New to ITP's with Mitch Goodall

Mark Simpkins (00:05.051)
Hello and welcome to another episode of FE Gold, your source for real talk, real solutions in the world of further education. And I’m your host, Mark Simpkins, and I’m here to bring with the help of my guests, insights that will hopefully take your provision to the next level. And today I’m delighted to welcome a good friend of mine, an ex-colleague, Mitch Goodall, who is director and co-founder of the new apprenticeship training provider, the marketing trainer.

Welcome Mitch, how are you today mate?

Mitch Goodall (00:36.21)
Oh mate, yeah, not too bad, not too bad at all. All good.

Mark Simpkins (00:41.487)
Good day.

Mitch Goodall (00:43.39)
Oh, sorry, you broke up there, mate.

Mark Simpkins (00:46.252)
busy boy I hear

Mitch Goodall (00:47.85)
Yes, absolutely. Yeah, we’re all the time busy. We’ve got numerous roles we’re working on. We’re working on curriculums, we’re working on everything. Yeah, it’s constant plates. Lots and lots of plates spinning all the time. It’s all good.

Mark Simpkins (01:03.151)
Ah, that’s good, that’s good. So today’s kind of podcast is really to get a bit of an insight for those people who are either thinking about or in the process already of starting up a new apprenticeship provider. So I guess first and foremost, tell us a little bit about yourself and TMT.

Mitch Goodall (01:23.19)
Yeah, no result. So, a little bit about me then. I’ve been working in apprenticeships for, about eight or nine years, I think, I’ve lost count. So yeah, started a while back. I’ve worked at a couple of different providers over that time. I’ve worked in sort of coaching, leadership, done a bit of EPA stuff as well. So I cut my teeth in that a while back. So, and in terms of kind of the marketing trainer, really sort of was born out of

kind of the desire for me and my sort of co-founders to sort of build a niche provider in marketing, doing just marketing, in what we knew and what we’ve done for several years and kind of stick to kind of those core fundamentals really and just do a really good job at the same time really. It’s kind of really what we’re doing this for. So yeah, that’s a little bit about me.

Mark Simpkins (02:19.731)
Yeah, good. So take me back to, I guess, really early days. You know, what, I mean, I understand obviously you’ve worked in the sector and stuff before. What were the main motivational, you know, kind of triggers for you that made you think, you know what, I’ve actually set up a trading provider.

Mitch Goodall (02:43.798)
I’ll try and be sort of middle of the road with this, be quite diplomatic probably. I think it really sort of boiled down to having both good and bad experiences with providers that I’d worked for. Sort of seeing opportunities for things that could be fixed or made better, either very simply or very quickly, but also maybe the slightly longer and more kind of.

impactful changes that take a bit of work and time and hard efforts to build in into a program, for example. I’m kind of wanting to take that into my own hands and one of my co-founders, Ash, is exactly the same. Because we’ve always worked for other organizations, always on that front line, dealing with the learners, dealing with the clients, and ultimately delivering those curriculums and those programs from start to finish. We were always victim of, as I say, the good and the bad.

And that’s really kind of, I think probably one of the biggest catalysts for what we did was born out of that kind of necessity to see meaningful change in the remit that we worked within, which again, as I say, was marketing from day one. So yeah, I’d probably say that’s the biggest fire. And I think, you know, there are other smaller kind of individual elements of that, but you know, boiling down to kind of wanting to be able to control.

Mark Simpkins (03:59.675)
Hmm.

Mitch Goodall (04:09.11)
the growth of our own business and not again be victim to maybe, you know, hyper growth where, you know, things spiral out of control and there’s hundreds of new learners and, you know, it’s kind of loads of bits and pieces ultimately, but yeah.

Mark Simpkins (04:25.572)
Yeah, makes an awful lot of sense. And so back from those very early days, talk to me, I guess, very briefly, tell us what the steps were. You know, you decide, you know, this is the right time. We want to make impactful change. We want to create something that’s exciting and unique that’s out there. And how do you then go from one idea to launching an apprenticeship training provider? Talk us through the steps.

