Carrie Burke Tutor Work: Growing a 40 Tutor Business Without Growing the Admin

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Seven years into a career as a business development director at a blue-chip market research company, Carrie Burke was doing well by every measure that shows up on a CV. The one that mattered to her was not there, and once she had put words to it there was no going back.
"I realised that not only had I climbed the wrong career ladder. I was on the wrong wall as well."
She retrained as a primary school teacher, spent years in the classroom, had her son, and then left teaching for tutoring. Nearly 7 years on, she runs Carrie Burke Tutor Work, a Stockport based tuition business with around 40 active tutors, a three person core team spread across Greater Manchester, and a matching service she guards more carefully than anything else in the business. All of it rests on a single, deceptively simple idea: when a child is not performing, the subject is rarely the real problem.
"At the heart of everything that we do, we know that learning is emotional as well as cognitive."
Almost everything follows from that sentence. It shapes how tutors are hired, how students are matched, how parents are handled on a first phone call, and why Carrie will happily tell a family they do not need tutoring at all. It has also shaped the business around it. A model that runs on human judgement, long first calls, careful matching, a check-in 3 weeks in, only works if the admin underneath it disappears, and that is the job Carrie handed to TutorCruncher when the spreadsheets ran out.
Ask Carrie why a child is struggling and she gives the same answer before any other.
"Unless there's an additional need, diagnosed or not, 9 times out of 10 if a student isn't performing to the best of their ability it's a confidence issue. They'll have had a self-fulfilling belief about themselves, that they can't do maths, that they can't do this."
So the first thing a tutor does is calibrate. A student in Year 6 working at a Year 2 level in maths starts at Year 2 and works up.
"I'm not interested in what you can't do, I'm interested in what you can do. Let's start from there."
What follows is deliberate, relentless positivity: praise for the work, praise for the attitude, praise for sitting down and getting started. Feedback goes to the parent at the end of every session, in front of the child, along with a clear next step. None of it works if it is not sincere.
"Children know if you're giving them a compliment and it's not true, so you've got to be truthful."
Underpinning all of it is neurolinguistic programming, which Carrie has trained in to a high level. It shows up in small, consistent choices: framing everything in the positive, adding "yet" to the end of "I can't do this", and treating difficult behaviour as information rather than defiance.
"You've not got to take it at the surface level. They're trying to tell you something."
Carrie is unambiguous about where the business's real advantage sits.
"Our USP is our matching service. It really is top class, and we want it to stay that way even when we grow."
The process is deliberately human. Laura, who manages enquiries, talks the parent through what is going on and writes it up. Mary, the company's tutor champion, reads those notes and picks a specific person for that specific child, rather than whoever has a slot free at 4 o'clock on a Tuesday. Around 78% of enquiries convert, which Carrie credits to the screening rather than to any sales technique.
Hiring runs on the same logic. Every tutor is interviewed against four tenets, resilience, focus, outcome and love, each considered across three levels: the self, the student, and the system they all work within.
"We see our tutors as our clients as well. They're as equally important to us as the parents are."
In practice that means socials, an open line to Mary whenever something is not working, and a 3-week check-in with every family in case a match needs changing. Carrie is now writing a formal training programme, partly because 40 tutors is more than one founder can keep close to, and partly because it would let her hire beyond qualified teachers.
The first question on any call is not about subjects or availability. It is: what has made you pick up the phone to us?
"Parents absolutely love the opportunity to talk about their child uninterrupted, because quite often we find that they've been gaslit. They've got this niggle, this feeling that there's just something not quite right."
What follows is practical. Carrie tells parents which questions to put to the school and to get the answers by email. If a report says a child is working towards expected levels, she wants them to establish what that actually means. Six months behind? Eighteen? If what she hears sounds like dyslexia, ADHD or autism, she signposts to a screening through what she calls her little black book of other professionals, rather than selling a tutor.
"We will support you regardless of whether they're having tuition with us or not, because SEND is really close to my heart."
It is close for good reason. Carrie's own son has ADHD and dyslexia, and she serves as SEN governor at his primary school. She has seen at first hand what changes when expectations rise: he scored 5 out of 34 on the Year 1 phonics screening check, moved schools, and passed it in Year 2.
Her frustration is with low expectations as much as with missed diagnoses.
"The amount of times I've heard a Year 6 teacher say to a parent in the summer term, oh, we think they might be dyslexic. Because they're going to secondary school, it's not the primary school's problem any more. That child's probably been struggling for 6 years or longer."
Two sh