Seth Godin gives an idea : “From personal YouTube videos to particularly poignant and honest presentations or direct and true sales pitches,
the humility, freshness and transparency that comes with an honest
performance might actually be better than what a professional could do.You must connect in a personal, lasting way that matters. That’s
difficult, but the professionals have no chance to compete with you.”

I believe small friendly tuition center is the next big thing in our business.

I had a conversation with CEO of tutorz.com Dirk Wagner. Tutorz.com is a search engine dedicated to tutoring with 16,000 registered tutors in United states.

Kapil : Dirk, welcome to the show. How tutorz.com helps a freelance tutor or
somebody who is planning to start tutoring ?

Dirk :From my own experience as a former tutor I know how painful it can be
for freelance tutors to advertise for tutoring services. Posts on bulletin boards are often ignored, fliers are thrown away and ads in newspapers are costly. Also, tutors tend to be more dedicated to their
fields of expertise than to promoting a tutoring service. This is where Tutorz comes in. It removes a tutor’s pain of getting in touch with students and parents. By doing so we empower tutors to focus on
the thing they like best: tutoring.

Now there are many tutor directory services around on the Internet.They innovate by integrating maps, certifying tutors and or by being a one-stop-shop for its clients. It is a great pleasure to me to see such diversity because this is sign of a healthy, free and innovative market segment. Tutorz also tries to form partnership with other tutoring companies as this for mutual benefit to both the companies and their customers.

Tutorz differentiates from the other directory services primarily through 2 means: vertical search and quality leads. Most users know how work with search engines and know how to refine the search
results. This paradigm enables students to hone-in quickly to the best tutor for their needs. Secondly, there are a lot of spammers out there who use these directory services to cheaply advertise things from cars to Viagra. Or even worse they trick parents to pay in advance for no
service (Nigerian scam). Tutorz combats this spam by employing machine learning techniques that filter spam. The result is high-quality leads forward to our tutors.

Tutorz has interviewed a lot of our tutors and students. Tutors want are motivated and reliable clients. Students and parents on the other hand look for qualified and safe tutors. While Tutorz has addressed the tutor’s needs we plan on implementing a rating service to asses the qualities of tutors. We also plan on doing a background check on our tutors as well as verifying the references of tutors. The result is a measure that enables parents to quickly assess the quality and
safety of our tutors.

Question Also, i found a resource centre for parents and tutors on tutorz.com.

Dirk Thank you for noticing. At Tutorz we know that parents and students have many questions about how to come about finding the right tutor.In our resource section we try to provide our clients with some answers they might have. We compiled these resources from our own
experience and from what we’ve learnt though our interaction with parents and students.

Kapil : Dirk, there are multiple tutoring directory services coming up every
quarter. And I have seen products trying to innovate and differntiate by integrating maps , providing end to end services like payment support to tutors etc, certifying tutors is one anohter challenge. Where do you see this tutoring search space going forward ?

Dirk In the short-run I see this (and other market segments) head south due
to the recession here in the U.S. Unless these tutoring services earn a profit or are well-funded they will become defunct. It’s a little bit lit the Cambrian explosion in our Earth’s history. Evolution tried
a lot of different way of how life could be and only the most successful species survived. I see the market space to consolidate.

For the long run I feel that the tutoring space has a tremendous future as we are heading into the Knowledge Society. More and more knowledge workers are needed while monotonous tasks are automated. Skilled professionals demand an even higher premium. Tutoring has become an indispensable component of education, thus it has a bright future ahead.

Kapil: Suppose if I am mandarin chinese language etutor based in china, Can I use
tutorz.com services ?

Dirk Good question. Mandarin is now a popular language in the U.S. We
record more and more search for Chinese/mandarin in our search history. While we recognize the importance of etutoring, we are today mainly geared for in-person tutoring in the U.S. This, however will change in the near future. Our search & match technology can be adopted for international use. I am sure our users will welcome these efforts.

Kapil There are lot of small tutoring companies that offer test prep products or
k-12 tutroing and these companies dont have big marketing budgets. How something like tutorz.com helps these companies ?

