One of the side hustles you hear about most is teaching English to students overseas, principally in China. This can be a great side hustle for teachers, or if you need to replace only a portion of your own income in order to stay home with kids, this would be an option to actually help you bridge that gap. Here is a link to their teacher website, so you can check out the basics.
I wanted to get the scoop from someone I know and trust, so I called my good friend Julianne. She has a strong entrepreneurial streak and previously started and ran her own paint-your-own pottery store. She has since moved away from that area. VIPKID allows her to work from home and keep a flexible schedule. If you decide to give it a go, her referral number is http://t.vipkid.com.cn?refersourceid=e01&refereeId=4058854. and I’m sure she’d love for you to use it.
How long have you being teaching for VIPKid?
It’s been just about a year now. I started in Oct. but my shedule wasn’t full until after Chistmas. That’s fairly typical. About 2 months to get your time slots filled.
In an average week, how many hours do you work for VIPKid?
15-20
What was the hardest part about getting started?
Probably just getting familiar with their format. Their teacher portal and also all the lessons. Just getting in the rhythm . There are at least 7 different levels and within each level there might be 100 different lessons. Just getting in the flow of what’s in the lesson – what you’re going to need. And then the tech stuff. Is the webcam working? That stuff is super important. They’ve been updating a lot because they’re getting so many new teachers, so just getting that figured out.
About how much do you make an hour?
$20/hour. Everybody has a base pay. My base pay is $8 per 25 min lesson. As long as you show up on time you get an extra dollar, and if you teach at least 45 classes per month, you get an extra dollar. So that makes it $20.
How much do you make from bonuses, like referrals and special promotions?
Not much really. I think if I worked more hours I would. There are certain prime time hours that I can’t work because I am getting the kids ready. But sometimes they will give a bonus if you open up all those slots.
I haven’t really done much on the referrals. There are other opportunities within the company. They have stuff like teacher mentors and curriculum development. You can move beyond just teaching , but I don’t know much about it.
What do you like best about VIPKID?
The flexibility. Most of the kids are really fun and they take their lessons seriously. I like to be able to work at home. I can sit in my little office in my comfortable clothes. Once you get into the rhythm of the lessons, it’s pretty easy.
If you could change one thing about VIPKID, what would it be?
Maybe that the Parents can rate the teachers. So every class you teach, you can get 1-5 apples. If you don’t get a 5 apple, you aren’t eligible for some things and if you don’t have a perfect 5 rating other parents might not book you. If there’s a kid misbehaving and you reprimand them, they can give you a low score and theres nothing you can do about that. VIPKID isn’t very flexible about the evaluations. Sometimes it’s a little difficult to correspond with VIPKID about stuff like that.
Who would you recommend VIPKID to? In other words, what would you consider to be their ideal recruit?
Someone that really enjoys working with kids. Somebody that can have a little bit of an understanding of the culture, especially regarding education. Why the parents are putting their kids through this education. They are spending a lot of time and money on these lessons. Someone who is energetic and patient and understands that it can be challenging to learn another language. You don’t have to be a teacher but need to have experience teaching children in some way.
Other options
So there you have it. Since Julianne and I are such good friends, I have heard about her VIPKID journey from the beginning, and I know it has really made a difference for her. If you want to try a side hustle, but don’t think VIPKID is the one for you, check out our post on other high dollar side hustles that can net you well over $20 an hour.
So, if you’ve already read Pricing, part 1: Can a Higher Price mean Better Value? and Pricing, part 2: You Deserve to Make Money for your Work – Good Money, you might think this is a total contradiction. However, like many things in life, it is part of a truth that can’t be summarized in a 30-second sound byte. Yes, higher price can mean better value. Yes, you deserve to earn great money for your expertise and skills. But your business will only be successful if your clients believe that the value you provide to them exceeds the amount you are paying them. That’s why if you want to have a wildly successful class or business or product or WHATEVER, you need to be besties with perceived value.
