Quality Product; How to make it into REAL money

[durron597]

Scenario: My mother is an SAT tutor. She is well known for being arguably the best SAT Verbal tutor on Long Island, mostly because she has a reputation for being able to get students up 200-300 and sometimes even 400 points (yes, she has helped people change a 300 range score to a 700). I'm not really interested in going into more depth on her resume, but suffice it to say, she is the best.

I have two problems: The first is that she doesn't charge enough. She has people banging down her door and is always completely booked with a huge waiting list but she lets rich Long Island snobs run over her and ends up only charging at most like $125/hr. Other top tutors on Long Island charge often $250/hr and in rare cases I've heard as high as $500/hr. She's told me stories about customers of hers that go to other tutors before her that charge more, get no results, then they come to her and go up 200 points in less than 6 months. She also does things like help with college essays, I don't know if she's charging for that now but she used to do that type of thing for free. The problem, though, is that she has self confidence issues which have everything to do with her personality and nothing to do with her skills and so despite myself, my brothers, my father etc. begging her to raise her prices, she doesn't and then complains about the number of hours she works. We have been trying for YEARS, inflation goes up faster than her rates it seems.

Cliffs Notes Problem 1: Mom is EXCELLENT SAT tutor. Self confidence prevents her from raising prices. How to get her to have confidence to do it?

Problem 2: She constantly talks about how to convert her system for beating the SAT into something marketable so that she can live off of royalties and doesn't have to work anymore. The problem is that she keeps saying things like "Well I asked your father to make me a website and he hasn't done it yet." She's not really giving us enough direction to be able to make anything REAL for her. She also wants to keep as much of the equity in the business as internal to the family as possible (myself, my father, one of my brothers are all computer people) and so getting her to go with a more professional route seems to defeat itself before it even begins. She seems unwilling to even do basic stuff like hire a secretary to do her photocopying and keeping her curriculum/office organized to keep things in good shape at even the most basic level before she can begin to grow the business. I'm not an entrepreneur myself so I don't really know what I can do to help... I do know that she's done really basic stuff like going to Kinko's and putting vocabulary words on placemats and selling them (way too cheaply IMO) to current students but there's so, so much more here.

Cliffs Notes Problem 2: Mom has a very marketable SAT system product. Disorganization + lack of direction is defeating business idea before it starts. Help!