I saw a new driving school advertising recently. They argue that – in their opinion – the franchise model is “out of date and useless”. Their model isn’t, they say, “a franchise per se”, and what say they are offering comes across as a non-PAYE, but nevertheless salaried job. They say that you state the number of hours you want to work and they pay you a “guaranteed weekly income” which doesn’t change “even if your pupils cancel their lessons”. They also provide 4 weeks paid holiday per annum.
What they don’t say is how much that weekly wage is.
Looking at their website, things become very confusing. On it, they say that they offer a salary with up to 28 days of paid holiday, PAYE with up to 28 days paid holiday, and both full and part-time header box franchises. I can’t quite work out the difference between the first two, but the last one suggests that perhaps the franchise model isn’t quite as dead as they had previously suggested. A company car is an additional option, and they still don’t say what the weekly wage is (you have to contact them for that).
Let’s just clarify what the bottom line in this job is.
- You need a car
- You need to put fuel in the car
- You need paying pupils
- Your hourly rate has to enable you to pay/provide all of the above
Getting a car and buying fuel is easy and these two together (assuming you work 30 hours) will cost you between £120 and £200 per week – and that is true, no matter what the forum gods might claim. Getting pupils and setting an hourly rate that they are prepared to pay are more problematic, though. If the forum gods have convinced you to go solo, you’ll have to advertise, and since you’re going to be desperate for work as a new ADI (and quite possibly as an experienced one from what I’ve read) you can’t risk putting people off with the top-end lesson prices that the likes of The AA and RED can get away with (they’ll be charging £25 and up). You’ll most likely have to pitch in at around £20, and this means that you will have to work for around 8 hours or so each week just to cover your overheads. In all honesty, a new ADI who has been persuaded to start out solo could struggle along for several months before they generate that much work, and quite a few never get there – all because they set off on a difficult trek that they weren’t prepared for.
Like most skills and products that are well established, driving instruction does not have a particularly high profit margin, and to get a decent income you have to do the hours and/or charge sensible hourly rates. It’s the difficulty achieving this which is one of the main reasons people attempt to move into “premium” territory – teaching children to drive, or using high-spec cars as tuition vehicles, for example, where ridiculously high fees can be demanded from wealthy parents and Hooray Henrys who are simply too stupid to realise that a) driving lessons are driving lessons, however you dress them up, b) driving instructors are driving instructors, no matter what car they drive, and c) teaching children to drive is an abstract concept that is likely to carry at least as many negatives as it does positives when you try to extrapolate it into the real world. For the newly-qualified ADI, a better option is to get outside help in the form of a franchise. The franchiser does all the advertising and – in theory – supplies all the pupils (and in spite of what they forum gods will claim, many of them do). Buying into a franchise raises the bottom line slightly, since they will have overheads to cover as well, and although hourly lesson rates will usually be higher, you’ll find that perhaps you now have to work around 10 hours to cover your costs. The big difference is that if the franchiser is doing their job right, you’ll have enough work to cover it.
This brings us back to that guaranteed salary claim. The school offering it has overheads to cover, and it can only do so if it can provide the work – and if the franchisee does that work – exactly the same situation whether you were solo or franchised to a bigger school. There is no way that they could go on paying their drivers not to do deliver lessons for any length of time, and I would imagine that the “salary” is sufficient to cover the pseudo-franchise cost and little else. I simply cannot see it providing £400-£500 a week when there is no net income to cover that expense. Keeping it low means that ADIs would be discouraged from being deliberately inactive. Similarly, I would also imagine that there is a fairly strong termination clause targeted at those ADIs who might inevitably see this “salary” as a some sort of meal ticket.
It’s certainly an interesting idea, and quite possibly offered with the best of intentions. But there are quite a few inconsistencies apparent which haven’t been addressed, and overall it seems that it’s just a franchise with some bells and whistles.