SPI 542: Creating Your Own Workshop with a Twist with Trudy Rankin

SPI 542 Teaching Friday #2: Trudy Rankin

Pat Flynn: All right, last Friday, you heard me share a little bit of the microphone with Mike Lander, one of our SPI Pro members, to teach you a workshop about how to literally negotiate anything. And I’ve gotten some amazing feedback from that. And today, we are welcoming another member of SPI Pro to come in, Trudy Rankin. Because what are we doing? We are doing teaching Fridays and we’re utilizing the amazing knowledge that the SPI audience and the SPI Pro members have to teach you. I’ve been on 500 plus episodes here and it’s about time I share some of the microphones with some of the amazing people here in this community.

Pat Flynn: And today, we’re talking with Trudy. She’s going to teach you a workshop, in fact, about creating life changing workshops but with a twist. These teaching Fridays are something new. They’re not necessarily permanent. They might be, but we’re experimenting. That’s what I encourage you to do. How do you know if something’s going to work or not unless you try it? And this is what we’re trying right now to just bring more of the community members in and talk about some other things that we just are not experts at. And Trudy here today is again, talking about life changing workshops but with a twist. Here she is.

Speaker 2: Welcome to the Smart Passive Income podcast, where it’s all about working hard now so you can sit back and reap the benefits later. And now your guest host, she once accidentally put salt instead of sugar into the meringue on the lemon meringue pie she made for her husband’s birthday, Trudy Rankin.

Trudy Rankin: Hey everyone, I’m Trudy Rankin and I started my own online based business in 2015. And that was the same year that I discovered Pat Flynn and the Smart Passive Income podcast. And being able to follow his progress and seeing what he was doing made a huge difference for me. It gave me hope. I’m really stoked to be able to bring this whole full circle and provide value back to Pat and all of you who are his listeners. Now, shortly after I made the leap from CIO to entrepreneur, I had actually used what I had learned from listening to Pat on the podcast to help a young man with significant vision impairment figure out how to monetize the blog he was writing. And it was really incredible to see the impact on his self confidence once he did start earning money from his blog, and I realized that I wanted to help more people like him learn how to start their own online business and make money doing things that they love.

Trudy Rankin: So I work with people who because of their life circumstances, can’t get or can’t do a traditional 9:00 to 5:00 job. And it is really, really fulfilling and I love doing it. But as part of that work with our Online Business Lift-Off community, I discovered that I also enjoy helping people figure out how to share their expertise in workshops and masterclasses. And I’ve worked with a number of experts, including SPI’s Jillian Benbow, to plan and run workshops and masterclasses with a twist, one that’s designed to help participants think more deeply about what’s being taught and apply it to themselves or their business. If you’re listening to this somewhere where you can take notes, I highly recommend that you grab a pen and a notebook, something that you can write in, and I’m going to share with you the process that I use to create memorable and highly effective workshops that participants find super useful. Now, because there’s a lot to cover, I’m going to be hitting the highlights and I’ll do my best to give you a headstart on creating your own workshop or masterclass with a twist. Ready to get going?

Trudy Rankin: What do I mean by a workshop or a masterclass with a twist exactly? Well, it’s a workshop or a masterclass or any kind of training session or course that comes and is included with it an interactive diagnostic type tool that compliments and creates synergies with what the presenter’s teaching with what you are teaching. You want something that’s going to help kind of double up on the impact there that goes with the training. Now this interactive tool also gets participants to think about how the individual parts of the training relates to themselves or their business, and by repetition and application, it helps participants to retain and remember what they’ve learned for longer.

Trudy Rankin: Now, I don’t know if you remember, maybe back when you were a kid and there used to be these “choose your own adventure” type books, where you get down to the bottom of page one and you’d have to make a choice. “Are you going to do X? Are you going to do Y?” And if you chose X, you got sent to page 32. If you chose why Y, you got sent to page 64. And these interactive diagnostic tools use this kind of approach to personalize the outcome for participants. Another way of thinking about it is it’s like getting your participants to do a really fun quiz, not one of those ones that you used to have to do at school or at uni but more like a “what’s your personality?” type quiz.

