Why have I invested in cracking tea and coffee for training? To help give a cracking experience

One of the beautiful parts of being your own boss is to make decisions and then backing yourself.

Over the past seven years I must have trained more than 3,000 people across the UK. Training has become a big part of what I do. First, under the comms2point0 banner and then moving across to be freelance.

One universal truth is that the quality of the tea and coffee can often be linked to the feedback. Provide a decent brew and a good lunch and you are half way there. When you think about it, if people are travelling a distance and you are with them all day a good cup of coffee is the minimum really, isn't it?

But when COVID-19 happened training face-to-face ended over night.

I shifted my training online and I've really enjoyed it. They are bitesize chunks and spread over a number of weeks. Why? Because people have had enough of wall-to-wall Zoom. Besides, soak up learning for an hour or two is about as much as most will manage.

When I was delivering it, I enjoyed it.

But one thing was missing.

The tea and coffee and cake.

So, I've retrospectively gone back to attendees to ask if I could send them some tea and coffee and some postcards and stickers by way of thank you. I'm pleased to say the experiment has been a success.

The feedback was really positive.

The easy - and cheaper - thing to do was to not do this. There's a cost involved. Decent teabags from Teapigs cost money. So do Tunnocks tea cakes, packaging, postage and ground coffee. But I strongly think that training should be experiential. It should be fun, creative and it should feel as though its not a regular work meeting.

It should be positive.

Frankly, the process of choosing the coffee was a joy on its own.

A mate who runs a publishing company was talking about how she selected some specially ground coffee to send out to people who buy her books. The coffee roaster was in Staffordshire and a trip to see him was an experience buy itself. He roasts his coffee using a machine before grinding it himself. He's been working with coffee since 1969 and makes it for independent cafes across the UK.

He's a bloke who really cares about the coffee and making a good product. That's absolutely something I can relate to.

It's about not just the learning but the experience that goes with it, too.