Tutor
Manfred Olbrich
Germany
a year
Over the past 7 years living in London, I have worked as a private tutor. It has been a sublime way to reconcile all the things that I’m good at and all that I have learned in life and use those things to make a living while helping others. It has helped me sustain myself while studying music full time, it has been my extra lifeline while being a full-time musician, and it has helped build a life in one of the most challenging and expensive cities in the world. Over the years I managed to master my teaching skills, and I was able to support countless students unlock their true potential, gain confidence, and ultimately become their best selves. Becoming somewhat a mentor to them meant that I was blessed to live through incredibly rewarding success stories from my students, some of which struggled with acute learning difficulties. Watching them grow in confidence and become happier while achieving their goals has made this the most meaningful journey thus far and I am very thankful for being able to add such value to people’s lives. Back in 2019, I made the firm decision to stop relying on music for a living. I realised after finishing my music degree, being a full-time session musician for over two years and touring across Europe on several occasions, that even though music is my deepest passion, the idea of mixing music with money felt incredibly conflicting and unnatural. Hence, I decided to focus on my work as a tutor. I quickly increased the number of hours I was teaching and the number of students I was taking on. I started delivering 30 hours of lessons a week on average and doing a blend of online lessons and commuting to all unimaginable parts of London to teach face-to-face. I quickly started to gain recognition and great reviews from my clients and the agencies I worked with. I was being recommended by my clients regularly and my work was continuously being backed by the results achieved by my students. Everything started to fall into place in my life, and things were flowing with a much more natural cadence in general. I started to do well financially, got engaged, and even got the opportunity to work as a private tutor in Dubai. I was finally able to reach some stability, something I was so longing for throughout all my years of grinding and working hard day in and day out in London. Towards the end of 2019, I slowly started to feel like I had reached a cap in my line of work. I had already exhausted the number of hours in the week I had available to teach and I felt like the only way to expand my work was to scale up my reach as a tutor and get to more students at a time. I wasn’t sure how to achieve that, but I knew it had to be through online tuition. I was determined to find a way. One day in 2017 I was on my way back from a music lesson when I received a call from a new potential client who wanted me to deliver a guitar lesson for his son. I didn’t know it then, but this call would end up being a pivotal moment in my life. Fast forward to December of 2019, one night after delivering a guitar lesson for this student, I decided to stay a bit longer to have a chat with his father. Given his vast experience and successful career as a businessman, I told him about my goals of expanding and scaling up my reach as an online tutor. He told me the story of the Rockstar tutors of Hong Kong who had built immense audiences and were delivering lessons to hundreds of students at a time. The conversation rapidly turned into a swirling brainstorming session. We quickly realised that there weren’t any easily accessible platforms that were specifically designed to help tutors scale up their reach all while providing them all the tools they need to deliver online lessons. There and then we started a company, and we were determined to develop such a platform. We called the platform LessonWise. We have developed a slick and interactive online platform designed to seamlessly connect tutors and students and provide them with the built-in functionalities and features they need to arrange and deliver live online lessons. We do this by offering an all-in-one environment that users can access for free, where they can interact with each other, advertise themselves, share resources, register courses, and deliver them in a highly interactive built-in online classroom. We want students to better themselves by easily accessing the knowledge they need, taught by top tutors around the world; and we want to empower tutors by helping them scale up while providing them all the tools they need to sustain their growth.