What to Do When Your Tutors Poach Your Students

Maybe you’re a tutor who grew out of your own ability to tutor more students, and you’re looking at hiring new tutors. Or you already have tutors who work for you, but you worry a lot that your tutors will poach the students you found and run away.

Or worse, they might work for you for a while until they learn everything about your business model, how your sales pitch works, your pricing model, your niche, how you do marketing, how you conduct and systemize a session, where you manage and schedule all the tutors and students. Then they will go off on their own and become your direct competitors.

All of these are valid concerns, whether you’re starting to expand by hiring or you currently do not fully trust your tutors. So I will address the problem and provide you with a solution on how to solve this.

You are the problem

We tutors are very good at teaching and sharing and connecting with students on a personal level, and it really bugs me that all of these positive traits will almost become useless when we’re faced with a new set of different problems. In the classroom, or in a tutoring setting, we tend to view it as a harmony environment so that we can do our best work, because the students and us share the same goal in mind and there’s nothing to compete with. It’s more like helping.

If a tutor happens to join you when you’re recruiting, even though you and the tutors who work for you still have the same goal, and on the surface it appears to be everyone working together, it is not the same thing.

Normally when you’re working with a student there’s no direct competition. It’s a harmony job. But once you hire a tutor, even though you pay them, there’s still this thinking that there’s a chance you can’t fully trust them.

The moment you can’t read

Imagine your tutor comes up to you and acts very excited, looking forward to getting more involved with your business, because she seems to admire you as a person. If you’re already a boss, or you’ve worked with other people before, this is fairly easy to tell.

But I remember the first time one of my tutors came up to me and asked a similar question, and I could clearly tell she had a strong interest in my business. I hesitated to decide whether or not I should trust her more.

The problem is exactly what I said at the start. You’ve been a great tutor, a great educator, but never a boss who oversees and operates a set of actions by delegating your tasks to other people. So sometimes you think, they’re not as good as me, fine, I have to do everything myself.

It was never about whether they will backstab you

The problem is not about trusting them, or whether one of your tutors will backstab you. It will happen. It might be what I said here, backstabbing you, poaching your students. Or it could just be any small things, any details that are in your day to day business. Conflicts, different values, different goals. With enough time, distrust happens.

Since we can’t control what other people do, here’s what I learned, and I think it’s the best solution for all of this. You are the problem, otherwise you wouldn’t be here reading this. So turn yourself into a great leader.

Protect yourself anyway

Sure, expect the worst from people. Be ready. Always protect yourself, either by designing the rules to favour you, or with contracts, or with a law consultant.

For example, when I design the system, a teacher submits the class as finished and she submits the status report to someone, or to a system. But she doesn’t have a way to change or view that status again once she has submitted it. This gives you a lot of leverage and protection, since essentially, as the admin, you have the power to alter her data of how many classes she did, and that directly relates to her pay. Her option is only submitting the session. You can change it, view it, and even delete it.

Will a contract stop them?

Of course it’s essential to have a contract. But don’t be panicked just because everyone is telling you that you need to have contracts. You might be like, I just wanna hire people and work together. But as you start a business, you need to have an open mind to always learn.

So what if you don’t know any law about drafting a contract? Do you need a lawyer? No. You need to start small. At this stage, if you’re just beginning to think about hiring tutors, don’t bother. Just go and learn the basics of the law stuff based on where you live, then you can easily go to Google or use AI to draft you one, and then you read it carefully and edit it. You can ask anything you don’t understand to AI, until you have a general grasp. Use that first, use that as a starter, so that you won’t feel stuck on these kinds of things. I promise you will learn, and gradually you will develop this kind of awareness naturally.

Two things are worth knowing before you write a word of it. The clause that usually does the work is a non-solicit, not a non-compete, and non-solicit clauses in tutoring agreements get treated differently from the blanket kind. And in the US, non-competes are state law with a lot of variation, so what is normal in one state is void in another. There is no national rule to lean on either, because the FTC’s federal ban never took effect and was removed from the books in February 2026.

I’m not a lawyer and none of this is legal advice. It’s what I would go and read first.

None of it works if you’re not a leader

But all of that doesn’t mean anything if you don’t become a great leader.

You might be like, uhh, I just wanna run a business, I don’t care about being a good leader, wouldn’t it be easier to just everybody makes money and win? Trust me, you ain’t gonna get far if you have a mindset like that. Learn to communicate. Care about what your team says and feels. It will avoid tons of problems.

At the beginning you don’t even have to make a big fuss about it. You can just say, hey, I feel like there’s something I could get your point of view on. Then if they’re into it, give them something else, something very small, to do something different from their normal work.

The tutor I almost didn’t trust

I’m not that kind of person who likes to work together with people. I prefer to work alone. That’s my personality. So trust me when I say this really means something.

One of my tutors came up to me one day and she was like, you know, I think I really like your business, the way you run and manage the whole thing, it really creates a very good experience for both us tutors and the students. Not only that, I just have a very good feeling about this, and about you as a person.

I’ve been given these kinds of compliments a lot, so the first time I heard it I was like, yeah thanks, but I really didn’t care. So we kept going as usual.

A few weeks passed and she came up to me again and said she just wanted to talk to me. So we did. We had a great conversation, we talked a lot about her personal life and mine, just casual stuff. But I could feel the vibe that she just really admired what I was doing.

So I offered her. It goes like, hey look, I don’t usually ask, but since we’re on the same page, do you wanna do more work than just tutoring? And she said, I’ve been meaning to say this, I just feel like you’re a good person and I just wanna help you.

We never mentioned compensation. We never mentioned promotion. Just as friends.

Did I feel there was a risk? You bet I did. Did I take it? Yes.

Fast forward a few months, she’s one of our managers, plus teaching, plus course designer. The pay came properly once the role was real.

The moral of the story is that trusting people is a risk for a lot of us. But you have to take it if you wanna go far. One person has only a finite amount of energy and time.

If you have any questions or want a deeper dive, I’ve helped hundreds of tutors start and grow their own tutoring business, and you can book a free strategy call to get a one on one with me.

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