Like so many in this modern tech culture, I do some consulting on the side. You don’t want to see my rates… I keep my client list small and the invoices large. Of course, my clients know going in that they’re getting top-top-top notch service, so it’s not a big deal when they see the bill.

One of my clients is rather novice to using computers. So, after much frustration with Vista, he decided to switch to Mac. I had advised the switch to Mac long ago, but $3,000 later in training, new equipment, and confusion on his behalf, he decided to listen. I will note here I was not the person that suggested Vista, someone else sold him on all the glorious additions… all of which confused him and training seemed to go in one ear and out the other.

The great news is, I now get to hand off the painful part of training to Apple, thanks to One to One. He’s buying One to One tomorrow (at my suggestion) and he’s now going to be trained on how to use a Mac, iLife, and iPhone. Once he’s up to speed, we’ll order the Mac hardware and I’ll switch him over. What was a painful process of invoices and “where’d the money all go” is now Apple’s problem.

Needless to say, I don’t like doing training. Clients don’t like me charging for training, and it works well when we have a meeting of the minds on that. The main reason is because it took me a lifetime to learn all that I know, I cannot dump that in someone’s brain in a few hour-long sessions. When I train friends and family, they’re appreciative, and can learn quickly… I’m off the clock, so there’s no rush if things go long, and there’s no impending demand of “I need to learn all of this in X hours so I don’t have to pay beyond Y dollars”.

One-to-one makes it simple for me to hand that part off to Apple, and focus on raking in the cash on important things… like producing, editing, reviewing, drafting, coding, publishing, and repeating all the above.