DirkThis is another good question. Parents with deep pockets always can go
to Kaplan, Huntington, Princeton, Sylvan etc. And there is nothing wrong with that if you have the money. At Tutorz we use technology to provide an efficient, safe and high quality match between student and tutor. By doing so we eliminate a substantial amount of costs (personal attention, phone calls, consulting). And the consumers is who ultimately bears these costs. Tutorz is a value-oriented tutoring match service. And we can see that now economically challenging times many parents search for alternatives and often arrive then at Tutorz.com.

Kapil: I feel mobile and location based services on platforms like iphone or
android is definitely something that tutoring directory services can look into.

Dirk: Yes, I have already an Android phone and love it. A Tutorz search
application on that platform is a great idea. And I heard Google made
it easy to develop on mobile platforms.

Kapil: One more question dirk, what will be your advice to somebody who is just
starting a tutoring on part time or full time basis ?

Dirk : First I will congratulate that tutor. Tutoring is both a rewarding profession and a good deed for society. My next advice is to talk to an tutor who has experience with tutoring. (BTW, you can even contact our tutors in that matter as well.) There are always differences depending on where you live. And my third advice is stop adverting in newspapers, blackboards and fliers as I feel they are mostly a waste of time and money. Go online!

While online marketing budgets for tutoring companies are rising, marketers are spending money entirely on PPC(pay per click) products like google adwords. The effort and expenditure required to make websites search engine friendly website is something most people are not comfortable with. Calculating the ROI for pay per click campaign is very simple as compared to estimating ROI to make a website search engine friendly. Also, PPC creates instant results while SEO(search engine optimization) might take some time to generate some measurable results.

I have seen tutoring companies going to these new age digital agencies and end up using a PPC product only. PPC is the best selling solution sold by many agencies as they give measurable results to their clients. Most of the companies in higher education feel that the more they spend on google adwords, the more visibility they will get. This somehow doesn’t work in long term but I think this is mentality of many people in our industry.

I think some test prep companies are not able to understand the real value of having good organic search results in long term. Also, paid search or online banners are known routes to marketers in terms of its similarity with many traditional mediums like newspapers.

I like PPC & Google adwords but I would like to see the understanding of Search engine optimization and serious allocation of effort and budget to search engine optimization when it comes to devising a long term online marketing strategy. The problem is that small mom and pop tuition centres have started playing the PPC game and losing, while not seeing the benefits of SEO due to either lack of technical understanding or these digital agencies still are playing the dirty game of recurring revenues.

Some small tuition businesses rely too much on word-of-mouth strategies as their only form of business development. One reason for this kind of thinking is the perceived lower cost of WOM than mass communication mediums such as advertising or print and electronic collaterals.

I found this amazing diagram in Jay Ehret blog. According to him, everything comes down to one basic principle : Customer Experience.

“The focus should be on creating remarkable customer experience first, which earns you both loyalty and word of mouth. The customer experience dynamic is the engine that gets new customers in your door and then keeps them there longer.”

A personal story from a new tutoring company. Manager hired a good science teacher for his evening batch class. After few days, three students came to the manager and told him,” This new teacher is not good. We don’t like him.” If you’ve ever been in this kind of situation, you know how frustrating it is. You work hard to find a good teacher and after few days, some students feel that the new teacher should be replaced.

There can be many reasons for this kind of conflict. But, one thing that can be done to improve this situation is to have an objective feedback process. I have seen feedback sessions that feels like a true false quiz show. Saying, “I don’t like this teacher,” is not feedback. Tell me WHY you don’t like it. And most students are not comfortable doing that. In order to develop that comfort level, we need to have multiple feedback channels like a feedback box somewhere or online form where students can give individual teacher feedback with clearly stated reasons in a pre designed template. Following up with these feedback forms, having one to one sessions with the students and understanding their issues from their viewpoint is very critical for long term success of student with the course, quality of your teaching and overall business in future.

I would definitely like to understand how student feedback process works in your tutoring company ? Please leave a comment.

If you have time, I would highly recommend this paper Teacher Feedback in the Classroom; What’s going on in there?. This paper gives us the third dimension of how teachers do actually take feedback ?