Running a Freelance Private Tutoring Business
Lessons from taking my side hustle full-time
It was 2019, and I had no clue that 2020 was coming. I think you know what I mean. I took a big step and left a position of tenure in software development for three reasons: 1) my tenure was being ignored and downplayed, 2) I felt I had stagnated and was stuck in my current role, unable to move up, and 3) I felt ready to go full-time with my freelance tutoring business that I had been building up slowly on the side. I had also undertaken a master’s degree with the end goal of pivoting into more of a teaching career. I had recently done a lot of mentoring at work, and I felt ready to tackle the incoming requests and needs of a wide variety of students. As you’ll see, I wasn’t quite as prepared as I thought.
If I had known 2020 was going to happen the way it did, I might have made a different choice. In the short term, the timing was awful because I quit my job in November, and in the late months of the year, tutoring demand dies down while classes take a pause and students are away on winter vacation. In the long term, I got more business than I expected, because spring 2020 saw a bunch of people locked down in their homes, desperate for some kind of social connection and/or professional development. There was also an influx of students whose schools went online and…
