Already at Capacity? How Tutors Grow Without Adding More

Sumantha (: 00:00

Some of the biggest income jumps I've ever seen a tutor make came from subtraction, not from adding more students or more hours or more offers, but from working out what to stop doing. If that sounds back to front, it's because almost everything written about growing a tutoring business tells you the opposite. Grow means add, more students, more hours, more marketing, more, more, more. Over the next 20 minutes or so, I want to show you with real examples from tutors I've worked with. why that instinct is often the very thing that keeps you stuck at the same ceiling year after year. Because there's a conversation I have with teachers more often than almost any other, and it usually starts with something like this. I want to grow my tutoring income this year, but I don't know where I'd fit it in. I'm already teaching as many hours as I sensibly can, and I can't continue like this. My evenings are full, weekends are starting to creep, sometimes it's phrased a bit differently. I want the business to be bigger, but I'm at capacity or I know I need to earn more, but my diary is already packed.

Sumantha (: 01:00

The one I've heard probably the most often in the last few months is I just can't see how to grow from here without burning out. So if any of this sounds familiar, this episode is for you. new here, I'm Samantha and I'm a business mentor for tutors and education business owners. Before that, I was a qualified business trainer and a teacher and right now I'm also a tutor myself. I work mainly with experienced tutors who want to earn well, protect their time and build a sustainable business that supports their life rather than dominates it. And that's really what today is about because... Almost everything I do with tutors comes back to designing the business on purpose, rather than letting it grow by accident or letting it just creep forward on its own. And there's one belief that gets in the way of that more than any other. And that belief is that growth means adding. It's so embedded in how most of us think that it doesn't even really feel like a belief anymore. It feels like the truth.

Sumantha (: 02:00

So today I want to hold it up to the light and ask whether it's actually serving you. So let's start with the tension between wanting to grow and having nowhere to put the growth. If that's how you're feeling, if that tension is there, then your instinct is not wrong. You are at capacity. The diary really is full or the hours are really accounted for. Or it might be that your headspace is full. You don't have the headspace to grow or to take in anymore. The default move when someone hits this wall is to look for ways to squeeze more in. Maybe I could start an hour earlier. Maybe I could add one more teaching day to the week. Maybe I could finally crack group classes. Maybe I could be more disciplined with my time and so on. And sometimes tweaks like that do help. I'm not going to pretend that every diary is optimally packed because most of us, well, they're not. But there are a couple of things that really matter. If the only lever you're pulling is a way to find more to do, like the way to fit more in, you're going to hit the same wall again in a few months.

Sumantha (: 03:00

Because your ceiling isn't really about the diary, it's about the shape of the business that's filling the diary. But it's also about how we view our goals. A really important piece of work I did in July in the quarterly road mapping session with my tutor clients was to properly sit down and analyse how they work. How do you think? How do you behave? How do you operate? and what are the demands in your life? Because whenever we sit down to set goals, we so commonly set them based on an aspirational version of ourselves, the version that we wish we were, the thing that we keep meaning to do. Instead of doing that, I encourage people to just embrace who they actually are and to set goals according to that so that they're far more likely to achieve them. So when we tie this into what we're talking about today, growth and finding ways to grow, it might be that you say, right, I need to make group classes work or I need to hire tutors.

Sumantha (: 04:00

But the reason why that isn't happening might also be because your heart's not really in it. Maybe you're trying to push something that you think will solve a problem when the reason you're not motivated is that it actually takes away your fulfilment. It isn't something you'll enjoy. So we need to factor that in as well. When we're thinking about growth, we need to factor in who we are. how we work best, what we actually want alongside designing things on purpose. So that isn't simply a case of squeezing more in whenever we can. There's actually a structural side to this. If your business currently needs every pound of income to come through one of your hours, then of course you feel stuck. There are only so many hours. That's maths, not mindset. The way out isn't to find more hours because there aren't any. is to change the relationship between your hours and your income. And that change almost always starts somewhere unexpected. It starts with what you take away. Now, just a quick one before I carry on.

Sumantha (: 05:00

If that idea on its own that the way past the ceiling is to change the relationship between your hours and your income is useful to you, then follow or subscribe wherever you are watching or listening. That way the next episode will find you without you having to remember to come looking for it. Right, let's get back to it. When a tutor starts working with me one-to-one, they usually come in expecting us to talk about what to add, a new offer, a new marketing strategy, a new structure. a new revenue stream. And we do that, we do get there in time, but it's almost never where we start. Where we start is a much harder question and it surprises a lot of people. What can you stop doing? I asked some version of that in the very first few sessions with almost every client and I ask it for a very specific reason. A tutor who's already at capacity can't absorb anything new. There's no space for a new offer, for example, to live in. There's no time for a new marketing strategy or more marketing effort.

