Corporate Training Company
The shortcut: Pick one vertical and one outcome (sales, leadership, DEI, manager onboarding) — refuse generalist work. The buyer isn't shopping a curriculum, they're shopping a facilitator who already speaks their industry.
Industry: Tutoring & Training | Investment level: Small — $5,000-$15,000 | Time to launch: 8-14 weeks (LLC, MSA, first scoping calls, then a paid pilot)
Best for: Senior practitioners with 8-15 years inside one function (former VP of Sales, head of L&D, DEI lead at a Fortune 1000) who can run a room of 30 skeptical adults without a slide deck and survive. What you'll likely make: $4,000 month 3, $12,000 month 6, $22,000 month 12. Math is in Section 4.
Market Opportunity
Your client has the LMS (Learning Management System) subscription. She has a completed needs analysis in a Google Doc. She has CFO sign-off on a $60,000 line item that has to spend by fiscal year-end. She has an executive mandate from a Q4 OKR (Objectives and Key Results) saying "lift sales close rate by 10 points." What she does not have is a person who can land in 90 days, watch the actual sales calls, and rewrite the discovery script in the language her AEs (account executives) use. That gap is the business.
The US corporate training market hit $87.1 billion in 2024, projected to reach $117.9 billion by 2030 — leadership and management at $32.7B and sales training at $5.5B are the two biggest sub-segments Training Industry 2024. ATD (Association for Talent Development) found organizations with formal training see 218% higher income per employee than those without ATD State of the Industry 2023 — that single stat is what gets your proposal funded.
The trap is thinking you compete with LinkedIn Learning. You don't. LinkedIn Learning sells a video library at $20-$40/employee/month and HR already bought it. What HR cannot get from 16,000 generic videos is a person who walks into a Tuesday all-hands, runs a four-hour sales objection clinic with the actual deals on the whiteboard, and stays for the post-mortem. That is what they pay $5,000-$15,000/day for. Generalists stall at $30,000-$50,000/year part-time. Vertical specialists (sales for SaaS, manager training for healthcare, inclusion training for engineering orgs) clear $120,000-$300,000/year solo because specialization closes deals 30-50% faster.
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