Thinking of Starting Your Own Business?

Three Ways Your Skills As A Teacher Can Really Help Your Journey

I hope the story of the path that I’ve taken from teacher to entrepreneur can help empower others to do the same.

I taught for almost ten years as a primary school teacher before making the leap to running my own business full-time. In the run-up to that, I had gradually reduced my teaching days until I was spending two days in the classroom, and the rest working for myself.

Like many teachers, I hadn’t a lot of experience outside of the education sector before I became a qualified teacher. I had interests and passions outside the classroom – sure – but I was always conscious that I lacked commercial experience. However, in my business journey, I came to realise that teachers really do have vital key skills and attributes which are readily transferable to other sectors – especially when it comes to running your own business.

1. Presenting & Pitching Your Business Idea

One inescapable fact of running a business is that you’re selling yourself as well as your product. Whether that be through sales calls, pitching to potential investors or hiring team members, confidence and public speaking are great skills to have.

Will you need external funding to set up your idea? If so, you’re likely to find that you’re competing in a crowded market for investors’ attention.  Funders tend to be overwhelmed by lengthy business plans and presentations – frequently complaining of “death by PowerPoint”.

When faced with these tasks, I think we teachers have a habit of forgetting that we’re presenting every day for seven hours! Not only that, but we’re masters of putting complex information into easy to understand chunks – I’ve taught division to Y4 enough times to know that! Simple straight forward presentations are exactly what will attract an investor’s eye.

Not only do teachers have a natural flair for presenting in person, but I also found many of the skills involves in lesson planning translate easily to creating marketing copy. In the same way as the content of your lessons are engaging, so too can this skill be put towards writing newsletters, website slogans and email content.

2. Building Relationships

In business, as in life, building relationships and being genuine is key. Before I started Scheme Support most of my peers and friends were teachers, I was therefore somewhat apprehensive about stepping into a new world where my potential clients wouldn’t have this shared background.

I quickly realised however that, as a teacher, so much of what you do comes down to building strong relationships between you and a diverse range of students. Not only that, but teachers are also adapt at dealing with a wide variety of parents, which as I’m sure we’ll all agree, can sometimes come with challenges. Negotiating with customers and suppliers of your new business will be easy in comparison!

3. Time Management

My last point might raise some eyebrows; especially as lack of time to do the things you need to is the key reason so many teachers leave the classroom! But don’t forget that the ability to juggle all the demands you have as a teacher (as well as your home life) will serve you well if you are starting a business. Particularly in the early stages of starting you’ll find that you’re being pulled in all sorts of directions. I strongly believe that the ability to time manage will enable you to apply those skills quite naturally to your business.

I hope these three points have reassured those of you who are thinking of starting a business that the fundamental skills you have as teachers – which you’re brilliant at – will transfer really well outside of teaching to the world of business.

Robert is the founder of Scheme Support [www.schemesupport.co.uk] a primary curriculum directory. Scheme Support helps primary schools improve the intent, implementation and impact of their curriculum by comparing over 400 schemes of work from the world’s best educational publishers.