Watching my 'Why I hated my private tutoring business' video, 1 year later

0:00so i created a video over a year ago called why i hated my private tutoring business and it did preparatively well compared to my other videos so i thought it'd be interesting especially at the end of 2021 now to be able to go back and see what i'd said at that point in time whether or not some of those things were still ring true today or if things have changed and i can tell you that there are some things that have definitely changed plus i can tell you that i love my business right now so i'm sure that would be insightful for you guys to see

0:31how i actually came to where i am now where that evolution and change occur and so if you enjoyed this video then make sure you like it make sure you subscribe if you haven't already because on this channel i offer a lot of tutoring advice for tutors and tutoring business owners and i've shared behind the scenes of me growing my businesses as well here we go i 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 site i've never talked about before and how i eventually was able to turn

1:05that around and create a career and a business that i truly love i think this love-hate relationship with my business is aside that i think the interesting here is that at this point of time when i say that i truly loved it i think i'm still learning and re-learning to love my business again whereas i can say now one year later at the end of 2021 i'm in even stronger of a happier place than i was at this point in time there was still a lot of confusion in my head with how i wanted to direct my business where i wanted to go what i wanted to do with

1:40it and so that confusion and that lack of clarity was actually really hard for me especially as somebody who is super future orientated i'm very goals orientated and so i thrive when i know the road map and when i don't it causes a lot of internal suffering and that is something that i've learned about myself over this past year and i wouldn't have been able to articulate it to you at that current point in time so this video is actually a follow-on from an original video i created for my lisa study guys channel where i took i didn't realize that that was a follow-on this is a follow-on from this video so that's

2:17cool 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 and so i was now looking for that next need in this maslow hierarchy of career needs so that's when i decided to build out a private tutoring company i hired my first tutor and it sort of just snowballed from there i'm really enjoying doing this video of re-watching an older video from a year ago because i've completely forgotten this maslow's hierarchy of career needs that i had created for myself that was a way for me to

3:00understand what was going through my head at those current points in times and so rewatching this again is giving me that refresher and just reminding me of actually how far i've come which is awesome however this rapid success in my business was sort of a double-edged sword on one side it was i drew these it's so cute i drew them on my ipad and turned them into a motion thing 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

3:37wasn't creating a business that echoed my own values and needs 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 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

4:14run 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 business i think this is a big one throughout 2021 i've really worked hard on understanding my personal values and how i breathe that into my businesses and so i can see when i created this video that i was still in those early stages of what are actually my values i know what i don't like and that my battery's out and i can't remember what i was saying oh yes so basically i knew what i didn't like which is what i have found to be

4:57the main theme of my life i've been able to find my pathway not through my passion or what i enjoy but more so i would say what i don't like that seems to be a big motivator for me so in pharmacy didn't like the fact that i wasn't making as much money as i could otherwise i didn't like the fact that i had a really restricted schedule and that i had to do nine to five which i understand you know undefined in itself is totally okay it just wasn't necessary right the right thing for me and so that helped me to understand what i did want and so here when i'm talking

5:31about the fact that i knew that i didn't want to sacrifice high quality education for growth and more money it made me think to myself okay well then what do i do now how do i turn something that i don't like into a strength of mine something that i would like instead and so i've actually changed some things here in the sense that i am not hiring as many tutors and i'm not going for that you know 1 000 shooters goal for example which i never had but just to give you an example but instead we're focusing more on hiring high quality tutors who can have more outputs

6:08so for example we're doing more classes now which means that we can have your top quality tutor helping many students as opposed to just one-on-one where those tutors will get capped after having four students and so that's where that quality of the tutor experience starts to lower down especially as your team grows and grows and you have to hire people who may not necessarily suit your criteria because that talent pool will reduce in size but by compensating that by doing classes for us doing more workshops which are larger scale with our best tutors that is the mentality of which i'm moving into 2022 with i've seen so many

6:48businesses start up so many grow and there's 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 enjoyed working closely with people i knew that the more people i 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 so just about that that part is still true definitely love making connections and so in 2021 what we focused a lot on behind the scenes was building out those

7:28processes and systems to support our tutors and to support my core team as well so even though on the surface if you look at our business it may seem like not too much has happened so much has actually happened internally and i'm so proud of how far we've come and leading into next year for our first quarter we'll still be focusing very much so on the internals on our team so that we can ensure that we have a happy team one that is thriving and one where we're all working synergistically towards that bigger goal of where we want the business to be to other companies in the space we are

8:10definitely 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 study guides is free so that's sort of something that i've also had to grapple with with the fact that we're at a premium price point because the other issue in that is that i'm perpetuating the site and the problem in that only those who can afford private tutoring have been getting it whereas

