How Administrate 2X this Company’s L&D Growth

Alright. Welcome, everyone, to another LinkedIn live stream. But this time, we are not streaming from our intergalactic headquarters in Edinburgh, Scotland. We've got a special on the road edition for you today. And the reason we're on the road is usually that I'm out visiting customers or, hanging out with prospects or going to an event or something or learning more about the training industry in general, but not this week. Not this weekend. This weekend was a special March Madness edition of, travel. My team, North Carolina State, made the final four, and we had to go. So it was a great experience, highly recommend, but that's why we're out here in Phoenix, Arizona. And, unfortunately, weren't in the championship game last night, but it's, been a great experience.

So took the opportunity to keep our, weekly stream going, and we've got a fun topic to talk about today. One of my favorite stories, how a training team really, changed the game for them. And, you know, as always, happy to, answer any questions, connect with me on LinkedIn, and we'll have a great kind of consolidated resource of what we're gonna talk about today for you to download if you'd like at the end, just to make sure that you can, kinda work through and maybe use it to to solve some of your own challenges. So let's, dive in here. Now, one of the things that was important, well, one of the things that I wanted to change is you may have seen on the title for this live stream, it was originally how training teams, can, manage two times growth without additional budget.

But I wanted to change that slightly because really this story is about a training team that drove two times growth. And it wasn't just two times growth of their training, it was two times growth of their entire facility and business. And so, really, for the agenda today, I wanna go through you know, we have our normal intro, greetings, salutations. In fact, I'm also gonna share a good travel tip whenever we do one of these, streams from the road. And, so we're gonna get get through that and then talk a little bit about how we think about growth here at administrate, how our customers think about growth, how they kind of approach it, what are some of the challenges involved when you're growing quickly, and, and also, what is the strategy, how do you execute it?

And, ultimately, what are the outcomes that you should be kinda looking for? So that's kinda what we're gonna cover today. And, really, this story begins with a company called Boston Whaler, and this is one of the boats that they make. They are originally, or they're famous for being, known as the unsinkable boat manufacturer. I don't think they've ever had a boat sink. And the reason for that is they've got this very innovative hull design. Now I'm not a mechanical engineer, you know, or anything like that, but as I understand it, the actual hull, if you look down at kind of the bottom of that, the boat, the whole piece is made of a kind of it's in layman's terms, kind of a styrofoam, structure, and that means that the hull itself is buoyant.

And they've got a famous picture of, the founder of this company driving a boat or do you drive a boat? You sail a boat. Sailing a boat through the, through a harbor, and the front half of it has been cut off, but it's still floating because the, the hull itself is very buoyant, which is, I guess, unusual. And Boston Whaler had a problem, and that was they needed to grow. So, at this time, this is about six or seven years ago, the economy was doing really well, and their boat line was doing very well. They I think they had, acquired the Mercury brand of engines, and so there's a lot of things that were going well, and they wanted to start building bigger boats. They've kind of been specializing in the sub, I I don't know, thirty five foot category, and they wanted to build bigger and bigger boats.

And so, what they did is they said, we have got to double the size of our factory, not only in just headcount terms, but also in terms of, actual physical plant size needed. So they had to buy land. They're kind of on this inlet in in North Florida. They had to buy more land, and they had to two x their headcount. They had to two x their product line because they're gonna bring out these new models of boats. And the physical space, of course, needed to to accommodate all these extra people and these much bigger boats. You know, the the actual assembly lines needed to get physically bigger. They were going to need a bigger boat. Somebody told me to make that joke, and, well, now I've done it, and we're gonna continue right on.

And, actually, this kind of challenge around growth is is something that many of us are familiar with. And, you know, even if your company is not growing at two times speed, you can still experience, know, training teams in particular can still experience, you know, areas where they'll need to grow the the training that they have to deliver. That could be because maybe the company made an acquisition. Maybe, there has been a product line reduction, and people need to be retrained on what we're gonna sell going forward. There's a whole bunch of reasons why growth needs to happen, and it's not necessarily overall company or organizational growth. But in this case, it was. Okay? And this is the, I would say, typical reaction that that people have when they're faced with, we gotta do at least a minimal, minimum of doubling the training, because they had to onboard all these people, but they also had to train them up from scratch because as a manufacturer, you know, even if you've been a lifelong welder or something, if you come in and, and were hired by Boston welder, you had to be trained from the ground up to to do your entire job.

So this is the the typical reaction. And the reason for this is because you have more training. That means you're gonna need more money. You're gonna definitely need more heads, and all of this leads to more headaches. That's the conventional wisdom. Our goal today is to kinda maybe show you an alternate path. Some would say an alternate reality where you don't necessarily need to, spend more money, go out there and and really bump up your headcount and have all these additional headaches, if you're gonna deliver more training. There's a there's another way. This is our thesis here at administrate. And just for some context, this is kind of the numbers that we're talking about. So, you know, it's a midsize manufacturer, small to midsize manufacturer.

