For those with professional experience in teaching, Thinking Caps Tutoring is a good business model to follow. According to its official website, this small business is “dedicated to developing innovative and individualized approaches to teaching middle and high school students.” And they do this by carefully matching students with tutors and creating personalized instruction focused on skill development.

Thinking Caps had generated more than $500,000 revenues in 2009 and employs about thirty temps and part-time support staff. In the article posted in NYTimes, the main challenge of the company is to expand without sacrificing the quality of their services.

The careful matching of students with tutors, who are paid by the hour, is also central to her approach, she says. She meets with each family and tries to assign the most suitable tutor, considering a range of factors, such as whether the student and tutor have had similar experiences and interests.

Thinking Caps charges $110 an hour for one-on-one tutoring, which is less than test-prep giants like Kaplan and Princeton Review (their hourly rates recently ranged from $125 to $350). While the national learning centers Sylvan Learning and Huntington Learning Center can provide one-on-one tutoring — one New York branch of Sylvan recently quoted hourly rates of $68 to $85 — their models emphasize working with students at Sylvan offices, with student-to-tutor ratios of three to one.