Ask most businesses how much they spend on training their people and, unless the answer is nothing, you won't get many exact replies. Ask how much they should be spending, and the answers will be even fewer. Yet it's a vital issue.
If a business isn't spending at least 1.5% of turnover on training, its future is at risk, say the experts. Few businesses shape up on this measure. During the recession, many firms cut back on training, and economic recovery hasn't returned the market to true buoyancy. Enthusiasts for training, though, are doing more - and doing it better.
BET's purchase of Style Conferences for £70 million is one consequence. Style operates 18 training centres in various locales in Southern England - and itself has to spend heavily on training. Otherwise its 1,200 employees couldn't maintain the services that satisfy big blue-chip customers (like accountants Coopers & Lybrands, Rank Xerox and the Prudential) at places such as Latimer House, Bucks; Hunton Park, Herts; or Hartsfield Manor, Surrey.
As the names indicate, the centres are mostly fairly grand country houses of the kind which, in a previous era, major companies might have owned and run themselves. That's become far less common as companies have realised the folly (and the cost) of maintaining large establishments solely for their internal use.
Many major business opportunities today arise from doing for others what they're no longer prepared to do for themselves. So-called 'out-sourcing', which spread like a bush fire during the recession, offers a ready-made customer base and the chance to build a profitable niche business on that foundation.
It's not only Style that's benefited from this trend in training. Major companies used to organise all the actual training in-house, too. Now most rely heavily on outside trainers and lecturers, ranging from American gurus to home-grown motivational firms, like Will Carling's Insights
The England rugby captain's company, which uses athletes and others to teach managers leadership, motivation and teamwork, has been employed by blue-chips like Royal Bank of Scotland, Oracle and IBM. It recently teamed up with Style in a joint presentation at Latimer, designed to persuade more companies to train more - and to use purpose-built centres away from home.
If giants can't sensibly afford to run their own establishments, how can smaller firms? Yet they can hire facilities like Style's, and for them the value of training is just as great. It pays off doubly: first, the company gets new and enhanced skills: second, good training of itself gives a boost to morale - and a continuing one, if you continue with the training.
The big fear, of course, is that training will also give a boost to premature departures, as other employers, not having spent a penny on developing their staff, poach valued and trained employees from the spenders. The fear is unworthy and unnecessary. Good staff will be loth to leave a good employer: and training is part of the goodness, as Style knows full well.
Its own offices are at one of the sites, Wokefield Park near Reading. This is one of ten Style centres dedicated to a single client where mid-week availability is limited or unavailable: the rest are 'open market centres' . But is it worth going away to smart premises like Latimer, with a 200-seat theatre, 19 syndicate rooms, golf and croquet?
If you can afford it, the answer is unequivocal. Makeshift lecture rooms with inadequate equipment - the usual provision, alas - don't deliver the right message. Making training and education look and feel important gives programmes a flying start.
To achieve take-off, though, make absolutely sure that you have clear business objectives, concrete and measurable benefits that you intend to achieve from the expenditure. A surprising number of companies which do spend on training don't relate their programmes to business needs - so they can hardly complain if no business results are achieved.
As the BET takeover shows, that hasn't happened to Style itself: The company plans to have 40 centres by the year 2000. Managing director Toby Ward doesn't see the market ever being exhausted: 'The basic need to get people together is unlikely to change.' Nor is the need to get them trained.
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