The business was started by Steve Comstock after he resigned from IBM in 1975. For eleven years Steve worked alone as a self-employed freelance trainer and course developer. By 1986 business was so strong he had to find additional help. At this time, Hunter Cobb volunteered that he would be interested in this line of work, and so Hunter joined the organization, although not as an employee but rather another self-employed freelance trainer and course developer.
During all this time, Steve's wife Kitty was involved in Steve's work in a supporting fashion: taking calls when Steve was teaching, helping with behind-the-scenes organizational and support tasks. Over time, her efforts on behalf of the group steadily increased, as the workload grew.
In 1989, John King joined the group, and in 1989, Mike Mathews also joined. Again, everyone involved was self-employed, we simply shared common resources (course materials, client management, and so on). Each instructor / developer was responsible for one or more curriculum areas and one or more clients. As we did work, commissions and royalties were paid to the course owner and client owner, as appropriate.
In 1989, Steve and Kitty formed the corporation The Trainer's Friend, Inc. as a Subchapter S Colorado corporation. All the instructors / developers (including Steve) remained as sole proprietors; Kitty was the only employee.
As time and the workload continued to grow, the organization evolved. At this point in time, Kitty has the primary marketing responsibility, also being responsible for office management and support and Steve still has teaching and course developing responsibilities. Steve and Hunter are still independent trainers and developers who use The Trainer's Friend for scheduling, marketing, and support services.
John King left to form his own business, King Training Resources. We still share materials and, to some degree, instructors. We still use some of John's courses and he still uses some of ours. Mike Mathews also left to work for a software development company in Colorado.
Recently, we have been very fortunate to have connected with some top notch trainers who we subcontract. These people bring the high quality technical and teaching skills that we insist on. We have been adamant about maintaining quality of materials and instruction since we started, and we have been careful not to compromise that quality, even turning down business if we can't do it right.
In first quarter 2008 we opened up The Trainer's Friend on-line store, to sell programmer toolkits: sets of libraries, JCL, source code, test data, and so on, to provide programmers with models and a simple, clean environment for them to Assemble or compile, bind, and test programs.
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About The Trainer's Friend, Inc.
this page last updated: 26 April, 2008
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