Recently updated on August 30th, 2024
There’s no better way to learn how to grow a training business than by gaining insights from industry experts who have successfully done it themselves.
One such expert is Scott D’Amico, President of Communispond, a leading communication skills training company. Since its foundation in 1969, the company has helped over 1,000,000 client associates—including CEOs, board chairs, sales leaders, and a wide range of business executives—build confidence and achieve business goals by communicating with clarity and power.
Scott recently participated in a live webinar with our North America Regional Manager, Andre Brice, where he shared actionable steps and strategies for scaling your training business while maintaining training quality.
In the webinar, Scott covered how you can:
- Drive behavioral change with sound instructional design.
- Maintain consistency at scale.
- Reduce administration within your training business so you can focus on delivering best-in-class training.
- Plus, live Q&A.
Watch the webinar, below and read on for an in-depth look at what Scott covered:
4 steps to growing your training business
1 – Create training that drives behavioral change
For your training business to grow, the training you offer needs to drive behavioral change for your participants. In practical terms, this means that the goal of your training should be to encourage participants to think, act, and behave differently. This applies whether the training involves soft skills like presenting or public speaking or more technical subjects.
Scott has found that effective behavioral change doesn’t occur solely during the finite time a student is in the classroom, whether in person or virtual. It requires attention from the pre-work phase—meaning the preparatory activities and tasks that occur before the main instructional period—through to the post-course phase, which involves providing materials that help reinforce the learning.
Here’s how the process works:
Make sure your learners have the resources they need before a course begins
“From a pre-work perspective, participants need to be set up for success before they even arrive in the classroom,” Scott explains. “This means informing them about necessary preparations, such as technology requirements for virtual classes, whether they need to bring a recording device for in-person sessions, or if they need to prepare a presentation for practical courses like public speaking.”
The pre-work required varies depending on the type of course you are running. For example, within Communispond the pre-work for a writing skills training course will be different from that of a public speaking skills course.
Pre-work may include an assessment or tasks assigned to students before the course begins. This could involve preparing an idea for a presentation topic, formulating a speech idea, or providing an overview of the technology they need to bring.
Get an understanding of each learners baseline
The second stage focuses on creating a process to assess your learners’ current skills in relation to what they will be learning or improving through your training.
For example, in a public speaking course, it’s important to understand whether a student considers themselves a good speaker and if they recognize areas where they need improvement. Each student will have their own perspective on their current abilities and their desired areas of growth.
Whether it’s delivering a presentation or working with Excel formulas, providing opportunities for students to evaluate their own skills helps them see where they stand, and gives them clarity around their learning goals and what they can achieve.
Make sure your training follows the Learn, Practice, Apply methodology
The third component to drive behavioral change is to make sure that your training is practical, not just theoretical. If training remains purely theoretical, students are likely to forget what they’ve learned or assume they can easily find the information online or through tools like ChatGPT.
An effective way to make sure your training doesn’t fall into this trap is to make sure your training programs are designed to follow the learn, practice, apply methodology, which, as the name suggests, is all about helping learners practice the new skills they are learning, and giving them opportunities to apply them in real-world, relevant situations.
To put the methodology into practice, Scott recommends trying to give your learners something practical they can bring to each training program to work on. For example, in the pre-work assignment for Communispond’s executive presentation skills training program, students are asked to bring an example of a presentation they frequently deliver, an upcoming meeting they’re preparing for, or an important email they need to send.
Within each session, the instructor applies in-the-moment coaching, which involves providing feedback and guidance during the actual execution of a skill or task, rather than after the fact.
Scott shares an example of this from his experience teaching presentation skills classes:
“If somebody is getting ready to present, and they have their hands in their pockets, or they’re shifting or mumbling, the instructor can stop them, remind them of what they’ve learned and have them pick it up and re-do it, to see if they can apply the skills they’ve learnt”.
Have post-training processes in place to help with learning reinforcement
According to pioneering psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus, whose research in 1885 introduced a theory known as the ‘forgetting curve’, learners can forget 70% to 75% of what they learned in class within 24 hours if there is no reinforcement, or opportunities to apply what they’ve been taught.
To stop this from happening, Scott recommends having a learning reinforcement process in place that gives your learners access to resources that they can access when they need to to remind themselves of key concepts.
For participants taking in Communispond’s public speaking course, participants receive practice slides, some tip cards, and a series of short videos that give participants a refresher around certain elements of the training. So, if a participant has a presentation coming up and is thinking ‘what was that certain skill I was taught’, they can go and watch a short video on the topic for a refresher.
2. Have a vision to help guide decision making around training
As your training business grows, it’s important to have a guiding principle or set of principles that you can rely on to guide your decision-making process. Scott recommends having a mission or vision statement that acts as a North Star, helping you make key decisions, from creating course content to taking on new clients, to guiding your marketing strategy.
Communispond’s vision/mission statement is to help the world communicate better, which focuses their decision-making process. For example, if Communispond has a training program designed for 10 people and intended to take 8 hours to deliver, but a client wants to present the same training to 40 people in 5 hours, they know that this client may not be the right fit.
Accepting such a request could dilute the quality of the training they’re able to deliver and undermine their company’s vision of helping the world communicate better.
3. Maintaining training consistency as a training company scales
Offer courses in different formats and durations
When your training business is growing it is natural for your training courses to change. Part of this change will involve implementing customer feedback to improve your course content or its delivery method, and it’s something Communispond have been able to do effectively.
When the business was founded their flagship presentation skills course was six weeks long, the idea of a business professional spending six weeks on a soft skills training program today is unheard of. As the world of work has changed, Communispond has adapted their training accordingly; today their presentation skills courses span two days.