Perceived value
The first thing we need to talk about here is perceived value. The actual value of your product or service DOES NOT MATTER. Yes. you heard me right. The actual value of whatever you provide has little to no bearing on your success. It is the value your client perceives that matters. If you have a winning lottery ticket that can be immediately cashed in for $2 million, and you offer to sell someone a 50% interest in it for $50, that is a GREAT value. However, if they believe that it is a forged ticket, they aren’t going to buy it. Their perceived value of the ticket is less than what you are charging.
Here is another example. Last week, I listed our family’s beloved, but beat-up, Volvo Station Wagon on Craigslist. I was asking $600 for it since it had several mechanical problems and over 220K miles on it. I was completely honest, sharing pictures of its distressed paint and admitting that it was going to need some work, but that it did run. However, I knew the price was fair, since it also had almost new tires, and would bring almost $500 if it were sold just for the tires and the scrap value.
Several people contacted me and said, “I’ll give you $200 cash” or “It’s worth $400, I’ll pay you today if you’ll take it.” However, I was also contacted by a guy who loved Volvo as a brand and had a Volvo with a busted engine sitting in his driveway. He looked at the car on Monday, said he’d pick it up the next morning for full price, and even reminded me that if I changed my mind overnight he’d understand. “I wouldn’t blame you if you did change your mind,” he said. “It’s worth more than that.” We assured him that a deal was a deal, and the next morning, he gladly paid the $600.
That buyer got more value than he paid for, but other people definitely thought I had overpriced the car. Perceived value is tricky like that. Like beauty, perceived value is in the eye of the beholder.
Perceived value is a huge topic, so there will be future posts coming on ways to increase it. However, there are basically two ways to ensure that the value you are offering your clients is greater than the price they are paying you. The first is to increase what they believe your product or service is worth. The second is to provide the same value for a lower price.
Increase what they believe the service is worth
Now, you are going to provide a high-quality product. You know it and I know it. So that is not the issue. The issue is to ensure that your potential customers know it is a high-quality product.
There are several ways to do this, but maybe the most effective long-term is education. When I started my Spanish classes for children, I had a big drop in enrollment after the first month. The students weren’t going home and spouting Spanish to their parents, so the parents thought the kids weren’t learning. They didn’t realize that you understand much, much more than you can produce. Nor did they understand that by learning to truly understand the language, instead of memorizing vocabulary lists, their kids were building a foundation to be able to actually communicate in Spanish.
What I had to do was educate them on the value they were actually receiving. So I started sending out short e-mails every week or two explaining why my methods were so effective long term, the benefits of learning a second language, and how to help their child at home, even if they didn’t speak Spanish. They also received almost-weekly updates on their specific child’s class, including what songs we sang, which books we read, and what games we played. After that, my retention shot up to near 100%. I didn’t change my actual product, I just educated them so they would realize its true value.
Provide greater perceived value
Sometimes, you can figure out ways to provide greater value without too much more work or cost on your side. For example, when I started my Spanish classes, I set up a website where I included information on language learning, links to Youtube videos of the songs we were singing and the stories we were reading in class, and tips on how parents could optimize their child’s learning. This can be done relatively inexpensively, but it creates tremendous value for the parent. They can simply look up the website and sing the songs with their child, even if they don’t know Spanish. It allows them to participate in their child’s learning, which greatly increases the perceived value.
Perceived value of e-book versus online course
Another example of this is an online course versus an e-book. E-books have a very low perceived value, no matter how useful or valuable the information really is. However, if you take that same content and package it as an online course, people will gladly pay a much higher price.
Now, I’m not talking about scamming people. Remember what we said in Pricing, part 1? Charging a higher price can actually cause your client to take action because the product has a greater perceived value to them.
Let’s imagine that you have information that will literally save a person $20,000 over the course of their life. You can either package it in an e-book for $3.95 or in an online course for $395.00.
