Meet Connie Johnston, Niel Smosna and Jacque Morgan

Today we’d like to introduce you to Connie Johnston, Niel Smosna and Jacque Morgan.

Connie, Niel and Jacque, before we jump into specific questions, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
All three of us are teachers and moms – Jacque and Niel had recently left the classroom to stay home with their young children, and Connie had recently retired after 36 years teaching elementary school. In 2017, Jacque and Connie initially collaborated to start a small side business offering tutoring to local students. With just a small handful of tutors they started offering a couple of sessions per week for local families. Quickly it became apparent that the need for knowledgeable, licensed teachers helping kids was a growing demand in our area. Jacque and Connie brought Niel on-board to help with the goal of expanding and developing the business further. We started advertising in local schools and offering tutoring within the school buildings, as well as renting local spots to be available for tutoring seven days a week. Over the years we have grown to a business with three owners, thirteen tutors, and upwards of fifty clients at any given time, but our goal has always remained the same – connecting quality teachers with students who need that extra support!

Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
Making the transition from being educators to business women has been an evolution. When we started we were coming from the mind frame of public school teachers – our heart was all about the student and in our teaching lives we never had to previously worry about advertising, payroll, rent, invoicing, and all the ins and outs that come with owning a small business. Learning how to balance our passion for kids with running a successful business has been a growing experience – but grow we have! We have educated ourselves on business law and licensing, taxes, bookkeeping systems, contracts, and more. We’ve learned that using the strengths in our education background in organization, communication, and collaboration lends itself well to running this business. Moving to the private teaching sector after many years of public teaching has been eye-opening, exhausting, and incredibly rewarding.

NoCo Tutoring & Enrichment – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
NoCo Tutoring & Enrichment offers individual and small group tutoring for kids from preschool through high school. We support a huge variety of learners, including students with special needs, kids just needing some extra support in specific academic areas, and enrichment for gifted/talented students. Our biggest source of pride is also what sets us apart from other companies – our tutors. We only hired local, state licensed classroom teachers. Most of our tutors are teachers we know personally and have taught with, or have a friend or colleague who can attest to the quality of their teaching. We collect information on every new client we get, then personally connect the student with the teacher we know best fits their strengths and needs as a learner. Most “big box” tutoring companies use a standard curriculum for all students – but because our teachers are highly qualified and specialize in the area of need the student has, we are able to give our tutors the freedom to create individualized lesson plans for each child so they can drill down on the exact areas of deficit for the student.

Our tutors have ongoing communication with student’s parents and classroom teachers, as we know the powerful role that collaboration has on a student’s academic success. We hear often from our student’s parents that “my child loves going to tutoring every week!” We are educators first and foremost, and bringing that love of learning to students is an ongoing source of joy for us. Lastly, we love the opportunity to offer additional income to local teachers. Everyone knows that teachers are an underappreciated and underpaid profession, so to offer our fellow teachers hourly pay at a rate much more appropriate to their level of experience and educational level is a source of pride for us as owners.

If you had to go back in time and start over, would you have done anything differently?
There have been plenty of mistakes along the way, but each mistake has been a learning lesson and helped us evolve to where we are today. In typical educator fashion, we feel “mistakes are merely footsteps to learning”, and we have embraced this philosophy as we have grown and learned!

Pricing:

• Online learning starts at $25/hour for private sessions
• Group rates start at $25/hour
• Private in-person sessions are $50/hour

Contact Info:

• Website: https://nocotutoringllc.wixsite.com/tutoring
• Phone: (970) 988-4748
• Email: NoCoTutoringLLC@gmail.com
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nocotutoring

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