How to Build Teaching Material to Scale Your Company the Right Way

You’re reading an excerpt of Great Founders Write, by Ben Putano, writer, entrepreneur, and book publisher. He’s the founder of Damn Gravity Media, a publishing house that inspires and educates tomorrow’s great founders. Purchase now for lifetime access to the book and on-demand video course.

I wish I had known Andrew Barry back in 2018. He would have saved me a lot of pain … and money.

Instead, I had to learn the hard way what happens when a fast-growing company fails to properly train their team.

WeContent was finally picking up steam. After months of cold outreach, I had just closed our best month ever—literally double the revenue from the month prior. But that also meant we had twice as many blog posts to write. I quickly got to work contracting three new writers and a freelance editor to meet the demand. The folks I found had good resumes and strong portfolios. I assigned them to my existing accounts so I could focus on our new, bigger clients.

Companies hired WeContent to teach complex tech topics through blog posts and white papers. The irony is that when I hired my new teammates, I failed to teach them the process that had made us successful. Instead of taking the time to train my team, I simply assigned article topics and deadlines for the first drafts.

The writers submitted their work promptly, but I was too busy for a proper review. After a quick scan of each piece, I sent the first batch of articles over to my longest-standing client. About a day later, I got this email from the CEO:

Ben -

First, I’ll say the first 10 or so articles are absolutely amazing and have been really good for us, have gotten a lot of great feedback. You knocked it out of the park.

That said, wanted to drop you a line as I would want someone to tell me. The quality has dropped off significantly.

Totally understand this might be a part of the leveling up process but I’ll just say the last few articles we’ve gotten back have been pretty rough. I think Laura can give some more detailed feedback as well but what I’m seeing is:

• I’ve spent more time editing these last 3 or 4 articles than all other articles combined, that’s not taking into account Laura’s time.

• The lack of understanding of our product, platform and general company is frustrating

• Our voice from the first several articles is completely gone. Zero conversational tone. These feel worse than reading a research paper.

Let me know how we can improve on our side to get you what you need.

(Emphasis mine)

By the time I got that email, it was too late. I had commissioned about 30 blog posts for that month, and all of them were coming back with the same issues in quality, research, and voice. I had no choice but to pay the contractors (it wasn’t their fault), let them go (I couldn’t afford to pay them again), and rewrite all the articles myself. It took me three months to catch up, during which I received no pay and lost half of my new clients.

That takes us back to Andrew Barry. Had I known him in 2018, I would have learned the critical lesson of training my team for success.

Barry is an accountant by schooling but a teacher by passion. After working in corporate training for a decade, he started a learning development and consulting group called Curious Lion. Barry has worked with organizations ranging from Pinterest to KPMG to the NBA.

Curious Lion does more than build online training programs—they create learning cultures within companies. When education becomes a habit, you’re able to grow your business without the false starts like we had at WeContent.

Much of your job as a founder is to teach and train. You have to teach potential customers about your unique approach and solution (See Chapter 3: Sell With Storytelling). You also need to train employees, contractors, and virtual assistants to run the ship while you continue steering. Fail at one of these jobs and you’ll run out of fuel. Fail at the other, and you’ll blow up the engine.

But teaching is more than just the transfer of information. Facts and formulas are useless without knowing why they’re important, where they fit into the big picture, and how to use them.

Almost all of your training material will be in written form (even training videos start out as scripts.) So what does good training content look like?

To set your team up for success, let’s look at Andrew Barry’s 5-Step Framework for writing training material:

1. Building blocks

2. Learning outcomes

3. Delivery format

4. Storyboard

5. Reinforcement