Every business in your room runs through one person. Usually the one who booked the ticket.
A talk for the owners you programme for: why the business stops when they look away, and what to take out of the middle first. It is not a talk about software.
Your members
The owners who come to your events are often the people their businesses still run through. They sign off the quotes. They know which order has to be checked by hand before it goes out, and why. They are the one the staff wait for.
None of that is written down anywhere, and almost none of them want it to stay that way. They have just never had a clear morning to change it, and the reason for that is the thing itself.
The talk, thirty minutes
Out of the Middle
Why the business stops when you look away, and what to do about it.
Thirty minutes, and then questions. I would rather have the questions than a polite round of applause.
We have all been using this stuff for a few years now. The software, the automations, the AI everyone keeps talking about. Everybody in the room is busier than they were. Almost nobody has more time.
It feels productive, and then you look at what actually moved and mostly it has not.
That gap is what the half hour is about, and it is not a technology problem. The work is still going through one person.
So I take one thing out of the middle, live, in front of the room.
The quote that cannot go out until the owner has looked at it will do. We pull it apart on the spot: which part of that is a real judgement only they can make, which part is them carrying numbers from one place to another, and which part is only theirs because nobody ever wrote down how it is done.
Three things that look like one thing. Two of them were never the owner's job.
Nobody maps their own week in half an hour, and I do not pretend otherwise. What they leave with is the question:
What is going through me that should not be?
It works best for owners with a team, or whose business is reaching the point where they need one. Trades, manufacturers, agencies, practices: businesses that have grown past the point where one person can hold all of it, but have not yet changed how the work moves.
Or make it a workshop
If your members would rather work than listen, the same material runs as a workshop: one hour to three, depending on how far you want them to get.
Everybody maps a normal week of their own business, there and then.
What only they can do. What they believe only they can do. And what is sitting still because a decision has to pass through them.
Then we take one of those bottlenecks apart and look at what the fix actually involves: what gets written down, what gets handed over, what gets automated, and what should never be automated at all.
Tools come up, because they always do, and I am straight about which earn their keep and which are just another thing to check.
Nobody leaves with a shopping list. They leave able to say their own bottleneck out loud, with one thing to take out of the middle first.
What it is not
It is not a beginner's session on a piece of software, and it is not a demonstration of the newest tool.
If what your members actually want is hands-on training on a particular system, tell me. That is a different session and I would rather you booked the right one.
About me
I was an actor before I became a trainer, so standing in front of a room has never bothered me.
Since 1999 I have been going into organisations and teaching the people there the software their jobs run on, from the British Museum to the National Audit Office.
Sixteen years of Microsoft training for the University of Greenwich. Happy, my first client as a freelance trainer and still a current one.
Twenty-seven years of standing in front of people who did not choose to be in the room on a Tuesday morning, and getting them to the point where they use the thing.
Watching that land live is the part of the job I have never got tired of.
Formats
The talk is thirty minutes with questions afterwards.
The workshop is the same material as a working session, from one hour to three, where your members spend the time mapping their own week and go home with it written down.
Either one runs in the room or online. I am happy to travel for it, and equally happy to do it online if that is what suits your group.
Before you book anything
Tell me what your members are actually asking about. What comes up in the room, what they complain about afterwards, what a previous speaker got wrong.
I am genuinely trying to find out, because a talk built around your room beats one delivered at it, and I would rather change mine than sell you the one I have.
If that conversation is all that happens, that is fine by me.