A grand day out

Sunday 28th September saw us attending a key event in the ADI calendar, the ADINJC & Intelligent Instructor National Conference & Expo. This year was the biggest event yet with over 1,700 instructors attending at Cranmore Park in Solihull. With a full schedule of seminars and a host of industry suppliers to talk to, there was plenty to keep delegates occupied.

We were certainly kept busy on our trade stand, meeting both new and old faces throughout the day. We were excited to show off our brand new backdrop and banners and, as a nod to our 10th birthday year, a big celebratory bunch of balloons! If you’re a regular visitor to our website, you’ve probably noticed that we have a brand new website too.

It’s always lovely to meet existing customers and chat about how they’re using MyDriveTime, and what new features they’d like us to add next. This year I found myself speaking to a lot more PDIs than usual, and I wondered if this was due to the lack of Part 3 tests preventing people from qualifying sooner. As part of our PDI Best Start initiative, we offer MyDriveTime free of charge to PDIs until they qualify – no matter how long that takes. And from speaking to those who have taken up our offer, it’s certainly taking longer these days.

Emma, our quality assurance and training manager, also commented on the diversity of attendees from Part 1 PDIs to ADIs with 25 years experience. It certainly makes it a challenge for the exhibitors to keep things relevant for everyone when delegates have such a wide range of experience.

 

Did we meet you?

If you came over for a chat or a demo, I hope you liked what you saw and have started your free trial already! MyDriveTime is the original diary and admin app for driving instructors and schools, and we’ve continued to innovate since our launch in 2014. Our mission is to help forward-thinking instructors and schools to benefit from better business management through technology, and we’d love to help you 🙂

Are you looking for an app to help run your driving school? There are a few in the marketplace; perhaps you’ve trialled some of them already. If you’re reading this article, I expect you have at least heard of MyDriveTime, the first business management software for ADIs to hit the market back in 2014. If not, welcome to our blog!

But maybe you’ve come across a free app and thought “This looks good! Why would I pay a monthly fee to use an app when I can get one for free?”

It’s a good question and you are right to ask it; everyone is feeling the pinch and we’re all looking for ways to save money. So let’s get under the bonnet and see if we can answer that question for you!

Here at MyDriveTime we are well aware of what it costs to run a modern software service – after all, we’ve been doing it for over 10 years. The most important costs that we have to consider are:

 

• • Our staff, who build the apps and provide customer support when you need it
  • Web hosting, to ensure that your data is stored safely and available whenever you need it

 

Any software company that cares about the quality of its product will never scrimp on these. All software has to be paid for somehow, and services like MyDriveTime do that by charging their users a monthly fee.

But what about free apps? How do they pay for their staff and web hosting, and all their other costs too? There are multiple answers to this.

 

By selling you something else

Providing free access to a business management app is often the gateway to other goods and services. One common tactic is to sell access to a supply of students. This is often, but not always, in the form of intensive courses. If you are keen to source more students, you may find this useful. However at the time of writing, the market is still considerably in the instructor’s favour, with lots of students seeking tuition. Most instructors that we speak to are not having any trouble filling their diaries, so why share the profits?

 

By using your data

There is a popular phrase in the software world, “If you’re not paying, you are the product”. This is most often used to refer to social media apps such as Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. They are free to use because you’ve agreed that they can analyse your personal data and sell it to advertisers in some form or other. Their real customers are not regular individual users, but the companies who advertise with them.

If it’s not clear how a company is making money from its app, you should always check their terms and conditions to see whether they are making use of your data. This could be your own data, or that of your students. Would your students be happy to have their data shared in this way?

 

So what’s the problem?

The main problem with using a free app is that you are relying on something that is not the company’s core concern. The app is being used to get you into their ecosystem, so that they can make money from you in other ways. If those other ways of making money fail, then the software that you are relying on to run your business is at risk.

And this is not just a paranoid concern, we’ve already seen it happen. In 2020, one of the leading free apps miDrive folded after it was unable to make its student supply financially viable. At the time, the company advised those who were using its free app to move to other services such as MyDriveTime.

If you pay directly for an app such as MyDriveTime, you know exactly what you’re paying for and, most importantly, that all our time is dedicated to making it the best it can be. By contrast, an app that only exists to encourage you to pay for other services, or to harvest your data, only needs to be just good enough to entice you in, and the company’s attention is going to be divided between it and their actual money-making concerns. We are 100% focussed on the quality of our app, because that is how we make our money. It’s literally the only thing we have to worry about!

 

In conclusion

As consumers, most of us focus on the cost of the goods and services we buy.  But as business owners, a different mindset is required; focusing on the value provided. Value is determined by weighing cost and benefit to determine if the output delivers more than the investment.

The software that you use to run your business is just as serious an investment as the car that you teach in. The value in MyDriveTime is not just in the reliability of our service and the features it provides, but in the reassurance of our intent. Thousands of instructors already trust us, and we hope that you will too!

 

 

 

TL;DR

Recurrence has arrived! Lessons and unavailability can now be booked with daily, weekly, monthly or even yearly recurrence. Furthermore, you can choose whether changes, cancellations and deletions affect the whole set of lessons/unavailability or just single ones. Maximum flexibility with the minimum of fuss.

 

Recurrence

When adding a lesson, you can choose whether to make it a recurrent lesson, opting for daily or weekly, up to 99 occurrences.

 

 

If any of the proposed lessons clash with an existing lesson (or a period of unavailability) you have the option to ignore the clash and add the lesson anyway or skip that date and add a lesson to the end. You can do this even if there is no clash (when you haven’t put the wedding anniversary in as unavailability!)

 

 

• • If you need to change the whole sequence of lessons, you can do that by choosing the next upcoming lesson in the sequence and when you have made your change, choose to update all lessons from that point.
  • If you want to change part of a sequence, you can do that by choosing the first lesson you want to change and when you have made your change, choose to update all lessons from that point. This will leave all lessons up to that point as they were and all lessons from that point as a new sequence.
  • If you just need to change one lesson, select that lesson and when you have made your change, choose to update just that lesson. In this case, the lesson will be detached from the sequence and be in the diary as a normal standalone lesson. The rest of the sequence remains unchanged.

 

Lessons can also be cancelled or deleted, one at a time or en bloc.

 

 

We hope that these changes give you everything you want in respect of recurrence and make your lives easier. Recurrence on the web app will follow.

Our very own Emma Ashley has recorded a really helpful video to show you the basics of recurrence. This is available in our Facebook User Group, so if you’re an existing subscriber, go check them out.

More to come soon! If you have any questions in the meantime, email support@mydrivetime.co.uk.