# Why I hated my private tutoring business | Career talk Channel: Lisa Tran Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rku4V-SEx0o Duration: 12 min Language: English Words: 2336 Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/Rku4V-SEx0o --- [0:00] In this video, I'll share with you my career journey. How I did pharmacy, ended up hating it, and then how I was able to become a business owner by doing private tutoring. And then how I ended up hating that as well, which is a side I've never talked about before. And how eventually was able to turn that around and create a career and a business that I truly love. I think this love-hate relationship with my business is a side that I haven't really heard many people talk about in their own journeys. So, I hope to share this with you in hopes that it gives you some food for thought [0:30] when it comes to your own career pathway so that you can learn from my mistakes and sort of get to where you want to be sooner. Hi, I'm Lisa. In case you're new here, I'm a business owner, an edtech entrepreneur, and I share with you my self-development journey on this channel. And I hope that in creating these videos, I'm able to, you know, help you avoid the mistakes that I've made, but also to encounter challenges together and sort of grow through this journey as a community. So, if this resonates with you, then please subscribe and hit that bell button so you get notifications from me every [1:01] Sunday-ish. So, this video is actually a follow-on from an original video I created for my Lisa Study Guides channel, where I talk about the Maslow's hierarchy of career needs. This is not an official thing, but something that I've come up with to help me understand my feelings, my love-hate relationship with my career as I've progressed over the past 10 years in the workforce. You probably already know Maslow's hierarchy of needs. You've got needs that need to be satisfied from the bottom of the pyramid in order to satisfy the next need that comes following that. And so, for me, I felt that I had a similar needs criteria when [1:41] it came to my career. My personal structure was money, lifestyle, and impact. And I'm going to explain this in detail with you now while I'm sharing with you my journey. So, I've talked about me hating pharmacy before, so I won't go into detail about here. Basically, I did pharmacy because of my parents and it promised a secure, stable income. So, it satisfied the most basic career need for me, which was money. But eventually, I realized I needed more. I wanted a better lifestyle for myself and that was through private tutoring. I could move into private tutoring because it also paid more than pharmacy, meaning that I was able to satisfy that first [2:15] money need while obtaining that second career need, which was lifestyle. I love the idea of being able to work my own hours, to dictate my hours, and to basically take off days throughout the week if I wanted to. I could potentially take off a Wednesday instead work on a Saturday. It was really just up to me and I loved this idea of creating the lifestyle that I wanted. But where I'll pick off is basically when I was around 24 and when I started my private tutoring business. Within my first two or three months, I realized that more students were asking me for tutoring help than I could personally support. I [2:51] started to see this more as a business opportunity rather than just a gal who was doing private tutoring as a thing just to support her lifestyle. And so, this need that I've required was satisfied. And so, I was now looking for that next need in this Maslow's hierarchy of career needs. So, that's when I started to build out a private tutoring company. I hired my first tutor and it sort of just snowballed from there. I hired five tutors in my first year and then an additional, I think, 15 or 10, maybe scale it back, maybe 10 in the following year. And then following that, another 20 tutors. However, this [3:33] rapid success in my business was sort of a double-edged sword. On one side, it was amazing. I was just following what customers wanted and creating a surface that would cater for this demand. But on the other side of the sword, I was running into all these problems that made me extremely unhappy. And innately, I felt like I I creating a business that echoed my own values and needs. This was compounded by the fact that I didn't [3:55] actually know what this next need was. So, I spent the following two to three years from when I was 26, 27 to 30, really trying to figure out why I was so unhappy in this private tutoring business. Here are the reasons why I didn't like my private tutoring business. The first thing was scaling. It's not impossible to scale a private tutoring business and have to have thousands of tutors and thousands of students, but at some point you're going to find that you're going to reduce the quality of tutors that you have. You know, there's only a certain amount of a talent pool that you can pull from. And [4:31] after that, if you are prioritizing the interest of growing your business first, you have to make that sacrifice of finding lower quality tutors, whatever that might mean to you. So, that might mean tutors who don't have as great credentials, tutors who don't have as much experience, um tutors who aren't in locations that you're looking for. So, things like that. So, when I started to run into that issue, I realized, "Hang on a minute. Like, I really value having high-quality education, and I don't want to sacrifice that just to scale a [5:05] business." The second problem I really had to grapple with was how that exponential growth I was looking for in my business, I just didn't really think it was possible one because, you know, sacrificing for lower quality tutors, but also with the amount of tutors that you hire on board, one tutor will only ever be able to take on a maximum capacity of students. So, let's just say if on average one tutor can take on board four students, you're going have to have to constantly hire one tutor for every four students that you bring on board in your business. And this was something for me that as scaling a business just didn't [5:47] feel right. I knew that if I decided to scale my business in this way, the profit margin would also reduce over time. So, I would have to add on more admin support. I'd have to add on more customer support. So, it sort of didn't really make sense for me. And because of that small profit margin, in terms of a private tutoring business, you need to have it scale on really really big scale in order to create a profitable business from it. This was very much a personal conflict that I had. You know, I've