Is your freelance teaching offer right for you? 7 questions to ask
How much thought have you actually given to your offer? Loads, you’re probably thinking! But perhaps it’s time to step back and ask yourself a few questions about whether it’s really the right offer, both for your clients and for you.
Your offer might be something that’s evolved over time because it seemed the obvious thing to do. Perhaps you started offering individual lessons because that’s what everyone else was doing, or developed a particular course because someone asked for it. Or maybe it seemed to be what people wanted, even though you never actually questioned or checked that out.
And that’s fine as a starting point. But at some stage, I think it’s worth examining what you’re offering a bit more closely.
Why? Because ideally, you want the decisions you make in your business to be conscious and intentional, rather than finding yourself doing something you’ve just fallen into. Particularly when that something takes up a huge proportion of your working life!
So here are seven questions I’d encourage you to ask yourself.
1. On a scale of 1–10, how much do you enjoy delivering it?
Even if you were really excited when you first created an offer, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re enjoying delivering it now. So, if your answer to this question isn’t a solid 9 or 10, ask yourself what it is that you don’t enjoy.
Perhaps you love the actual teaching or coaching, but find the amount of preparation involved exhausting. Or perhaps you enjoy the subject matter but have realised that the format you’ve chosen doesn’t really suit you.
This matters for two reasons. First, if you’re not particularly enthusiastic about an offer, you’re probably going to find it harder to sell. And, perhaps even more importantly, if you don’t really enjoy delivering it, you may not be doing your best work with your clients either.
Of course, no offer is going to be wonderful every single minute of the time, and there will always be tasks that aren’t your favourite. But if a substantial part of your working week is taken up with something you don’t particularly enjoy, surely it’s worth questioning why you’re doing it?
2. Are you working with the right clients?
How do you feel about the people you’re currently working with? Do you look forward to your sessions together, enjoy their company and feel excited about helping them make progress? Or do you sometimes find yourself dreading a particular appointment, or just feeling a bit meh about the work?
If it’s not feeling good, try to work out why.
Sometimes it’s simply that you don’t particularly gel with someone, and that’s fine. We can’t expect to enjoy working with absolutely everyone. But it might also be something about their expectations, their attitude towards the work, or the kind of support they actually need.
It’s worth looking for patterns here. If you consistently enjoy working with certain kinds of clients and find others much more draining, that could tell you something important about who your offer should really be designed for.
3. Is your offer attracting the right people?
This partly overlaps with the previous question, but here I’m also talking about the people who show an interest in your offer and don’t end up working with you.
Lots of interest but no sales
Perhaps you’re having plenty of conversations with potential clients, but very few of them actually go anywhere. If you’re spending hours on calls with people who turn out not to be right for you, you need to understand why, because otherwise you’re going to waste an awful lot of time and probably become pretty frustrated.
It might be that your marketing is attracting people who aren’t yet ready for the level of support you’re offering. Or perhaps they want a different kind of service, have different expectations or genuinely can’t afford your prices.
Sometimes the offer itself is fine, but you’re simply getting it in front of the wrong people.
No interest at all
Alternatively, you might be putting your offer out there and hearing absolutely nothing. Just crickets.
In that case, I’d start by asking whether the right people even know it exists. If they do, are you communicating clearly enough why it’s relevant to them and what difference it could make?
It could be that the offer simply isn’t what they want or need. Or perhaps the price is putting them off, though that doesn’t automatically mean it’s too expensive. Sometimes a very low price can actually undermine confidence in the quality of a specialist service.
The important thing is not to jump straight to the conclusion that you need to do more marketing, reduce your prices or create something completely different. First, try to understand what’s actually happening.
4. Does your price fully reflect the value your clients get from the offer?
To answer this, start by thinking about the value of what you’re offering. And I don’t necessarily mean calculating an exact financial return on investment, although that’s great if you can do it.
