Friday 15 March 2013

growing?

I'm doing 35 hours work this week. That equates to around 50 hours when you take into account things like travelling time, etc. And the enquiries keep coming in. Some of this work is really interesting and rewarding. I'm currently helping a 78 year old woman back into the swing of things, and after a shaky start, she's doing really well. I have a profoundly deaf pupil going to give me a try next Friday.

I put a special offer up offering an upgrade to 90 minutes on hour lessons for the first calender month of a pupil's involvement with me, but I've now cancelled that. With my diary being so full, I don't need to sell myself so cheaply.

As an added benefit, if people want to bugger me about, I'm now happy to say, "Yeah, whatever. See you when you feel like having lessons" rather than needing their sporadic business.

But I'm tired. I am usually working 6 days a week, for pretty much the whole day, with scarecely a break. I want to get stuff done on the allotment. I want to go play golf with my dad. I want to go on a bike ride. I want to just do jack shit for a day.

So I'm contemplating taking on a franchisee.

I've been on the other end of this arrangement several times before. Instructor pays driving school £X per week, and in return is given Y pupils. It's both a regular source of income, especially if you get several instructors working under your name, and a responsibility.

I have a few ideas about how this would work in my own school.  Precise details would have to be worked out.

driving lessons in Wallasey? learn to drive in Wirral? driving instructor in Birkenhead?

2 comments:

Pete said...

Instead of the franchisee idea, I have another idea. Calculate how many hours for the calendar year you have to or want to teach in order to have the annual income you need or want. Plot 2 curves on Microsoft Excel or Word showing how you are doing week by week. You will like that kind of stuff. Then use that as a target. When you are very confident of hitting the target, put up your prices for new students or just turn them down. This will probably be in November or December. Then you can have a holiday or a day off provided you stay ahead of the curve.

That way, you won't seesaw back into the situation you were on about just very recently where you could not pay your bills.

This basic financial planning over long terms than just the here and now is how the ethnic Chinese diaspora has ruled South East Asia for the last century. If you like, I can go on about rice farmers and rice mill owners. Let me know if you want to be bored.

Paul said...

Last week I did 35 hours. This week I'm doing 49. By November I will be doing around 169 hours a week.

I already know roughly how much I want. Perhaps 30 hours a week is about right. That's 6 lessons a day and 2 days off, or 5 lessons a day and one day off.

If I'm keeping my website up at the top of the organic list for driving lessons wallasey, the phone will continue to ring. It makes sense to capitalise on this.