Trudy Rankin: I’ll give you a specific example. One of my collaboration project partners and I wanted to help small businesses diagnose how well they stand out from their crowd of competitors, and my project partner who’s an experienced marketer turned trainer, put together a training that focused on key marketing concepts like awareness. And I created a tool that reinforced that training by helping participants understand where do they need to focus their efforts so that they can make more people aware of who they are and what they do. And people would walk out of that workshop going, “Oh my goodness, I’ve just gone through and answered all these questions and now I can see exactly where I need to focus my efforts in terms of marketing.” And typically people would walk out going, “Wow, I’ve got a really fantastic thing that I offer but hardly anybody knows about me. I’m going to be able to do these things to actually address that issue.”

Trudy Rankin: Now, another example is a workshop that I run for people who are looking at making a significant change in their lives but they’re actually feeling paralyzed from indecision. And that happens a lot because when you’re making a big decision, sometimes you know the choice that you’re going to make is going to impact yourself and maybe your family. I show people how to use a specific thinking framework, plus the interactive tool as a way of gaining clarity about their options or their choices. And at the end of the training, they have the tools that they need to be able to make that decision with confidence. And could I teach the framework, the decision-making framework by itself without the tool? Yes I could, but the interactive tool makes the whole process come alive, and it has a greater impact in terms of trusting that they’ve made the right decision. I’ve had people tell me that they’ve walked away and made really big decisions based on this framework that they’ve learned and the tool that they’ve used.

Trudy Rankin: Okay. Let’s get stuck in. There are four parts to this training. First, I’m going to walk you step by step through some pre-planning questions. Next I’ll cover off the questions you’re going to need to think about when you’re designing your training session so that you can also design and create an interactive diagnostic tool to go with it. Then I’m going to walk you through the things you need to think about in order to create the tool, the interactive tool. And lastly, we’re going to talk about what software you can use to actually build the tool so that people can use it. And I’ll explain about the software I used to build mine and why I used that particular software.

Trudy Rankin: Okay. Let’s start with a pre-planning part. Now, for those of you who are already workshop or course creators, this is going to be really familiar. What I want you to do is while you’re listening, just start thinking about how the interactive tool fits in with your existing training content creation process. And then I want you to ask yourself these seven questions, and these seven questions are really, really, really important. They’re the pre-planning questions that you need to sort of set the stage for making sure that the training and the interactive tool work really well.

Trudy Rankin: The first question is, where are your participants in their journey? And I’m not talking about the buyer’s journey. I’m not talking about the process where they don’t know anything about you and then you eventually help them get to the place where they buy from you, they love you, they’re super fans. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the part of the journey that you are wanting to help them with and where they are in that journey. Are they at the very beginning? Are they at the middle? Are they at the end?

Trudy Rankin: And then the next question is, is what’s the next small step they need to achieve their goals on that journey? Do they want to go from level B to level C? Do they want to learn how to hit a golf ball better? Do they want to learn how to have a better relationship with their teenager? Do they want to lose weight? There’s this journey that they’re on and you want to think about what’s the next small step that they need to take to move towards their goals and something that’s going to give them a bit of a quick win. And as you think about those small steps, you need to think about how wide that gap is or that chasm or canyon is between level B and level C. How wide is it? How big is it? How deep is it?

Trudy Rankin: Then you want to think about what you could teach them in 30 to 40 minutes that’s going to help them move across that gap or that chasm. And you want to be quite crystal clear in your thinking here because really you want to be able to narrow down what you can teach them to something that’s really, really, really tight, succinct, and able to be consumed in small chunks. You want to then think about that, what are those chunks? What are those small steps or pieces of material that people need to be able to, as I said, cross the chasm, and you want to try and aim for about four to six of those small chunks of material that people need to understand and use in order to move forward in their journey. Because like I said, it can be too much to take in at one sitting if you have too much more than that.

Trudy Rankin: Then the next question, which is number six, this is what frameworks or proven process will you use to help people take those small steps? Typically you will already have a proven process that you use that helps people get results, and you want to think about out which one of, because usually people have more than one, you want to think about which one of those you’re going to use to help people with that small movement forward.

