Congratulations on getting signed up to teach stick shift and thank you for helping to save the manuals! The purpose of this document and quiz is to help start you get off to a good start. Since we started this business, we’ve helped over 4,000 customers to learn stick shift. This means we’ve also helped numerous instructors with speed bumps and problems along the way. On the following pages, we’ve compiled what we’ve learned about the problems and points of confusion that are most common to new instructors. By reading this material and taking this quiz, you can be sure that you’re starting off on the right...er...left foot! This information packet and quiz has 4 sections and should take you about 10 - 15 minutes to get through. Once you get a perfect score and finish sending back all of your documents, you'll be eligible to start teaching customers.
Below, for each day of the week, please indicate your regularly scheduled availability.If you are not available on a given day of the week every week, please leave the entry marked as "Not Available". If you are available on a given day of the week every week, please indicate the time range when you are available. Please only put down time ranges when you are consistently available to take lessons every week. Note that you will NOT get lessons for all of the times you list. You are simply indicating when you're available. Availability RequirementsPlease note that we can only work with you if:You have at least 15 hours of availability per week AND at least one (1) of the following:3 weekdays of availability and at least 4 hours each day,1 weekend day of 5 hours or more each day,2 weekend days AND 4 hours or more each WEEKEND day
There are a few ways that you can communicate with us and other instructors. Below, we outline the ways you can communicate with and other instructors and how to decide which way to choose. Facebook Group - Oftentimes, your questions will focus on questions about how to teach or manage certain aspects of your relationship with customers. For those matters, we recommend joining the Facebook group and chatting with other instructors. They’ll be able to give you a broad range of opinions on your questions. Email - The best way to get help with anything other than order confirmations is to email instructors@stickshiftdrivingacademy.com. The admin team that manages that email line is equipped to handle a broad range of questions and problems. This is the best place to go for things like questions about curriculum, insurance, paperwork, taxes, payments, using the scheduling system, and just about anything else that you can think of. Texting - Our admin team on the texting line can only help you with confirming and rescheduling lessons. They are NOT trained to handle anything related to things like problems with direct deposit, changing tax forms, car inspections, or anything else. If you need help with anything other than order confirmations, it is best to email us. If you text us asking about anything unrelated to order confirmations or emails, the team will likely reply with a suggestion of having you email the instructor admin line.
Much like your sixth sense for knowing when to upshift and downshift, you likely also have a gut feeling about when something isn’t right. We believe that you should ALWAYS trust your gut feeling, even if it makes the customer unhappy. If you ever get the feeling that you don’t want to teach a lesson, whether in advance of a lesson or even in the middle of the lesson, we will 100% support your decision to cancel or end the lesson early. Even if that means the customer calls us and yells at us and demands a refund, we would MUCH rather process a refund than have you call us and tell us that you didn’t listen to your gut feeling and something bad happened. Your body, your car, and your peace of mind are not worth sacrificing simply for the benefit of making money. Because of our support of your gut feelings, you AUTOMATICALLY have our support for making whatever decision you think is safest and in the best interest of caution. You don’t need to call us or text us to get our permission to cancel or end a lesson early; you already have that support. If you decide to cancel a lesson before it starts or end it early once it has begun, please first communicate with the customer about your decision and then text us after you talk with the customer so that we can make sure we close the loop with the customer.
The best place to start with helping you to get good reviews is by helping you to avoid bad reviews. When we get bad reviews, it is usually for one of a few reasons.
Order Confirmation SpeedCustomers want to hear from you ASAP after placing an order. The longer you wait to contact them, the more likely they are to request a different instructor or a refund. So, quick order confirmation directly with the customer is key. Likewise, we want to know that you and your customer have spoken with each other soon after the order was placed. We expect that you will contact both your customer and us within 24 hours of the order being placed.When the order comes in, you’ll get a text message and an email from Acuity, our scheduling system, letting you know about the order and giving you the customer’s contact information. We recommend you call, text, and email the customer as soon as you get that email to coordinate where you want them to meet you for the lesson. Beyond helping yourself to get a good rating, you’ll also be helping yourself to get more customers. Instructors who contact the customer quickly rank higher in the search results than instructors who confirm orders slowly. Once you've talked with the customer, please either reply all to the order email from Acuity or text us letting us know that you and the customer have spoken.
