Buying a simulation
Two quotes for the same brief can sit a factor of ten apart. The spread is not margin, and a buyer who can name the drivers negotiates better.
Experiential learning is bought rarely, by people who buy a lot of other things routinely. That combination produces briefs that cannot be compared, quotes that cannot be reconciled, and a decision made on the strength of a showreel.
Written for the person signing the purchase order rather than for the person delivering the session.
What am I actually buying, and what should it cost?
- What should this cost?
What a simulation costs a corporate buyer, and what drives the price
Two quotes for the same brief can sit a factor of ten apart. The spread is not margin. It is five specific cost drivers, and a buyer who can name them negotiates better.
11 September 2026 — 6 min read - How do I tell a real provider from a reseller?
Eleven questions that separate a provider from a reseller
Anyone can show you a showreel. These are the questions whose answers cannot be improvised, and what a good answer to each one sounds like.
19 September 2026 — 6 min read - How do I write the brief?
Writing a brief that gets you comparable bids
Most learning briefs describe a solution, so the bids come back describing different solutions and cannot be compared. Describe the room instead.
20 September 2026 — 5 min read
If you are choosing rather than running
- team building activity for 200 people, large group facilitation
Running a real session for 200 people or more
- change management workshop, resistance to change training
Getting a team through a change they did not ask for
- cross-functional collaboration workshop, silo busting
Two teams that have to work together and do not
The other four
- How do I show this worked?
Proving the session did something
Reaction scores come back between 4.2 and 4.7 every time and tell a sponsor nothing. These are the measurements that survive being questioned.
- How do I run this well?
Running the room
The game is not the intervention. What a facilitator does with the forty minutes after it, with two hundred people, or when the session goes sideways — that is the intervention.
- Which format fits this brief?
Choosing the format
Physical or digital, in a room or on a call, twelve people or five hundred. Each of those choices changes what the session can produce, and none of them is a preference.
- Where does this fit in the wider programme?
Designing around the session
A simulation is one day. Whether it changes anything is settled by the weeks either side of it, which is the part nobody designs.
Book a call with Fernando
Thirty minutes on whether the catalogue fits your market. No pitch deck — bring the clients you are trying to win.
- With
- Fernando Mendes
- Timezone
- GST (Dubai, UTC+4)
- Length
- 30 min