Alexander founded Brooklyn Math Tutors with a simple guiding philosophy: Make math fun, the process of learning enjoyable, and the rest follows.
He graduated Summa Cum Laude from Northeastern University, worked as a Researcher at Carnegie Mellon, and did a brief stint as a technology consultant before leaving the corporate and academic worlds to tutor full time. We had such a fun time chatting with Alexander about his journey and how starting his own tutoring business was the best decision he ever made.
Get in touch with Alexander and his team: https://www.brooklynmathtutors.com/
If you enjoyed this video and would like to be featured in the next one, feel free to drop us an email at info@tutorcruncher.com. We’d love to hear from you!
TRANSCRIPT:
Raashi Thakran: I'm really excited to hear all about your journey. So let's just start by talking a little bit about your journey. How did you get into tutoring?
Alexander Friedman: I am probably the only tutoring agency owner who is a high school dropout. I was a really bad student in school for various reasons, and then a few years after I dropped out of high school, I went to college, and a completely randomly somebody I knew, asked me to tutor her son. We did martial arts together, and she said, "Oh, this kid is very smart, but he doesn't like any of his tutors. You're good at math so maybe you can help him." And that's how it started. I tutored one kid, and then I realized that it was so much more satisfying to actually help people directly than whatever my day job was - I was a software engineer.
This was around 2007 when there wasn't any real business content. There was no four hour work week, there was no Alex hormozi. There was nothing. So it took me a long time to realize that this can be turned into a business, and that it should be turned into a business, and I was actually quite reluctant to do so. I didn't see myself as a business owner. But eventually, over the course of many years, which it doesn't have to take other people, it went from me tutoring a few students to me tutoring a lot of students, to reluctantly hiring other tutors, and then even more reluctantly hiring a manager to do the agency management for me. And now it's, it's an actual business.
Raashi Thakran: It sounds like it's something that happened very unexpectedly. It wasn't something that was planned or you know, you didn't think that, "oh, this is where it's gonna go."
Alexander Friedman: Yeah, it was completely unexpected. I never saw myself one as an educator. I mean, again, I did drop out of high school. I hated school, but it turned out that that experience was kind of a plus. A parent never asked me, "oh, let me see your high school degree. Like they don't care. But it did help me connect with students who also struggled in school because that would work with them. I always said to them "You know what? I also didn't like this. It's okay not to like it. Let's get through this. You don't want to end up like I did and not have a degree for no reason."
I've talked to a lot of agency owners actually, and the majority that I know are also like this. Very few people are like "I'm gonna get into this and make a lot of money." Like, I don't know anyone like that. I know they exist, but for most people it just organically becomes a business, because they turn something they enjoy doing into a business?
Raashi Thakran: You're so right. Every single company I've spoken to or people I've interviewed, they all always say the same thing, that this was something that they were truly passionate about, and that's how they got into this. So that's incredible to hear. Was it scary at first? Was it a daunting journey?
Alexander Friedman: It was so scary. It was scary on so many levels. I had to really change my mindset as a human being. Self employment of any kind is scary. If you've only had a job, being self employed is terrifying. It's one thing to do the work of being a tutor. It's another thing to find the clients and then manage those clients, and then they're not happy with you. You need to ask them for money. That's the scariest thing like "can you please pay me? Just, please pay my bill." So there were countless, I guess personal transformations. I don't want to overuse the word, but I had to really go from a guy who had a job to somebody who sees himself as a business owner and runs a company. There was so many things that were scary.
Raashi Thakran: What were some of the challenges you faced when you first started Brooklyn Math Tutors?
Alexander Friedman: Well, when I first started out in 2008, I had no idea how to advertise. That was probably the biggest challenge. I didn't know how to organize everything. When you start, you're like, "Okay, I have a client. Great. How do I build them? What if they don't pay me. There's all these things that are hard to figure out when you don't know what you're doing, you don't know how to set things up. And then after you get a few clients, how do you keep track of them? Like how many sessions do I owe this person? How many hours? And then once you start hiring other people, just that whole thing just explodes, which is why I've used almost every tutoring software you could find. I even had to write software to add to the ones I was using previously, because they didn't do what I wanted to do. And it becomes like an administrative nightmare. That's the last thing I remember, because it was many, many years ago.
Raashi Thakran: It's just one thing after another, isn't it? No, I completely agree with you. Like you said and from what I've seen, there are four important parts of a tutoring business, there's obviously the owner, the person who runs the tutoring business, and then we've got the tutors, and then the students and the clients who are paying for those students. So they're all these different pillars that make up a tutoring company, and how successful it is. So we'll start with tutors, because I want to hear from you how you built your tutor team. What was that process like?