Trudy Rankin: And question seven is, is that, what activities will you use that are going to help them understand and internalize what you just taught them and prepare them for using the interactive tools? This is like running workshops 101, but it’s really important questions that you need to ask yourself before you create the training material so that you’ve maximized your ability to help people learn, remember and apply what they’ve learned. Now, I find that mind mapping really helps here. Having something visually you can see and add to as you think your way through these questions. I use a tool called Miro, that’s miro.com, and I’m happy to share the Miro board template that I use while I’m walking through this process. If you were to use other mind mapping software, that’s fine. You can just take a screenshot of my template and just use it whatever way works best for you. I’m just happy just to share the template.

Trudy Rankin: Let’s move into part two. Let’s start looking at the design of the training for your workshop or your masterclass. First thing you’re going to do is you’re going to take those small steps that you’ve identified in the pre-planning phase and you’re going to use those as the basis to decide exactly what concepts you will include in each section of your training. And as I said before, these concepts are going to be based on your proven framework or process for getting results. Now remember, and this is really important, that people have different learning styles. Some people learn best by listening or by watching or reading, and pretty much everyone learns by doing or discussing.

Trudy Rankin: So you want to aim for about 10 to 15 minutes where you explain the relevant concept, the first concept from your framework or your proven process, and then you want to have a short activity where people work either individually or in a group to immediately apply that specific concept to their own situation. And then you’re going to teach the next concept and have an activity and the next concept and an activity and so on until you’ve covered your four to six concepts or small steps that are going to take people through to this endpoint of their journey. These concepts and short activities are going to form the basis of the questions in the interactive tool, which we’re going to get to in a minute. And by the time you finish this part of the process, you then should have a really, really good idea of how you’re going to run the workshop. You’re going to know how long it needs to be. You’re going to know exactly what you want to introduce the interactive tool to the participants.

Trudy Rankin: And as far as that goes, some people will get their participants to start using an interactive tool from the start of the very first activity. And so people like to do all the training activities first and then introduce the tool and get people using it, and some people use the tool as a way of demonstrating what they mean as they present the concepts. It gives people a visual way of seeing what it is the trainer means when they’re talking about something . And they’ll work through the questions in the tool using a case study, which helps people understand how to apply the concepts that are being taught in their own situation.

Trudy Rankin: And always be sure to follow up with a Q and A session with your training so that people have a chance to ask questions, or oftentimes people will just open things up for questions as you go through. But once people use the tool and they get to the end of the training, invariably, they have more questions. At least that’s been my experience, so you want to open it up and let them have a chance to actually ask those. Make sure you schedule your workshop to include that Q and A session at the end.

Trudy Rankin: All right, now we’re up to part three and we’re going to be talking about the interactive tool itself. And the first bit of part three we want to talk about is the pre-creation side of things. Once again, we need to do some thinking before we get into the actual creation process. So here are three really, really important questions to consider. The first one is, what aha moment or moments do you want to enable for your participants? What do you want your participants to be able to understand so that they’ll walk out feeling like their mind’s been blown or an unsuspected problem’s been highlighted or uncovered or the next step is now sort of laid out in front of them in blazing lights? In other words, what do you want participants to understand? And how do you want them to feel about what they’ve just discovered about themselves or their business?

Trudy Rankin: The second question that you need to ask yourself is, what do you want the final results page to look like? Now the results page is the page at the end, after they’ve filled out all the questions, that they get a results page that kind of shows them something and helps to create that aha moment. A results page works best if it’s really, really highly visual and not just text. It’s really easy to put a lot of text on a results page but that doesn’t work the best for this kind of thing. It needs to work like a really good children’s picture book, wto here the text and the images work together to create synergies. The images help expand the meaning of the text and the text expands the meaning and explains the images and they work together to create a bigger, wider, richer, deeper story. And you want your results page to be like that.

Trudy Rankin: And you’re going to want to mind map out your results page or draw out your results page as much as possible so that you can actually see what you’re thinking, and you can use pen and paper or you can do it on a presentation slide like PowerPoint or one of the Google tools or you can use Canva. It doesn’t really matter. You can use anything that’s going to help you visualize what your results page is going to look like.