Sumantha (: 06:00

There's no room for a fresh idea to take root because the system, their cognitive load is heavy, it's full. So before we can talk about growth, we have to make space for it. And making space means being honest about what's currently sitting in the diary that shouldn't be there anymore. Now, I want to be specific about this because I think that it's important you hear real examples than abstractions. One of my clients had a small cohort of long-term students, all kept at rates that she'd set about three or four years ago. She couldn't bring herself to have the pricing conversation, so she kept the status quo. That one decision was costing her thousands of pounds a year in underpriced hours. When we looked at it properly, we realized those hours were also some of her most tiring because the dynamic with those clients had actually drifted over time and she was getting less joy from the work. Stopping those hours, gradually and professionally, didn't shrink her business. It freed up several hours a week that we used for a new office she'd wanted to build for two years, but could never find the time for.

Sumantha (: 07:00

Another client was spending roughly five hours a week preparing bespoke resources for every student she taught, every single one. Her students loved her for it, but it was slowly killing her energy for the work. When we audited it, we found that most of these resources could be templated, simplified, or in some cases not actually made at all. And there was no drop in result for her students. Getting those five hours back didn't mean she taught five more hours. It meant she had time to think about the business, which she just hadn't had in years. A third client was running three different pricing tiers because she had kind of kept inherent pricing and so on. And she also had two different lesson lengths. And she was trying to offer bespoke packages on top. She was basically trying to please everyone. Every new inquiry became a 15-minute custom quote. And when I say 15 minutes, I'm probably being generous. She stopped. I got her to stop. And she picked one signature structure, priced it clearly, and retired the rest.

Sumantha (: 08:00

Her inquiry conversation went up, her admin dropped, and within a few months, her income was higher than when she'd been offering so many different things to lots of different people. In every one of those cases, growth came from subtraction. And this is the pattern that I really want to highlight because it's one of the most under discussed ideas in any industry, especially in general hustle culture that's obsessed with adding. Now, there's an idea that I come back to often when I'm working with tutors. You can't add something meaningful to a business that's already full. You can only add that to a business that has space. And when I say full, I don't just mean that your timetable is full. Maybe it's not, and maybe that's the problem you're trying to solve. I mean that your head is full as well. The time where you're working on the business or doing admin or whatever it might be and all the different demands in your life, you can't add when all of that is also full. And most tutors who come to me are in that situation.

Sumantha (: 09:00

They just don't have space. They don't have the head space. They're struggling. Now, often, they assume that they're badly organised, that they don't manage their time very well. But usually that isn't the case. Us educators, we are usually very capable and actually very organised, especially professionally, and we're already managing far more than we even realise. Recently, I asked one of my clients to send me an audit of their time. I got them to track it for about a week. And all the things that they were doing with all the times that they were spending on it, you know, we've got to identify what were time drains. Just we create this honest picture of where their time goes day to day and week by week. And they even surprise themselves at just how much they were doing. So they weren't, they're not underperforming. They're just full. Their time and headspace full, full of their tutoring and the admin, full of the unspoken expectations that have accumulated over the years, full of the habits they've built over time and kept adding to without ever pruning that list.

Sumantha (: 10:00

full of the marketing they feel they should be doing. So even when they're not on top of it, it's still filling their headspace. It's still filling their to-do list, full of the resources they feel they should be producing and the stories they feel they should be telling on Instagram, let's say. So when they come to me and ask, how do I grow from here? The honest answer is that you can't, not from this point, not from that fullness. Growth from fullness leads to burning out. It leads to feeling bad about yourself because you're not doing the things you think you should be doing. So where we start is by creating a clearing. And from that clearing, growth becomes possible in a way that it just wasn't before. This is a piece that so often gets missed. When we read business content online or listen to podcasts or webinars, the advice is almost always about what to add, a new funnel, a new platform, a new product, a new lead magnet. And I'm really intentional about this. In my recent free webinar where I talked about how to get your marketing to do the heavy lifting, I very deliberately said to tutors, I want you to cut down what you're doing.

Sumantha (: 11:00

I want you to focus on doing one thing and doing it really well. Because anything you choose to do needs space to think about and space to implement. If you don't have headspace, if you don't have the time, it just sits on your to-do list and stresses you out even more. So that work of figuring out what to stop, it's not glamorous, but it's very freeing. It doesn't necessarily make a good Instagram post. It won't sell a course, but... In my experience, it's the single most important piece of work any of us can do, especially at the stage where growth feels impossible because there's no space left for it. I'm just going to pause here for a quick moment because everything I've just described, the clearing, the honest look at what to stop, the space that needs to come before growth is the exact work I do with tutors inside my bespoke one-to-one accelerator.

