How Lynn Brown, M.Ed. grew from a solo tutor to a team of 7 with TutorBird
Results at a Glance
What started as a solo tutoring practice quickly grew into a thriving team of educators. Learn how Lynn Brown, M.Ed. of Willamette Valley Dyslexia Center uses TutorBird to streamline administration, create consistency across its team, and focus more time on supporting students.
About Willamette Valley Dyslexia Center
Founded in 2019 by Lynn Brown, M.Ed., Willamette Valley Dyslexia Center helps students with dyslexia develop the skills and confidence they need to become successful readers. What began as a solo tutoring practice has grown into a team-based business dedicated to providing specialized literacy support for families throughout the region.
Outgrowing Spreadsheets and Manual Processes
As the business grew, the systems Lynn relied on became harder to manage. Scheduling, billing, student records, and tutor information were spread across multiple spreadsheets and platforms. Keeping everything organized required constant manual effort, and information often lived in different places.
“There was a lot of chaos,” Lynn says. “A lot of spreadsheets, a lot of calendaring.”
The challenge became even greater as demand increased. During the early years of the business, Lynn was managing a growing roster of students while handling every administrative task herself. Tracking attendance, managing schedules, and keeping billing records up to date quickly became difficult to maintain. What worked as a solo operation wasn’t built to support a growing team — Lynn needed a system that could bring everything together and create a more sustainable foundation for the future.
“I ended up tutoring a ridiculous number of hours by myself,” she says. “It was sloppy, and it was really hard trying to make it all make sense.”
Finding a Better Way to Manage the Business
While participating in a business training program, Lynn kept hearing the same recommendation from other tutoring business owners: TutorBird. She explored several options, but many only solved parts of the problem. Some handled scheduling but not billing. Others required multiple tools working together just to accomplish basic administrative tasks. What stood out about TutorBird was its ability to manage several key parts of the business within a single platform.
Being able to manage tutor schedules while automatically generating invoices from completed lessons immediately caught her attention. TutorBird’s billing flexibility was another advantage — rather than creating individual invoices for every lesson, Lynn could structure billing in a way that better matched how families preferred to pay.
“The initial sale was the calendar system,” Lynn says. “The time save of just having the calendar that triggers the invoices was huge.”
Bringing Scheduling, Billing, and Student Records Together
Today, TutorBird serves as the operational hub for Willamette Valley Dyslexia Center. Schedules, invoices, attendance records, lesson notes, student files, progress monitoring, and communication are all connected within a single system.
Instead of searching through spreadsheets, email chains, and cloud storage folders, Lynn and her team can quickly access the information they need. For a tutoring business that works closely with students over long periods of time, having a complete record of each student’s journey is especially valuable. Parents also benefit from having easier access to information through the Student Portal, helping reduce back-and-forth communication and making it easier to stay informed about their child’s progress.
“That’s been a really great way to communicate and know systematically that things are being managed,” she says. “If I click on a kid, I can see every tutor they’ve ever had, all their testing data, all their sessions, their attendance history. It’s just really nice not having to track that down.”
Creating Consistency Across a Growing Team
As Willamette Valley Dyslexia Center expanded from a solo practice into a team of seven tutors, TutorBird became more than a scheduling tool — it became the system that kept everyone on the same page, with a centralized place for schedules, student records, attendance history, billing, and communication.
“If I click on a student, I can see every tutor they’ve ever had. I can see all their testing data, all their sessions, and their attendance history. It’s really nice not having to track that down.”
Saving Time Through Automation
Lynn believes administrative work shouldn’t take time away from helping students — that’s why automation has become such an important part of her business. With TutorBird, lesson reminders, attendance tracking, invoicing, payment records, and account management require far less manual effort than they once did. By reducing repetitive administrative work, TutorBird helps the team stay focused on delivering high-quality support to students and families.
“I’m a big fan of automating as much as you can,” she says. “The couple of bucks it costs me to have a tutor assigned in TutorBird far outweighs the payroll to have someone managing all of those systems.”
“It just adds to the professionalism and the consistency across the team.”
What Lynn relies on most
More Time for What Matters Most
At the heart of Willamette Valley Dyslexia Center is a commitment to helping students become stronger readers. Administrative work will always be part of running a tutoring business, but it doesn’t have to consume valuable time and energy — TutorBird has helped Lynn’s team spend less time managing systems and more time supporting tutors, helping families, and focusing on student success.
“We are starting to look at some small group options and things like that. My business mind has grown a little bit too.”
Ready to Move Beyond Spreadsheets?
As Willamette Valley Dyslexia Center discovered, the right systems can make it easier to stay organized, create consistency across your team, and spend more time supporting students. Whether you’re running a solo tutoring business or managing a growing team, TutorBird can help simplify scheduling, billing, communication, and student management in one place. Ready to learn more?
English
French
Spanish
Dutch
German
Polish
