Are you looking to earn money from teaching students and want to register in any tutoring agency?
Before joining any tuition agency, I will show you exactly what a home tuition agency is, how they work and why you should think twice before joining such tutor agencies.
What is home tuition agency?
A home tuition agency is nothing more than a commission agent who connects parents and students and takes a huge commission from aspiring tutors by giving them tuition inquiries from students and sometimes from parents, by giving them tutor’s references.
Home tuition agencies are of two types.
One is local agencies, and the other is online websites.
I know that you might be more interested in online websites that can provide you with student inquiries or leads so that you can start earning by teaching nearby students and supporting your family.
How would I know this?
A few years ago, I was in the same situation as you are today, but I believed in myself and opted to start home tuition without being dependent on such greedy tuition agencies. Today, I, along with my wife run a full-fledged tuition class with over 150 students.
We started with our home with only five students.
Could you believe this?
Anyway, let me come to the point.
Home tuition agencies act as mediators between the parents (students) and tutors. A tutor joins such agencies to get students, and the parents join to get the best tutors who can teach their children.
Disclaimer: I have no intention to defame any tuition agency or website through this informative post. This post is not targeting any specific agency or online website. To maintain the privacy of individuals and agencies, I have taken utmost care to hide the names wherever I have given a reference. This post is solely for the people who want to understand everything about home tuition agencies in general. I do believe that not all agencies or websites are fraudulent or fake.
How does a tuition agency work?
Tuition agencies are working on a commission-based business model. Whenever any tutor and students agree, the tuition agency will take commission either from tutors or from parents and sometimes from both parties.
Let us understand it in detail.
How are the tutors getting connected with students?
The tutors have to register on the website of the home tuition agency. (Some websites will not let you register yourself as a tutor for free; you have to pay some fees in the name of registration charges.)
Tutors need to create their profile with name & address, exact location, qualifications, experience, and all necessary details or as per the online form available on the home tuition agency website.
After the profile submission, the tuition agency will evaluate the profile and accept or reject the profile application accordingly. (The interesting thing is that most websites that charge registration fees in advance will never reject your application!!)
The tutors who register with the tuition agency will get parents’ phone numbers who require tutors. Typically, tutors and students are from nearby locations only.
How parents or students are getting connected with tutors?
There is an easy registration procedure for parents or students compared to tutors. With essential details like name & address, exact location, grade, or subjects they are looking for. (Most likely, there are no registration fees for parents or students.)
The home tuition agencies forward the list of a few local tutors’ profiles with the parents and phone numbers to choose the best tutor from available tutors.
The parent and students can talk or meet physically and discuss everything before the agreement.
Once the parent chooses the tutor and confirms with the tuition agency, the tuition agency prepares an agreement(online) with both parties that may include the following:
- Terms and conditions
- Contract period
- Payment cycle and mode of payment
- Commission percentage
- Time duration ( if it is per/hour basis )
The agreement is typically in digital form and, in most cases, favors students or parents, not the tutor.
The tutor and the student abide by the terms and conditions.
When the payment cycle comes, the parent has to pay the fees or money to the home tuition agency, and the agency will deduct their commission and release the payout to the tutor.
Some agencies take commissions from tutors for one time, and some agencies take it every month from tutors.
This contract remains valid as per the agreement.
Usually, home tuition agencies are working on this business model. A local agency uses a similar method but is more reliable and trustworthy.
Should you register with the home tuition agency?
If you need my personal opinion, NO.
You should never join a tutoring agency to get students unless you are not comfortable starting a teaching business on your own. You can start your teaching business from home and earn more money than by joining any agency.
I have made a complete guide on home tuition, its meaning, types, and the practical and unbiased comparison between home tuition and private teaching jobs or tutor jobs.
I highly recommend you NOT to invest your hard-earned money in these agencies in the name of registration or some shiny terms like a highlighted tutor, premium membership, star tutor, and similar to those.