Trudy Rankin: And then the last question you need to ask yourself is, how do you want to present the actual results? And by that I mean, are they going to get a checklist? Are they going to see a total score, or their score based against a total score? Are they going to get personalized advice based on their answers? What you decide here is going to determine how you frame your questions inside the tool. So it’s really important. This question’s really, really important.

Trudy Rankin: Now we’re up to the part where you start to actually create your questions for the interactive tool. And you want to decide which questions you want the participants to answer and in what order, so that order part is important too. And less is more here. Typically you’re going to want to have between 10 and 15 questions and really critical, no fluff questions allowed. Only questions that are critical for helping to achieve that aha moment that we talked about earlier. Now coming up with the questions is going to be easier if you already have a framework you use to help people get results, and you’re going to want to use only the most critical parts of the framework. You’re not going to use all of it. And you want to pare down the questions that relate to that framework so that they’re really clear.

Trudy Rankin: For example, when I worked with Jillian Benbow on our introduction to community management workshop, we started out with Jillian’s deep experience of what’s needed to start a community. She does have a framework but a lot of it’s based on her deep experience. Then we took that and then we came up with a series of questions that were designed to help participants think through what needs to be in place when they start their community so that it has every chance for success. And once you’ve decided which questions you want to have, then you need to decide how you want to frame those questions. And that’s going to be largely determined by how you’ve decided to display the actual results.

Trudy Rankin: If you’ve decided to give someone their score against the total score, you’re going to find that phrasing the question or questions so that people give a yes/no answer, works really, really well. Or if you want to give them a checklist of things to work on, you’d phrase your questions so that there are multiple answers they can choose from, and you’re going to use their answers to personalize what shows up on that checklist. This is the important part of helping to be able to personalize the results that show up at the end of them filling in the interactive tool.

Trudy Rankin: For example, another collaboration project I did was with someone who’s a profit first method professional. Lots of you will have probably heard about Profit First. It’s a really, really useful tool for managing cashflow. This particular workshop was focused on how to help new businesses manage their cashflow so that they could show a profit from the very first sale. This Profit First method was created by a guy named Mike Michalowicz. I use it, lots of people use it and it’s actually saved my hide a number of times in terms of my own business. And so this particular workshop is aimed at helping business owners not get into cashflow crunch issues.

Trudy Rankin: In this workshop, my collaboration partner, who has been trained in the Profit First method, she’s a certified Profit First professional. As I said, she taught the basics of the method and then I created the tool where the questions were designed to result in a snapshot of the instant assessment grid, which basically tells you what percentage of your cashflow you should be allocating towards things like tax, profit, owners compensation, all those sorts of things. You can see that the type of questions you have and how they’re framed or shaped will depend completely on your framework you use for the training and what type of results you want people to see after they’ve answered the questions in the interactive tool.

Trudy Rankin: Once you’ve written your questions, you want to quickly check that they don’t break any of these six rules for writing a great set of questions. The first thing you want to check is that you want to make sure that the way the questions for the interactive tool are worded is crystal clear. There’s no room for confusion, no ambiguity, no way to derive more than one meaning from the words. And sometimes you have to work on that a little bit because what you might think is clear, won’t be clear to somebody else.

Trudy Rankin: Now the second thing you want to check is that there’s no double questions. Now that’s where there’s two different questions have been combined into one so it’s really difficult for the participant to know which way to answer it. And a lot of times people will create questions like did you know it’s raining today and are you going to take an umbrella, sort of a thing. It sounds like they fit together but they’re actually two completely separate questions. You do not want that. Absolutely don’t want that.

Trudy Rankin: Now the third thing you need to check is that your questions are based on or they’re relevant to the small steps that you’ve outlined in your training. Like I said, no fluff questions, no questions that don’t relate specifically to what you’re trying to help people learn.

Trudy Rankin: The fourth thing you want to check is that the questions flow from one to the next in a really, really logical way because it can be confusing for people if you start over here and all of a sudden they think they’re going over here and all of a sudden, you’re way off down the alleyway somewhere else chasing a cat. You don’t want that.

