How Teachers Are Making over $1 Million by Rethinking the Traditional Classroom

Two teachers who believed they could improve their schools' curriculum have used their ideas to create seven-figure companies — and are now reaching more students than they could have imagined in the process.

Lisa Collum and Beth Gaskill are part of a growing movement of teachers using their skills to become education entrepreneurs outside the school system.

As both women tell The Messenger, their companies began after they identified problems in the classroom that others in their school were not addressing.

After being placed in charge of the writing department at her school, Collum says she had to put together her own curriculum when she found out the administration only had a few books on grammar and paragraph structure to help guide her and the students.

"That's hard to hear as a teacher, especially as a new teacher, that you have nothing to follow," she recalled in an interview with The Messenger.

"And so that was the moment, within the first week of getting that job, I realized there are no resources for writing that provide daily lessons," she added.

A few years after starting her job at the school, Collum founded Top Score Writing, which she turned into a multi-million-dollar company offering writing classes and curriculum to teachers and schools around her home in Florida and the country.

The company was born from the lesson plans she created at the school, which proved overwhelmingly successful — so successful that it eventually led her to be investigated twice by a suspicious Florida Department of Education when she helped 100% of students pass the state's writing test after only about 38% had passed the previous years.

But it wasn't until she changed schools and had teachers and administrators come asking for guidance that Collum realized that she had stumbled across a business opportunity.

"Finally, one day I'm like, you know what, let's map all this out, and I had 25 lessons," she said of the lessons she sold in person before expanding online.

"I would teach all day online during virtual school, and then, at night, it would become like an assembly line, with all my kids and my husband punching holes and putting the copies in binders," she recounted.

Likewise, Gaskill, popularly known as Miss Beth on social media, started her company, Big City Readers, after she became disheartened with school administrators in her native Chicago.

Gaskill says during her six years as a teacher, she recognized changes that could help improve the way children were learning how to read. But her ideas fell on deaf ears when she tried to convince staff.

She worried: "I'm going to get burned out," she told The Messenger of her efforts. "I know that I want to change this," she thought at the time, "but I have to do it from the outside in if they're not going to let me do it from the inside out."

Gaskill left the school system and began tutoring children on her own. As word spread, she hosted "reading parties" for parents and their kids, focusing on early literacy skills.

"I realized at the end of the summer I had 64 people who wanted to continue tutoring with me," she recounted.

"I couldn't keep up with the one-on-one" work, "so I had to develop a method to teach group classes," she said. "Then my research led me to ask why there were all of these kids struggling with reading. There shouldn't be this many kids struggling."

But Gaskill's method for teaching reading by making lessons fun and engaging continued to prove popular — even if her former colleagues had not taken her up on the idea.

Gaskill then formed Big City Readers, which initially operated from a physical location in Chicago, but adapted to the pandemic by going digital, astronomically expanding her reach. Today, the company brings in seven figures in revenue.

"I have over 10,000 clients taking my virtual classes," said Gaskill, who also hosts the podcast "The Play On Words Podcast With Miss Beth."

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, nearly 17% of teachers in the U.S. work second jobs outside their school system to supplement their income.

Like Collum and Gaskill, teachers have used the internet to create other avenues of revenue outside the traditional means, like former teacher Doug Neil, who owns Verbal to Visual, a service that helps teachers use sketching to enhance their lessons, and Lindsey Wander, who started WorldWise Tutoring, after teaching STEM.

Though inherent risks are involved with starting a business, Collum and Gaskill hope others take the leap.

"I think what I've found is most people just won't take that first step," said Collum. "And once I can get them past the first one, step two or three are pretty simple. It just takes a little hand-holding at first."

Gaskill encourages anyone thinking about wanting to start their own business, but being afraid about that first step, to "just be curious."

"Because for me, I was holding myself back so much by thinking that it was safer to stay in my career," Gaskill explained.

"The trick is to be undeniably yourself," she added, "and that's what I want to teach kids, too."