Gimps, Gears and Geeks.

Gimp can make animated gifs. I never knew this before.

Here's one I made earlier.

The reson I made this particular animated gif is because I had this idea that if I was so excited by the prospect of chucking a really quick car around a track, then presumably the sort of person that goes looking for driving lessons might be too. So I intend to do a prize draw in 2012, with the supercar driving experience as the prize.

On a similar vein, I've just sent an enquiry to a local (ish) company that does skid control lessons with a view to offerering one of their things as a prize, or even some kind of collaborative venture where they offer some kind of discount, and I incorporate them into my curriculum.

driving lessons in Wallasey?

So just what business is being done?

Of the 32 vouchers that people bought, so far, 3 people have called.

One is pretty much at test standard. She's had a couple of driving tests, and failed. She reckons she was put in too early. I will be doing a 2 hour assessment of her driving in a day or two, to find out where she's up to. She probably won't need more than maybe 10 lessons.

Ditto the second one. She's had quite a lot of lessons, and gets a lot of private practice in her own car, so my job will be to assess her driving, and to try to smooth off any rough edges to get her through her test.

Finally, I had a call this morning from a woman who's bought a voucher as a christmas present for her son. He's an absolute beginner, and she will be buying him more lessons for his birthday in January. Potentially a full course of perhaps 35-40 hours here.

driving lessons in Birkenhead?

Here is as good a place as any to keep tabs on how effective this form of marketing has been for me. As more come in I intend to add to this post.

Doing the business...

The daily deal format is pretty new. Here's how it works.

A merchant contacts the daily deal website, and offers a substantial discount to their subscribers.
Interested subscribers buy vouchers representing the deal. They give their money to the daily deal website.
The website then gives some of that money to the merchant.
So the subscriber gets a product or service at a knock down price. The website take a big chunk of the money given by the subscriber. The merchant gets business.

Today, my driving school has been the focus of Wirral deals on the Living Social website.

Instead of the usual £20 per hour, Living Social subscribers are being offered 3 hours for £19. Of that, Living Social take about £9+VAT, so I actually get about £8.50 per voucher. Less than £3 per hour, but of course, some of those subscribers will go on to take proper full price lessons.

So how well is it being taken up?

It's exceeded my expectations by quite a long way. Getting the deal up in the first week of December was a huge bonus of course. These vouchers are the perfect christmas gift to give a teenager, and about twenty quid is a pretty typical amount for people to want to spend on nephews or grandkids or whatever.

So far, 20 people have bought vouchers. If all of them went on to take a full course with me, and they were all absolute beginners, and they rook the average 43 hours to get through their tests, that would be 20 people x 40 hours (43 minus the 3 cheap ones) x 20 quid. That's £16,000!

That's not going to happen of course. And that £16,000 is income, not profit, but still, this looks like it's going to have been  a really good way of getting business. Certainly better than giving some arrogant parasite £130 a week. So far, Living Social will have made somewhere around £200 from me, but it looks like I'm going to hit the ground running in the new year.

Some of those subscribers (21 of them now) will already have had lessons. Some will be just going from cheap deal to cheap deal, regardless of how well they've been taught. Some may not redeem their vouchers, or may not like me or my methods. We can't all be born with taste after all!

I will probably do this again sometime next year.

Optimistic for a change!

The deal page has also been driving traffic (excuse the pun) to my website.

driving lessons in Wallasey?

Update: With around five and a half hours to go, I'm now up to 30 vouchers. 90 hours work, for £262, and the potential to bring in as much as £24,000. I have access to a list of purchasers and a bit of demographic info. 78% of purchasers have been female. Over three quarters of payments were made via computer. 10% was by Iphone. Quite a lot of them have been bought as gifts. One person has bought three vouchers, each gifted to a different person. Merry Christmas to them!

Might even be able to get the roof mended some time in the spring.

Further update: 7 dec 2011...

Living social are extending my promotion by another 72 hours - a second chance thing. not as the headline promotion, but further down the page.

