Why you Should Charge for Everything you Do

Jul 28

Written By Andrew Woodbury

Moving away from time-oriented lessons and towards a results-oriented service.

Read time: 4 minutes

Here’s our TTT for this week on how to grow your online teaching business.

What is TTT? A Tip, Takeaway, and Task. On Thursday.

Today’s read will take you about 4 minutes.

Enjoy!

Tip: Why you should charge for everything

This week, we look at how we charge. In previous issues, we’ve discussed why charging by the hour is detrimental to our business: we need to charge for results, not by the hour. But raising rates isn’t so simple, either.

There are many inadvisable gimmicks:

Just raise your rates
Shorten the class length
Give discounts on bulk lessons

All of these still involve you selling your time. Most of all, they don’t include the work students and you do outside of class.

We’ve talked to hundreds of teachers and one of the biggest frustrations is that students don’t do the work outside of class time; they don’t have time; they’re too busy; they don’t know how to do the homework.

What if you offered something that would help them solve all of that? And charged for it?

Before you say “my students wouldn’t go for that,” instead ask “why would my students go for that?”

Takeaway: Develop a Flat Rate

To have a successful teaching business, you need to package your services and charge a flat rate for it all. And frame it the right way. Analyze the delivery of the follow two framings:

Scenario A: “Hey Tom, I’m raising my rates by $20/hour. Cool?”

Scenario B: “Hey Tom, I’m working on a new service that will help you [student’s goal] in [time frame]. Are you interested in learning more about it?”

As teachers, we do so much work that we don’t charge for: homework, feedback, booking lessons, re-booking lessons, emailing students. Package this all together as a flat rate to ensure your student gets the best experience possible, and you earn what you deserve.

Task: Create a service package

Take a hard look at what you do on a per-student basis. Write down all the things you don’t charge for. Put a package together where you do charge for that. Again, at a simple level, this includes feedback and scaffolding homework.

This also is the bare bones of the course you have in you. With that, you can scale and start the path to your teaching business being your full-time income.

We hope this helps.

See you again next week.

Leo, Andrew, and Mike