Episode 397: What is your training budget?
In this episode, Fiona discusses the importance of having a training budget. She also shares her work experiences and emphasizes the need for ongoing learning and upskilling to stay competitive in business. Tune in!
You'll Learn How To:
The absence of a common agreement on training budgets
Importance of training budget for self-development and staff upskilling
The challenge of keeping up with evolving business demands and technologies.
Utilizing training budgets for courses, mentorship, educational programs, and skill development.
Encouraging staff to identify training needs
The necessity of ongoing learning and growth to avoid stagnation in business.
Budgeting for training expenses and avoiding ad hoc spending.
The importance of sharing insights and experiences with other small business owners and encouraging reviews and sharing to reach a wider audience.
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Resources and Recommendations mentioned in this episode
Welcome to episode 397 of the My Daily Business Podcast. Today is a quick tip episode and whether you work by yourself or whether you head up a huge company with hundreds or thousands of staff, this is such an important one because I know that so many companies miss this many people, particularly those who work by themselves, miss it as well, and it can be such a game changer. Before we get stuck into that, I want to of course acknowledge the traditional owners and the custodians of the lands on which I record this podcast and give all of this advice and work with my clients. And that is the Wurrung and Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. And I pay my respects to their elders, past, and present, and acknowledge that sovereignty has never been ceded. Let's get into today's quick tip episode.
Before starting my business at the very end of 2015, so long ago now, I had worked at so many companies and people are often surprised at how many different places I have worked. I have worked at Open University in the UK looking after the MBA program. I've headed up big teams at Amazon UK. I consulted Audible Australia. I worked at Audible in the UK. I have worked in magazine publishing, and I've worked in book publishing. I've written for countless magazines and also been lucky enough in some of those cases to go in-house and work at those magazines as well, and a whole bunch of other places. I've worked for the biggest newspaper or newspaper group in Australia and also used to work there taking ads when I was going through uni, I've worked at cafes, and I've worked at event management groups.
That was one of my early jobs as well, like doing work parties where I was a waitress. Just so many different places. I've ghostwritten books for publishing. I've written my books for publishing houses. Suffice to say, that even before I started my business, I had so much intel as to how different businesses, huge multinational corporates, and tiny startups work. I realised then I didn't even mention all the digital agencies that I've worked at and the startups in many places. What I've noticed is that there doesn't seem to be a common agreement in any of those places and in any of the thousands of small business owners that I've come into contact with over the last almost decade when it comes to training budgets. What is a training budget? A budget is a certain amount of money that you allocate for something, and a training budget is a certain amount of money that you allocate to upskill.
This can be for yourself as the founder. Maybe you are a solo operator, but it can also be for your staff. In various places I've worked, there has been zero training budget. We expect that people are going to enter into a job. Maybe it's a lower-rung job initially. And then we expect that only through their initiative they are going to understand how to do things. Of course, they will learn as they go, but if they don't have mentors or perhaps there's nobody else in the company who does what they need to be able to upskill into doing to succeed and grow forward in their path, then how are they supposed to do that? Added to that, so many businesses are changing all the time because the platforms they need are changing the systems are changing or something else is happening.
A different social media platform comes up and we suddenly need to learn all of this, and we are expecting and, and I think we expect it so much of ourselves, probably more than anyone else, that we will just somehow figure it out. And yes, in some cases there will be people that use initiative or that have a lot of time to be able to research things or get up early and look through different trend forecasting platforms or look at for inspiration through podcasts or other things. And yes, that is amazing if you have those types of people or are like a lifelong learner. However, we also all have so many demands on our time as well. It's like where is that extra time magically going to come from for me to upskill and know things?
This is where courses, working with a mentor, going into an institute, or even if you wanted to go back to uni and go through some tertiary qualification or even just reading books or spending some time to look at a documentary together. I was doing an International Women's Day talk recently, and there's an incredible documentary that I suggested to this company. if anyone wants to see that as well, it's also called Undercover and it's about homelessness in Australia and the vast number of women, 55 plus who are experiencing that. That's ever-increasing. Anyway, one of the things that I said was why don't you as a company get together and do a screening or watch this together, put them in touch with the filmmaker, we don't do that enough and we don't even look at those sorts of things as a training opportunity.
