Scale up essentials: 7 steps successful training providers take to ensure sustainable growth

It’s an exciting time to be scaling up a training company. The last few years have shaken up the industry, providing new opportunities for those who are willing to make the most of them.

Scale up essentials: 7 steps successful training providers take to ensure sustainable growth

We’ve seen incredible successes from providers who have managed to stay ahead of the curve. By harnessing the right people and technology, they’ve created unparalleled learning environments that serve the needs of both learners and employers. These businesses have not only scaled up, but often attracted significant investment, too. 

So what do today’s industry leaders have in common? What has helped them to scale successfully and how can you emulate their success?

In this guide, we look at seven key factors every growing training provider needs to bear in mind. We’ve also included words of advice from our founder Heather Frankham, who scaled her first training business from one to over 1,000 staff before selling it.

Whether you’re just getting started or you’ve been running your business for several years, it’s never too early or too late to start thinking about scaling up your business.

Heather Frankham’s scale up story

Bud Systems founder Heather started her career journey as a PE teacher before launching Lifetime Training in 1995. 

Over the course of two decades, she built it into a market-leading apprenticeship training provider that employed more than 1,000 staff, before exiting the business in 2016.

Seven tips for scaling up your training business 

1. Prepare to scale from day one

Scaling a business isn’t something that happens overnight – but when you have the right strategy, it can happen fast.

It’s an exciting time, but it comes with significant risks. If you don’t have the right foundations in place, growing too quickly can result in cracks appearing in your training provision and potentially attract the wrong sort of attention from auditors and inspectors.

That’s why it’s so important to get the right systems, processes and technologies in place from the outset. Think about not only what you’ll need today but in one, three, five and even 10 years time. Harness economies of scale by planning for the longer term. What can you put in place today that will allow you to maximise your margins without necessarily increasing your overheads?

If you’re already several years down the line, don’t worry. Make today ‘day one’. If you’re really committed to growing your training business, you need to start now.

Heather says:

“As a small business, you meet most of your clients, you hear learners’ names around the office, you have a real sense of how things are going. As the business gets bigger, you become more removed from the day to day. So you need to be able to look at the data and make sure you’re measuring the right things and have those feedback loops. And the sooner you get them in place, the better.”

2. Understand what employers want

There was a time when training providers had two groups of people they needed to keep happy: the funding bodies and the learners themselves. Employers didn’t factor as highly in the equation. After all, they weren’t having to pay for the training so they weren’t always approaching apprenticeships with the mindset of being a customer in the traditional sense.

Since the introduction of the levy, that mindset has shifted. Employers are looking more carefully at which training provider they want to work with and who is going to deliver the best return on investment. 

If you want to scale your business, it’s important to think more commercially about what you have to offer an employer. Whether that’s creating training programmes to address skills gaps or providing the latest technology to make overseeing their apprentices as easy as possible, show employers the value you can bring.

Heather says:

“Focusing on the needs of the employer and the impact you’re having on their business – and understanding what your USPs are in that regard – is vital in order to be successful. Employers want value for money; they will be measuring impact and demanding more.”

3. Recruit trainers who fit your business vision

A training provider is nothing without its trainers, which is why it’s important to choose carefully. Naturally, subject expertise and experience need to be a big part of the mix when it comes to selection criteria, but don’t forget the softer skills too.

Your trainers need to be able to engage learners, support those who are struggling and encourage them to keep moving along that learner journey. They need empathy, insight and the ability to inspire.

Perhaps most importantly as you scale your business, they need to believe in your vision. Growing your business will bring a huge amount of change, so make sure your trainers are ready to come on the journey with you.

4. Understand learners’ current and future needs

The world is changing quickly and each new generation of learners – from millennials to Gen Z and even the upcoming Generation Alpha – will have a new set of expectations for their training provision.

Today’s learners are far more educated about their options when it comes to apprenticeships than previous generations. They’re skilled at search and comparison. They have access to online ratings and reviews, and they hear personal experiences from friends and acquaintances via social media.

