How Alexander Friedman Cut His Admin Time by 60% and Made His Life 'Unmiserable'

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Alexander founded Brooklyn Math Tutors with a simple guiding philosophy: Make math fun, the process of learning enjoyable, and the rest follows.
He graduated Summa Cum Laude from Northeastern University, worked as a Researcher at Carnegie Mellon, and did a brief stint as a technology consultant before leaving the corporate and academic worlds to tutor full time. We had such a fun time chatting with Alexander about his journey and how starting his own tutoring business was the best decision he ever made.
Get in touch with Alexander and his team: https://www.brooklynmathtutors.com/
If you enjoyed this video and like to learn more about how TutorCruncher can support your business, get in touch with our team.
Raashi Thakran: I'm really excited to hear all about your journey. So let's just start by talking a little bit about your journey. How did you get into tutoring?
Alexander Friedman: I am probably the only tutoring agency owner who is a high school dropout. I was a really bad student in school for various reasons, and then a few years after I dropped out of high school, I went to college, and a completely randomly somebody I knew, asked me to tutor her son. We did martial arts together, and she said, "Oh, this kid is very smart, but he doesn't like any of his tutors. You're good at math so maybe you can help him." And that's how it started. I tutored one kid, and then I realized that it was so much more satisfying to actually help people directly than whatever my day job was - I was a software engineer.
This was around 2007, when there wasn't any real business content. There was no four hour work week, there was no Alex Hormozi. There was nothing. So it took me a long time to realize that this can be turned into a business, and that it should be turned into a business, and I was actually quite reluctant to do so. I didn't see myself as a business owner. But eventually, over the course of many years, which it doesn't have to take other people, it went from me tutoring a few students to me tutoring a lot of students, to reluctantly hiring other tutors, and then even more reluctantly hiring a manager to do the agency management for me. And now it's, it's an actual business.
Raashi Thakran: It sounds like it's something that happened very unexpectedly. It wasn't something that was planned or you know, you didn't think that, "oh, this is where it's gonna go."
Alexander Friedman: Yeah, it was completely unexpected. I never saw myself one as an educator. I mean, again, I did drop out of high school. I hated school, but it turned out that that experience was kind of a plus. A parent never asked me, "oh, let me see your high school degree. Like they don't care. But it did help me connect with students who also struggled in school because that would work with them. I always said to them "You know what? I also didn't like this. It's okay not to like it. Let's get through this. You don't want to end up like I did and not have a degree for no reason."
I've talked to a lot of agency owners actually, and the majority that I know are also like this. Very few people are like "I'm gonna get into this and make a lot of money." Like, I don't know anyone like that. I know they exist, but for most people it just organically becomes a business, because they turn something they enjoy doing into a business?
Raashi Thakran: You're so right. Every single company I've spoken to or people I've interviewed, they all always say the same thing, that this was something that they were truly passionate about, and that's how they got into this. So that's incredible to hear. Was it scary at first? Was it a daunting journey?
Alexander Friedman: It was so scary. It was scary on so many levels. I had to really change my mindset as a human being. Self-employment of any kind is scary. If you've only had a job, being self-employed is terrifying. It's one thing to do the work of being a tutor. It's another thing to find the clients and then manage those clients, and then they're not happy with you. You need to ask them for money. That's the scariest thing like "can you please pay me? Just, please pay my bill." So there were countless, I guess personal transformations. I don't want to overuse the word, but I had to really go from a guy who had a job to somebody who sees himself as a business owner and runs a company. There was so many things that were scary.
Raashi Thakran: What were some of the challenges you faced when you first started Brooklyn Math Tutors?
Alexander Friedman: Well, when I first started out in 2008, I had no idea how to advertise. That was probably the biggest challenge. I didn't know how to organize everything. When you start, you're like, "Okay, I have a client. Great. How do I build them? What if they don't pay me. There's all these things that are hard to figure out when you don't know what you're doing, you don't know how to set things up. And then after you get a few clients, how do you keep track of them? Like how many sessions do I owe this person? How many hours? And then once you start hiring other people, just that whole thing just explodes, which is why I've used almost every tutoring software you could find. I even had to write software to add to the ones I was using previously, because they didn't do what I wanted to do. And it becomes like an administrative nightmare. That's the last thing I remember, because it was many, many years ago.
Raashi Thakran: It's just one thing after another, isn't it? No, I completely agree with you. Like you said and from what I've seen, there are four important parts of a tutoring business, there's obviousl