I can absolutely imagine someone buying an e-book for $3.95 and NEVER reading it. They would miss out on the information they wanted simply because they didn’t prioritize reading it. Or maybe they don’t like reading and just keep putting it off. They have wasted that money. Much worse, they have missed out on a chance to be $20,000 richer because of the information they didn’t read.
However, imagine if that person purchased that same information in the form of an online course priced at $395 and studied and implemented every lesson. They would have received massive value from that online course, even though it was priced at 100 times more than the e-book. Granted, this is an extreme example, but it happens literally every day. The takeaway here is that you can increase the perceived value of your product in a lot of ways. Your primary job, though, is to have your customer leave feeling like you gave them a heck of a lot more value than you charged them for by providing an outstanding product at a price that is fair to both you and to them.
Provide the same value for lower cost
Question: Is the value you receive approximately the same whether your child has a one-on-one class or is in a group of 5-6? I would say yes. In some cases, the value might even increase in classes because it’s more fun to learn with your friends, right?
This is why I almost refuse to do private tutoring. My clients receive much greater value (and I also increase my own earnings) by offering group classes. To be sure, I make sure the classes are small, so that our time is spent learning and not dealing with discipline issues. However, the kids really learn well in a group setting, so they aren’t sacrificing value. However, I can charge $12 per child and still make $60 per class. They are paying less, but they aren’t receiving less.
This is the same concept that many people are putting into practice online. I just finished a short course on how to design your own website. (By the way, do you like it? I thought the course was OUTSTANDING! If you want to set up your own website, see the end of this post for the link and information.) Shannon offers pre-recorded classes that are value-packed. I loved her free class so much, I decided to sign up for her Serious Side-Hustlers subscription course because I know I’ll get unbelievable value from it.
However, she has already done the work by recording the lessons and posting them on her web site. She is providing me EXCELLENT value with no extra work because she figured out how to scale her business. What if she had to sit down with me individually (even online) and teach me step-by-step how to set up my website? It might be slightly more valuable to me since I could ask questions in real time. However, she’d have to charge me so much that the value of her service would no longer exceed what I was paying for it. She has figured out how to charge less for basically the same value. She has scaled her services, just like I scale mine by doing group classes instead of individual classes.
Link and info for Shannon Mattern’s 5 Day Website Challenge
OK, I mentioned that I would share the link to the website class, so here it is. I can’t recommend it highly enough. And for the first 30 days, IT’S FREE!!!!!! Here’s the link to Shannon Mattern’s 5 Day Website Challenge. This is an affiliate link, so if you follow one of her paid programs I will receive a small commission. However, I ONLY endorse things that I have used and LOVE. And for anyone who knows me, I don’t do tech! So if she can teach me step-by-step how to set up every aspect of a website and all sorts of gobbledy-gook that I don’t understand, you know she is a tech teaching goddess!
Pricing is an issue that many of us struggle with as we start a business or create a side income. As women, we are conditioned by society to be more communal than men are. Now before you get mad at me, I am basing this not on my own opinions, but on studies of how women are perceived in the workplace. Generally, co-workers are more likely to ask help from women. They are also more likely to be offended if that assistance is not forthcoming.
This can create problems in our own brains. Because our culture often expects us to just “pitch in” without a thought for ourselves, or the inconvenience it may cause us, women often have trouble valuing ourselves at our true worth. While men tend to be confident that their services are worth a premium price, women often second-guess themselves. It can make us uncomfortable charging for our services, especially if we are pricing them at the upper end of the spectrum.
I tell you this for several reasons. First, because being aware of the problem is an important step in overcoming it. Second, because we need to address how we are actually serving people when we charge money for what we do. And third, because if you are going to provide a high-quality, premium service (which I assume you are), you deserve to charge a premium price. To do less is to short-change yourself and your family. Since this is a pretty important point, and since I tend to be wordy, I’m going to break this down into three separate posts. Today, we’ll cover how we serve people better when we charge a premium price.