They had a head count of about eight hundred people. They wanted to double that, and they were targeting kind of around sixteen hundred. They figured that they needed to overhire and get to kind of seventeen, eighteen hundred because there'd be natural attrition for for the folks that came on board. They had a very, very small training team. You know, many of the training teams that we work with are in kind of the, you know, dozens or, you know, fifty to a hundred folks. This was a small training team. They were already pretty lean and pretty efficient. So, they were the team that was responsible for training the existing staff, and they needed to also bring in, the the new folks. And the training team of the five, they would all teach courses, but because many of these courses were very technical and involve things, you know, like, actually putting stuff together, they had about ten to fifteen instructors that would kind of work part time out on the factory floor, but would also be part of the instruction team.

And they kind of really knew that classroom instruction was really, really critical. That was the best way for them to to teach and train up their workforce. But often, they were kind of struggling even at the time before they started to grow with the the delivery of this because, you know, they would, just get too busy. It was an administrative nightmare to to make sure all the stuff was scheduled in classes. And so they were kind of falling back and relying on their LMS in areas where they actually would prefer not to. And so that was, like, a core concern as well. And then they did have a lot of hands on training, and what that meant was because they were a manufacturer where guys are using their hands and people are going out there and and building stuff, the, there were the hands on training usually required, very resources were often very difficult to manage.

And in addition to that, in order to kind of suit up and learn how to fiberglass the whole of a boat, for example, you had to have a whole bunch of safety prerequisites and things that must be true before you started that hands on training. And, you know, just as an example of some of the hands on training that we're talking about, you know, fiberglassing is one. You know, they get donned head to toe with protective garb and then go in, and it was, like, looked like this, you know, garden hose sprayer, and they would spray this this mold and and so forth. And I don't understand much of any of it, but, very hands on. So you have a limited number of spray booths, you have limited number of molds, And, you know, it's this type of management of, is the spray booth gonna be available two weeks from next Tuesday? You know, where do you store that information?

A lot of it was being done in spreadsheets. Some of it was being done in whiteboards. Some of it was being done with SharePoint. You know, these are familiar tales, from from training teams out there. And in addition to all of this, right, so you had not only did you have the eight hundred people that already worked at Boston Whaler, but you needed to train up eight hundred new people, and then the eight hundred existing people had to be recertified throughout the year. Not everybody had to get recertified on everything, you know, every year, but recertification burden was existing, and important, and they also had to make sure that they trained the eight hundred people, that were already at the factory on the new boat models that they were going to be building. Right? So this wasn't just, kind of linear doubling of work for the training team.

It it act and and we see this a lot. Right? If the the organization wants to double, sometimes the training team's workload can ten x, or more. And so this is a very, very difficult problem that they were gonna need help to solve. And so when they thought about this, you know, how are we gonna deal with this challenge? Really, there are kind of five key things that helped drive this two x growth. Okay? And I'm gonna start from the bottom and work up because, you know, this is a nontraditional stream day for us, but it's actually because, the top one was was the most important. I wanna spend a minute or two talking about that. But, basically, what they did is they they really wanted to invest in automation because they knew that the their, you know, doubling their headcount and spending all this money, it could be done, but they felt like there was a better way.

And so they said, you know, we're they looked at their team. They were already doing tons and tons of manual administrative, kind of very important, but very low value work. You know, it's just not high value sending out reminder emails or making sure that everybody's calendar is updated and so forth. And they they looked at their team, they said, you know, we could actually get this done if we could stop doing all this administrative manual work. And so automation became a priority for them, and then what they wanted to do is take the the time that they reclaimed from all of this manual administrative low value work, and they wanna invest that re reclaimed time. They also decided that in order to hit their growth objectives, they couldn't rely on elearning solely. Right? And they really wanted to double down on classroom training.

And so for them, they knew that the best fastest way to get people out on the assembly line and productive was to go through classes. And so they made the decision that classroom training, they're gonna double down on. They're gonna still use elearning where it made sense, but it really wanted to focus on getting the highest quality training to the folks the fastest in a way that they could measure, that they could, really make sure that people were learning how to do these intricate assemblies very well and so forth. And, they also integrated their learning systems with their manufacturing systems. Now I've got an asterisk next to that because that's an entirely different story and entirely different, kind of focus, and I wanna skip over that today. But that was kind of like phase two. So we wanna focus on really the the tangible things that they that they did that, didn't require any outside IT help or assistance or investment, and we'll probably talk about that story later on, in a in a future livestream.