So, it won't be generating customers at the same high frequency. Apart from it being less high profile, those interested in driving lessons will presumably have already seem this offer and acted on it. Still, 3 more days of it, and all the stuff about ideal gifts still being true, I could potentially double the 32 vouchers sold.

I hope I haven't bitten off more than I can chew.

On the buses

Well, I've just been for an assessment/interview this morning. I got to wear a hi-viz jacket, but I didn't get a hat.

I got there early, but the guy who was supposed to assess me was with someone else, but I went into the bowels of the building with the manager, who asked me some questions, and gave me the low down on life with First Group.

If I get the job I will be working split shifts, monday to friday, 4 hours a day. Nominally the pay is something like £8.45 an hour, but they actually pay a bit over £7 per hour, and pay 52 weeks of the year, so you get a wage coming in, even when the schools are on holiday.

I can teach during those times of course. £140 a week over christmas would be very nice thank you very much!

I had to blow into a breathalyser (reading, zero) and the trainer got me to drive a couple of miles in a small van. I got a minor fault because I rolled back a little bit at a junction. Should have used my handbrake.

The shame of it!

A minor fault is OK though. The guy assessing me reckoned he'd had a few instructors coming into bus driving, all saying that it was very hard to find enough work.

Over 100 people applied for 6 vacancies. Some were prepared to travel from as far afield as Litherland and Mold. From those 100, a shortlist of 16 was selected. not all of whom have shown up for interview.


I should know in the next week or so anyway.

Watch this space...

Update: I passed the interview, but the vacancy had been filled.

Huh? In retrospect, I'm quite glad I didn't get it.

driving lessons in wallasey anyone?

Blogger Vs Wordpress

I keep trying with Wordpress. I really do. I can see that it has real potential. Yet doing simple things like removing or adding page elements, or getting it to put line breaks between paragraphs seem only possible through an esoteric and convoluted process. I'm sure there are ways of doing what I want to do, but it's a whole lot of work.

Also, worpress wants to charge me for using my own domain name. It seems that blogger allows me to do this for free. I'm not making any firm commitment to any platform yet, but I've made a lot more progress using the blogger site than I have with the wordpress one.

In case anyone's interested, here are the two sites.

Blogger


Wordpress

Blogger loads up faster than wordpress, at least on my computer at this moment.

Still trying stuff. What you see there at the moment is probably not what it will end up looking like.

And I will continue to try with wordpress. Even if I can't do things conventionally, I might find workarounds using more creative methods.

And jumping off...

Sort of, anyway.

I give Chris Kelly my franchise fee for the next 4 weeks. In return he does no work for me at all, but graciously allows me to keep the pupils he's given me.

Thanks Chris.

I can use that time to sort out my own school and it's associated advertising/web presence.

My other main overhead is the hire of a car. I want to end the contract on that (It's supposed to run until August 2012) and try to get a second hand car at a bargain price.

Tippytoeing up to the edge of the high board

Another crap week has made my mind up. Carrying on regardless is a death by a thousand cuts.

I'm really not looking forward to this, but I'm going to hand in my notice.

Up and away... soon... maybe....

Shhh! Do you hear that?

It's the sound of loins being girded. Of palms being spat upon. Of sleeves being rolled up.

You see, I'm going to go on my own again, only, not just yet. I'm preparing the ground first. Getting things in place, so that when I tell my current booking agent I am not going to pay him any more, I have some other means of getting work.

So, I have been informing my current crop of pupils that if I do leave, their arrangement is with me, not with the driving school as a whole, and that they don't have to go with a different instructor, no matter what they are told.

I've got a load of free business cards printed, and I use them as appointment cards for my pupils, letting them know that should that card come back to me from someone else, they get a free lesson, or £20 if they've passed their test.

I've found our old dreamweaver disk, and installed all sorts of macromedia gubbins on my computer with a view to creating a simple website.

Currently I'm giving £130 a week to my booking agent. I'm gambling that if I give my money to google/facebook/the local ad rag/etc, I will be able to fill my diary better than I'm doing right now. I'm gambling that since it's me that get's the credit for a good job done, and not someone elses school, eventually I will have to pay out far less to find work.

But for now, I'm going to carry on as I was.

