Small side business idea - teaching people to drive a manual. oppo-pinions welcome!

"trmoore09" (trmoore09) 08/17/2015 at 11:50 • Filed to: savethemanuels

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ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: THIS WOULD BE A SIDE JOB. I already have a good day job working 40hrs/wk. I understand this would not be a 40hr/wk, well paying job. It would just be an interesting side gig to make a little extra money and give back to the Save the Manuel Foundation.

Oppo-pinions: Small business idea feedback. - teaching people how to drive a manual transmission car.

Hello oppo, I need some opinions and feedback if you can spare a few minutes of your time.

Recently, I have taught a few people how to drive a manual transmission car (my wife, a co-worker, and I will be teaching my brother soon hopefully). These experiences went pretty well, and I feel like I did a fairly good job with it, but clearly the more people I teach, the better I will get at it (ideally). My qualifications to teach this: I have been driving a 5 speed or 6 speed car for approx 11 years now.

My questions to you guys would be:

How many of you would be willing to pay somone to teach you how to drive a manual transmission car? (assuming you don’t know how, or if you do, assuming you didn’t)

The car would be provided (which then brings in the issue of insurance/liability).

How much would you pay? Flat rate or hourly? (short session to teach the basics vs in-depth lesson that is very catered to the customer/client)

How long do you think would be a good standard amount of time to teach someone? I was thinking 3-4 hours.

Clearly, this is a very niche market, but there are still people willing and wanting to learn, and I feel I should do my part to Save the Manuels.

Thanks for your feedback in advance!

-trmoore09 (Ryan)

jkm7680 > trmoore09 08/17/2015 at 12:16

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I honestly wouldn’t pay for that service.

I’m a firm believer that if you don’t know how to drive stick, you should just go out and buy a manual car and teach yourself as you go.

trmoore09 > jkm7680 08/17/2015 at 12:29

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Fair enough. I appreciate the honesty. That’s the feedback I was looking for. Just trying to decide if the market is there and if it’s worth my time and effort.

NYankee1927 > trmoore09 08/17/2015 at 12:36

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I think you should partner with a dealership (ideally one with tons of manual sales) so when someone comes in who wants to buy a sportscar, they can spend an out with you before smoking the clutch on a brand new one. 3-4 hours seems excessive though.

Bytemite > trmoore09 08/17/2015 at 12:38

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Its a good idea because even though there is only a small market, there is no competition. Just post an ad on Craigslist and keep it updated. You can charge about 15-20 dollars an hour. Let them pay by the hour so they can buy just the right amount of time for themselves. Honestly, why not? There is no running costs. You are using your own manual car, cl ad is free, so why not. Once you get enough clients and they refer more people and your schedule becomes too packed, you hire another teacher under your wing. Pay him 12 an hour and keep the 3 for yourself. Expand from there, make a business name, get a logo, advertise. Just do it.

trmoore09 > Bytemite 08/17/2015 at 13:25

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Thanks for your input! Your point about there being no running costs is my snag though. My current DD/manual is my E46 M3, which I would not feel comfortable teaching people on. I would want to buy something a) easier for people to learn and b) cheaper. Maybe a $3-4k civic or something. That being said, at an average of $50 or so a session, it would take 60-80 people to break even, not including gas/insurance/parts/etc. Considering I have a full time job from 8-5pm, this would have to be a night job or weekend job, and I could maybe fit it 3-4 people max comfortably per week. I would be looking at around 20 weeks to break even, which I guess isn’t too bad.

trmoore09 > NYankee1927 08/17/2015 at 13:29

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That’s a good idea, I could look into that. It may be hard to find any dealership with tons of manual sales though, due to the decline of the manual. I feel like my target audience would be people considering buying a manual car, but won’t because they can’t drive it. I assume most people that go into a dealership looking to buy a manual car, or who actually buy one, can already drive a manual. As for the time, I recently taught my co-worker and while 2 hours was what it took to teach him the basics, I did not feel he was as comfortable with it when I left him as I would have liked him to be. Especially if this was someone paying me. I would want them to feel comfortable with it and prepared. This also definitely depends on where you live. I live in Raleigh, and people definitely need more instruction here with the traffic than some other places where traffic is less of an issue.

trmoore09 > jkm7680 08/17/2015 at 13:37

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Also, while I agree with you for the most part, some people may not be willing to make that leap. This would provide people the opportunity to learn and then decide if it’s something they want enough to include in the car they are getting. This could also be for people who just want to learn, without even wanting to buy a manual car; just having another random life skill.

Bytemite > trmoore09 08/17/2015 at 13:54

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Profit margin gets so much thinner if your DD is not going to be your business. But I know for sure there is demand for learning manual. I searched for a service like this before I had to take the plunge and just buy my Miata and learn on my own. If there was someone I could pay maybe $20-25/hour to teach me manual, I would have gladly given him business. I think there are also a lot of people who are deterred from buying manual cars, whether new or used, because they can’t test drive them or are afraid of them. So in this way, not only are you providing a much needed service, you are also literally saving the manuels in the best/most effective way possible. Please do this.

Eric @ opposite-lock.com > trmoore09 08/17/2015 at 14:07

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I’m not sure how it would work. You’d need a really cheap Civic or Corolla (or something along these lines) for the training car, then you’d need to be ready to replace the clutch every 6 months.

I couldn’t see doing it for less than $50 an hour after an hour or two of classroom explaining how it works at that rate to be able to make any money at it (like $150, min, per customer). Below that, you might as well just get a job.

I’m also not sure how many people you’d get looking to do it. It’s fairly niche and people that really want to learn will probably be willing to buy a car. On the flip side, at something like 4% of cars sold (probably 80+% of those are sports cars), there’s a large portion of the population that doesn’t even know someone that owns one, let alone one that they would be comfortable teaching someone in. The problem is that the low value of the skill because there are so few cars with them would make it a hard sell.

I could see it being popular with people planning a trip to Europe, where manual cars are plentiful. If you had an RHD manual you might do even better, since the RHD countries have very high ratios of manuals:automatics.

You could also train “Amazing Race” contestants, because, seriously, most of these fools can’t even drive one, let alone drive it well. If you watch it for a while, it’s painful just how poorly these people that can actually move the cars know how to drive them (and the likelihood they can even move them is low).