The First 90 Days: What the Workload Actually Looks Like When You Leave Corporate for EdTech
Leaving a corporate job for freedom? For the first 90 days of running your own school, weekends stop existing.
Below is the workload curve nobody puts on a franchise webinar slide.
The short version
- A founder opening a children's coding school works 55 to 70 hours a week during the first 90 days.
- The peak lands in weeks 8 to 10 — the fortnight before opening and the first days after.
- That peak sits in evenings and Saturdays, because parents are your buyers and parents are mostly free after 6pm. This is how the market works, not a scheduling mistake.
- Workload flattens out around month 4 or 5, once three or four groups are running and your teachers no longer need daily supervision.
- A franchise won't give you a 20-hour week. What it gives you is a shortcut past the three things that sink most first-time founders: curriculum, teacher training, and marketing that actually converts. You start at week five, not week one.
Why senior managers underestimate these 90 days
Because for the past ten years you managed functions instead of performing them.
You had a marketing team, HR, a lawyer on retainer, a CFO on a call, and someone who knew where the printer paper lived.
In your own school you are all of those people at once. Not full time in each role, but part time in all of them. And the part that hurts more than the hours: you switch between them fifteen times a day.
The common miscalculation at the start is assuming 40 hours of management work equals 40 hours of operational work. But it doesn't. Forty operational hours feel like sixty, because nothing gets delegated, nothing has slack in it, and nothing gets pushed to Wednesday. The good news is that this phase has an end date. Once the processes are built, you can breathe again.
Week by week: the real load
| Week | Stage | Hours/week | Where the time goes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1–2 | Setup and paperwork | 40–45 | Registration, banking, learning the methodology, first projections |
| 3–4 | Finding the space | 50–55 | Viewings, lease negotiation, legal review |
| 5–6 | Fit-out and hiring | 55–60 | Contractors, furniture, equipment, first interviews |
| 7–8 | Marketing goes live | 60–65 | Ad launch, lead follow-up, teacher onboarding |
| 9–10 | Peak: opening | 65–75 | Trial lessons, selling to parents, technical fires, filling groups |
| 11–12 | First groups running | 55–60 | Lesson quality, unhappy parents, topping up half-full groups |
| 13 | Stabilising | 45–50 | Process, second recruitment wave, first reporting |
What a peak-week day looks like (weeks 9–10)
- 09:00–11:00calling back leads who filled in the form overnight
- 11:00–13:00suppliers, landlord, contractors, bank
- 13:00–15:00advertising: creatives, budgets, numbers
- 15:00–20:00trial lessons and parent meetings (your prime time)
- 20:00–22:00the admin you couldn't get to during the day
- Saturdaythe busiest trial-lesson day of the week
- Sundayplanning, reviewing what went wrong, answering chats. Depending on the market, Sunday can be a teaching day as well: four classes fit into it comfortably
So "weekend" becomes a word with no content. Your customer is free precisely when you used to rest.
What the table leaves out
Hours are the easy part to plan for. These are the parts that catch people:
- The first rejections. A parent says "we'll think about it" and you spend twenty minutes replaying what you did wrong. In corporate, a lost deal was a line in a report. Here it feels personal.
- Deciding alone. No colleague to sanity-check you over coffee. You sign a three-year lease at 23:40, by yourself.
- Feedback speed. In corporate you saw the result of a decision next quarter. Here you see it in 48 hours, measured in how many children showed up.
- How your family takes it. This is the item that actually causes burnout in month four, more often than the 70 hours do.
What a franchise changes, and what it doesn't
It removes
- curriculum and course design — you're not building courses from zero, which is 200+ hours of work on its own
- teacher training — a working standard arrives ready, you don't invent what "good lesson" means
- marketing mechanics and creatives — the combinations have already been tested in other markets
- the financial model and unit economics — you're not guessing what a lead should cost
- backup — there's someone to contact at 23:40 about that lease
It does not remove
- finding premises — only you know your neighbourhood
- hiring teachers — the local labour market is yours to work
- selling to parents — parents buy from a person, not from a logo
- local operations — opening on time depends on your contractors
The arithmetic: of eight workstreams, a franchise covers three. The peak drops from 65–75 hours to roughly 50–55 — and more importantly, you avoid building a methodologically broken product that has to be rebuilt in month six.
