Are you interested in starting your own tutoring business?
Do you yearn to help young minds learn the most basic skill?
Creating a Business
When I decided to publish my book, A Reading Tutor’s Toolkit, on Amazon the first book I read was Self-Publisher’s Legal Handbook by Helen Sedwick, a self-published author and business attorney. Her step-by-step guide aided me immensely in my journey of setting up my business, abc-tutoring, and moving the manuscript to book. She literally takes you step-by-step through the entire process.
Within the first couple chapters Helen explained in detail:
- sole proprietorship, limited liability companies, general partnerships
- business names (DBA, doing business as), imprint names
- how to research availability of a company name
- where and how to purchase your domain name
- purchasing EINs (equivalent to a Social Security Number for your company)
- purchasing your ISBN (International Standard Book Number) for a book
- obtaining LCCNs (Library of Congress Control Number)
- business licenses, bank accounts, merchant accounts, recordkeeping, insurance
Tutor Requirements
Since I’ve tutored within classrooms and privately I was interested in reading the following books:
- Become a Private Tutor by Victoria Olubi
- how to start a home-based Tutoring Business by Beth A Lewis
- How Tutoring Works by Nancy Frey, Douglas Fisher, and John Almarode
- The Reading Tutor’s Handbook by Jeanne Shay Schumm, Ph.D. and Gerald E. Schumm Jr., D.Min.
It is always beneficial to read of the highs and lows of fellow educators. Their chronicle assists in setting up a flow chart for your own potential business. I recommend all of these books along with my own of course. They all augment your preparation experience. I have cherry-picked a few excepts from the books but they all warrant further study! Clicking on their above links will take you to their websites.
Victoria Olubi is quick to point out tutoring does not require formal teaching certificates, but usually tutors “are hired for their expertise in a subject as well as their ability to teach in an individualized manner”. She is quite the cheerleader encouraging anyone with skills willing to learn new ways and the ability to “take a complex subject and make it digestible”. Tutoring does require one to be positive and energetic as you build a rapport with your student. Victoria stresses punctuality, listening, and communication skills plus approachability and organization.
How Tutoring Works introduces six steps to grow motivation & accelerate student learning under the following chapter headings: 1) Effective tutoring begins with relationships and credibility 2) Building confidence and addressing challenges to learning 3) Leveraging relevance and setting goals 4) Learning to learn 5) learning content, and 6) Practice, deliberately. A must read!
Jeanne and Gerald Schumm share illiteracy statistics:
- 40 percent of children are not reading at grade level by the end of third grade
- 50-70 percent of unemployed adults have minimal or no literacy skills
- 60 percent of unemployed people lack basic skills needed to be trained for high-tech jobs
- 60 percent of prison inmates are illiterate
- 85 percent of all juvenile offenders have a reading problem
Is this incentive enough to get you involved?
Dr. Fry’s How to Teach Reading for Teachers, Parents and Tutors is a good synopsis