Elliot Phillips Podcast Transcript
Elliot Phillips joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, home of the Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Elliot Phillips. Elliot Phillips is the founder and CEO of The Teacher Project, an education technology company on a mission to transform the way teachers educate the world. As a former PE teacher, Elliot is deeply passionate about empowering educators to build thriving online businesses and achieve unprecedented levels of impact and freedom.
Under Elliot’s leadership, The Teacher Project has helped over 3, 000 teachers start their own successful online teaching ventures. with many replacing their full-time teaching salaries in just a matter of months.
Well, good afternoon, Elliot. Welcome to the show.
Elliot Phillips: Good afternoon, Brian. Thanks for having me.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely. Appreciate you making the time brother. It’s 7am here in Kansas city, but I appreciate you making the time across the pond out in that near London area. I appreciate, I really do. I love to traverse the world when doing these podcasts.
So Elliot, I’m going to jump into your first question. Can you share your journey from being a physical education teacher to founding the teacher project?
Elliot Phillips: Absolutely. Absolutely. So I left teaching in 2015 and my mom’s actually still a teacher or she retired in the summer and then ended up going back because she missed it so much.
So, so teaching had been, you know, in my generation. So my dad was a teacher for a long time as well. However, I just found that, you know, living in London at the time when I was in the last teaching position, there was the, you know, the workload growing, but the paycheck doesn’t. And it was just very difficult to sustain the type of lifestyle that I wanted to create for my family.
And so whilst I was really passionate about it, I felt, you know, I had to draw a line in the sand and make that hard decision. So I actually left teaching in 2015. To because I transitioned into the fitness space, which was a natural progression as a PE teacher, did that for a couple of years till early 2017, and I found that I still wanted that kind of ability to travel and have more freedom.
And so I looked to try and take that online, and I actually started helping teachers online initially with fitness, and I always thought to myself once that started doing really well, if I had been able to make that transition and make that jump and improve my lifestyle. Why couldn’t I help the teachers who I used to listen to in the school staff room complain about not having any work life balance and not achieving the income levels that they wanted?
So, you know, I started thinking about it in 2019 and I thought, you know what, I could help the maths teachers or the science teachers or the English teachers or language teachers. And so I started putting together a program in 2019, and to be honest, I was scared to launch it. I didn’t think that anybody would want it.
And then, of course, the school shut down at the pandemic, and that kind of forced my hand when I thought, well, I’ve got this program that I’ve built out on exactly how I made the transition online. Now’s the best time to launch. And of course, things went from there and the pandemic’s really changed how education’s delivered for the better.
I think it’s opened the eyes of the parents and the students, like, instead of getting their kids to sit and watch Netflix or cartoons or play games in the evenings, they can access online tutoring. At the same time, the teachers have seen that, hey, they can do some tutoring on the side as well. And now everybody has a Zoom account or whatever video hosting software they’re using.
And so it’s just really made it way more accessible for everybody. So I think the students are benefiting and the teachers also in terms of if they want to make this a full time thing or a side gig alongside their classroom job, the opportunities are endless.
Brian Thomas: That’s amazing. Thank you for your story.
Influenced by your mother as a teacher, of course, got into teaching, love that, but it just doesn’t pay the bills. And I hear that a lot in that space. So I appreciate it and jumping out and just going for it. I think that’s awesome. So thank you for the share in your story. And Elliot, the teacher project aims to empower educators to build thriving online businesses.
What are the key challenges teachers face when transitioning to online tutoring? How does your program address these challenges?
Elliot Phillips: Absolutely. So teachers are very blessed at the skills that they do have and the talent and the, you know, expertise in teaching their students and pouring into the students and mentoring them.
And so they’re not essentially equipped with those business skills, right? And ultimately, in this day and age. To run an online tutoring business, you need to master some digital marketing skills, for example, and the ability to sell. And so teachers are kind of really givers and we have found a lot of teachers found it hard to even ask for money from the students because they just love doing it so much.
That’s one of the challenges for sure. And so, you know, like we, we really do tell the teachers that if you, if you’re good at something and you’ve got expertise and there’s students who need it, you’ve really got that moral obligation to get it into the hands of more students who need your help. And so it’s switching that mindset from just teacher to, to business owner.
So the mindset there is something that we definitely work on with the teachers to help them see that actually they’re doing good and they deserve to get paid more for expertise. And then, as I mentioned a second ago, it’s those digital advertising skills that it’s kind of like learning something new if you were to go learn something new in the beginning, it’s really hard, but they are really essential skills to get the message, I guess, of what the teachers are doing and their subject offer in front of the parents who need to see it.