Price Influences Value
Two years ago, I invested in a class on how to make an income by creating and selling online courses. And when I say invested, I mean it was a big decision – over 2 weeks’ take home pay for me. I went through the course. I followed the course. It didn’t work. I adjusted and started over again. Still, no luck. Meanwhile, in the Facebook group, people are talking about their successes. How they created a course, tested it, and are earning money teaching people about something they love. I cringe and start over – again!
So why am I still trying instead of throwing in the towel? First, because I know for sure it can be done and I know for sure I can do it, even if it takes multiple attempts. Second, (and this is probably the real reason) because I just flat refuse to lose that kind of money. If I stop trying, it becomes a “waste of money” not an “investment,” and I am too stubborn to let that happen. Paying a high price made this course matter to me, and in the long run, it is more likely to make me successful.
Another example is a treatment we chose for my son’s ADHD when we wanted to get him off his medication. Its effectiveness was backed by multiple studies. Unfortunately, it wasn’t covered by insurance, and each session cost $100 AND it worked best when appointments were at least once a week.
Well, you’d better believe I didn’t miss any sessions, nor was I late unless something major happened. Also, we changed our lives to make it a priority, even taking our son out of school early a couple of days a week, which doesn’t happen lightly in our family. (In case you’re wondering, yes, it did help and we’re thankful we did it.) Would I have taken it as seriously if sessions cost only $25? I hate to admit it, but I don’t think so. Consequently, it probably would have been a lot less effective and my son would have missed out on its benefits.
In both of these cases, pricing the service at a premium may have actually improved its benefits.
It won’t happen overnight
Learning to value yourself and your skills probably isn’t going to happen overnight, because this is truly a paradigm shift. If you, like me, have spent a large portion of your life looking for bargains, it’s hard to change that and start thinking that setting a low price isn’t necessarily doing your customers a favor. But I want you to start trying.
Examine your beliefs about what is “fair pricing,” and what truly constitutes value. When we are talking about services, the customer’s perception of its value, and thus its importance, sometimes has even more impact on their success than the service itself. Is it a better value for a person to spend $100 and get an outstanding service that they prioritize, or to spend $10 and get the same product, but not the benefit from it because they don’t value it?
What do you think? Do you have an example of a time when a pricing a product or service higher actually benefitted the customer more or when a low price prevented you from appreciating a product or service? You’ve read my take. What’s yours?
We’ve all read those articles about “50 Ways to make money in your spare time.” We get all excited, but when we read the article and then figure how much we’d make per hour, it works out to about $1.50 if we’re LUCKY! I don’t know about you, but I don’t have the time for that! If I’m going to get a job on the side, it had better be worth my time. That’s what I call a high-dollar side hustle. So here are four jobs on the side for teachers that can earn you $20/hour or more.
Side Hustle #1: Pet Sitting (or walking during the summer months)
This is a high-dollar side hustle that will make animal lovers smile. Rover.com matches animal lovers with people who want pet care while on vacation. The pets come to your house and you care for them. Some providers snap pictures to send to owners and do other cute things, but mainly it’s about providing safety and care without the pet having to experience the stress of a kennel. The going rate usually runs between $20-25 per day per pet, and some care givers also offer pet sitting, drop-ins, or house sitting.
Rover is ideal for someone who can really demonstrate they have experience and a knowledge of dogs, but they only accept about 20% of people who apply to work through them. However, you can also let your friends and neighbors know this is something you’d be willing to do. Just know your limits and make sure you can adequately care for any pets you are entrusted with.
Since rover.com provides the insurance, you don’t need to worry about it. Yes, they do take a cut, but the insurance plus the fact that they help with getting your name out there makes it not such a bad deal.
Side Hustle #2: Teaching English online
Teaching English remotely to students in China and other countries has become a huge business, and it can be a flexible and portable job on the side for teachers. One of the best things about this plan is that it allows several options, based on what you’re looking for.
