Even if you were able to start selling training tomorrow there would be a time lag before you sold a course, then a lag before you delivered it, and then a lag before you get paid. This sales pipeline is about 3 months – so I find that at Christmas and during August I don’t do any work (which is great) resulting in a drop in income inmates March and November. Of course, I do have money coming in during Christmas and August because of the work I did in September and May, so it works both ways. But it’s something to keep an eye on.
And before you can start selling you have to set up your company, website, blog etc and plan your subjects and build up the course contents ready in case you sold one tomorrow. This takes 2-3 months.
So there’s a total of about 6 months before any cash comes in, and you’ll need to plan on paying the mortgage and buying food for this 6 months, with no money coming in.
This is why ideally you’d do the preparation….
- while still working at your employed job, spending the evenings and weekends getting everything ready.
This would get you past the preparation stage.
Then for the selling stage, which can’t be done in parallel with a full time job, you’d need to either…
- arrange to work part time,
- or have a redundancy sum,
- or a saved-up sum,
- or a partner who can support you – until the sales turn into revenue.
Of course once you have your training business rolling it’s all going to be worth it. 30 customers each booking 3 days a year on a repeating basis will bring in about 100k a year, for as long as you want to do it. And it’s reasonable to expect to be delivering 4-6 days a month by the end of your first year, which is £4-8k/month, and then by the end of your second year you should be delivering 8-12 days a month which is £8k-16k/month, if you choose to work as hard as 3 days a week. And within 5 years you’ll be established, with 30 repeating customers, with well proven courses, and with a reputation for quality. So that’s fine. But you just have to work out how you’ll get through that first 6 months.
Video here if you want to see a more detailed spreadsheet calculation of launch time lag: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzYfAmo28b4
PS – Are you considering getting into training? Would being a freelance trainer suit you? Get more information here: www.becometrainers.com
Hi Chris,
Thank you so much for your insightful post. I’ve been looking to start an online training website on various subjects such as MS Office, Manufacturing, Supply Chain, and Business Accounting all of them revolving data analytics tools and techniques. And this post gave me a better understanding.
Sincerely,
Milad Riasati