One coach. One tutor. One business at a time.

Two languages, zero plans

I grew up in China. In two years I took my English from barely-the-basics to near-native — not in a classroom, but by using it everywhere, for everything: conversations, negotiations, closing real deals with it. I didn't know what I wanted from a career yet. I just knew I loved learning new things and applying them in the real world.

The agency year

My first tutoring job was at an online agency, teaching Chinese adults business English and everyday spoken English. I loved the work. The pay? The agency took a large cut of everything my students paid. I spent a year there, learned the craft of teaching — and felt a growing itch that this couldn't be the whole story.

The leap

So I quit. No income, no safety net, no business skills — just the teaching skill I'd built. I threw myself at marketing, self-promotion, sales, closing. It took three months of trying, failing, and adjusting to land my first student that was entirely mine. No agency. No platform. No middleman.

With no one taking a cut, my income changed completely. But something more important happened: that year of making a living — not just surviving, but thriving — taught me how to sell, how to read a niche, how to price, and how to find students I genuinely enjoyed teaching.

From tutor to owner

I was still trading my hours for money, and I knew where that road ends. So a year later I got serious: registered a business license, learned advertising, started interviewing tutors, delegated my own sessions, trained new teachers to my standard, built a teaching management system, and standardized every procedure. I stopped working in the business and started working on it. That business still runs today — taught by a team, not by me.

The real product

Here's the part I didn't expect. Some tutors who joined me with nothing but language skills became managers and sales leads. Others grew into fully independent teachers, capable of walking out and building businesses of their own. We used to joke about it: I don't just run a tutoring company — I can manufacture what I learned, in other people.

Then one day the joke stopped being a joke. There are so many talented tutors stuck exactly where I was — capped hours, agency cuts, no business playbook — who want a better financial life and a better quality of life. That’s why TutorMax exists. Teaching English was the first thing I built. Helping tutors build businesses is the thing I was building toward.