What good training used to cost

A Greggs employee in Grantham posted a review on 6 May 2026. She works as a Cash Handler. Here's what she said:

"Greggs is generally a positive place to work, especially for those looking for a fast-paced retail environment with clear structure and expectations. The company provides good initial training, making it relatively easy for new employees to settle into their roles, even without prior experience."

That review stopped me when I read it. Specifically the phrase "good initial training." That's the thing every operator I talk to wishes they could deliver. The thing most of them know they don't.

It's worth asking what makes Greggs able to do that. They have 2,500 stores and around 30,000 staff. They have a dedicated L&D function. They have apprentice programmes. They have probably £5 million a year going into making sure a new Cash Handler in Lincolnshire settles in without prior experience.

The cafe down the road from her has 12 staff. The owner has £0 a year going into proper training infrastructure. So they shadow. They wing it. They lose 42% of new hires in the first 90 days and tell themselves it's the labour market.

This piece is about why that gap exists. And what just changed.

Why proper SMB training has been structurally unaffordable

Most SMB owners I've spoken to genuinely want to train their staff properly. They know shadowing is brittle. They know the cost of bad onboarding lands on them. They've heard the phrase "first 90 days" and they feel guilty when they lose someone.

The problem they're up against is financial. Building the infrastructure that delivers Greggs-quality training requires money the cafe owner does not have.

The framing I usually hear about bad SMB training treats it as a motivation problem. Operators don't care enough. They're cutting corners. They don't take their people seriously. That framing misses what's actually going on. Most operators care. They just can't afford the stack that would let them act on it.

What proper training infrastructure actually costs

Let me walk through what a 12-staff hospitality SMB would need to spend to deliver structured training the conventional way. These numbers are modelled from UK market rates and current SaaS pricing pages. Where I'm rounding I'll say.

An L&D specialist. A part-time consultant one day a week works out at £400-600 a day. Fifty days a year sits at £20,000-30,000. Without someone who understands instructional design, the content gets written by whoever has free time, and what you end up with is a Word document nobody reads.

An LMS subscription. Articulate 360 lists pricing from $1,399 per user per year for the personal plan and $1,749 per user per year for teams. For a small operator that's 1-3 author seats at £4,000-12,000. Mid-range SMB LMS platforms (TalentLMS, LearnUpon, Workramp) start at £5,000-15,000 a year. The LMS is what assigns content, tracks completions, and proves training happened.

An instructional designer. UK freelance instructional designers charge £400-800 a day. Writing 40 procedures into structured modules takes around 40 days. That's £16,000-32,000 in Year 1. Your senior staff member would otherwise become the unwilling content author, and the content quality reflects their writing skill.

Video production. Hiring a videographer to film 20 procedure videos with proper lighting and editing comes to £8,000-15,000. The alternative is a manual nobody reads or a Loom link buried in WhatsApp.

Translation. Professional translation runs roughly £0.10-0.20 per word. A 40-procedure library translated into five languages comes to £25,000-50,000 the first year. The alternative is your Polish prep cook nodding along during training and quitting in three weeks.

A compliance records system. Either a module of your LMS or a separate tool, this tracks who completed what and when. £2,000-5,000 a year. The alternative is scrambling when the inspector visits and hoping nobody asked when Sarah did her allergen module.

Mobile delivery. Most LMS platforms have desktop-first interfaces. Building mobile-first delivery for deskless staff costs anywhere from £5,000 for a wrapper to £50,000+ for a custom app. Floor staff who can't open the system from their phone never open it at all.

Ongoing maintenance. Quarterly content updates as the menu, procedures, and suppliers change. Around £8,000-20,000 a year of consultant or instructional designer time.

Add it up and Year 1 for a 12-staff hospitality SMB comes to £88,000-175,000. Mid-range estimate: about £93,000. Year 2 onwards runs £35,000-70,000 a year.

To put that in context: the cafe in question has maybe £200,000 a year in profit if they're doing well. Spending half of that on training infrastructure is structurally impossible. So they spend nothing on it, and the cost shows up somewhere else.

