Teachers on Call president and CEO Joanne Sallay, left, with her daughter and her mother Rhona Sallay, who founded the company in 1984 before the digital era transformed students and education.Thomas Bollmann
High-school teacher Rhona Sallay began her in-person tutoring service Teachers on Call in 1984 as a side business. Concentrating on individualized strategies to keep students motivated rather than simply boosting grades, she relied on her Rolodex, land-line phone and years of classroom experience in Montreal and Toronto to pair Grades 7 to 10 students with certified educators.
Her approach was simple: find the right tutor, focus on the curriculum and let relationships drive results.
“I would rather not fill an assignment than send the wrong person,” says Rhona, who retired from secondary-school teaching in 2000. “You want success. Otherwise, you are wasting time, money and expectations.”
Today, that principle remains, but almost everything else has transformed completely: the company, the technology and the students.
Teachers on Call started with around 50 families and 25 tutors who taught teens in their homes in the Greater Toronto Area. Today, it works with thousands of children and several hundred instructors at any given time – two-thirds of sessions are online and half its students are in elementary school. The organization has supported more than 10,000 families since it opened, with services now extending into Northern Ontario, remote parts of British Columbia and the territories.
Credit for much of the expansion goes to Rhona’s daughter Joanne, who joined the company in 2011 after a career with Royal Bank of Canada, and Rhona’s willingness to accept fresh ideas. The metamorphosis required early bets on technology, a readiness to give up control and a clear understanding of how children’s learning needs are changing in a world where screens have become a part of daily life.
Mother and daughter navigated two overlapping transitions simultaneously: the introduction of online learning in what started as a strictly in-person business, while also passing leadership from one generation to the next.
Such nimble adaptation often distinguishes smooth handovers from bumpy ones, says David Simpson, program director and lecturer in entrepreneurship at Western University’s Ivey Business School. “Successful families are usually the ones that remain entrepreneurial across the generations,” says Mr. Simpson, who discourages owners from holding onto past models solely for the sake of tradition.
Enduring enterprises honour their founding values while allowing the next generation to reshape the business model as technology, demographics and customer expectations shift, he adds.
With her banking background, Joanne introduced ideas about growth and systems that would move Teachers on Call beyond her mother’s early administrative methods while preserving the belief that the right teacher-student match could change a child’s trajectory. She also took it from a side gig to a full-time business.
“I always say I went to the ‘Rhona Sallay school of education,’ but she really taught me the ropes,” says Joanne, 44, who holds a commerce degree from Queen’s University. “We have very different skill sets, but she’s that teacher everyone loves and her founding principles were right.”
Joanne Sallay’s husband Michael Handelsman, top, became Teachers on Call’s chief operating officer when his wife took over her mother’s business and shifted its service from exclusively in students’ homes to two-thirds virtual tutoring.Thomas Bollmann
They spent five years transferring the business onto a digital platform and modernizing how student-tutor matches were made, complete with a website and online forms. By 2016, Joanne had completely taken over the business as president and CEO. Her husband Michael Handelsman, who studied business at McGill University, became chief operating officer. Rhona remained on in the background as a valued advisor.
Joanne began exploring virtual tutoring around 2018 even though there was little demand. She saw its potential as certified teachers increasingly moved from expensive urban centres to smaller communities, making geography an obstacle to finding appropriate matches.
“I thought [online learning] was the future, but I would have said it was 10 to 15 years away,” she says. At the time, virtual sessions made up less than 5 per cent of the company’s revenue. Technology was far from seamless: Teachers on Call had to enlist a U.S. account manager to secure a Zoom account as the service wasn’t yet widely known or offered in Canada.
But with virtual delivery, the business’s longstanding strength in pairing tutors and students no longer depended on physical proximity. Joanne realized that “the best match doesn’t necessarily live in your neighbourhood anymore.”
That early entry into online tutoring shifted from experiment to necessity when the pandemic hit in March of 2020. Teachers on Call halted in-home visits within 10 days, even as competitors moved into in-person learning pods and microschools.
“A lot of people say to us, you must have done really well during the pandemic,” Joanne says. “But really, we survived the pandemic. We grew and thrived after.”
In the short term, business shrank. Demand for tutoring teens dropped sharply as high schools cancelled exams and often stopped grading assignments. Many families also held out for in-person support. New clients came from parents seeking structured learning when schools couldn’t provide it consistently.
Demand accelerated when Ontario introduced the Learning Recovery Action Plan that gave school boards funding to help priority students. Five boards in urban and rural areas hired Teachers on Call to support vulnerable pupils and still use the company today as needed.
Joanne aims to reach even more Canadian students who lack support in their own community. Her observation that there was demand for assisting younger learners “and get to those struggling students early on” also proved significant. She prioritized elementary students when she first joined the company and they became its steady foundation. “That was all Joanne’s idea and she was right,” Rhona says proudly.
It’s an example of what Rhona says is the most important lesson for other family-business founders: know when to let go.
“You have to be able to trust the people you are working with and give up that control,” she says. “If they understand the basis of the business and the values behind it, they can take it further than you ever could on your own.”
Have a suggestion of a Canadian multigenerational family business for this regular series? E-mail smallbiz@globeandmail.com.