The Perfect Workshop: The Consultant's Guide To Running Successful Workshops

The ability to teach great workshops is something which should be in every consultant's toolkit. Through a lot of practice and trial and error, here is my short guide to running a successful workshop.

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If you’re a consultant, being able to deliver successful online and offline workshops has to be a tool in your toolkit.

Three Types of Workshops

There are broadly three types of workshops we do.

1. Client workshops. This is where an organisation brings us in to train their team. The organisation provides the venue and undertakes recruitment, we deliver the workshop. We’re paid a fixed rate.

2. Event/organisation workshops. This is where an organisation brings us in to host a workshop for event attendees. The organisation provides the venue but we split the recruitment effort. We typically split the revenue.

3. Self-hosted workshops. This is where we host the workshop ourselves. We book the venue and undertake all the recruitment. But we keep all the profits.

Each type of workshop has pros and cons. Self-hosted workshops can be most lucrative, but only if you’re able to attract enough people to attend. We’ve had mixed results with this in the past. I know others have done incredibly well in the past. I once attended a Seth Godin Workshop at $1200 per head that had over 100 attendees. You can quickly do the math on that.

Event workshops can also be the easiest, but there’s always a risk that not enough people attend the workshop.

To simplify this post, we’ll focus on client workshops.

There is a lot to teaching a workshop, more than I can cover in a single newsletter, but here are the big things that matter.

What Should You Charge?

I once hosted a workshop for an international organisation which paid $30k+ for a single day’s work.

But my typical rate for a day-long workshop is typically between $10k to $20k.

It really depends on a bunch of things. This includes:

1. How large is the organisation? The size of the organisation has an impact on the budget. Smaller organisations simply aren’t going to have the budget for a workshop. This really creates a question of whether you want to host workshops for smaller organisations.

2. How many people are attending the workshop? The more people attending the workshop, the more the organisation will be expecting to pay.

3. How senior are the people attending the workshop? Same as the above, greater seniority means better results.

4. How important are the skills you’re teaching? Workshops that teach people how to perform a critical skill really well (like sales) tend to do better than workshops teaching people

5. Is it in-person or online? In-person workshops nearly always incur a premium due to the time involved and simply the nature of hosting workshops in person.

6. What are their alternatives? Do you have to price competitively or does the organisation specifically want you to host the workshop?

Each of these should factor into your decision-making on price.

Another consideration is whether you’re creating an entirely new workshop from scratch customised to the client or whether you can re-use previous materials which is relevant to the client?

What Makes A Workshop Unique?

Avoid The Common Mistake When Hosting Workshops

You’ve probably sat through as many poor workshops as I have.

But what makes them poor?

If I had to zero in on the biggest mistake it’s probably not understanding the core purpose of a workshop in the first place.

Bad workshops tend to be a series of lectures with some poorly thought-through activities to break up the monotony of the experience. I once attended a workshop where the host would speak for an hour and then say “Discuss these ideas between yourselves for 10 minutes”.

That’s an extreme example of what not to do, but it’s not an especially uncommon one.

The biggest mistake by far is to not understand the difference between a presentation and a workshop.

A presentation is designed to share knowledge.

A workshop is designed to teach skills.

A presentation ensures people know what to do, a workshop ensures they have the skills to do it.

For example, telling salespeople about the sales process, how to overcome rebuttals, and sharing techniques to get a commitment to action is all useful knowledge. This can be delivered as a presentation. People walk away with an improved understanding of what to do.

However demonstrating sales in practice, identifying key techniques to improve, having attendees practice those techniques, and creating an environment where they can give each other feedback is a workshop. People walk away with improved abilities.

A workshop shouldn’t be a series of lectures with some primitive interactive tasks thrown in for good measure. Instead, you have to work backwards from the skills you want people to acquire.

(aside, it’s perfectly ok to have a hybrid format which combines both).

Designing Successful Workshops

Step One: Benchmark Your Current Audience Skills

I hate to write sentences which are this obvious, but it’s worth noting you should absolutely understand the current skill and knowledge level of your audience before running a workshop.

I like to do this through benchmarking. For each topic we covered, we have a set of benchmarks where we can identify where people are today and where we can improve.

This is an older template, but it gives you an idea. We can select one skill, benchmark where people are today, and then design the workshop to take them to the next level up.