Ask for FeedbackInstructors who get the best ratings do a great job of finding out what is important to the customer and then making sure they’re delivering. Often, this means having a quick call a few days before the lesson to make sure they understand what’s important to the customer and any fears that they may have. During the lesson itself, they constantly check in with the customer, asking if the lesson is going too slowly or too quickly. The more often you ask for feedback, the more easily you’ll be able to match the lesson to the customer’s expectations.
Talk with customers before rescheduling or cancelingSometimes you’ll need to reschedule lessons, and that’s ok. If you need to reschedule a lesson, the best first step is to call and text the customer directly to see if you two can find a new time and date for the lesson. If you and the customer have agreed on a new time and date, just update the appointment in Acuity and/or text us with the new date and time of the lesson. Similarly, if you can’t take the lesson, it’s best to call and text the customer first to discuss two items. (1) let them know that you can’t teach the lesson and let them know that (2) you’ll contact us to help get them rescheduled. They'll appreciate knowing that you're helping them to get rescheduled. Once you do that, text us to let us know you’ve talked with the customer and that you can’t take the lesson. Once we get that information, we’ll get them rescheduled with a different instructor. Whether you need to reschedule or cancel, contacting the customer first and us second will help to smooth things out for everyone involved. Note that if you cancel or reschedule a lesson without first talking with the customer, we'll pause your calendar and prevent future bookings until we review these standards with you.
Regarding how you teach your lessons, you have quite a bit of freedom. Oftentimes, new instructors think that they have to follow our lead on how they teach as if they are our employees and they have to do what we say. This isn’t the case. In many ways, you can think of us as working for you. We do marketing and sales for you, similar to how Airbnb or eBay would bring customers to your listings and facilitate the transaction. As a result of this, you can pick how, when, where, and who you teach. The only requirements of a lesson are (1) you give the customer the amount of time that they purchased and (2) your teaching location meets the insurance requirements. Duration RequirementsAs long as you give the customer the ability to use all of the time that they purchased, you’re fine. If the customer decides to end the lesson early, that is their choice and you’re free to end it early. But if they want to use all of the time that they paid for, you need to let them use that amount of time or you’ll need to give them a full refund. We don't to payouts for partially completed lessons if the instructor ends the lesson early. Location Requirements1) Paved & Off-road. Typically, this means a parking lot. Note that driveways connecting parking lots are allowed. You CANNOT use a named city street. If the customer complains or has an issue with this, we strongly recommend that you remind them that they agreed to stay off the main roads when they signed the paperwork online.2) Away from vehicles and pedestrians...in public areas only with minimal traffic flow. Because of this, we strongly recommend AGAINST commercial shopping areas.3) Large enough to allow for continuous practice of upshifting and downshifting. As a general rule of thumb, your teaching location should provide at least 500 to 1000 feet of continuous, straight pavement. 4) Well-lit. If you teach early morning or in the evening, your teaching location will need to be illuminated with street lamps. If you teach during daylight hours, this isn't a concern. If you're looking for ideas about how to find a suitable teaching location, we'll provide training during your next step in the onboarding process. You can also find our training on finding a suitable location in our help center, Instructor Central. We'll send you information about that during your onboarding.
Recommended CurriculumAlthough we have a recommended curriculum, you are free to ignore it if you have a method or style of teaching that works best for you. We simply recommend that you use your best judgment and focus on balancing the safe operation of the vehicle along with the needs and desires of your customer. You’re the one who is in the car with the customer and therefore you have the best awareness of what is safe and reasonable. Therefore, you should teach in whatever manner you think is safest. A bias towards caution is always the best choice.
High Horsepower Preparation LessonsSome instructors are not comfortable offering Level 3 lessons because they don't have or have never owned a high-horsepower vehicle - they have no experience driving one. They feel it would be not safe or fair to the customers. If you have such concerns about teaching Level 3, it’s pretty likely that you have a misunderstanding about the Level 3 offering. Every instructor should be able to teach every level in any car. Level 3 is all about low-speed maneuvers like parallel parking, getting in and out of parking spaces, hill starts, and so on. What if an instructor doesn't want to teach level 3?If you read the Level 3 FAQs and you still don’t want to teach Level 3, we can remove you from our list of active instructors. We don't support instructors NOT teaching level 3.
One of the most common points of confusion that new instructors have is around getting paid. Below is some useful information to help you get paid quickly and to know what you can expect.