I feel much better, although I'm finding the website creation thing a bit daunting. Not so much the stylistic elements. Generally that's straightforward, if occasionally a chore. But the actual nuts and bolts stuff about root folders and ftp transfer.

Might just spend a few quid on one of those website in a box packages where you get a "free" domain name and what have you.

Rent-A-Wreck

Just thinking out loud.

We're on the bones of our arses here. All relative of course, when you consider the poor starving wretches of Somalia or Bangladesh, but without doing anything profligate like going on holiday or repairing the roof of our house, we're gradually slipping further and further into debt.

Much of this is down to me. Partly because sloth is the deadly sin I'd associate myself with more than all the others combined. Partly because I don't like confrontation. So when pupils leave, I don't always tell my boss, because he gives me a hard time about it. So I don't have enough work.

And when you need £300 a week just to break even, this can very quickly go tits up.

So here's my thought.

Rent a wreck school of motoring.

CHEAP DRIVING LESSONS! NERVOUS WRECKS WELCOME!

Let's face it, most learners will not be driving around in brand new cars when they've passed their tests. They will be buying cheapo old bangers.

So why not teach in one? Make it a selling point? Certainly the question everone asks when they ring up about lessons is "How much do you charge?"

Currently my weekly costs break down as follows:

franchise - £130
car - £85
insurance - £20
fuel - £80

total - £315

These are rough figures. They jumped upward because of the VAT increase. They are climbing steadily because of fuel costs.

But what if I got some cheap pile of cack fromthe bargain basement of my local garage? Annual budget of perhaps £500 a year.

Well that's £10 a week. Add a couple of hundred quid for the cost of fitting dual controls. So that then goes to maybe £15 or £20 a week.

Because the car would be worth less, it would be cheaper to insure. Perhaps £500 a year instead of £900. That's £10 a week.

Fuel costs would probably go up a bit, especially if I got a petrol car rather than a diesel. Let's call it £100 a week.

Finally, if I do this, then I won't have to give all that money to The Man. But I will have to spend something on advertising. Last time round I seriously underestimated the amount I would have ot spend. So let's commit £50 a week to google, newspaper ads, yellow pages, website, whatever.

So what does that add up to?

£180 a week. Rather better than £315.

But that's only part of the story. We also have to live. Pay bills. Keep wolf from door. That kind of stuff. Roughly, we need about £200 a week to do this.

I need to earn £515 a week to get by. How the fuck did that happen? I used to get by on the dole, sort of.

Anyway, where was I ?

Oh yeah. £515.

I get £20 a lesson. That's effectively £20 an hour because I need to get from one lesson to another and I don't have a teleport. So I need to do 26 hours a week.

Of course the big selling point of shithole school of motoring would be that it's cheap.

I'd keep it simple. No frills. No gimmicks. No introductory offers. Just a straightforward flat rate.

Say, £15/hour.

Still got to find that £200 a week to pay the bills. New overheads would be £180 a week.

That's £380 a week. I'd need to do 26 hours a week doing it this way too.

OK well how about £16 an hour? Still well below the current market rate. Well that puts it down a bit. Now got to do 24 hours a week.

So not that much to choose in terms of how hard I'd have to work.

But there's more to it.

You see, I'm not really interested in becoming rich. I can't be arsed. I became an instructor because I wanted to earn enough per hour that I wouldn't have to slog my bollocks off for 40+ hours a week to earn a crust.

Currently, if I have a few bad weeks, I quickly find I'm up shit creek. Of course, if I have a good few weeks, I make a lot of money. But this never happens. Not the way I'm doing things right now.

As an example, let's say I do 15 hours.

Right now that brings in £300, and I fail to cover my overheads (actually I'd probably break even becuase my fuel costs would be down a bit) but I would still have to find £200 to pay the bills.

With rent a wreck, I do the same 15 hours and it brings in £240. But my overheads would be perhaps £130, again shit week = less fuel. Still not earning enough, but only about £90 short instead of £200.

I cannot carry on the way I have been. It's unsustainable. We face losing our home unless something changes. So either I find a way of making a go of this, or I do something else instead.