Pure hustle
HeyTutor wasn't born as HeyTutor. It started as Beverly Hills Academics, a tutoring company my cofounder and I started at 19 to serve the local Beverly Hills community.
The early days were pure hustle. My cofounder Ryan Neman and I would sneak out at 1AM, and I would stand on his shoulders to zip tie huge banners high on the local middle school's fence, high enough that it took the janitors a while to get them down. A few hours in the morning was all we needed to land a couple of customers. Our first client: we paid the tutor $21 an hour and charged $22. One dollar an hour, and we felt on top of the world. This was before CRMs, so marketing meant getting creative. We paid kids twenty bucks for school directories, then woke up early and emailed every parent, one by one. Those were the days.
Our first office.
Somewhere in there, Ryan's grandfather stepped in with a $50K loan. He didn't care about traction or numbers. He just believed in us and wanted to help. At that age, he was the only one who did.
After that first office, we ran the company out of our houses and apartments for years. I would wake up to employees answering phones in the living room. The first three years, the company lost money. We kept it alive with side jobs. Mine were waiting tables and hauling luggage as a bellboy. Tips paid my bills so the company didn't have to.
When we decided to expand beyond Beverly Hills, the name came with us. Beverly Hills Academics became Premier Tutoring, built to work across more cities. Around this time we bought a smart car, wrapped it in marketing, and parked it on busy streets all over Los Angeles. It got towed constantly, so Ryan and I decided the fix was for me to just drive it. It became my main form of transportation. For the record, this strategy sucks. I think it brought us two or three clients over an entire year.
The Premier Tutoring smart car.
The real edge came from somewhere less visible. We found oDesk, the site that later became Upwork, and were hiring overseas developers before most people knew that was a thing. Because of it, we were always ahead of the game on tech. We built our own internal CRM that matched every new client to tutors by preference and radius. A client would sign up, the system would blast notifications to qualified tutors nearby, they would apply, and we clicked one approve button to connect them. That sounds simple today. Back then it was cutting edge, and it's what let us scale into new cities and states. We recruited tutors any way we could, including sneaking onto college campuses with a massive booth setup and signing people up until security kicked us out.
Recruiting tutors on a college campus.
Becoming HeyTutor
As we grew, Ryan and I kept coming back to the same thought: we had to be more than a tutoring agency. The answer was a tutoring marketplace, and the marketplace needed a name. We found it on a phone call. We lived in the same two story apartment, Ryan downstairs, me upstairs, and we still called each other. His dog Fluffy kept barking at my leg, and I said "hey Fluffy!" to quiet him down. Then it hit me. "Ryan, I got it. HeyTutor." The company is named after Ryan's dog.
The HeyTutor office.
The company was everything to me, and the employees were friends. We went out together and celebrated together. It's also where I met Patrick McClure, one of the hardest working and most disciplined people I've ever known, and a great friend to this day. As we grew, the company matured, and the bigger we got, the bigger the swings. The ups: big clients, new cities, more revenue. The challenges grew too, and every stage of growth brought new problems to solve.
Early team, out in our HeyTutor caps.
And it grew
That's when we raised our first round from Kevin O'Connor and ScOp Venture Capital (that story has its own page). The marketplace taught us a lot, especially how hard consumer tutoring is to scale.
It got to the point where we had to lean out and rethink, and that's when we came across pitching school districts. From there the company grew exponentially. We were winning contracts left and right, raised again from ScOp, and grew the team like crazy to handle fulfillment. We grew to hundreds of employees in Los Angeles and thousands of tutors and educators working with students. The company contracted with some of the largest school districts in the nation, and became one of the leading providers of high dosage tutoring for public schools in the country.
In 2022, after ten years running it, I stepped down as CEO. Jennifer Sheffield, who had joined the company as General Counsel and worked her way up, became CEO and took HeyTutor the rest of the way, through its biggest growth and all the way to the acquisition. She deserves a lot of credit for how this story ends. I remained one of the company's largest shareholders through the sale.
In 2026, HeyTutor was acquired by ESS, a leading provider of workforce solutions to school districts nationwide, in a strategic acquisition backed by The Vistria Group.
Last updated September 15, 2026