You Need a Business Plan for your Corporate Training Department

Will Kenny, Best Training Practices

As we all know, there are many small companies offering various kinds of training services. They may deliver standard seminars or provide coaching. They may offer content development, step in to facilitate internal discussions of various kinds or create delivery tools such as online courses. They may be one-person shops or small organizations with several employees. And almost every one of these small training consultancies has something that is rare in the departments of their corporate counterparts—a business plan.

They have formal business plans for both philosophical and practical reasons. Philosophically, a business plan helps focus efforts on the opportunities, resources, and practices that lead to success. Practically, a business plan is required to get a loan or raise any other form of financing.

These business plans don’t have to be very elaborate. Simple answers to a few key questions will do most of the work:

• Who is your market, your audience?
• How many people will you serve and where?
• What are their needs? How will you meet those needs?
• What resources do you require to meet those needs—funds, equipment, people?
• Where else can they get their needs met?
• How will you generate revenue? Why will they buy?
• How do we know the business leadership knows how to succeed in this business?
• What potential threats do you see, and how do you plan to overcome them?

Apply those questions to the corporate training environment, with an internal training department, and I think you’ll find few people in most training departments who can begin to answer them. In many companies, the training function “just is,” and the fundamental questions are rarely asked . . . at least by management within the training function. More importantly, every employee in the training function needs to understand these questions and know the answers to them, especially as questions like those may be hinted at by other departments when budgets get tight.

Those small consultancies know that unless they tell their story effectively, they aren’t going to get the loans they need to expand their business. And internal training functions are really in much the same situation. They don’t generate enough revenue from per-person fees for their courses to pay for their operating costs. They live on “credit” from the rest of the organization, on what they get from “investors” elsewhere in the company.

It makes perfect sense, then, to be able and ready to present a business plan that supports that financing. You may already have a lot of those answers in your department objectives, budget documents, training catalog and so on. Even so, a true business plan provides a somewhat different focus. It’s the difference between:

• Talking about what you do, what your activities are, how you manage your resources; and
• Talking about how you help, why and where you are needed, what benefits justify investment.

In other words, the first approach talks about you and your department. The business plan approach talks about your customers and investors, the organization you serve. Formalizing that outward-looking perspective helps you focus your conversations on the benefits your “business” brings to the rest of the organization. It also helps you make better decisions about where to apply resources or where to look for additional support, crucial decisions when the budget is under pressure.

Your business colleagues truly appreciate a business-like approach. Run your business better, with a clear business plan, and you are likely to pick up a few more “wins” in the budget battle.