Sounds good doesn’t it? No more elbowing your way to the front of the pack to get the biggest scraps from beneath the boss’s table, doffing your cap and saying “thank you” for the ever-decreasing yearly bonus, begging the boss for more hours that bring you less and less time with your loved ones. Wouldn’t it be better to cut out the middleman and just run your own school?
Of course it would. But how to get started? Here are my three suggestions for how to start your own English school even if all your time is spent working for the man.
Ween yourself off of relying on your current job. Could you block off one day, evening, afternoon or morning every week that becomes your exclusive time for working on your own school? Granted, you may have to keep the true reason for blocking off time from your current job a secret, but if, for example, you teach children’s English for your employer, start offering English for adults one evening a week for yourself. That’s hardly a threat to your current employer. They may not like it, but ultimately, whose life is it anyway? Don’t have a location to teach from? Use one room in your home, use a coffee shop or…
Start an online school that runs concurrently with your existing meat-world job. Again, your employer may not like it (if they knew) but you could demonstrate that your students come from far afield and you’re not poaching existing students from your employer. In the meantime, you are doing valuable work such as figuring out how much to charge students, working out a good name and getting your head round a business model that will bring in more than just a trickle of students, although when you start, a trickle may be enough to stay afloat.
Go cold turkey. At some point you are going to have to just step away from your existing job and go it alone. This is the method that worked for me, largely because I didn’t have any other job to fall back on. If I had, then when things got tough, I might have got going, I might never have built up the business to stand on its own two feet if the wolf had not been at the door.
If you are at the pain point where you just can’t see yourself working another minute for your boss, you are ready to make self-employment work for you. Of course, it helps if you have a supportive spouse, a bit of spare cash and a place to teach from, but ultimately it comes down to your level of pain.
How badly do you want it? Badly enough to make it work?
Until next week…
All the best,
Patrick