From Teen Tutor To Titan

By June Ramli

Perth, April 22: Michael Black, founder of Success Tutoring, shares how he turned a $250 side hustle into one of Australasia’s fast-growing tutoring franchises.
In this candid conversation, he reflects on how tutoring while at university grew into a network of more than 65 locations and around 5,000 students across Australia and New Zealand.
He also discusses his early jobs, why he chose to carve out his own path, and why Success Tutoring continues to back small, in-person classes even as online learning and homeschooling gain momentum.
From cash-in-hand tutoring sessions to leading a franchise network with around 30 head office staff and dozens more tutors across multiple locations, Black’s journey is one of persistence, experimentation and a clear focus on personalised learning.
With most of his team now working remotely, a head office in Sydney, and growing interest from professionals keen to buy into the model, he remains optimistic about the future, even while acknowledging that, like any business, some locations will inevitably close.
As homeschooling rises and more families seek tailored education options, Success Tutoring’s small-group model appears well placed for further growth.
Below is the Q&A between Michael Black and Lisa Saville, Head of Operations and Events at the Franchise Council of Australia, held at Mount Lawley Golf Club in Perth today.
First names are used in the dialogue below.

Lisa: Michael, let’s start at the beginning. How did Success Tutoring come about?

Michael: I started Success Tutoring almost 10 years ago in a spare room in my parents’ home in Bosley Park in Sydney. I was 17, straight out of high school, and studying a Bachelor of Commerce, majoring in management and law. It began as a side hustle. I didn’t want to work in fast food, I loved business, and I just wanted to make a bit of extra money while I was at uni.
I was good at English and some of my mates were good at maths, so I messaged a friend on Facebook and asked, “Do you want to do some tutoring?” He said yes, and I told him I’d get in touch when I got my first customer.

Lisa: How long did it take to get that first customer?

Michael: About eight months, which felt like forever. I had no idea how to advertise. I created an Excel spreadsheet with around 30 different marketing ideas and tried all of them. I made a Facebook page, printed A4 flyers and stuck them on bus stops, tried all sorts of promotions, and none of it worked.
My first customers actually came because my mum told her friend that I’d started a tutoring business, and her friend told someone else. Their kids were getting Ds and Es in maths and English. I tutored them in English, my mates handled maths, and after three to five months they’d gone from Ds and Es to Bs, and one of them even got an A on an assignment. Their mum was thrilled, and that’s when word of mouth took off. It’s funny, because the one thing I hadn’t formalised as a marketing strategy became the thing that really worked.

Lisa: How did your parents feel about you turning their home into a tutoring centre?

Michael: They were supportive, but also a bit confused about what I was doing. My dad was the one who actually suggested using the spare room for tutoring, but he was also worried that I wasn’t focusing enough on my studies. I was cramming my classes at the University of Sydney in the mornings, which was about an hour and a half to two hours away by public transport, and then rushing home to tutor in the afternoons and evenings. I’ll admit I failed a few units at university because my heart wasn’t really in it. I loved being at the University of Sydney. It felt like Hogwarts: beautiful buildings, green lawns. On days when I didn’t have tutoring, I would literally just sit on the grass and think, “Wow, this is nice.” But my real focus and energy were going into the business.

Lisa: At what point did you start thinking this could become a franchise?

Michael: That came from my passion for business. About two years into the business, I had saved a bit of money because I was extremely frugal and reinvested almost everything. I decided to take a risk and sign a lease for a proper centre. I only had roughly a year’s worth of rent saved, maybe a little more, so I was very risk averse about it. Eight months later, I found another really good site and signed a second lease. So at that point I had two leased locations plus my parents’ house, three locations in total, with me and a team of tutors running all of them. That gave me a real proof of concept. Around the same time, I did a franchising unit at university and that sparked a lot of ideas. I realised we could actually franchise what we’d built. I loved the impact we were having on kids and families, and that made me want to keep growing. I had thought about going into something like management consulting, but I was too invested in this and I enjoyed it too much.

Lisa: Fast forward to today. Where is Success Tutoring now?

Michael: Today we have 65 operating locations, and we’re aiming to reach 100 by the end of the year across Australia and New Zealand. We’re also expanding overseas. We’re launching in Houston in the United States after about two years of groundwork there. We have a site opening in Vancouver in Canada. We have master franchise rights in Canada and in India, and we’re working on expanding into Mumbai. We’re also looking at Singapore next year. Our goal is to become a leader in education globally. Across all our centres we live by three words: motivate, inspire and uplift. We don’t just want to teach content. We want to believe in the student, support their growth and help them see what’s possible, because that mirrors my own journey.

Lisa: You’ve spoken a lot about systems and foundations. In franchising, what’s more important for scale: systems or people?

Michael: In franchising, I think it leans more towards systems, not because people aren’t important, but because the whole point of a franchise is a repeatable model. If I had to put a number on it, I’d say about 60 percent systems and 40 percent people. At Success Tutoring we standardise how we acquire and retain customers, how we deliver learning materials and how we run our operations. If a tutor leaves, of course we care about that, but the system still stands. It’s like McDonald’s. You don’t need a master chef to make a burger there. You need someone who can follow a system. At the same time, we’re absolutely in a people business. Our work is all about students, families and franchise partners. People bring the system to life. But the system has to be strong enough that it doesn’t fall apart if one person leaves. Then, when you add great people on top of that, that’s when you get something really powerful.

Lisa: With so many locations, how do you keep the experience consistent?

