Birthday Gifts Are For Giving

Last year on my birthday, I invited people to meet 1-1 with me to talk about business stuff. The conversations with the people who took that offer were scintillating. Kate, I'm looking at you 😍

This year, instead of "business stuff," I invite you to celebrate my birthday by taking some time with me to talk about anything. I got into my career because I enjoy helping people learn, sharing what I have learned, and solving fun and interesting problems.

I love my work.

In case we haven't officially met or it's been a hot second since we've had a meaningful chat, here's some topics that would spark joy:

• Renovating a sales funnel
• Growing mushrooms
• AI prompts
• Whiskey that's not too expensive
• The professional League of Legends esports team Flyquest
• Whether or not you should change careers
• Homemade pizzas
• Failure, generally or specifically
• Lead magnets
• Magnets

-or literally anything else that's on your mind.

Give a gift of 30 minutes of your time and I have a feeling that we'll both get significant ROI. Life's short- let's have some fun.

A TL;DR from the CRO

You get one very personal holiday every year and you can spend it any way you want, even if it means lying around like a bum.

-Roman Noodles, Chief Ruff Officer

Breaking News TL;DR - Where'd All The Money Go?

The Commonwealth Corporation who oversees the Workforce Training Fund Program (a way for businesses to get free money to pay for training) has recently announced that they have effectively run out of money.

​Read their press release here.​

This Massachusetts program annually distributes over $25M to over 1,500 businesses to upskill employees at small and large organizations on everything from proper needle injection to English as a Second Language to sales training. And now it's broke.

Well, "broke" is a little unfair- it's too successful.

Over the past few years, the WTFP grant program (which completely underwrites Learn to Scale's Cliftonstrengths Assessment and Team Workshop) has scaled back their grant sizes and become more particular about what they cover. Awareness and demand for free money, unsurprisingly, has gone up.

It's the Tragedy of the Commons, ironically happening in the Commonwealth.

The grant administrators say that they anticipate being able to distribute grants again starting in July 2025 but we can see the writing on the wall: free money for training is going to be harder to obtain for the foreseable future.

We've talked about this on the Learn to Scale team and have some exciting new developments that we're officially rolling out in June. I'll spill some details in the next TL;DR.

For now, though, if this is the first time you've realized that you could be getting free money to invest in training, watch the webinar I did with Krysta Van Ranst from BuildingPPL, a fellow training firm that also leverages WTFP grants for their clients. We explain how the grant program works and Krysta officially submitted a grant application during the webinar to do the CliftonStrengths Assessment and Team Workshop. It took less than 10 minutes to apply.

​PS. You can read and feel the recap from that workshop with Krysta's team in this short LinkedIn post.​

I had a 1/14 chance of my birthday falling on a TL;DR day. May 2nd is officially my birthday.

Whether you became a newsletter subscriber for the learning, the Roman Noodles hot takes, or my occasional rock rumbling updates, thanks for reading. I truly do love my work and writing this newsletter is a biweekly high point for me.

As someone who read all the way down here, I am guessing that you've gotten some personal or professional benefit through this biweekly missive that I've been writing for over five years.

A final birthday request for you extra-special fans: invite someone to subscribe. I get a thrill every time I get a new subscriber because it's one more chance to make the working world slightly better through learning.

Let me make it easy for you to refer with any of the following:

• Send your colleague to https://go.learntoscale.us/tldr​
• Forward this email and let them decide
• Reply to this email with a message and we will reach out to your referral

​

Survived another year,

Dan from Learn to Scale​

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​PS. Celebrating with a birthday clown this year.​