It’s important to understand what your potential business partner wants from the tuition business. What are their priorities? What vision do they have for the tuition business? 

It’s also important to understand where they see the tuition business in the future. Understand their approach and the road map that they have in mind. 

It could be that they want something completely different to what you want for the business. If there is no alignment, then there will be clashes; and clashes only mean one thing – affecting the overall tuition business. 

So it’s vital to understand who you are teaming up with what their future aspirations are for the tuition business, and what they want for themselves on an individual level. Knowing these facts will allow you to see if you both want the same thing or not. 

If you both want the same things, it’ll be a match made in heaven; if not, you can go your own separate ways. 

But know this for a fact – No matter how much alignment you may have with your business partner, business challenges in future will lead to disagreements, but by having these conversations upfront, you will be able to avoid a lot of these difficult conversations in advance. You will still have to deal with people’s personalities, but that’s part of the journey. 

I had a great run working with my brother, but sadly it was time to part ways. He came up to me and said: “You’re holding me back. There is so much more I want to do with our tuition business. This is my bread and butter.” 

When we first started our tuition business, I had a full-time job and I was also running our tuition business simultaneously on the weekends. I also had the pressure of completing my Chartered Accountancy exams and performing at my job. For nearly 3 years, I worked seven days a week. So you can imagine how stretched I was. 

My brother on the other hand was a sole businessman. He didn’t have anything else to do apart from business. All he wanted to do was work on our tuition business. I understood the scenario and didn’t want to hold him back in his ambition to grow the tuition business. I was happy to part ways. 

At the time, for me, it was making my job and the tuition business work together. I had one remaining exam, and I wasn’t going to give up on a qualification that easily, a qualification for which I worked so hard to get. 

There was a lesson for both myself and my brother in this. When we first started, it never crossed our mind to consider our ambitions and aspirations when starting our tuition business, and most importantly the people we will be working with. He was my brother, and I’ve known him all my life, so you would expect for everything to work out perfectly right? but that was far from the reality. We all have our journeys; our aspirations; our ambitions; and our circumstances. It’s imperative to understand these before partnering up with anyone. 

Conclusion 

Understanding what vision people have for the tuition business is very important. For instance, how many branches are you thinking about? Do you want it to be an online tuition business only? Do you want to adopt a franchise model? Do you just want it to be in London? These are some real questions that nobody thinks about before starting a tuition business. 

These questions are real and must be addressed as a part of partnership talks to give an idea and a potential road map of where each individual would like to see themselves. 

This will then easily filter out people who think this is not for them, given their existing commitments and the amount of hard work that’s expected to go into developing this business. 

Strategies may change in the future, and even people’s aspirations, but at least having these discussions in advance would avoid a lot of the issues to begin with.