[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Randal L. Schwartz) writes: > >>>>> "William" == William R Ward <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > William> Well, the way I see it there are the big names like Randal Schwartz, > William> community colleges, and a few individuals like me. I haven't seen > William> much else. > > <voice actor="Ian McDiarmid" movie="Return of the Jedi"> > Everything is proceeding according to my plan... > </voice> > > :-) > > There are certainly others out there, like TCPC. But perhaps you are > missing the raft of training organizations (or training divisions) > that produce non-Perl as well as Perl. I know: I'm up against them on > bids all the time, if I even get the first call (which is rare).
I have not entirely missed these, and have been invited to submit bids a couple of times for training organizations who were looking to subcontract a training course. Unfortunately it didn't work out, but I'm not entirely unaware of this route. It's not a major portion of what I'm trying to do however. My focus is on the classes that I run on weekends at the moment. > Most corporations these days have "training coordinators", who prefer > to buy from "all in one" training outsourcing companies, rather than > deal with boutique companies like Stonehenge. So I've worked hard to > brand Stonehenge all over the place as if we were a big company. It > seems to be working. I used to get calls all the time asking for > "Randal to come do some training". Now, nearly all of our new > customers just say "any Stonehenge instructor would be great, we've > heard". Kudos to those on our team, but also it was a conscious > decision to deemphasize me, and make *us* a company. I'm doing that too. If you look at my website (bayviewtraining.com) you will see that my name only appears when you click on "Instructor". And that the page it appears on is "instructors.shtml" - sooner or later other faces should appear there. The focus is on the courses and the company, not the instructor. Of course I don't have the celebrity value that you have, which is another reason in my case, but I'd like to think my site gives the appearance of a larger company than we actually are. > As an individual, you probably won't have that ability. It's > expensive. And so you're more likely to get hits from buddies of > yours that know you and like you and can convince the training > coordinator of their company to hire you as a contractor. So make a > lot of friends: that's how I tried to do it in the early days, and > luckily, I had a lot of friends. I've been doing that. My first training class consisted of several paying customers and several freeloading friends who were there to give me feedback and make the room more full. Already one of them referred a friend of his to take my class. I also offer a lot of incentives: $50 cash to anyone who sends someone to take one of my classes for the first time, 10%-20% discount for groups of friends/coworkers who come to one of my Saturday classes together, and similar discounts for members of certain nonprofit organizations. --Bill. -- William R Ward [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.wards.net/~bill/ ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- AMAZING BUT TRUE: There is so much sand in northern Africa that if it were spread out it would completely cover the Sahara Desert!