Alexander Friedman: When I started, I was really clueless, and I didn't know what to look for, and so I would interview people, and I would give people the benefit of doubt. I'd be like, "okay, is this person good at math?" And then, like, as I got better and better at running the company, as my own social skills improved, I started really filtering for people that had very high EQ, basically high social skills. So even if they were good at math or physics, I would start filtering them incredibly heavily. Like, will our parents like these people? If something goes wrong, how are they going to react? In terms of practicalities, when most companies post ads for tutors, they write these very short ads. I have an ad that's like a small novella. The people who apply are really a good fit, as these are people who manage to read the whole thing, who have attention to detail, and are like "oh, I want to work for this company." I like it when people are extremely clear about what they're asking for.
So it was a very long process of learning how to select people. Because ultimately, if you're just a one man show, then people are picking you based on maybe 20% your tutoring skills, and 80% your presentation. When you start picking people, all these people are your company representatives. So you have to be extremely careful because they don't have the same goals as you do, and it's very easy for them to mess up your reputation. And I've had that happen in all sorts of unpredictable ways, like things you couldn't imagine. So it took a long time to figure out how to filter that out.
Raashi Thakran: Coming to your clients. Now, how did you go about finding clients for your business?
Alexander Friedman: Initially, I think we got extremely lucky. Realistically, it's very hard to find clients. Clients have to find you. When I started the company, I started researching search engine optimization because I didn't really know how to have clients find us.
Our company has a search engine friendly name, and then we have lots and lots of reviews on Google, Google Local, Google business pages etc. I noticed that we do get clients through referrals. But one odd thing we found is that in our city, people don't refer as much. I once wound up tutoring two students who were best friends in different schools, and they told each other like "Oh, I have a great tutor. Oh, me too." And it turned out to be the same person.
Raashi Thakran: That's so interesting. Is it the stigma, or is it just like. "well, I don't want to share my tutor with anyone else."
Alexander Friedman: It would be that because at some point, I partnered with a similar company in California, and people referred. So I'm not sure what New York parents are thinking. It may be that they don't want to share their tutor because tutors are very busy, like it's hard to be a good quality tutor in New York. You tend to get booked out very quickly, because there's just not a lot of people who want to do it and can afford to do it. So it's like, really high skilled people who are in grad school or they're actors. So maybe it's that, like, I don't want this tutor to not have availability.
Raashi Thakran: That's so interesting, something to look into. And I think that brings me to my next question, because I'm in the UK, so I know what the tutoring landscape is like in the UK, but what's the American tutoring landscape like? How competitive is it?
Alexander Friedman: I don't know. I just know the New York landscape, and it's incredibly competitive. Private tutoring is not a big thing in America as a whole, but it is a very big thing in the big cities, like in LA and New York, and not so much in the rest of the country. So you'll have tutors in New York charging and getting paid literally three, four times more than they will in most other places. It's partly the cost of living difference and partly parents putting that pressure on their kids. And hence there are many tutors and tutoring agencies.
There seems to be enough client demand, where we get lots of clients. I think it's probably hard for people, at first, to understand what it is that parents want from tutoring companies. I'm surprised there aren't more tutoring companies, because it doesn't seem like that difficult of a business to run.
Raashi Thakran: There was a surge during the pandemic, so that was a big surge in terms of people starting their own tutoring business, because they're like, "Well, you know, it's all online, so it should be super easy." So we also saw a surge in people using TutorCruncher. But even now, that has been the trend, and there are a lot of people are starting their own tutoring business, which I think is really cool.
Alexander Friedman: I think so too. I think it's better that lots of people have their own individual companies than, like, the giant tech companies in education make money. I hate those companies, so I'd rather there's a lot of private tutoring companies. If they can manage to find their own clients. God bless them. I'm happy that they're doing it.
Raashi Thakran: Coming to the third pillar of a successful tutoring business. Obviously, students are a very important aspect of it. So how do you ensure that each of your student is at the center of your approach?
Alexander Friedman: I mean, we like to keep things very simple. We just find good tutors that we know will do a good job, but then release them. I think a lot of companies like to talk and say a lot of words about methodologies and their mission statements but I think it's mostly fluff. Ultimately, it's just like, "Do you have a good person working with the student? If you have a good person, things will go well. If you don't have a good person, no amount of training materials or logistics, nothing's going to make it better. And I think that's also the case in the classroom.
Other good companies that I know would just focus on having very good quality tutors who are just very good quality people, and then it magically works itself out. There's a really good book I read when I was trying to scale my business. It's called "Good to Great". And it made a very good point. It was that if you have good people, management problems disappear. And that's what I came to see because I used to have a lot of management problems like, "oh, this person isn't doing this. Why aren't they doing this? How do I motivate them, and how do I organize them?" And it would drive me nuts. And then I realized I just have the wrong people, because some people are completely problem free, and then some people just constantly cause problems.
I spent a lot of time trying to softly, "leadership" them into doing the right thing. And you just can't if they don't want to. So for anyone who's watching this - if you're having problems, it's not you, it's the people you're choosing. It's not your systems. Just choose the right people and you'll have zero problems, almost zero problems.
Raashi Thakran: Yeah, exactly. That is very good advice. Now you've been with us for over five years, I think, which is a long time. So I want to hear from you - how did you find out about TutorCruncher?
