In this LMScast episode Gina Hoyt, discusses her innovative use of LifterLMS in building a travel agent certification program.

Gina Hoyt is a passionate professional at Avoya Travel Academy, where she is instrumental in developing future travel agents. The academy provides prospective travel agents with a basic education, giving them the know-how to succeed in the field.

Given that the majority of travel agents operate from home as independent contractors, Gina stresses the need of formal training for more sales, larger commissions, and a more seamless entry into the travel sector. Her CLIA and ASTA-recognized certification program offers insights into business setup, industry best practices, and utilizing travel knowledge.

Gina attributes her ability to develop a thorough, user-friendly course to LifterLMS’s rich features, intuitive interface, and complex quizzes, automatic certifications, and wealth of learning materials. Her narrative emphasis.

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Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest. Her name is Gina Hoyt. She’s from AvoyaTravelAcademy. com. She’s been using LifterLMS for a bit now. I just found out on multiple sites. But first, welcome to the show, Gina. 

Gina Hoyt: Thanks, Chris. Glad to be here. 

Chris Badgett: I’m excited to chat with you today and learn what you’re up to and what you’ve been building.

Tell us about Voya travel academy.com. What’s the project? What’s going on there? What did you build? 

Gina Hoyt: Sure. The Voya Travel Academy is a. We’ve got an LMS solution that we’re pretty proud of. We’ve implemented a lot of the LFTR, solutions from, oh, the advanced quizzes, the videos. the audio options several different things that we love, but what we’ve built is a course really providing a foundation for travel agent, for a travel agent certification.

So those who are new to our industry who raised their hand and say, Hey, I want to be a travel agent, but don’t necessarily know where to start. This would be the first place to start is, provide getting some sort of education. Hey, when you’re become a travel agent.

And you affiliate with a host agency, you understand what that looks like and what it’s going to take. 

Chris Badgett: How much of the travel agent industry is work from home? 

Gina Hoyt: A lot. So I would say probably 90 percent of travel agents to leisure travel agents. Let me, because there is a difference between leisure and business, but and corporate, but most probably 90 percent of the leisure travel agents work from home today.

Chris Badgett: And tell us about the industry a little bit. Sometimes we think, Oh, the internet, we talked about this before we hit record, but I think it’s cool for people to hear. Like you can shop for a house as an example on Zillow, but you still need a real estate agent to make things happen. I think some might argue people can book flights and hotels online.

Where does the travel agent fit today? Like, how has the industry evolved given the internet and technology? 

Gina Hoyt: Sure. When it comes to air only, and you’re right, we did talk about this a little bit, but if. If somebody was, if I was still booking travel and somebody came to me and said, Hey Gina, I need a domestic flight from Seattle to Vegas.

I’d say, Hey, here’s a website, go check it out and go book your flight. Because at the end of the day, I’m not going to be able to provide much value as a travel agent to an air only. But if you’re talking an international flight or even the whole package, this is really where travel agents, Can show their value in terms of what they can offer, not only with pricing, but in their knowledge, right?

So you, you want to put together an entire package. Let’s say you want, to visit Venice, Rome, Florence, and end up in London for 3 nights and you want that all put together. Can you do that today? yourself? Absolutely. You can. The truth is you can. However, if you’re booking with a travel agent, they’re going to know where to go and they’re going to have their knowledge to draw from in terms of versus you spending hours yourself looking online, right?

And then it’s is that hotel really what it seems like? Where we have a bunch of knowledge that we can draw from and suppliers that give us great values and benefits. And then Very rarely costs you anymore to book with a travel agent. Most people don’t know that or understand that, but our commissions come from the suppliers.

So even if you book with a supplier directly, you’re still paying the commission. You’re just not paying for the support that goes with it. 

Chris Badgett: Wow, that’s cool. I feel like that’s a secret of the industry that needs to be out there more so that people know that not just the time savings, but you might even save money.

And, yeah that’s, super valuable. Tell us more about the professional certificate. When people earn that, what do they do with it? How do they think about it? How do you think about it? What is the certification all about? 

Gina Hoyt: So that certification is, It’s both recognized by CLIA, which is Cruise Lines International Association, and ASTA, which is the American Society of Travel Advisors.

We’ve had both of those organizations review our program and give us a thumbs up. They actually both have a some knowledge of what our program is and what it looks like, and the content that we include. When you come out The avoid travel Academy, you’re going to have a really solid foundation in terms of number one.

How do I set up my business? Because again, we talked about 90 percent of travel agents today are work from home, probably very close to that percentage are independent contractors. So they each own and operate their own businesses. But if you don’t understand what that means, you could end up getting yourself into a little bit of trouble on the, and again, there’s nothing to be scared of, right?

It’s just have the knowledge. And that’s what we’re providing in that certification. It’s like, how do, how can you set up your business? What are the different options? What are some of the requirements, is there a requirement industry wide or state wide? in the states that you live in things to look for.

And again, we’re not telling you what to do because you’re going to own and operate your own business. So we can’t however we can provide you some really good insights and suggested best practices in moving forward and what that’s going to look like for you. 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. In entrepreneurship, we talk a lot about the ideal customer profile or the avatar.

What type of person, like if you think of the perfect fit person for your program. Is like the perfect travel agent. What were they doing before they made the decision to become a travel agent? And now they’re on this new journey and they’re looking for direction and guidance. Who is that person? If you could paint like a picture of them.

Gina Hoyt: Part of it is, I think that Travel agents can come from just about in any industry, right? We have a lot of health care providers. You know what I mean? That have a lot of people who come from the health care industry or even from an education background but they love to travel. They have that passion and that bug to travel.

And they, love to be of service. Those are two really good qualities. The other piece of that is to never be afraid to keep looking and asking questions. And like you talked to you and I talked about earlier before the show, being that entrepreneur, never being satisfied looking at, okay, yeah, I’m going to do this, but could I do it a little bit better and always keep and keep learning and, I think those are some great qualities of travel agents is they’re, they have the passion and they continue to learn.

Chris Badgett: That makes sense. Yeah, because I’m a traveler. I love traveling. I’ve been to Florence and Nice and the places you were talking about. And I’m like, yeah, if I was going to go back there, I might avoid this thing. I do that thing. And it makes sense that they have to have that travel passion. 

Gina Hoyt: Absolutely.

Chris Badgett: That’s cool. Tell us about how you found your way to LFTR LMS when you decided to do this education arm of what you do. 

Gina Hoyt: Sure. Thanks. So we, so there are a lot of, especially post COVID, right? There’s a lot of people who are working from home who didn’t necessarily want to go back into the office, really wanted, they decided that they wanted to don that little entrepreneur hat and, travel is something they wanted to do.

And, We, as a Voya, as a network, years ago, we didn’t affiliate with anybody new to industry, was only experienced only, and there’s a lot of reasons for that, but we wanted to bring that new to travel person in and continue to grow the industry, not only our network, But just the industry overall.

But the biggest thing that what we’ve seen is people with education, some sort of foundational education, their sales are 50 percent higher, their commissions are higher their close rate percentage is higher when they have a solid foundation. So we set out to create a course that can provide that, provide that foundation.

And for me, when I started in this industry, 25 plus years ago I started knowing nothing. And I remember I had interviewed with a agency in the town that I lived in and I came home and my husband said what did they say? And I’m like they offered me the job, but I’m not going to take it. He goes, what are you going to do?

I said, I’m going to open my own. And he goes, okay. And I didn’t know anything about travel. So I made a ton of. And for me, it’s I love being of service. I love helping the next guy, the next, that next person in line who really wants to learn our industry. And so the big thing is you don’t have to make these same mistakes.