Sumantha (: 12:00

It's a six-month program and it's open right now. So if you've been listening to this thinking, yes, I want this, but I can't see my own business clearly because I'm too close to it, I'm on the inside, I need someone from the outside looking in, then this is the exact point where we should talk. because it's far easier to spot where that clearing can happen when there's someone standing on the outside, but also right beside you, helping you through it. So if that sounds like you, come and have a chat with me. It's a free call, no obligation, just a proper conversation about your business and whether my one-to-one program is the right next step for you. The link is in the description. So what does it look like when a tutor grows their business without doing more? I'll give you a few patterns that I've seen play out repeatedly because it can be quite hard to accept that you can grow without doing more. The first relates to pricing. It's really where you think about changing your pricing so it reflects your actual expertise, the impact that you make, the actual results you produce for your students and with your students, and the actual value that you're bringing at this stage in your career.

Sumantha (: 13:00

For lot of tutors that I work with, their rates haven't actually changed in a long time. Often they're still stuck at the rate that's helped them leave the classroom, that was quite a while ago, to match their teaching salary and they kind of got stuck there. We so often outgrow the structures we put in place. A thoughtful pricing change can create a really significant income jump without you increasing your hours. So straight away you're earning more but you're not working more to make that money. One of the resources that I share with my one-to-one clients is an earning and timetable tracker, where they map their current situation visually so they can see the gaps. And then we build an ideal one where they get to explore and play with the numbers to see what impact it would make. The second is looking at your offer or your offers. A lot of teachers have a main offer, but sometimes some side ones too, like resources or the odd one-off masterclass.

Sumantha (: 14:00

What really helps is taking a bird's eye view and reshaping into what I call an offer suite. You have a signature offer, let's say, and everything around it is interlinked so that everything feeds into it and sells each other, so to speak. You're not under pressure to constantly be selling these different things. Now, this can sometimes look like you're shrinking what you offer, but a business almost always earns more from something really clear, something you get known for, something that's kind of a signature. than from a scattered set of half developed ones that don't really feel connected. A clear offer attracts the right clients. Scattered offers attract whoever happens to walk past in that moment. third one is something I call a capacity redirection. You take the hours that you currently spend on low value activity and move them to higher value activity. It's really powerful because you reduce what you're doing, but you use your expertise in a way that actually moves the needle. So that low value activity might be admin that could be systemized, automated or delegated or even scrapped.

Sumantha (: 15:00

It might be marketing that isn't working. It might be a client relationship that has now drifted beyond what makes sense. Redirecting those hours rather than adding to them is often how real income growth happens. because you free up the time and then you spend that freed up time on the things that you're already doing that's working, but you're now doing them better. The fourth, now this one is the one that most teachers don't see until they're quite deep in the work, is designing something that earns income independently of your hours. I don't necessarily mean something that earns money without you, something not reliant on you at all, because that isn't the direction everyone wants to go in. I mean designing something that isn't quite so transactional as if I work I get paid and if I don't work I don't. For some people that might look like group teaching with a structured payment plan so that they're paid across the whole year. For some it might mean growing a team of tutors and for some it might mean something hybrid, something creative that still gives them the fulfilment they want without feeling insecure that everything rests on every hour that they work.

Sumantha (: 16:00

This is where we move into more advanced territory. designing a business rather than letting it happen to us, rather than letting it just grow organically. And it's really impactful. It can future-proof your business. But it almost never works if it's bolted on top of a full diary or a full schedule or a full headspace. If the clearing has happened, though, that's where we can welcome this stage, and it's where the real income growth and the longevity lives. So notice that in none of those patterns is the move to do more of what you're currently doing. The move is to do something different with what you've already got or to put it another way, you're doing what you're doing, but you're doing it better. You're scrapping the things that aren't making a real impact. So what you're doing here through this deeper work, the clearing and the designing, and by the way, stay till the end because I've got something for you that's free for this.

Sumantha (: 17:00

You're addressing the bottlenecks in your business. You're stepping out of the situation where your income only scales when you personally put more in. where if you work more you earn more and if you work less you earn less. There'll always be some relationship there, up to a point, but you aren't working quite so much like that and things start to feel more robust and safer. The truth is that most tutoring businesses, even very successful ones, are run as bottleneck businesses. Without the owner putting in the hours, they can't make very much money. And for a while that can work, but it needs to be temporary if you're on a path towards growth. longevity and future proofing your business. A bottleneck business can earn well if the owner is really good at what they do and if they work really hard. But if that isn't how you want to live and work in the long term, you need to redesign it. And you're not adding more, but by doing things more intentionally. Because those businesses have a ceiling and the ceiling is your own capacity.

