I saw this story in the Mirror yesterday. At first, it was quite heart warming to read it… until I got to the end.
In a nutshell, this guy on Teeside was made redundant and so became a driving instructor at the otherwise virtually unemployable age of 60. Sounds great, so far, and you can forgive him his know-it-all attitude (something ADIs are quite good at, even if they know nothing at all).
However, at the end, he says this:
I charge as little as £10 a lesson for the first five and then blocks of 10 for £15 each, much cheaper than big schools.
In the area he works – Stockton – the going rate for lessons is £20-£22, and yet here you have this complete idiot giving them away for between £10-£15. He’s even got some free advertising worth thousands of pound to advertise the fact from the Mirror, so Heaven knows what impression that will give to those who read it
The simple fact is that in spite of the gushing rhetoric and gooey rags-to-riches crap, people like this guy are effectively destroying the industry for everyone else, and they are not as good as they think they are. There are always prospective pupils who are only interested in money, and who want to pay as little as possible for driving lessons. The fact that they end up taking more lessons than they would with a good instructor – charging a little more – is something they can never know, because everyone only learns to drive once in their lives. Some DO realise, though. That’s when they move elsewhere complaining that they weren’t getting anywhere.
That’s because you cannot make any money at all if you are paying for a car and the fuel to run it on idiotic hourly rates like this. Unless someone owns the car outright (and this guy had to lease a car), it will cost at least £70 for that alone. How much you spend on fuel depends on how many hours you work, but you can easily reckon on somewhere between £100-£200 a week for 30+ hours of tuition.
So, he’s spending around £170 (let’s say) a week to run his car. At £12.50 an hour average, that means he has to work 14 hours just to cover costs. Then – and let’s assume he IS working 30 hours – his before-tax profit is going to be £200 a week!
Yes, his wages are £200 a week!!!
If anyone in the real world can live on that I’d like to meet them.
And when you fiddle with the numbers further, it works out at around £6.70 an hour based on tuition hours alone. Add travelling time, and you’re probably under £5 an hour. He must have been on really poor wages as a salt shifter!
For anyone interested, as of January 2009 McDonald’s was paying up to £5.75 an hour to new staff!.
As I said above, people like the guy in this story are really what’s wrong with the industry. Absolutely no business sense whatsoever. They are prats who see themselves as philanthropists – and the only reason pupils “like” them is that they think they’re getting a good deal.
Still, as long as decent instructors can charge £23 or more an hour and have a full diary then people like this berk are welcome to work for peanuts.