Starting a tutoring business can be fairly simple, in that it can be fully developed online and does not require an office or too many employees. A better way to put it is “Starting a tutoring business can be as simple or complex as you want it to be”.

Difficulties arise when you reach the capacity of your own resource, being the single or a small group of teachers, managers, marketing experts and financial managers of the school. Another elaboration here is that scaling is not necessarily a difficulty, but rather a challenge you can choose to go through.

Either way, here are some tips you get you started on your growth journey you won’t find anywhere else on the web.

When it comes to tutoring businesses, growing does not implicate vertical growth. Often times, trying to up every number on your dashboard will still require creative solutions. At times, on the horizontal dimension. And what better way to think of a creative solution for your case than looking at what the competition is doing?

Some research is always helpful. Especially now when information is readily available online. Any listing website you find, Crunchbase.com, for example, is one-stop shop for a list of companies that match the size and operation of the dreamed next milestone in your school’s path. There’s a free trial and enough time for you to research most of the tutoring schools nearby. A simple Google search can go a long way, if you're willing to sacrifice the details.

But why stop there? Any changes in structure are reactions to the environment. Adaptations, if you will. These adaptations occur when external factors, such as language, culture, economic status and more, bring the existing structure to an adapted state. This does mean that you can get your creativity boost by checking out other schools of the same size and market, but operating in a different cities or ones bigger than yours. Things get even more creative when you explore other countries, if you’re willing to take your research that far.

Hear me out. You will never really know exactly what your customers are after. Sure, it might seem that they are exactly after what they agree to pay for. However, thinking this way puts an end to the continuous strive of providing the best and most unique product or service. Starting a new school with different branding, mode of operation, staff or location, can help you grow a new, different version of what you already have.

At this point, you have probably figured out a certain flow of operating your business and like it is the case with a lot of businesses, you may be reluctant to make big changes, in order to avoid customer loss. However, it’s certain changes that can either make or break the business. And this is where starting a new school comes in.

Considering all the fails and wins of an existing business, starting a new one can already have its way paved. You can easily recycle the same structure, but this time build a whole new audience by developing a list of courses untapped by your first attempt.

This is even more plausible if you have a technical solution in place to manage your first school. Copying processes that are already automated through an LMS is way easier than starting from nothing. When it comes to online schools, having multiple websites with varying SEO and clientele, that still leads to the same teacher resource is a no-brainer.

Technology brings people together like never before. Learners search for courses they are interested in and most of the time, they can easily find an online school or a local one that offers exactly what they need. However, there is a segment of learners that prefers to stay clear of the new and the unknown, limiting themselves to one school and thus limiting themselves to the courses they offer.

Considering this, a B2B opportunity arises, where one school recommends another. The recommendation is based on mutual partnership and trust that the partner school can deliver the desired, but missing course in the same manner, quality and price. For offline schools, a key parameter for recommendations is the location too.

Having another school similar or nearby as a partner, or as the missing puzzle within your courses and services, is also more plausible if things are digital. Imagine having to transfer handwritten applications from one location to the other. Now imagine sending an application file of the same format to another school online that you’ve previously set up an automated one-click workflow with. Much better, isn’t it?

Making improvements to the flow that already works is key to success. However, structures can look very final once they reach a certain amount of stability and age. After that it’s only worth it to introduce new elements or remove old ones if following profit and success are guaranteed.For example, let’s say your school has a website, where the blog is SEO-optimized and this generates visits to your website. From there the visitors are able to learn more about your courses and book a lesson with one of the available tutors. The blog content is already there and there seems to be no need to do much with it. However, sharing the posts as links on social media does not generate the additional page views on top that you think the post deserves and has the potential for.

What could help here is making sure the blog posts are instant. Instant-enabled posts can be easily viewed on social media platforms, such as Facebook and even messengers, such as WhatsApp and Telegram. This an optimization that has proven to generate more page views, however many people could easily render it useless, given that they have to put in effort to optimize something that already seems to work just fine.

These are the kind of things that truly benefit from optimizations, or in other words, taking them to the next step. These are also the kind of things that you either know about or have heard of or you haven’t. Reading every relevant advice you can find or inviting experts for a short term consultation can help you envision the next steps in your journey to make things function better.

Sometimes bringing the thinking behind scaling a business to new dimensions can open you up to various new ideas. It’s all about trial and error, nevertheless, unorthodox approaches at times yield the best results.