And so. We’ve really built after working with, you know, just over 3, 000 teachers now in the past five years. I’d say we’ve done so much trial and error on kind of what works for the teachers. So we’re really just able to kind of walk them by the hand and help equip them with those basic skills, the mindset, the sales, and then the advertising.
And then of course, they’re able to compliment that with their existing teaching skills and expertise that they really have already.
Brian Thomas: Amazing. And again, you’re back in the, I would say the driver’s seat or the teacher’s seat, right? You’re teaching teachers how to really excel in this space and learn a new skill so that they can augment their income and enjoy what they do.
So I appreciate that. Elliot, as a best selling author, how was your book, Teaching on Your Own Terms, influenced educators, and what key takeaways do you hope readers gained from it?
Elliot Phillips: Yeah, I mean, the main kind of initiative behind the book was really to show that there is an opportunity window here and to install the belief in the teachers who have thought about online tutoring or haven’t discovered it yet, that it is possible to keep teaching and and have a teaching schedule that You’re in control of and how much you want as a teacher have more impact.
Hence, hence the name teaching on your own terms, because a lot of people don’t believe it’s possible. And I saw a study actually, Brian, back in, I saw this one back in 2022, I think it’s by the National Education Union, something like that. They’d done a study on the teacher well being, and they’d found thousands of teachers that they kind of surveyed in the UK, just under half, I think it was 47 percent were expected to quit the profession.
By 2027, and that’s almost half the workforce, and that was due to things like mental health and mental well being for teachers. Along those lines, and so there’s a lot of teachers quitting the profession as well, but there is another way to teach and that’s to teach online. And so it really, the book was there to help teachers get started and have some initial insight and also create the belief as well that it is possible.
In the book, we talk about some of the teachers that we’ve worked with as well, and some of the strategies that they’ve used to get started and the routines that they use. And so to really, I guess, create that launchpad, there is another way. And I think at the same time, of course, the whole initiative or the whole goal isn’t to get to just to quit the professional or to leave the classroom, whatever it’s for those teachers who would otherwise quit because they don’t like it and you know that they’re unable to keep up with the demands and it’s impacting their life in a negative way that to teach online is the other.
opportunity. And so, yeah, that’s, that’s really kind of what the book’s about. And there’s some free course materials and stuff like that in there to help people get started and just have an entry point to online tutoring.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. Gosh, I didn’t even know the statistics. And again, I’m sure it’s, it varies across the world, but 40 7 percent quitting the profession in the next few years.
That’s just an astounding number and not good, obviously. But I appreciate you writing the book, letting the teachers know that this is a possibility and they have an alternative. So I really appreciate the insights on the book there. Elliot, how do you envision the future of education technology and what role do you see online tutoring playing in that broader educational landscape?
Elliot Phillips: Yeah, well, I, I really do think that, you know, the future of education is going to move further online, especially with the way that artificial intelligence is developing as well, at the same time. And so, I know a lot of teachers use it, whether they’re in the school or teaching online already, to help with things like lesson planning, curriculum development.
Students potentially use it to support their studies, of course, like the older age students. And so things are gearing up online and I think more parents though is the key. I’m a data free, right? And so, of course, I’m kind of right in the thick of it. So it’s, it’s a little bit more natural, but there’s so many students who are getting online tutoring now.
And I don’t think that people. used to do that. I think pre pandemic, it was probably just more affluent families who would probably utilize tutoring. Um, but now I think there’s an opportunity for all students with the amount of tutors that are working online as well. And I think of it like a sports team or let’s use Michael Jordan, for example, you know, he didn’t just have Phil Jackson at the Chicago Bulls.
He had all of those coaches around him. Tim Grover is probably one of the most well known ones, the most famous ones. He’s wrote a few books helping him train and develop his physique so they could complement his performance on the, on the court. Right, and so I think the online tutoring is going to play a massive part in that to help students develop further.
More parents want their kids to get the edge in their education, it’s more competitive for jobs. Again, relating back to AI, especially with AI, replacing some, some jobs in some fields. So it’s really going to matter the education the students get. So if they can be given the edge, then that makes a huge difference.
And so, yeah, that’s what I’ve kind of seen and that’s what I foresee. It really being a compliment. To the standard traditional classroom teaching and just more and more people will begin to access online education. And that’s where teachers can step in and play like a massive role in that.
Brian Thomas: Thank you so much.
You know, if you look across the spectrum of industries, I think every industry has been disrupted, but I think it truly it’s time to disrupt education. You know, we’ve been doing the same thing over and over for hundreds of years. It is time leveraging technology like online tools, AI and other emerging technologies.
So I appreciate that. And Elliot, it was certainly a pleasure having you on today, and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Elliot Phillips: Thanks so much, Brian.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Elliot Phillips Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s Podcast Page.
