Launching a Growth Academy for your Boutique Firm

Last year, Eclipse Consulting Group launched our internal “Eclipse Academy” where we have been investing formally in the strategic development of our employees to be better professionals and consultants through a blend of structured offerings around everyday learning, core training, and targeted skill-building.

These types of learning can be summarized as:

• Everyday Learning – 30-50 hours per year via books, articles, podcasts, videos, feedback, lunch & learns
• Core Training – The common skills for our organization – 10-15 hours per year via courses, videos, instructors
• Targeted Skill-Building – 100-500 hours per year via on-the-job experience and intentional training

We knew that for upskilling to align with the company’s goals and unlock the “drive” needed to complete necessary activities, Eclipse Academy had to provide the connective tissue between learning platforms, data, and people (e.g., other departments, leaders, managers, and employees) while giving our people the autonomy to fit the activities into their individual development plans and schedules. 

Our launch event was followed by 3 phases that built upon each other. This blog post will walk through that process and highlight some of our lessons learned and advice for those considering this journey.

Phase 0: Planning and Launch:

For a business to become successful in a market characterized by specialization and change, meaningful learning & development must be created and nurtured organically, we can’t simply rely on hiring people ready to jump in like we did in the start-up and early days of growth. We believe that a well-structured Corporate Academy is an essential component needed to support our people in the Scale Stage of the journey. To be successful and figure out when the time is right to launch your own academy, I would suggest 3 key steps:

1. Do your homework. As Greg Alexander would say, “this is well-worn territory” so there is no need to reinvent the wheel

2. Involve the most important people in your company early on – you’re going to need buy-in and champions

3. Let that research and your own sense guide you in setting the goals of your corporate academy as you develop a launch plan

Once we had these points covered, we built a launch announcement that we enthusiastically shared in one of our Friday town-hall style forums. The agenda was intended to educate, align on expectations, demonstrate commitment to our Mission, and in general help get the team excited about the academy. Like we do in most forums at Eclipse, we emphasized how this aligns to our Mission, especially in regards to our team:

The launch event covered the following topics:

What a Corporate University is and is not: We cited an article published in HR Magazine¹ that highlighted the general lack of understanding of what a corporate academy is. It juxtaposed training departments (typically more tactical and operational) with a Corporate Academy that is meant to develop “on on-the-job skills, company-specific proprietary knowledge and branding, and certification”.

We went on to formally define a Corporate Academy: (noun) a collaborative place where employees develop skills that align with the business needs.

Why “Eclipse Academy”?: To further emphasize why we are doing this we cited research presented in a webinar put on by leading authorities in the space (LinkedIn Learning² and Josh Bersin) that showed the benefits of cultivating “Heavy Learners” vs. “Light Learners”. I’ve included a link to the webinar in the references; it shares a great deal of evidence-based research that supports why an academy is needed. Helping to further underscore the need for an academy beyond just the science, the webinar speaks to the art of launching an academy – simply put, you must make sure this isn’t just another check the box burden on the time of your people. A few of the datapoints that stood out to me emphasizing how employees are already “overwhelmed” include:

• More than 80% of all companies rate their business “highly complex” or “complex” for employees.
• Fewer than 16% of companies have a program to “simplify work” or help employees deal with stress.
• 40% of the US population believes it is impossible to succeed at work and have a balanced family life.
• The “average” US worker works 47 hours and 49% work 50 hours or more per week, with 20% at 60+ hours per week.

These stats aren’t exactly surprising but figuring out how to make an academy that helps improve them and not just add more fuel to the fire can seem daunting – especially for operators of boutique firms that already have enough challenges to keep them busy! This webinar went on to emphasize how “Organizations must redesign themselves” and showed a comparison of the antiquated hierarchical team and communication structure of the past relative to the complex nature of how things “are” and the how things actually work.  

For those of you reading this that want even more data on the business case and ROI for launching an academy, there is a great piece of research produced by IBM on “The Value of Training³, which I have cited in the references. For us at Eclipse, we felt it was enough to simply quote Zig Ziglar:

Phased Approach to Launch: To help ease our teams into the concept of the academy, we felt it was prudent to follow the crawl-walk-run approach. The final piece of our Academy Launch session was to train them on the first components we already built and to show our plan for building the academy through 3 distinct phases, which are summarized in the following sections.

Phase 1: Foundational Pilot: Plan to spend at least 6-9 months in this Phase to get it right.

