In this episode, I explore how tutors can make confident decisions about pricing, social media, and AI by focusing on impact, purpose, and personal style. I share practical insights to help tutors tailor strategies to their unique business models.

Takeaways

• Pricing should reflect the impact and transformation, not just the offer details.

• Social media can reinforce credibility and build trust, not just attract clients.

• AI tools can save time if used to support existing routines, not replace genuine connection.

• Trust your experience and instincts when creating unique offers.

• Decide the purpose of each marketing activity before investing effort.

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👋🏽 Hello! I'm Sumantha McMahon, and I've supported over 100 tutors and education business owners.

As a teacher 'dropout' turned professional tutor, combined with my 20+ years as a business owner, I'm in it with you! Yes, I'm qualified too :-)

My training leans on tried-and-tested methods that are completely tailored to our niche.

Work with me to breathe life into YOUR definition of success:

#1 Bespoke 1:1 Mentoring

High-touch 6-month programme for tutors who want to make their business more lucrative, in a sustainable way for the future, while protecting the impact they make.

#2 The Tutors' Mastermind

The leading membership for tutors that combines tailored training (live and recorded), a community of like-minded business owners and exclusive discounts.

This podcast is recorded using Riverside. Sign up for your account here (free plan available)

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Sometimes, I share links to resources and apps that I recommend. They are all based on my experience - if I don't love them, I don't recommend them. In some cases, I earn a small commission for my recommendation, at no cost to you.

© 2024 Sumantha McMahon

If you’re trying to make decisions in your tutoring business, there’s a good chance you’ve got one of these three problems, if not a combination. Number one, you’re getting confused by all the different advice around you and you can’t work out which of it will actually work for you. Number two, you think you should probably be doing something because so many other people are, but it’s not quite yielding the same results for you. And there’s no real template to follow, so you’re not sure if you’re even doing it right.

And number three, you keep second guessing the decisions you do make because you’re in that loop of not really knowing if something’s right for you until you give it a go, but then you’re scared to give it a go because maybe it’s a lot of upfront work for something that may not pay off. I’ve made these calls in my own tutoring business and this tutoring mentoring business. And I have sat with over a hundred tutors while they made theirs. In fact, just this month, three different clients brought me three completely different questions.

One about pricing, one about social media, and one about the use of AI. And every single one came back to this. So in this episode, I’m going to unpack those three questions so you can see exactly what the common thread is and how do you take all the advice that’s out there and mold it to do it your way so that you’re doing business your way. If you’re new here, welcome. I’m Samantha McMahon and I’m a qualified business trainer and teacher-turned independent tutor.

So, education and business from the inside are both second nature to me, along with how the two come together. My work is helping tutors design a business that gives them the life, income, and impact they want through the tutor’s mastermind membership and through the one to one support with me and my team.

So let’s start with the first question that one of my clients asked me very recently, and this was about pricing.

She came to me knowing that she wanted to charge a premium for her one-to-one because she’s moving into groups and she recognizes that that’s where she wants to place her one-to-ones in her offer suite. Now, she’s already got the demand, so I’m just helping her get that all up and running and tighten everything up and make decisions. Now, she also has other courses that feed into this kind of whole thing as well. So when I asked her about that premium price,

She believed her clients would pay it. So that wasn’t the issue. That wasn’t why she was coming to me with this kind of this hesitation, so to speak. The issue was that when she looked at her whole business, all the different entry points that a student could make, the tuition, the courses, all of it, it didn’t look like the standard package that everyone else was selling. And because of that, she kept hesitating. She was she was worried that.

You know, what if I haven’t quite priced this right? She had this nagging worry. You know, what if she couldn’t justify premium pricing for something that didn’t look like what everyone else was doing? And this is the first place we often get stuck. We look around us to learn what the norms are because that gives us evidence and evidence makes us feel safer. If someone else is doing roughly the same as you, charging roughly the same and getting clients, that gives you faith that you’re in the right place and you’ve made the right decisions.

But when you’re doing something that no one else is doing or you’re just doing things a bit differently, how do you price that? And how do you even know if you’ve got it right? I know this one firsthand. My own bespoke accelerator, my one-to-one support program for tutors, doesn’t look like anything else in the tuition industry, not as far as I know. And I’m actually moving it even further away from the norm because I’m building a team around the one-to-one support I give tutors. So when I originally priced it, I didn’t have anyone to go by.

