From consultancy to e-learning provider: How Stallard Kane turned a platform into a product

Twenty-five years ago, Stallard Kane set out to help businesses get health and safety right, and today they are doing something few consultancies have managed: they have turned that mission into a fully commercial e-learning product, serving over 80 client organisations and more than 1,000 learners from a single platform.

It did not start that way. The training department grew out of a recurring frustration, with consultants going out, completing audits, flagging training needs, and then returning a year later to find nothing had changed. Clients simply had not got round to it. Bringing training in-house was the obvious answer, but the platform they were using could not keep pace with a growing business. It was hard to customise, hard to manage at scale, and harder still to sell with any real confidence.

"We needed something that gave each client their own space, but that we could still manage centrally," says Naomi Wistow. Access LMS Evo gave them exactly that.

After evaluating a wide range of options, Stallard Kane chose Access LMS Evo. The multi-tenant architecture was exactly what they needed: a single platform that Stallard Kane manages centrally, but within which each client organisation has their own completely separate, branded environment, with their own URL, their own logo, and a Spotlight banner at the top of the homepage pointing users to the Stallard Kane team whenever they need help.

The impact on how the team works has been significant. Previously they had to stay closely involved in every client's learning activity, allocating courses, chasing completions and fielding basic queries.

Now, once a client is onboarded, they self-serve entirely, with administrators managing their own staff, assigning learning, setting due dates and pulling compliance reports without needing to contact Stallard Kane at all.

Since the Evo refresh, the experience of demoing the platform has transformed entirely. Lucy Clayton manages the platform day-to-day and runs every new client demo herself, and where she once hesitated with a system she was not fully confident in, she now walks prospective clients through it live, switching between learner and admin views, assigning content and showing them exactly what their team will see.

The result has not just been more positive demos but a shift towards multi-year contracts from clients who are happy to commit for the long term.

Getting health and safety training in front of warehouse workers, factory staff and mobile operatives is a fundamentally different challenge to training an office team, and many of Stallard Kane's clients operate in exactly those environments where not everyone has access to a laptop. For Lucy, the mobile app is not just a handy feature but the single most powerful part of the conversation when she is in front of a new prospect.

"A massive selling point for us is the mobile app. I would say it's the best feature for us to sell." says Lucy Clayton, from Stallard Kane

The reason it resonates so strongly is that it removes the most common objection before it has even been raised. Clients whose workforce is largely non-desk-based often assume e-learning simply will not work for them, and the mobile app changes that conversation entirely.

"There are always excuses. 'I don't have access to a desktop.' Well, we can fix that. If someone's waiting for ten minutes while a lorry's being filled up, there's nothing stopping them doing a course." - Lucy Clayton, Stallard Kane

Naomi describes the same reaction from clients once they understand what is on offer. A username and a phone is genuinely all a learner needs, and that simplicity has been transformative for organisations that previously struggled to get everyone trained at the same time in the same place.

"The mobile app is something our clients love. They can log in on their phone, and it just makes it so much more accessible." - Naomi Wistow, Stallard Kane

For health and safety training in particular, completion is not optional, with legal obligations, audit trails and certificates all requiring evidenced completion. A platform that works on any device and in any location removes the last excuse for non-compliance.

When a health and safety adviser spots a training gap on an audit visit, the natural next step is to ask whether e-learning can fill it. For Stallard Kane, the answer is almost always yes. Access LMS Evo's content library covers standard compliance requirements, wellbeing topics and industry-specific courses, which means that when a client comes to them with a need, they rarely have to look elsewhere. That breadth has also had a measurable impact on retention, with Lucy seeing a clear shift towards longer commitments since the Access Evo refresh.

Running an e-learning product for over 80 organisations from a small team means that when something needs resolving, it needs resolving quickly, because a delay for Stallard Kane is a delay for their client. The responsiveness of the Access support team and the account management relationship with James have become something Lucy mentions to prospective clients as part of what makes the overall offering work.

"The support from yourselves is great. You've been there, you've offered little sessions. It's been fantastic." - Naomi Wistow, Stallard Kane

With multi-year contracts becoming the norm and their client base continuing to grow, Stallard Kane are now exploring developing their own original course content, moving from using existing material to creating and hosting courses of their own. For anyone considering a similar model, Naomi's advice is straightforward.

"We asked the question, and you guys said yes and delivered on it." - 
Naomi Wistow, Stallard Kane

Solution used

Stallard Kane's extended enterprise model is powered by Access LMS Evo, a flexible learning management system built to scale across multiple organisations, teams and learner types from a single platform.