Being a tutor isn’t easy, though the satisfaction you get from helping a student succeed is always fulfilling. But there’s a lot to manage when you’re a tutor and running your own business. From planning out lessons, making sure they are engaging and educational, to managing a business budget, there’s a lot on your plate.
Spreading the word about your business and gaining more students is a great way to increase your income, but it also means you have a lot more to track and manage. There are tools out there that can support your business’ digital transformation.
vcita’s all-in-one tutoring management software is known to aid tutors in their journey to growth and digitalization. Though that might sound scary to some, online tutoring has become popular, raking in a $6.57 billion USD global market size in 2021 and expected to grow at a CAGR of 14.7% from 2022 to 2030. If you are part of that market teaching online, using a tool like vcita can help you manage your day-to-day and grow your business digitally.
How does vcita help tutors go digital?
Automates scheduling
With vcita’s online scheduling software you can reduce the amount of time you spend on the phone with students setting up lessons, and fill up your calendar more efficiently. A smart scheduling tool allows you to send a link to students that leads them to their own, secure student portal, where they can see your calendar and book a lesson on their own time. In addition, each student will receive their own portal encouraging them to go in and schedule their lessons. With both facets available, you’ll be able to put your phone down and instead, focus on providing the best lessons to your students.
Organizes student data
If you’re manually keeping track of each new student, follow-ups on lessons, student information and performance and more, you’re wasting time on maintaining these files (whether they be physical or online) and then wasting even more time searching for them when you need to access their information.
Using a robust CRM, like the one vcita offers, will help you maximize your student’s information and more professionally address each student. You can segment your students based on their level, interests, location and more. This will help you personalize your interactions and your lessons with them making for better and lasting relationships.
What about documents that you spend so much time searching for right before you start your lesson? Now you can attach the document to the student’s card and always have the most updated version at your fingertips. Communicating with them is also simple. With two way communication, straight from your CRM, you can chat with your students and they’ll receive it as an email or text message. Basically, all your interactions with your students get recorded and sorted in a way that lets you become a more organized and efficient teacher.
Streamlines payment collection
Imagine a world where you no longer have to chase your students (or their parents) for payments, or wait for your money to arrive. That can all be possible with the vcita platform. You can easily generate branded invoices and send them to your students to view and pay. Create simple payment request links and let your students pay with one click.
In addition to all this, you can send quick payment reminders via SMS or email that keep your outstanding payments at the top of your students’ minds. You can also set up scheduled payment requests that go out to all students on a daily/weekly/monthly basis. This payment request will ask them to close out their unpaid balance and allow them to do so quickly and effortlessly. This feature helps you get paid on time, everytime and bridges the gap between asking for payment and waiting for it to arrive.
Simplifies marketing
Maybe one of the weaker points for you as a tutor is learning to market your business. Perhaps you haven’t had access to tools that help create marketing emails and campaigns successfully. Or it could be that you don’t understand marketing enough to feel confident doing it.
The vcita platform enables you to create enticing email campaigns that keep your tutoring business at the top of your students’ minds, helps seal the deal with prospective students, and makes you look more professional overall. Whether it be a newsletter, an email wishing a student a happy birthday, or a campaign offering a discount on lessons, you can create these emails in seconds with the platform and send them out right away, or automatically set them up to be sent when a student has hit a specific trigger (like their birthday for example).
Further to creating compelling email campaigns, you can also use vcita to ask your students to leave you a review. An email with a link to your social media pages is sent asking them for the review, making it easy for them to leave one. Reviews are one of the most effective ways to ensure you keep getting students so having this capability helps a lot.
Makes it easy to share documents
Documents are your life as a tutor. From lesson plans to worksheets, contracts and onboarding forms, keeping track of and sharing documents with students is imperative to maintaining an organized business. Moreover, you need your students to be able to access their documents and possibly approve or sign them.
This is made easy with vcita’s intuitive document management software, which aggregates and compiles all your files and documents to be viewed easily in one location. You can send and share documents with your students to view and, as mentioned above, integrate the software with your CRM to attach documents to a specific student’s card. That’s it! No more searching for the latest version in your inbox, you’ll always have it at the ready.
Lets tutors envision the bigger picture
One of the hardest things to do as a tutor is see past the immediate work you have and envision the bigger picture of where your business can grow. Using the Reports feature on vcita helps with that. The platform offers tutors important insights into the health and performance of their business, so that they can properly forecast and make smarter business decisions on the go.
These reports are connected to all aspects of your business – money, clients, services, scheduling, staff and marketing – offering an instant view into how they each perform. You can analyze these reports to learn which service you provide generates the most revenue, and which the least, or which client has the most amount of no-shows and much more. These insights help with seeing the bigger picture of your business and understanding how your decisions about your business affect your end results.
Turn your small classes into big business
By now, it should be clear that vcita is the perfect companion to any tutor wanting to take their business to the next level and digitalize their operations. From saving time on administrative tasks, to getting paid more easily, to marketing your business and even gaining insights into your business operations, vcita can handle all aspects of your tutoring business with ease.
With vcita, you’ll not only improve your own experience as a business owner, but also that of your students, who will thank you for taking the time to invest in tools that help them better interact and engage with your business.
Tutoring is a calling, but running a business isn’t always. Leave the passion of teaching to you and the heavy lifting to us, you’ll be glad you did!