What difference does working with you make to your clients? What can they do afterwards that they couldn’t do before? Does it save them time, help them perform better at work, give them greater confidence or open up opportunities that weren’t previously available to them?
And, crucially, how important is that difference to them?
Sometimes we become so focused on what we’re teaching or delivering that we lose sight of what our clients are actually buying. They may be paying for language training, for example, but what they really want is to feel confident leading meetings, pass an important exam or be able to apply for a particular job.
It’s also worth asking whether your offer is genuinely helping people achieve those results. Is there something you could change about the content, format or level of support that would make it more effective?
Because being able to charge a good price starts with having something people genuinely value, and making sure they understand that value.
5. Does the price reflect the amount of time and energy you’re putting in?
This is the other side of the equation, and it’s one that freelance language professionals often overlook.
You might be charging what seems like a perfectly reasonable hourly rate, but how much time are you really spending on each client?
There’s the session itself, of course, but what about preparation, creating or adapting materials, giving feedback, answering messages, doing admin and keeping track of their progress?
It can all add up rather alarmingly.
If you’re not sure, try tracking your time for a few weeks. You may discover that an offer you thought was quite profitable is actually earning you very little once you take all that additional work into account.
I’d also consider the emotional energy involved. Some kinds of work are simply more demanding than others, and you need to think about how much of that you can realistically sustain.
An offer can be fantastic for your clients and still be a terrible business model for you. And if you’re constantly
exhausted or struggling to earn enough, something needs to change.
6. Is there something else you could or should be doing instead?
Even if you’ve worked through all the questions above and everything seems basically OK, your current offer might still not be the best one for you or your clients.
I think this can be quite a scary possibility to look in the eye, especially when you’ve put a lot of time and effort into developing something, and perhaps already have clients who are happily paying for it.
But just because something is working reasonably well doesn’t mean you have to carry on doing it forever.
Could you be using your expertise in a different way? Perhaps developing a small-group programme instead of working entirely one-to-one, creating a more specialist offer or changing the balance between live sessions and independent work?
Or maybe there’s a completely different kind of work that you’d enjoy more and that could be just as valuable to your clients.
I’m certainly not suggesting you should continually reinvent your business. That can become a very effective way of avoiding the less exciting work of marketing and selling! But I do think it’s healthy to question the assumptions behind what you’re doing, rather than carrying on simply because it’s what you’ve always done.
7. If you knew you were going to carry on doing exactly what you’re doing now for the next five to ten years, how would that feel?
This is a big one, and I’d encourage you to spend a bit of time with it.
Imagine yourself five or ten years from now, still delivering the same offer, working with the same kinds of clients and following roughly the same weekly schedule.
How does that feel?
Perhaps you feel perfectly happy about the prospect, in which case, wonderful! You may already have created something that works really well for you.
But perhaps you feel a slight sinking sensation. Or even a sense of horror at the thought of doing this for another ten years!
If you enjoy journalling, you could write about an imaginary day in your future working life, describing what you’re doing, who you’re working with and how you feel. Notice what comes up for you.
And if the prospect doesn’t fill you with enthusiasm, ask yourself what you’d want to be different.
Because surely one of the biggest advantages of running your own business is that you have the opportunity to make decisions about the kind of work you do and the life you want that work to support?
Of course, you still need to create something that people want to buy and that earns you enough money. But those two things don’t have to come at the expense of enjoying your work.
I’d recommend revisiting these seven questions from time to time, especially if your business has grown or changed, or you’re beginning to feel that something isn’t quite right. And if you have several different offers, it’s worth considering each of them separately.
You might discover that you’re already doing exactly the right thing. Or you might realise that a few relatively small changes could make an enormous difference.
And sometimes, of course, you might need to rethink the whole thing.
Could a different business model work better for you?
If these questions have got you wondering whether there’s a better way to use your skills and experience, you might find my free Business Models Guide useful.
It explores different ways of structuring your freelance language business, from one-to-one services to group programmes, memberships and digital products, and helps you think about which approaches could work best for you and your clients.