt cheap we're not as expensive as your examiners out there who charge over 200 an hour we sit in the 75 bracket which is sort of in the mid to upper range i'd say and so because of this you know we attract a certain type of customer we're not trying to attract the people who only want to pay 30 an hour for a tutor we're also not attracting the people who only want examiners and teachers as a tutor we're attracting people who want quality shooters who've we've vetted ourselves and come to a brand that they know they can trust and they know that we take our customer service seriously and that we are professional sometimes we do have reviews that get left behind that say this private tutoring company it's so expensive it's definitely not worth its value and when that happens it definitely sucks because we work so hard to try to provide value where we can and so i know at that point that something has gone wrong in that process and it could be anything in the process it could be from the very beginning that this customer was not the right customer for us but for some reason we still took them on board and that means that our vetting process with our own customers and who we decide to take on as customers needs to be improved and yes you can vet your own customers as well you don't want to take on board customers who aren't the right fit for you either because they probably are going to leave negative reviews otherwise it could be something that happened with the tutor themselves in this particular case with the latest bad review that i'm thinking of i think it's because it was a tutor who just started with us so that makes me think that we need to sort of rethink about how we train up our tutors when they first start up with us and to go into this situation and ask them what happened here let's kind of try to troubleshoot this and see how we can do better next time so yeah it could be anywhere or it could be even something that we promised them but we didn't deliver for them so it could be something as small as the fact that maybe we promised them that we'd give them a study guide and we were late in doing so this is just made up but you know it just gives you like lots of points to think about in your own business and how to improve them but more importantly is your response and that's that public response i think whenever it comes to a bad review just always admit fault to some extent so say that you're sorry and acknowledge what they're saying and i think it's really important not to dismiss it because then it just makes you seem like somebody who's not listening but also feel free to give your own side of the story as well because i think it's really easy for a bad review to be just taken as the only side of that story so in this particular case i think the response i said was hi i'm really sorry you know what i'm just gonna slap it up on screen for you because you might as well have a look at it like it's public available i might as well chuck it in this video all right let's move on so now that we've talked about sort of the more negative things let's talk about the positive things stacking your advantages so when you run your own business especially when you start off you're the person who needs to do everything obviously what i found super helpful for me over the years and this may not be the case for everyone is to kind of block out periods where you focus on one thing at a time and do it really well so when i first started my business i started with a blog and that was all i had i wasn't trying to do a million things at once wasn't trying to do like 10 different social medias as well i just had the blog and i just learned everything there was to know about blogging i learned about seo i learned about the type of content that was out there versus the type of content i want to create i learned about my own writing voice and the type of style i wanted to have and i learned about how to market my blog so that was all to do with blogs and i spent a long ass time doing that probably longer than what's necessary like i started when i was 19. i was doing pharmacy at the time so i was like distracted by other things so yeah my blog was there for a good few years before i actually actually to stacking my next thing on top of it but yeah you can do this in a timeline that suits you the second thing i did was i stacked it with a mailing list so once i had my blog going and i knew what i was doing there and it was pretty much just automated in a sense like i didn't have too much more to learn week after week i knew what i was doing i then stacked it with a mailing list so i let people subscribe to my mailing list and i started writing weekly newsletters and i learned everything to do with weekly newsletters i learned about why they're important for marketing marketing funnels i learned about how to write emails how to write good titles how to write good bodies and how to review my analytics and the marketing software that was involved in that and that took a really long time as well for me to really get comfortable with and then once i was done with that i then stacked it with youtube and youtube has literally been the best business decision i think okay one of them one of the best business decisions i'd made at the time i noticed that nobody was doing youtube at the time who was in my space so i thought why the heck not i'm not afraid of putting myself out there and it's just been a gold in terms of its returns like anybody can watch my videos for free if you wanted to but if you wanted to come in and get tutoring or study guides you can if you want to and there's no pressure for you to do that and i love that like i love that i can offer education for people who don't want to spend any money or those who can't afford it to those who can spend 75 an hour and those who only want to spend 25 for a study guide like there's just a really great mix of what you want from lisa study guys and that makes me really happy from then i stacked it with a little bit of instagram instagram's still not perfect my social media apart from youtube is not great and i will very easily and happily admit that and i think it's just because i never found any social media platform that has stuck but recently i stacked on top tick tock and that has been amazing that's been so good for just my own creative spirit and just me having fun again in