Starting a business is easy. Starting a successful business is only a little bit harder. But how do you keep an open source training business going and making money when the shine has worn off and it's now just hard work?
This talk will discuss what it takes to run a successful, small, totally independent, open source training business. It will cover considerations like outsourcing extra tasks (and then taking them back again when it didn't work), holidays, managing staff who prefer to be constantly partying, and advertising to a wide variety of open source user groups without making enemies.
There are also the joys (and pains) of creating training materials, scheduling courses, running training and balancing the books. Tips will be given on how to make training fun, so that your attendees consistently give you high overall ratings; and how to teach the same week-long course twice a month for 6 months running and not get bored.
Finally you'll see how community involvement is essential for micro-businesses like this to survive.
Jacinta Richardson runs Perl Training Australia, a micro-business offering courses throughout Australia. Both as part of her job and a massive free-time sink, she is involved in running conferences (LCA 2007, OSDC 2004-2008, SAGE-AU 2008-2009), attending conferences, speaking at Perl Monger meetings whenever she's in the right town, participating in on-line Perl forums and promoting women in IT. For her work in the Perl community, Jacinta was awarded the White Camel Award in 2008. When away from the computer, Jacinta enjoys scuba diving, cycling and baking.