This episode addresses the common overwhelm faced by tutors and education business owners when contemplating growth. It emphasizes the importance of clarity about personal goals, strategic thinking, and the value of ongoing support to build a sustainable, lucrative business aligned with one's life vision.

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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 :-)

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© 2024 Sumantha McMahon

Here they are:

Today I want to talk about something that I think a lot of tutors and business owners in general feel, but it doesn't get talked about very often. And that is the particular kind of overwhelm that doesn't come from being too busy or having too much on, but from wanting to grow and just not knowing which direction to go in.

Because what I see a lot is tutors who are ready for something more. They can feel it. They have ambition. They have ideas, they have a real desire to build something bigger or different or more sustainable. But when they sit down and they try and work out what to actually do next, everything becomes quite noisy.

Too many options, too many questions, and underneath all of it, this quiet but persistent fear about whether investing in support to help them figure it out would even be worth it. Now, if any of that sounds familiar, this episode is for you.

I'm Samantha and welcome to the Upgrade Your Education Business podcast. I really specialise in working with tutors and education business owners who want to build businesses that are more lucrative but also genuinely sustainable. Something that's designed around the life they actually want to live.

So today, I want to get into that pinch point of what that overwhelm actually looks like in practice, where it tends to come from, and importantly, how to start thinking about it differently.

When tutors come to me feeling overwhelmed about growth, they are almost never overwhelmed because they don't have ideas. It's almost always the opposite. They have too many. They are stuck very firmly in idea mode, turning possibilities over in their minds and unable to land on a direction. And they are increasingly frustrated with themselves for not being able to just decide.

And the reason they can't decide — it's not because they're indecisive people, it's because they're asking themselves the wrong question. The question they keep returning to is, which idea should I go for? And that question can't be answered properly until a much bigger and more important question has been addressed first.

And that is, what do I actually want? And what do I want growth to deliver for my life? Until that's clear, every idea looks equally plausible and equally risky. And so the tutor stays stuck, cycling through options, never quite committing to any of them.

And quite often concluding that the problem is a lack of clarity about their business, when actually it's often a lack of clarity about their life and how that interlinks with their business. So this is actually the first thing I do with clients when they arrive at this place. Before we look at a single idea, we zoom out.

We look at the much bigger picture of what they want their life to look like. And we use that as the lens through which every business idea gets evaluated. Because an idea that looks exciting in isolation can look very different when you hold it up against the life you're actually trying to build. There are things that feel hard to different people and things that excite different people. And without that self-discovery process, the most important filter is missing entirely.

Something else I notice alongside this idea overwhelm is how narrow the view often is. Tutors who are trying to work out how to grow tend to look at what others are doing in the industry, which makes sense. But the tutoring industry has a fairly limited menu of suggestions — build a team, run a group, run group classes, create resources to sell.

These ideas circulate because they're familiar, not because they are universally right, or because they represent the full range of what's possible. And sometimes the ideas that tutors are drawn to are ones that, when you look at them carefully, are more vulnerable than they appear.

For example, I often work with tutors who present an idea where they want to create and sell specific types of educational resources. And my first question is always around how easily that could be replicated. Because in a world where artificial intelligence means that parents and students can generate a great deal of that kind of material themselves, the value of a resource that relies purely on content becomes much harder to protect.

That doesn't mean the idea is wrong, but it does mean it needs to be designed in a way where the tutor's genuine expertise is irreplaceable, where what they're offering can't easily be recreated by someone or something else. I sometimes have tutors who suggest memberships to me — that seems to be on the rise.

But what happens is they straddle between the course model and the membership model and they kind of blur the two lines. You have to pick one or the other and the models are really different. That kind of thinking requires looking further afield than what everyone else in the industry is doing.

I'm currently working with a client, for instance, who teaches music, and her natural instinct is to explore tutoring-adjacent ideas that would serve the students she already works with. Now, this is completely reasonable. It's a great place to start. But I've been encouraging her to research things like corporate musical team building days — things that are quite far removed from the tutoring space.

But ones where her expertise is just as relevant and the commercial opportunity is quite different. The exercise of her looking further afield has really opened up something in how she's thinking. She's beginning to see that ideas don't have to come in the form of supporting existing students, that there are ways to use the same expertise in completely different contexts.

And sometimes the most exciting and sustainable direction is one that you never would have found by staying inside the familiar edges of the industry. So the point isn't to abandon what you know — it's to be genuinely curious about all the ways it could be used.

Now I want to talk about the other side of this, because for many tutors, the overwhelm around which direction to go is compounded by the real fear around getting support to help them work it out. And it's worth being really honest about where that fear actually comes from, because it's usually not simply about money, even though that's how it tends to present itself.

What I hear underneath the hesitation when I really listen is a fear of not getting a tangible result, of investing and then not being able to point to something concrete that happened as a direct consequence. And that fear comes from a very specific way of thinking about what investing in support actually is. I know this from my own experience of viewing support this way and then shifting.

Many tutors approach it as a one and done transaction. So they take a course or they work with a coach and they expect the problem to be solved. And when it doesn't work out that way — because growth simply doesn't work that way — the conclusion is the investment didn't deliver. Growth isn't a problem to be solved once. It's a continuous process.

You reach one milestone and then there's another one beyond it. The work evolves as the business evolves. And how much support you need and for how long depends enormously on your starting point. If you are coming in without a clear sense of the life you want to build, without the business foundations in place to support growth, then that foundational work alone takes real time.

And it's some of the most valuable work you'll ever do. Even if it doesn't produce an overnight result you can point to. The thinking you develop, the offer you design, the foundations you put in place — these things compound. They produce results in months and sometimes years later that you can trace directly back to the work you did.

But in the moment of deciding whether to invest, many of us do the maths in a very short term way, asking whether we'll make back the cost of the investment in the next few months. And that's simply the wrong measure of success for this kind of work. We live in a world that celebrates the most successful people in business, in sport, every field you can think of. And almost without exception, those people have coaches and mentors throughout their careers.

It's not because they can't figure things out alone — it's because they understand that having the right thinking partner alongside them is a strategic decision. So if you're sitting with that overwhelm right now, if you have the ideas but not the direction, the ambition but not the clarity — what you're feeling is completely normal. The question worth asking isn't which idea should I pursue. It's what do I want my life to look like, and how can my business be designed to help me get there?

Start there and everything else becomes a great deal clearer. I hope this episode has given you something useful to sit with, and as always, you will hear from me on Wednesday.