If you’re interested in freelancing, you can sign up through verbalplanet.com. It costs nothing, but you have to build your own clientele base and create your own lessons. VIPKID, on the other hand, is a little more corporate. They provide lesson plans (which you are expected to use). One of my close friends has been doing VIPKID for over a year, and it really works for her. Read more about her experience here. If this interests you, this is one of the most up-to-date articles I’ve found on the different options available.
Side Hustle #3: Offering premium classes in person
Offering group classes can allow you to earn a great per-hour rate (think over $80 per contact hour!). Now that’s a high-dollar side hustle that beats the pants off of filling out surveys online! I am a language teacher. Instead of offering one-on-one tutoring, I teach group classes in preschools and just-for-fun classes at a local winery.
Maybe you are a dancer, a black-belt in karate, or have a knack for making science irresistible for kids. All of these are currently successful businesses in the preschool enrichment world. But you don’t have to build a huge business. If you can get 1-2 locations with lot of interest, it can add $800 or more to your monthly income.
Or if you’re not into the preschool scene, wineries and micro-breweries might partner with you to lure clients in at off-peak times.
If you’d like to offer a group class, think about what skills you have and who might be interested in them. Be creative. Do you knit? Are you an artist? The winery where I offered classes also partnered with a henna artist, a tarot card reader, a message therapist, and a yoga instructor to use their back room when it wasn’t booked. So this is limited only by your creativity and ability to market your skill as fun and useful. If you want to learn more about starting a successful preschool group class, check out my article on three make or break steps.
What you are looking for here is a skill that 1) you know well enough to teach 2) you enjoy doing and 3) people are willing to pay for. Often, after you’ve built a class up, you can earn $60-$100 per contact hour. Not too shabby!
Side Hustle #4: Offering autism-specific services
This one is for you, special ed teachers. You know you are amazing in the classroom every day, but how about using your gift to not only make money for yourself, but also allow a special-needs parent to get a service with peace of mind and zero stress? Do you have a knowledge of autism or other special needs? Have you ever thought about how stressful it must be for the parent of with special needs to get good-quality family photos done? Or find a babysitter they feel confident leaving their child with? From what I hear, it can be a nightmare.
Let’s look at photography as an example. Most photographers don’t understand how to work with these special kids, and so a lot of parents don’t even try to get professional quality pictures. So instead of marketing yourself as just another photographer (or whatever your service is), do some thinking about how your service could be made more attractive to parents of kids with special needs. Then use your expertise to market yourself as a provider of services for this special demographic. This high-dollar side hustle will also let you help others in a big way.
What other services do you think create stress for parents of special-needs children? I’ll bet you can think of a few, and some of them might even be something that you love doing.
Work it
There you go. Four possible high-dollar side hustles than can earn you $20 or more. Will they all work for everyone? Heck, no! But you don’t need five or ten different ways to make money. You need 1-2 ways that fit your personality and work for you.
The other thing I hope you gain from reading these ideas is the belief that where there’s a will, there’s a way. Once you start thinking about business ideas and how you can turn your own skills and interests into a viable income, you’ll eventually hit on an idea that is perfect for you. It might not be the first idea you try, or even the second or third. But action is the important thing here. Try something. Do something. See what works and what doesn’t. Then adjust if you need to.
Preschool Enrichment Classes: Three Make or Break Steps
1. Selecting a location
In real estate investing, there is a saying that “You make your money when you buy.” While this might seem odd (“Hold on, don’t they write the the big ol’ check after I’ve sold the property?”), it is 100% true. Of course, what they mean is that if you don’t select a quality property that you can buy below market value, you’re not going to realize a profit when it’s time to sell. The same thing is true for your preschool enrichment classes. (Class that are taught by an outside group at a preschool location are often called “enrichment classes”.)
A big part of having a successful class happens long before you start enrolling students. You make your class successful by doing your research and finding a location where the parents already want what you are offering. If you are offering classes in the wrong location, you can do everything else right, but you still won’t have success. So how do you know what makes a great location?