The majority of the home tutoring service providers (agencies) or websites do not guarantee you to give students. They will only give you some random inquiries from parents or students, and there is a high chance that the student or parent will not choose you as a tutor.
Sometimes you will get completely irrelevant inquiries.
Even after your mentioned tuition fees, parents will negotiate with your prices, and you will get frustrated by listening to their final fees that will be too low that you have never expected.
I have never seen or heard of any tutor making a full-time income to support their family by joining such home tuition agencies. Please comment in the comment section if you have ever witnessed such tutors.
But, I have personally met many people who started taking tuition from their homes and now earn a decent income every month to live a better life. I am one of those people!
Even if the home tuition agency is genuine and well-reputed, the biggest disadvantage of any home tuition agency is they will take a commission from you.
You will never get the full money you are worth for your efforts and time!
Apart from this disadvantage, you may face many issues while working with fraud & greedy tuition agencies.
I have mentioned some real-life problems that I have researched on the internet by the real tutors who registered with such websites or agencies and lost their money.
Disadvantages of home tuition agency
Competition:
Never think that if you register with any home tuition agency website, you alone will get leads. (contact numbers of parents looking for home tuition).
You will not be the only person to receive these leads or contact details. Along with you, many other tutors will also get the exact leads near your location.
Similarly, parents will also get the profile of many tutors to choose from the available tutors. You will be one of those tutors.
The bad part is that you don’t have any choice to choose students, but parents have this advantage, and just because of this advantage, parents start negotiating and hiring tutors who need money and are ready to work at lower fees.
Remember, the agency will not reduce the commission percentage even if you charge lower fees, which will remain the same.
Dependency:
You will be completely dependent on the website and can’t do anything to promote yourself. Some websites attract you by giving your profile link to promote on social media or anywhere on the internet but in reality; you are actually promoting the site only.
Not clear? Let me explain to you in simple words.
Suppose you are a registered tutor or premium tutor at any tuition agency website. You can create your profile link to share online with anyone from the website itself.
Now, you share your profile link on, say, Facebook or WhatsApp or wherever, the person will receive your profile details, but the person will reach the agency websites where they can explore some other tutors.
The worst part is that there is always a better tutor than you, available in your locality in terms of fees and quality. Some of the tutors are so needy that they are ready to work at any fees or terms and conditions.
All the benefit is with the website as they will get a new parent as their customer.
Remember: Parents are the actual customers of any website, NOT the tutors. And, I don’t think that I should explain what businesses can do to get more customers.
You are smart enough to decide the worth of your role on such websites.
No physical address:
Most websites that provide tutors don’t have any physical addresses. However, very few genuine websites mention the physical address, but they are farther from you and don’t have any branch office in your city or location.
You can never reach them if you need some support, and they are practically unreachable to you. You don’t know with whom you are dealing.
It is always better to check the physical address and visit before registering with such websites.
Rude customer care or no customer care
As the physical address is not available, these websites either give customer care contact numbers or email id to communicate with them when you have any issue.
Surprisingly, they are just making you a fool, nothing else.
In fact, these websites don’t have any systematic approach to handling tutors’ grievances or complaints.
If they give you the contact number, no dedicated representative will support you. Either you won’t get any response or get random answers, or sometimes you have to face rude behavior also.
If you keep calling them, they will block your number, and then you will lose any mode of communication with them.
You will always get an automated WhatsApp reply when you register your complaint and never hear back from them.
The fake guarantee:
Many websites do this fraud in the name of a guarantee. If you read their terms and conditions carefully, they talk about leads and guarantee you leads.
A lead means inquiries.
Some websites also attract you by offering a fixed number of monthly leads if you take their so-called premium plans.
Let me explain to you this money game on these websites.
They also collect parents’ and students’ data from the school, colleges, the internet, and their sites. They have an extensive database of tuition-seeking parents and students.