Sumantha (: 18:00

I've been in that position. In fact, to a point I'm in that position in my own tuition business. And to be honest, I'm at peace with it because it's not one that I want to grow, which is why I'm not changing it. I'm an independent tutor. If I teach, I earn. If I don't teach, I don't. But if that were my main business, the one that my future depended on, I would certainly be redesigning it. So before I give you somewhere to start today, I want to really hone in on something. It's easy to listen to an episode about stopping and subtracting and assume that it's about doing less for the sake of doing less. It isn't. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about being really intentional about your decisions and opening up space. Because when you finally have room to think about your business rather than only room to run it, the ideas that have been buried under the noise also start to surface. ideas you maybe had years ago and you never quite acted on.

Sumantha (: 19:00

Offers that really excite you, a picture of what the business could look like in two years time. Something you actually have time to plan and think about. So the thinking, the real thinking that gets unlocked here, it's not the tidying, but it's the room that that tidying actually makes space for so that your best ideas come up for air. And this is where the growth really comes from. So I'm going to give you somewhere to begin. I'm not going to pretend this work is easy to do alone because it's really difficult to spot the opportunities for those clearings when you're working inside a business. It's the reason why I have business coaches of my own. They can see things I can't. But I do want to give you a starting point so you can take some action rather than this episode just being an idea. The place to start is an honest audit of what you're currently doing, not what you think you should be doing, what you're actually doing week by week and ideally, if you can, hour by hour. There are some really good free tools for this, like Toggle, where you can just click Start when you sit down to do a piece of work and it tracks your hours for you.

Sumantha (: 20:00

I'll pop the link to it in the show notes. However, however you choose to do it, do the audit so you really understand how you're currently working. Once you've done that, look at the list and ask yourself a question. And that question isn't like, is this working? Because that's too easy to answer yes to, since we're very good at justifying our own decisions. Instead ask, if I was designing this business from scratch today, knowing everything I know now, would I actually put this in? That's a very different question because you're filtering everything through whether it's genuinely needed in your business. It's so easy to get in the habit of doing things or thinking you should do things and stay till the end because I mentioned it earlier, but I do have something free for you that will facilitate this process. Now some of what you're doing will stay, it should stay, it's working, it's aligned, it's producing real value for you and your clients.

Sumantha (: 21:00

But some of it, and this is the honest bit, will fail the test. You'll notice that maybe you've kept an offer out of habit that isn't really working, or maybe you've kept a pricing tier because you couldn't face the conversation. Admin that you know you could streamline or get rid of or automate or delegate, those are your leverage points. That's where the space lives. So I'm going to leave you with three questions to take away and I'd really encourage you to take them slowly rather than rush through them. The first is if I could take one thing out of my business this week, one commitment, one offer, one client, one habit, what would create the most relief right now? The second is what am I doing out of inertia rather than strategy? What would I miss if I stopped it? And the third is, which is probably the most important, if I had five hours back next week, Clear of teaching, clear of admin, what would I use those hours for? What does that answer tell me about the business I actually want to be building and what kind of life I want it to make room for?

Sumantha (: 22:00

That third one is my favourite because it's almost always is a window into what the next chapter of your business wants to look like. The thing that surfaces when you imagine having that time back is usually the exact thing that's been waiting for you to make space for it. Now, holding these three questions in your head is one thing and actually working through your whole business that way is another. So I've made something for you to help you do exactly that. And it's completely free. It's called The Clearing and it's a short guided audit that walks you through your business the way that I would walk a client through it in those first couple of sessions, looking for the things that fill your diary that you'd never really choose to do again if you were designing from scratch. It's the natural next step from this episode and it'll be really useful for you, whether you ever choose to work with me or not, it will be a really great way for you to start that clearing.

Sumantha (: 23:00

So to get it, the link is in the show notes, or you can go straight to www.upgradeyoureducationbusiness.com forward slash the clearing. That's www.upgradeyoureducationbusiness.com forward slash the clearing. Link is in the description. So I'll leave you with one thought. Growth doesn't have to mean doing more. In the business that I see, grow most meaningfully, it often means doing less on purpose so that what remains has room to become something bigger than it could have been before, room to develop into something that really fulfills you. Thanks as always for giving me your time and I'll be back on Wednesday with our short PS episode that isn't on YouTube but you will hear it if you're listening on a podcast player. You'll hear from me then.