Thankfully this year hasn’t been as bad as it could have been, and thanks to some tutors near me and myself forming something of an alliance, we have managed to navigate our way through the pandemic and all that it has brought with it. It is fair to say that this year has been a real leveler for so many businesses around the world and the events of 2020 will forever be in the mind of those who have suffered and those who have survived, including mine.
This year saw things change very quickly for the tutors who I know, including myself, and here is how we managed to navigate it.
Online Push
One of the great benefits which we had that so many didn’t was that we could quickly switch out operations online. Whilst this was helpful however, we had an added challenge that many of our students wanted to stop their tuition because of money, which we perfectly understood given the uncertain nature of what was going on. And so we decided that it was time to really double down with our online work and we decided to offer students a package deal for online lessons, which we would share amongst the tutors. This turned out to be a very popular option.
Cost Cutting
Ultimately I knew fine well that there would be some level of financial pain and the cost of losing a long term student was always going to be far more than the cost of offering discount for a few months. I picked the more loyal students to offer a discount to and that way I was able to ensure that this discount would be recouped in some way in the future. Extending this discount was as much for them as it was for me.
Picking Up The Slack
One of the best moves which we made in order to keep things rolling was to contact schools and local learning institutes, in order to see if we may be able o offer our services in the absence of students who were no longer at schools. As any student will tell you, learning when you are in not in the traditional classroom set up just isn’t the same and that is why supplementing that learning with some additional support was always going to be the best move. And so we decided that we would see if we could help and we suddenly saw a large number of students sign up with us.
Parent Outreach
And finally we decided to speak with our friends and our family members to see if we could help any of them who were parents, who were now charged with the responsibility of home schooling. Naturally we offered lower prices for this based on the fact that they were close to us, yet anything coming in was good for us.
These were just some of the steps which we took this year to survive, and thankfully that is so far what has happened.