Whether you have a business, are in a business or you’re looking at a project on the side to make a few extra dollars, you’re going to be on the lookout for ways to improve your business as a whole.

Teaching is not a ‘sexy’ subject, but in this article I’m going to share 4 ways that training can benefit your business

Staff Development – Asset development

Knowledge may be ‘your’ most valuable asset, but within an organization of any sort the staff are the biggest asset by any measure. Regardless of the product, service or consultancy that any company provides or how good the deliverable is, the staff are the ones that make it happen.

Especially when the deliverable has complexity or flexibility associated with it, the last thing any client ever wants to hear from a staff member are the words ‘I don’t know.‘

Ongoing training and support of staff can be expensive but having staff not only at the standard required but setting higher standards is where better client experience comes in. And when the client experience is improved everything else follows on.

Preventative Training – Business Investment

After a decade in Industry I can say this – support is tedious and repetitive. In general the more powerful a product or deliverable is, there will usually be a degree of complexity and flexibility associated with it. What does this mean?

Unlike the iPhone or the Galaxy smartphone which have extremely intuitive interfaces that have been crafted through years of revisions, many ‘powerful’ products out there aren’t that easy to use.

Particularly in Industry now venturing into IoT / Industry 4.0 the most powerful tools require extensive setup and configuration simply to make them functional.

Turnkey solutions are great for dedicated applications, while dynamic applications require a product that acts as a framework for further development. But this power comes at a cost.

The client is expected to have a fundamental knowledge of what is being offered and if they don’t they call for support. Supporting each client is a lengthy process that requires headcount and time.

The expected prerequisite knowledge also makes a powerful product harder to promote to potential clients who aren’t at the desired user level.

This is where a training course for new clients can make a major difference. By Educating the client prior to the purchase the client can validate the product prior to making the financial commitment to the product. Secondly, the education provided earlier in the customer life-cycle can reduce after sales support later allowing the business to focus on other things.

Added revenue streams

Any business model involves some form of transaction. One where there is exchange in value for a cost. The ‘Value’ can be in the form of a product (hard or soft), a service or a subscription.

Education in the form of knowledge or a skill can also be one of these items. You don’t need to look very far to find people who have tapped into this. Dan Lok, T. Hark Eker, are just two names in an exhaustive list of people who make use of education as a major component of their business models.

Note: Education as part of a business model is not harmful to the business.

Why? Because not every single client that a business ever gains wants to go as far as learning the in’s and out’s of a skill. Simple! The vast majority of clientèle will normally want someone to do the job for them. They will still want a service.

However there are the dedicated few who not only see the value in an education but they’re also willing to pay top dollar for the education on the grounds they understand that education is an investment, and they will get their return through repeated application of the knowledge.

Improving the quality of your client

At the end of the day eduction is something that always has a benefit. But no where is this more apparent then when an educated client is talking the same language as the company that trained them.

When the client and the supporting company are speaking in the same language, using the same terms and references, the conversations are able to progress faster, go deeper, and most importantly prevent misinterpretation of information, and this is something that benefits everyone.

Got a comment? Thinking about teaching for your side hustle? I’d love to read your feedback, so leave a comment below.

#business #businessdevelopment #training #trainthetrainer #entrepreneur #sidehustle #userexperience #education #freelancing