Trudy Rankin: For the next thing you need to check is that if you ask an either/or type of question, your next question is still going to make sense. For example, if you ask a question about how many people they have on a team, they pick the answer that says, “Hey, it’s just me, I’m a solopreneur,” your next question, or any other subsequent questions after that have to reflect that it’s just them. You wouldn’t say something like “you and your team” in any future questions or answers. And that’s where we sort of get a little bit more advanced here is because you have to be able to use something called branching logic or just be really smart about how you create your tool to make sure that that doesn’t happen.

Trudy Rankin: And then the sixth thing you want to check is that the answers you make available to choose are going to easily translate into people’s personalized results page. That’s really, really, really important. And when you’re doing your first one, you’re going to get it wrong the first time, that’s okay. Work your way through it, work through it yourself and you’ll very quickly pick up that it just isn’t going to work and you’ll need to change the way you’ve worded your question. But the most important thing to remember here is that you always want to have just one question per question. In other words, you want the question to be crystal clear about one thing so that people don’t get confused about what’s being asked or how they should answer, because there’s nothing that’ll stop the flow of them going through your tool quicker, than them going, “Ah, I don’t understand the question. How should I answer it? I’m not sure. Is that right? Or is that wrong?” And because they’re in a learning situation, they’re going to feel like it’s their problem instead of you for not designing your questions really, really well.

Trudy Rankin: All right. The next part we want to just touch on is what tools can you use because obviously you’re going to need some sort of software tool or platform to actually create your interactive diagnostic tool. It’s truly, you could probably go really old school and you could design some sort of cool choose your own adventure workbook that’s either paper or PDF based but it can be really, really hard. In fact, if not impossible to use what I referred to before, that whole branching logic part of things, where if people answer a question one way, then the following questions make sense. The example earlier where someone says they’re a solopreneur, you don’t want to have any questions or answers asking about their current team. Now, like I said, if you get really clever, you might be able to do that with a choose your own adventure type an approach to the workbook and that could potentially work but typically you’re going to want to actually use some sort of software.

Trudy Rankin: You can use things like Google Forms or Jotforms or Typeforms or something like bucket.io. You may have heard of that, or LeadQuizzes, and they range in price from free for the Google Forms, all the way through to a couple hundred dollars a month for Bucket. It just depends on what your budget is, how complicated your interactive tool is, how much branching logic there is, how much backing functionality you need for things like branching logic, plus control over what the results pages look like. Those are really important things to think about.

Trudy Rankin: Now, personally, I know something called LeadsHook. It has everything I need and more, function wise and it’s at the very affordable end of the scale for the monthly fee plus thing I really like is that their support’s great. It’s very responsive and the founder and her team are really committed to listening to their customers and providing what’s needed in terms of new functionality. And their users range from newbies all the way through to really incredibly powerful and well known sort of internet marketers, who tend to use the tool for quizzes. It’s well proven. It’s well suited for quizzes but it’s also well suited to these interactive diagnostic tools we’ve been talking about today and I love it, so I said I’m an affiliate for it. You can probably tell how passionate I get about it. It’s just so much fun to use.

Trudy Rankin: If anyone who’s listening to is interested in LeadsHook, I do have an affiliate link and if you do sign up using my affiliate link, I’d be happy to give you a template that I created plus my quick start training video that explains how to get your interactive tool up and running very quickly.

Trudy Rankin: Very quickly, here’s a recap of the steps that you need to go through to create your own masterclass or workshop with a twist. First, the way you want to start with understanding where your customer is on their journey and what they need to know or understand or do or prepare for to take that next small step towards their goals. And then keeping that in mind, you’re going to want to break what they need to learn down into small digestible chunks that’s based on the framework you use to help people get results. You’re going to want to keep their learning styles in mind and you want to design your training to support those multiple ways of learning because that’s just as important as the way you frame your questions and what your training is like.