Now, when you register yourself by paying upfront fees for 20 leads/month, they will give you contact numbers of literally random inquiries just based on your location.
Like, if your profile is for a class 12 maths tutor, you might get an inquiry from a class 2 English tutor. Yes, that is pretty common.
Your one lead is gone!
And, even if you get a few relevant inquiries, it is up to you to convert them to a confirmed student. I hope that you remember the competition and negotiation that we already discussed.
You will face many surprises. I have read a review that many parents want a free demo class first before hiring you as a tutor, and they do the same with many tutors.
You can understand that it will NOT be easy to convert all inquiries to get confirmed students for tuition at the fees you want.
Personal safety:
If you are a female, personal safety becomes more sensitive because you deal with strangers.
You have to go to the students’ homes, and you don’t know if they are alone or with their parents. You have to use your sixth sense to predict unpleasant events.
Similarly, you have to consider travel safety also.
Security:
You are not an employee of these websites, and you can be fired at any time without any genuine reason. All websites have a customer care team for parents or students, not tutors.
They have a rating system to rate any tutor.
Any parent or student will rate you, and if you are in a bit of bad luck, you might get the wrong students and end up with poor ratings, and then it will be tough for you to get new students.
Payouts:
You will get your payouts after deduction of agency commissions or per agreement with the website.
This does not include registration fees or premium membership, and it is a different amount that you have to pay.
Registration fees are usually one-time, and membership fees are on a monthly basis.
Except for a few cases, you won’t get direct payment from any parent or student, and you have to rely on websites to release your payment on time.
Sometimes, if parents don’t pay fees for these websites at the end of the month, the website will not give you your fees.
Please understand this. There is NO guarantee if the parent stops tuition before certain days or as mentioned in their terms and conditions.
For example, if you started giving tuition on 1st January and the parent stopped tuition on 16th January, you probably won’t get any payment from the websites if the parent doesn’t pay the websites. Please read the terms and conditions carefully before joining any tutoring agency.
If the website is genuine, they will take advanced fees from parents and give your payouts, but genuine websites or home tuition agencies are rare.
No regular income:
As you are dependent on these websites, you can’t earn money in a consistent manner. Any student can stop taking your services due to any reason.
You can’t work on your personal growth as a tutor with these websites or agencies.
You are limited to the website only, and you miss the huge opportunities available in your location because you are missing every student who hasn’t joined such websites.
In the case of your own tutoring business, you can build your brand, gain popularity and scale it to the next level, for example, from home tuition to tuition classes or tuition centers.
This is only possible when you do everything for yourself, not for the websites or agencies.
Upfront charges:
As I have already discussed earlier, some websites take registration fees before you get your first student.
I request you to please read the terms and conditions of the website, word by word and after that, decide whether you should join these tuition agencies or start your own teaching business.
How to identify fake tuition agencies?
I hope now you understand how home tuition agencies work and how they get profits from your hard work.
However, sometimes you may not be able to check the genuine and fake or fraudulent websites due to their attractive website designs and appealing and persuading testimonials from their existing tutors (fake though!)
I have researched and identified a few points that help you differentiate between fraud tuition agencies and genuine tuition agencies or websites.
Strong sales department
If you have registered on any website without paying any upfront fees and you start receiving frequent calls to get their premium membership, believe that the website is fraud.
Fake or fraud agencies usually focus more on getting money from tutors and parents.
If they try to attract you with such words like,
“11 students are looking for tutors in your area, get our premium membership and grab these opportunities.”
“You will get at least 25 leads every month if you take our premium membership.”
“Our premium tutors are getting inquiries almost every day. Join them and earn more money.”
Sometimes they have fake testimonials from so-called tutors.
If the tutor’s contact details are not mentioned or the tutor’s social media profile doesn’t exist, stay away from such websites.