I modelled the invisible training tax for a typical operator at around £51,600 a year. That tax exists because the infrastructure to prevent it was unaffordable.

What changed

For 15 years the answer to "why can't SMBs deliver proper training" was the same: the tools were built for enterprises. Articulate, Cornerstone, Docebo, Workramp - all priced and designed for organisations with L&D teams. The SMB market got Trainual at $249/mo, which assumes the owner does all the writing themselves, or SC Training, which gives you a generic content library that doesn't speak your operation.

What changed in the last 12 months is the AI capability that lets a phone video become a structured guide automatically. The instructional designer's job (extract steps from how something gets done, structure them, add timings, label equipment) is the job the AI now does. The translation team's job (convert 50,000 words across five languages) is the job the AI now does. The video production team's job (turn the senior's walkthrough into a deliverable artefact) is the job the AI now does.

That collapses a chain of expensive specialist roles into one phone video plus AI processing. Which collapses £90,000+ of Year 1 cost into something an SMB can actually pay for.

What I built to do this

That's why I built Lattify. For £948 a year on the Growth tier, you get:

Phone video capture, where the owner films a 90-second walkthrough. AI extraction of steps, timings, and equipment, which replaces the instructional designer. Auto-translation into 20+ languages on fetch, which replaces the translation service. Mobile-first delivery to every staff phone, which replaces the LMS plus mobile development. Completion logging built in, which replaces the records system. A searchable knowledge base across all content, which has no traditional equivalent. An AI advisor that answers mid-task questions grounded in your content, which has no traditional equivalent. Auto-generated checklists derived from the guides, which has no traditional equivalent.

The 90-second filming job stays with the owner. Everything else collapses to software.

For a 12-staff hospitality SMB the maths comes to:

• Traditional Year 1: £93,000
• Lattify Year 1: £948
• 98 times cheaper

Over five years the gap holds. Traditional approach runs roughly £181,000 (Year 1 build plus four years of maintenance). Lattify runs £4,740. 38 times cheaper over five years.

What this stack can do that the old stack couldn't

The cost saving is the headline. The capability story is what justifies the buying decision for most operators.

Updates propagate the same day. Traditional training has content lag. You change a procedure, the instructional designer rewrites the module, the LMS pushes the update, your staff retake the lesson. Two weeks minimum. With Lattify the senior films the new way once, AI rebuilds the structured guide, and every staff phone sees the new version on next open.

Multi-language scales at zero marginal cost. Adding Mandarin to a Greggs LMS rollout requires translating all the existing content and integrating it into the platform. Adding Mandarin to Lattify means flipping a setting. Translation runs on fetch, automatically, in any of 20+ languages. Greggs cannot do this at their scale. A 12-staff cafe gets it for £79 a month.

The AI advisor has no traditional equivalent. Staff member on a Saturday at 7pm asks "how do I do a refund on a card payment with a partial credit note." Lattify answers grounded in the venue's specific procedure, on the staff member's phone, in three seconds. A traditional LMS has linear courses and step-level search at best. There is no version where the LMS knows where the staff member is in a specific task and answers contextually.

Compliance renders in one click. When the EHO visits, traditional setups require pulling completion data from the LMS, exporting reports, cross-referencing with HR records, and assembling the pack. Lattify produces an audit-ready evidence bundle on demand because the data model was designed for that render.

The vertical taxonomy ships pre-built. Greggs spent years getting their bakery content right. A 12-staff cafe using a generic LMS starts with empty templates labelled "Customer Service Module 1." Lattify ships with hospitality, trades, dog daycare, cleaning, childcare, retail, and fitness taxonomies pre-curated.

Even Greggs cannot do most of these capabilities at their scale, despite their L&D budget.

The Greggs reviewer in Grantham praised "good initial training" because Greggs invested millions in it over years. The owner of a 12-staff cafe down the road wants to deliver the same thing to their staff. For the first time, they can afford to.