Let me help you. Let us help you show you the way, to give you that foundation. Are you going to make mistakes? 100 percent you are, I promise that, but hopefully it’s not as expensive as the ones I made. But anyway, so that’s how we ended up here. How we ended up with LFTR is we looked at several different LMS resources, and I was sharing with you.

I actually seen an advertisement for LFTR. I had never heard of it before, and I went, What is this? And so I started digging in, and I loved the resources that you guys, that LFTR provides, and how easy it was to build and also to teach my team, right? It’s I can teach my team how to maneuver within the software and, they’re not afraid once I show them it’s super simple and there’s, no fear there.

And so those were some really big things for us. It’s can you, can we do what we want to do and can I, is it. Repeatable. Can I show my, can I show my team members? And absolutely. And I, and so thank you. Thank you for that. We love the software. 

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Was that, was this project your first foray into WordPress or did you have some history with WordPress already?

Gina Hoyt: A little bit of history in WordPress. It’s been years. I, when I had my brick and mortar, I built a website. So that was years ago, by the way. So nothing recent. But I’m pretty persistent. And if I want to do something I tend to eventually figure it out or I’m not afraid to ask questions either.

Chris Badgett: I think you’ve already answered my next question, which was, learning WordPress, I know you had some previous experience, but learning Lifter, there’s like a lot of features and bells and whistles and things to figure out decisions to make. What advice would you have from somebody going into that journey of building an online education website?

From the standpoint that you said you were persistent. So to me, that’s the answer, persistence. But what else would you add around that? 

Gina Hoyt: So for me, Lifter, your team makes so many videos available. And so for me, it was like, I tend. I can read and learn, but if I watch and learn, for me, it’s, that’s how I learn, so I would sit in videos and I would listen, and then I would pause, and then I would try, and then I’d turn it back on, you know what I mean, so again, that persistence, and, but if it was me, if I was recommending somebody, if this is something that you’re looking at, Go look at the videos.

Go watch them. They’re out there. You guys make it available. Thank you. Thank you, by the way, because I could have never done it otherwise. But it’s all there, and that’s how I did it. It was just by that persistence and And watching the things that are available versus saying, Hey, this isn’t available, or I don’t know how to do this.

Go look, it’s there. I promise you. 

Chris Badgett: I think last time I checked, we had 1700 videos on our YouTube channel. And that’s just YouTube. That’s not our documentation and stuff. So that’s, I appreciate you saying that. Are there any features that you like most, or like parts of the software that you or your team likes, or that’s super valuable to the project?

Gina Hoyt: We love being able to use the engagements like the, automatic, certificate, awarding and triggering emails. I’ve literally used all those engagements to do everything. For the team so we don’t have to. I love it. I absolutely love it because that just takes time off of it.

Those are things that we used to do manually and I don’t have to do that anymore. Neither does the team. And so we appreciate that the advanced videos. I love that because somebody wants to plow through a course. And I get, and I understand wanting to go through quickly. I understand it, but I want people to stop, and actually absorb what you’re learning. So we love the advanced videos, the fact that they can’t. They can’t advance without, and we get that all the time. The button’s not active. My first response is, go watch the video. Go watch the video and I promise it’ll appear. So anyway, I mean you guys have, again, you guys have done a great job in terms of making the course layout how to build it.

The course builder is super simple. And then the different features between the advanced videos. There was something else too. I forgot. Anyway. Thank you again. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And what other tools besides Lifter LMS and WordPress do you find mission critical for your online education business?

You mentioned GoDaddy. Do you use them for hosting? 

Gina Hoyt: Okay. Thank you. I was like, what are you talking about? Yeah. Yes. So actually we do use GoDaddy. We’ve got a couple of our product development teams that are considering maybe some other options because like I mentioned we’ve got, we have for three different websites a fourth one that we’re launching right now, getting ready to launch with a new education.

With the potential of bringing a lot more enrollees so we’re just looking at is it. continuing to be our best interest there. Do we want to go someplace else? But some of the other plugins, and I, we try to limit the amount of plugins that we use just because I don’t want any conflicts. But some of the other, We actually use Elementor and Elementor Pro for some of our WordPress features.

So the advanced quizzes, I know you asked what are some of the other things, but that comes from Lifter. So I, while I don’t necessarily use a lot of that feature on the Academy website, And then on two of our other websites that other teams are using, they use the features of the advanced quizzes. So again some great opportunity, that we use there.

And then we also use front end premium or front end admin, excuse me, and then there’s the publish press premium. capabilities pro. So to limit, so like my team, I limit what they can see. If they log into the WordPress website, there’s only certain things that I want them to be able to access. I don’t want them to see everything and be able to maneuver with everything.

So there’s a few different things that we use. 

Chris Badgett: What about, you mentioned videos. What do you do for video usually? Is it mostly you? Is it are you recording the videos in Zoom or ScreenFlow or some Camtasia? What do you use in that department? 

Gina Hoyt: So for our, I have a few videos that I’ve done that I actually record in zoom and I throw them into Camtasia and edit them.

And then other team members, same thing, but we also have some videos from some, of our suppliers because we have some of their certification courses within our program, because our suppliers have seen our product and they’re like, we want our certification program in your academy.

So we pull videos from there. Now we used to house all of our videos in our own, 

Chris Badgett: was it Vimeo or 

Gina Hoyt: it was not Vimeo, but with the advanced videos, we ended up transitioning all of our videos over to Vimeo. So we could use that advanced video feature. Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: Okay, that’s awesome. Tell us about just like how you gauge the success of Avoya Travel Academy.

What kind of impact have you been able to have or, maybe a story about somebody’s life that changed because of the training? Just what kind of impact is the platform having? 

Gina Hoyt: For us, what we look at is, okay, so we have a test, we have a test group of students, or excuse me, of new to travel who came to the industry, who had no education, right?

And then we compare those who come through the education, and we compare them post, post graduation, post certification, graduation isn’t the appropriate, certification, And we, compare those two groups in terms of sales and close rate percentages. And as I mentioned earlier, those who take the certification, they have a much stronger base and foundation to begin with their sales, their commissions and their close rate percentage are averaging upwards over 50 percent higher than those who did not take that foundational education.

What that means for somebody, they’re going to stay in our industry longer, right? They’re going to get to do the thing that they visioned, that they had a vision for and that they love doing longer because they’re not going to get so frustrated. That was, I think part of, which was so hard about bringing somebody in new to travel, who doesn’t have a foundation, who doesn’t understand what it means.

It’s though. because there’s not that foundational understanding. They may make a hit, run into a hiccup or a challenge or make a mistake and they’ll turn tuck their tail between their legs and their leave. And it’s no, don’t leave. Let’s walk through and figure out how to make this better.

But we’re able to eliminate some of those before they ever get started. 

Chris Badgett: I want to go back to some, you said earlier you mentioned that you were getting some resources from the industry to include in the training resources. Those is that something you have to license or they’re just happy to give you or how do you sometimes it can be a little overwhelming if we have to create everything ourselves when there’s all this other great stuff out there.

Tell us more about that content. 

Gina Hoyt: So we have Some of our, and if you go to our website, if you look at avoid travel academy. com, you’re going to see sponsored by Norwegian cruise line sponsored by Colette. Those are 2 major industry suppliers who, have allowed us to use some of with, there are, agreements in place on the backside with those 2 suppliers in terms of what that’s going to look like.

So we don’t just go take their content. We have, agreements in place, and then there’s also another. Party, another third party out there that they’ve been in the industry a lot longer than the 25 years I’ve been here. And so we’ve partnered with them as well and have an agreement in place with them and some of their content.

And so they’ve provided us some content. So we’re really pulling content from a lot of different areas. I’ve written and created content. Some of my team has, and then we have industry, other industry people who have. Brought it all together. 

Chris Badgett: I love that. Sometimes it’s not just about being a content creator, but also a curator.

