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Our training clients include:
Local Businesses
What is the opportunity? Technically, there are over 14 million small businesses in America, but you want companies with at least several dozen employees. There are over a million companies with between a hundred and five hundred people scattered throughout the US, literally thousands of businesses in your area large enough to pay for strategic training. All have companies meetings and sales training.
Most are private businesses run by their owners, but many are locally run, largely independent branches of large business. These businesses have a clear need for training in strategy, but the best opportunities takes three forms: 1) sales and marketing training, 2) management training, and 3) annual company meetings. Sales and marketing training is vital because those departments almost always have a training budget. Management training is more common in private businesses run by owners than local divisions of larger organizations. Only the largest have annual meetings with speakers.
Why are local businesses important? For the same reason that bank robbers rob banks, this is where the money is. You get paid for these speaking engagement directly. However, they are also an important step in building your credibility as you begin to college speaking credentials by training organizations. Local branches of large, well-known organizations are especially valuable because you get the value of adding their name to your resume. There is not visible difference between the training I give, traveling to national conventions training a corporate division, from the training you give to local branches of the same corporations.
Where do you find these groups? The best way is to initially make contact through local affiliated organizations. You then work by getting references from one local business person to another. You can also contact through local meeting planners at hotels with convention facilities, city convention centers, and so on. (See Convention and Visitors Bureaus below).
How to you get invited to speak? At the end of all presentations to groups that potentially have local business owners or managers; you must make it clear that you offer strategy training to local businesses. When networking at the end of these meetings, you collect cards and contacts. If the person at the meeting does hire trainers, you specifically ask for the name and contact information for the person in their organization that does. You then send that person a book as a gift and a letter of introduction, telling them who referred you. You then follow that letter up with a call to arrange a meeting. You get the job by sitting down with business owner/manager and discussing what teaching strategy can do for his or her organization. If there is a committee involved, ask for a half hour to give a part of your presentation: worst case they will learn a little strategy from the experience. At the meeting, you explain how training in strategy can help them become more competitive as a business and make more money.
How do you make money? This is simple: you charge them. Price depends on size and budget of companies and upon the size of your resume in training businesses. Generally $500 for a presentation is a good starting point, you discount based upon how badly you need the experience. You will generally not want to sell product hard at the back of the room, though you can offer a special promotional teleseminar or something during presentation to sell other product to attendees afterward.
You make more money by building up experience within an industry. For example, if you tailor your seminar on strategy to train salespeople at a car dealership, you can take that material and testimonials to other car dealerships. These deepens and broadens you experience within the industry and can lead directly to engagements at promoted events within that industry.