How to Get PaidTo make sure you get paid in a timely fashion, you'll need to text us after you complete your lesson with your customer. If you split up the lesson into multiple days, you'll need to notify us after you complete the last lesson. Please note that partially completed lessons will not be paid out. You must provide the customer with all of the time that they purchased to be eligible for payout. When you text us, please include the first and last name of the customer who you taught and the date on which you completed the lesson. For example, you might write "I finished the lesson with Inigo Montoya on 2/28." Once you do that, we'll follow up with the customer to confirm that the lesson was completed. Once we hear back from the customer confirming that the lesson (or the last one, if broken up) was completed, we can release the payment to you.
Contract DetailsIf you would like to see where this information is located in your contract, please check your email for a copy of your contract. It will have been emailed from either Zoho or Docusign (we use two providers). If you cannot find your contract in your email, please contact us at Instructors@stickshiftdrivingacademy.com and we can forward your signed contract to you. Please do not text us asking for this, as the team on the texting line will not be able to help you.
Income RateThere are three levels that we currently offer to customers and each has a different income rate. Level 1 is a 2 hour lesson and you will earn $100 total. For Level 2, which is a 3 hour lesson, you will earn $125. For Level 3, the 4-hour lesson, the payout is $150. This information was presented on page 2 of the contract. As of 6/26/2020, all contract signings included initialling next to the compensation rate schedule. When you signed the contract, you were required to put your initials on page 2 next to the section where we specify the compensation. Below, we've posted a screenshot example.
Payment Timeline We process payments via direct deposit once per week on Wednesdays for lessons that were completed between Monday of the previous week and the most recent Sunday. To help illustrate this, let's use the calendar below to explain via an example. If today is Wednesday the 18th, we will process payments for lessons that were completed between Monday the 9th and Sunday the 15th. This means that lessons completed on the 16th and 17th will be processed on Wednesday the 25th. Typically, your bank will process the payment to your account within 2 - 3 days, meaning you will likely see the money in your account on Friday or the following Monday.
The two common questions that come up is why do we not process the Monday and Tuesday payments on Wednesday and why do we only do this once per week. For the Monday and Tuesday lessons, we need time to check in with the customer to verify that the lesson happened, that they are satisfied with the lesson, and to make sure there will be no refunds, chargebacks, or other adverse issues with the payment. As to why we do this once per week, we have to manually process each payment and doing so can be cumbersome and time intensive, especially if there have been scheduling issues, reschedulings, cancellations, and so on. Similar to how you might pay all of your bills or balance your checkbook on a periodic basis, doing all of our AP once per week helps us to make sure we get it all right. It would cost a significant amount of money to develop an automated payment processing system, which we can only afford to do once we get to a large scale. For now, we'd rather focus our spend on helping you to get more customers (aka marketing) rather than speeding up payment processing. Better to have the slightly slow dollar than the quick quarter.
During your first 5 lessons, you'll be on a probationary period. During the probationary period, we'll be paying close attention to how well you adhere to our policies and procedures. Generally speaking, we like to give instructors the benefit of the doubt. If we find you're not complying with our policies and procedures, we'll assume it was a misunderstanding and we'll let you know what to do differently. That said, there are certain behaviors that result in automatic dismissal or other punitive actions. Failure to communicate with SSDA and your customer within 24 hours of a customer bookingIt is vital that you quickly communicate with customers and with us after the customer books a lesson. During your probationary period, if we and your customer do not hear from you within 24 hours of the customer booking a lesson, we will automatically reassign the customer to another instructor, pause your calendar of availability, and offboard you. You will not be eligible to teach any future lessons. Note that once you have taught more than 5 lessons, you will be out the probationary period. If you're past your probationary period and you fail to confirm a lesson with SSDA and with your customer, we will pause your calendar and ask you to re-do this onboarding quiz. Failure to show up for a lessonIf you do not show to one of your first 5 lessons, we will automatically reassign the customer to another instructor, pause your calendar of availability, and offboard you. You will not be eligible to teach any future lessons. If, after your first 5 lessons, you fail to show up to a lesson without providing adequate notice to the customer, we will immediately pause your calendar and conduct an investigation. Depending on the circumstances, this investigation may result in permanent removal. Rescheduling Lessons with CustomersIf you cannot teach the originally-scheduled time and date but you reach out to the customer to reschedule and the customer agrees, no penalty will be applied. The same is true if you're running late for a lesson. While we might be strict, we also understand that sometimes you may need some flexibility. As long as the customer is ok with rescheduling or waiting for your late arrival and you give them enough notice, no penalty will be applied.