Rerouting Your Training Business
© Richard Bolstad
The Crisis and Our Training GPS:
There’s a world wide crisis in training. If you’re an independent trainer you know all about it. People are still interested in your trainings but they don’t commit, or they commit and then pull out. They say they just haven’t got the money to do it right now. Or they say the time “isn’t right”. They have other commitments. You get a sense that they are generally stressed. But so are you! You know you need to do something different, but what?
A lot of our brain’s energy is focused around the memory recording system of the Hippocampus, which is like a neural GPS, keeping track of our journeys both physically and metaphorically. So using the GPS in your phone or in your car, for example the Google maps system, as a metaphor makes neuroscience sense. And when there is an economic crisis, such as the current global hyperinflation following the worldwide pandemic of the early 2020s, you are quite likely to find that just driving as you were is not going to deliver you to your desired destinations any more.
Rerouting is what your GPS does when it realizes that you have driven up a road that it did not intend you to drive up, and it needs to rethink how to get you from where you are now to where you wanted to be. There’s a moment of pause and it tells you something like: “Rerouting”. That’s what this essay is designed to be. A rerouting pause. The current crisis is a global economic crisis, but it has some unique features that hide it from view. The economy as a whole may still be running, but it may increasingly favour larger organisations that focus on life necessities, rather than small and one person businesses that provide choices people will shelve when their money doesn’t go as far as it used to. The crisis is also much greater in some countries than others, so overall it represents a massive redistribution of wealth rather than an even reduction in profits. The New Zealand’ Treasury’s finance minister, for example, claimed in September 2023 that employment is high and “The economy is turning a corner and outlook is positive.” and yet notes paradoxically “These are challenging times for many Kiwis.” (Robertson, 2023)
1. Focus on your destination, not your speed:
One of the things that an economic crisis does is focus our attention on urgent needs for income. “Why isn’t this training running?” “What can I do to earn enough money?” “How can I attract more students?”. We rush around trying to create more courses, trying to reduce prices, trying to advertise more persuasively. Even when we notice our “firefighting” mode, we try to think positively by focusing on where we have earned money or where we might earn money. The more we do this, the more we tell our brain “We are only in this for the money.” And sadly, just earning enough money to survive isn’t inspiring. The passion that really motivates us comes from remembering our mission, thinking about those moments when someone tells us that our training changed their life or touched their heart. What is the point of working out how to make enough money, if it pulls us away from these precious dreams that made us want to come into the business. When we have a clear representation of this higher outcome (visual, auditory, kinesthetic and other representations of the experiences we hope to deliver to people) then our anxiety reduces, our energy level rises and we can also think more clearly about what we want. This happens even easier after a good night’s sleep, rather than by trying to solve our economic problems at 3.00am. Get some sleep, have a good breakfast, and take time to identify your purpose in training, and the kind of experiences that make it feel worthwhile. Once you have this, even the most challenging economic conditions can feel more like a heroic journey to your desired life goals, rather than a winding trip into disaster.
2. Check the numbers, and your ETA:
When we are using our GPS in a car, we don’t usually need to check the expected arrival time, but when rerouting happens, this becomes important, because those numbers will affect what we do next. We need to know if we are going to be late and by how much. We may need to take action to apologize for our lateness and reschedule things. It’s the same with rerouting our business. However another thing that happens when we stop earning the money we expected, is that we start to get anxious about checking just how bad it is. This, again, is a result of ineffective state management. Starting from a place of being rested and fed, from a place of knowing your destination, you are better equipped to face the reality of the numbers. Actually, avoiding them doesn’t make you feel better, it just prolongs real decisions and creates a “worst case scenario” in your unconscious imagination. That worst case is firing the alert in your brain’s amygdala emergency system, and pretending it isn’t is like trying to sleep with the morning alarm ringing. You need to know how much money you have coming in for sure, how much you might have coming in, how much you are going to be spending on inevitable backup things that you don’t usually even notice (like insurance, payments for your various online presences, accounting costs, staff payments, tax), how much debt you have right now, and how much liquidity you have (how much money can you safely borrow before your private life is at risk). Do the numbers. That will enable you to make the realistic decisions that serve you best, less-than-ideal as they may sometimes be.
