by Colin MY COMPUTER TUTOR
Each September I always feel as though I'm making a new start - a left-over from school-teaching days - and as the end of my 3rd business year approaches I'm very much in "review" and facts-and-figures mode.
I've met a few people recently who, for one reason or another, asked me what I do for a living. And when I say "I teach people how to use their home computers" I often get this response:
You must be very good with old ladies...
...often followed by a chuckle. I go on to say that I do have quite a lot of men clients too.
But I hadn't calculated what the proportion of men to women has been so far, so this weekend I totted it all up. I keep records of my clients and all the sessions they've had on an Access database. I'm quite proud of this, as I've managed to cross-reference it and can make structured queries on it.
So I got Access to count all the clients whose title was "Mr", and out of the 186 clients I've had to date 69 of them are male. That's 37%.
This isn't necessarily a good picture of the split, so I then asked how many of the lessons I'd given had been to male clients. This called for some serious revision of my SQL, which I hadn't used for 4 years! But I got the answer - 337 out of 972 sessions to date, which is 35%
So 37% of my clients are male and they had 35% of the sessions.
I'm not quite sure what to do with that information, other than produce it when someone assumes that I spend my time teaching old ladies! Age is something that I don't record, although clients often tell me anyway. Many times I've had phonecalls that start "I'm umpty-seven you know, am I too old?" But I'd say that the average age of my male clients is lower than the average age of the females.
More fascinating figures will follow - I'm quite prepared to publish my turnover, for example. Why not? I'm proud of this business!
How's yours?
Colin