You’re bringing in the and assembling the best possible stuff. 

Gina Hoyt: Absolutely. 

Chris Badgett: Just a quick, fun story sidetrack. I’m sure you mentioned Norwegian cruise lines. 

Gina Hoyt: Are you 

Chris Badgett: familiar with, I’m sure you are like Alaska cruises. 

Gina Hoyt: Yes, been about there about six times, but anyway, go ahead. 

Chris Badgett: So before I did Mercator LMS, I used to work at a helicopter supported sled dog tour business on a glacier above Juneau.

So the cruise ships would come in. Some of those were Norwegian and people would fly up in the helicopter and we’d take them out on sled dog rides. So that’s my old connection to the Norwegian cruise industry. 

Gina Hoyt: Love it. Love it. 

Chris Badgett: Tell us more about I call it the offer stack. So is this like one mega certification course?

Is it a collection of courses? Is it, like what kind of support is included? If somebody has a question as they’re going through it What’s in the stack of the offer? 

Gina Hoyt: So in, we have one course, we do one course, and there’s about a hundred and 19 lessons within that course. So it’s one big one to get through, we give everybody a hundred days to get through the education.

We do have a timeline on there and at the end of the day, it’s if somebody is having a struggle we understand life happens. So it. Reach out to us. We can always work with somebody on that in terms of what that looks like. In terms of support, I have an, I have myself and my team.

We, we support people all the way through. If they have any questions we have a, team email. We ask people to send their questions to the team email. Because if I’m not, if you send an email to me directly or you send an email to directly to one of my team members and let’s say they’re not in the office that day you’re not going to hear back right away where it’s most efficient to send it to our team email.

We pick up the phone, we call people, they can schedule, they can actually schedule. We have a link in all of our emails because we, it’s not just a. Register, take your money and you never hear from us again in that 100 days, you’re going to probably get 9 or 10 emails from the, throughout that process, just touching bases. Hey, we want people to know, look, we’re here. We’re here to help. And we’re here to support you. If you have questions, let us know. So you can call, you can email. You can schedule a call with one of our team members if you have any questions. If something’s not working technically our office hours are Tuesday through Saturday, but I tend to watch emails on Sunday too, just because that’s who I am.

I struggle with walking away. Yeah. So we there’s a ton of support. We’re here to see people succeed not, to take their money, have them register for a course and walk away. You know what I mean? We want to see everybody succeed. 

Chris Badgett: I think that’s fantastic. I’ve done a lot of these interviews and talked to a lot of Lyft Realness users and the ones that are most successful they support their people outside of the content, whatever that means.

You mentioned phone calls and emails, whatever that is. Like people sometimes need a little help along the way, not just access to great content. So my hat’s off to you. You mentioned you had three or four other LMS projects in the works or actively going on. How have you branched out from Avoya travel academy.

com? 

Gina Hoyt: So they’re all industry related and all related back to avoid in some way, shape or form. They are my employer. But we have, like I mentioned, we have the travel Academy. We also have so for. AVOIA as a host agency, the AVOIA network, the AVOIA travel network is a host agency for independent agency owners.

So there’s education that we have support teams that offer education like our early success team. They talk about sales and different things like that. Destinations and so there is a project there where we have a platform where those teams use the lifter software for their that type of education, which is separate from the travel Academy.

And then we have internal training for some of our teams. Some of our, the different support teams for Avoya. We offer, education training for employees. And then we have a fourth one that we’re getting ready to launch. Remember I talked about while we love and we want to provide Avoya and our agents the best possible resources available.

We have a commitment to our industry to the travel industry overall, and there is not a requirement right for somebody to say if you want to be a lawyer, you got to go to school for a lawyer, you know what I’m saying, if they’re in the travel industry, there’s not a mandated certification that you have to do.

But what we find is, again, and I’ve keep touching on this, is those who are in our industry have, who have a foundation, who understand what it means. They’re much more successful. And so we really feel oblig, I don’t know if obligated is the right word, but we have a desire to, help our industry overall.

So we’re actually providing a white label product. Some of our other host agencies in, the industry will be able to provide their agents and their new to network agents and education resource as well, because for whatever reason, maybe they don’t have the resources available to create it or the team, the manpower, whatever the reason is, and we’ll be able to, bring that to the table for them and it’ll be branded with their information.

Yeah, it’s pretty exciting. 

Chris Badgett: I love that. You’re keeping the focus on the industry and the the travel agents at the heart of that. And, and really getting as much impact as you can out there, whether it’s your team, Avoya, the industry, it all works together and everybody wins.

It’s not, I call it the infinite game, which is, somebody doesn’t have to lose for somebody else to win. And it’s just. Let’s help everybody, basically. 

Gina Hoyt: And, I was always taught the sun shines for everyone. You know what I’m saying? There’s enough to go around. And that’s even when I owned my, my, my travel agency and I would hear people get frustrated, I would talk to another agent.

This customer went and booked so and and I’m like, you have to remember the sun shines for everyone. Maybe there was a better connection there. It doesn’t matter. There’s going to be somebody else coming. You know what I mean? And, we really want to provide. Again, the sunshine’s for everyone and we want to provide something industry overall that, that benefits all of us.

So 

Chris Badgett: What’s, your vision for the future? You’ve been doing this for a bit, like you’re doing a lot already, but is there anywhere else you’re, wanting to go with this or what, is your plan to make Voyage Travel Academy even better? 

Gina Hoyt: So future goals, we’re not there yet, is we’re going to provide some ongoing education.

So some additional courses. Again, we’re not there yet. I’ve got my head in too many other arenas right this second. But as soon as those calm down and we get those launched and implemented, then we’ll start doing some research for some additional certifications. For again, not just our, the agents in our network, but overall industry wide.

Chris Badgett: I love that. And it’s also what’s interesting about your story is this industry is not like heavily controlled or regulated. It’s not like you have to have certain training or continuing ed, but you’ve realized that, hey, these people need this. I’ll provide it. People are using it. They’re getting paid 50 percent better or doing better in the career they’ve chosen.

I think it’s really cool. It’s not yeah. It’s not like you’re asking for permission. You’re just doing the thing that this, these people need and helping improve their lives. That’s really cool. Fun. Final question for you. So in leisure travel, I know there’s a broad question, but what are some counterintuitive underappreciated trips that people could do or ways to think about vacation?

That from your time in the industry, you realize, Hey, there’s a lot of opportunity off the beaten path over here, or maybe try this, but do this differently. I’m just looking for some insight from the inside of travel. What are some counterintuitive insights or little known secrets? 

Gina Hoyt: Oh my. 

Chris Badgett: There’s probably a lot.

Gina Hoyt: There’s a, so my head goes, which part of the world, right? It’s because to me, the world is like a candy store, right? And it’s for me, I walk into this candy store and I go, Oh, where do I start? Which piece do I want first? Let’s 

Chris Badgett: divide it into three parts. Let’s say, North America, Europe, Asia.

If you were to do those three, what are some off the beaten path things or little known, insights? 

Gina Hoyt: Asia, Vietnam. I, oh, Halong Bay. If you stay in a junk for a couple nights out on Halong Bay, I know One of the state colleges in the state that I live in they have a business group that goes, I don’t know if it’s every other year, the students in their business degree program, when I was selling travel, I actually had a friend who was in that course for a while.

And so she came to me and I started doing that every other year for them. And we would put some of the most amazing trips together coming down through central Vietnam and on the coastline and Halong Bay, by far. over and over every year was like the winner. People loved being out on a junk for a couple of nights and having that experience.

So if you’re going to Asia and you have an opportunity to do Vietnam go to Hong Bay. Okay. So there’s that piece. Europe. I know this is, there’s so many, I love Europe. Holy cow, there’s a lot of really cool things and I could go on and on. But one of my favorite cities in, which is probably not most, but I love Amsterdam, I love the canals.

