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2 Look Mom, I Built a Virtual Training Studio

In January 2019, I sat down with David Monostori, who leads our creative team, and laid out my plan to build a virtual training studio complex at our corporate headquarters from the ground up.

There were two things driving this plan. First, I was worried about the inevitability of a recession hitting within 18–24 months and that we needed to be prepared. Second, I was very unhappy with the of our virtual training deliveries (see voice-over PowerPoints).

In recessions, travel budgets always get slashed, which is generally devastating to private training companies and corporate learning and development (L&D) departments. However, even in recessions, people need training. In fact, when times are bad, elevating and training talent gives organizations a competitive edge. Back in 2019, my plan had been to prepare to shift to high-quality virtual delivery as a hedge for when the next recession hit.

I also thought we could do better, whether or not there was a recession. Personally, I wasn't proud of our virtual training performance and quality. Our virtual deliveries were often poorly planned and delivered on the fly in airports, hotel rooms, and even cars.

David and I devised a plan to build broadcast-quality sound studios specifically for virtual training delivery. When we presented the idea to the rest of the team, though, it didn't go over well. My CFO was not happy about the massive expense involved in building the studio. The sales and training teams thought we were nuts because, in their minds, no one was going to buy virtual training on a scale that could justify the cost to build studios. To them, I was just another Don Quixote fighting imaginary giants.

We ignored the skepticism and forged forward with construction anyway and built three full-production virtual training studios. A year later, at the beginning of March 2020, the construction crew was still working on the finishing touches and much of the equipment we'd ordered wasn't even out of the boxes. Then, the pandemic stuck. We worked around the clock for several weeks to get the studios ready for action.

This included teaching our trainers to deliver virtual training in a whole new way. Gone forever were the days of voice-over PowerPoint slides. Our trainers stepped out from behind the slides and in front of the camera and we became laser-focused on delivering a legendary virtual training experience. Our new studios gave us the ability to re-create the feel of being in the classroom and interacting with the instructor.

“Our People Won't Accept It!”

With the studios up and running, we were able to beg, plead, and convince our customers to give virtual training a chance. We sent them pictures of our sets, did virtual tours of our studios, and put on our tap-dancing shoes.

Many of our clients pushed back against moving their classes to a virtual classroom. The head of leaning and development (L&D) for a large Fortune 500 client argued emphatically, “Our people won't accept it!” Like so many of our customers, he worried that it would be a low-quality disaster. Such was his experience. Finally, though, we convinced him to give it a try. He agreed, but he forced us to conduct a twice-per-week planning meeting over the three weeks prior to the training.

On that first run, we had people from all over the world in the classroom. Traditionally, these folks would have traveled to the company's headquarters for the training, spending hours on airplanes, days in transit, and thousands of dollars to attend the two-day course that we taught for his company.

Following the virtual experience, we surveyed the participants. They gave the experience a 4.9 on a scale of 5.0. The in-person, classroom experience that we had been delivering for the past three years averaged a 4.7 across all of the previous participant surveys.

This was not what the head of L&D was expecting because, up until that point, his experience with virtual training had been dreadful, and his learners had agreed with that assessment.

One participant commented, “I'll admit, I didn't want to attend this training. But, I'm glad I did. I never thought a virtual training could hold my attention. The training was outstanding.” (Most other comments from that session followed this same pattern.)

Our client was convinced—so much so that he hired us to teach his internal trainers to deliver virtual training like ours. It was our very first Virtual Learning Experience® Train the Trainer delivery. Today, his organization is delivering more than half of its courses from a virtual classroom, and the course we teach has remained virtual.

That wasn't a one-off experience, either. In April 2020, we were confronted by a CEO of a mid-sized business-services company that had scheduled a three day in-classroom training with us. He demanded a refund for the course because he didn't want it delivered virtually, which, at that time was our only choice. He hit us with a stream of expletives, among them, “I'm not f@cking doing that [virtual training] to my people.”

We managed to convince him to give the virtual training delivery a try with a guarantee that if he and his people didn't like it, we would give him a full refund. As he entered the virtual classroom, along with his skeptical learners, I'll never forget the look on his face as he mouthed wow silently. He did not ask for his money back, and we are still delivering virtual training for his company.

Virtual Training Explosion

A couple of weeks later, we were delivering virtual training to a group of sales professionals in India for one of our most valued clients. Because of our history with this company, it hadn't been too difficult to convince them to shift the scheduled physical deliveries to virtual.

Still, there were top executives observing the training because there was so much skepticism (this was true for almost all of our early VILT deliveries). About 10 minutes into the training, we overheard the senior vice president on an unmuted mic calling the CEO and telling him, “Log in now … You've never seen anything like this!”

The company subsequently engaged us to deliver virtual trainings to participants in countries all across the globe. We began following the sun from Asia to Europe to North America, teaching people from around the world, from our virtual training studios in Georgia.

Suddenly, at least in the eyes of my team, I went from a man tilting at windmills to a genius. My trainers bought in and my salespeople, for the first time, felt confident selling virtual training. Our clients and their learners loved the experience we were delivering. Once they experienced our methodology, they were willing to pay a premium for high-quality virtual instructor-led training.

What we hadn't anticipated, though, was that the savings on travel costs and flexibility that VILTs afforded would cause them to double, triple, and even quadruple the trainings they were ordering. In the middle of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, our business exploded.