I couldn’t compare it to anything. I had to use my confidence, my conviction, my knowledge, my experience, and just sort of price it accordingly. So let me share how I helped her see it. I’m going to call her G just to keep her anonymous. I told her that the price doesn’t follow what your offer looks like. It follows the impact that you make. So essentially lots of people will list all the things that are included and they think, well, how much is this worth?

But it’s not about the stuff. You can offer very little but make a huge impact. So it has to follow the transformation that you’re creating. And then I said, picture all of your offers like they are products sitting next to each other on a supermarket shelf. If you’ve been listening for a while, you will have heard me talk about this. And we need to look at how they sit together and what the pricing communicates about each one when you’re seeing them side by side.

Because that’s what sends a message about whether your one-to-one reads as premium or not. The reason her offer looked different was because she had built it around what her clients needed, not around the template that everyone generally follows. Now, that’s not automatically a reason to charge less, and it’s not automatically a reason to charge more either. It’s a situation where you look at the impact you make and the kind kind of clients you work with and you let that steer your pricing.

So once she saw it that way, once she realized that the decision was in her hands and that she could trust her experience and instinct, it became less scary. You’d think it would be the other way around, but it wasn’t. Instead of asking how do I get this right for something so unusual, she started saying, This is what I want to charge. So how do I make the value of what I’m offering crystal clear? That’s a completely different problem and a much easier one to solve. So here’s the practical part for you.

If your offer doesn’t quite look like anyone else’s, or you’re just doing things differently, or you just don’t want to measure yourself against other people, don’t reach for standard pricing as your anchor. Just get clear on the specific transformation you’re creating, be clear on that, communicate it, and look at how your different offers, if you have different offers, sit alongside each other and the relationship between them. Does someone start on a course, let’s say, and then move into something bigger?

Or is it the other way around? Or are there supplements that you offer people? Let your pricing reflect that. The more unusual, let’s say, your offer is, the more the selling is about making the outcome obvious, not about defending the number.

So let’s move on to the next question one of my clients asked me very recently. And this one was about social media, but that same thread still ran through it. How do I do it my way?

This client, one of my masterminders, has built a really successful business through SEO. People find her through online searches, typically like the Google search engine. They come to her, it works. She doesn’t really do any other marketing. But she came to me wondering whether she should be adding social media to the mix. Now she’d been looking at other businesses with a similar profile to hers, and she could see them doing well on there. And it left her thinking, should I be doing that too? And here’s where she kind of got a bit stuck.

She kept looping on the same thing. Social media is a lot of upfront work, and she couldn’t see the payoff clearly enough to commit. So she was going round and round, not quite starting, not quite letting go. She wouldn’t know the answer unless she started, but she wasn’t sure about doing all that work without knowing. And on it went. The thing underneath this one is an assumption about what social media is even for. She was picturing it, the way most people do, as a way to attract more clients, to post and

Hope more students come. She wanted it to reinforce the sales that her SEO is already doing. And when you see it that way, of course it feels like a huge effort for an uncertain return, especially when the client’s already coming through another door. So here’s how I helped her reframe it: social media doesn’t have to do the job of finding clients. It can do other jobs too. It could back up the work your SEO is already doing. When someone finds you, let’s say on Google and then goes to have a proper look.

Your social media is part of what tells them you’re the real thing. It lets them learn more about you. It builds credibility. It helps them binge on your content, get to know your personality. And this is important for anyone who’s doing their homework before they get in touch. And there’s another angle. More and more people are turning to AI for help and for recommendations. These tools draw on what’s visible about you out there, actual content. They are large language models. So particularly your content.

So having a presence online can feed into whether you get mentioned when someone asks AI for a recommended tutor. The tool is just the same, you just get to choose the job it does. So before you decide, you know, if you’re sitting there thinking, should I add this, should I add that? The first question is simply, do you need it? And if you think you might, then get really clear on the job you’d actually want it to do. What’s its purpose?

For this client, social media as a client-chasing machine didn’t really make much sense because that need was already being met. But social media is something that reinforces SEO and builds trust with the people who are already finding her. That’s a much smaller, clearer, and more targeted job. And that makes it far easier to say yes to. So decide the job, the purpose first, then you know whether it’s worth the work.

Now, thinking about that third question, that was about AI. But again, the same thread ran through it. How do I do things my way? How do I use AI in a bespoke way that’s really going to help me? Now, this client of mine, he is really stretched for time. So he did, you know, exactly the right first move. We did it together. We audited his business. We looked for the bottlenecks. And we were working out where his time was actually going so that we could look to streamlining and make some decisions. So when he got to his marketing, he decided to give it a proper go. It was something that was time consuming.

