Ben Short 5/28/19 Ben Short 5/28/19

How I Got Booked Out in 10 Weeks

It all begins with an idea.

I decided to leave my full time, salaried job over a year ago. I’d been casting about looking for the next thing, and I finally decided on tutoring. I have over twelve years experience tutoring, so I thought it would be a good try.

My first big problem was how to get students. I had fallen into tutoring, almost by accident, years and years ago. My very first student came when I was still in high school. I was in grade 11 and a family asked me to help their grade 8 son with math. After that, word slowly got out that Ben was a great math tutor. Each year would have a slow drip of referals, and I often found myself saying, ‘no’ to requests for tutoring.

Launching this business, my goal was to replace my old salary as fast as possible, so I needed to get clients fast! Waiting for referrals would not suffice!

This week I have had 29 hours of booked tutoring. At my current price, this equals a pretax income of about $9000, which is more than old salary! Quite a bit more. There is much variance, and perhaps the summer months will go down. That is a future problem, I currently have more than enough students to pay the bills. Nice.

I am still generating leads. I get about three inquiries a week and I am at the place where I will need to hire tutors to fulfill this new demand. This is the beginning of a business.

So how did I do it? I used five methods for generating leads. They are warm outreach, cold outreach, Facebook Ads, Flyers and referrals.

Warm Outreach

I follow the work of Alex Hormozi. In his excellent book $100 Million Leads he says there are basically four ways to get leads: warm outreach, cold outreach, content creation and ads. The quickest and fastest is warm outreach.

Warm outreach means talking to your friends and family. All I did was contact many of the people I know and tell them I was doing tutoring and I was looking for families that needed support in math and sciences.

One of the keys to success in business is achieving volume through hard work. I sat down and did a few hours a day of outreach for a few weeks. I found that in about two hours I could contact 50-60 people. I went through my email list, Facebook list and phone list and looked for people that might know someone who needed help. So if someone lived in a different country or if someone definitely didn’t know anyone who was a family with teens I might not contact them. But I contacted a lot people. Maybe ~1000 people or 1500 people.

This has lead to a number of great leads and maybe 5-6 clients. The people who come by warm outreach have been warm leads, that is they have heard that I’m great and they are usually willing to become clients fast.

2. Cold Outreach

The second method I tried to get clients is cold outreach. This means contacting people you don’t know, like door-knocking or cold calling.

There is a method I had heard from a few tutoring sources about cold outreach. The idea is to find Facebook groups where parents in your local area meet to discuss topics relevant to them. You are meant to join the group, add value by contributing to discussions and then as people get to know you, you can let them know about your tutoring services.

This method did not work for me at all. I found several groups that were like, ‘Burnaby Parents Connect’ or ‘Richmond Mom’s’, but they were not places where the parents of Burnaby connected. Instead they were stuffed with small business posting about their businesses. In most of these groups literally 100% of the posts were business and 1 or 0 of the posts were from actually parents discussing actual parent stuff.

This is ok. In business we need to try things out. I have things that are working, so I don’t need everything I try to be awesome.

3. Facebook Ads

The third method I used to get leads was FaceBook ads. So, this is a whole area that people write books about and get careers in, but you can learn the basics in just a little while. I simply turned on a camera and spoke to the camera about me and my tutoring offer for 90 seconds. I gave Facebook a budget - about $15 a day, and I got a number of people that were interested in my services.

I would say if you are just looking for a few families in your local area then FB ads are worth a shot. Budget some money, maybe $200, and shoot one or two well done videos. If you are advertising in a smaller market, like just one city, and you are a local you should get a few real leads. This method may not be necessary for you at the beginning stages, but it is a skill worth developing if you want to scale a business.

My further experiments with ads actually did much worse than the first one. The first ad was shot for desktop (16:9) and was longer. I did some other ads for phone (up and down) and I added the text at the bottom, but these ads did not do very well.

4. Flyers

The fourth method I used for

5. Referrals

Cold Outreach
FB Ads
Flyers
Referals

Ben Short 5/28/19 Ben Short 5/28/19

Blog Post Title Two

It all begins with an idea.

It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.

Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.