# Tutoring Business Plan Template A lean one-page business plan for tutoring businesses: market, services and pricing, per-hour unit economics, staffing triggers, and 90-day milestones. Canonical URL: https://gigpie.com/templates/tutoring-business-plan-template --- You do not need a 30-page plan to start a tutoring business. You need one page you will actually re-read: who hires you, what an hour really earns, and what has to be true by day 90. The template below is built for monthly re-reading, which is why every field wants a number or a name instead of a paragraph. It also refuses some conventional sections on purpose. There is no mission statement and no five-year projection, because neither survives contact with your first ten families. There is a "what you will NOT do this quarter" line under marketing, because for a new tutoring business the expensive failure mode is doing six channels badly instead of two channels weekly. ## The Section Most Plans Skip The unit economics block is the heart of the page. It forces the math down to a single delivered hour: what you charge (A), what the tutor keeps (B), what your tools take (C), other variable costs (D), and what is left (E). Divide your fixed monthly costs by E and you know your break-even hours. Every pricing, hiring, and rent decision afterward is a rerun of this arithmetic. Line C deserves the worked example. Say you charge $70 an hour and the tutor keeps $35. A tool with a flat $50 monthly fee costs $1 per delivered hour in a 50-hour month and $2.50 per hour in a slow 20-hour month; the fee does not care that January emptied out. A percentage-based tool moves with revenue instead: Gigpie charges a flat 2% of collections, which is $1.40 on that $70 hour whether you delivered five hours that month or five hundred. Neither structure wins universally. The point of line C is knowing which one you are in, and what it does to your worst month rather than your best. **Template file:** [tutoring-business-plan-template.txt](https://gigpie.com/templates/tutoring-business-plan-template.txt) ```text TUTORING BUSINESS PLAN (LEAN ONE-PAGER) Keep this to one page. A plan you re-read monthly beats a 30-page plan you never open. Every blank should hold a number or a name, not a paragraph. Delete the bracketed prompts as you fill it in. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- BUSINESS Name: _____________________________________ One sentence: we help [who] achieve [what] through [service]. Format: [in person / online / both] Service area: ______________ Legal structure: [sole proprietor / LLC / other: __________] MARKET Who exactly hires you? [e.g. "parents of grades 6-12 students within 15 minutes of downtown who want weekly math help," not "students."] _____________________________________________________________________ How many of them can you realistically reach? [Count something real: students at the 4 nearby middle schools, members of 2 parent Facebook groups, your current waitlist.] _____________________________________________________________________ Who else do they consider? [Name the actual alternatives: a specific competing center, a franchise, online marketplaces, the school's free tutoring. Note one thing you do that each does not.] _____________________________________________________________________ SERVICES AND PRICING Service 1: ______________________ $______ per [hour / session] Service 2: ______________________ $______ per [hour / session] Package option: ______ hours for $________ (effective $______/hour) [Prepaid packages smooth your cash flow and commit the family to a block of work. Decide your package sizes here, and make sure your contract's refund terms match.] UNIT ECONOMICS (per delivered hour) Work this out per hour, not per month. It decides everything else. Average revenue per delivered hour $________ (A) Tutor pay per hour (yours or an employee's) $________ (B) Payment processing + software fees $________ (C) [Estimate C as a percentage of A. Know your tools' actual rates: card processing, platform fees, subscriptions divided by monthly hours. If a tool charges a flat monthly fee, it costs more per hour in slow months. If it charges a percentage of collections, it scales with A.] Other variable costs (materials, room rent) $________ (D) Contribution per hour = A - B - C - D $________ (E) Monthly fixed costs (insurance, marketing, accounting, subscriptions) $________ (F) Break-even hours per month = F / E ________ hours [If E is thin, raising A or restructuring B moves it more than anything else on this page.] STAFFING Delivered hours/week you can teach yourself: ________ Hire the first additional tutor when: [e.g. "waitlist of 5+" or "my own schedule is 90% booked for 4 straight weeks"] Tutor pay model: [hourly / per session / % of session rate: ______] Classification: [employee / independent contractor] [Classification affects taxes, control over schedules, and payroll. Get an accountant's advice before the first hire, not after.] MARKETING (pick 2, do them weekly) Channel 1: ______________________ [e.g. one school partnership] Channel 2: ______________________ [e.g. asking every happy family for a review or referral at a set trigger, like the 10th session] What you will NOT do this quarter: ______________________ Cost per new student, once known: $________ 90-DAY MILESTONES Day 30: ________ enrolled students, ________ delivered hours, contract + cancellation policy in use with every family Day 60: ________ enrolled students, first ________ reviews collected, scheduling and billing running through one system Day 90: ________ enrolled students, $________ collected in the month, decision point: [hire / raise rates / hold steady] RISKS AND HONEST UNKNOWNS Biggest risk: _______________________________________ What you'll watch to catch it early: ________________ The assumption in this plan you're least sure of: ____________________ ``` ## Milestones That End in Decisions The 90-day section asks for enrolled students, delivered hours, and collections at three checkpoints, and each checkpoint ends in a decision rather than a feeling. Day 90 is explicit about it: hire, raise rates, or hold steady. A milestone you cannot fail is a hope, and hopes do not tell you when to change course. The final block asks for the assumption you are least sure of. Write a real one. A plan that names its own weak spot gets corrected in month two; a plan that projects confidence in every line gets abandoned whole. ## Frequently Asked Questions ## FAQ **Q:** Is one page really enough? **A:** For running the business, yes, and the discipline is the point: a page you update monthly beats a binder you wrote once. If you later seek a loan, a lender will want supporting financials, and you will build them from this page's numbers rather than instead of them. **Q:** How do I estimate my market without paying for data? **A:** Count things you can verify yourself: the schools within your service radius, their approximate enrollment, the parent groups you can actually post in, your current waitlist. The template asks for reachable counts, not a top-down market size, because 'the US tutoring market is worth billions' has never booked anyone a Tuesday session. **Q:** What share of the hourly rate should tutors get? **A:** There is no universal number, and be skeptical of anyone who hands you one. The split depends on who brings the client, who carries the no-show risk, and what your fixed costs are. The unit economics block exists so you can test any split against your own numbers: set B, compute E, and see whether break-even hours are achievable on your actual calendar. **Q:** Where do software fees go in the math? **A:** Line C, expressed per delivered hour. Divide flat monthly fees by your realistic monthly hours, and apply percentage fees directly to line A. Gigpie is a flat 2% of what you collect with no monthly fee or per-tutor charge, and it costs nothing until you collect revenue, which keeps line C at zero while you are still validating the plan. **Put a real number in line C Gigpie charges 2% of what you collect, with no monthly fee and no per-tutor seats. The pricing page has a calculator, so your plan can run on your numbers.** [Try the 2% calculator](/pricing) ## Related Resources - [How to Start a Tutoring Business](/blog/how-to-start-tutoring-business) - The step-by-step work this plan is the map for. - [Tutoring Pricing Strategies](/blog/tutoring-pricing-strategies) - How to set the rate that becomes line A. - [Managing Tutoring Business Finances](/blog/managing-tutoring-business-finances) - What the bookkeeping looks like once the plan is running.