Will Zoom replace face to face training? Maybe for a while, maybe for ever. I suspect face to face will return, but zoom will always have a foothold from now on, especially for teams that are spread around the country or the globe, and also for coaching.
So what would a mixed model look like for a trainer?
I have made a spreadsheet – email me chris@chriscroft.com for a copy if you want one to play around with it.
Here are some screenshots of the options:
a) Assuming you charged cautiously low prices, £900/day for training and £200 per one hour zoom training session
You can see that assuming you want to earn more than 100k there are three options:
- 2 days a week of training plus 2 one-hour Zoom sessions,
- 1 day of training plus 6 zoom calls (you could do these over 2 or 3 days) or
- all Zoom, 10 one-hour sessions a week, which you could do in 4 or 5 days a week.
All good ways to earn 100k!
Alternatively you could go for quality of life and “only” earn 60k by doing 6 zoom hours a week, or 2 zooms and a day of training each week (not a bad way to earn 60k!).
And you can see that the top end of earnings, even with these low pricings, can be, say, £175,000 if you do three days a week of training and 4 zooms – reasonably hard work I admit, but you’re being paid more than a doctor or an air traffic controller*, and it’s a lot less stressful!
If you want to earn more then a better way would be to put the prices up. Let’s look at two more options – decent pricing and high pricing.
b) Decent pricing, which I feel any good trainer should be charging, would be £1100 for a day of training and £300 for an hour of Zoom training. In which case the combinations look like this:
- Just two days of training a week,
- or 7 Skype sessions (could be done in 3 days)
- or a mixed model with a day of face to face training and four Skype sessions – you could do two Zoom sessions per day so that’s three days worked per week for 100k per year.
c) Finally, once you’re established and you can pick and choose your customers, just the ones who value you and who understand the value of good training, you can charge what I do: £1400/day for training and £550 for a one hour Zoom training session, (I’m actually charing £650 per hour of zoom now) …and then the figures look like this:
then your mixed model looks like
- one day of face to face and 2 Zoom sessions per week – 125k
- with the fall back of just doing 4 one-hour zooms in a week – 110k
- although if you wanted you could easily to 2+2: two days of training and two zooms a week, which gives you £195k/year.
- or, if Zoom goes back out of fashion and we return to fully face to face, you could do what I did last year and just do 3 days a week of face to face training – 210k
Finally – how many weeks of holiday do you get, with the above combinations??
You can see that for the 2+2 model, £195k, you’re working 3 days a week = about 100 days off per year = 21 weeks of holiday.
Or one day of face to face per week, and two zooms per week, gives you 3 days off per week, on average, which adds up to 31 weeks off per year. Not days, like most employed people get, but 31 WEEKS.
And as a freelance trainer you can certainly take three weeks or a month off for a foreign trip every now and again, by booking training in before you go or after you get back, or even doing some zoom sessions from your place abroad….
So my conclusion is that the mixed model works – Zoom training combined with face to face is certainly financially viable. And even better, the two work well together, for example you could run a training day and then combine it with some refresher sessions or coaching 1:1 followups.
Anyway, if you want a copy of the above spreadsheet (or if you want to know how to get started as a trainer) let me know at chris@chriscroft.com
If you want to know more about becoming a trainer, I might be able to help.
Get more information here: www.becometrainers.com
Onward and upwards!
Chris
* Data for comparison:
Source: The data uses pay-as-you-earn (PAYE) tax records on a random sample of 1 per cent of workers who have been in their job for more than one year.
PS – Why isn’t management training on the list above??
Are you considering getting into training? Would being a freelance trainer suit you? Get more information here: www.becometrainers.com
