The groundwork
Masterclasses & seminars
Masterclasses and seminars that leave your team knowing not just which button to press, but why.
The situation
You want your team to use AI. Not to talk about it.
The licenses are bought, a few people are experimenting, and nothing is happening in the rest of the department. There was a training session that walked through interfaces, and three months later the interface looks different. What’s left is the feeling of running behind.
The problem is rarely operating the thing. It’s that nobody can judge what the effort is worth: which task a model should take over, what that costs, what it returns, and where the limit sits. Those questions are older than AI — and they’re easier to answer at an ice cream stand than on a dashboard.
That is exactly what Ice Seller 101 is for: the model I use to explain Contribution margin is what a single ice cream contributes toward fixed costs and profit after the cost of goods — at a €1 price and a €0.50 buy-in, that's €0.50 a unit. It's the number that decides whether a second seller is worth it. full card — at what point a second person behind the counter pays off, and why Revenue is the money that comes in before anything gets subtracted — 100 ice creams at €1 each is €100 in revenue. It tells you how much business happened, not whether the day was worth it. full card is the less interesting number. Do that arithmetic once yourself and the conversation about an AI budget sounds different.
What happens
Models, not tools.
I build every format around your case. Beforehand I talk to two or three people from the team — not only to you as the client — so I know where it actually sticks day to day.
- Masterclass, one day
- Small group, one subject, a lot of arithmetic and argument on your own case. What’s left at the end isn’t a deck, it’s a handful of decisions that were still open that morning.
- Seminar series
- Several sessions across a few weeks, with work in between. It beats one long day, because the team gets to fail at something real between sessions and comes back with better questions.
- Leadership format
- Half a day for the people who decide budgets. Less craft, more judgment: what’s realistic, what’s marketing, and how you’ll tell the difference inside your own house.
- Train the trainer
- For when it should keep running without me coming back. I hand over the models, not just the content — including the examples that make them stick.
What you won’t get is a tour through seventeen tools. Tools go out of date between the quote and the date. A model you have understood once survives the next generation of them. My aim is to make myself unnecessary, not indispensable.
Straight talk
Not the right fit if …
- … you want training on one specific tool. The vendor does that better, and usually for free.
- … there has to be a certificate at the end. I don’t issue one.
- … it’s mainly meant to be a team event. It’s enjoyable, but it is work, and anyone who’d rather not be there notices by mid-morning.
- … the group is larger than about 15 people. Past that, thinking stops and listening starts. Book a talk for that instead.
Not sure which format fits? Describe the group and what should be different afterward. Sometimes the honest answer is half a day instead of a series.
Track record
Where this has run.
“At first I thought we had ended up in a philosophy seminar.” — a participant, after the first morning.
In a company of my own I built a digital-marketing education platform — from the curriculum down to the question of why people abandon a chapter halfway. For the Audi Akademie I developed a curriculum. At BMW the result was a cookbook that let teams learn from each other instead of starting from zero every time.
The thread is the one in the quote: I start a level earlier than people expect. That’s irritating in the morning and load-bearing in the afternoon — because what the group leaves with isn’t answers, it’s a way of doing the arithmetic.
References and sample agendas on request.
Rate
€3,200 a day.
It’s here so neither of us wastes time — whether it becomes a single day, a series, or a longer mandate is what the first call is for.
The call
30 minutes before anything is booked.
Tell me who’s in the room and what the team should be able to do afterward. If a talk is the better answer — or nothing at all — I’ll tell you.