3. Choose the best routes for the real world conditions:
Anyone who has used their GPS in unfamiliar territory knows that sometimes the fastest way on the GPS is NOT the fastest way in real life. When I’m driving in Cyprus, a country that I’m less familiar with than my home country New Zealand, the GPS sometimes shows me a route that turns out to be through a winding mountain road, or through narrow one way city roads that are harder to identify at each corner. Technically faster than the longer main roads, these routes are actually both slower and more stressful. The usual algorithm for choosing the best path doesn’t work in those contexts, except for locals who know every turn and feel confident managing the traffic and road conditions. In the training business, the real world conditions are the real needs that our customers have in this recession. For people who are employed, the recession means their money doesn’t buy what it used to, and they live in fear of losing even that income. They still want to learn things, and in fact they are well aware that learning things might give them a safety edge in this new and more dangerous world. As they look for trainings, they look for
- Value for money. They are more than usually searching for free materials, package deals and things they can pay a little at a time for, because they don’t want to spend their final savings and they can’t manage more credit card debt.
- Focus on essentials. They are trying to work out what is essential and what they can let go of or do later. Explain your trainings as providing essential skills for giving them an edge in their business environment, and essential skills for crisis management and anxiety reduction. Nothing else they do will be useful if they can’t get themselves into a good state of mind and plan (they need to do what I reminded you to do above).
- DIY (Do it yourself). They are looking for ways to cut costs by self-education and learning that can be done when they have brief periods of time away from the essentials. Taking time off work to attend a training is always a massive section of the real cost of a training for them, and now it features even more so. Create ways they can access training without losing income, by self-paced learning and by peer study programs, as well as by training outside of normal work hours. Of course this also means that training can be presented as a “do it yourself” upskilling. A training that teaches people to get fit at home rather than spend money on a gym membership, or to cook economical and fast meals rather than spend on restaurants, is a winner. Look for opportunities to run do-it-yourself trainings to enable small businesses to let go of costly “professional” services. As an example, having previously spent tens of thousands of dollars to pay website developers, during the pandemic I created this site you are reading on, by myself. It may not be the most glamorous internet site, but it sure beats what I spent so much money on before. To do this, though, I needed to train myself in the use of WordPress.
4. Take time to plan the route carefully:
You can’t plan your route carefully while driving at full speed, so the safest thing is to pull over to the side of the road and think this through. That includes getting help from a mentor who has been through this kind of thing before, or a coach who knows how to help keep you focused on changing the things you can change and accepting the things you can’t change. Take time every day to do something that is not just responding to the emergency, but is actually proactively building business possibilities for the future. Successful managers do not spend most of their time handling crises. It is nice to put aside a set amount of time every day to plan new responses. How can you deliver products faster, more cost effectively, utilizing the latest technology or indeed helping other people utilize that technology? Spend time checking this out. You have expertise in re-organizing information so that it makes sense and can be used. People need that expertise. They don’t think of it as training: your job is to show them that it is in fact training, and you know how to do that.
5. Utilize the weather conditions:
If it rains when you are driving, some roads become less passable and some are still easy. Find ways to use the conditions. The economic crisis affects people differentially, remember. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Identify which countries this means you can market which trainings to, and which sections of your own community you can best focus on. Link in with organizations that are getting richer due to the centralization of the economy and show them how they can use your services to manage the very challenges they face as a result of growth, especially by providing the human skills they need more to deal with more people, and more stressed people. Create training hybrid models that make it clear that training is not just fact-collecting but provides an emotion managing function in itself. Our trainings are sometimes presented as holidays, as time to reflect and calm down, as time to remember what is really important. Don’t assume that anxious people are looking for more facts. That may just be feeding their anxiety. All this means utilizing the features of the economic downturn. Look at what happened during the pandemic, for example. Sure the pandemic was a disaster for some businesses. Lyft, for example, provides vehicle hire and taxi services. Suddenly, no-one was travelling, no-one was wanting their lifts. They shifted to ferrying medical supplies and creating meal delivery services: remember what a boom in courier services there was. In any crisis, there are new roles just coping with the specifics of the crisis, and places where people are desperately trying to find a solution that you could offer. You know how to train. You want to train people to manage things that benefit them. Find out what trainings they wish they could run – they don’t even think of it as training, they think of it as a gap between what people do and what they wish people could do, and you have the skills to help them bridge that gap. Tito’s Vodka makes a handcrafted alcoholic drink. Based in Texas, but with production in places like New Zealand, they faced a challenge in the pandemic because bars were closed and music events where people would drink were no longer happening. They produced alcohol, so they shifted production to produce hand sanitizer for the pandemic market. That’s utilization.
