Wednesday, July 22, 2020

The Massive, Wasted Investment in Brett Palmer, CST

The investment in Brett Palmer, Certified Scrum Trainer was significant. And lost. Well, lost to me - the investor. Others profited off of my investment. Handsomely. But that's a later story.

The classes highlighted are actually from Brett's application to the Scrum Alliance Trainer Approval Committee (TAC). These critical, key co-trainings below where arranged, paid-time-off and sometimes actually paid classes and/or forfeited revenue to another co-trainer. The personal connections, relationships, trust, time and bottom line cost are incredibly high to become a CST. This is an example of that.

This is the highest hurdle to clear for someone, like a Certified Scrum Professional (CSP-SM) who wants to become a CST because they need: willing co-trainers, time on each co-trainers schedule, a flexible job that lets them take the equivalent of six weeks of work off, and months of pay to cover that and travel expenses. Brett had the benefit of my classes to practice with (and my willingness to take the customer hit for lower quality training by him). If you don't have a local trainer who will do that, you'll be traveling every single class. Even with all that practice, Brett still failed to pass the TAC the first time. This happened to be a paid trip to Dublin, Ireland for over a week. At least he got to spend some time with Kate Megaw, of BrainTrust, who would later employ Brett as one of their busiest contract trainers just days after Brett quit the full-time job at my company.

All this co-training is a once-in-a-lifetime deal if you can have someone else pay for all of that, then you walk away and take all the profit for yourself.

It's like getting into Formula 1 racing, so you build a top-level car. Then someone takes the car and goes off to race and keep all the winnings. All the investment is lost.

Or perhaps going through all the production cost to make a movie, then someone takes the reel and goes to a theater and says, "If you'll play this movie, I'll split the profits with you."

Worse yet, there are other trainers and REPs with the Scrum Alliance who will take this stolen investment in and profit off the breach of contract! We will cover that more later.

Brett Palmer