Mitch Goodall (04:52.458)
Yeah. Well, mainly the first step is a lot of fearful kind of, can we do this? Is this gonna be an actual reality of something that we can achieve and taking that kind of, those initial sort of steps really. I think the first thing was ultimately research was kind of looking at even down to the basics of how does this actually kind of work? How do we go about starting this process? This isn’t just a case of you set a business up and you go, oh, we’re a training provider by the way. You’ve got all those kind of hoops you’ve got to jump through.

Mark Simpkins (05:20.251)
Hahaha

Mitch Goodall (05:22.474)
So the first kind of initial steps, I mean, our journey specifically started, this was pre-COVID, and when I say pre-COVID, it was literally just weeks before lockdown happened, we started mulling over the idea. We’d both been sort of made redundant from a provider we were working at, and we kind of thought, you know what, maybe it’s time to sort of start this, and then, ah, COVID will never affect anything. No problems. And then we got to lockdown, so.

Mark Simpkins (05:48.027)
Hahaha

Mitch Goodall (05:50.306)
Um, we ended up having to kind of postpone things for a while. We ended up getting other jobs and bits and pieces, but then we kind of eventually came back around to it and sort of said, you know, listen, um, let’s pick back up with this, um, how do we do this? How, what’s the process like these days? The window thing changed and kind of like the time you could apply to be a provider change, so we had to find this kind of route into the market and what could we provide that other people aren’t. So we did all this sort of stuff really. And then.

It sort of then led on to all the, the next steps was kind of finding that, finding that sponsor and, you know, then having to start thinking about, you know, policies and procedures and obviously building an actual plan out and, you know, it was months of work really. It wasn’t just a kind of a switch strike. We’re going to be a trainer provider tomorrow. This was, you know, planning lots and lots of planning. Um, and you know, I think we, we went about it probably in a slightly different, maybe approach to a lot of other people. I’m.

Mark Simpkins (06:42.895)
Yeah.

Mitch Goodall (06:48.998)
It’s just been an assumption, I suppose, but we did everything ourselves. Our application was us, our policies was us. We kind of thought, you know what, if we’re not really doing anything else, let’s really go full-hogging. Yeah, we didn’t want to pay people to write our stuff for us either, to be fair, because we’re quite tight. So, yeah, no, it’s all good.

Mark Simpkins (07:10.511)
So I guess then it was then the thought of, right, so how did you define TMT’s core purpose, values, mission, and what was your kind of unique approach? How are you gonna stand out in the market, which is it’s fairly small, let’s face it.

Mitch Goodall (07:30.794)
Yeah. Um, I think there’s probably a little over or maybe just a little under 1200 providers in the UK on that register. So it’s a really sort of core concept you got to get your head around is how you’re going to stand out. And I think, you know, for us, it was sort of really the idea was around that kind of being that niche provider, you know, there are other niche providers out there, but there’s this sort of tendency as they grow to start branching out and being the kind of

you know, the tree sort of model of several programs. And I think for us, because we’d always worked in marketing, it just made a lot of sense that, you know, we niche down with the plan that we never actually branch out into anything else. This will always be hence the name, otherwise, it’s a bit of a stupid name. So you know, we stick to that kind of core field of things. So whether it’s marketing, whether it’s market research, or whether it’s kind of the caveats of marketing, or the sort of

Mark Simpkins (08:15.273)
Yeah.

Mitch Goodall (08:26.234)
more than niche areas that kind of fall under the marketing umbrella. That’s what we’re going to sort of specialise in. And I think the other thing that we kind of thought ultimately around was, again, from experience of having worked for some very, very large and, you know, profitable kind of providers in the past, and we always felt there was this sort of path of least resistance approach when it came to a lot of the sort of delivery. So…

we really looked at it as an opportunity for us to add real value to our programs by kind of evaluating how we do things. So, for example, you know, we only deal with very, very small cohorts when we deal with kind of training. So because we know from experience, if you’ve got 30 people on a call, they’re all going to have their cameras off and they’ll all be asleep in 30 minutes. So, you know, we, we did these kinds of things around kind of how we felt optimally, you know, training could occur, but also this sort of value added.