Five things that make the 90 days survivable
- Book the peak in advance. Mark weeks 8–10 in your calendar as a no-personal-plans month.
- Hire teachers two weeks earlier than feels necessary. Training always takes longer than planned.
- Outsource accounting and legal from day one. Cheapest hours you will ever buy.
- Start counting leads in week 5, not week 9. Marketing ramps slower than construction.
- Have the family conversation out loud. "I'll be working Saturdays for three months" is a twenty-minute talk that saves months of tension.
If you recognise yourself here, write to us
Ninety hard days is a real price. Here's who pays it and says afterwards that it was the best trade they ever made:
- You're good at your job, and it stopped meaning anything. You can see your next five years clearly, and that's exactly the problem.
- You've built teams, budgets and processes before. That skill doesn't disappear when you leave. It just finally points at something with your name on it.
- You want to see the result of your work with your own eyes. Not in a quarterly deck. In a nine-year-old who just made her first game work and runs to show her mum.
- You have children, and you've looked for a school like this for them. Half of our partners started exactly there: they wanted it for their own kid and found there wasn't one nearby.
- You want an asset, not a position. Something you can grow, add a second centre to, hand to your family, or sell. A job can't be any of those things.
- You want a system, not a promise. You'll read the financial model line by line before you say yes. Good. That's the kind of partner who opens on time.
- You want your calendar back — on your own terms. Not in month one. But our partners in their second season decide themselves how many hours a week they work, and nobody has to approve it.
- You want to be known in your own city. In five years, being the person who taught 800 local kids to code is a different life from being a director at a company nobody in your neighbourhood has heard of.
Our partners who came out of corporate roles have now run five academic seasons with us in a row. None of them are going back. The franchise didn't just pay for itself: it gave them the thing corporate never could, which is the right to plan their own week.
Questions people ask
How many hours a week does opening a children's coding school take?
Between 40 hours at the start and 65–75 hours a week at the peak, which falls in weeks 8–10 around opening. Averaged across the first 90 days it's 55–60 hours a week.
When does the workload become normal?
Usually in month four or five, after the first three or four groups are running and teachers work without daily supervision. Typical owner load at that point is 30–40 hours a week.
Can I open a school without quitting my job?
Technically yes, if you have a manager. Without one, a parallel launch roughly doubles the timeline: parent meetings and trial lessons happen in the evenings and on Saturdays.
Why does the workload peak in evenings and weekends?
Because parents decide whether to enrol a child, and parents are available after 6pm and on Saturday. This never changes with scale — it's a permanent feature of children's education.
How much does a franchise reduce the launch workload?
It removes curriculum design, teacher training, and building marketing from scratch — about three of eight workstreams. The peak comes down from 65–75 to 50–55 hours a week. Premises, hiring, and sales stay with the partner.
What actually causes people to burn out at launch?
Not the hour count. It's the gap between expectation and reality: someone left corporate for freedom and ended up with a denser schedule than before. The people who knew about the peak in advance get through it fine.
Who does this work best for?
People with management experience who want ownership rather than a role, who are comfortable selling face to face, and who can commit their evenings and Saturdays for one season. Prior teaching or IT experience helps but isn't required — the methodology and teacher training come with the franchise.
If you're going anyway
The first 90 days will be harder than your heaviest quarter in corporate. They also have a property your job never had: they end, and what's left afterwards belongs to you.
The difference between the person who closes in month six and the person who opens a second centre in month eighteen is almost never how hard they worked. It's whether they knew about weeks 9 and 10 before they got there.
Now you do.
Algorithmics is an international network of coding and AI schools for children: 90+ countries, 240+ centres. To see what a launch looks like with support behind it, request the full 90-day roadmap and we'll send it with a financial model built for your city.
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