This is a declaration of war upon those training companies who routinely rip off committed, conscientious and professional trainers. Yet again today, I’ve lost a day’s work through miscommunication, and possibly three days because someone got dates wrong in a confirmation email. There was a time when I’d have got right cheesed off with this, but today, I’m just frustrated with it all. The sad truth is that this happens frequently to other trainers too, and frankly, enough is enough.
When you sign up with a national ‘training company’, to deliver training on their behalf, you are often required to utilise your own materials, experience, and know-how. This by implication means that you ‘…know your craft’. If that’s the case, and we’ve spent years refining it, building upon our own CPD, attending trade fairs, networking and so on, so where does it say it’s fair to rip trainers off? Then there are the costs (sometimes hidden) of registration, extra (often unnecessary) insurance, costs of specific books and materials (often poorly designed and written, outdated, or even just plain wrong!) with their logos plastered all over them that you are required to use. And what do you get for your money when you do all of this? A few dates a month, sometimes a lot, sometimes none, where they command a daily rate iro £500 a day, and YOU, dear reader, will see usually under £200 of that, and not all providers pay mileage, and most of those that do hardly make it worthwhile, sometimes not paying anything until a set distance has been met. Of that, we have to pay for our own training equipment (which can run to thousands), insurances, registrations, and resources and then lose days naturally to admin and preparation. We often sacrifice family time and work late into the night to provide the service WE would expect were we on the receiving end.
So, let me get this right; THEY get around £300 a day for some admin and minor marketing to a captive audience who may have to come to themin the first place, whilst WE drive for hours (sometimes, a working day can be lost behind the wheel), arrange any course tailoring with the client, often spending hours doing so, deliver the training, and follow up with any required admin and so on. It all seem barse-ackwards to me…am I wrong? To be fair, not ALL providers function in this way, some are very fair, but I do find it hard to see how they justify at least half of the daily fee, sometimes two thirds for flying a desk all day.
The nett result is that I no longer have any compunction in poaching this work from them, or rather, selling myself and our companies…cold calling doesn’t really work in the main, and they know that they get myself or Marianne, AND we can come in at a fraction of the price charged by these larger more established companies (established on the graft of trainers like us); handy when you have a tight budget in a cash-strapped healthcare sector.
Marianne and I take our profession, our knowledge and our experience very seriously, and we wish that both training providers and sometimes the clients themselves would too, so from this point forward, everyone gets a contract and terms of service. We’re tired of being the nice guys and losing out as a result. Go to a large company if you must but remember that you won’t always know who, or indeed, WHAT you’re going to get, and like the saying goes: If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys…
As Conrad Hilton once said: “If people like you, they’ll listen to you, But if they trust you, they’ll do business with you.”
And here at SEED, 2M, and Aspire To Be, people DO trust us.
SEED Training 