We wanted to establish a few key building blocks that were easy to understand, required no new tools or platforms, and could add immediate positive interactions and value for teams across the firm. Some of the foundational items we decided to include in Phase 1 were:

• Eclipse Knowledge Exchange – A repository for peer-to-peer content sharing of impactful publicly available resources. People are free to share anything from materials they liked from a webinar they attended, articles about impactful topics relevant to the firm and our clients, and even scrubbed POVs/tools/templates they want to make their peers aware of. Our hope is that one day in the future, this could even serve as a knowledge base to help further the training of our in-house AI Agents.
• The Eclipse Book Club where we meet monthly to discuss classic titles that reinforce the development of our professional acumen as well as the ongoing development/maintenance of our domain knowledge. Our first Book Club title was a classic – The McKinsey Way by Ethan Rasiel.
• A weekly company-wide “Friday Forum” where leaders and peers present on various relevant topics ranging from the “Eclipse Way” and best practices to reinforcing company initiatives/resources.
• Lunch & Learn Series – monthly deep dives into high-impact topics led by peers. This is often a POV on an emerging challenge we are gearing up to support clients on or a report out on experiences from a real engagement where we made significant impact for a client.

Phase 2: Establish a Learning & Development Platform & Committee: Plan to spend 9-12 months in this Phase to get it right.

We knew we needed to bring more features into Eclipse Academy, and we needed more structure to integrate it with the rest of the employee experience. To accomplish this, we launched a new Learning & Development Platform (often referred to as a Learning Management System or LMS) integrated with our performance management process. We needed to ensure that it offered the tools necessary to make learning a visible, goal-driven part of every career at Eclipse. This included out of the box training from a library we paid for, Eclipse-curated training courses, resources from our trade and technology partners, and content from other sources like LinkedIn Learning, YouTube, and university offerings.

For the benefit of others reading this article who may be exploring how to pull this off I will elaborate more on the options we considered, but first I’ll highlight what we chose to use and our progress standing it up so far. Since we already use many modules within Rippling for things that go well beyond the HRIS features it is most known for, it had a big advantage over the numerous platforms that we considered. Given employees already rely on Rippling in our firm for everything from Time and Expense tracking and Performance Management, this felt like the optimal place for us to start.

Rippling has a specialized L&D module that we were able to add to our subscription at a relatively low cost per employee. The most basic level of the service felt like the right place for us to start, but they offer larger packages that would make sense for larger firms. The basic L&D package in Rippling included the ability to launch and track up to 10 on-demand courses from their extensive course library, so we designed a release and rotation schedule that we communicate to employees so we can make the most of the vast library of training options available on the platform. While these L&D courses are considered optional, our A-Player scorecards imbedded within our Perpetual Performance Management™ cycle includes KPIs for “developing yourself and others” that help reinforce the need to proactively leverage this resource for development.

The next goal we set to expand this platform included exploring how to load and track our own in-house developed training resources in the most efficient way possible. This will include helpful guides to aid people during onboarding to subject-matter-led sessions leveraging some of the vast array of Eclipse’s proprietary POVs, tools, assets, and accelerators. The key success factor will be if Rippling is able to track the user data around these other training resources that are not coming from their library. As of the time of this writing, we have not yet tested this functionality to be able to comment on it but ping me on LinkedIn in 2026 and I am sure I will have an answer for you!

To help ease the effort required to build this additional content, we have decided to leverage the rails we are building for our newly launched Eclipse Content Marketing Growth Engine™. This Growth Engine includes things like our soon-to-be launched video podcast and other long-form marketing pieces. We are intentionally designing and planning the investment in our marketing engines in a way that will be useful for other things within the firm like L&D!

So wait a minute…. You don’t use Rippling already? Well then, this platform would likely not make sense for you to consider. I would say the Rippling platform just barely meets our basic needs to achieve our L&D platform goals. We evaluated many others in our due diligence, so to potentially help you with that, the table below summarizes our key observations from the top 9 platforms we researched. We have also continued to explore others since this analysis was done, but I must say the pace of innovation here is rapid thanks to the explosive growth of AI. In fact, AI makes it easier to script and leverage avatars to instantly record content. Of course, there needs to be enough personalized experience with real human coaches blended in to not lose the feel of being a boutique firm, but the capabilities and applications we are already seeing with AI are incredible. All of that to basically say, the below list is probably already outdated!