There is also a smart way to fool you, the website mention tutor’s contact number to win your trust but when you call them they are actually one of their team member who is being paid to trap tutors like you by praising the website and behaving like a tutor.
But as I am also in this field for a long, I have noticed one thing, when you call such tutors, they will first ask you about your location and when you ask them about their location, they will tell you their location that is at a greater distance than you.
Why?
Because you can’t meet them in person.
In fact, they don’t want to meet any tutor personally.
Give us five stars, give us five stars
The fake home tuition agency will always force you to leave a five-star rating or feedback if they have any app on Google play.
They also tell you to give your feedback and rating with praising words and in return, they might offer you free lead.
If they are forcing you, again and again, beware, they are literally greedy blood-sucking mosquitoes!
If you leave poor feedback and your feedback is removed within a short period, stay assured that they are totally fraudulent.
Genuine agencies will never remove any feedback from dissatisfied tutors and always try to understand the reason behind the dissatisfaction and offer solutions with high priority.
But, such fake home tuition agencies are caught on public forums where they can’t remove any feedback. The popular one is “quora” ( I have taken all the screenshots from quora to make you understand practically.)
Now, these fraud tuition websites try another trick.
Feedback manipulation/counter replies or fake backups
When they can’t remove the real and poor feedback on public forums like quora, they ask their team to reply to that feedback.
These members usually support the fraud websites and give you some fake proof of earning as a real tutor.
If you see the reply to a negative review with the website link, consider it as fake support to the website or agency. Most probably these people are working for that fraud site or getting compensated by supporting them online.
Always check the profile of such members and you will soon catch them as they might be smart but not the smartest.
- Their profile will have the following things that are enough to identify them as a member of fraud websites.
- They have a brand new profile on the public forum site.
- Incomplete profile.
- They reply instantly.
- They only participate in feedback or discussion related to these specific websites.
- They dislike or downvote the answer or feedback that is not in favour of their website.
- They try to report your feedback or flag.
- They sometimes abuse the person who left real feedback.
- They put excessive data as proof in a counter reply to the poor feedback.
If you have still any doubt about the genuine feedback, let me tell you one perfect way to identify it.
Usually, the genuine or real negative feedback from the tutor will be longer and sometimes you will see grammatical mistakes.
Because, when people are frustrated, they don’t care about proofreading their feedback, they want to put their feelings and emotions into the words without thinking much and as they are writing the feedback faster than usual speed, they make grammatical mistakes.
Such feedbacks are from real tutors who are cheated by such fake home tuition agencies.
You might see proof of their personal communications when they had communicated with the website’s customer care or with any representative.
These are some of the signs of fake or fraudulent agencies or websites.
Will you now accept their terms and conditions before even reading them?
I know you will now save yourself from such fraud websites and can easily distinguish between fake and real.
Best alternatives of home tuition agency
The best alternative of any home tuition agency is to start your home tuition. You will have complete freedom and zero dependencies.
You can grow as you want and make more money as you get experience in promotion and teaching. I have written a massive guide on how to start home tuition on this blog. Before you join any agency, I request you to at least read that post and decide whatever you want to choose.
Joining a reputed coaching class or institute as a permanent teacher is the second-best alternative and if you have such an opportunity in hand, you must go with that but make sure you have the potential to grow there.
Want to save time and money to get more students for your tuition? I recommend you read this.
What is a home tuition agency? – Conclusion
I hope that I have tried my best to make you aware of what home tuition agencies are and how they function.
I have also explained the disadvantages of home tuition agencies in a logical and practical way.
I have also explained how you can identify fake and genuine tutoring websites or agencies before you join or invest your money.
Now it’s over to you.
Have you ever experienced such fraud as a tutor?
You can comment below so that anyone can check the facts before joining any websites or agencies and save money.
If you loved this article, you can thank me by sharing it with your friends!
I wish you the very best in your tutoring career!
Also Read: How to create home tuition posters for tuition classes for FREE in under 30 minutes!