Sean D'Souza: Get away from work and get the payback

Sean D'Souza.

Now do you make workshop training pay for itself? If you're a small business owner, the most interesting word in that sentence is "pay".

Why would you put in time, money and effort without a clear payback?

And yet most people don't have a clue what this payback could be. For me, it was about confidence.

When I first started in business, I saw myself as an impostor. I knew stuff about marketing, but didn't feel confident about my knowledge. For me, each workshop I went to built more confidence in myself. I went to many workshops and spent a lot of my money, time and energy.

Did I get a direct return on the first $12-$15k I spent? Not if you count dollars and cents. When I look back, those three workshops (and one was priced at $10,000) didn't bring in any dollars and cents. But what they brought me was confidence.

Can't you get that confidence from a book? Or an online course?

I was reading two books a week at the time. And yes, that was giving me a lot of knowledge, but for confidence I needed something else. I needed to be with real people in a real-life situation. To understand not just my strengths and weaknesses, but to see the strengths and weaknesses of others. In live workshops I learned things I could not have learned at home.

So the biggest paycheque I got was confidence. The second paycheque I got was time away.

I didn't realise the value of being away. Getting disconnected from your work enables you to connect. I'm always amazed at how people stay in touch with the office the whole time they're away on a conference. To me that's a complete waste of a workshop experience.

The time you spend travelling is the time to disconnect. That helps you think. The time you sit in the workshop and then the time after the day's proceedings - again "thinking time".

When you're connected all the time to your email and phone, you can't disconnect. Hence, you don't make use of the downtime.

But what if you're a sole proprietor? How can you let the business run without you?

Good point. And in today's world, expectations are quite high. People expect you to respond to email and answer your phone.

Actually, no they don't. They just want "someone" to answer the phone. "Someone" to answer the email. In our case, that "someone" happens to be a family member. In your case that person could be a trusted friend or a paid assistant. Or someone with whom you swap places - "you look after this stuff when I'm away and I'll do the same for you later". And that enables you to disconnect and get time to think about your business.

The third factor is simply one of connections. This is a big paycheque. Probably the biggest of them all. When you connect with others, you lay the foundation for implementation.

Because frankly speaking, most workshops are information dumps. You have 10 speakers and 20 topics, and all you can ever hope to do is clutch at a few good ideas. But even with one speaker and just a few ideas, it's still hard to implement anything, especially when you get back to your office.

There are several reasons for this:

* You have to catch up with all the work.

* You need some time to just get over the "jetlag" (even if you don't live far away).

* Implementing anything new is so darned hard, you just go back to whatever you were doing.

So connections help. When you spend time at a workshop, you get to connect at a real level with the other participants. And when you get back, you can continue that connection.

Of course, all this can be done without having a workshop, but a workshop makes the experience richer and the connections deeper.

So there you have it: 1) Confidence 2) Disconnection 3) Connection. It doesn't sound a lot like payback. And yet it is. It's the payback that is invisible and not considered, that counts the most. Eventually, you'll learn to cherish workshops instead of treating them as an expensive activity. Of course there's still the matter of money. But no workshop in the world can guarantee you money, because the money comes from implementation. And implementation counts on connection, and disconnection and confidence.

There's payback all right. It's just invisible. And now you can see it.

Sean D'Souza is chief executive of Psychotactics and an international author and trainer. He is the author of The Brain Audit - Why Customers Buy (And Why They Don't).

* psychotactics.com