Like most of us, I’m in a lot of tutoring Facebook Groups.
At this time of year when we’re headed towards exam time, naturally we start thinking about new students, filling our tutoring slots for next year, our prices for next session and maybe even raising our prices…
And oh man, is there a lot of insecurity out there around pricing: kowtowing to parents unnecessarily, putting up with shitty behaviour and just generally not valuing what we have to offer.
Posts on these are seen way too often:
- Parents messing tutors around by cancelling last minute
- Parents trying to add another child into a tutoring session
- Parents not paying or offering part payments or haggling to reduce the tutoring fee.
- Parents questioning our fee and our professionalism.
One such post this week went like this:
How much are you willing to drop your price when negotiating with parents?
I’ve tutored the same family for 4 years now with no price increase. I want to charge £25 an hour (at the moment I charge £20) She says she’s willing to go to £22 . What should I do ?
This has been my rallying cry for over 3 years now since I set up How to Tutor Online – see this post – and I don’t want to be repetitive but really…
Of course I get the whole ‘nurturing’ teacher thing and that we don’t want to be seen to be in this for money,
but here’s the thing:
ECONOMICS.
The scarcer the resource the more people are going to give up to get it.
The more easily accessible the resource the less people are willing to give up to in order to have something.
So we’d expect to pay more for a ticket to the show Hamilton than for a Macdonalds.
Similarly, a plot of land in the city is worth more than the same sized plot in the country.
And you don’t need to know the maitre d’ at your local Nandos to get a good table
So the reason we think the customer is always right and put up with their shitty behaviour is because we believe that they’re the ones with money.
AND that money is scarce.
MONEY IS NOT SCARCE
There’s about $80 trillion dollars in the world and about 1 billion people looking to make money.
So there’s an abundance of money in the world.
Money’s not the scare resource – YOU ARE
And if you don’t believe that to to be true when it comes to teachers and tutors – read this
Once you come to terms with this truth money has a way of finding you – it just does.
For examples of tutors acing it economically read here and here
We’re agreed, then ? No more skirting ‘difficult’ money matters in our business.
Let’s rewrite the money script:
“Here’s what I’m charging next year, are you in or out? ”