There are three ways to benchmark folks.

1. Issue a survey. Ask questions where people can rate their skill level against a given criteria to give you a broad picture of where they are today.

2. Interview prospective attendees. If a survey isn’t possible, you can interview a handful of prospective attendees to gather their feedback and understand where they are at today.

3. Ask your primary contact. If it’s not possible to speak to prospective attendees, this is less than ideal. But you can still ask your primary contact and go through a bunch of questions

4. Test it for yourself. In many situations, you can simply test processes out yourself (by joining, inquiring, or observing what happens). Then benchmark the current level.

Make sure you include benchmarking as part of the scope of work. Clients often find benchmarking to be extremely valuable.

Step Two: Designing The Right Agenda

If workshops are about skills, the key first step is to figure out what skills you want them to acquire.

Most workshops will begin with a broad goal of what attendees want to achieve. This is usually something which can be measured. Then you break this down into a series of topics to cover and then the specific skills they will learn. For example:

Topic: Improving Your Sales

1. How to find the perfect prospects.

   1. Understanding how sales decisions are really made.

   2. Finding the real buyers of consultancy services.

   3. Identifying the influencers of the buying decision.

2. Crafting the outreach email.

   1. Creating an instant value proposition.

   2. Getting the subject line right.

   3. Building trust in the follow-up.

3. Writing great proposals.

   1. Succinctly telling your story.

   2. Crafting the perfect offer.

   3. Persuasive writing techniques.

So now we have a goal (improving your sales), the three key topics, and then nine specific skills in each of those topics.

We can now easily assume this is a day-long workshop with perhaps two sessions in the morning each lasting 90 minutes and one in the afternoon.

This gives you 30 minutes to teach each individual skill.

Make sure you check this agenda with the client before you design the workshop. Getting feedback at this stage is critical.

You can see an example of this here:

RESOURCE: DOWNLOAD WORKSHOP TEMPLATE AGENDA

Step Three: Decide How To Teach The Skill

Understand the structure of how people acquire skills

For people to acquire a skill they need the following:

1. Know what to do.

2. Practice doing it.

3. Get feedback on how they did.

If we assume each skill has been allocated 30 minutes, we can divide this into:

• 10 minutes of sharing the knowledge. This is you telling them what to do and sharing examples of good and bad.

• 10 to 15 minutes of practice. This is where people have time to practice their knowledge.

• 5 to 10 minutes minutes of feedback. This is where you and others can grade and provide feedback on the results.

A quick aside here, if this is group work, you will need at least 20 minutes of time to practice the skill. In groups of four, each person needs AT LEAST five minutes of time to practice.

You have to make the means of practising the skills engaging or people will tune out.

Selecting The Right Exercises To Teach Skills

There’s no shortage of activities you can use. But there are some you shouldn’t use.

1. Requires too much time. If you’re giving people an hour to practice a skill, then they can certainly develop a presentation. But in 30 minutes, that’s just not feasible.

2. Requires people to write a lot. i.e. Having people write a proposal in a workshop is obviously not clever. Even writing a paragraph is difficult - especially in a group setting.

3. Requires too much preparation. I’ve hosted several data workshops recently. My initial plan was to have people gather data themselves they could work on in the workshop. I quickly realised that was a bad idea. Too many people would struggle to get the data. Instead, it’s easier to share or provide sample data for people to work on.

Some good exercises to consider include:

• Practice doing it. This is where people practice doing the thing you taught them. This works well when there’s some element of roleplay involved. This is the best outcome when it’s feasible. For example, public speaking workshops, sales workshops, leadership/management workshops are great for this. It’s not so great if you’re teaching, say, marketing.

• Test / Exam. Create a test and encourage people to work in pairs or in groups to answer the questions within a given time. This is fun because you can have a ‘winner’. But make sure the questions are very clearly written. It’s a good way to test whether people have memorised the knowledge. Make sure it’s a multiple choice test! You usually won’t have time to subjectively grade the responses.

