Sell Courses: Teach What You Already Know

Every kitchen contains somebody who knows how to do something that other people would pay to learn. Most of that knowledge never leaves the building.

Courses are the mechanism for selling it — and, just as usefully, for training your own staff on the standards you already have in your head.

Who it is for

Two quite different venues, and the product serves both.

Venues with something to teach. A chef running cookery classes, a café running barista training, a wine bar running tastings, a producer running a tour. These are revenue from a room and a skill you already have, usually on a day you are otherwise closed.

Venues with staff to train. Induction, allergens, food safety, your own service standards. Built once, used for every new starter, with a record that somebody actually completed it.

Online, in person, or both

A course is one of three shapes and the machinery differs:

• In person — dates, seats, a waitlist when it fills, a calendar file, and check-in on the day. Completion is attendance.
• Online — lessons, video, quizzes and practical submissions, taken whenever the learner has time. Completion is the curriculum.
• Both — an online module before an in-person session, which is how most real training actually works. Completion needs both, and only then does a certificate issue.

That last rule is worth stating because it is the one people expect to get wrong. A learner cannot watch the videos and skip the day, or turn up and skip the theory, and end up holding the same certificate as somebody who did the lot.

Seats, and the last-one problem

In-person courses sell seats, and two people clicking at once on the last seat is the normal case rather than the edge case.

Seats are claimed safely, so the second person gets a clear answer rather than a double booking you discover on the day. When a session fills, a waitlist opens — the same logic as a fully booked restaurant, for the same reason: somebody who wanted to come is worth keeping hold of.

Certificates that mean something

Where a course awards a certificate, it is verifiable and downloadable as a PDF.

For a cookery class that is a nice memento. For food safety or HACCP training it is the entire product: the thing being bought is evidence, and evidence that cannot be checked is not evidence. A certificate carries what was completed and can be verified by somebody who was not there.

Training your own team

This is the use most venues underrate.

Build your induction once — how you take an order, your allergen procedure, what your coffee should taste like — and enrol every new starter on it. It costs €3.99 per person per course, and what you get back is consistency plus a record that a named person completed a named course on a named date.

For anything compliance-adjacent, that record is the reason to bother. "We train everybody" is not a defensible statement. A list of completions is.

Selling to people who do not speak English

You can unlock a course in another language. A translation is drafted and you approve it before anybody sees it, so what goes out is something you signed off rather than something that appeared automatically. The learner reads it in their language and their certificate is issued in it too.

For hospitality training in Ireland that is not a niche feature, and it is optional and priced per language rather than bundled into everything.

Pricing a class

The instinct is to price a class against the cost of the food, which produces a number far too low.

What somebody buys is two hours with a person who knows how to do the thing — the ingredients are almost incidental. A pasta class priced at €25 reads as a cheap evening; the same class at €65 reads as a proper one, and the people who book it are the people who wanted a proper one. Venues that underprice classes generally end up cancelling them, because twelve seats at €25 does not cover a chef.

Think about what else that evening competes with. A cookery class is not competing with dinner at your restaurant, it is competing with dinner somewhere plus a cinema, and it is a better evening than that.

What it costs

• 5% venue commission
• 5% buyer fee, paid by the learner
• €3.99 per person, per course, to enrol your own staff

Nothing monthly, nothing to build a course, nothing if nobody enrols.

A worked example

A restaurant runs a pasta-making class on Mondays, when it is closed. Twelve seats at €65.

That is €780 a session. Mosey's venue commission is 5%, so €39, leaving €741 for a room that was earning nothing, using a chef who was going to be there anyway.

The same restaurant builds a two-hour allergen and service induction for new staff. With fifteen starters a year, that is €59.85 annually, and every one of them arrives at their first shift having been taught the same thing.

What it connects to

• Sell event tickets — for a one-off night rather than a taught class
• Staff hiring and training — the rest of the team side
• Get discovered on Mosey — how learners find the course
• Getting paid — where the money goes
• What Mosey costs — every rate on one page