{"id":23516,"date":"2019-10-30T02:31:26","date_gmt":"2019-10-30T02:31:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.diaryofanadi.co.uk\/?p=23516"},"modified":"2019-10-30T02:31:26","modified_gmt":"2019-10-30T02:31:26","slug":"getting-pupils-you-have-to-smile-sometimes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/?p=23516","title":{"rendered":"Getting Pupils – You Have To Smile Sometimes"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"NotThe article on the blog, Should I Become A Driving Instructor,<\/a> is very popular. Yes, it\u2019s very long, but there\u2019s only so much information you can convey in a single Tweet, or with a couple of rows of emoticons in a Facebook post, and sometimes you have to go into the grown-ups\u2019 world and actually read more than a handful of words to learn anything.<\/p>\n

One of the points I make in that article \u2013 indeed, in a fair number of articles on this blog \u2013 is that many independent driving instructors have a completely blinkered view of the world, and genuinely believe that when they\u2019re independent, every single penny they take from their pupils is profit. In particular, they sincerely believe that compared to a franchisee with a driving school who pays maybe \u00a3180 per week, they earn \u00a3180 extra by not having to pay a franchise.<\/p>\n

When they\u2019re giving bad advice to prospective or recently qualified instructors, they readily advise them to go independent and not to pay money to any of these thieves and robbers (aka driving schools). They say that they can get their own pupils just like that (and their car is free, of course), so why waste money paying someone to do it for you?<\/p>\n

So it makes me smile when I see them online asking about pupil referral companies, and then seeing the replies that show a lot of other independents are already using those same companies. You’re not<\/strong> “independent” if you’re relying on someone else to get pupils for you. It doesn’t matter, of course – but it means the “independent” claim is simply untrue.<\/p>\n

When someone is with a franchise, in most cases that franchise supplies pupils. If it\u2019s a decent franchise, then a decent number of pupils will be available. So the \u00a3180 the franchisee is paying covers the car, insurance, pupil supply, and probably a few other things.<\/p>\n

As I explain in the Should I Become A Driving Instructor<\/a> article, an independent instructor will<\/strong> likely be paying between \u00a370-\u00a3150 for a car if he or she is leasing it. If they buy outright, they\u2019ll be paying about the same per week if they keep the car for three years (\u00a370 for a Corsa, \u00a3130 for a Ford Focus, at least \u00a3150 for a BMW 113i) then sell it. Even if they have a banger, it\u2019s still going to have a weekly cost for tax purposes of \u00a330-\u00a350. And if other Facebook posts are anything to go by, most independents are being asked to pay about \u00a3300-\u00a3400 a year on average for insurance (\u00a36-\u00a37 a week, though some are up to double that). These pupil referral companies charge around \u00a320 per pupil.<\/p>\n

Independents will deny all this, of course, but it\u2019s true. Even an ADI using the cheapest (non-banger) car option is paying around \u00a3100 a week if he is taking these referrals. If the ADI has a BMW, he\u2019s paying more like \u00a3170.<\/p>\n

And franchises are a rip-off for new instructors, right?<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t get me wrong. I have no issue with these referral companies. I only have issues with instructors who mislead others by making false claims about how much it costs them to run their businesses (I wonder if they tell HMRC the same?) and how easy it is to source your own pupils, when they end up paying someone else to do it for them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The article on the blog, Should I Become A Driving Instructor, is very popular. Yes, it\u2019s very long, but there\u2019s only so much information you can convey in a single Tweet, or with a couple of rows of emoticons in a Facebook post, and sometimes you have to go into the grown-ups\u2019 world and actually […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[80],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23516","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adi-related"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23516","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23516"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23516\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23516"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23516"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23516"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}