Going from eight to 200 (and how to do it)
Eight. That was it, the most CPDs I could do in a month. I’d originally been doing four and our board said four wasn’t enough. So eight it was. That was absolutely pushing it, if I hit eight, I’d nailed it.
My glass ceiling was nothing to do with workload and everything to do with being scared. Back then, I was delighted if a CPD cancelled on me. It meant not nervously driving to an architect’s office, wiring up my useless projector and talking about a complex subject, with slides that had questionable information on, only to have curve-ball questions thrown at me by some know-it-all.
So what changed? My mindset.
I went from focusing on bringing in leads to focusing on educating.
I got my colleagues together and tore apart our CPD, binned anything salesy, wrote a new structure and focused it on understanding the very basics of our industry. At the time there were three complex topics, we distilled down the core information and made it simple and understandable.
We tried it, and people liked it. In fact they really liked it - it was simple and helpful. And they wanted more.
Armed with this knowledge, we took each of the three complex topics and created a presentation to explain it. We started it simple so that beginners would understand but added enough detail that the experts would still learn something.
Whilst doing this, my knowledge expanded, I still worried about the curve-ball questions. To write about how I overcame that would make this post too long - so I’ll detail that elsewhere.
I formed the presentations into a series; book the first, if you like it, book the rest. Before long, our series had six presentations and we were being booked up all around the country. I was doing 200 CPDs per year. Yes, that’s right, the guy who thought eight-a-month was a winner, was doing 200 per year - as well as my ‘day job’. The experience was exhilarating, but we had more demand than we could cope with, so I roped in a colleague. We soon ratcheted up to 400 per year, training government agencies, fire and rescue services, the most eminent fire engineers in the country, managing directors of large construction companies - you name it, we were doing it, often doing all six CPDs in one day.
As for the results, they poured in, our marketing leads averaging £1.3m a month (bear in mind that we were just a tiny start-up).
If you or your team are struggling with delivering boring, painful CPDs, managing only a few a month, try changing your mindset - stop focussing on the projects, the leads, and start focussing on helping, educating and then supercharge the volume - I promise you, the difference will be unbelievable.
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