Josh Horwatt is an educational therapist and founder of Beyond Bored, which provides educational therapy and tutoring. Josh became a certified education therapist while working a full-time job and being a full-time Dad of 3 kids.
There came a point when Josh had to decide if he wanted to be an educational therapist or start a business. He had a mentor who pushed him to use what he’s good at and start a business from it. Since then, Josh has put his heart into his business, enjoying each moment.
He shares a memory of one of his first clients who would cope with anger by spraying a garden hose at his parents and in their home. Josh is still in touch with this client today and the client now runs a successful gardening business.
Setting boundaries with clients and welcoming in feedback
Each client has different needs. Josh has learned a lot about when to set boundaries with clients and when not to. It is important to evaluate, with each client, if they need boundaries.
Holding kids to a higher standard shows them that they are capable, confident people. So, most kid clients respond well to their tutor or therapist confirming that what needs to be completed, is completed.
Josh strongly values receiving feedback from clients and adjusting accordingly. This value comes from his own experience of someone telling him a hard truth that has stuck with him to this day.
Josh discusses male educational therapists and how masculine energy is brought into educational therapy. He noticed that, with his male clients, they needed academic help but mostly needed help being a boy. His next big project is an unbreakable boys program to help boys navigate life more confidently.
No one can run a successful business by themselves; having a team by your side is life-changing.
You can find Josh at www.beyondbored.org
Sean McCormick 0:02 This week on Earn More Tutoring, I speak with Josh Horwatt, founder of Beyond Bored educational services. On this episode, Josh and I talk about how he learned to transform challenging feedback into finding his life's purpose, how he started a business while also juggling the demands of fatherhood, and the time he had to set up a behavior plan for a client who liked to spray the inside of the house with a hose. Josh Horwatt 0:26 He would take his garden hose, and he would bring it inside his house and start spraying everything in the house, including his parents, when he got mad. I had to set very clear boundaries with this kid. And let him know that if that's what he was going to do, that he wasn't going to get a drop of water on me. That was a great kid to work with the great kids that break mighty fun. We're still in touch to this day, he actually started a business around gardening. And he's doing very well with it. Sean McCormick 1:06 This is Earn More Tutoring, the ultimate crowdsource education entrepreneurship show. Welcome to the show, Josh. Josh Horwatt 1:13 Thank you, Sean. It's nice to be here. Sean McCormick 1:15 Absolutely. I'm excited to have you on. So I think the thing I love to start with is just tell us about what you offer Josh, what your different services are. And ventures would love to hear kind of an overview of those things. Josh Horwatt 1:28 Great. Well, it's pretty simple. I'm an educational therapist, and most of what I offer is educational therapy. But over the years, I've grown my company a little bit. So now I have tutors that work for me as well. And I'm now kind of focused more on building the educational therapy side of it and bringing in some other specialists to work with me. And then, over the years, I've also had some other programs that I've started to build and an offer. Some of those have been put on hiatus for the past year due to Corona. And I'm looking at how to try to rebuild Sean McCormick 2:10 those. Yeah, I love the title educational therapist. I didn't even know about it until a few years back and then our mom not sure. Do you know, Kara Scanlon? Josh Horwatt 2:21 Sure, um, I'm very familiar with the name. And I listened to that episode on your podcast. And it was excellent. She's great. Yeah. And she's well known amongst some of my other colleagues, Sean McCormick 2:33 Totally. But she she introduced me to educational therapy. And, you know, as coming in from as a from a special education background, it was like, wow, this is really similar. But at the same time, I had never known that there was such a huge need out there, right? There's so many people who want an educational therapist, that's kind of like, if your kid is struggling, that's what you should be looking for pretty much unless they're already in a special education program. But you could probably do both and be better for it. So tell us about how did you become an educational therapist? Josh Horwatt 3:05 Well, that's a good question. I, when I moved back to LA with my wife, we both landed in education her very much by choice, because that's what she trained to do. And me kind of by accident, because I really didn't have anything else lined up. And that led me down this road of having a lot of different experiences within education. At one point, I was behavioral interventionist and working with kids with autism. And then I ended up in a few different classroom positions. And it really was a big mishmash, I had no education in, in how to teach. And a few years in, I realized, like, I either need to commit to this, or I need to go a different direction. And I liked it. It was interesting. But I saw this thing called educational therapy. And it was appealing because on the one hand, you got training as an educational specialist, you could work in a school, but it also allowed you to build these tools that you could start your own thing eventually. And that sounded cool. So I enrolled, I signed up I didn't know much about it. I hadn't had any contact with any educational therapists. But I investigated the program a little bit and then jumped in. And so that led me down that road. I worked in schools while I was taking while I was in the program. And I was working in the resource department and so I was, you know, starting to work with kids privately while I was also Working with kids in the school setting. Sean McCormick 5:02 Yeah, so you did the program. Now, the program was that I didn't even know that there was educational therapy programs until I became at their educational therapist and I had done a whole program on exceptional education, which had enough of the aligned credits, along with my experience. Tell us about how you found that. And also, like, what were the was that that was a certificate program or like for someone who's like, I think I might want to do an educational therapy program...
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