You cannot sell an hour twice,
or sell Tuesday at eleven.
A tutoring business is a capacity business, and its capacity is not the number of hours in your week. It is the hours when your students can actually attend — weekday late afternoons and early evenings, weekend mornings — and for a tutor working with school-age children that band is perhaps fifteen to twenty hours. Everything you earn comes out of that band, and an hour in it that goes unsold is gone for ever, in the same way an empty aeroplane seat is.
Utilisation is the fraction of those hours you sell. It is the single most informative number in the business and almost nobody calculates it, because the diary looks busy and busy feels like full. Work it out once: count your genuinely sellable slots in a week, count how many were taught and paid for, and divide. The answer is usually lower than expected, and the gap is where the money went.
One caution against optimising it too hard. A hundred per cent utilisation means no capacity to take on the referral that arrives in March, no gap when a family wants to move a session, and no margin for the week you are ill. Running near the top of the band is how tutors burn out and how they turn away the students who would have been their best. Aim high, but decide deliberately how much slack you are keeping and why.
Every taught hour
drags unpaid ones behind it.
The rate you quote is not what you earn per hour worked, and the difference is large enough to change decisions. Behind each taught hour sit preparation, marking, the note to the parent, the scheduling messages, the invoice, the occasional difficult conversation and the travel if you go to them. None of it is billable and all of it is necessary. A tutor charging what looks like a handsome rate can be earning an ordinary wage once the real hours are counted, which is why so many feel obscurely poorer than the number on their website suggests.
Two useful responses. First, count the unpaid time honestly for a fortnight; the figure tells you what your rate really is and usually justifies raising it. Second, attack the admin rather than the teaching, because the preparation is the part that makes you worth hiring and the messaging is not. Reusable materials, a standard progress note, a fixed weekly slot per student rather than a negotiation each week, and one place that holds enrolment, attendance and payments will recover more hours than any change to how you teach.
Six lines,
and two that surprise people.
The second line is the one to settle before anything else. Whether you need a background check to work with children, what insurance is expected, and what records you must keep differ by country and sometimes by region, and none of it is something an article can decide for you. Find out locally, in writing, before your first session with a minor — it is cheap at the start and extremely awkward retrospectively.
The last line is the one that catches people in year two. Nobody is deducting tax for you and nobody is paying into a pension on your behalf, so a month that felt profitable can turn out to have been spent. Put a fixed percentage of every payment into a separate account from the very first one, before it feels necessary, and treat that account as not yours.
Plan the trough,
not the peak.
Demand follows other people's exam calendars: a surge after disappointing reports and in the run-up to major exams, then a collapse the week the last paper is sat. The peak looks after itself — the risk in a busy season is only that you overcommit. The trough is what closes tutoring businesses, and it is entirely predictable, which means there is no excuse for being surprised by it twice.
Two defences. Keep a deliberate proportion of your diary in students who are not on an exam clock — younger children, adult learners, long-run confidence work — even during the months when exam clients are easier to fill with. And decide in advance what the quiet weeks are for: an off-season offer, intensive courses, materials you will reuse all year, or simply a budgeted period of earning little. Any of those is a plan. Discovering in July that August is empty is not.
The second-tutor sum,
which is worse than it looks.
Once your own band is full, more income requires either a higher rate or somebody else's hours. The arithmetic of the second option is unforgiving and worth doing before you advertise rather than after. The figures below are round inventions to show the shape; replace them.
Suppose a family pays €50 an hour and you pay a tutor €30 of it. Your margin is €20 an hour — but only on hours actually taught. If that tutor fills ten hours a week, the business gains €200 a week gross, out of which comes your time recruiting them, checking their work, covering when they are ill, and handling the family who preferred you. If they fill four hours, it gains €80 a week for the same management effort, which is not worth doing. The first hire frequently loses money, and the reason is almost never the tutor's quality: it is that there were not enough unmet enquiries to fill them.
So the condition to hire on is demand you are already turning away, consistently, in slots you cannot cover. Not optimism about demand you might attract. If you are declining three or four students a month for the same subject at the same times, the sum works. If you are hiring to create capacity in the hope it fills, you are funding somebody else's learning curve out of your own margin — and the next article is about everything else that changes when you do.