3 things I learned starting an employee training company in quarantine
NEWS FROM MY LATEST SIDE HUSTLE: Last year in the middle of pandemic, my life-long friend approached me about co-founding a company. I had been working from home for nearly two decades. He’d done so for almost a decade. Both of us had been self-help students for over 30 years. “Let’s combine the two and help the millions of employees now working from home,” he said.
After studying the market for several months, we discovered two things: 1) there wasn’t an existing company that did this, and 2) we possessed some promising experience, empathy, and research to make it happen. So we spent the next half year interviewing executives, developing the initial curriculum, getting our ducks in a row, and launching with two pilot customers last fall.
This year, we fully launched as Power Space and have been gaining momentum ever since. Here are three things we’ve learned so far.
- Employees are stuck in limbo. While many employees are thrilled to be working from home, a sizable majority are struggling, according to every major metric on employee health. Yes, these employees have adapted to this new reality and proven the productivity of working remotely, but they’re far from reaching their potential in this new isolated state while still figuring out the rules.
- Companies are scrambling to keep up. How do you transition from central headquarters to dispersed home offices overnight? You don’t. This takes time. While HR departments have been working hard to help with the transition, they come from a very different background and need assistance with the transition and ongoing training required to make the most of remote work environments.
- Aggressive pricing is required in recession. While we believe there’s significant value in the training we’ve created, we also believe that every remote employee and cash-strapped employer deserves an affordable training option. That’s why we’ve launched our training program starting at $1 per year per employee. That jumps to $3 per employee if we deliver the lessons for our customers (our most popular option), and $5 per employee if lesson personalizations are needed to fit your unique policies.
If you or someone you know is in HR and is struggling to help your employees transition to remote work (or in getting the most from this promising but isolating environment), I hope you’ll consider us when planning your employee training this year. Thanks for thinking of us.—Blake Snow