When you say you specialize in everything, people know you specialize in nothing.

Wise words from today's featured story, a New York City English teacher, and need of extra money to support his family.

What was the trick he used to go from being just another tutor to suddenly becoming the number one writing tutor in New York, according to his glowing Yelp reviews?

That's what we're going to look at in this story. It is short yet packed with lessons on authority, qualifications, and the importance of specialization in a crowded market.

Now, by the way, when a market is crowded, often it's crowded because there's opportunity there. It's crowded because it's a good market.

So don't write it off. We are talking about writing after all. Don't write it off. Ask if there's a way you can edit your idea to earn a higher test score.

English teacher writes his way into all-star tutoring. That is today's story. That story is coming right up.

John Castellano was working as an English teacher in New York City. As much as he loved his job, he needed more money to support his family.

So, a few years ago, John started doing odd work around the school to get paid overtime. He taught night school, summer school, and started coaching basketball and volleyball.

One night, he even went back to help the IT technician update the school's antivirus software.

The most he could possibly make from overtime was $42 an hour, which might sound like a good rate to some of our listeners, but remember this is New York City. He had a family to support, and he was already working a lot.

What John needed was to find a way to make more. As he thought about his options, he realized there might be some advantages to working as an independent tutor.

He could set his prices based on the market and shift them easily in response to supply and demand. There would be no fixed ceiling.

But what kind of tutoring would he do? He hit the books and found out that SAT tutors made the most money.

As there always is, just one problem, John hadn't done very well on the SAT. Back in high school, in fact, he had scored in the 50th percentile.

Even though it had been years since then, and he had a lot of experience as a teacher since then, he knew that without a good score himself, he'd have a credibility gap.

John also knew what he had to do next. As a 32-year-old, he signed up to take the SAT again.

This time, he scored in the 90th percentile. From there, he spent $3,000 in magazine ads to start getting clients. But was this a good idea? No, it was not. He actually got zero in return.

It was an expensive lesson to learn. He decided to switch his technique and spent $150 on a square-space website and another $50 on SAT books.

That was the right move. And with those credentials, John scored a job, yes, another job, at a different school to tutor for the SAT.

It was a great way to get some experience there. And a year later, he was let go due to low enrollment. But over the course of that year, he'd become even more knowledgeable about the test.

So he decided to spend another $70 to take it one more time. On that attempt, he scored in the 99th percentile of test takers in the writing section.

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