Time Management
This subject is very similar to our Pricing subject. But it's more about making sure you get the most out of your time.
As the title says, "if you're not teaching you're losing money"
For every second of the day that you are driving around without a pupil in your car that is paying for a lesson, you are losing money.
The car is running, fuel is being consumed as well as wear and tear on your vehicle which is also costing you money.
Ensure when you create your timings for your lessons that you try as best as possible to keep your pupil locations close to each other.
It may be that you can cover certain lessons in certain areas on particular days of the week.
This might impact on the amount of lessons you do slightly, but in the long run, it may benefit your wallet.
You'll have to do the calculations yourself as to whether this would work for you or not.
It may be that all your pupils are a very short distance from your home location and it wouldn't matter either way, but if you have one pupil in one location, the next 20 miles away, the 3rd 20 miles in the opposite direction etc, it is going to become a costly day keep travelling form one location to another. This is going to eat into your profits.
We talk about route planning in another section of this site.
Again this is crucial to offering value for money to your pupils but is also crucial for your to be maximising your time and earning more.
If your pupils are paying for an hours lesson they should be getting an hours lesson right down to the last second.
But, if you don't get your lesson plan and route sorted, you could be leaving yourself in a messy situation that leave you miles away from your finishing point at the correct time.
This is going to cause your lesson to overrun and a possibility of you being late for your next pupil.
Get to know your locations extremely well, know the short cuts, get to know how you could take a different route to get you to the same location if a road were to be closed or an accident has occurred (obviously, sometimes this is going to be impossible) but by having options you could make up time.
If you find you are going to arrive back at your pupils finish location a little early (allowing for debrief) then by knowing your locations well, you could always add on a couple of extra roads, or carry out a manoeuvre just before the end of the session to make the time work correctly.
Being a good instructor is not only offering good lessons that are value for money, but it's also about being able to manage your time and run an efficient profitable business as well.
A well planned diary will not only reap rewards, it will also reap you "Your time".
Any time that you get back by creating a well planned diary will pay dividends for you to get things done that you can't do during your working time, but possibly more importantly will give you down time.
Down time / Family time is so important.
Make a list of things that you need to achieve outside of your working day. Categorise it as most important to least important.
Ensure that you allow and make time to get those things done. If you don't, more will eventually add to that list until it overflows and nothing gets done.
This will lead to frustrations and anxiety that isn't necessary if you plan correctly.
Always remember, YOU are in charge of your time, no one else. If you need to get things done, MAKE TIME for it.
You may need to jiggle your whole working week around to make things work right, but you are in control of that. If you are crammed packed with pupils, when one of them passes, possibly consider NOT taking on another to fill that slot. This will give you a regular timeslot each week to "get things done".
You may think "well I won't be earning then", but if you are creating this heap of things that need to get done that is constantly getting bigger and bigger week on week, it will eventually just drag you down, get you stressed, and when you do eventually get around to sorting it all out it will possibly take you a lot longer than it would have done had you allocated a little time each week to carrying out the smaller tasks. By waiting and not allocating any time, you've now got a huge list of things to do.
If you are out teaching all day every day and you only get around to doing your paperwork, accounts, phoning new clients etc after your working day is done, then in truth you're still working, so your working day is not done. You need to ensure when your working day is done you relax.
If you cannot get the "after hours" stuff done in your working hours then adapt your diary so that you can.
It may be that you end up allocating a specific time of the day or day of the week purely to dealing with paperwork, new clients, etc. and if this is what makes your time better used, then that's what you should consider doing.
