Teaching & coaching · idea 17 of 52
Corporate workshops on one narrow software tool
Companies pay for a day of training on Excel, Notion, Git or a CRM what they'd never pay an individual for. One tool, one deck, run it fifty times.
- Who pays you
- Companies pay you a day rate or a per-seat fee, on invoice, to run a half-day or full-day workshop for their staff, on site or over video. Some become repeat clients for each new intake.
- Outcomes
- 0 receipts. Nobody's reported back on this one yet. Receipts open when accounts launch.
How it works
Most staff in most companies use their main tools badly, and managers know it. A half-day workshop that takes a team from "we all use spreadsheets" to "we all use them the same way, with lookups and pivot tables and no more broken formulas" is worth a day rate that would embarrass a freelancer. You pick a tool you know inside out, write one workshop with real exercises, and sell it to small and mid-sized companies through your own network and their internal training budgets. Then you run the same workshop over and over.
What it actually takes
- Genuine expert-level knowledge of one tool, including the ugly parts people actually get stuck on.
- A workshop that is exercises, not slides. People learn tools by doing.
- The ability to hold a room of bored adults for four hours.
- Selling: emails to operations and HR managers, one pilot at a reduced rate, and a case study from it.
Where it goes wrong
- Being general. "Productivity training" competes with everyone. "Excel for finance teams" competes with almost no one.
- Pricing like a tutor. Companies expect and respect a proper day rate.
- One-off clients. Structure the offer so a company books you for every new hire cohort.
- The tool changes. Keep the deck current, or the first question from the room will catch you.
Published 11 Aug 2026