Here’s a simple but effective way to make sure your agency really benefits from the professional development dollars you spend on your team.
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Hey, everybody.
Drew McLellan here from Agency Management
Institute this week coming to you from Taipei, Taiwan.
You know, we have a lot of agency owners who send their employees to AMI workshops,
and we often get asked, how do I maximize that investment?
And one of our favorite ways to suggest agency owners maximize
the investment
they make in professional development, whether it's with us or anybody else,
is to sit that employee down, prior to them going to the workshop
or taking the class, whatever it may be, and saying, look,
between your airfare and your hotel and the registration fee
or between the tuition, whatever the hard costs are,
plus the two or three days of you being away from work,
this is about a $5,000 or a $7,500 investment
on the agency's behalf, because we believe in you
and we want to help you grow.
First of all, your team has no idea how much you're spending on these things,
and they don't add up all the things like the Uber ride and the food
and all of those if you send them to training
or even if you just let them take an online course
and they're away from their desk and they're not doing billable things
for a couple of days.
So however you're going to monetize that, you're just going to say
this is about what the investment is and we're excited to do it.
We're excited to have you bring back some information and knowledge and
meet some people who do what you do.
But here's what we would like you to do for us to be able to maximize
that investment.
The investment is
$5,000, $7,500, whatever it is.
And we'd like you to come back with at least one or two ideas
that when you combine them, will either make us $5,000 or $7,500
or will save us $5,000
or $7,500 that you learned from this opportunity.
So in other words, we want you to bring something back
that we can actually put into play immediately so that we can
recoup that cost and the entire agency benefits from your education.
Now, many of you do have them do lunch and learns of the presentations,
which is all great.
Nothing wrong with that.
I would highly encourage that.
But this idea of tying a monetary value to the workshop or the learning experience
and then asking them to bring back
value is sort of commensurate with that expense – with that expense;
reminds them, number one,
you're investing in them and how much you're investing in them.
Number two, it gives them homework to think about before the workshop.
It's much easier to have this conversation prior to the workshop than it is
to have them come back after the workshop and say, okay,
what did you learn that can save us or make us $5,000?
So set the homework in advance and then set a meeting on your calendar
or with their supervisor, or when they come back to report back
their idea of what they can extract
from the content to help the agency make money or save money.
All right?
Super simple, but super effective.
See you next week.