Willing and Able to Pay
Well, first you need parents who are willing and able to pay and who value what you are offering. As you know, I offer language enrichment classes. I look for suburban centers with highly educated parents. These are parents who ALREADY WANT what I’m offering. I don’t have to convince them to enroll their child in Spanish class. They have been looking for a way to expose their kids to a world language, so when I show up, they are excited about enrolling their child.
Besides being willing to pay, they also need to be able to pay. Now, I am a lover of language and I want EVERY kid to be able to learn with me. But I also have to be able to turn a profit, especially until I get myself up and running.
So while you can certainly offer partial scholarships to students who want to take the class but can’t quite afford it, if every student is asking for a scholarship, you have probably chosen the wrong location. Also, I don’t offer any FULL scholarships for this simple reason: most parents can afford something toward the class if it is a true priority for them. Even if it’s $10 per month, I want them to be invested in their child’s success, and that’s a lot more likely if they are making a financial contribution every month.
So there you go.
Step one: Choose a location where parents are already interested in what you are offering and are able to pay for your enrichment classes.
2. Offering a Free class
At the beginning of each semester, I offer a free class at every location. This does several things.
First, it allows me to market my class. We try to keep the free class fun and upbeat, and at the end of class, each student gets a sticker with a reminder for their parents to enroll them in Spanish class. Students also go home with a sheet of frequently asked questions and a registration form.
Require a registration form for the free class
Here’s the real secret to a free class that leads to enrollment, though: require a registration form. When I started, I didn’t want to do this. I was convinced that if the kids experienced my engaging, fun, and all-around wonderful class, they’d sell it to their parents by begging to enroll. Yeah, whatever.
While that might happen in a few cases, it’s pretty rare that a parent who isn’t even interested enough to fill out a registration for a FREE class with absolutely no obligation is going to actually pay for the full enrichment class. Now sometimes it happens that they were just busy and I pick up a couple of registrations for the class even after the free class. But that is definitely the exception rather than the rule.
Because…
Here’s the other thing. If you offer the class to all of the students, your free class isn’t going to be an accurate reflection of how fun your class really is.
At the first preschool I went to, I agreed to offer the free class to all the students. They combined two preschool classes and had me offer a class to 25 preschoolers. It was NO fun. I had to cut all of my best activities to keep it from dissolving into chaos. My enrollment never recovered because none of the kids wanted to take my boring class – which had only been boring because there were too many students.
Step two: Start each semester with a free class, but ONLY for students whose parents fill out a registration form.
3. Educating parents
Whatever type of enrichment class you are offering, whether it’s ballet, karate, computers, language, or STEM, you are the expert. You know how much students will realistically learn and be able to do. You know the long-term benefits. You know why you do what you do and how it will produce learning.
But the parents aren’t experts. They don’t know any of these things. And if you don’t teach them, they never will.
My first location started out with 22 students – so many I had to break it into 2 different classes. I was thrilled. Then almost half of them dropped after the first month. Some of that was explainable. It wasn’t a good fit for some of the kids, and a couple of them had scheduling conflicts that popped up.
You’ve enrolled them, now you’ve got to KEEP them enrolled
However, the majority of it was my failure to educate the parents on language learning. I just assumed that they knew what I knew: how students learn to understand before they start to speak, that students will retain a ton more through Communicative methods (CI, for you language geeks), but it won’t show up as fast, and that learning a second language has very real long-term benefits to the developing brain.
But they didn’t. And so when I asked some of the parents why their kids dropped the class, I got a lot of responses like, “Well, they weren’t able to say anything.” Now, as a language educator, I know that after four 40-minute classes, that’s absolutely normal, but I hadn’t educated THE PARENTS! So they thought my classes were a flop.
So if you want to KEEP those students you worked so hard to get, you’ve got to educate parents, and communicate regularly. Ideally, these should be short, informative blurbs of 150 words or less. They can be sent through e-mail or handed out on paper. Each one should cover one TINY bit of information and use only terms that a newbie could totally understand. Don’t go all jargon on them; make it something that 6 year-old could understand.