Trudy Rankin: And then you’re going to use your framework and/or small learning chunks to come up with questions for your interactive tool. You’re going to design a results page, the page that people see after answering the questions so that it combines text and visuals, plus their answers to create an aha moment for your participants, one that’s going to help them remember and take that next step towards achieving their goals. Now I do highly recommend that you run these workshops live at least three times. That’s what I try to do. And you want to ask for feedback each time about what worked and what didn’t, and you’re going to use the what worked part of what people tell you as testimonials and you want to use what didn’t work to improve your training and the interactive tool. Because in my experience, it’ll take you at least two rounds to actually get the tool working the way that participants need it to work. Not the way you think it should work, but the way participants actually use it.

Trudy Rankin: First time through, you’re going to go, oh my goodness. I didn’t realize that’s how people were going to think about that or how they were going to use it. You really do need to observe and watch and see how people use the tool before you kind of set it in stone. And remember, be sure to hit record each time you run the workshop because once you’re confident that the training and the tool are working the way you want them to, then you’re going to use your best recording or a compilation of the recordings to create an evergreen training that people can buy from you. And that could actually make a great tripwire product or a low cost way for people to get started working with you. Or it could even be a core part of your main course.

Trudy Rankin: Either way, there’s really huge value there because even after people finish the training, because there’s an interactive tool there, they can go back again and again to the tool and they can use the results as a way of measuring progress. And being able to measure progress can be really, really important because you can use the first time they go through your course or your workshop as a baseline, and then two weeks later, once they’ve implemented something, they can go back and do it again and see if they score better. It’s a really good way of helping people stay accountable to the things that they’ve learned when they’re doing the workshop.

Trudy Rankin: I really, really would love to be able to talk more about this, but I know that it’s already been a lot to take in and I’ve done my best to teach you the core elements for the creating the workshop or a masterclass with a twist, your specific special unique workshop or masterclass with a twist. But because we could do so much deeper, I’ve been looking to see how I could help people more with this. So if you’re interested in being part of a pilot group training, where I go in depth into how to create your workshop and interactive tool, I’m opening up a wait list where you can sign up and I’ll let you know when it opens. There’ll be a link in the show notes for that, plus a link to the Miro board that I mentioned and to a LeadsHook bonuses page.

Trudy Rankin: There you have it. I hope it’s been useful. If you’d like to connect with me, I’m in SPI Pro, which is Pat’s community, or I’m happy to connect on LinkedIn. If you do send me a LinkedIn connection request, make sure you add in a note saying that you heard me on the SPI podcast. Or if you’d like more information about our community and our program for helping people who can’t fit a traditional 9:00 to 5:00 jobs into their lives, start their own business, you can go to onlinebusinessliftoff.com. And I’m looking forward to connecting, and thank you so much for listening.

Pat Flynn: Wow. That was amazing. Trudy, thank you so so much. I’ll see you in SPI Pro, and I’m looking forward to doing a few more of these before we make a decision whether or not we want to keep going. And we’d love to know what you think. I would love to hear from you. If you go to @patflynn on Instagram or Twitter, you can do both if you want, but just let me know how you feel about these Teaching Friday episodes. We’re maybe going to come up with a better name. We’ll see. But we just so, so, so much enjoy the idea of bringing more people into the show who have some incredible talents and things to share and more workshops coming your way.

Pat Flynn: So, not bad, especially considering this is all free. This is all free. However, if you want to check out SPI Pro and join an incredible community and enter a safe space to be vulnerable, to talk and join mastermind groups and all this other stuff that we have to offer you, events and challenges and get direct help from other members and our team, just check out SPI Pro, smartpassiveincome.com/pro. You can apply and get in in the next cohort that we let in once per quarter. Check it out, smartpassiveincome.com/pro. And again, let me know what you think @patflynn on Twitter or Instagram and I look forward to serving you in the next episode. Cheers.

Pat Flynn: Thanks for listening to the Smart Passive Income podcast at smartpassiveincome.com. I’m your host, Pat Flynn. Our senior producer is Sara Jane Hess. Our series producer is David Grabowski, and our executive producer is Matt Gartland. Sound editing by Duncan Brown. The Smart Passive Income podcast is a production of SPI Media. We’ll catch you in the next session.