To attract such a discerning audience, it’s not enough to offer the chance to learn and earn a bit of money while doing it. Every provider does that. That’s why it’s important to create the best possible learner experience and outcomes, from hiring skilled trainers to harnessing technology in a way that these digital natives expect.

Heather says:

“The training providers who have scaled successfully have done things differently. They’ve looked at what the market wanted and delivered it. Learners want easy-access, remote-access, always-on learning, but also with that social element too. No one is going into a training centre 9-5 any more but young adults still want to connect.”

5. Prioritise evidence from day one – and every day after

Training provision relies on funding. Funding relies on evidence. If you’re not keeping meticulous records, you and your learners could end up losing out. This focus on compliance is especially important as you begin to grow and scale.

Make sure you have the processes and technology in place to collate and report evidence of learning and development – not just at the size you are now, but the size you’ll be in a year or five years. 

Remember, the faster you grow, the more questions that will be asked both by competitors and by funding bodies who have a duty to protect public money. Successful providers embrace this, understand the risks and build quality and compliance at the core of what they do.

Heather says:

“Ignore the requirements of funding agencies and Ofsted at your peril. Today’s most successful players know that you need to keep employers happy while also maintaining an equal focus on the evidence needed to satisfy the funders. You can’t grow one without the other. ‘I didn’t know’ isn’t an excuse. You have to be on top of all those things, operate within your contract and ensure that you’ve got the processes and procedures in place to fulfill requirements.”

6. Choose the right suppliers to help make growth easier

We’ve already talked about choosing the right trainers, but there are other individuals and businesses that can support your growth journey. It’s important to pick the right ones here too.

These include technology suppliers, content providers, awarding bodies and initial assessment providers. Ask yourself: how can each one make your life easier as you grow? Do they have the flexibility that you need to scale processes up or down?

It goes back to the point about putting the right foundations in place. Your suppliers should help you achieve your vision rather than holding you back, so focus on building the network you need. 

7. Remember that learner outcomes are your first priority

This last point is the heart of what makes any training provider successful. Everything we’ve talked about up until now is worth very little if you don’t genuinely have a passion for helping people to learn and progress in their career.

Learner success is the evidence that you’re delivering great training and that your business has the correct moral compass. Without prioritising learner outcomes, any success you might be able to achieve will be short-lived at best.

Heather says:

“Learner outcomes are directly linked to the value of your business. If learner outcomes drop, the value of the business drops. And it can’t just be about saying ‘our learners think we’re brilliant’. You need the data; you need to be able to actually bring what you’re achieving to life and demonstrate it.”

Key takeaways for scaling your business

The world of funded training provision has always been a fast-moving and changeable one. But with the market becoming more competitive, it’s more essential than ever to understand how you can scale your business in a sustainable way.

Here’s a quick round-up of the seven steps that successful training providers take to ensure they achieve their goals:

1. Prepare to scale from day one

2. Understand what employers want 

3. Recruit trainers who fit your business vision

4. Understand learners’ current and future needs

5. Prioritise evidence from day one – and every day after

6. Choose the right suppliers to help make growth easier

7. Remember that learner outcomes are your first priority

Which areas do you feel most confident about? Which ones could you focus on to improve the long-term health and growth prospects of your business?

Sustainable growth takes a combination of skilled people, the right systems, processes and technologies, and a mindset focused on the future, all aimed at creating genuinely excellent provision that puts learners first. If you can tick all of these boxes, scaling is virtually inevitable.

As a technology partner to the training sector, Bud can support you to improve many of the essential steps listed in this guide.

For example:

• Create a consistent, easy-to-use digital learning environment that learners, employers and trainers will love

• Empower learners to manage their journey from beginning to end, with an intuitive and mobile-friendly interface

• Track learner progress in real time, using reporting dashboards to monitor and improve learner outcomes

• Automatically collate evidence needed to hit compliance targets and release funding

To find out more about how we can help you scale your training business, book a discovery call.