After securing several rounds of funding, the company, originating in Brisbane, has expanded across the east coast of Australia and now operates in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne and employs over 200 tutors.
Co-CEOs Sam Robertson and Cameron Schmidt identified a gap in the tutoring market where bricks and mortar centres offered quality but lacked efficiency for parents and students.
Cameron, once a tutor himself, would drive around on a scooter, tutoring students in his local area, which explains how the name of the business came about.
Scooter Tutor launched in mid 2015 and has grown exponentially, with the website receiving 15,000 enquiries in the past six months alone and close to 600% growth year on year. “Cameron began tutoring in 2007 but it wasn’t until 2015 that we realised technology could enable a tutoring business to grow much larger and operate much more efficiently than any other tutoring services available on the market,” said Sam.
Bringing tutoring into the digital age
Sam said the tutoring centre model is very old school and admin-heavy and although it has the quality control, it lacks the efficiency, whereas the referrals and cash in hand tutors have the efficiency but no quality control as tutors are not screened. “There was nothing in the middle that was connecting the dots to modernise the way tutoring works.”
Ensuring every tutor is certified to work with children, background checked thoroughly and employed as a Scooter Tutor employee, Sam said the quality offered by Scooter Tutor is the platform’s biggest asset, as parents need to feel comfortable inviting a stranger into their home.
Parents and students are able to jump online and find the perfect tutor based on availability, subject and year level. The service is also location specific where tutors travel directly to students within their allocated area.
“We need to know when the tutors are available, so we built our own software that the tutors can log into and update their availability, which is also a great feature for parents who are notified of any amendments ahead of time,” said Sam.
How is Scooter Tutor doing so far?
The software is so efficient it’s in the process of being licensed to one of the largest aged care providers in Brisbane to manage its huge remote work force.
Unlike other tutoring providers, a rating system is also in place where users can give a score to their respective tutor, ensuring a high standard is maintained. The rating of each tutor is available on the Scooter Tutor website for others to see before selecting their own tutor.
“Flexibility, efficiency and quality are all instrumental in the way we’re trying to modernise tutoring within Australia and we’re hoping to expand to 1,000 tutors by the second half of 2017,” said Sam.
“However, as we employ all of our tutors, it’s really important that we take the time and effort to find the best tutors out there; this is a big point of difference for us, and something that parents really care about, so it’s crucial that we get it right.”
Sam and Cameron will now turn their attention to expanding the company’s current offering, with online tutoring sessions to students in remote regions next on the agenda, as well as expanding the software development team.