What is a training budget? It's an amount of money, like I said, that you can put aside either for yourself or for people in your team, and you decide what that is going to be spent on. Or if you have staff, you may say to them, we've got a training budget for you. What do you think you need to be upskilled in? And can you bring that to me? Like bring a class or a course or a book or whatever it is that you think we should purchase for your training from the business. And then we will decide if that works within our training budget. But also as a founder of a company, there are so many things that we don't need to know until we become a founder of a company. It could be going on some organizational course.
It could be going into getting a lot of leadership training. It could be important things like understanding how to use Excel better and investing in a course. It could be upskilling on Google AdWords, it could be all these things. Sometimes these things come up, and we are like, that's too expensive. Whereas if we had a training budget and we're like, I've got X amount of thousands of dollars to spend this year or hundreds, I am going to think about how I spend my money and what do I need most to upskill on. Likewise with your staff. I remember when I went to when I was in my last job before I started my business, there wasn't a training budget for the staff I asked my managing director and talked this through with them and they were open to the idea.
I was able to then say to some of my staff or all of the staff, there is a small amount of money for you to spend on a course or some training. If you see something out there that you think is going to help you in your role and upskill you in certain areas, please present it to me and we will see if we can afford it. We had our social media person bring this an Instagram course that's being offered on the weekend, and I think it would be helpful for me. Somebody else said, this is a course about, I think it was like a workshop on how to use their phone to take better photos, which was going to help us hugely because you can't always have campaign shoots all the time, even in bigger companies.
Today's quick tip is to think about, firstly, do you have a training budget in your business? Secondly, how are you using that? Thirdly, if you are lucky enough to have staff, do they understand that if they see something that is going to increase their knowledge, their capability? And that, in turn, helps you do this, they know that they can come to you and ask for the business to pay for that. Again, I know lots of people are very tight at the moment with their purse strings and maybe their cash flow isn't coming in as beautifully or as abundantly as it may have and cost of living and all of that. But also, if we don't keep learning and growing and iterating, then you're going to get left behind. That is just the fact we have to be learning and increasing our knowledge and not constantly 24/7, but is in understanding that I can't just stay stagnant in business. You just can't.
There are always things to improve on, and it's figuring out what is going to help us with the business or help our staff and then in turn help the business. And then where is the money for that coming from? And it's much easier if, at the start of the year or twice a year when you're looking at your overall huge budgets for the company, you might decide, in the next financial year we are increasing that training budget to X, Y, Z. That is it for today, thinking about what is the training budget and also what am I spending that on. It also will stop the ad hoc spending, which I have to handle. I'm putting my hand up right now. I've done this many times where you are scrolling and you see an ad and it's 11 p.m. and you're like, I need that.
And then you buy this course and you never look at it again, and you feel like just because you bought it, you've actioned something. As opposed to it being a line item in your financial reporting in which you were like, okay, that got coded to training budget. Let's have a look when we are assessing our finances, did we utilize that training budget? Did we utilize those courses or books or things that we bought from it? And do we need to increase the training budget for the next financial year or the next budget? Assessing it all, which we don't do if we are just ad hoc buying things and not thinking about where they fit into the overall financial architecture of the business. That is it. I would love to know from you what training you have done that you think has been incredible for you.
I had a good friend years ago who did the Australian Institute of Company Directors training. That is quite an expensive one. I know that I have done back in the day at one of these companies I was manager for. They put me in for like a three-day Australian Institute of Management training, which was quite interesting. I didn't know what to expect. It was okay. But there are so many things out there for us, and I think we just forget about that and also it puts so much pressure on us to just know all the answers or have all the answers as opposed to being like, I've got this training budget, what can I spend it on? Like I said, I'd love to hear from you about what has worked for you, what would you thoroughly recommend to other small business owners? Maybe we can do another episode on this. And if you did enjoy this or it's given you something to think about, then I would love it if you could share it with another small business owner or even leave a review or hit those stars so that it gets found by other small business owners. Thank you so much for reading. I'll see you next time. Bye.