I love the whole, that whole thing. Rome is another one, but there’s a lot of things to go see and do. Aye yai While Greece is amazing, I hate the flight. I’m West Coast, so for me trying to get there I tend to stay away just because of the flight. You know what I mean? I struggle with flights, but Africa, if you ever want to do a safari in Africa, make sure you do one that has a hot air balloon.

The hot air balloons over the Serengeti. Nothing like it. Again, something little, not everybody, not, you can’t book it through everybody, but if you find, if you’re going to look into that, being sure and do the hot air balloon over the Serengeti, it’s an amazing, it’s amazing. North America.

Holy cow. I love Hawaii, but that’s such a, for me, that’s I know I’m West Coast. So again, for me it’s like, a bread and butter thing. When I was selling travel, everybody does it, train travel, TransCanada on VRail is amazing with what the domed cars and the meals and nothing like it.

So that’s really cool going East Coast to West Coast. And I’ve been anyway, so I don’t know if I answered your questions, but I’ve. 

Chris Badgett: You did. And I’ll, let me actually throw two more on real quick. What about Mexico? 

Gina Hoyt: What about it? I love Mexico. If you’re looking for all inclusive and and I hear this a lot, cause I, I have a lot of friends who hear, Oh, don’t go to Mexico because of this and because of that.

And I’ll, tell you the same thing. I tell, would tell them is that As long as you stay in the areas you’re supposed to be in, you’re going to be fine. Do you know what I mean? It’s you’re going to be fine, but if you decide to venture out on your own and go into in into an area that you shouldn’t be in, you might run into some trouble, but I hate to tell you, you’re going to find that in the United States anywhere.

So any major city that you go to. Yeah, it’s fine. And there’s a lot of great, there’s a ton of great resorts, all inclusive resorts. If that if, my kids, they went for their honeymoon last year. I was a couple years ago, not my honeymoon, but I’ve been married for a lot of years. But we go. So I’m not afraid to be in Mexico. We find it safe. Like I said, as long as you’re going to the areas, And you stay in the areas that you’re to be in. 

Chris Badgett: And last one, I may have a trip coming up to the Philippines. Is there anything, do you have any intel on the Philippines? 

Gina Hoyt: In terms of Philippines, what, what type of travel are you looking for?

Chris Badgett: Let’s say I was at a business conference in Manila and then wanted to take a week or so at a more, beach, low key environment. 

Gina Hoyt: So are you wanting to just go to a resort and stay, or are you wanting to maybe do a tour and see more? What, do you know what I mean? There’s so many, it’s not just a, Hey, I want to go here.

What do you got? There’s really an entire conversation for somebody, for a travel agent, to provide you what you, want. There, there’s an extensive conversation that needs to be had in terms of what are your expectations? If you have this thing of I want to visit this, and this, but you say, I want to go to the Philippines and stay at a beach resort and somebody gives you that, you’re going to be highly disappointed because that’s not what you had in mind.

Yeah, it’s not a simple question of go here. Unfortunately, I’m sorry. 

Chris Badgett: I love that. Yeah, so we, as travelers, we need to do more research and at least get directionally, not just like the geography location, but what’s the experience we’re going for? What things do we want to see? What types?

Gina Hoyt: Yeah, and I think that a travel agent who has a really good, solid foundation, they’re going to be able to, start asking you those questions, right? They’re going to know, hey, this is a great destination. Now, share with me some of the are you going to be traveling with family with children?

Is it just you? Or what are some of the experiences you want? Then they can take all of that information. put it together. I refer to it as a puzzle. You know what I mean? And I put all, I used to take all this information and put it together like a puzzle and then I’d provide you, okay, here, this is what the puzzle can look like.

What are your thoughts? What do you think? You do, is there anything in here that I, didn’t include that you want to see or is there too much and we need to take some of it out, some of it out. So anyway. It’s a big puzzle. It’s lots of fun. 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. That’s awesome. That’s Gina Hoyt.

She’s from avoyatravelacademy. com. Is there anywhere else people can connect with you or any final words you have? 

Gina Hoyt: Sure. On the Academy, you can always send me an email, which is just Gina. Hoyt at avoyatravel. com. 

Chris Badgett: Awesome, Gina. Thank you for coming on the show and thank you for being a shining example of what I call the education entrepreneur and your persistence and all the value you’re creating in the world, helping in this industry and helping your team and all of that.

It’s I love seeing what you’re up to. So thank you. 

Gina Hoyt: Thanks for having me, Chris.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMSCast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you [email protected] slash gift. Go to lifterlms.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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In this LMScast episode, Aaron talks with Chris Badgett about AI for course creators. He shares the journey of developing DocsBot.ai, from creating a proof-of-concept chatbot trained on WordPress documentation to building a powerful tool that enables companies to leverage their own documentation for content creation, customer service, and more.

Aaron Edwards is the creator of DocsBot.ai, a cutting-edge chatbot driven by AI that improves document management and business assistance. Aaron explains the fundamental idea of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), which blends generative.

By giving the AI context, real-world data can help it provide precise, well-founded responses. This method tackles a prevalent issue with AI, which is that it “hallucinates” or fabricates knowledge. By giving the AI context, real-world data can help it provide precise, well-founded responses. This method tackles a prevalent issue with AI, which is that it “hallucinates” or fabricates knowledge.

Data from the actual world can assist the AI give accurate and well-founded answers by providing context. A common problem with AI is that it “hallucinates” or creates knowledge, which this approach addresses.

This podcast offers insightful information on the technological foundations of DocsBot.ai and how it can be used to many businesses, from agencies to course developers, to enhance assistance, productivity, and content reuse.

Here’s Where To Go Next…

Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

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Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by my friend Aaron Edwards. He’s from DocsBot. ai. That’s DocsBot. ai. Go check this out. This is not going to be your average episode where we talk about chat GVT or some basic AI concepts, although we are going to talk about that stuff some.

We’re going to go deep. Aaron has been deep in the weeds with WordPress, AI, software development, solving problems for business owners. We’re going to get into it today. This is going to be a fascinating episode, but first welcome back on the show, Aaron.

Aaron Edwards: Thank you for having me, Chris.

Chris Badgett: Good to see you again.

I always love running into you because you’re always up to like really interesting, cutting edge things. Whether it was NFT stuff in the past, solving challenges. With the media library and uploads and stuff like that. I’ve watched you over the past couple, maybe several years launched DocSpot.

So we’re going to focus on the AI component both for WordPress professionals and agencies, but also for course creators. But first, just at a high level, what is DocSpot. AI?

Aaron Edwards: Yeah, sure. The idea is let me go back. I’ll tell my story a little bit with it. As you said, I just love playing with the latest new technology.

So obviously as this generative AI stuff started coming to the forefront I was just diving in and building things, playing around with it, learning the latest Tech and stuff like that. There was images and I know we talked about in the previous episode and now doc spot and what I started out is this new technique called retrieval augmented generation.

So, chat GPT dropped in what is end of 2022, I think. And it like wowed everyone, obviously, like we’re like, Oh my gosh. But people quickly realized that what hallucinations were. So these AI models are trained to be like super, super helpful and great assistance so much so that they’ll just make stuff up to make you happy. There’s a new in that time during that fall, there’s a new technique some papers and things that have come out where People had realized that, okay, if you provide like chat GPT with context, for example, you paste in a page of text or whatever about your product or something like that you paste that in there and then you ask a question about that content that you pasted in.

Now it has like facts to ground its answers. So that way it can actually like. Provide like a accurate and valid answer by summarizing or extracting information from that text that you pasted in this context. So that’s what. This new technique called retrieval augmented generation is.