Alexander Friedman: My background is in software development, and when I started scaling the company, I realized you can't just do this on Excel spreadsheets, right? It just doesn't work. Although believe it or not, I know companies that make much more money than me that are still doing things on the spreadsheets. And I've been trying to be like, "please, please, pay for TutorCruncher".
So I basically tried, almost every tutoring management company. I started with Teachworks. And then there was another company that's very similar, that's also run by the same company but that didn't have all the features I wanted, so I actually ended up writing software to create a bunch of features which are actually features that TutorCruncher already has. And I was like, "I can't be the only one that has this idea. Of course not. It's not like I'm doing anything special." The whole idea of organizing things by job, most portals don't have that. And the whole idea of getting tutors to apply, most portals don't have that either. And so what ends up happening was that the portal software, just allows you to do the billing, but it doesn't help you with the matching process. And so if you're having a lot of people coming in and you have more than just two or three tutors, you're like, "Oh, you need help with math. This is your tutor". When you have 20 or 30 tutors on your system - God, good luck! You don't know what's going on. So I remember having to write like, five identical emails to five tutors and keep tracking them - it was just a freaking nightmare. So I first solved that by writing my own software. It wasn't hard, but it was annoying. And I was like, there's got to be a better solution. And I don't know how I came across TutorCruncher, but I was always looking and I was like, "Oh my God, these guys are doing it pretty much exactly the way I want it to be done." That's how I found TutorCruncher.
My mission in running my company was always not to make as much money as possible, but to make my life as as UNmiserable as possible. TutorCruncher basically made it so that there's a lot less administrative work. In fact, almost no administrative work.
Raashi Thakran: That's amazing to hear. And this is why I love talking to our clients, because the journey is just so inspiring. And obviously you've been with us for a really long time, and you have grown exponentially. Would you say TutorCruncher has played a tiny part in helping you with that?
Alexander Friedman: So it's an interesting question, because TutorCruncher hasn't directly helped the specific financial growth of the company, but it helped my life immeasurably, because the growth has been in the amount of free time me and my manager have to not do repetitive, tedious administrative work. No tutoring portal software, as far as I know, will help you find clients, but they will make the rest of your life less miserable. So if you want to spend that time on doing marketing, on doing whatever it is to get more clients, then it will help you. And I think a lot of people don't realize just how much time they're wasting on tasks that are better done by a computer. People who run tutoring companies, as you mentioned, they're very rarely business people, and so they're like, "oh, okay, this works well enough." But they may be spending 15 hours a week on something that we spend two hours a week on. So I use that to spend time with my family. If they want to spend that time growing their company, that's what they should be doing.
Raashi Thakran: Yeah, that's so true, because we speak to so many clients and so many prospects who tell us that, "oh yeah, we're still using spreadsheets, and that basically takes up our entire day. And then when they join us, they're like, "Oh my God, we've got all this free time now, and there's so much we can do". So it's actually incredible. It just makes life so much easier, you know? So I'm really happy to hear that. Now on to my next question, because I really love this question. What is your favorite thing about running your tutoring business?
Alexander Friedman: To be honest, I don't like running a tutoring company. I like tutoring. I really love tutoring. I don't love running a tutoring company. I suspect that a lot of people don't love running a company. That just what ends up happening. So I think if I have to have a favorite thing, it's that you're still doing something meaningful. What's the favorite thing for me? That's really what you asked me. Favorite thing for me is that it's an easy business to run. We're helping people, and we're making money doing something that's not bad for the world. So, yeah, I'm sorry. It's not more in depth, or like, "I get to help people every day". I wish I got to help people every day, because that's how it was when I was tutoring. I love tutoring, but running a tutoring company is like running any other company.
Oh, yeah. I love that we never have to sell anything. I hate businesses where it's like, "look, you want this thing. I know you want this thing. I don't really want this thing. Like, come on, buy this thing." We don't have to do that. We don't have to market. We don't have to do anything like that. People come to us and say, "please help us." We say, "Okay." And there's nothing like sleazy or salesy involved.
Raashi Thakran: Yeah, yeah. I love the real talk. This is a very real conversation. So I love that. When it comes to someone else, you know, if there's someone out there who wants to start their own tutoring business, what advice would you give to someone who is just starting out?
Alexander Friedman: Just do it. Don't try to get everything lined up. If you're already tutoring and you're at your client capacity limit, just start. You'll be glad you started years earlier. I wish I had started earlier than I did. So if you're thinking about it, just go for it. There's lots of information out there, lots of information on how to run a business. It's not a difficult business to run. You're not gonna go broke paying TutorCruncher $50 a month. It's not like you have to buy a huge inventory. There's nothing that can really go wrong. So if you happen to be in this industry and people like you, you have a huge natural advantage. So just, just go for it. It's not such a big deal.
Raashi Thakran: Well, that was Alexander. Thank you so much, Alexander for being part of this today, and thank you for having such an honest and real conversation with us. I absolutely loved it. And for anyone watching, if you are a tutoring business and you want to get featured in the next video, please reach out to us.
