Costing Myself

Friday, May 29, 2009

I don’t often write about myself, but this short item and the next are based on two conversations I had within the past 24 hours.

In discussing my fees for an upcoming training session, I was asked “How much will you charge the company”. I replied casually “A thousand dollars per day”.

“A THOUSAND DOLLARS PER DAY!” was the predictable response across the table.

Yup.

It seems like a lot to my friend, who is a salaried technical employee of a major university, but as I explained to him :

Any reputable downtown business school will charge $300/day per attendee for what I teach. Since I am taking five attendees per class, that’s $1,500 per day.

The downtown business school employs trainers who can read-from-a-book. I design and deliver my own training materials.

The downtown business school offers a set of fixed day-long courses; I provide half-day sessions uniquely tailored to my clients needs.

On this particular job, two of us will be in attendance, so once my ten-minute lecture ends, the twenty-minute practical work will see both me, the aggressive, assertive, hard-nosed technical nerd AND the pleasant, persuasive but passionate expert Kimberly working the room. That is, the client gets two instructors for the price of one.

No matter how you slice it, I offer at least three times the value of a cookie-cutter classroom.

And I haven’t even mentioned life-time support for everything I teach!

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