Tag Archive for: The 8.45 Club

Leading customer service trainers partner with The 8.45 Club

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Today, we are proud to announce that after an extensive search, Mary Gober International (MGI), a world-leading customer service training organisation has selected The 8.45 Club (part of the Being Smarter group of companies) to provide custom ‘sustainability training’ to its customers.

For some time, MGI, like many training organisations used traditional methods to reinforce training messages taught during face to face during a campaign.

“MGI has been looking for new, cost-effective and innovative ways to enable organisations to embed and sustain skills learnt on our Seminars – to complement the sustainability activities we currently use” said Shona Cooper, Managing Director, MGI. “We are delighted to be partnering with The 8.45 Club to offer engaging, practical video training, delivered to inboxes in bite-sized chunks over weeks or months as a way of reinforcing our face to face Seminars.”

In addition to providing bespoke learning for its clients, The 8.45 Club also plan to be producing a public courses throughout 2010 in conjunction with the Mary Gober team.

Shona Cooper added, “One of the initiatives we will undertake together is to host an innovation session with learning professionals to show examples and discuss the potential of this bite-sized video training. From there we are looking to trial these techniques with some launch customers. It’s an exciting time in MGI’s evolution.”

Mark Copeman, founder of The 8.45 Club said, “We’re delighted to be working with Shona and the team at Mary Gober International. After seeing their trainers in action, it became clear to us that their methodology naturally lends itself to video training, because what they do is so visual and so engaging. We hope that this partnership will enable more and more customers to take advantage of their excellent coaching and that lessons taught will now be reinforced even more successfully.”

If you are interested in learning more about the innovation session Shona discusses above, please contact us using the link at the top of the page.

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Create an org chart for a one person startup. Are you serious?

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The Being Smarter team has a lot on its plate at the moment and we would all love to read more, but fail dismally. There’s one book however that the whole team has read – it’s almost like our induction course and it’s called the E-Myth. If you are starting or running a small business – it’s a must read.

Today, I wanted to pull one of the key concepts from that book and show how it really can work. It features as #26 in the popular 51 lessons learnt in year 1 as an entrepreneur post.

The book addresses the age old problem of going from startup to 50 person company. How do you as an entrepreneur keep the ethos and style of the business alive whilst expanding? How do you as an entrepreneur let go of responsibility and trust others? How do you as an entrepreneur ensure that letting go does not affect quality of the final output?

Michael E Gerber is a bit of a genius. He’s been there and bought the t-shirt. One of the many excellent tips I’ve taken from this book, which has stayed with me is to create an org chart from the outset. That’s exactly what I’ve done as the founder of Being Smarter Ltd which now has two other businesses under it’s umbrella – The 8.45 Club and TargetstoProspects. I have a very clear idea of how the organisation needs to look and with a £0.5m worth of investment I could fill every position tomorrow and move the company on at great speed, but…

Clearly that’s not a practical solution – and so the second part of his advice is to put YOURSELF into every position in that org chart. Write the manual for every job – document everything – and become expert in every position. Pin it on your wall and stare at it every day.

Your key to success then is slowly back filling those positions using smart recruitment techniques once the cash starts to flow and you can afford to employ people.

At the moment, I’ve got three people on my org chart and about 15 positions with my name on it. That would explain why I don’t sleep a lot – but at least I can see a way forward. Can you?

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The 8.45 Club partners with Kaplan Eduneering

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Being Smarter Ltd is delighted to announce that its 8.45 Club venture has partnered with Kaplan Eduneering (NJ, USA) owned by The Washington Post.

Kaplan Eduneering will be adding our 8.45 Club style of learning to its already innovative portfolio of elearning capabilities designed for its corporate clients. The partnership has already delivered three video courses on Building Sustainable businesses, featuring Jeffrey Hollender, founder of Seventh Generation, Business Ethics training and an Instructional design course. All feature subject matter experts from the Kaplan stable.

Whilst these are private, subscription only courses – you can see screenshots below… (click for larger image).

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Over the coming months we will be releasing new, engaging courses together, delivering short, practical and to the point videos, delivered by expert presenters. Knowledge workers can be safe in the knowledge they will still be back at desks for 9.00.

Mark Copeman, founder of The 8.45 Club said, “We are delighted Kaplan Eduneering found our service – they are training experts, have been delivering training to 100’s of corporate clients for many years, yet they still see the value in what The 8.45 Club style of training can deliver. We are looking forward to continuing with our vision for innovation and providing Kaplan with a solution to the problem of people not having time to learn any more.”

Kent Malmros, director Business Development, Kaplan Eduneering said, “Our mission at Kaplan EduNeering is to help companies promote behavior change through effective online training and knowledge management. That means we’re always looking to provide clients with the best adult learning tools and The 8.45 Club has developed one.

They have blended traditional news delivery and sound instructional design to create a compelling new methodology for delivering knowledge. As partners with The 8.45 Club, Kaplan EduNeering passes this progressive new approach on to its clients and has the privilege of working with them to stay at the fore of training’s evolution.”

The partner page can be found here.

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How to leverage your next customer event

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It’s always great to write on subjects dear to your heart and ones based on personal experience. Today is both.

I’ve been lucky enough to watch many great presentations, speeches and seminars over the last few years, however have also been incredibly frustrated that no one apart from those in the room at the time can benefit from the experience. How long does it take event organisers to pull good speakers together? How long does it take speakers to put their materials together? Days? Weeks? And it’s all over in a few hours.

Ever cooked a roast dinner for 12 people? Spent 6 hours preparing it to see it all eaten in 15 mins? Well it’s the same thing with events, except with a roast dinner, I’m guessing you wouldn’t want to keep it for ever…

Today and tomorrow our team is working with one of our partner companies to record an expert seminar, given only to a select few. The speaker is then going to spend some time with us after the session, recording in a green screen studio and we are then going to turn the whole event into an ‘8.45 Club’ style course for them…

So what’s the point of all this?

  1. The presentation which has taken many hours to put together will not be lost forever. It can remain a useful asset for years after the event.
  2. An audience other than the limited few that could make it to London on that specific day can now benefit from the material.
  3. The company putting on the event can leverage this material with other clients – possibly even sell it, because of its value.

And how will it be presented?

  1. The material will not be presented as a giant, unmanageable block of 2 hours, it will be turned into an engaging video training course.
  2. The 8.45 Club style of training means it will be delivered to email inboxes, first thing in the morning, in bite-sized chunks of ten minutes per day, perhaps for a couple of days of week for a month or so.
  3. Learners can now benefit from this session without leaving their desk and still be at their desk by 9.00.

I believe that’s win, win, win…. and possibly win.

How are you leveraging your next event? http://the845club.com/bespoke

Personnel Today features The 8.45 Club

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It’s always a good feeling when the industry trade press feature one of your innovations. Lesley Everett’s Walking Tall personal branding course has been featured today in PersonnelToday.com.

One of our esteemed partners and a true expert in her field, Lesley Everett commented…

“In the current climate, providing people the ability to access highly effective, but low cost training solutions has never been more important. Our personal branding modules launched on the 8.45 Club will show subscribers how to develop their personal brand in order to develop executive presence, confidence and marketability.

Lesley is one of a number of partners The 8.45 Club works with to develop courses for business audiences. If you are a true subject matter expert with a story to tell and an audience who wants to hear it – why not consider using this virtual presenter format as a way of reaching untapped audiences as well as generating an additional source of income… while you sleep.

Use the contact us link at the top of the page to request a call.