Building a training calendar. Interview with Philipp Engstler.

Philipp Engstler

Nice talking to you.

Philipp Engstler

Yeah, happy to do so. Flowdays is a cooperative we founded more than six years ago now. We are based in Switzerland, and serve basically Germany, Austria, Switzerland, German-speaking people, but also corporations. And we also give trainings in the Agile area in the English language as well. For about four years or three and a half years, we have decided to create the Agile Academy, which is part of the Flowdays Corporation, and we run with the Workshop Butler on that.

That's basically our set-up. That's what we do, we are all agilists by heart and by soul. We're into Agile and Agile organizations, and this is also what we teach.

Philipp Engstler

The cooperative is basically a set up where we bring our interests into this cooperative and make it run. Instead of having five, six, seven, eight, or several multiple owned companies with one or two employees, we have a kind of connection with each other in this cooperative, which has the big advantage for us that we do not need to make money by law. Of course, we want to earn money for what we do, but we don't have to make money or have to show the taxes that we have great wins at the end and growth. We're not committed. We don't need to grow or have a lot of reserves which we have to put at the bank as a regular company has. We don't have a boss. We are on the I level and have to talk to each other.

We found it is a great start when we founded a company, to have a learning company.

That's what we are right now. It's not always easy, I must say. Without the boss everyone is the boss, so making sure we get in one direction. But these are the main reasons that we have a legal base where we can actually practice a non-boss firm.

Philipp Engstler

Yes, so we have basically the inner circle, as we call it, or the heart of Flowdays cooperative. These are the people who make sure that the company runs and also bring in some labour and leave some money there. And we have an outer ring or Flowdays friends, we call them. That's the people we really like and of course, we hope that they like us as well. We like to work with each other. They don't want to become Flowdays core members or so, but they are interested in freelance-based work with us. The good cooperation from the past has shown that this is quite a good solution for people looking for work or freelance-based mandates and stuff. So that's what we are doing right now.

Philipp Engstler

Yes, well, it’s not an easy one. As you mentioned, it’s quite a complex thing. We have friends that work with us, maybe with others. We have to coordinate these potential dates from all these different trainers. This is what an academy does, this is kind of our core competence at the end.

But you asked me how we do this. Basically, we communicate a lot and we feel independent. When each of the Flowdays Academy members or trainers wants to schedule their training, they go to our website or our backend and find out when our trainings are already planned and if there is a conflict. We can run two different classes at the same time, this is not a problem. But it’s up to the trainer, so we delegate it to the trainer to find the dates they want to offer their classes. They have to check themselves in the backend. And then they enter basically a plan for the next half a year.

And every half a year we do have a meeting where we meet in the small inner circle, come up with the schedule, send it out, and get the agreements. That’s basically it.

Philipp Engstler

Yes, but that's very operative, what I just mentioned. That's just one side. The other side is a more tactical or strategic one — when is it seasonally a good time to offer trainings. What we find out is that in Switzerland at least, in Q4 (October, November, December) it's a very good time to offer training. The year is almost over, people still have a budget, and corporations are looking for trainings. They also have a bit more quiet time, where they find space to fit training into their schedule. So Q4 seems to be a very good time for trainings here in Switzerland.

Of course, summer vacation is not the best time as many people are out and not in the office. Or if they're in the office, they have to be a deputy of others and have a lot of tasks to do. These things are quite obvious.

And then we look back for the last few years and find out when we saw a good amount of bookings over the year, try to find out and figure out why this happened and try to make use of this know-how again for the next year planning.

So, what we do is delegate it to the trainers. They come up with some dates when they think it’s good. During the planning session we give trainers feedback if this might not be a good idea or this is a good idea. Then we get along with each other and have the dates done.

And then there's a third side, which is basically the strategical one — how many and what training shall we offer. If we offer too many, we don’t have enough people who sign up for it and we have to move the dates or transfer people who have signed up into other classes, which we don’t like to do. Imagine, you sign up for a class which happens in two or three weeks and you are looking forward to it, and then the couple of days before the training should start you get the message that the class wouldn’t happen. This is a lot of inconvenience we don’t actually want to bring to the participants.