But, ultimately, all of this and what I thought was so smart by the CEO of Boston Whaler, who actually, bizarrely, went to university in, in Edinburgh. So that was something that was kinda cool. That CEO was very, very smart. He came in. He said, we've got this goal. We're gonna have to double the size of the factory. We're gonna have to double our team size. We're gonna have to double our product line. And in order to do that, the training team is going to be pretty much the first phone call. So they were the first group along with HR that was told this news, that started planning for this, and so forth. And this is really what we wanna see is when an organization is going through big change, the training team needs to be on the forefront of that and really kind of lead the charge.

And that was something that they did that thought that I thought was very smart. It's hard to do sometimes in, corporate environments, but if you're out there listening and you're running an organization and you're about to go through a big train change, highly recommend you get the training team involved early and often. Okay. And so they wanted to get all this automate all this manual work automated, and then they wanted to take that time that they were spending on automation or on manual work and reinvest it. And so we call this kind of reclaimed time. You know, what would you do what could you do if you got eighty percent or ninety percent of your time back? Most training teams today, and this is a deep sadness for us, and it's why kind of we exist and why we get out of bed in the morning.

Most training teams today spend a huge amount of their time not training, not teaching, not helping with organizational change, but doing manual work. Manual work primarily around scheduling. So even if you only do elearning, there's gonna be a lot of work usually just to get the right students onto the right, you know, courses and so forth. And if you're doing classroom training, there's so much work that needs to be done to get these students into a class, make the class effective, make sure these teachers arrive, make sure the equipment is there, and so forth. And that's just not, you know, high value, high return work. And so to automate that and get back that time, you then have these avenues that you can really invest.

And, we see this all the time. The average customer of administrate, just to toot our own horn here, will usually double the volume, and that's usually worst case. I think it's the worst we've ever seen. It was but minimum double the volume of training that they deliver within the first year after implementing the ministry because they get so much of their time back. And what they did at Boston Whittler specifically was they improved their instruction. So they actually went and, did a whole lot of work on making sure that the materials that they had were updated. They standardized things. So it was a good opportunity to say, okay. We're launching new product lines. Let's incorporate the things that we've learned in in how to teach people to do this and, put it into, you know, that that new training, but then let's take what they learned and back port that and kind of revise all the existing training materials as well.

So that was a a really high value thing that they did. They improved, the materials, but they also improved how they were teaching. So they actually spent time saying, alright. Who's doing the best job here from the instructional, you know, the the actual instructor perspective? And then what can we do to roll those best practices out across the entire team. They, also improved a lot of their processes. So with with automation, you know, all of a sudden, they could sit down and say, okay. What's the ideal process? How do we make sure that it's if it's automated, it can it can run the same way every time. You get a bunch of standardization. And so they standardize all their processes around, you know, getting students onto a course and so forth, and and that was really, really, valuable. And then one thing that I thought was super interesting that I'm not sure I don't think I'll ever forget was they actually found that folks were getting, you know, they're getting hired.

And I think one time when I visited, it was on a Monday, and that was, like, intake day. Right? So there's, like, twenty people in the lobby, and they're all filling out paperwork and stuff, and then they were they were hired, and then they'd start the training. And the interesting thing about it was they would start training, and they'd go in. And the specific example that was used was the fiberglass kind of piece of the the instruction. So if you can imagine, it's Florida, it's hot, it's humid. You're going in, you've got head to toe garb all over, protective goggles, everything, and you take this sprayer. And there's a mold, and you're in this, like, kind of hot shed and whatever, and you start spraying it. And I think the goal was to get it as even as possible. Right? And there's an instructor in there, and it's loud because there's a compressor and all that stuff. And so you're kind of in this hot, cramped, you know, unfamiliar garb all over you.

You can't see super well, and it's very loud. And at every point, an instructor is kinda shouting instructions to you because it's very, very loud. And what would happen was, the first time that you would do that, you wouldn't do it very well. Right? And so you'd you know, they and they showed us a few examples. They were like, here's a piece of fiberglass from, you know, somebody who's just now learning. And it was bumpy and irregular and stuff, and they're like, this is what we want to see. Well, what was happening was the, after that experience, the student would just be like, man, I didn't do a good job, and they would quit. And they noticed that there is a huge dropout rate of folks literally saying, I can't do this, or I did a bad job, or, you know, I'm going to get fired anyway because I did a bad job, so I might as well quit.