6. Remember, this too will pass:
Especially in the self-development business, our tendency is to encourage thinking of each person as being responsible for their own results. When the economy goes through a major downturn, this (usually beneficial) thinking style becomes counterproductive. You are responsible for how you respond to the world, but you are not the cause of the economic downturn, any more than you would have caused a war or a military dictatorship or an earthquake. Once you are clear about this, you can accept that sometimes bad things happen to nice people, and plan how to survive the storm, rather than trying to “positive-think” blue skies. Many such crises have their own momentum, and will pass in time. Take a longer term perspective and ask yourself what you would rather be doing during this time when forward movement is impossible. Perhaps this is like being stuck in a traffic jam on the freeway. Do you have an audiobook you can listen to while you wait for things to get moving again? They will get moving, and anguishing about how bad it is going to be will not actually help you to detect and respond to the first signs of the future. Thinking about this as a temporary event in a much longer story can be important.
It is useful to understand that the effect of an economic crisis on training is delayed by approximately two years. The 2008 “Great Recession” affected core business results immediately, but training really declined over 2010-2011 (as I can verify anecdotally in New Zealand). Here is a larger scale study from Germany showing the decline in number of training events per year in businesses affected by crisis and those less affected (Dietz and Zwick, 2019). While most businesses were immediately affected by the pandemic in 2020-2022, training effects become most apparent by 2022-2024, and initially training simply adapted by going online. This is part of how the drop in training may “surprise” training providers who thought they had safely weathered a recession. [Below. Graph 1. Green line = Non-crisis-affected establishments (N=3.894). Red line = Crisis-affected Establishments (N=2,089). The recession officially ended in mid-2009, but trainings dropped by 50% over the next year, for crisis establishments.]
Those areas of the world where the recession was more effectively managed tended to benefit from active government intervention to support training. “Training for employed workers in the private sector was in most cases offered only where some funding was available through public training support schemes. For example, in Denmark, 39 per cent of enterprises increased training activities as part of their strategy for tackling the crisis (Eurofound, 2011), supported in part by a wage subsidy provided to employers through the Danish Adult Education and Continuing Training System. Governments tended to support training activities connected with explicit public policies in selected sectors and to encourage development of transferable skills. A review carried out by Eurofound revealed that in most EU countries public subsidies were the largest form of support for training employed workers.” (ILO, 2014)
Where next?
OK. That all made sense, and you even got a sense of hope, but there’s a part of you that still runs that old anxious track, and its distracting you from really doing this. What can you do? How can you make sure that you use this information to the max, to really get the most out of it and really apply it? Because by yourself, it’s so easy to get sidetracked into worrying, into firefighting, into avoiding change. You know what I’m going to suggest right? I’m going to suggest you let me be your mentor, your coach, your trainer, and attend a one-day workshop where we focus on all this. Sure, you could do it by yourself, but why not let me take the responsibility for keeping you focused, keeping you on track emotionally? Isn’t that spending even more money? Well, yes it is spending money, because I’m not going to undersell myself. That would be bad modelling. I’m going to deliver exactly what I promise, what you read about here and a little bit more. And you’re going to have the online videos of my training to study after the event. So I genuinely believe that this one day is going to pay off. If you really can’t afford that, I promise you that the 6 step process I’ve taken you through here will be useful IF you actually alot some time each day to do it. So yes, you can go it alone, and yes I really did write this article as a free gift…. And the contact for the training is below.
References:
- Dietz, D. and Zwick, T. 2019, “Training in the Great Recession – Evidence from an Individual Perspective” De Gruyter Oldenbourg: Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik https://doi.org/10.1515/jbnst-2018-0072
- Etherington, D., 2020, “Lyft to offer medical supply and meal delivery during coronavirus pandemic” https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/22/lyft-to-offer-medical-supply-and-meal-delivery-during-coronavirus-pandemic
- ILO, 2014 “Lessons from the implementation of training and retraining programmes in response to the Great Recession” International Labour Organisation, United Nations, Geneva https://apskills.ilo.org/resources/lessons-from-the-implementation-of-training-and-retraining-programmes-in-response-to-the-great-recession
- Robertson, G. 2023, “There is no recession in NZ, economy grows nearly 1 percent in June quarter” https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/there-no-recession-nz-economy-grows-nearly-1-percent-june-quarter
- WBALTV, 2020, “Tito’s vodka unveils solution to help hand sanitizer shortages” https://www.wbaltv.com/article/titos-vodka-unveils-solution-to-help-hand-sanitizer-shortages/31904891