And so, I just was playing with that and I thought this would be really cool just as a proof of concept. And to learn myself is to build a chat bot that was trained on all the WordPress documentation. So I went and I like built like a web crawler that went and crawled all the documentation pages on wordpress.

org. Whether it’s the developer side or like the user kind of side, all that kind of stuff. And then. into a, it’s called a vector database, which is just a way to store that training data using AI embeddings it’s called, which is a way to do semantic search so that if you search for you give a question and it’s able to identify texts that may not have the exact same words in the question, but I do.

but able to identify pieces of text that are the same like semantic meaning or close semantic meaning. So basically that way you can transform a user’s question into an actual whatever the most relevant document pieces of documentation are to answer that question. And so I launched that and it was called, um, chat WP and it’s still online.

It’s a, let me see if I remember the URL even as WP docs dot chat. And that’s still like a free tool that’s out there. Ask me anything about WordPress. And so the kind of ideal of that was, actually I’ll share my screen. Is that all right?

Chris Badgett: Yeah, and if you’re listening to this on the podcast, just head on over to the Lifter LMS YouTube channel and look for Aaron Edwards, and you’ll find what we’re looking at here.

Aaron Edwards: Yeah, so wpdocs. chat. Just a simple chat interface, where you could ask like questions about WordPress and then it goes. And then from that training data, it’s able to provide like. Output and examples and things like that, even code snippets and stuff that is learned from the documentation.

So that was my my learning experience and proof of concepts. And then what I did is people like were super excited about it. So I slapped a little a waitlist signup form at the bottom of the page. And I said, Hey, if you’re interested in this for your business. Let me know. And I just put a little survey there what are like the key features that you need, that kind of thing.

If you’re trying to use this for your own business and I got a lot of like good responses on that, like a good wait list and the thought, all right, this is like somewhat proven that there’s some desire, for businesses to have something like this. And I spent a month working nights all night, to put out duck spot, so that was the product, which has been going well.

It’s grown a lot, it’s my full time job now. It’s been More than a year and a half. And basically what we do is we make it super easy for businesses to train their support. It can be used internally, like for your team to be able to get answers quickly from your existing documentation, files SOPs, that kind of thing it can be used.

Some of our customers use it. For, the classic content generation or repurposing. So they have their chatbot trained with all their marketing content or whatever. And they can use that to generate, ad copy or different things like that. Or if their agency, they might have a chatbot trained for each of their clients.

And they’ll use that for content repurposing a lot of different use cases.

Chris Badgett: So what was the surprise to you as people started using it? Like who was like the main group and then what were some surprising use cases that started popping up?

Aaron Edwards: Yeah. I think the biggest thing, and this is really what led it to it being a success is somehow some Japanese Twitter tech influencer.

Like from my chat bot, like in Japanese and just shared a video of it, answering questions in Japanese. And that went totally viral in Japan. It was so crazy. I like woke up in the morning and suddenly. I had 100 support tickets in Japanese and my servers are crashing. And I was getting all these signups and things like that.

I am really stressed testing it. So it’s like, What is going on? Yeah, so it went viral in Japan, which is pretty crazy. So still probably maybe a third of my customers are Japanese. And that really led me down the path of doing the work that kind of sets us apart from a lot of our competitors and that making sure that it’s very like multilingual and compatible with non English languages.

Most of all the AI announcements and benchmarks and all that stuff that you see. online and all the hype. It’s all English. Like you don’t actually realize it that, that, okay. Yeah. This tiny model that’s like amazing that like Lama or whatever that Lama three or whatever, that meta put out it sounds like so amazing, but you realize, Oh, it’s only trained on The four most common like Western languages, and the benchmarks suck on other languages.

So that’s been a really big thing, like from prompts optimization on the backend to making sure it like can detect languages properly and answer and whatever the language that the user asked questions, that kind of thing. It’s taken a lot of like work and even ongoing as I add new features, making sure that It works for all those use cases,

Chris Badgett: tell us more about like the training data or the source pages.

So for example, if I’m an agency, I may have a bunch of case studies and service offerings and a blog, bunch of blog posts about how I approach my agency work or my clients, or podcaster and I have a lot of podcast episodes. Or I’m a, I have a product that has support library of content. Like, how do people think about source pages and what could be sources?

And at what point, how much source content do you need for this to get really valuable?

Aaron Edwards: Yeah. That’s like one of the harder things that we do is like the actual like code to create these like chatbots and do the retrieval augmented generation, and that’s all open source. There’s all kinds of.

Like things that you can do and probably spend that up. If you’re a developer and just a few hours, something that kind of working as a proof of concept, but really the hard part is like figuring out how to take like real world data that businesses have. Whether it’s course content, as you mentioned, documentation, crawling a website, all that kind of thing and transforming that into something that the bot understands and is able to use to answer questions accurately, without hallucinations.

So we developed a lot of different,

Source pages or ways to, Import information to your bot. So whether it’s like uploading document files PDFs or docs, PowerPoint, Excel, whatever it is, each of those things, we have to have different logic for how we parse that and how we divide it up into pieces.

That that the LLM, the large language model AI can understand. So there’s a lot of work in that. You can train it just with like FAQs that are simple to answer. You can have a crawl your entire website, like sitemap, that kind of thing. And connected to tons of cloud sources, to your notion, confluence, Salesforce, get book places where you already have documentation stored, or if you’re using like Zen desk or help scout or intercom fresh desk, like a lot of these popular, like support tools that maybe you have your knowledge base in, or you have your previous Customer support, history tickets in there, and you can use all that to train your bot so that it can answer questions into the future.

So we’re always adding like new data sources. A fun one that I worked on last month is YouTube. Yeah, it sounds awesome. You’re mentioning that you have all these YouTube videos, right? , so being able to train your bot just by dropping in a YouTube video, URL or like a URL to a playlist of a.

Of, up to a hundred different videos. And then it goes through and actually had to, this is the hard part. YouTube does not like scraping. So it’s literally like people don’t realize that’s the hard part. I had to use like a whole network of residential proxies, so it’s actually going through like people’s home computer to scrape the subtitles from YouTube and then use that to train the bot so that you can chat with your YouTube videos.

And and even as you’re chatting with them, it like provides source links to where it got the answer. So it’ll actually link to the correct second in the video where it pulled that answer from which is fun.

Chris Badgett: Very cool. In terms of humans. Potentially being concerned about I don’t want this AI to speak for me, like how what are the options in terms of just cut it loose and let it talk to anybody versus a human reviews before it gets communicated?

Like, how do you think about that moderation aspect?

Aaron Edwards: Yeah, I think and a lot of our customers. They’re using it for frontline customer support. So tier one. So if you think about it, first of all, if you have a business, that customers never read the documentation, right? A

Chris Badgett: lot of our support is here’s the link to the doc.

Exactly.

Aaron Edwards: Yes. That’s whatever, 75 or something percent of the average company support is like here’s the link to the document where they answer that question for you, and in the, Previously, there’d be things like search tools and stuff try to identify that to try to prevent tickets being created, deflection, we call it but why not have the same thing that Google does now when you Google something and it gives an AI answer by looking at the top results and summarizing that into a succinct answer instead of having to go to all these pages and read and figure out how to answer your question.

That’s what we do. You take all the existing information that you’ve already written at some point, that’s already been recorded at some point in your documentation or support history or whatever, or YouTube demo videos, whatever it may be. And provide like an instant, like quick answer to them.

That’s grounded in that truth of your training data and also provides links to where it got that information. So they could click out and. And verify that if they want to or whatever. So yeah, that’s one side of it. And I think that these models are definitely well proven to be good enough for that kind of tier one support.

