How do you start a new business?

Tutoring Service

If you can add 2 plus 2 and get 4 most of the time or can read “See Spot run!” then you have what it takes to be a tutor – at least for first graders! And if your skills are more advanced then you can tutor at higher levels. Or you can just hire other people to do all the tutoring for you!

You can tutor almost anywhere. You can tutor online via video, such as on Zoom. You can go to your clients’ homes or they can come to your home. Or you can meet in a coffee shop or a library.

The demand is huge. We hired tutors to help my kids improve their college entrance test scores. One year, when they decided they weren’t learning much at school, we hired a tutor to home school them. The tutor was an MIT college student who had never tutored, but nonetheless was fabulous.

Tutoring is still another example of a very easy-to-start business. Yet you can grow it as large as you want by hiring additional tutors and ramping up your marketing. For example, I sold a career magazine business that I started to Kaplan Inc. Kaplan has grown into a world leader in tutoring with over 12,000 employees and over 1 million students. Like any business you will be more successful if you first learn about business and then plan it carefully. You’ll want to think about things like what type of students to focus on, what subjects to offer, how to set pricing, and how to write a business plan. And you’ll need to learn some of the basics about how to market your business online.