The cost of a presentation

I ran a training course today for a mixed bunch of engineers and salespeople for the European branch of an global engineering company. Not everyone wanted to be there (although everyone enjoyed it and no one was negative on the day). To try and make the point that the training was there for them… we did some sums.

Their MD told me that (although it was something of an under-estimate by a quite bit of a way) they worked on the assumptions of it costing them £100/hour for them to employ people – this included costs and some of their on-costs, such as pension and so on: it didn’t include the broader ‘soft’ on-costs such as training them, illness, recruitment costs and so on). The under-estimate was made up for by the convenience of having simple calculations to do! :)

We applied that figure to a presentation, like this: (all these figures are taken from the figures we worked with this morning, I’m not hyping anything here – in fact personally I think things were underestimated by people who didn’t want to be proven wrong!)…

• time spent designing a presentation – about two hours
• time spent delivering a presentation – another hour
• number of other people there – seven
• average travel time for  the attendees – two and a half hours each