Every now and then, I gave private lessons, especially in math. It wasn’t about the money for me, it was more of a pro bono thing. On the one hand, because I had difficulties at school myself when I was younger, and on the other hand, because I have since realized that I am very good at explaining things. Without exception, the students I tutored achieved their goals.

It was a time when I was able to make an interesting observation and learn something about markets and people. Because I was, in a sense, competing with tutoring institutes, if you will. For the “price” I offered for my services, students received one-on-one instruction and individual attention of excellent quality. At the tutoring institutes, on the other hand, you were just a number and, for the same money, you only got group lessons from, I suspect, mainly retired teachers. So when I was done with school, I definitely didn’t want to see another one of those types in the afternoon 😠. On top of that, there was the contract commitment. I heard reports of parents who wanted to take their students out of the institute but couldn’t because the contract was still valid for quite some time.

In summary: a very poor price-performance ratio compared to me, who offered his services as a soloist.

Nevertheless, I knew that the institutes were full. Why is that?

My observation at the time was that people trust “institutions” much more than a soloist. There has to be a secretary, office hours, and everything has to be very formal.

This reminds me of a podcast episode in which Silicon Valley bigwig Naval Ravikant talked about whether a soloist or an agency is more trustworthy. His conclusion was that he would usually give a job to a soloist rather than an agency, as the soloist takes on and bears 100% responsibility. Despite the fact that an agency potentially has more resources due to having several people, all employees in the agency only take on minimal responsibility for the project (quitting at 5 p.m., not legally liable, etc.). Even the business form often expresses a desire to distance oneself from the matter: limited liability company (LLC). That sounds strange to me. So you like to earn money, but when something goes wrong, you don’t want to be liable?

It would be interesting to see a study showing whether clients are more satisfied with freelancers or with agencies (or even larger business forms). I’m sure it’s the former.

Image by Melk Hagelslag from Pixabay