Short version: I'm no longer instructing.
Longer version:
I really enjoyed my time as an instructor and did it part time, building up gradually for about 3 years. I liked the work, got a good sense of satisfaction from helping people gain skills and pass. I enjoyed being my own boss, designing and running my own syllabus and pottering about in the car for my working day. My frustrations were:
- Odd and disconnected hours. I found it difficult to string a working day together. One lesson 9am, someone else at 1pm, 3pm, and then 7pm for example. No real time to do anything in between, but everyone wants their lessons at times to suit them.
- Customers. Always, and I mean *always* cancelling/rearranging their lessons. You're deali with teenagers a good portion of the time who are disorganised and generally hopeless. "I forgot", "my phone run out of battery so I couldn't call last night", "I got drunk at my mate's last night and mum think is I shouldn't drive this morning". Cancellation fees are well and good, but get too draconian and they'll go elsewhere. Also, driving instruction is an odd world. If you're good, you lose your customers as quickly as possible... I had a few real battles with parents who just wanted their precious to take their test well before they were safe and ready.
- Pricing. This was a real difficulty for me. It cost me about £8 an hour to run my car when counting fuel, tax, servicing, instructor licence costs etc etc all averaged over the year. There seem to be two brackets of instructors - the long standing 20+ year guys charging (at the time) £24-£25 an hour, and the various newbies on the "5 lessons for £55" type deals - or £3 an hour for the instructor. I tried to go in the middle. £23 an hour, and a bit of a discount if bulk buying. I lost count of people - even friends of the family, local people around the village I've known for years since they were toddlers, whose parents would enquire, suck their teeth, and then I'd see their kid driving round in a franchised car a few weeks later. The same people who quite happily use the local £40 an hour dog walker won't pay £23 an hour for driving tuition... Quite often though, they would get sick and tired of being parked up by the side of the road the whole time in their cheap lessons (instructor's got to save money on fuel somehow I guess?), come to me for a change, find it a revelation to actually do some driving in a driving lesson, really enjoy themselves and make progress. I think there's a constant recycling of these "deal" type instructors who come in on the "£30k" promise, run ludicrous pricing deals, work 7 day solid weeks to try and make ends meet and give up a year or two later...
- The franchise model. BSM or AA charge an absolute fortune. I think BSM were about £230 A WEEK. So your first £920 a month that your earning (a good portion of that through your £11 an hour deal lessons) goes on your franchise fee before you earn a single penny to pay yourself... Self employed for me was the only way to go (despite an offer from my instructor trainer to join his local franchise and expand into a new town for him).
Ultimately, I brought my instructing up from a beginning of nothing to a good 3 day week part time job, alongside some other music teaching. I was then offered one day a week work in a local school teaching their music technology lessons, which is also right up my street. After a term, they asked me to interview for a full time paid teaching post. I decided, as I was trying to save for a house, that a full time, well(ish) paid teaching post beat continuing down the instructing route, so I reluctantly didn't renew my licence.
Any more questions, please ask. I did enjoy it, but ultimately the process of slowly building a business - which was definitely going pretty well - at a time when I was approaching 30, met a girlfriend (now my wife) and was looking to buy a house didn't really make sense. I never got to he point where I could ditch all my other work and go full time driving, and without going full time driving, I couldn't have a completely available diary to fit in all the students on all days of the week.
Anyway, school budgets collapsed, music technology became superfluous to requirements and I'm now a cop! Blue light course soon