8:46people who can't afford it are left to their own devices so for me this has been a big thing and it is now that i'm feeling a lot more sure of myself i felt very guilty for taking money from those who could afford it in the first place and i felt very guilty for not being able to support those and make more affordable tutoring for those who are of a lower social economic status and i just felt guilty in being a part of the problem and so even to this day the guild still sits there but i think i'm more proactive about it i used to just feel

9:24guilty about it and it was more so subconscious in how it would affect my day-to-day actions whereas now it is very much at the forefront of my mind and very clear that i do feel guilty and that i can admit that i feel guilty about these things very openly as well and we've implemented and we will be implementing a lot next year in order to would it be to say that it's like appeasing my guilt or like helping to what's the word i'm looking for because i know appease is not the right word but that's the only word that can come to mind right now basically to turn it into

10:00something that is a good thing kind of going back to that idea of the things i didn't like and turning that into a strength something that i do like and so here i'm turning the guilt from something that kind of keeps me feeling bad about myself and feeling bad about the situation and bad about the business that i've built in 2021 as part of our values one of them is that sense of community and so we're going to be implementing a lot of new things in order to ensure that people regardless of if they can afford our tutoring services or not can still access our resources and that they're accessible

10:36for these people we're going to be doing a lot more free things for students such as free a study club that we have so we did that earlier this year and that was super fun where we just had like 50 students joined them to a zoom core and everyone just studied at the same time and they just felt connected supported and accountable for their studies and that was just really nice for me to be able to see firsthand that at lsg we can create this sort of space and community for students from all walks of life it's in terms of however they want to study so

11:09i 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've found that i've finally come to terms with everything and i'm understanding the bigger picture girl i can tell you that this year has been the year where i understand the big picture i did not understand the bigger picture back there and so a big part of that has been me finding a business advisor that has been instrumental in helping me shape the direction of my business and also investing in a coach who has just been

11:45an absolute boar of information and critical advice that i needed to hear in order to grow my business in the way that i've grown it and actually it's a big reason why i also started my coaching business tudor boss because i just realized how important it is to have a coach to support you along the way to have somebody bounce ideas off with to have somebody help you cut through the crap and see where you're feeling insecure or the subconscious thoughts that you have about your business such as the guilt that i was talking about i was able to uncover more of that with my coach but also my coach

12:23has been able to help me implement the systems that i needed in my business in order to take it to that next level and so for me in terms of nasa's hierarchy career needs the next need that i needed to satisfy was impact and you can see how everything actually felt true to impact so that i wanted to maintain high quality tutors and that and i think a lot of what i've been doing in 2021 has been about this impact and it will come into fruition more so in 2022 this year has been more about building the foundations for it act on the world wasn't possible

12:59without that i knew i wanted to support thousands if not thousands and hundreds of thousands hundreds hundreds thousands hundreds of thousands of students with the work that i do but i knew that at some point when it comes to private tutoring you're gonna 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 think it's totally possible to have three or four core people impact hundreds and thousands of people especially through prioritization and that's what i've moved into over the past years we've also just hired fern

13:35who will eventually step into the marketing role full time and then peggy will be head of teaching next year so i'm building out my core team the people who i work closest with and that has just been so so fulfilling getting to know my team more getting to work with them more closely and just to build a business with a team of people who also believe in the same vision as you now working on an 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

14:10past 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 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 text 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 and so with journey actually the interesting thing is that we've actually

14:49taken a little bit of a step back from this i mean the study guides are still there and people are using them and they're still doing great but that customized part with adding quizzes and such has been something that has left been left on the back burner just because i've been focusing on essentially fixing my business fixing the internals working on my team developing my team and getting us to a place where we're focused on again the foundations our values making sure that we're living our values making sure that our tutoring experience is super high quality and that the customer service is great rather than overloading us with a lot of

15:27work we've been focusing more on the things that are already existing in the business and basically elevating them in the future i may say that we'll go back to journey again and start building it out but it's not currently at the forefront of what we're doing 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 my vision today has never ever been clearer i would say i look back now and go girl your vision was very confused back then when i did pharmacy it didn't align with my needs of wanting like a secure stable

16:03income that was more than what a pharmacy one 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 life by the way if you like what i have to share on this video yay so i guess this is a summary of this video it actually makes me really happy to watch this video i feel like i should do this every year to see my personal growth and progress and i can see that even from then when i

16:36felt like i knew what i was doing and i had more clarity that the clarity that i have today is just so much more confident in itself and so i can't actually wait until next year having seen what would do in 2022 to reflect back on this video and see how much i've grown then so i hope you guys have enjoyed this video and you found it insightful to see me looking at my own progress and hopefully it might inspire you to potentially you know record a video down for yourself or maybe write down a journal for yourself that you could reflect back on each year to see

17:13how you've grown as a person and so if you enjoyed this video then please like it leave a comment for me on what you thought was most insightful about this video or if you have any questions about it and i cannot wait to see you guys in 2022 thank you so much for joining me on this journey i really appreciate you and i really appreciate the community that's here happy new year and see you then bye