Tutoring as a Successful Business An Expert Tutor Shows You How

Tutoring as a Successful Business An Expert Tutor Shows You How

How to tutor everyone from pre-schoolers through college and adults. How to set-up and promote a full-time or part-time, professional tutoring business. And how to tutor your children at home. It’s all here, everything you have to know.

User Ratings and Reviews

4 Stars Great book
Great ideas and very easy to read. Some of the info didn’t pertain to me, but I could use a great deal of the ideas and have been tutoring ever since.

3 Stars A useful book, but only for absolute newcomers to the field of education
Based on the tone of this book and the anecdotes it contains, Mrs. Shapiro, the author, seems like an excellent teacher and tutor. However, because I am not new to the field of education, this book was not useful for me. If you have never taught students before, and you need the information and motivation to start your own tutoring business, then by all means, buy this book! If you’re already a teacher or a tutor, then you just don’t need this book, unless you have trouble exercising common sense in either the business aspect or the educational aspect of tutoring.

The message the book conveys is certainly positive: that we tutors must always believe that our students can succeed. But this concept is much too rudimentary for teachers and tutors who are already involved in students’ successes. It’s true what the other reviewers have said; most of the book is anecdotes about how Mrs. Shapiro has helped students through tutoring. Her formulaic approach grew tiresome: “Sandy Sue was X years old. She really needed help with Y and Z. I helped her. Her life got better. Hooray!”

A few problems plague the book. Strangely, though the book was copyrighted in 2001, in the chapters about advertising and communicating with parents, there is no mention of the Internet or e-mail. The resources that the author provides in the appendices are embarrassingly basic. And while no book is edited to perfection, this book contained many strange errors in hyphenation, and two entire chapters are inserted twice, giving the book a thickness that belies its superficiality.

Finally, if you’re going to purchase this book because you’ve never taught children before, and you want to start your own tutoring business, then I beg you, for the sake of your students, to read a whole lot more than just this book before you start. For example, after reading Chapter 3, “The `Can’t-Read’ Kids,” PLEASE read both of the following books before you actually start tutoring kids in reading: Jerry L. Johns’ “Basic Reading Inventory” and Kylene Beers’ “When Kids Can’t Read: What Teachers Can Do.” These two books will give you a much deeper understanding of how you can identify and cure students’ problems with reading.

5 Stars Reviewers who don’t read!
It’s fascinating how many reviewers bash the author saying she’s not a teacher. Didn’t they read “about the author” or the acknowledgements? She was definitely a teacher. If reviewers want to write about the author, they should research first or just read the aforementioned articles! Sandy

3 Stars Best viewed as an intro to meatier resources
I’ve been a professional tutor for the last two years and involved in for-profit education in some way since 2001. Now that I’ve gained some tutoring skills, I’m thinking about starting my own firm, and I picked this book up looking for strategies about how to start a tutoring business. This author clearly loves what she’s doing. Her compassion for her students is admirable. She sees tutoring as an accessible profession that everybody does to some extent, and she feels that others can follow her model closely and become tutors.

Like other reviewers, I was disappointed that she spent at most 1/3 of the book talking about the business side of tutoring. Perhaps she doesn’t want to fully train someone to compete with her. She briefly mentions things like “Doing Business As” announcements in the final third of the book. She helpfully shares what marketing strategies have worked for her, and she gives several helpful anecdotes about what working with parents and students. I really wish that she had expanded this section because the practical advice she has to share is what separates this book from many other offerings on the market.

How you find the other 2/3 of the book will depend on what kind of tutoring you wish to attack. Probably the best thing here is that so many types of tutoring is addressed. She describes young kids, properly labeled Learning Disabled kids, falsely labeled Learning Disabled kids, adult learners, exam prep students, and other relevant case studies. Yet she doesn’t really go into great depth on any of these issues. I tutor SAT, and I did not learn a great deal about teaching students from this book. Sadly, she doesn’t go into great depth on ACT or graduate exam tutoring. On the other hand, I’ve always thought working with middle school and elementary school students would be tough for me and this book exposes me to the attitudes that have made her a successful tutor.

My suspicion is that this author is trying to vault into educational consulting from the tutoring ranks. It’s a fine line. How do I share enough info to be classified as an expert without sharing so much that I train someone to compete with me? For the most part, strong tutors will gain from a quick skim and then find other resources in either the small business field or the educational literature that are more helpful. Still I believe that this is a helpful book that is worth picking up used or from a library as part of the background research for finding whether you have a calling for tutoring.

3 stars

–SD

postscript: I see that some reviewers are concerned that she bashes teachers. She is a little hard on teachers, but this is somewhat understandable. I don’t think that she was a teacher before she started tutoring [unlike myself and most tutors]. Consequently, she hears mostly from students who have poor teachers and need tutoring. Most students from excellent classes with strong teachers will have their needs met in the classroom and are less likely to cross the author’s path.

3 Stars Useful Information Overshadowed By Author’s Poor Attitude
Shapiro provides much valuable information near the 2nd part of her book as to the practical specifics of starting a tutoring business. However, I find the benefit of this information to be overshadowed by her nasty, anti-teacher attitude. Her comments and tone suggest that teachers are lazy, selfish, and unwilling to help their students outside of the confines of the daily class period. As a former teacher, I am totally offended; that is simply a huge generalization to make about an entire profession. Every profession has its losers, but teaching has no more than any other vocation.

This poor attitude, in addition to the author’s cocky tone, seriously compromised the value of this book. Tutoring is one of the easiest businesses to launch; take the $12.89 this book costs and instead put it toward your classified ad.

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