This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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Hello, hello. What's up? Welcome to Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau. Going strong into season six.
Season six of the podcast, new episode every single day. And today is this year's first Throwback Thursday segment. And we started this a couple of years ago. It's been one of our most popular segments. Every week we take a look at someone whose story has evolved since we first featured them.
And that individual, that case study, that Side Hustle or small business owner is actually providing the detailed update. So last week, which I mean by that last year, how about that last year? Long ago, last year, also known as six days ago, we heard from the co-founder of Radical Tea Towels. They are a British family business that promotes historical progress and modern messages of change. Today, something different.
We're gonna hear from Tyee Slage. She is the young founder of a Florida tutoring business that now has 25 staff tutors. And she does this all while working full-time as a rocket scientist, a real life aerospace engineer. So how has she done this? What's she working on?
What is her greatest challenge? Let's hear directly from Tyeece and I'll come back at the end for a quick wrap up. [Music]
My name is Tyeece Lage. I live in Central Florida. My side hustle is a tutoring company called 321 Tutoring.
And I was featured on episode number 769. We serve students all over the country. We tutor all grades and all subjects in all sorts of different formats. My team has grown to 25 tutors of all different disciplines. We have engineers, doctors of chemistry, accountants, physicists, college students, and of course, teachers.
I started tutoring when I was 14 years old. I've always been very gifted in math and science and my peers took note of that pretty early on. And more importantly, their parents took note and wanted me to start tutoring their kids. It wasn't long before my high school trig teacher asked if he could pass my information on to students in his class who needed tutoring. So I tutored all throughout high school, earning $20 an hour, which is a pretty great wage for a 14 year old.
When I moved away to college, word got around again that I was not only good at math, but good at tutoring math. So I tutored my way through undergrad and that helped pay for rent and food and tuition while I was also working engineering internships. After graduation, I settled down in my engineering job with a salary and realized that I really missed tutoring. So 321 tutoring was born. Tutoring is not my main hustle.
I currently work as a mechanical engineer in the space industry by day and I run my tutoring business in the evenings and on weekends. Since I was last on the show, my team has grown to 25 tutors. The demand I was seeing for elementary students who needed tutoring was growing by the day. I was turning students away left and right. It broke my heart that there were all these young kids who needed help and with my specialty being high school and college level math, I wasn't able to help these kids.
So I took to social media with a we're hiring post and the response was amazing. Teachers and engineers and accountants from all over wanted to work for my tutoring company. 321 tutoring is now able to serve students in all grades, learning all subjects. The biggest challenge I'm currently facing is keeping track of which tutor is working with which student and for how long. I currently use Google Calendar to keep it all straight, but I'm looking to find a third party program to optimize this so that I can pay my tutors accordingly and invoice my students and their parents accordingly as well.
If someone wants to follow in my footsteps, the best piece of advice I can give them is to center your business around compassion. My business model since expanding my team has shifted. Our goal has always been to provide quality individualized tutoring at an affordable price, but since expanding my team, our goal is now to continue providing quality individualized tutoring at an affordable price while also providing a fair wage to professionals on my team. By focusing on serving your students and your tutors, the right clientele will come to you. When the pandemic hit and student transitioned to virtual school, I knew the need for tutors would be huge.
I made sure to hire my tutors before the start of the 2020-2021 school year to be prepared to serve all the students who would need help. I wanted to give a shout out to Justin and JJ. Justin found me through my podcast episode with the Side Hustle School, and I've been tutoring his son JJ ever since. [Music]
Thais, thank you so much for those updates. I also want to give a shout out to Justin and JJ.
Appreciate you guys listening to the podcast. It's always so fun when our listeners end up connecting with some of the people we feature or vice versa. Check out Thais' website at 321tutoring.com, 321tutoring.com serving central Florida, and I believe now beyond through virtual sessions. All right, that's it for today. Let me know what you think and who you'd like to see featured from our archives of more than a thousand stories.
If you've got a question or an update for us, sidehustleschool.com/questions. Today's notes, finally, are at sidehustleschool.com/1832. Hope you have a wonderful day wherever you are in the world. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School.
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From the Onward Project.
