My mother founded the company in 1980, shortly after I was born, so the business and I grew up together. She started with one student at a time, and that’s still the model. I took a longer road here: I practiced medical malpractice law before joining the family business in 2008.

What sets us apart is our mantra, individualization and customization. Nothing we do is off the shelf. Every program is built around how a particular student learns and what motivates them.

The same philosophy runs through the company itself. We set clear guidelines, and within them our staff are encouraged to be themselves, because personality connects with students in a way no script will. Our managers lead the same way. Some people want autonomy, others want structure, and a good leader adjusts to each one. We ask managers to do for their teams what we ask our educators to do for students. When the way you run a company mirrors the way you serve your customers, the culture reinforces the product.

Right now it’s an even split: half Google search, half referrals. I’m glad both halves are healthy, but the referral half is the one I watch most closely. A parent doesn’t recommend a tutor or a school unless it worked for their own child, so every referral is a report card on the work itself. Search brings us strangers; referrals bring us families who already trust us before the first phone call.

The channel I wish were producing more is social media. Today it generates almost nothing for us, and that’s a gap I want to close. The parents making education decisions are on Instagram and Facebook every day, and our students live on these platforms. We also have something most competitors don’t: thousands of individual student stories. The challenge is turning work that happens one student at a time into content people want to share. That’s the project ahead of us.

The clearest win has been reporting and competitor research. Work that used to eat hours of someone’s week, pulling data, watching what other programs in our market are doing, assembling it into something readable, now runs largely on its own, and the reports are more consistent than when a person was cranking them out by hand. That’s exactly what AI should be doing: the repetitive analysis nobody went into education to spend their time on.

The one we walked back was social media. We tried handing the whole function to AI, and the output was competent, on brand, and flat. Our work happens one student at a time, and posts about it only land when a person who knows the students is behind them. AI still helps with drafts and scheduling, but a human decides what’s worth saying.

That split matches how I think about AI generally. It’s an amplifier. Hand it the mechanical work and people get better; hand it the judgment and the work gets worse.

Yes, and it’s happening faster than I expected. Over the past year we’ve started seeing a steady trickle of families who found us through ChatGPT. We put real work into making our websites clear and substantive, and it’s gratifying to see the AI crawlers rewarding that. Being the answer an assistant gives is becoming its own channel, alongside search and referrals.

The other shift is in the inquiries themselves. We now get emails that were clearly drafted with ChatGPT or another AI tool. You can tell because they arrive with a longer list of questions than any parent has ever asked us on their own: pricing structures, credentialing, methodology, outcomes, all in one message. A parent who might have called and asked two questions now shows up with twelve.

I don’t mind it. A better-prepared family is easier to serve, and it pushes us to have real answers ready. But it does mean the first conversation starts further down the road than it used to, and businesses that count on educating customers from zero will feel that change.

Do this: hand AI your repeatable work. Reports, research, scheduling, the analysis that eats staff hours without requiring judgment. That’s where the return is immediate and the risk is low. Then draw a hard line at anything that goes out under your name. If it’s written for your community, for parents, or for students, your fingerprints need to be all over it. AI can produce a competent draft, but families choose us because they trust the people, and trust doesn’t survive discovering that the person they trusted is a template.

Ignore the noise at both extremes. One camp says AI will replace tutors and teachers within a few years; the other says touching it will hollow out your practice. Both are wrong, and both are a distraction. You don’t need a grand AI strategy in the next twelve months. You need an honest list of which tasks in your operation are mechanical and which ones are the reason clients pay you, and the discipline to automate only the first column.