Mark Simpkins (09:03.468)
Hmm.

Mitch Goodall (09:17.982)
service of, so we offer CIMs as part of our programs. Um, something that allows us to really differentiate from the market because the CIM achieve several things for the learner, us and the client. Ultimately is, you know, you’re providing a real, it’s not a tangible thing, but it is a certificate at the end of the day, but it’s a real badge of honor, a sort of stamp of approval within the marketing field, um, that they have these CIMs that

puts them above other apprentices in the market and allows that learner to bring those skills into that workplace as they learn it. Those officially sponsored, recognised training comes into those smaller businesses then, which they may not have had access to through other means. These professional qualifications cost upwards of 1,500 to 2,000 pounds. So not every business can afford to do that.

Mark Simpkins (10:07.759)
Yeah.

Mitch Goodall (10:14.146)
So that’s kind of how we really differentiated ourselves. And I think a lot of our values and core principles are around that kind of, we’ve seen what a general apprenticeship can be, but we don’t want to be general. We want to be, our goal is that we become sort of synonymous with marketing apprenticeships. We wanna be the first organization that people go, I’m looking for a marketing apprentice, these guys. Yeah, we use these guys. But also that…

the quality side of things is kind of, one of our sort of major core values is sort of this idea of innovation and iteration. And because we are so niche, we have this awesome ability to be able to, if something changes in the marketing field, new algorithm comes out tomorrow from Google, we can update all of our training material across all of our courses. So we update it for one, it largely applies to all the others as well, because we’re building out a singular sort of subject.

Mark Simpkins (11:02.839)
Yeah.

Mark Simpkins (11:06.147)
Hmm.

Yeah, yeah, of course.

Mitch Goodall (11:13.042)
So, you know, iteration, quality, you know, innovation’s a big thing, all kind of like these big buzzwords, but in reality, really, really are kind of the core of what we do. So yeah.

Mark Simpkins (11:22.479)
Great. Yeah, sounds perfect. So along the way, you must have come across some like big, I guess, either operational or logistical challenges, you know, just give us a flavor. What kind of things, what were the stumbling blocks?

Mitch Goodall (11:36.234)
Yeah, I think it really kind of comes down to the core composition of the organisation in a respect because you’ve, you’ve got myself who comes from coaching and kind of a bit of like IQA and EPA, you’ve got Ash who’s also again, a kind of a coach veteran with a variety of other kinds of skills on the ACIM, qualified, all that sort of stuff. And then we’ve got our other kind of director, Andy, who comes from sort of sales and BD. So I think one of the big things for us was that sort of getting that, that

understanding that knowledge under our belts as to how the rest of the stuff works. You know, we’d never necessarily been part of compliance, you know, or part of X, Y, and Z the admin that goes on the background. So like, you know, one of the stumbling blocks we had to get very early on with our first placements was how do we submit ILR? How do we record ILR? All those lovely codes that you have to learn. Um, it, that was quite a big sort of chunk of what we do. The coaching, the training.

Mark Simpkins (12:24.568)
Yeah.

Mitch Goodall (12:32.546)
We know it, we can do it. The standard could come out and we could start building a curriculum tomorrow. It’s not a problem. It’s all the other stuff. When you go into this kind of thinking, like I’m gonna start training provider, you probably have a niche area that you are used to working in. And then you’ve got the 270 degrees of stuff that you weren’t involved in. So it’s that, yeah. I think it’s getting all that nailed down, learning all that, tapping into kind of the industry was a big thing for me

Mark Simpkins (12:52.763)
Hahaha. Yeah.

Mitch Goodall (13:02.81)
seeking out individuals that knew those things, you know, and kindly enough, they were able to help and guide me through stuff like that. So, you know, yeah, definitely one of the biggest things was learning all the other, the big picture stuff, not just your kind of narrow avenue.

