The Agility Collective

The inner workings of a rather different consulting company

Courses and event production

Although we are at heart a consulting company, we do offer quite a lot of courses and seminars.

How we do courses

The Agility Collective itself doesn’t really run courses, it just provides the platform.

Anyone at the Collective can organize a course (or any kind of event), and when they do, they implicitly take on the Producer role for that course.

Driving principles:

  • Each course or event has a Producer
  • As Producer, you “own” the course. You are responsible for the course as whole, including course design, quality, marketing, etc.
  • As Producer, you use the Collective’s Calendar (a shared Google calendar) to book the room and make sure there isn’t a conflict.
  • As Producer, you own the financial result of your course (win or loss). Just like with consulting, The Collective retains X% of your profit (see economic model).
  • The Collective’s role is to be the “platform”, providing things such as a classroom, onsite assistance (serving coffee & snacks, etc) and lots of administrative support (invoices, lunch reservation, email communication, registration page, etc). The office team organizes all of that.
  • The Collective will charge the producer a fixed course admin fee (usually around $600-700 per day), an all-inclusive fee that covers the cost of the office and all administrative support.

The Producer doesn’t necessarily have to teach the course (although that’s the most common case). Sometimes a producer will invite a “star” (someone outside of the collective who is a well-known “guru” within his/her field) and host or co-teach a course.

Marketing

Some of our courses market themselves (as in, previous participants recommend it, or the teacher is famous). Just post the registration page and it fills up!

Other courses are new and need a bit of exposure. So about once or twice per quarter we will send an email to our customer list (all previous course participants). We store our customer data in Insightly and send marketing emails using MailChimp.

Typically one of the producers of an upcoming course will take lead on this, talk to other producers, agree on what should be in the email (usually via a shared Google Doc), and send the email. They will of course also market the courses through their personal networks, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and whatever other channels make sense. If a course needs an extra push they might ask other Crispers to retweet, etc.

What if people don’t sign up?

Together we have a big network so most courses should at least brake even. In some cases, however, the registrations just don’t come in, and if it’s really bad we have to cancel.

Fortunately, the Collective doesn’t charge the Producer for a course if it got canceled. It’s like a small insurance (or failure cushion). As a result, the cost of canceling a course is quite low for the producer (except for damaged pride). Why? Because we want people to experiment with new types of courses, since that benefits everyone in the long run. Make innovation easier by minimizing the cost of failure!

Fake it till you make it

A member might put up a registrations for courses for which no course material exists. If no one signs up, then no one is harmed. If enough people sign-up, then there can be a mad scramble to create the course the few weeks before the course. This may not sound like a serious way to run things, but in a way it is like a lean startup - make a minimal product and see if it flies. This model works as long as nobody gets too reckless! Too many canceled courses would hurt the brand (see how we build the brand).