At the same time we know that participants sign up. Especially, one of the big things is the timing. The more trainings we offer the more we catch. So there’s this — should we offer a lot of trainings or just enough? What is “enough”? Will we not catch people because they go to someone else and buy it there?

So this is a bit of a mismatch. And it’s also difficult for us. If anyone out there has a good tip on how we could do that better, how we better come to the numbers, we are so open and looking for your answer as well.

Philipp Engstler

That's absolutely true. No, we have not found it yet.

From the participants’ side — I already mentioned it. But there's also a story from the trainers’ side. The trainers also have a calendar and reservation in their calendars. If we have to cancel the training, then these guys have no work, and they don't earn any money during that time. You see the difficulties, right?

Philipp Engstler

Yeah, good question. I'd say, it's quite a pragmatic one.

We have given ourselves an OKR (a key result) which is 80% of the trainings which are on our website, shall not be cancelled. The maximum that we want to cancel is 20% of the trainings.

What we do is we try to figure out where the people are. Sometimes you know when you are in coaching sessions if there are some people interested, or we get people who send us emails or sign up for something or have a request or call in. So we got a bit of a feeling of how many people want to come up. We work together with HR departments and their internal academies, so we could also get some numbers, some forecasts from them. But this is just a gut feeling. But at least it’s one of the inputs we have.

And the other one is we ask all the participants in our trainings why they have decided it, where did they find us, so we can enhance our reach and the effectiveness of our ads or commercials or social media posts. So we could expand our reach to get the information out to more people and hopefully to get more market share and more participants over time.

Philipp Engstler

Well, a good question. We look back to the years before and see the seasonality and see when trainings had good bookings.

We ask people we know in larger companies if they are interested in our trainings, if people want to sign up for our training, if they know. So we try to get some information out prior to our plan, if possible. We work together with these internal academies, so we might get a bit of feeling what’s hip, what’s in, what's good. That's how we try to get information.

And the rest is just guessing. We do some experiments and find out what happens. We come up with hypothesis and say: “Oh, okay, we think that before holidays or vacation time or after is a good time”. And then we try.

It's been difficult for the last one and a half years, with COVID. Honestly, we guess a lot and we do a lot of experiments. We are using the data afterwards, but still we do a lot of experiments.

Philipp Engstler

Yes, so we gather the data, the actuals of signups, and also all the feedback from the people who participate in our trainings. So when we ask and say: “Why did you sign up? Where did you find us?”, we get some information.

If they, for example, saw us at the conference and then signed up for training, we know that conference has worked very well, people see us talking, and then they say: “Well, these are cool guys. I would like to sign up”. Then we get a feeling of where people take a decision and what that means. We also do some interviews from time to time, go deeper and check out what was their decision path and how did they get into the sales funnel, what did they need before they sign up and stuff.

We are a small company, so we are not too deep into that. We would like to know much more, but we actually don't have enough data to follow up on this.

Philipp Engstler

Right, sometimes there are opportunities. Sometimes you see that there is no one or not that many people have signed up. We might call them and say: “Hey, what about if we could transfer you to another training? There are not enough people who have signed up for training.” And then we get some days off our schedule. And maybe we have some opportunities at the business where we coach and we have available days suddenly, which is also an opportunity from time to time, which is not the goal, not a target, but very pragmatic flying down the calendar’s timeline. So we can fill up these days with coachings if we're lucky.

Philipp Engstler

Yeah, that's nicely summed up, Sergey.

Philipp Engstler

So you're not starting up a training company now?

Philipp Engstler

But if you want to do so, I'm happy to share our experiences.

Philipp Engstler

Go out and try. It may be a good point to start with.

Thank you for the interview, for having me here.

Philipp Engstler

You too. See you, Sergey.