TUITION CENTRE OWNERS, TAKE NOTE. If you do this, you are losing potential profits.

Tuition centre owners, listen.. if you are greedy, you will lose profits.

By all means, take care of your bottom line. No one is asking us to sink to bankruptcy just to teach. However, if you are already making a healthy profit, don’t go all out to fleece your employees and customers just so that you can go for long holidays in the North Pole. Yes, there are bills to pay just because a tuition centre is a brick-and-mortar establishment. Pay them off, take care of yourself and your family, but take care of your employees and customers too.

In my experience, tuition centres pay their tutors pretty bad rates. This, to me, is inexplicable. Yep, I tried working with tuition centres for awhile, and while I had a fairly pleasant experience with the people I worked with, my experience seems to be atypical. I honestly wonder how people can work for S$30 an hour, for 1.5 hours, especially if they know that they are good teachers.

Let’s think of this with the bottom line in mind. Imagine a tuition centre that gets a good tutor, and pays him a low wage, making profits off him while word spreads about his teaching abilities. Perhaps he will stay till the end of the year out of a sense of duty to the students, but once the tuition centre loses the good tutor (who stays for low pay, right?), the tuition centre is at the mercy of the next tutor. Perhaps the next tutor will come into class hungover everyday (you pay peanuts, you get monkeys).

Let’s spell it out: parents will figure out that they aren’t getting value for their money, and the tuition centre might go bye-bye.

I’m not asking tuition centres to run themselves like a charity. I’m asking tuition centres to run themselves as profitable businesses via the offering of high quality services (i.e. high quality teaching). You don’t get good teachers unless you pay them decent wages and offer a good working environment. (Aside: MOE, if you experience a perennial shortage of English teachers, offer higher pay and fix your systems!)

I’ve never run a tuition centre, so to be completely honest, I don’t know the pressures of running one. But if I were to run one, I would make sure -all- my employees were happy, so that they can concentrate on the job of delivering the best lessons they can. Who knows, perhaps one day I may step into the tuition centre biz.

If I do, I’ll post the results of my attempt. Something tells me I won’t fail.