Update about my teaching company

[Anthares]

Hello, just a (pretty long) update after the last threads I've posted over the last years.
I'm a private online maths teacher at high school level in France.

I've been stuck at 10-15k euros/monthly because I'm basically selling my time for money (went to 160 euros/h maximum and it became my hourly threshold).

I had a huge bottleneck. I studied marketing in my business school + read a few entrepreneur books + had good academic level in high school maths, and that were basically the skills I had when I founded my business in 2020.
I became one of the highest paid private tutors in France in terms of hourly rate, since 2023 but never wanted to teach more than 30 hours per week. I want to scale, not do 60 hours of teaching like some of my high-paid colleagues.

After reading the Fastlane book in 2022, I felt like I had to find the way to scale. I'm also not very interested in doing a teaching school or being a tutor tutoring others how to become tutors.
I want to create a system so that I could teach more students and extend my reach, while staying location independant.

So first I learnt how to code in LATEX and use AI, to create strong academic resources, so that my students can work between lessons. The exercises are gradual, printable and have a qr code with a correction. I did that from 2022 to 2024 and created 600 pages to cover the most important exercises of high school.
AI and having a freelancer who taught me LATEX really helped.

I also started teaching to small groups to multiply my income from 2023. And this year, I teach some groups with 4 students at a time. But it's exhausting because they all are on different chapters and I need to divide my attention and multitask. So next year I will "impose" a common lesson for the whole group, no matter what each student studies in class. I will go faster and deeper than the school program, so after a couple months, the students should be at ease with the system.

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I don't think I was lazy. BUT I've been going too slow and as a result my revenues stagnated and I'm still stuck selling my time. I'm comfortable enough in terms of revenues which made me complacent a bit. Also 70% of my students come from a single platform (the rest by word of mouth). And every year the demand is decreasing, so it gets harder to have a full schedule all year round. It creates some anxiety. Some competitors have been arbitrarily banned from the platform, which would be a nightmare scenario.

I've been procrastinating a lot (for more than 3 years), the creation of my youtube channel. Because I didn't know how to record with a good setting, lacked camera speaking skills, my previous flat was inadequate for having a big whiteboard, and I lacked design skills for thumbnails etc..

BUT all that procrastination shattered when I met a girl at a bachata dancing party. I asked her what she did in life, expecting that she was studying litterature like her other friends at the party. But she was into filming studies ! So I just asked her to come a few times and organize my filming setup and made me comfortable with all the technical setup, I just had stored and forgotten. In a month I started recording. Then this month, I had the same thing regarding the design of logo, widgets, videos intro, pictures with various expressions. In a few weeks I could start thanks to a freelancer.. And now it's good enough. I can publish 2 videos a day and I already have 30 videos ready to publish.
I will try to record 300 to 400 videos during the summer, to cover all the basic notions that will be useful to harmonize the level of my students in my groups next year.

My goal will be to teach 8 students at 35e/each. I consider that if I earn 300e/h, 25 hours a week, I will already have reached my income goal, since I don't live super lavishly. It will be enough to invest in my company, and enjoy my life and many hobbies.

But if I can make more, why not. The nice part of scaling, is that I feel like I progressively remove the "gravity" of money, and then arbitrary hourly figures and salary will matter less and less.

So the big lesson for me, is that advancing in the unknown technically has a huge cost on my motivation. It could litterally take me months, even years to go from an idea to implementing it in real life, because of all the the rumination.
AI helped me a lot at brainstorming and cutting projects in small steps, prioritizing projects.. It made me reduce 95% of the friction between idea and action.
And secondly, I should get help from others much faster. A few hundred euros comes a long way with the right freelancer. It can save me months, if not years, when put strategically at a bottleneck.

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Optimizing the online individual lessons was the level 1 of my company.
Having the group lessons optimized and a big youtube channel that also brings in customers is the level 2 of my company.
(It will probably also be possible to have partner teachers, if I have excess demand and scale a bit this way too, by finding a commission system. But it's more a bonus and not my main objective).

Finally the level 3 of my company.
I dream of building a Duolingo for mathematics, but more gamified, a bit like a RPG. With a very solid maths foundation, so that students can improve a lot, and not just "feel good".
It's once again out of my competences scope. But I have an intern in game design, who is one of my former math students, who is helping me designing the game. And I will find a freelancer who knows how to code maths exercises to learn about the architecture.

I will still spend 80% of my energy recording youtube videos, because just having my group lessons full after the summer holidays will already be a huge upgrade. But gaining some insight fast about the possibilities of building the gamified app has value too.

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So I just wanted to keep you updated once again. It's not easy for me, but the path towards scaling is also opening up my life possibilities and showing me my biases, bottlenecks and weaknesses. It's really transformative.

Ah one last aspect that was key this year. I realized than I'm working in sprints and crashes. Like super productive phases, followed by long unproductive ones. I realized that having a very regular and restorative sleep has a huge impact. If I wake up tired, the day is mostly lost. I won't do much "deep work / improvement work" that day. Also reducing distractions / blocking social media and having my phone on silent mode 99% of the time was key.
Distraction is destruction and is the worst thing in today's world

I am 36 now and sometimes regret not going faster. I feel like I've done good these last years, but also sometimes too complacent with myself with distractions. It's never too late to learn, but the earlier the better, since success compounds !!

I will keep you updated in a year or two, with hopefully great news with my company growth.

Thank you for this forum and the great opportunity it provided. Exchanging ideas and getting inspired from each other is very valuable

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PS: This is actually important. I'm using CHATGPT all the time. It has litterally changed my life, especially in business. I don't miss other chatbots like Gemini or Claude yet.
But I feel like I'm missing out with automation and AI agents.

It's a buzzword. But behind, I'm sure there will be usage for my business. It's just out of my scope of thinking, because it's still new, but I'm eager to adopt new efficient tools. How would you educate on it, in order to know exactly what needs it could solve in your business ? Employ a freelancer to audit your business and watch where it could be of use ?
So the next phase, this autumn is to educate with automation, to see how it can be of use.

 

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