Every few weeks I get some version of the same email. Someone has done their numbers, thought seriously about tutoring as a business, and landed on the same fork in the road: buy into a franchise, or start up on their own. Usually they have already half decided that going it alone is the sensible, cheaper option, and they are writing to me half hoping I will talk them out of the franchise fee.
I want to answer that properly, because it is the right question to ask. It is just not the question most people think they are asking.
It is not franchise versus solo. It is built versus built from scratch.
Here is what going it alone actually means on day one. You are the teacher. You are the bookkeeper. You are the marketer. You are the person writing your own assessment tools, working out what a session with a Year 11 NCEA maths student should cover, and building a reputation in your town from nothing, one family at a time, with no name behind you that anyone has heard of yet.
None of that is impossible. Plenty of good tutors do it well. But it is slow, and it is lonely, and you spend your first year rebuilding things that already exist instead of spending that year on the thing you actually wanted to do, which is teach.
That is the real trade. Not franchise fee versus no franchise fee. Years of your own trial and error versus thirteen years of mine, already built, already tested, already working in three Hubs.
What you are actually paying for
I will tell you plainly what that buys, because vague answers here are how people get burned by franchises generally, tutoring or otherwise.
It buys the assessment tools and teaching resources for every level we teach, already written. It buys the systems for bookings, invoicing and parent communication, already built. It buys training, and it buys a brand families already trust before you have taught a single session under it. And it buys me and my team, on the end of the phone, when something goes wrong in a way you have not seen before. Go it alone, and you are paying for all of that too. You are just paying in time, and in the mistakes you make while you build it yourself, mistake by mistake, with no one to call.
Here is where I will say the thing a lot of franchisors will not. The honest one is a known cost with a working model behind it, against an unknown cost in time, trial and error, and the students you lose while you are still figuring your systems out. We also offer flexible payment options if you need to hold your territory while you get ready, because the fee itself should not be the thing that rules you out either.
When going it alone is genuinely the right call
I would be lying if I said franchising was the right answer for everyone, so I will not say it. If you want to tutor two afternoons a week from your dining table for a handful of local families and nothing more, you do not need a brand, a royalty, or me. Go and do it. Honestly, go well.
But if you want to build something bigger than your own two hands can teach, if you want other tutors working under your name one day, if you want a reputation in your town that outlasts any single term, that is a different business. That is the one I built, and it is the one our Hub owners are building now in Te Awamutu, the Far North and Hawke's Bay.
Why I still call them torchbearers
I do not think of the people who join us as franchisees in the dull, corporate sense of that word. I call them torchbearers, because that is closer to what is actually happening. I started this with one idea, that no child should feel like their maths grade was a verdict on who they were, and thirteen years later that idea is strong enough that other people are willing to carry it into towns I have never set foot in. That only works because the thing they are carrying, the systems, the model, the proof that it works, is already solid. Nobody hands someone a flame and asks them to also go invent fire.
If you are the one emailing me
If you are sitting on that fork in the road right now, weighing a franchise fee against going it alone, ask yourself a different question than the one you are probably asking. Not "can I save money doing this myself." Ask instead: what do I actually want my first three years spent building, a business, or the scaffolding underneath one?
Have a proper look at our franchise page to see how the Hub model works, request the information pack for the real numbers on cost and territory, or take two minutes on the readiness quiz if you just want an honest read on whether this fits you. Whatever you decide, decide it with the real comparison in front of you, not the one that only counts the fee.
Jean McKenzie
Founder / Franchisor, Impact Tutoring