Labour

No - not the political party, but work. Doing stuff.

This last week, I’ve relaunched my training and consultancy website, moving it onto the Teachable platform. Of late, I have only taken clients on a “retained” basis. This is by far the best value for them, and allows me take a logical, methodical approach to getting the business in shape, compliance-wise.

Generally, clients are UK non-bank financial services companies. So bureau de change, pawnbrokers, money transfer agents, that sort of thing. The relentless march of anti-money laundering regulation does me favours here - recently Estate Agents have been brought into scope too.

Despite my protestations to the contrary, some businesses insist that a piecemeal approach is best for them. Finally, I have relented - so Lime Consulting now offers online training modules and template packs.

I’ve started by recording audio alongside a slide deck for “UK Anti-money laundering and counter terrorist financing basics.” Ninety minutes in total, this gives an introduction to the laws, regulations and obligations of employees in the regulated sector. My intention is to build a suite of courses, so that clients can cherry pick at their own pace. The process will be iterative - in that the legislation changes, and I imagine that I’ll get better at the medium with practice.

Alongside training, the compliance consultant’s lot is policy and procedures. Regulators love big meaty sets of Policies and Procedures, and businesses hate writing them. Getting me to write them from scratch is an expensive process - and is very involved. Ultimately the practice of the business needs to match the policies and procedures, so there’s a lot of to and fro between the business and the consultant. By offering generic templates, I hope to give businesses the opportunity to write their own documents. Should they lack the internal knowledge to finalise them - at least they will have a document that I understand for me to start from, which will increase the efficiency of getting everything up to snuff. Again - this is an undertaking that risks growing ever larger. Modern business is obliged to have lots and lots of procedures.

So far, I’ve been impressed by Teachable. In a week, I’ve setup a working platform, with custom domains, payment systems and working content, all with pretty much zero technical knowledge. There are some idiosyncrasies, things that didn’t feel intuitive, but a bit of trial and error has got me where I need to be. Isn’t technology grand? Still plenty to learn, but with a bit of luck, I’ll have made a couple sales before I’ve finished the free trial.

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