Maybe it's time to move on, but where?

Very few things in real life come with a clean yes or no, and “should I quit my company job?” is one of them, even though it usually gets asked as if there were only two buttons, stay or jump.

The teachers we’ve watched make it on their own almost never pressed either button. They did something much less dramatic, and it worked a lot better.

Most of the ones who jumped had a rough first three months

When someone quits first and starts looking for private clients afterwards, the first months tend to go the same way. The schedule is suddenly empty, the savings start shrinking, and the families don’t arrive as fast as the teacher had hoped, so three months in they still don’t have the number of students or the income they had at the company. That’s usually when the burnout starts. Going solo works fine, it just almost never works at the speed a resignation letter demands.

The ones who made it tested the ground first

Most of the teachers we’ve seen succeed started while they still had the job. They took a couple of private families alongside their platform hours, learned how clients actually write and what they ask, and found out whether they liked this kind of work at all before anything depended on it.

So when someone asks us “should I leave?”, the honest answer is usually “maybe you should consider going solo, and start trying it now, while the company still pays your rent.” That’s a much smaller decision, and you can make it this week.

Still on a platform? Our free Lesson Package Calculator turns your own lesson price into packages of 10, 20, 30 and 100 lessons, with the package terms already written in English and Chinese. Get it free

Slowly but surely

A prepared transition

1. Start 8020
2. Halfway 5050
3. Mostly yours 1585

Platform hoursYour own families

"…slowly but surely…"

In the guide we call this a prepared transition: you start at roughly 80/20, with most of your week still on the platform, and move to 50/50 and beyond as your own families grow. We go through each stage in detail there, including what has to be true before you move to the next one.

Done this way, the change doesn’t land as a shock. Nobody wakes up to an empty calendar and a panic about rent, because the private side has been growing quietly for months before the old job gets smaller. It’s slower than a dramatic exit, and it’s a lot more likely to still be working a year later.

So if you’re asking yourself whether to quit, try asking a different question first: what would it take to start going solo before you leave?