Cost is a struggle on these platforms and can get very confusing. For us, Rippling met our basic needs, was integrated into something our employees were already comfortable with, and happened to be one of the least expensive options from a per-employee per-month (PEPM) and total cost perspective. In a perfect world, we would like to pair the platform with other resources, but the challenge with items not hosted in the L&D/LMS platform native libraries is often that it is much more difficult to automate the tracking of data. Some of the more costly platforms do offer additional features to help with this, but still nothing felt like a perfect solution. Note: I love LinkedIn learning, but as of the time I am writing this blog, it only offers a content library and not the full features of a Learning Management System (LMS). It does offer canned certifications, learning paths, quizzes, manager dashboards and other features that do make it a powerful addition to your L&D ecosystem. For some of you, that might actually be enough given your current size and growth stage. I am sure you will not be surprised to hear this, but LinkedIn learning can be very expensive! They do give a great deal of content away for free, but premium content and enhanced features will cost you.

Phase 3: Develop an Employee Certification Program: This can be as fast as 3-6 months if you do well in Phases 1 & 2 and know how to execute well.

While our focus for now at Eclipse is still on getting the processes and tools homed in and systematized for Phase 2, we are already working on what’s next! For Phase 3, we’re actively building out our 10+ new certifications for our staff that emphasize some of the most impactful differentiators that embody “The Eclipse Way”! This internal employee certification program will help us formalize expertise and create more pathways for impact and recognition. It’s important to at least think of this phase as we go through Phases 1 & 2 because the right planning will allow us to leverage the same infrastructure built for other needs without adding even more tools or overhead to our operating model.

Below is a snapshot of some of the key elements we considered as we designed our certification pathways as well as examples of what we’ve built or otherwise consider to be best practice for each:

Final Thoughts:

You may think this is starting to sound like a full-time job for someone. Well, I can assure you it is not! Don’t mistake this very detailed summary for being hard or excessively time consuming. A competent and passionate lead empowered to get these steps done as a +1 activity is all that is required here – a dozen or so man hours in a series of 90-day quarterly sprints to deliver on the Phase objectives will be more than sufficient.

To summarize, you have to do the basic planning and preparation, and then when the time is right you need to just start the work. Spread it across a couple years by incrementally building one piece at a time – it’s a marathon not a sprint! If you hit the points in the summary checklist below, your team will have your own academy up and running before you know it!

• Do your homework, don’t reinvent the wheel
• Involve the most important people in your company early on
• Set the goals for your academy as you develop a launch plan
• Define the learning and engagement formats that fit your needs
• Get the low-hanging fruit – build the foundational components that don’t require incremental spend or technology to operationalize
• Launch the foundation and share the roadmap for continued enhancements – socialize and secure the acceptance and commitment of your teams
• Involve managers and employees to set L&D goals
• Market your Academy internally as if you were marketing a product
• Choose the right learning platform for your evolving needs
• Enrich with the best additional features and integrations
• Build the Certifications that emphasize what already makes your firm special and operationalize these by leveraging the same tools you built for the rest of the components
• Measure and drive continuous improvement

Bonus Content:

It’s a good idea to make your foundational components in Phase 1 so easy and clear that a 5^th grader could follow them. The below screenshots are examples from our Eclipse Academy Launch training and resource guide that helped us get everyone rowing in the same direction:

References:

¹ HR Magazine: https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/news/hr-magazine/corporate-university-not

² LinkedIn Learning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niOI9VoS7IY&t=993s&ab_channel=JoshBersin

³The Value of Training (IBM): https://www.ibm.com/training/pdfs/IBMTraining-TheValueofTraining.pdf

You can learn more about Eclipse Consulting Group at our LinkedIn page https://www.linkedin.com/company/eclipseconsultinggroup  or check out our website at https://teameclipse.com/

Michael is the Founder and Managing Partner of Eclipse Consulting Group, a specialized professional services firm that empowers highly regulated and data intensive businesses with subject-matter leadership and execution-focused delivery capabilities across Data Management & Analytics, Risk & Regulatory Compliance, and Operational Transformation.

With nearly two decades of experience working across domains in both public and private sectors, Michael is passionate about pioneering best practices in partnership with clients to help them evolve. His diverse background working across the enterprise in numerous change management and executive leadership roles for many of the world’s leading financial institutions has helped him develop a unique perspective on how organizations function and how to navigate changing business, technical, and regulatory landscapes.

Michael is also a lecturer in Columbia University’s Graduate School of Professional Studies where he has spent 5+ years contributing to the creation of new courses and enhancement of exiting curriculum to support impactful and relevant delivery that better mimics real-world application. Select courses include Financial Risk Management within the Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) program and Insurance Risk Management within the Insurance Management program.

Michael received an MS in Finance and an MBA in Risk Management & Insurance from Georgia State University’s J. Mack Robinson College of Business. He earned a Professional Risk Manager (PRM) certification from PRMIA, Basel Compliance Professional designation from BCPA, Project Management Professional (PMP) credential from PMI, and numerous other industry licenses (including FINRA and OCI) and data/IT certifications.