And I’m surprised like what it can answer too. So even like my bot is trained on all my like developer documentation for APIs and things like that. So I find myself like asking questions about how do I give me an example code for how I integrate my widget with Zendesk, And it literally both reads like my documentation, but it’s actually like performing logic and reasoning as well after reading that, just like a human would to generate new answers.

It’s not just copying, copying and pasting verbatim which is pretty amazing that these AI models are capable of doing that reasoning. So that even gets you more than what you’d say is the tier one support, because it’s not just. Not just linking to documentation, but it’s actually able to do some reasoning to

Chris Badgett: that’s very cool.

I know one of the things that I think about when, looking at AI tools is cost and we don’t have to get into the specifics of your pricing because I know it might change. But As the better AI gets, it might require more resources, which could in theory, make it more expensive. Or you need a large training set.

Like, how do you think about pricing and making it work for everybody? The the business owner, you making sure it’s a profitable venture. Like, how do you think about that?

Aaron Edwards: Man, when I launched the same week that the. Chat GPT API became available which was great timing, right? But the costs for that, like even the old, like 3.

5 model, chat, GPT model it would cost, I think three or four cents per question per user question. Now, if you’re getting like 10, 000 questions a month or

something that adds up fast, right? But at the same time, if you compare that to hiring a support person, the answer, those Whatever, 70 percent of those 10, 000 questions. That’s still super cheap, right? It was hard thing to, to factor in. And so what I actually did in the beginning is we did bring your own API key.

So you could actually put in your key from open AI, like into our dashboard and we’d save it like encrypted and use that At cost. So instead of reselling credits or something like that, like some of our competitors do with a markup, we just basically at cost, for the actual processing.

And what’s amazing is in, in less than two years, the The price for how much power you get, like from the AI model has literally dropped more than a hundred times. It’s yeah, it’s been crazy. And as a business who’s like trying to figure out like my pricing models and things like that, and how to charge.

That’s been great both for my customers who are like bringing their own key, but now I’m able to provide access like included to make it simpler for people to get started. They don’t have to have their own key, so like I heard, I think it was

said that if you’re building products on AI, like it’s changing so fast and its capabilities are changing so fast, you need to be building like on the cutting edge to where right now. It’s seems super expensive or super like impossible for it to do. Because it’s just change every two to three months.

It’s like a new model comes out two to three times price drop. It’s amazing.

Chris Badgett: Help us understand like the models in the background are you leveraging open AI or you’re leveraging llama, a combination of stuff? Like how does it, like what powers all this?

Aaron Edwards: Yeah, right now we’re using only a open AI models just cause they have the best, like developer ecosystem and things like that.

We are playing with other models like Gemini and Llama. Maybe, like I said, there’s still weaknesses there for other languages. So that’s one of the things that we have to test heavily is we want to support having a chat bot in Japanese, right? And that it’s going to be able to, no matter what language the user asks a question, that it’s able to still find the right documentation, even though maybe your documentation is in English.

If someone asks a question in Japanese, it should be able to use AI to find the relevant documentation and provide an accurate answer to the user. And so for that, you need some of these larger models that are, have much more training data from other languages than English. So right now that’s the GPT 4.

0. That’s what kind of like our workhorses. So food like for free, like along with your plan. And that works for almost all use cases and it’s super fast and it’s super good. Multilingual as well. And then if you like, you want Much more advanced reasoning, like to where it can maybe do some custom coding and things like that as part of its answers.

Then you could jump up to the full, like GPT 4. 0 model, which has dropped down in price substantially to, it still costs less than one cent per question, more like 0. 5 really. So super cost effective. And they just keep getting more and more powerful.

Chris Badgett: Could you describe to the layman, just to highlight the rate of change with AI what’s the difference with 4.

0 in OpenAI versus 3. 5 or Turbo or whatever came before?

Aaron Edwards: Yeah a lot of it’s like proprietary, so they don’t tell us like all the technical details you can infer. There’s been a lot of new inventions. So first of all, was just like the amount of data is trained on, right? Like call that parameters, like how many parameters, that’s the size of the model.

And so like you had Like GPT two, I think. And then GPT three which is like the first ones that they had like an API. If you were really lucky, you could get a key to use that one. And that’s what some of the early like content creation things, um, used and then 3. 5 was basically, they took that same model and they did what’s called RLHF, which is basically they they Took had humans, right?

A bunch of okay, here’s the message. And then here’s what a good response is for that. And so they hired, armies of people and in Africa and other third world countries that speak English and other data set online to do that reinforcement learning on top of the existing model, which is basically where the invention of chat GPT came from.

So instead of being something where you had to figure out these weird Ways of prompting it crazily to where it like completes, like what you started. Now you can just give any kind of instruction and it just knows how to follow that instruction and provide a good output. So that didn’t really change the size of the model.

It just made it much more useful to the average user. And then you had the next big jump in model size and that was GPD four. And they say that went from GPD three is probably something like four or 500 Billion parameters. I think they estimate maybe three or 400 billion parameters.

And GPD four is probably like closer to 2 trillion. Wow. Yeah. And that’s after being pruned and cleaned up and that kind of stuff. It’s more like a tenfold increase, in size. And so that’s why it’s so much more expensive and slower. Cause it’s got to run on a whole cluster of 20, 000 GPUs, because it uses so much memory.

To do all that kind of stuff. And then I’ll put on top of that, then they’re able to do what’s called distillation, which is where you take that big model and you pull out by using like the reinforcement learning and things like that training, what’s the most useful. Parts to you, so it may not have the widespread knowledge from all that training that pulled in, but all the things that people most commonly ask, or most commonly use it for logic, it kept only those parts so you can have a 10 times smaller model that was trained that was distilled from the big one.

I’m just pulling out the most useless things. And that’s what GPT 40 mini is which is like their most cost effective model. It’s super, super fast, super inexpensive, but still very powerful, even in other languages.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And Aaron, while I’ve got you an AI expert and who’s great at teaching and communicating this stuff.

Help me understand the buzz around two concepts. I’m not sure if they’re related or not, but one is having a large context window and the other is chain of thought reasoning. What are those?

Aaron Edwards: Okay. They’re not like necessarily related, but the context window is basically like How much text or video or whatever the input, how much the AI model can handle at once.

Chris Badgett: If you’re using chat, GBT, sometimes you’re like, you try to copy paste and it’s too long or whatever.

Aaron Edwards: Yeah. Yeah. That kind of thing. And that’s why we do what my business does is called retrieval augmented generation. It’s like when it was GPT. Context window was 4000 tokens which a token is just like a piece of text.

Like the average word is like four tokens, I think. If you think about that and so you can imagine, okay, you can only post. Roughly around 1000 words or whatever into there as part of your question and also that usually includes the response to. So there’s a input context window and an output one, how much text they can generate.

So that kind of limits you, like how much you can put in, especially when you’re trying to answer questions from your documentation. I just crawled your website and there is what was it like almost 2000 URLs, and all the content from that that’s a lot, right? You couldn’t paste all that into chat GPT to ask questions about it, right?

Chris Badgett: But you can with DocSpot.

Aaron Edwards: ai. Yes, exactly. Because we pre process all that into getting rid of all the extra stuff and just keeping like the important chunks of text and trying to keep the chunks semantically relevant to where you’re not cutting off information between them. And then when a user asks a question, we actually search to find the most relevant pieces.

And that’s what is put in the context window for the model. But there has been. There’s been a lot of doubts if that’s like the best technique as these context windows getting bigger. So now you have GPT 4. 0, the context window is 128, 000 tokens. So that’s a big jump from 4, 000, right? The problem is you got to pay for all those tokens, right?

Cause the cost is like per token, and it’s slightly less for the input versus the output, but still that adds up a lot. So you don’t want every time you ask it or a user asks a question. To have to paste in that whole thing and pay for all that each time, you know, and there are techniques around that, like opening.

