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5 Strategies to Explode Your Training Business

If you are an independent professional trainer with an established clientele, you are in grave danger. The danger is called complacency. Now, that word might have a connotation of “laziness”, but that’s not what I’m talking about. You probably work harder than most of your friends and relatives. And  you get to send all the invoices, sweet!

But the thing is you could achieve even more if you left your local optimum. You see, you are standing on top of a hill. It provides a nice view of the scenery, but as long as you stay there, you will never reach that mountain peak that is on the horizon. To reach that mountain and scale it, keep reading. In this post I’ll share 5 strategies on how to explode your training business.

However, before we take a look at the 5 strategies, you need to recognize when you are at a local optimum. This may be sooner than you think, because nobody is able to deliver training 40 hours a week. You have to allocate time to acquiring new customers, doing the paperwork and actually preparing each new training.

Let’s put it in straightforward terms. If your income has plateaued in the past few years you are now standing on that hill, looking out longingly to the mountain in the distance. If you could not possibly do more without getting overworked and stressed out, you have reached a local optimum. This is actually quite an achievement. Many people quit and become employees long before that time.

But before we congratulate ourselves too much, let’s see how we can move on. Without much further ado, here are the 5 strategies.

1. Productize Your Training

Wait? What? Is that even a word, productize? Yep, and it means: turn (a part of) your training into a product. Some ideas, starting with a few low gain options, ending with real money makers:

• Create mouse pads, mugs and leaflets which reinforce the core concepts of your training. You’re probably not going to able to actually sell these items, but they will be distributed among employees and continue to refer customers to you long after the training.
• Write a white paper on your topics of expertise. Again, this will not directly make you any money, but it will establish you as an authority, making your marketing efforts easier.
• Write an actual book. This may be the first product that will make you money independently, but it does take a significant amount of time to author a book. Odds are that you’ll just barely break even on this.
• Sell training materials: in addition to the book, you create work sheets and training exercise materials. This is where the real money is. Other trainers will use your stuff to deliver their own training.

2. Delegate Or Outsource

To grow your business, you need to free up time. Delegate or outsource boring, repetitive, time consuming tasks. Not just bookkeeping, but also tasks like finding videos or images for your training sessions, putting together powerpoint slides or other training materials, and creating proposals.

Depending on your level of ambition, you can use the liberated time to deliver another training, which creates additional revenue. But really growing your business demands that you spend your time on creating products and selling these.

Now, delegating and outsourcing is a skill you need to learn. At first, if something goes wrong, you want to be able to finish the task yourself quickly. So, start with small, non-essential tasks. Maybe you need to find a video on Youtube to illustrate a training concept. That would be a perfect task for a virtual assistant (VA).

A virtual assistant is a professional assistant you interact with through the internet or the phone. They typically provide assistance in the field of administrative tasks or online research (such as finding a list of candidates for your Youtube video).

You can find virtual assistants anywhere, but some sites have specialized in offering virtual assistants. Here’s a short list:

• ask sunday
• Brickwork India
• YourManInIndia
• TasksEveryDay

If you decide to ‘hire’ a VA, insist on an assistant whose English is excellent. Be prompt to ask for another assistant if you feel they are not being helpful. When assigning tasks, be very specific and provide examples of the results you’re looking for.

3. Hire Trainers

Hire starting trainers to execute less demanding training sessions. You are the expert, so you probably cannot hand over all of your training to another. But a significant chunk of the training might be about introductory level stuff that could easily be done by a new trainer.

So, see if you can split up a longer training into multiple sessions. On day one your hired trainer starts with the introductory level session. The other session you deliver yourself. If you training typically consists of three days, you have just saved one third of your time spent on delivering the actual training.

You can ease your way into hiring by starting out with freelance trainers. Tap into your network or use sites like linkedin.com (there a number of groups for trainers, some of them have job listings), elance.com and odesk.com to find freelance trainers.

Once you’re comfortable with having other trainers delivering part of your offering, I would recommend taking a look at payroll companies. A payroll firm deals with the administrative tasks normally associated with hiring somebody. In many countries, it’s also possible to have the payroll firm hire the trainer, legally speaking. The payroll firm will sent you an monthly invoice, which includes a small surplus charge of course.

So, the payroll firm is the legal employer while you’re the actual ‘boss’. This saves you a good deal of time otherwise spent on, well, doing the payroll. Be sure to find a really trustworthy payroll firm though. If they file for bankruptcy, in most countries you will be charged with the taxes the payroll firm normally would have paid, even though you have already paid them through the monthly invoices. In other words, check out the payroll firm and avoid paying your taxes twice.

4. Put Your Training Online

Create a stand alone online version of your training. Using software, such as a Learning Management System (LMS) you create an online version of your regular training.

Of course, an actual face-to-face training session can never be replaced by online training, but you can probably think of some parts of your training which could be delivered asynchronously (trainees are in different places, taking the training at different times).

You can go about this in various ways:

• Create so-called scorm packages containing a single mini-training
• Conduct the pre-training assessments online
• Deliver the entire experience online: from assessments and the actual training to follow-up tests

You can also look at online training as a special case of productization. I’ve talked about both topics in separate posts as well, see productization and online training, so let’s skip to the next strategy.

5. Start a Franchise Or an Affiliate Program

Are you very successful with training methods you have developed and fine tuned yourself over the course of many years? Then think about starting a franchise training business or an affiliate program.

This strategy is the logical next step if you are already selling your own training materials to other trainers (as discussed under 1. Productize Your Training). In addition to using your materials, a franchisee also conducts business under your company’s name. Usually, they are only allowed to do this once they have followed some sort of certification training – for which they will have to pay a fee.

To keep things simple initially, you could also start with an affiliate program. In this case, other trainers resell your training – or training materials such as assessments – to their own customers.

Providing an affiliate program can be really successful if you are specialized in a one or at most a few closely related topics. Your name will provide credibility to all trainers working with your materials and training programs. Establishing credibility is worth a lot, especially for starters, so you should be able to sell your affiliate program with relative ease.

If trainers are actually using your business name, as they would under a franchise arrangement, you have to be pickier. You don’t want just anybody to use your name. Here’s what you absolutely need to have in place:

• An overall “this is how we do it here” guide, describing your values and goals.
• Manuals for each specific training.
• As mentioned before, you should have a certification program in place: a “train the trainer” program.

Make sure that everything and everybody is kept up to date. Each expired certificate should be a signal for a franchisee to return to HQ and do a refresher.

A final word of advice: develop an entrepreneurial mind set. Try to seek out new opportunities for your growing your training business. Good luck with scaling that mountain!