Today we’d like to introduce you to Audrey Smith.
Hi Audrey, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
After graduation from The University of Georgia, I got a job teaching at the same middle school where I student-taught. I absolutely loved my job, and I found joy in the creative side of being a teacher. I enjoyed finding new ways to engage students, no matter how much they liked or didn’t like school. However, when my second child was born, I decided to take a year off. During that year off, I started tutoring for anything and everything before I found my niche with SAT and ACT material.
When I first began tutoring, I would meet my students in coffee shops or go to their homes and make a “classroom” wherever I went. One of my favorite places to work when I started hosting group classes was Laurel & May in Milton. I went there so frequently, the staff recognized me, and when they finally closed their doors in 2020, I bought a table from their cafe and the whiteboard from their meeting room. I still use them today in my home office where I tutor students one-on-one and through group classes online.
As my business grew, I hated to turn down students, but I was hesitant to add someone to my team who might have a different style than mine. It was really important to me that the teacher would connect well with the kids and treat them with respect and kindness. I told my husband that my “ideal” teammate would be my friend from college, Nicole. I knew she was fun and energetic, she loved her students, and she even won Teacher of the Year. Not even a week after that conversation with my husband, she reached out to me looking to see if I was hiring. She, too, wanted a more flexible job in order to spend more time with her kids. Nicole started working with me, and we’ve never looked back!
After almost 8 years of running my business, and 4 years with Nicole, I had just had my son, and I was in desperate need of some administrative help. I had kept in touch with one of my former students from my years as a public school teacher. Derren had become a teacher herself after graduating from UGA, and during her three years as a teacher, she had reached out to me for teaching advice, and we would go to dinner periodically. During her transition to getting married and moving to Florida, I snatched her up before she could consider her next professional step. Working together has been a dream come true, as we’ve both expressed how the opportunity came at a perfect time in both of our lives.
When our team gets together over Zoom, or occasionally Disney World and Universal (team building), we connect so much over how much we love our students. We think it’s fun to take a really stressful situation like standardized testing and make it more approachable. We love when students get their scores back and are able to celebrate their successes with us.
I want to thank my husband Alex for being so supportive over the years and being my sounding board for all of my ideas and ventures. He has even allowed me to train him to work with students, as he did get a perfect score in math on the SAT back in the day. As high school sweethearts, we never thought we’d still be doing high school math together at our own kitchen table. It’s a good thing we’re both huge nerds, and it’s actually kind of fun.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Before I got started, I didn’t see myself as a business person. I was a teacher, and I had to teach myself a lot about how to start a business. I didn’t know how to set things up, how to advertise, or how to set fair prices while still supporting my family. I learned a lot from listening to podcasts and reaching out to other female business owners. I think the main thing that helped my business was the energy I got from watching students succeed.
My business really picked up a lot of steam while I was in Roswell, and I was getting a lot of students just through word-of-mouth. When my husband got a job in Griffin, which is two hours away, I thought I might lose a lot of that steam. So I decided to just keep driving that distance from Griffin. I would drive to Roswell on a Tuesday morning, work all day, and then spend the night at my mother-in-law’s house, work all day Wednesday, and come home late Wednesday night. I also often drove up on the weekends to teach classes. That lasted for two-and-a-half years before we moved back to the Metro Atlanta area.
Because I was only ever in town on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, scheduling started to become more difficult for students who weren’t available on those days. Time started to become very limited. This really pushed me to adopt Zoom even before the pandemic pushed schools in that direction. It allowed for me to accommodate students’ widely different schedules, and it also opened up the opportunity to teach students from all over the country.
As I got busier, work/life balance became an issue, which eventually led me to fully adopt a digital platform. Being fully digital has allowed me to be more fully present with my kids and make sure I don’t miss any field trips, performances, and big life events. I also think it helps me to be a more effective teacher to have everything in one place and not be traveling so much. It’s been great for my students, too, as it helps them fit prep into their busy schedules. It still feels like we’re sitting in the same room, and we still get great results.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
Tutoring with Audrey is a service-based small business that specializes in prep for the SAT and ACT.
I think it’s important that I was a teacher because I have a degree in how students learn, backed with experience. This is especially important as it pertains to anyone who has an IEP, a learning disability, struggles in general, or even the other extreme, being very advanced (I am also gifted certified).
At this point, my experience tutoring has actually outrun my classroom teaching experience. So, I have a track record of helping students of all ability levels reach their full potential–whether that means getting a 17 to get into nursing school, or getting a 36 for an out of state scholarship.
I hire previous classroom teachers because their experience allows them to relate to students and understand their needs on a professional level. It’s also important to me that those I hire are well-liked by students because we want our students to feel comfortable and look forward to their sessions with us.
We don’t require contracts because we don’t want someone to feel stuck, and we feel confident that they’ll see the value in what we’re doing enough to see it through. We also don’t want students to take more sessions than they truly need. We won’t insist that kids need thousands of dollars of prep if that’s not necessary for their particular goal. We do work with some students for the better part of a year, and we also have some students for just a quick class before they meet their goal. We like to remind kids that there’s more to life than their standardized test score, so we don’t want them overworked or stressed more than necessary.
So, before we go, how can our readers or others connect or collaborate with you? How can they support you?
I love connecting with teachers, college counselors, and other tutors! We are all in it to help students, so I’ve had great success collaborating with other people who do what we do. Also, I have had the most supportive clients, and I’d say most of my business comes from referrals. Simply sharing one of my classes on Facebook and with other parents goes such a long way. I’m grateful for past clients who have turned into my cheerleaders and helped get the word out.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.tutoringwithaudrey.com
- Instagram: @tutoringwithaudrey
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TutoringwithAudrey
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