Today, I answered the following question on Merspi — and I’d like to share it with you:

Hi all,

I’m currently a final year university student and I’ve often been curious in the past about what’s the best way to go about becoming a VCE tutor.

For example, I’m very interested in Small Business Management and Entrepreneurship from what I’ve learned in my electives at University and would love to teach it casually.

Is it a problem that I have never studied Business Management at the VCE level before?

What’s the ‘right’ way to become a VCE and/or university tutor? Is it simply a bad idea if I’m not used to experiencing that subject in the secondary school format?

Who should I talk to? How would you go about marketing your services?

Thanks in advance!

Here was my reply:

Hi James,

As a successful VCE tutor for more than 3 years, I’ve found that the best way to gain students is to simply let them know that you are a tutor, and to build up your reputation so that they will trust you.

I did this for my first two years of tutoring, and have since sustained demand entirely through word of mouth. I wrote about my experience previously here on my blog.

Making them trust you

Be a frequent part of VCE communities, such as Merspi, where you will gain exposure to many VCE students who are looking for help! When you help them out repeatedly for free, they will come back for more. Even if some of these people never pay you a cent, you have gained a wealth of reputation because other students can see your work! You will have become a trusted member of the community, and students will want you to tutor them!

An additional point I’d like to make, in line with keeping the community’s trust, is to avoid blatant advertising. Having outstanding answers is enough to get people wondering enough about you — place a little note in your Merspi profile that you are a tutor, and how to contact you, and they will find you. The key to being a great tutor is to be found by others, rather than having to find others — as is the case with lots of businesses and services.

I hope this section helps you a lot with finding out how to become an acknowledged VCE tutor. It’s what worked for me!

Becoming an expert

As for learning the VCE subject matter, I believe that you could learn a whole lot from simply frequenting Merspi! This place is for VCE questions after all, and you can give and take from the community until you eventually learn everything you need to know to become a great tutor.

Even though I went straight into tutoring right after my VCE studies (and tutored the relevant subjects), I still learnt a lot from frequenting VCE communities. Through collaborating with students and seeing the way they do things, I saw the subject matter under new and interesting perspectives. You’re always learning new things, even as a tutor, so no one is really ahead of you or behind you. Most of the time students are just looking for someone to discuss their thoughts with and to help train their confidence anyway.

I hope this is a great help to anyone who is looking to become a VCE tutor. It’s a highly rewarding job that delivers a competitive pay-rate under your own terms and conditions (there’s no boss!), while also training your communication and presentation skills — which will be extremely valuable for whatever future career path you choose to embark upon.

Best of luck with your tutoring adventure,
Collin

P.S.: An update is long overdue about what I’ve been doing in the past few weeks. As you can tell from the Q&A above, Merspi has launched, and as a result I’ve been pretty busy, along with assignments and exams. Hope to update you all soon!

Pink Floyd got it wrong — at least for the purposes of entrepreneurship.

In their well-known song Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd sings about an “unfulfilled presence” with a verse that goes:

And did you exchange
A walk on part in the war
For a lead role in a cage?

From what I can tell, the song suggests that being a big part of something small is worse than being a small part of something big — something that I lapped up during my idealistic teenage years.

But for the entrepreneur, life is a lot like the lead role in a cage. And author of The 4-Hour Workweek, Timothy Ferriss, agrees. In his book, he explains the futility of being a small fish in a big pond. Sure, bigger markets entail larger demand, but also more competition, and more customers to please. Instead, he asserts that you must establish yourself as the big fish in a small pond. Smaller markets, on the other hand, have less competition, less customers to please, and hence higher profit margins and a clearly defined target audience.

“It is said that if your target audience is everybody, your target audience is nobody”

“When you try to please everyone, you please nobody.”

The true purpose of the entrepreneur is to find the cage (i.e.: “what is their niche?”) and to become the leader of it.

What do you think?

Whenever I finish meeting a group of fresh and new faces, I often reflect and ask myself: how will I be remembered by them?

Recently, I had the privilege of attending the Liberty and Society conference, and the Ernst & Young Career Compass Program. With each event being a short-term commitment of three days, consisting of thirty to forty other attendants to meet, these events set the ideal environment for understanding the types of impressions that I leave behind on others.

I start by asking myself a few questions: How am I remembered? Am I remembered at all? What are my defining features? Or, how about I start by thinking about how I remember others?

Being Different to be Remembered

At the Liberty & Society conference, I found it hard to remember the differences between the attendees from the “Adelaide group”. There were around six of them, but the only ones that left any impact on my memory were the ones who had somehow differentiated themselves from the pack. For example, I can remember Zach for proudly being one of the few at the conference who weren’t studying either of commerce or law.

Of course, I might just be biased because I had struck up an engaging chat with him about journalism, online entrepreneurship and blogging — topics that naturally steal my attention. But this also leads to a noteworthy suggestion: finding something in common with others is another way to be remembered.

However, sometimes common interests can only go as far as to build rapport with whomever you are conversing with. This is especially the case for “interest-centred” conferences, like Liberty & Society and its strong libertarian focus. For instance, it’s not enough to find that you both enjoy libertarianism — that’s just the starting point. It takes more than that to make an impression, to build a personal brand.

Twitter and Merspi

During Sydney, I was probably remembered by the few on my side of the dinner table for my strong defence of Twitter. When the phenomenon of online social networking was brought up, I couldn’t help but rant about the mainstream media’s misrepresentation of Twitter and its uses.

Additionally, I was also well remembered for my involvement in my entrepreneurial project, Merspi. My attention was brought to this as I noticed that my many of my farewells consisted of, “good luck with your business!” from people I had forgotten I’d even mentioned it to!

By being contentious on non-libertarian issues, such as the uses of Twitter, I became known for it at a libertarian conference. Also, by having a practical project like Merspi, I set myself apart from the many of attendees who were involved in non-profitable organisations, political clubs and societies, and other efforts more typically aligned with a libertarian. It was these interesting tidbits of my personal profile that had set me apart from others, and became what defined me.

Be noticed for treading your own path

The Low-Information Diet

A buzzword I was throwing around a lot at the time, the low-information diet, was unintentionally becoming a part of my identity at the Ernst & Young Career Compass Program. I didn’t realise I was using the buzzword so much until I had brought it up (probably for the millionth time) in front of a group of them at dinner, where one of the attendees, Elaine, had remarked that she remembered how I mentioned that about myself the other day.

To my amusement, I had let a peculiar non-mainstream buzzword become a notable description for myself at Ernst & Young. On the flip-side, another attendee, Maria, approached me to commend me for my question to one of the Transaction Advisory Services (TAS) representatives from Ernst & Young. In an environment where there were “questions asked for the sake of asking questions”, my question about market rumours and speculation had managed to stand out for at least one of the participants there.

Have your own unique and peculiar style

Regrettably, I didn’t take full advantage of my opportunities to reach out to other potential entrepreneurs at this event. And while I don’t consciously build my personal brand at these events (besides trying to avoid being remembered for bad or embarrassing things), it never hurts to evaluate how I am perceived by others. I think it helps a great deal in understanding how others treat you, and consequently, how they deal with you.

So, now it’s your turn to answer some of these questions:

• Will you be remembered the next time you meet someone? If so, how?
• How are you remembered by the people you’ve already met?
• Is this the way you’d like to be remembered?