They’ve also broken the presentation into smaller portions to accommodate different customer needs. For example, they offer one-day sessions, focusing on a core set of skills that are a part of the wider presentation skills course.
Based on customer feedback Communispond have also adapted their training delivery methods as they’ve grown. They’ll deliver programs in-person for clients who want to upskill employees in-person, particularly if they work in an office environment full time. They’ll also offer programs in a blended format, or virtually to accommodate hybrid and remote participants, so each client has options to select the delivery format that best suits their learner needs.
The key lesson to takeaway from this is to listen closely to the feedback your customers are providing you and take opportunities to adapt your training to fulfill their needs.
Related article: Instructor-led training design: How to plan engaging sessions
Offer a variety of registration options
Another way your training programs can change over time is the registration options you offer, particularly around the number of participants.
For example, when Communispond works with small companies that may only have a small number of employees they want to put through a training program they offer options for individuals to sign up, rather than the client needing to sign up a minimum number of participants to be able to take part in the course.
Offering individual registration options can also help bring in new business, particularly if a company is looking to roll out training to more participants but want to see how effective it is first.
“Allowing individual sign-ups lets potential buyers test our training. They might send one or two people to attend a course, and if they have a good experience, it becomes much easier for the client to roll out the training to a larger group of employees, knowing they are making a positive investment,” explains Scott.
Another benefit of maintaining training quality above all else is that once a company begins to see benefits then they don’t want to have training running through different providers, and they want to maintain the consistency of training quality, so to do this they’ll want to do this through one provider.
Of course, you don’t have to limit your training to individual registrations; you can also offer group sign-up options for larger clients, to accommodate a range of needs and expand your reach.
Improve training consistency with certified trainers
A challenge you may face as you scale is ensuring that the quality of instruction remains the same across all the courses you offer, particularly if you begin to offer them in different locations.
One way to help ensure training consistency is to enroll your trainers in a certified program to upskill them, and this is exactly what Communispond does.
The company runs training certification programs for their facilitators, so they can hire a facilitator and put them through their certification program to ensure they are qualified to deliver training at the required standard.
This has been particularly beneficial as the company scaled to offer training across different states and internationally. If a client takes one of Communispond’s programs in January, run by one instructor in one location, and then returns in August to take a program with another instructor to train an individual or team in another location, they can be confident that they are receiving high-quality training each time.
Communispond’s instructor certification process has multiple steps:
Step One – Attend: The trainer must first attend the course they wish to be certified in. For instance, to become certified as an instructor for a presentation skills course, the trainer needs to participate in that course as the initial step.
Step Two – Agree: Next, the trainer must agree to certain legal requirements set by Communispond, such as non-compete agreements, which are necessary to proceed with the program.
Step Three – Prepare: After completing the course and finalizing the required paperwork, the trainer will receive an instructor kit. This kit includes all the necessary materials, such as slides, student workbooks, and faculty notes, to prepare for delivering the course.
Step Four – Practice: The trainer will then spend several days with Communispond’s head trainer to practice. This phase focuses on mastering the timing of the content, honing coaching skills, and managing classroom dynamics. The trainer is required to teach the course multiple times and is evaluated based on a rubric assessed by the head trainer.
Once these steps are completed and the trainer achieves a satisfactory score on their evaluation, they receive certification.
4. Have a tech stack that facilitates growth
When Scott transitioned from his role as head of sales and marketing to President of Communispond, his responsibilities expanded to include the operational and logistical aspects of training delivery.
In this new role, Scott reached out to Arlo to explore how our training management software could automate logistical tasks and reduce manual processes. And how the platform could help Communispond with a more secure payment process, a professional, polished looking website, better reporting, and streamlined processes for communication.
The key Arlo features that have helped Communispond are:
Website integration
Arlo’s pre-built course page templates make it easy to create and publish new courses to the website straight from the Arlo platform, without shifting information between multiple systems.
Communispond’s courses can be filtered by location and in-person or live online on the course catalog page, and sessions can be viewed by timezone. The individual course pages include information such as location, which Scott says helped with their SEO. All of the colors and fonts match their existing brand, and the website looks modern.
Online registration is easy and secure and the Stripe integration has made accepting payments and processing refunds hassle free.
Automated communications
In the past, all course confirmation emails were manually sent by staff at Communispond. And those emails could be delayed by a day or more due to time zone differences.
With Arlo’s automated email communications it’s easy – use a templated confirmation message, select a venue, and attach any pre-work documents to the emails. Once the learner has registered and paid for their course online they receive immediate email confirmation of their enrollment.
Communispond also utilizes Arlo’s waitlist feature, as they have minimum course number requirements, and they’ve been able to tailor their communications to let recipients know when the course has been confirmed.
“Arlo gave our customers a much better experience. They are now getting immediate notification when they enroll on a course, and notification when the course has been confirmed” says Scott.
Reporting on training and course success
Arlo’s business intelligence and reporting features have provided performance visibility and insights to everyone across the company.
Arlo allows you to schedule reports to be automatically sent on a regular basis to any email addresses, saving you time and ensuring the right people have the information they need. You can also choose whether you would like to send your scheduled reports securely.
For Scott, he has a report scheduled to land in his inbox every morning. For everyone else, a weekly report is sent that shows a breakdown of course performance including how many people registered for each class, popular regions, what discount codes were used and when, and more.
Scott says Arlo’s live reporting dashboard has also been beneficial for sales people in each region to jump into the Arlo platform and get a real-time look at their upcoming classes and the number of enrolments.
When asked how he would describe Arlo, Scott says “in a nutshell Arlo helps us sell and deliver our public courses, without having to worry about it 24/7”.