5 min read · Written by Grant Rayner on 06 Sep 2023
Share by emailOver the past few weeks, I’ve focused on different types of services that you might deliver as an independent security professional, including consulting and retained services.
One type of service that almost all of us will deliver at some point is training.
As you design your business, you could focus your offerings solely on training. Some companies do exactly that. Alternatively, you could offer training alongside other services. I’ll discuss the pros and cons of different types of training in later articles. For now, I want to focus on the advantages and disadvantages of training as a service for you as an independent security professional.
As a service, training provides several tangible advantages:
Training is an excellent way for you to demonstrate your competence in your chosen field. As a specialist in your particular field, you will have knowledge to share. It therefore makes sense to offer training as a service alongside your consulting services. A complementary set of services can provide a compelling offering.
In addition to demonstrating your competence, developing and delivering training can also build your competencies as a professional. If you’re seeking to become an expert in a particular area of specialisation, running training is a great way to get there.
When you deliver training, you’ll be showcasing your expertise to a large audience. Most training sessions will involve a minimum of 10 people. Quite a number of the training sessions I’ve conducted have involved hundreds of people, sometimes in one session and at other times across multiple sessions. The people in the room will be promoted at some point, or they may leave to join other organisations. It’s possible they may become your clients at some point in the future.
Compare this with consulting services, where only a handful of people in the client organisation may ever meet you or read your reports.
Overall, the exposure that training provides will help you demonstrate your competence to a broader audience. Over time, training will help to develop your personal and company brand.
Unlike consulting, where you’ll work with a single organisation, training services enable you to reach individuals outside of the context of an organisation. For example, you could run workshops on a particular topic for anyone who wants to sign up. By doing so, you’ll exponentially expand the size of your potential customer base.
Of course, there’s a significant difference in how you can structure your pricing when it comes to a single organisational client or a group of individuals. I’ll get into different approaches to pricing in later articles.
Unlike consulting services, which are necessarily bespoke, the same training package can be delivered again and again to the same or different clients. In fact, consistency in content and delivery can be a feature. The fact that training is repeatable enables you to build a sustainable revenue stream with a client, by offering the same training on a regular basis (annually, for example). Training also allows you to grow a client account, by expanding the scope of your services to provide training across multiple sites.
One of the key advantages of training is that it can be productised.
Productisation in this context refers to the process of transforming a service into a standardised, replicable, and scalable product. Unlike services, which are often tailored to individual client needs and delivered in real-time, a productised service is pre-packaged and sold at a fixed price. Overall, your objective in transforming services into products is to create a business model that enables easier scaling, reduces the complexity of operations, and offers a more predictable revenue stream.
There are different approaches to the productisation of training services. At the most basic level, you could develop a standard training package and deliver that package to multiple clients. While this approach will enable you to scale your operations, you’ll still be delivering the training. Full productisation, on the other hand, would involved the development of pre-recorded training that does not require you to deliver the training. You’ll be able to sell your training 24/7.
I’ll be discussing productisation in more detail in future articles.
While there are a lot of advantages to offering training as a service, there are also a number of disadvantages that you’ll need to factor into your planning.
There are a number of factors to consider when deciding whether to offer training as a service as an independent security professional.
Depending on your chosen speciality, you may be entering a crowded competitive space. Most security consulting companies will offer training as a basic service. There are also companies that specialise in offering security training.
To some degree, you’re also competing with your clients. Most large organisations have the resources to run training internally. Many will have implemented a host of different online training solutions for subjects such as security awareness and travel security.
Accordingly, you’ll need to be selective regarding the topics you decide to focus on for your training. I’ll touch on how you can structure your training services below, and will discuss what makes an ‘ideal’ topic for training next week.
The development of training materials can be a time consuming process. If you’re planning to develop an online course, don’t underestimate the time required to draft scripts and record audio and video.
In-person training and workshops take considerably less time to deliver. In my experience, a typical training package for an organisation can be developed relatively quickly (within a few days) and then iterated over time. Don’t expect to get everything perfect the first time around. The best ways to improve your training will be to routinely gather feedback from participants after each session and continue to learn about the topic.
Not many clients will be willing to pay you to fly to a different state or country and deliver a few hours of training. This may limit your opportunities to deliver training services.
If you’re facing this challenge, a good approach is to package training with other services, such as a review of office security or an assessment of some kind. By doing so, you make the additional costs associated with travel more acceptable. This approach reinforces the need to develop a complementary services.
Of course, online training can be an effective alternative to in-person training in some cases. However, as you’ve probably experienced yourself, there are challenges with online training, including participation and attention. Some workshop-style training sessions, which rely on engagement to enhance the learning experience, will be less effective in an online format.
While anyone can learn how to train, not everyone is a natural at delivering training. Being an expert in your chosen field doesn’t necessarily imbue you with the skills to impart that knowledge to others. If you aren’t a natural trainer, the only solution is to practice.
Now we’ve presented the various advantages and disadvantages of training as a service, the next question is whether it’s worth adding training to your suite of products and services.
Absolutely.
Training services provide an excellent complement to consulting services. As noted above, they also provide a tangible demonstration of your competence in your particular field.
However, you need to carefully plan how you package your training services. If packaged poorly, training can provide sub-optimal revenue streams and can have a negative impact on the overall performance of your business.
I recommend a hybrid approach that combines tailored training (training built to specific client requirements), standard training packages designed for organisations, and online training packages that are available to the broader public. Of course, the content of each training package will need to be different to cater to the different needs of each audience.
Next week, I’ll expand on different approaches to structuring your training offerings. I’ll also discuss how to determine what topics to use for training, and the ideal types of clients for you to pitch your training services.