As a tutor, you have to wear a lot of hats. Aside from mastering the subject matter, you need to also be a skilled teacher and essentially run your own business, which includes marketing your services to potential students.
When advertising your tutoring or speaking to potential students, one of the biggest questions is how much to charge. There are a few schools of thought on the matter so here are some ways to help you come up with a price.
Every tutor is different, indifferent place, and in a different situation so rather than just telling you what price to charge, here are some of the best ways to work out or calculate your rates and how to make sure that you're getting what you deserve as a nursing tutor.
Reverse Engineering Your Rates to Earn What You Need
Rather than picking a rate first and hoping you get enough students to make enough money, consider starting with the amount you'll need to make and then working backwards until you end up with a workable hourly rate or rate per session.
Consider the amount you'll need to earn to get by. This will be the money you need to pay the bills, travel costs, and materials, and to leave you with some disposable income. This will be how much you need to be earning for your tutoring to be worthwhile.
Once you know how much money you need to earn, you'll need to think about how many sessions you can offer during that time. Don't be overly ambitious and remember that between lessons, you'll have to travel as well as plan or prep other sessions.
Simply divide the amount you need to make by the number of sessions you could offer in that time and you'll get your minimum rate per session. This is the price that you can't go below or you'll be offering your sessions at a loss.
Find out more about becoming a nursing tutor
Make Sure That You're Earning What You Deserve for Your Nursing Tutoring
Once you know the minimum you could accept, you also need to know the fair rate for your work. There are a lot of factors that affect this, but it's best to find out what the going rate is. Look for averages (the median is often the best average in this instance) and start there.
Remember that your qualifications and experience will affect this so if you're new to the game, you'll likely end up with rates lower than the average for nursing tutors. As you gain experience, you should be able to command higher rates as there'll be fewer tutors out there as experienced as you.
In every industry, you'll find cheapskates and generally, working with people who don't value the work that you do is a bad idea. If they don't think your tutoring is worth paying a fair amount for, th don't really appreciate all the work you do, your expertise, or your experience. These kinds of students tend to be the most difficult to work with, quick to complain, and a nightmare to work with.
It's also important to realise the difference between students on a tight budget and students that just aren't willing to pay the going rates before generalising, of course. However, a student that can't see the economic value of your service is unlikely to fully understand or appreciate its educational value.
Discover how to find students for your nursing tutoring
Regularly Check the Going Rates
There are plenty of tutoring websites you can use to make sure that you aren't wildly overpricing or underpricing your services. While overpricing is fine if you have a lot of students on the books and there's demand for your sessions, it can be devastating to find that you've been charging way less than you should have been.
Even when your tutoring business is going great, it doesn't hurt to keep checking in on the competition to see how much they're charging.
You can also ask your fellow tutors. It's important to carefully gauge whether or not this is acceptable and who to ask. Some people aren't comfortable talking about money and some tutors mightn't want to tell you, but if you know some tutors who won't mind helping you out with that information, then go for it!
You can also look at the going rates for similar services and related fields. Just always make sure that you're up to date because being out of the loop and charging the wrong rates could hurt your tutoring business.
Adjusting to Market Forces
While it would be wonderful to just charge what you think is fair, it won't always work that way. In the same way that you wouldn't pay a fortune for something you could get anywhere, the forces of supply and demand will also affect your rates.
When there's a lot of something that few people want, the price goes down. When there's a lot of demand for something, the price goes up. If you're offering the only nursing tutoring in town, then your rates can go up. This is especially true if there are a lot of nursing students in need of tutoring and you have a full schedule.
On the other hand, when there are a lot of nursing tutors and few students, tutors may have to lower their rates to attract students to them rather than another tutor.
But what if you can't or don't want to lower your rates?
If you don't want to be a part of the race to the bottom (and you shouldn't be), then you may have to alter your service rather than your rates. If you want to keep commanding higher rates, you'll need to make sure that students understand the value in what you're offering over cheaper tutoring from somebody else.
People can be convinced to pay a premium for better service even if there are plenty of nursing tutors about. Make sure you're the best or one of the best. There'll be students looking for a premium service and willing to pay the rates that go with it.
Find out why you should become a nursing tutor
Pricing Strategies
Where you set your rates can also affect how successful you are at finding students for your nursing tutorials. To a certain degree, lower prices will result in more business as students have less to worry about financially.
However, there is a certain point where setting your rates too lhurtpact on business. Rightly or wrongly, consumers see the price of a product or service as indicative of its quality and lowering your rates to the bottom will make some students believe that your service is substandard or poor.
Similarly, you may even see an increase in business by increasing your rates above the average. This simple strategy can make your tutoring services stand out and appear “premium” in contrast to the other tutors out there.
Again, your pricing strategy needs to ensure that your tutoring is sustainable, profitable, and representative of the rates you're charging. If you're putting yourself out there as a premium and experienced tutor, your rates will need to be higher than the average. Conversely, it's hard to say your tutoring is cheap if students can see you're one of the most expensive tutor around.
The simple act of adjusting your rates can say a lot to students about the kind of service you're offering and how you want to be perceived so be sure to consider this when setting them.
Adjust as You Go
While it can be tricky to charge different rates per student, especially if they speak to each other or are in the same session, you'll regularly want to evaluate your rates and adjust them.
As you gain experience, your rates should naturally increase. Fortunately, with fields like nursing, you'll likely have students for a few years until they become registered nurses themselves and you can start new students at different rates.
You probably don't want to annoy your current students by constantly changing your rates, but starting with a new student is often a good time to move on to your newer (and likely higher) rates.
Find out more about how much nurse educators earn
Don't be Afraid to Make Deals
While you need to respect yourself and what your tutoring services are worth, you can lose out on business if you're too rigid when it comes to your rates. If a student is likely to walk because they can't afford your current rates, but would sign up for a year of classes at a discount, it might be worthwhile considering the lifetime value.
Calculating this is easy, too. It's just how much they'd pay you in total. While it mightn't be ideal having to offer a 10% discount for each of their classes, it's probably better doing that forty or fifty times than getting one lesson out of them at your standard rates.
Similarly, a discount or reward for booking multiple sessions can help turn potential students into loyal customers, which also means you can free up a lot of the time you have to spend looking for students.
With this advice, you should now have everything you need to start working out how much to charge for your tutoring.
Enjoyed this article? Leave a rating!
Loading...