Michael: We’ve built what I see as an ecosystem around support and coaching. We have Growth and Performance Managers based in most of the major cities and states we operate in. They visit locations, work with franchise partners and help them both on the business side and in terms of mindset and personal resilience. We also use systems and software to track performance and to give franchise partners easy access to the tools and information they need. The idea is that they always know where to find the answer, instead of chasing people at head office. We’re very conscious that head office must not become a bottleneck. Our role is to provide resources, structure and support, so franchise partners can go out and succeed using those tools.

Lisa: Your early marketing attempts didn’t work. What does your marketing strategy look like now?

Michael: It’s very different from me handing out flyers at bus stops. These days we rely on things like shopping centre promotions, where we set up pop-up booths and talk to families directly. We use Facebook ads, we invest in search engine optimisation so families can find us online, and we focus heavily on Google reviews because in a service business, reviews make a huge difference. It’s just like choosing a restaurant; parents will look you up and see what others say. Our business model is also structured as a membership. It’s pay per week with no lock-in contract. We often sign up students on foundation memberships before a centre opens, much like a gym presale. That helps reduce the risk for franchise partners and means we can open with a strong base of students.

Lisa: AI is a big talking point right now. How are you using AI in the business?

Michael: Over the last three or four months I’ve been very deep into AI. A lot of people only use tools like ChatGPT or Claude for answering questions or writing emails, which is fine, but that’s a very small slice of what’s possible. We use AI for analytics and insights. For example, you can put a large amount of data into a tool like Claude and ask it to surface patterns and insights around things like retention or margins. You can also use AI to help build internal dashboards and tools without being an expert coder, as long as you can clearly describe what you want. We’re still in the phase, like many organisations, of working out exactly where AI delivers the most meaningful return, not just something that looks cool. But I see this moment as similar to when the internet emerged, or when calculators and GPS came in. It changes the way everything works.

Lisa: What do you look for in a great franchisee?

Michael: Our criteria have changed a lot. In the early days we were much less selective, partly because we were bootstrapped and there’s pressure to grow. We said yes more easily, and we learned some tough lessons from that. Now we’re far more deliberate. Bringing in the wrong person can cost a lot of money, time and energy, and it affects not just us but the rest of the network. We have a responsibility to protect the investment of existing franchise partners and to protect the person coming in from stepping into something that isn’t right for them. We look for people who have real drive and determination and who genuinely want to see kids succeed. If someone is only motivated by the idea of making a lot of money, that comes through. Parents can feel it the moment they walk in. They can tell whether you are really there for their child, or just for the transaction.

Lisa: How do you handle underperforming franchisees?

Michael: With honesty and empathy. Nobody goes into business wanting to fail. Performance issues are often tied to what’s happening in someone’s personal life as much as what’s happening in their business.
That’s where our Growth and Performance Managers are important. They check in on how franchise partners are really going, support them, and help them with both practical business strategies and the mindset side. Running a business is hard. Being in a franchise makes it easier, because you have support and a proven system, but it’s still not easy. Our job is to help franchise partners stand back up, learn from what’s happened and move forward.

Lisa: How did COVID affect you, and how did you adapt?

Michael: When COVID first hit, it knocked us down. We had just signed leases for our second and third locations, and within about four months the pandemic arrived. That was a big shock. We pivoted quickly to online tutoring. Fortunately, most of our tutors are university students, so they’re very comfortable with technology and adapted fast. It was still a difficult period, but we came out of it stronger and with an online capability we might not have developed as quickly otherwise.

Lisa: What is the best piece of business advice that has stayed with you?

Michael: It sounds simple and a bit cliché, but not giving up. There have been many moments where I thought about quitting. The main difference between where we are now and where we could have stopped is that we kept going. You get knocked down, you learn, and you keep moving.

Lisa: Who mentors you? Where do you get your leadership and business education?

Michael: YouTube has been a huge resource for me. I went to a great university and studied a good degree, but it didn’t really teach me how to run a business day to day. On YouTube I follow entrepreneurs like Patrick Bet-David and many others. It’s not just about tactics; it’s about mindset. I believe that in many organisations, the biggest bottleneck is the founder or CEO. Your mindset limits or enables how far the business can go. Inside the company we try to work as a meritocracy of ideas. It doesn’t matter where you sit in the organisational chart. If you have the best idea, that’s the one we want to test and implement.

Lisa: What is one non-negotiable in how you run the business?

Michael: Document everything and don’t answer the same question twice. Recently I told the team that if a franchise partner asks a question, the answer must be put into our knowledge base, which we manage through a system called Operandio, and then we send the franchise partner a link to that answer. Over time this builds a very strong library of information. It frees our Growth and Performance Managers to focus on mentoring and coaching, instead of continually re-answering the same questions, and it makes the whole system more scalable.

Lisa: What do the next 12 to 24 months look like for you and for Success Tutoring?

Michael: We want to keep growing and keep deepening our impact. In practical terms, that means launching in Houston, opening in Vancouver, building out in Mumbai and moving into Singapore. In places like India, every suburb can have different languages and different ways of doing business, so we have to learn the local landscape. Our systems and processes will help, but we also have to listen to what parents and students there actually need. I often say that if we can succeed in Mumbai, we can succeed anywhere. Through all of this, our focus stays the same: to motivate, inspire and uplift every student who walks through our doors.

Lisa: Finally, what keeps you grounded?

Michael: The challenges. The constant reminder of how much I still don’t know. Inside the organisation, we try not to let ego drive decisions. The best idea wins, regardless of whose idea it is. We focus on doing the right thing, serving franchise partners, students and families, and staying open to learning and improving. On a personal level, I unwind by playing tennis with my partner once or twice a week at a local public court in Mount Lawley. I don’t play golf or surf at the moment. I did try surfing during COVID when I was on the east coast, but it didn’t really stick. Maybe one day I’ll pick up golf, though, so if anyone plays, they can reach out.