But because everything else was time consuming, he could never give it a proper go. So now that we’d released a little bit of time elsewhere, he decided to go for it. And in doing that, he leaned very heavily on AI to systemize the whole thing, to create his content for him, the ideation, all of it. And this was aimed to save him more time because he is still feeling quite stretched. But here’s what happened: it ended up taking him longer. The thing that was meant to save him time actually cost him more of it.

Now here’s the assumption underneath this one. He believed that an efficient, switched-on business owner should be automating as much as possible by now, that using AI for everything was simply what good looks like. So he reached for it as the default without asking whether it was the right tool for this particular job. So here’s how I helped him sort of see the situation.

it’s a really important concept. The best kind of marketing shortens the distance between you having something to say and actually you saying it. You’ve got the thought and you just get it out into the world quickly. What the AI was doing was widening that gap. He’d have an idea, then he’d be wrestling with prompts, he’d be editing the output that didn’t quite sound like him, he’d be trying to knock it back into shape. All of that sat in between him.

And just simply saying the thing he wants to say. And this is the bit that’s really worth paying attention to. A system doesn’t always mean automating everything. A system just means an efficient, repeatable routine. For him, the more efficient routine might have been just speaking his thoughts into his phone for five minutes and lightly tidying them, not building an AI content machine. Same goal, far less friction.

So when something is sold to you as the efficient option, always test it against the actual outcome that you want, not the kind of label that everyone’s putting on it. Ask where your friction actually is and choose the tool that removes it. For my client, ideas wasn’t really the problem. He’s actually pretty good at coming up with ideas. He just felt that the creation of it and the thinking and all of that took time.

So you can use AI to just, you know, you could dump your ideas in and you could use AI to tidy it up if that’s where the friction lies. And sometimes the solution might be AI, and that’s brilliant for the right job, but sometimes it just isn’t. You don’t need AI. Sometimes the simplest route is the one that’s kind of already sounds like you’re using tools that are really easy, like using voice to text or voice recordings or whatever your situation, whatever the context is.

Efficiency is about the result. It’s not about how clever the method looks.

So I want to wrap up with something a bit bigger than those three questions. Part of being a business owner is giving yourself the freedom to be creative and to really stretch your wings. And that doesn’t always come naturally because most of us has come, we’ve come from employment. Many of us have come from the classroom where we felt restricted in all sorts of ways.

We had to ask permission before we tried anything. We were shoehorned into a particular way of teaching, into schemes of works, into you know set methods and so on.

So, although structure feels really nice when you’re putting systems around you and you’re deciding your pricing based on a formula, although structure feels nice, and although a proven way of doing something feels safe, there is a middle ground. If you’re one of the people that I so often speak to, the one with loads of ideas.

Struggling to know which one to press play on, then giving yourself permission to be creative and try things out is actually where it starts. That’s the most important part. And then you bring in your analysis, your experience, blended with the advice that you’re getting, to make sure the decisions that you’re making are right for you, for your students, and for the life that you want.

I’m lucky because I get to have these exact conversations, particularly with my one-to-one clients, but with people in the tutor’s mastermind as well.

And there’s so much opportunity for us to have these conversations. And in many ways, it helps me because when I’m repeating similar advice, it’s almost a narrative that I’m believing for myself. And then when I’m in that situation, which I’m in, I can then lean on that advice. So, I mean, whether you’re working with me, a coach or or not, this reflection piece is really worth doing because it’s tempting to have an idea and leap into action and then get stuck on something like.

How do I price this? Like the thing we talked about earlier.

But when you take that step back first and you can say, do you know what? I’m doing things my way because, you know, you really have found the meaning behind why you’re doing that thing and its purpose in your business. That’s what unlocks those stuck moments, those wobbles, the hesitations that, you know, happen right before you take what feels like a risk and you try something. And that’s why the theme of 2027 Samantha Summit, which is my free event coming up. It’s the theme of it is doing things on your term. It’s a conversation that’s happening so much in my world right now that I wanted to bring it right to the forefront. So if you’re watching or listening around the time this goes up, I’ll I’ll pop the link below to grab your free ticket for the event. Last year we had around 300 tutors come along, and this year I think it’s going to be bigger and better. So I’m really excited about it.

Have a look at the link below if you’d like to see more. And as always, thank you for giving me your time. You’ll hear from me on Wednesday.