I just last week announced prompt caching. And I know Google has that and Anthropic has that now too. They’re a little bit harder to use, but basically if you’re asking the same question or at least the beginning of it. Over and over multiple times in five to 10 minutes, then it actually caches a big chunk of that’s reused each time.

And by doing that, I think that you save 50 percent on those tokens. So there are techniques around that, but still it’s inefficient to paste everything in there, but it is really useful for some things. Like I love using a Gemini. They have a 2 million in context window, which is huge. You can paste the whole book in there, right?

and do Q& A or summarization or whatever over the entire book without having to do what we do, like the reg. And the same thing like with Gemini, you can do like a video Or a bunch of images all at once because their window is so big. It’s expensive, but you can do like certain tasks that you couldn’t do before.

So we’ll see these context windows keep getting bigger and prices drop. And they introduce things like caching. I think these like chatbots and things like this for our use case are going to get even more accurate because we’ll be able to pass. Passing even more information.

Chris Badgett: And how about chain of thought reasoning, or is that a bigger advance from autocomplete or how do you, how would you describe it?

Cause obviously we want like the AI to be as good or smarter than,

Aaron Edwards: basically, like some people do

Tells it to think carefully, and how to think then it actually somehow does that internally before it gives an answer. So it’ll be like something like, all right, divide the problem into 10 steps for how you’ll solve it. And then think about if those are good steps for solving this particular problem.

And then as you generate the output, compare it to these like rules to see if that’s a good output, and it’s not like necessarily doing that internally. It’s just Telling it how to think makes it think better,

which

Aaron Edwards: is weird, right? It’s like those hacks like where people just start, Oh, if you say I’m going to get fired, if you don’t give a good answer, then it gives a better answer, these weird little quirks in the system that people like didn’t realize it’s a little bit like that.

So that’s what the chain of thought is you provide like a specific like prompt template like that, and then it. Can do a better job of more advanced like reasoning answers. And then what open AI did is they just released a new model called Oh one, if you’ve heard of that, and basically what they did is they baked in that chain of thought into the model.

So instead of having to prompt that each time, the model has actually been fine tuned with a whole bunch of examples of chain of thought. I don’t know, like really. Really advanced chain of thought prompt and then how and then the output of how it would develop that and then what the final output shown to the user should be and then they passed in whatever 100, 000 examples of that they had generated or compiled.

And use that to fine tune the model. So now it does that chain of thought internally, but on its own. So that gives you much more accurate, like things, especially if you’re wanting to do things like math or coding or it’s great if you’re trying to do something like, okay, this is. Here’s my guidelines of for how this entire like proposal should be laid out.

The outline and all the things and the logic and everything. Now here’s, I pasted in all the information, now I want you to compile that into this beautiful report. That’s 10 pages long, right? So instead of trying to just one shot that using that, Oh, one model, it’s actually does all that thinking behind the scenes and that means it’s slow because it’ll literally say, it’s like thinking about this.

Considering this, whatever, it can take five minutes sometimes for really advanced job you give it to you for it to do all that internal thinking before it spits out the final product. So it’s really cool, but it’s not like great for like customer support or chatbots to where you, you want to answer quickly.

But it is very good for things that require a lot of like complexity and thinking and reasoning to generate a good output.

Chris Badgett: And that five minutes may be like a year of human time, right? Let’s talk about something really to, for the course creator folks.

Aaron Edwards: Yeah,

Chris Badgett: there’s a lot, there’s courses and content, but there’s also coaching.

So let’s say somebody has been YouTubing on a given topic for years, or they’ve been podcasting on it for years or blogging about it, or they have a course library on their website. How could they use dark spot AI to. Answer questions, but also in more of a coaching context, so essentially a subject matter expert could turn their body of work into a like a digital mentor or coach.

Aaron Edwards: Yeah, that’s actually a great idea. I really have been wanting to play around with use cases for LMS. Cause as you mentioned, I think that is really like cool way of doing it, different than just customer support or whatever, being able to chat with, or have that kind of conversation with the course content.

So there’s the one thing to where obviously it’d be like user initiated. It’d be really fun to play around with ways to have the chat bot initiate things. It’s not a

Chris Badgett: process of what’s your biggest challenge and

Aaron Edwards: right. Yeah. That kind of thing. And perform more like reasoning things, even generating like quizzes on the fly or something like that.

Would be cool.

Chris Badgett: Or even prescribing sometimes it’s a problem. It becomes a problem when you actually have too much content and then a student or a client comes in and they’re overwhelmed. So one of the things is just like helping people find the stuff that’s most related to their biggest.

Your challenge.

Aaron Edwards: Yeah. And that we do very. Efficiently, as it is. But one of the cool things about DocSpot is you can embed it anywhere, we provide like a simple like chat widget that you can stick on your website, but we have a full featured API. So we have people like we have WordPress plugin authors that have it like built into the dashboard of the plugin.

That’s pretty cool. To where, yeah. So to where users can. Quickly, get a answer to a question about how to use the plugin and you can even pass in like custom metadata. So the chat bot can know, okay, what page it’s on, like what settings page or different things like that. Or you can pass in just random metadata, like, the, obviously the user’s name.

It can personalize responses or maybe like what plan they’re on, that kind of stuff, you know, the links to get to certain pages that are like to manage their account or manage their orders and WooCommerce or whatever it may be. You can pass all that in as metadata, as context to the chat, so that the bot is able to answer user questions, not just from your documentation, but from personalized metadata about the user and their state in your application.

So something like that would be really useful, like for Lifter LMS or whatever In courses. So it can know section of the course it’s on, like maybe what they’ve completed, different things like that, as well as being able to actually chat with the video content or chat with the course content and that kind of things.

Yeah.

Chris Badgett: This concept of a AI tutor is a big deal. Khan Academy, that guy, I know he’s done some stuff with his body of work, but in the LMS space, we’re all chasing that AI tutor, which is. Ideally would be, could be proactive, not just reactive, like we talked about with coaching versus retrieval or reacting.

Yeah. We can’t do an AI, or sorry, go ahead. Did you have something else?

Aaron Edwards: No.

Chris Badgett: We can’t do an AI podcast without addressing like fear or concern with AI. Like, how do you think about the future? Are you worried about AI taking over? For me, it seems what happens when we, when AI becomes more intelligent than the smartest human, I would argue maybe that’s already happened.

Like, how do you think about the future, particularly with the rate of change?

Aaron Edwards: I’m not that old, but I feel like I’ve lived through at least three or four major technology waves where people said, this is going to destroy society or whatever it may be, take all our jobs, and I think the pattern has always been the same, like with new technology, new tools, it just makes us more efficient.

Obviously there’s, but just like any other tool, whether it’s technology, whether it’s a gun, whether it’s money, it just like accelerates people’s base tendencies, like for good or bad, things who use for good or bad For AI, obviously like the fear is, Oh, it’s going to like, obviously the fear is like replacing jobs.

And I’m torn on this because literally my business right now is like to help replace jobs, you have a support bot that can handle like 70 percent of your tickets granted, it’s probably like tier one, so those are the people that are going to get eliminated.

First, the ones with the lowest like capability or education or that kind of things if that happens. But also it makes lives a lot. Easier for the other workers, because they don’t have to answer those boring, repetitive questions or tasks or things like that.

Chris Badgett: And if you’re using it for pre sales, like you might actually start selling more product, which is going to require more support because people don’t have to wait to get an answer about.

Will this work for me? And that’s true.

Aaron Edwards: Yeah. Or other marketing use cases. Like I use my custom trained chat bot for when I get like a lead, like someone signs up, like gives them their email or whatever on the site. I actually have the chat bot go and read their website, their business website.

