Doing the business!

One thing I ain't is a natural born businessman.

I'm sloppy, disorganised, poorly motivated, and not particularly materialistic.

So the admin side of this job gets avoided until it has to be dealt with.

And crunch time has been the last couple of days.

I've had to try to find all the reciepts I could get hold of from April 2006 until April 2007.

I've had to work out on a week by week basis exactly how much I've earned.

Then I've had to write all this stuff down in a book and make all the numbers add up.

It's taken a number of days, and culminated in me staying up until nearly 5am this morning getting it sorted out. I still have a few bits to do, and I do need to double check the figures while I'm not half asleep. And I need to tidy up, because the living room is a mass of strewn paper.

I made a profit of just under £7000 last year. That's a little bit less than £140 a week. And that's without any kind ofcreative accounting. In fact, because I'm so slipshod, there are quite a few weeks where the car must have ran on fresh air, as there are no petrol reciepts.

Still, there you go. Spend 000's getting a professional qualification. Then work in a business where the overheads are so high, you make bugger all from it.

And that's why I've chosen to stop working as a franchisee for other people and start my own school up.

My current costs are basically franchise and fuel. This comes to a rough figure of £260/week.

My new costs will be car lease, insurance, fuel and advertising. The first three should come to about £150/week. I'll be charging less per hour than I do now, but even so, unless I spend
£90/week on advertising every single week, I'm going to be much better off.

So there you go! Probably boring as hell, but don't believe the adverts. The instructor training colleges charge a lot of money on what I reckon is something of a false promise.