Notes · September 1, 2026
Every training company wants your whole day. Here is why I ask for an hour and a half, and what I do with it.
The first question I get from owners is some version of: is ninety minutes really enough? It is a fair question, and the honest answer is — enough for one thing. Not enough for five.
That constraint is the design, not a compromise. Here is the reasoning.
If you close a floor for a day, you lose the day's revenue, you pay the wages, and you pay again in the goodwill of whoever covers. For most small businesses that math never works, which is why the training keeps getting postponed to a quieter month that does not arrive.
Ninety minutes fits in the shape of a real week. Before opening. Between rushes. After close, with the door locked and the chairs still down. Split across two shifts so nobody misses a service. It is small enough that you say yes this month instead of next quarter.
Sit through six hours of anything and you will remember two moments and a sandwich. Attention does not scale with duration, and neither does learning. The useful unit is not "how long were they in the room" but "what can they do on Tuesday that they could not do on Monday."
So I plan backwards from one behaviour. One skill, sequenced properly, practised out loud, written down in their own words. Ninety minutes is roughly the honest interval for that: long enough to teach, demonstrate, rehearse, and debrief; short enough that nobody has drifted.
Roughly: a short frame for why this skill matters on your floor specifically. A demonstration. Then most of the session is people practising on each other — awkward the first time, noticeably better by the third. Then everyone writes their own version on a card they keep.
Notice what is missing. No icebreakers. No personality quiz. No slide deck emailed afterwards that nobody opens. The room is mostly people talking to each other, badly and then better.
Here is the thing I would want to know if I were buying: the workshop is not the intervention. On its own it fades, the way everything fades. So every program carries two weeks of follow-through — a challenge to use the skill three times while it is fresh, and a ten-minute check-in with the owner or manager to see what held.
If someone offers you a day of training with nothing after it, they are selling you the part that feels substantial rather than the part that works.
It will not fix a staffing problem, a scheduling problem, or a manager problem. It will not turn a resentful employee into an enthusiastic one. If your issue is that people are underpaid and overworked, training is not the answer and I will tell you that on the phone.
What it will do is teach one skill properly to people who were never taught it, and give them a way to keep practising. Done three times across six weeks, that adds up to a team that handles customers noticeably better. That is the claim. It is the whole claim.
Gina Wilt, EdD designs and runs NextReady Studio workshops in Phoenix. See the workshops →
Ninety minutes for your team? $297 for one workshop, materials and follow-up included. Book one → Or join one online for $49 if you are building the skills yourself.