Women grown niche training business

While they have about a dozen clients between the two coasts, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, they are expanding outside power generation.

“When we have a subject matter expert, we can create training in any field,” Stuart said. “So we’re looking at some more manufacturing-type clients. They have processes that need documented.”

An estimated four million baby boomers will retire every year. With more than half of those workers leaving leadership positions, a wealth of experience, skills and day-to-day operations could be lost.

Stuart said that in the power plant industry, there’s a huge “blue collar” shortage nationwide. She said there was a big push 20 years ago to get ready for the baby boomers to retire.

“In our experience, they kind of stayed on a little longer,” she said. “But, now, they really are starting to retire.”

Finley and Stuart currently are working with a client in this situation.

“Their main guy who had been there forever and knew everything retired in March,” Stuart said. “We were able to come in and glean information from him. But that’s happening all over the place. They need to capture that knowledge before its gone forever. Because once they’re out the door, it’s gone forever.”

Retrieving years and years of operational processes, organizing the information and making it accessible to the employers and employees that need it is a specialty for Finley and Stuart. They’ve been doing it a long time.

“Those step-by-step operating procedures and instructions are needed in a lot of plants and manufacturing facilities,” Finley said. “They might not even realize they need them.”

Finley and Stuart began working together back in 1999 at Epri Simulator and Training Center. They honed in their skills a year later when asked to grow a training department that began winning projects. Unfortunately, the company closed their office in 2012.

“Tara and I knew we wanted to keep working together because we’d been working together for 13 years at that point,” Finley said. “We had great synergy. She’s strong in areas that I’m not and vice versa.”

They took a couple months off to make a decision.

“We decided to keep doing the same thing because we’d been doing it successfully,” Finley said.

That’s when FTTC was born.

The women knew they wanted to serve local clients.

“When you’re small you don’t have a big budget to hop on a plane and serve everybody,” Finley said.

But those small projects rolled into larger ones after that.

Stuart works out of her home in Stewartsville, Missouri, and Finley is based in her house in Gladstone, Missouri.

Stuart, who received her degree in English and journalism from Missouri Western State University, started as a web content specialist at the school years ago. Finley is a drafter by trade. She started working for a company that specialized in power plant control system retro fits. That’s where the power industry part came in. She worked there for 10 years.

“We put on our work boots and our hard hats on and we get to stomp through (places),” Stuart said. “We get to climb up on cooling towers and get to look out over the city and the plant. We’ve seen things that not everybody gets to see. It’s a privilege and incredibly interesting.”