seen other people who've gone out there and who've grown amazing private tutoring [6:21] businesses and they've completely scaled and just blown up and they've done great. I've also seen a lot of people who've grown really quickly and then have actually gone and failed. So, they went into liquidation and just yeah, their company went bankrupt. So, over the past 10 years sort of in the space of private tutoring, I've seen so many businesses start up, so many grow, and then so many fail at the same time. I felt that innately there was a reason not to want to scale and to keep things small and steady. And that's also because for me, I really enjoy working closely with people. I knew that the more people I [7:01] onboarded, the less I'd be able to build that personal connection with them. This has therefore meant that my private tutoring has stayed at a premium price point. So, relative to other companies in the space, we are definitely at a higher rate, but only at this higher rate are we able to then actually support all our tutors, offer the best customer service that we can, funnel a lot of that money into creating all the free resources that we have on our YouTube channel. Effectively means that 90% of the resources at least at StudyPug is free. So, that's sort of something that I've also had to grapple with with the fact that [7:38] we're at a premium price point because the other issue in that is that I'm perpetuating the cycle and the problem in that only those who can afford private tutoring are then getting it. Whereas the people who can't afford it are left to their own devices in terms of however they want to study. So I sort of had to deal with all this conflict in my brain and sort of go, "Okay, what am I going to do?" And it's only really in the past year or so that I found that I've finally come to terms with everything and I'm understanding the bigger picture. And so for me, in terms [8:14] of Maslow's hierarchy of Korean needs, the next need that I needed to satisfy was impact. And you can see how everything actually relates back to impact. I knew that I wanted to maintain high-quality tutors and that impact on the world wasn't possible without that. I knew I wanted to support thousands if not thousands and hundreds of thousand hundreds hundred thousands hundreds of thousands of students with the work that I do, but I knew that at some point it comes to private tutoring you're going to run out of tutors whether or not they're high-quality or low-quality. I also knew that I wanted to create a big impact but with a small team because I [8:51] think it's totally possible to have three or four core people impact hundreds and thousands of people especially through productization. And that's what I've moved into over the past year or so and I'm just so stoked. I'm now working on app called Journey where I take all the knowledge that I've learned from private tutoring, from my time studying English all the way back into high school, from my own tutoring experiences over the past 10 years and I've culminated this into a resource in this app where it would be at an affordable price and students would be able to access high-quality education because the resources created on there [9:29] are only by the best of the best but also we're creating a customized learning pathway for students. So what this means is that students can access tech guides, they can access videos, audio files, quizzes, in whatever learning style they prefer and that they study best with, they can use that. And we're already making such a huge impact with my work that I know that I'm now on the right track and my vision has never ever been clearer. And I can tell you that I can only truly be able to articulate all this now as a 30-year-old, as somebody who has gone through sort of my 25 to 30 years just [10:06] being completely confused, not being sure of where to head next, not understanding why I hated my business so much, but now I can say that I understand my values extremely clearly. I want to have that impact on the world and that's what I'm striving for now. So, the reason why I'm telling you all this is because with Maslow's hierarchy of career needs, I think when you understand what your values are and what your needs are, you're able to then sort of align your career to exactly what's going to be fulfilling and meaningful for you. And I'm sharing this with you because I don't want you to go through [10:45] years of your life just sort of grappling and struggling with this inner turmoil where you know that what you're doing isn't quite right, but you're not sure how to get out of it, you're not sure what you should do about it. I hope that by sharing with you my journey, it's sort of showing you that, you know, I've gone through it, too, and it's definitely a struggle and a challenge, but when you're on that other side and you have a clear picture of what you want, what your values are, what your needs are, then you're going to be in a really good space. When I did pharmacy, [11:19] it didn't align with my needs of wanting like a secure, stable income that was more than what a pharmacy or a pharmacist earned. Then when I went into private tutoring, I had the lifestyle and I was really happy with that, but then I wanted more. And so I was looking for that next thing and that's Impact. This is very conspiracy like, by the way. If you like what I have to share on this video, please thumbs up to let me know that this is the type of video that you are after and that you'd like for me to to discuss more. If you have any questions, please [11:52] leave them down in the comment section below. I'd love to start a conversation with you about where you are on your career journey and answer any questions you have about mine. Otherwise, if you're interested in my monthly musings, then make sure you join my subscribers list where I send out one monthly email to you just sharing with you new food for thought ideas that I think might be interesting for you to know. And I'll link you to a playlist of videos where I've talked more about my journey as an entrepreneur and somebody who's just figuring it out as I go. Thanks so much [12:23] for watching, guys. Bye. --- About this transcript Read from YouTube's own caption track and laid out by ViewRank AI (https://viewrankai.com). ViewRank AI finds the videos already beating a creator's own average on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube Shorts, transcribes them from the audio itself in more than 60 languages, and turns what worked into new ideas and scripts. Free transcript tools, no account needed: https://viewrankai.com/tools How to read any video this way: https://viewrankai.com/llms.txt