• Scenario challenges. This is great when it’s not feasible for people to do the task themselves but you can give them a scenario and they can develop their best way of solving it using the knowledge you’ve given them. This works best when the best way is subjective. You can combine this with either a test or group discussion activities. The outcome is usually a presentation in groups of four but not necessarily. In a recent workshop I challenged groups to turn their measurement goals (‘the impact of community on retention’ into specific metrics (e.g. ‘the relationship no. active members in past 30 days and retention rate of orgs with at least 1 active member in the past year).

• Paired/Groups Discussions. These are great when you want people to bounce ideas off one another and understand the personal implications of their work. But give very specific instructions for this. For example, let’s imagine I’m teaching a workshop on leadership. I might set a task where people can create and rank a list of the biggest personal stress factors in leading their team. Then, in round two, I might ask them to develop ways they tackle them today.

• Games. Games, especially card-games, are where you give people a set of cards and they can decide how to play those cards to achieve their goals. If I’m teaching community, for example, I might create a set of cards featuring member types and get people to choose who they would invite to a superuser program. Another example would be letting people choose which card best helps them tackle a situation etc…

  (I remember the very clever ‘trade game’ in school . Groups take the role of high, middle, and low-income countries. High-income countries are given the means of production and money. Middle-income countries are given technical equipment pencils, ruler etc…and the low-income countries are given the raw materials (paper, glue etc..). The groups are then told to manufacture specific shapes and be paid for each.) Whomever has the most money at the end wins. It’s a clever game which teaches kids the power of bargaining, trade, and alas, in my group’s case, outright theft.)

Perhaps the real key to a successful workshop is to spend a LOT of time thinking about how you’re going to get people to practice and truly learn the skill. If the activities are an afterthought, your workshop will soon be forgotten.

But if you think of the skills you want people to acquire and then find the right way to ensure people acquire those skills, you’re going to find things a lot easier.

It’s very important not to overcomplicate the activity neither. If it takes you more than a minute to explain the activity, the activity is too complicated.

Don’t Rely On Internet Access

Let’s imagine I’m teaching a workshop for fifty people on selling consultancy services. One of my skills is ‘how to find the real buyers’.

An easy exercises here would be to give people the key information and then have them browse the internet to find the right buyer.

But two things are going to happen here.

1. About half the group won’t be able to resist checking their email.

2. There’s a high chance the internet connection will suddenly drop.

As a rule, I would avoid relying on internet access. A far better approach in this scenario would be to give people a set of cards featuring profiles of real people and asking them to evaluate if they are likely to be a buyer or not.

Do the hard work for them to make the exercise a lot better.

Step Four: Seating Plan And Group Size

There are good and bad seating arrangements.

A final thing to consider is the seating arrangements. Do your absolute best to avoid the lecture or theatre style of seating. This is where people are sitting in rows facing you. It’s just impossible to develop groups easily in this format. It’s not impossible, but it’s incredibly challenging.

The best set up is obviously groups on three to five people clustered around tables where they’re facing you when you’re speaking but can quickly adjust to facing each other when you’re not speaking.

Be mindful that when it comes to group work, each person needs equal time to speak. If you have groups of eight, you can quickly spot the problem. For each person to speak for five minutes, you will need to allocate 40 minutes. Worse yet, this means everyone is going to spend 35 minutes waiting for their turn to talk (this is also why class-sized discussions should be limited).

So even if you can’t control the seating plan and wind up with groups of 7+ people, break them down into groups of three to four people. It will make everything a lot better.

No Surprises

As a general rule, try to avoid using a technology or engaging in a situation where you’re not familiar with what you’re doing. I’m hosting an online workshop later today where the organiser invited me to run breakout groups.

In theory, this is a great idea. In person I would absolutely do it. But I’m not comfortable with the technology and don’t have the ability to test and practice it with groups beforehand. There’s too many things which could go wrong.

Start Small And Build Slowly

Your first workshops might not be great and that’s ok

The best way to practice workshops is by hosting a couple of free online sessions first. This lets you focus on a few specific activities without the fear of making mistakes in front of a larger group.

Once you’ve hosted a few online workshops, then you can expand to bigger groups and in-person. Paid workshops can be a powerful way of attracting clients and earning a great living - but make sure you build each skillset slowly, be clear about the outcomes, and then develop a great session.

P.s. Don’t forget the template agenda.

P.P.S I highly recommend this book (most of what I learned about workshops I learned from this book).

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Thanks for reading

Richard Millington