I recently spoke with Cheryl McNeil of GC Learning Services about the details and benefits of her training and e-learning services.

Tell me a bit about your business, what it is that you do and how your help your clients.

My business is a custom, business-to-business instructional design and e-learning training solution.  We provide services for any business.  It's really about improving their bottom line.  Everyone always thinks about training as an after-thought.  Most of the time, people don't put a lot of effort into training.  It's not really a top priority.  Most of the time, employees think about it as boring, they have to do it, and we want to get away from that and make it fun and interactive and make it a top priority.

Most of the businesses, how we help them is by aligning their strategic goals with their training goals.  If their customer service department is having a lot of complaints, dropping a lot of calls, or taking too long to answer the calls and they see that that's affecting their bottom line, then they might take a look at their learning and development needs for that specific department.  We try to figure out a way to help them.  It might be that they just need a quick reference sheet or a job aid at their desks to remind them of the important key points that they're missing.  Maybe they need to start doing quarterly reviews, so that would be a new policy.

Whatever the needs are, they come to us, and we do a needs analysis and come up with a solution that works for their budget.

So, you actually create the materials for the business owner, whether that be a training program, an e-learning program, a new policy or training manual, whatever the case may be?

That's correct.  We do everything from the project management to the design and the development, and it's not necessarily hard-copy materials.  Our biggest niche right now is e-learning.

Do you actually help the business owner come up with or create the content for those materials and programs?

There are instances where we have to create or research to come up with the source material or maybe we even need to interview a subject-matter expert within the company, but for the most part, I would say 90% of the time, the client already has some documentation.  Maybe it was a PowerPoint presentation.  Maybe it was an employee handbook.  Something is out there within the organization.

What about things like systems creation and documentation?  Do you help with that?

Absolutely.  We have many organizations that need to train their employees or their customers and clients on their product or service, or they need to provide access to information or training on their system through a public website.  We can address all three of those.

I know that every project can vary tremendously in scale, but how do you charge for your services?

We start with our free thirty-minute consult, where we gather enough information to estimate the hours of work that it's going to take to complete the project.  We add that up and bill at our hourly rate, which is $75.  Our pricing is very unique to other e-learning vendors.  They most of the time bill hourly, accumulating time weekly or monthly.  We do flat-rate project pricing.

This is something that really can impact a business owner's bottom line.  If operations are not running smoothly, it can really cost in the way of productivity.  What would you recommend as the first steps to someone who thinks they might need this type of service?

I'm glad you mentioned operations, because a lot of people, when they think of training, they always think software, but 90% of the stuff that's come in in the last twelve months has been soft skills, policies and procedures, new hire training, customer service, conflict resolution, a lot of law stuff like labor laws and sexual harassment laws.  It's not just software.

The main thing that you want to think about when you're approaching any type of training initiative is determining that you have a need, "Okay, I definitely see a need here.  Let's figure out what we can do to understand the problem and the benefit that we could get, the return on investment," so you want to understand the benefit that you're going to get.  You also have to define your budget.  Maybe you need to start small and just re-write your classroom materials.

Then you need to make sure you're reviewing all your options.  See what's out there.  You might even want to issue an RFP.  Like I said, we offer free consults.  Your training dollars are really valuable, so you want to make sure you research.  We have an e-learning checklist on our downloads page that's proven very helpful for determining whether you're ready or not.

You made a very good point about the benefits, when you can figure out how this is going to help your business and why it's so important to the success of your business and the satisfaction of your customers and employees, and I think this is one of the areas that we tend to neglect in our businesses.  We don't really understand the impact it can have when these things are in order and things are streamlined and working smoothly.

And, you know, people like to feel like they understand as well.  It makes them feel confident.  I'm talking about a consumer with a product, a client with a service.  I have a blinds manufacturer who is one of our clients who actually took this blinds for roman shades training that we did for them and took the module and put it on their website, and their actual customers go through the entire module and learn all about the roman shades, and they said that sales have gone way up just from putting that on their website.

Right, and you know, these are things that you just don't think about.  If you put something on your website that shows potential customers and clients how you work or how the process might go or how the product works, that might impact sales.

Image from Flickr by shinealight