Tutoring, part 2 of 3
The wall at 80 hours a week
Demand kept growing, and I was turning paying students away.
Context
Within a few months, referrals had pushed me to nearly 80 hours of teaching a week. Many of my students lived outside the UK, so my day was set by their time zones, not mine: early mornings for one country, late nights for another, and everything in between.
The problem
The business had a simple shape. One hour of my time, one hour of revenue. And I had run out of hours.
I was turning away students who wanted to pay, which is a strange thing to do when you are short of money. I was still short of my goal. At the pace I was going, reaching it meant delaying college by a year.
There was a less obvious cost too. The only students who could learn from me were the ones who could pay an hourly rate and whose schedules happened to line up with mine. Everyone else was turned away by the calendar.
What I did
I put the two options side by side.
- Keep teaching live. Safe, predictable and paid today. But it couldn’t grow past my hours, and it meant pushing college back a year.
- Build an online platform of recorded lessons and structured material. It could grow without me, but it cost time up front, it meant giving up income I needed right then, and if it failed before the semester started, the goal failed with it.
Then I compared the bad case for each. If I kept teaching, the worst case was a guaranteed miss: another year. If I built the platform, the worst case was the same miss, with a real chance of avoiding it. Put that way, the “risky” option was the only one with an upside.
So I chose the platform. I stopped taking new students, consolidated existing lessons into fewer days, and protected the rest of the week for building. I kept enough live teaching to cover the basics, because the experiment couldn’t be allowed to sink the goal it was meant to save.
What I learned
The safe option wasn’t safe. It was a guaranteed miss on the thing I actually cared about, just a comfortable one. Since then, when a choice looks safe, I ask what it is actually protecting.
The second lesson took me longer to see. Recorded lessons don’t have a time zone. Moving the business off my hours also moved access off my availability. At the time I was thinking about money. Looking back, that second effect may have mattered more.