Mark Simpkins (13:07.267)
Yeah.

Mark Simpkins (13:20.503)
I think I noticed that within the sector and I very much are an advocate as well that actually there’s a lot of people within the industry that really want to support and help others and I mean that there’s a few ones which you know that really they’re just focused on themselves and you’ll get that in whichever sector won’t you let’s be honest but I do agree with you know when I took

Mitch Goodall (13:30.07)
Yeah.

Mitch Goodall (13:38.196)
Yeah, absolutely.

Mark Simpkins (13:43.523)
the jump into doing what I do now, which is consultancy and quality. The first kind of few people that I would go out to are the ones who I knew well, and they said, yeah, bring in your services. I know what you’re trying. They helped and supported me lift my business from where it was just over a year ago to where it is now. And, you know, and you’re one of them, obviously, that as soon as this kind of came on, we got in touch and, you know, started working together on this, which is, you know, which is perfect. So I totally get it. I think

Mitch Goodall (13:59.404)
Yeah.

Mitch Goodall (14:06.615)
Yeah.

Mark Simpkins (14:10.699)
One of the other things I wanted to touch on with you is to do, because obviously the curriculum is a big thing now. Okay, of course, you know, it’s high up there on the DIF and Ostead’s agenda and one of the big things is about ensuring that employers are involved. They’re involved in the creation of the curriculum, they’re involved in the delivery, they’re involved in… Everything needs to be bespoke and changed and individualized, which I get and I understand why. How have you really…

tapped into and understand that your curriculum is truly going to meet those employer needs.

Mitch Goodall (14:43.306)
Yeah, so I mean, it really starts from kind of step one, you know, our kind of sales and immediate kind of contact process is very consultative. You know, we talk to the employers, what is it that you are actually looking for from, you know, the candidates, all that kind of typical stuff you’d imagine. But in reality, you know, those first couple of conversations deal with the idea of we will deliver a curriculum that is tailored to sort of your requirements. So for example, at the moment, I won’t name the employer, but.

We’re working with an employer that’s looking for someone who’s very, very sort of going to be kind of involved in lots of copywriting content creation. How can we expedite our training towards the requirements that they need that person to get? You know, they’re not going to hit the ground running sort of thing, but you know, it’s how can we get this individual up to speed as quickly as humanly possible? Part of that is ultimately the recruitment process, finding people with the right backgrounds, as we know. But then secondly, it’s kind of this idea of, well,

with every standard you have that kind of skeleton curriculum, which is the basics, right? We have to deliver that like everyone else does, but what we do is we kind of complement and add auxiliary kind of modules and training to all of what we do. So we would add additional months worth of training, e-learning, you know, and it also comes down to kind of the idea of the coach will be working with both parties to sort of provide

You know, we are completely not against the idea of utilizing external training resource, for example, like HubSpot, there’s just a simple, single example. You know, if we can’t immediately provide coverage of a specific topic like PPC, we can guide that learner in the direction of meaningful, good quality industry kind of qualifications, whether it’s paid, free, or whether we’ve got access to it. So that’s kind of what it’s all about for us is, we get that, you know,

The long-term investment of an apprentice is one thing, but you still need that individual to kind of get up to speed at some point. It’s not kind of like, oh, we can wait 12 months for little Sarah to get to this point. So that’s kind of how we do it. Yeah, it’s very consultative throughout the whole process. Our goal will ultimately be our coaches will be industry experts that if we don’t house those resources ourselves, we can definitely point you in the direction of external.

Mark Simpkins (16:45.772)
Yeah.

Mitch Goodall (17:05.334)
providers, whether that’s training websites or whatever it might be as well. So yeah, loads of options from our side where it comes to customization.

Mark Simpkins (17:13.451)
Yeah, I think fundamentally it’s a great approach as well, because obviously with the changes to the, the apprenticeship account, accountancy framework, it’s almost like, I think being able to adapt and bring things in is ultimately gonna keep people on programme and make sure that those withdrawals are as low as possible because I think there’s those moments in that curriculum that if…

Mitch Goodall (17:33.507)
Yep.