my business or having more fun in my business i should say if you look at my business from the outside you'd be like oh dang girl she does blogging she's got a newsletter she's got youtube she's got private tutoring she's got study guides she's got instagram she got tick tock and it's a lot for somebody who's just starting out like to think that you need to do all of that is just a hell no don't worry about it focus on one thing at a time and build them up gradually i think that's what's going to make it a whole lot more enjoyable for you as well let's talk about finances finances can be really overwhelming they're overwhelming when you're destroying your own personal tax a lot of people have no idea what they're doing when it comes to their own money so to run a business and think about the finances for that is a whole other thing in itself so i wrote down a few things that i think is important one is remember to have everything business regulated going into one account create a business account you can go to com bank pay ten dollars a month and you have a business account and any transaction that goes in or out of the business should go through that one business account don't mix it with your personal finances because it's just going to get super confusing down the track and it's a hell of a lot of admin for you as well keep it simple think for yourself ahead of time because the you in july that needs to do the taxes is gonna thank you second is once you can afford it pay for a software like zero zero is a godsend basically what it does is it keeps a track of all the transactions that you have made in and out of your business but it also offers you like all these different reports on how your business is going and more importantly when you have an accountant who comes in and does your end-of-year reporting xero is the perfect software for them to just go into and figure out everything by themselves rather than asking you for all your bank details all the transactions and statements and interests that you've gotten inside the bank account it just makes it so much easier when you have a software like xero yes you have to pay like 50 a month for it but i think the 50 is very much so returned for you the other thing about xero is that you can reconcile all of your transactions as well i do this myself you can hire a bookkeeper to do it but i find that i can keep my hand on the pulse of what is actually going on in my business if i do it myself so i can see exactly what money has been spent on what we have purchased but also if there are any like fraudulent or spammy transactions which absolutely have happened so not too long ago i had like over two thousand dollars from my bank account get taken out being spent on himalayan salt somewhere in sydney and i was just like what the heck so i think doing reconciling by yourself is absolutely okay too like sometimes you feel like you need to delegate certain sections of your business because people tell you need to but also think for yourself and think about what you want final thing here is only if you're interested in purchasing property i just want you to know that if you want to purchase property and you work for yourself banks are not going to like you because you're considered more risky if you're self-employed especially if you don't have more than two years worth of tax returns so if you're just starting out in your first or second year just know that if you want to purchase a property during that time it's just gonna be a little bit trickier doesn't mean that you can't it just means that probably the most popular banks that you're familiar with probably won't lend you at an interest rate that you'd want or as much money as you want so there's definitely workabouts around it and that's it for finances but if you want to know more about the finances and want me to go in more detail then just let me know okay so i want to talk about the most important thing the last thing and that is you need to be your best hype man or hype woman i think running a business is incredibly taxing even if people don't admit it it's so fruitful and so rewarding in so many ways but it can be incredibly challenging as well you'll just kind of face so many different challenges unhappy employees bad reviews not knowing what you're doing and also like the instability of it when you first get started it depends what situation you're in but you might not have that much money going for you and sometimes it's going to take years for you to build up to a place where you're going to be comfortable and happy with how much you're making and i think all of that psychologically can be quite heavy and as a result i think it's really important for you to look after yourself so for me if you know me i only work like 20 hours a week because i cannot do more than that if i do more than that i know that it is physically draining and emotionally draining for me and that i'm just not happy as a result and yeah like working 20 hours means that absolutely my business has scaled at a pace that is a lot slower than other people's but i am okay with that i am okay with dedicating time aside for my yoga for my bjj for my exercise my other exercise i'm doing like 100 other different sports at the moment for my baking for my veggie garden for my cat for you know experimenting with makeup i'm doing a new lip today do you like it these are the things that get me going they're what invigorates me because sometimes business can drag you down and can bring your energy down not always it can absolutely bring you up as well but i think it's just having that acknowledgement that business is tough and i don't want you going in sort of being naive about it and thinking that it's all gonna be you know red roses and wine glasses it can be but yeah these are all things that are coming from somebody who has run my business full time now for five years so happy five year anniversary to me if you enjoyed this video please give it a thumbs up i'm really appreciative you've stayed all the way until this end of this video listening to the advice i have to share please write down the comment section below what would you like to hear more about i love talking about this stuff i love to share my experiences with you and giving you the real talk you know because i think it's important i'll catch you guys next time bye
2022-12-15 10:57