Step three: Educate parents so they know how you teach, why you teach that way, and how it benefits their child.
Can I guarantee you’ll have successful classes? No. There are too many variables, too many moving parts to make guarantees. But I can tell you this: keeping these three steps in mind will put you light years ahead of those who neglect them!
So why are group classes – classes with 4 or more students – superior to individual tutoring? Here are four reasons.
When teachers think of making extra money, one of the first things that pops into their heads is tutoring. After all, they already work in education. They are good at breaking down complex concepts. And they relate well to young learners. They have all the qualifications and they feel pretty comfortable with what it takes to get started. In short, it is totally within their comfort zone.
However, sometimes there are serious rewards for stepping out of the comfort zone and trying something a little scary. And this is one of those situations.
Group classes are more fun
I’ve done individual tutoring, and I enjoyed it. It was really rewarding, and my students were super-motivated. However, it was a little boring. No matter how interested the student is, the spark of interaction between one student and another is missing. As a teacher, that’s part of what I live for.
Get 4, 10, or even 20 students together, and somehow the energy just multiplies. Instead of an isolated learner and a teacher, you have a group dynamic. They make connections on their own that I just couldn’t make for them. (Now sometimes there’s a bit more energy that one might want, but that’s a whole different story, and for the most part, it’s very manageable.)
Group classes are more secure
Let’s say you devote 3 hours per week to tutoring. One student per hour for three hours. If you have three tutoring students and one decides that they don’t want tutoring anymore, that’s a 1/3 reduction in your tutoring income. You could take a huge pay cut simply because someone decides they want to play a sport or are “just too busy.” If you are counting on that income, it can be a major problem.
However, let’s change that scenario to group classes. Again, let’s say you devote 3 hours per week to student contact time and keep your minimum class size at 5. Even if 3 students decide they are “just too busy,” at most that’s only 1/5 of your clientele, and probably a lot less. Not super, but a heck of a lot better than the other scenario.
Group classes provide better value for your clients
Let’s say that you want to make a minimum of $60 per student contact hour. And let’s face it, your time is absolutely worth that. If you do private tutoring, you have to charge parents $60 for an hour lesson or $30 for a half-lesson. That means that only parents who are fairly affluent can afford to work with you.
But you know that LOTS of kids can benefit from your services, so instead, you offer classes. You design a weekly preschool group class that lasts 30 minutes and charge $12 per session per child. You have 5 students enroll. That’s a lot more affordable for parents! More kids can benefit.
And just because you are teaching more children, it doesn’t mean that each student is getting less. They are getting the same learning, as long as class sizes are reasonable. They might even learn more because they will be engaged and having fun with their friends. So you can offer the same benefit for a much better price.
Let’s apply that same concept to adult learners. You still want to make a minimum of $60 per hour, but adults can handle longer classes. Your group class becomes 75 minutes for $18. (That would cost an individual learner $75, so a major difference there.) Eight students enroll. Again, students get the same benefit (and often more) for less money and you are still making your hourly minimum.
Better income for you
So, if you were doing your math in the last two examples, you might have noticed that while the students were receiving a much greater value, you were also doing better in the group classes.
With 5 students paying $12 each for a 30 minute class (and that is usually as long as I recommend a preschool class last), you made $60 for only HALF an hour of contact time. That’s twice your minimum.
In the adult class scenario, you were teaching 75 minutes, but you were making $144. That is over $100 per hour.
It pays to be out of the comfort zone
If you have your heart set on individual tutoring, by all means, go for it. After all, this is your gig and you are in charge. Here are some tips if that’s the route you choose to take. But if you are willing to do something that could make you a little uncomfortable at first, you can provide incredible value to your students, have a lot of fun, and increase both your security and your hourly rate. If you’d like to try out the idea, check out my guest posts on fluencymatters.com or martinabex.com to get some ideas.