Mark Simpkins (17:41.435)
learners aren’t getting what they need and the employees aren’t getting what you need is without those troubles and those tools. So, you know, I completely agree in what you’re doing. That’s great. So my kind of last question, which is, you know, and I’ll do this in every single episode is, you know, ask my guests that the kind of, I guess the top three golden nuggets, what are the top three things that you could say, you know, what if you’re thinking of doing this, or you’re in the middle of this? These are the three things I would definitely do.

Mitch Goodall (17:56.759)
Yeah.

Mitch Goodall (18:10.602)
Okay, so I suppose it depends on kind of the situation of the individual, but if you’re kind of in isolation on your own, my first kind of piece of advice would be find people around you that you can do this with. You know, this doesn’t necessarily kind of have to be, you know, I’m going to have to pay these guys thousands of pounds a year to help me out. This is like we’ve sort of said, find like minded individuals that can be your team, your kind of founding individuals of the organization. And you know,

I can’t imagine having to try to do this on my own without Ash and Andy, it’s just not possible. It’s one of those. So that would kind of be my first point. The second point would ultimately be kind of, really understand the reasons behind why you’re doing this. You know, we all like to think on the outside that this is gonna be easy, I know how to coach. I could do this, I could set this up. You can’t, it’s not easy. It’s, you know, setting any business up is never gonna be easy. You’ve got, you know.

Mark Simpkins (18:42.063)
Cools.

Mark Simpkins (18:59.429)
Yeah.

Mitch Goodall (19:03.51)
you’ve got all the various facets and bits and pieces that go towards building a business. You know, you need to have things ironed out or at least ideas of how you’re gonna do things. How are you gonna market your business? How are you gonna grow it? What’s the sort of like the short-term goals and the plan for your business? What’s the long-term? How are you gonna solve problems if they occur? All this kind of stuff. But then also you’ve got, as I said, you’re probably gonna have to learn a lot of stuff. So seeking out that advice is gonna be another thing. And then I think…

Mark Simpkins (19:27.334)
Yeah.

Mitch Goodall (19:31.89)
I suppose the last one is just kind of, it’s really just kind of just stick at it. You know, it’s, you know, we’ve only been going a couple of months and it’s, there’ve been kind of big hurdles where we find bits of information out, which could be like, Oh no, like we’re done for in a respect, you know what I mean? It’s like, but in the reality of things, if you just keep sort of chipping away at stuff and just keep going and seek out the right advice, you know, and, and

build your network of sort of supportive individuals. You know, this kind of huge kind of atmosphere of apprenticeships which can be incredibly intimidating actually becomes a lot easier and a lot more kind of decompartmentalized and you can tackle those bits, bit by bit. And it’s not the sort of the huge nightmareish ball rolling at you that you initially kind of thought it probably was. So yeah, that’s probably my three tips, yeah.

Mark Simpkins (20:17.786)
Yeah.

Mark Simpkins (20:30.063)
That’s great. And I think you’re evidenced to say that it’s doable, right? You know, if you do all those things. You stick at it and you learn and you’re willing to do it. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So that’s great. Anyway, Mitch, thank you so much for your time today. And that’s a wrap for this kind of edition of FE Gold.

Mitch Goodall (20:34.91)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, just free blokes from the Midlands.

Mitch Goodall (20:43.25)
What more can I say?

Mark Simpkins (20:55.983)
And I hope the listeners are getting something, some tips and inspiration. So as always, if you enjoy the show, tell your connections, tell your friends, tell your colleagues, and that will help obviously this grow. And what’s key for me is if you’ve got any topics you’d like me to cover in future shows, if you wanna drop me a message on LinkedIn, you can do, or you can get in touch with me at simp

Mark Simpkins (21:25.471)
Um, and yeah, we’ll, we’ll move on to the next episode. So this has been Fe Gold with me, Mark Simpkins, and thank you all for listening. Thanks again, Mitch.

Mitch Goodall (21:35.054)
Cheers.