Students and a rate.
Not a brand.
There is a version of starting a tutoring business that consists of choosing a name, commissioning a logo, building five pages of website and registering a company, and it is appealing because all of it is under your control and none of it can be refused. It is also almost entirely irrelevant to whether you will have students in March. The things that decide that are less comfortable: telling people specifically what you do, naming a price out loud, and teaching a first session well enough that the parent tells another parent.
So judge the first ninety days by three outcomes. Do you have six to eight students who come regularly and pay without being chased? Do you have a rate you can say without apologising and that survives contact with your actual costs? And do you know where the next student comes from — not vaguely, but a specific repeatable route that has already produced at least one? A business with those three things is viable and can be improved. A business with a beautiful brand and two students is a hobby with overheads.
"I tutor" gets nothing.
Specific gets referred.
The instinct when starting is to stay broad so as not to turn anyone away. It is exactly wrong, because the mechanism that will actually fill your diary is one parent saying something about you to another parent, and nobody can pass on "she tutors". What gets repeated is specific: GCSE maths for students who have lost confidence, primary literacy, A-level chemistry, exam technique for children who know the content and panic in the hall. Specificity is not a limit on who you accept. It is the sentence that makes you referrable.
Choose it from the intersection of what you can genuinely teach well, who is asking in your area, and which problem parents worry about enough to pay to solve. That last filter matters: general improvement is a weak motivator, while a named exam in eight months is a strong one. You can broaden later from a position of being known for something, which is far easier than becoming known while being a general offer.
Your rate is not
your income.
Two errors dominate. The first is setting a rate by asking what others charge, which tells you what a market tolerates but nothing about whether you can live on it. The second, more damaging, is treating the hourly rate as if it were an hourly wage. It is not. For every taught hour there is preparation, marking, the note to the parent, admin, travel where relevant, and the hours you were available and nobody booked. Your income is the rate multiplied by the hours you actually sell, spread across all the hours you work.
Build it from the bottom instead. The following uses round invented figures only to show the method, and you should replace every one. Suppose you need €2,400 a month before tax. Suppose you can realistically sell 15 hours a week in the after-school band, and you expect to sell about 80% of them once the diary settles, giving roughly 12 paid hours a week, or around 50 a month. That implies a rate near €48 an hour — before any allowance for the unpaid hour of preparation and admin that sits behind every two or three taught ones, and before the quiet weeks. Run the same calculation with your own numbers and you will usually find the defensible rate is higher than the one you were nervously considering.
Then say it without hedging. A rate delivered with an apology invites negotiation; a rate stated plainly, with what is included, rarely does. And put up the rate for new students before you put it up for existing ones — it is the least painful way to move, and it rewards loyalty rather than punishing it.
Five routes,
in the order that works.
The second row is the engine of this business and the one most tutors leave to chance. Referrals do not arrive because you were good; they arrive because a parent had a reason to mention you at the right moment and knew what to say. You can make both more likely without being pushy: report progress in writing so the parent has something concrete to repeat, and ask once, directly, at the moment when things have visibly gone well — after a good result, not at the end of a routine session.
The fifth row is a warning rather than a prohibition. Advertising bought before you have results to point at spends money persuading strangers at the exact stage when you are least able to convert them. It can work later, once you know your rate, your conversion and what a student is worth over a year. Start with the four routes above it, all of which cost time rather than cash, which is the resource a new tutor actually has.
Four things written down
on day one.
You do not need software to start and anyone insisting otherwise is selling. You do need four things to exist in writing rather than in your memory, because all four become disputes if they live only in your head. Who is enrolled and what they have paid for, so that nobody is taught for six weeks on an assumption. A cancellation policy, written before your first awkward Tuesday — the evening slot you lose to a last-minute cancellation is income you cannot recover, and the policy is much easier to state at the start than to introduce to a family who has been cancelling freely for a term. A note after each block to the parent. And what you covered last time, which is the difference between a session that builds and a session that meanders.
A notebook does all four perfectly well at six students. It stops doing them somewhere between ten and twenty, when you can no longer hold the whole diary in your head — at which point one place that holds enrolment, payments, attendance and session notes starts saving more time than it costs. Ours is free for one educator and ten students, €29 a month on Pro, and takes 0% of what families pay you. The no-shows article has the cancellation policy in full, and it is worth reading before you need it.