They saw a lot of that happening. And so what they did is they started improving the expectation setting before every class and along each course and so forth. And that really cut down on folks that were dropping out of the program because now all of a sudden, it was like, it's okay to, you know, take four or five times. It's normal to take four or five times to learn something. So I thought that was really interesting. They also spent a lot of time training trainers. So they got they kind of beefed up their instructor, their part time instructor, crew. Now it wasn't necessarily like a huge bandwidth, improvement that they had, in terms of just raw numbers of hours or bodies that people had. It was they worked a little bit more on the the kind of flexibility aspects, and they made sure that they had people available in the morning and the afternoon, for example, to to teach, which they they didn't have before.

And all of this was kind of just through this analysis that they could perform once they got their day to day jobs automated. They could start looking into how do we do these improvements, how do we figure out what's working and what's not. And, you know, it's a that's a really important thing that, folks, need to do. And so the outcomes was growth. It was a it was a fantastic outcome. They doubled their production. They doubled their boat lines. It was really, really cool to see and, like, literally go visiting there, before this growth had happened and then visiting after. And there's like, wow. There's new buildings and and all these new people, new parking lot, and so forth. So it was really, really cool. And through that process, you know, I think I mentioned a little while ago, that, they kind of expected to go they needed to get to to sixteen hundred bodies, but they expected to need to hire about seven hundred to eighteen hundred.

Well, what they found was that they had a sixty percent reduction in employee churn. So not only were the dropouts not happening anymore when new hires came on board, but actually existing employees were staying with the company. And that they attributed that entirely to the improvements they made in the training programs, which is really cool to see. So not only did they not have to do that over hiring, but, they hung on to folks, that they really wanted to to hang on to because they could identify if somebody was struggling and and train them, and and so forth. So, the other thing that was really cool to see, that we love to see and we expect to see, with customers is career advancement. So not only the the director of training get a promotion and a raise, but the CEO of Boston Wither got a promotion and a raise, and actually became a CEO of a much bigger group of boat manufacturers, that's owned by Brunswick today.

So that was really cool. And, ultimately, that team had this foundation. So they they went through the grinder. It it wasn't easy, but they went through the grinders about a twelve to eighteen month, time frame. And, after they came out of that, they knew not only could they be up for any challenge, but that they had a foundation of automation and process improvement and, and and good tech backing them up, to take them on into the future. So it was a it was a really, really cool story. And if you wanna read more about it, we've got a QR code up there. That's a screenshot of the case study. We'd, invite you to go to the website and download that. And, I'm gonna see if we've got any, questions or, or comments from folks.

We encourage you to comment. If you don't wanna download the case study, you know, connect with me on LinkedIn. I'd love to buy a a virtual coffee or, you know, I'm on the road quite a bit throughout Europe and the US and would love to hang out with you forever in the same city or same event. But I did promise you, that I would provide you a travel tip today, because this is a special, LinkedIn live from the road. And so my travel tip today is actually one of the newest travel tips in my quiver. I travel something like, I don't know, hundred and twenty, hundred fifty thousand miles a year or something along those lines. And this is one of the newest things that I have now in my quiver of tricks to make traveling just a little bit easier, and it's this right behind me.

Let's see if I can show you all. I'm gonna go back to the the part of you. This this is a travel electric guitar. Okay? Now it looks a little bit weird, and the reason is is because these metal things, I probably won't even be able to do this now. We're live. They come off. Right? Which means that I only have to carry kind of like this, tennis racket sized bag. And, this thing, because it's electric, and, it's got a nine volt battery in the back here, and then I can plug in my headphones or amp. I can play this at home too, And, I can be off and rocking, even if we're, you know, in an airport waiting room.

You know, I don't normally play it around people, but, you know, it's quiet in a hotel room. Nobody's gonna hear it, and, you can you can go nuts. So that's my my trial tip. Find a portable, electric, quiet version of your instrument, and then you can keep practicing on the road. So okay. Let's see here. Still can, scan that QR code if you like to download that resource, but, next week on Tuesday, we'll be back at our intergalactic headquarters. The basketball season is over. It will be back in Edinburgh, and I'm gonna be joined with one of our solution engineers, a guy named Kevin, who is instrumental in making sure our customers get up and running and successful quickly.

And he and I are gonna talk about how we integrate administrate with an LMS or multiple LMSs in just a few days. Days. And we're actually gonna show you one of these integrations, working, and, it'll be a great nerdy chat, maybe a little bit more hands on and down and dirty than than north than we've been doing in the past. But if you like to join us, those, we're we're doing this usually on Tuesdays, most weeks, and, would love to see you there. Just follow us on LinkedIn. Connect with me. Connect with some of our team. We'd love to answer any questions you have. And, I think that is pretty much that. Live from the road out here in Phoenix, celebrating college basketball and the unlikeliest run-in college basketball history with the NC State Wolfpack. My name is John.

Definitely, check-in with us, and, and we'll see you next week. Have a good one.