Return On Planned Obsolescence (ROPO), I have recently learned, is basically the extra money Apple gets when people buy a new phone while their old still works perfectly fine, but just doesn’t have the newest bells and whistles. It can also refer to extra money netted by a manufacturer who purposely shortens the lifespan on a product in order to encourage more purchases faster. (If you are as new to this idea as I was, you might enjoy skimming this, this, or this.)
When I saw this acronym for the first time, it struck me that this idea is built into the tutoring industry, and that that’s a real problem. Now, I’m not talking about the version of ROPO where you make a disposable thing so people will buy more. The tutoring analogy of that would be giving students less-than-great help in order that they’ll need more.
To be clear, I don’t seriously think anyone’s deliberately doing that. But I am talking about quality control in a broader sense.
The fact is that it’s pretty profitable to have students — or better, for your tutors to have students — who keep coming back, week after week, for help. Every tutor has to eventually face the question “what if I help this kid enough that s/he doesn’t need me anymore?”
For me, the really interesting part is that I’ve seen a few different sides of this question now: I have been the tutor, I strongly suspect I have been the student, I have been the tutor manager, and I have been the finance guy looking at the firm’s metrics.
And I am here to report that this idea is more important than I ever gave it credit for. I’ll explain why, but first, two more bits of context:
Recurring revenue is a very, very good thing for a business to have for many reasons that have been hashed to death in the blogosphere, such as here, here, and here. (Cue entrance, Captain Obvious!)
Owning a tutoring business often feels like serving two masters: you are an educator, and you are a business person. At least that’s how it can feel on a bad day. And if those two masters disagree on the best course of action in just about any situation, you as are in serious trouble, because you are likely to regret whatever you do next.
My big takeaway is that you can and should choose to be an educator first, which means that every single tutoring session with a student should feel to the tutor like the last. You aren’t ever doing the same old thing. You aren’t “working on an assignment.” You aren’t “making progress.” You are solving a problem, removing a barrier, addressing an issue. You are finishing, finishing, finishing.
You are fighting against recurring revenue, every single time. And suddenly, with that realization, comes an understanding of a choice that matters to me, and how I can move even farther in that direction: buck the trend, and keep finishing.
Let me try to illustrate why that isn’t actually bad business, even though it might sound that way:
I had a session with a remarkable student a few years ago. She was having trouble with a math class — well, really, with a math teacher. The teacher and the student had different expectations on a few levels, and neither “spoke the other’s language.” I felt I understood the student’s position and the teacher’s position pretty well, so I set out to teach the student how to see the class through the teacher’s eyes. It led to an energetic and enthusiastic high-level discussion in which the student originated a number of spot-on ideas for how to better give the teacher what she wanted, without watering down her own experience in any way. From the outside, I can’t imagine anyone would have identified that session as “tutoring.” It was just what that student most needed.
The student never returned for math help, and when I later asked why, the answer was simple: she no longer needed it. Now, how much recurring revenue did I turn away that day? Answer: don’t think about it. It’s not the point. That kid is going to do great things; it was right and good of me to help her with no thought of holding back. (If this doesn’t seem self-evident, then you may be interested to know that her father has been an enthusiastic referral source for years now, because, luckily for me, these folks are not only smart but also conscientious and mindfully supportive. And while that doesn’t happen every time, it does happen surprisingly often.)
Here’s the lesson for educators: don’t save a “big reveal” for next time. Don’t ever turn on the auto-pilot. Don’t be complacent. If you really want your education practice to last, you have to be a better educator tomorrow than you were yesterday. And that means giving it 100% (no matter what the business coaches may say).
My experience mirrors yours, Wes: the boost in reputation and future referrals that come from working one’s self out of a private teaching job far outweigh any loss of recurrent revenue.
From a mercenary standpoint, bringing students the point of independence from tutoring is the best thing one can possibly do, as you’ve written; word gets around, and then the phone rings (and rings). From an ethical standpoint, it’s the only thing to do since independence is what we promise to deliver and what we should always be focused on.
Teachers foster independence; it’s what we do (or should do); it’s the first line in the job description. This important distinction qualitatively separates what educational businesses offer from the vast obsolescing product lines of the Apples of the world. Ideally, it’s one lesson and done. Next customer!
In practice, it doesn’t work out quite that way; but the basic point in your article still holds: *especially* in the private teaching world, giving clients more than their money’s worth is good for the soul … and good for business.
This point has been largely forgotten by modern neo-lib corporate America, which now calls it virtue to get as much as humanly possible from customers while giving as little as possible in return, and regards it as naive to prioritize anything ahead of short-term profit.
Chris Borland for the win!
Thanks for helping to reinforce this message with stories from your own experience. Knowing that we’re all experiencing this helps to fix in my own mind that this choice is alway the right one, even in situations that seem ambiguous or exceptional.
Thanks also for putting this into the context of a larger system that is drifting in the other direction. It’s a lot easier to paddle upstream when you are aware that you’re doing it on purpose.
Presumably, therapists have the same problem.
Yep, I imagine so.
(Indeed, I often think of myself as a kind of therapist. I don’t generally say it because “educational therapist” is a credentialed, valuable, and specialized job title for which I lack the necessary qualifications. But I find it remarkable that I do as much “soft work” as I do, relative to traditional math instruction.)
Great article. Has interesting parallels with how we’re interacting with people in a health care advice context. I love the idea of “finishing” repeatedly, every single time.
I’d love to hear more about how it unfolds for you. This is harder to do than we’d think: there’s a lot of automatic human nature fighting against you when you try.
But that helps reinforce for me that it’s a competitive advantage, and one with a relatively high (and subtle) barrier to entry.
Like all good teachers, Wes isn’t giving kids a fish. He is teaching them to fish on their own.
Keep up the good work!
I appreciate it, Bret! So much of this work feels like it’s bring done “in a vacuum” but then I remember that even if no one else is watching, it matters to me. And, it turns out, that’s enough.
And every so often, I get lucky, and someone (like you!) reminds me that we’re all connected even in the modern day “attention economy.”
BINGO. you just described the beginning, middle, and end of my “marketing strategy”–which is, luckily for me, my tutoring philosophy, and the way I like to live day by day to maintain happiness.