Oh,

Aaron Edwards: and then use that, pass it to, My train chat bot and say, okay, I want you to draft this like really bespoke custom email. That’s recommending all the specific ways my product can be used for their business. So it writes like a totally personally, way better than I ever could with an hour of research, right?

That’s giving them specific things like, Oh, here’s how you can use a chat bot for your carwash network,

Chris Badgett: yeah. Super contextual.

Aaron Edwards: Yeah. So it allows like mass personalization. So I think it’s going to lock more things. I think just like other technology, it’s, I think for the most part is just going to be making users more efficient, making them able to achieve more.

I think obviously it will replace some jobs, but it creates new ones. Just like we’ve seen with every new technology. So I think instead of spending your time, like being scared, I think it’s a lot better to spend your time learning. Yeah. Playing the playground. Yeah. The way you succeed in this world of ours, and this has been true for a long time is learning how to learn.

So that means staying on top of whatever the latest technology or developments are playing with that, figuring out how to leverage that and use it in your workflows and your business, um, in your career, there’s that classic quote that your job might not be replaced by AI, but it’ll be replaced by someone who knows how to use AI.

Yeah,

Aaron Edwards: and I love that quote because I think it’s very true, at least right now. Maybe someday we get to that point where, like the AI takes over everything and no one has to work anymore or something. I don’t know, I don’t really see that happening. And I think the same pattern is going to replay itself.

Like things get more efficient, new jobs that no one ever imagined, are created. So I’m a bit of an accelerationist in that. Absolutely.

Chris Badgett: Can you final thing prepare that demo where people can talk to the AI? And as Aaron’s getting that ready think about this idea that somebody could talk to your website just using voice potentially in languages.

Aaron Edwards: Yeah, so this is very This is like my weekend project that I’ve been hacking together. But if you, I don’t know if you knew, but open AI just released their advanced voice mode, like both in chat, GPD plus, where you can play around with it. But last week they released an API for it. So you can actually have the real time, like conversations with AI.

And what makes this different than before is before you would have to you asked a question, it would have to first run it through a model to turn that audio into text, right? Then it would pass that text to chat, GBT, which would provide an answer in text. And then it would have to turn that text back into voice again.

latency there. Because you’re doing like three different conversions. And so like a lot of big gaps and things like that to make it just really not feel like a phone call or not feel like a real person. So their new real time API, which they just released. I was just playing with connecting that to DocSpot cause I want to create like voice agents so you can connect your phone number to it, or you can add a little widget like this that I have right here on your website.

To talk like to a human representative, human sounding representative. Obviously there’s a lot of UX things to solve. Right now there’s like a bit of a pause while it’s looking at data to answer a question, which I need to fill in those pauses, but I’ll give you a quick demo.

Hola, como puedo ayudarte hoy?

Aaron Edwards: Can you speak in

English? Absolutely. I can speak English. How can I assist you today? What kinds of questions can you answer? I can help with questions related to DocsBot testing, from features and troubleshooting to integration. Okay,

Aaron Edwards: I want to know about the pricing plans.

How about the hobby plan? How many pages does that come with?

The hobby plan for DocsBot includes up to 1, 000 source pages. If you need more detai

Aaron Edwards: Oh, that’s great.

Chris Badgett: Are you there? I’m

Aaron Edwards: here.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, that was awesome.

Hello again. Regarding your question. Let me check if you can train your bot using YouTube videos. Give me a moment. Good news. You can indeed train your DocsBot using YouTube videos. This feature allows your chat bot to provide answers. Talk

Aaron Edwards: faster. It’s too slow.

You can definitely train your DocsBot using YouTube videos. This feature lets your chat bot. All right. Thank

Aaron Edwards: you.

Glad to help. If you have more questions, feel free to ask. So that’s

Aaron Edwards: A rough demo.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Thanks for giving us a glimpse into the future. It’s amazing, Aaron, what you’ve built over at Docspot AI.

So go check that out. If you’re listening to this episode, that’s docspot. ai. And how would you say Aaron was the best way for somebody to get started? They’ve listened to this episode. They’re excited. What should they do to we have

Aaron Edwards: a free plan. You don’t even need a credit card. So you can just.

Click the big, build your chat bot right now. And then you can super simply without even paying, like you can add in like URL to your site or a few different things. There’s obviously limits on how you can train your bot with the free plan, but if you need more than that, you want to try all the features.

We do have a money back guarantee. So we’ll give you 14 days to give it a try. And if it’s not good for you We’ll just give you a full refund. But for most people, it takes like less than five minutes to have a working chat bot for customer support or internal knowledge or whatever.

So it’s pretty magical.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome, Aaron. Thank you for coming back on the show. I really appreciate it. Thanks. We’re going to have to catch up in another year and see what’s going on here. And the way the rate, this is accelerating. It might have to be before a year.

Aaron Edwards: No problem.

Chris Badgett: Super impressed.

And The way you innovate and play in the playground of technology and provide business tools is really inspiring. So thank you for coming. Thanks for coming back on the show.

All right.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMSCast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you [email protected] slash gift. Go to lifterlms.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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The post AI for Course Creators with Aaron Edwards From DocsBot AI appeared first on LMScast.

In this LMScast episode, Dustin Hartzler discusses creating a performance continuing education business. Dustin launched a firm focused on continuing education for functional medicine, which will be directed by Dustin’s wife, Melody.

Dustin specializes in starting and expanding continuing education companies, especially in the wellness and healthcare industries. He is from Your Website Engineer. He describes how he and Melody built Functional Medicine CE from the ground up, frequently experimenting with various formats to see which ones work best for their target audience.

In order to accommodate people with more demanding schedules, they first experimented with virtual live events such as symposia, which enabled pharmacists and other medical professionals to participate in real time. Later, they modified the content into on-demand courses.

Dustin highlights the value of community involvement in marketing in addition to the format of their classes. They also look at specialty marketing techniques like customized advertisements and professional LinkedIn communities.

Here’s Where To Go Next…

Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

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Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Dustin Hartzler. I first found Dustin many years ago, probably a decade ago on his podcast, which is your website engineer. That’s at your website, engineer. com. I’ve seen Dustin around WordPress for a long time.

And recently I found out that his wife has a continuing education business. So I want to do a chat with Dustin today and talk about building that type of business, just story of how it all happened and what, how it all works it’s, as I look into the LifterLMS user community, some of the most successful platforms.

From a financial perspective, our continuing education projects. And so when I learned about this with Dustin, I wanted to chat with him about it, but first Dustin, welcome to the show.

Dustin Hartzler: All right. Thanks Chris. Thanks for having me.

Chris Badgett: So your wife, Melody has a business functional medicine, CE. com. CE stands for continuing education.

Frame us in on the niche here. What is. Functional medicine. And why do these people need CE or continuing education credits?

Dustin Hartzler: Yeah, for sure. And maybe I’m going to probably butcher exactly what it is. I’m just the tech guy here. But but my wife is a pharmacist and she is an entrepreneur and she has her, hand into lots of different things.

And so the functional medicine aspect side of things is basically doctors can practice functional medicine. Pharmacists can provide do functional medicine, nurse practitioners and whatnot, but functional medicine is addressing the root cause of any type of issue that you may be having. Like you could go to your doctor and say, Hey, my stomach hurts.

It consistently hurts when I eat these foods or anything along those lines. And a conventional doctor will say, Oh, you probably have I don’t know, IBS or like some sort of something. Here’s whoops. Here’s some medicine. Take that and your symptoms will go away. There are symptoms might go away, but they might crop up at different things.

There might be different avenues that, now something else hurts or, something along those lines, or maybe you’ve got heart medication. You have all these things. things. What my wife does and what she is teaching pharmacists to do is to look at the root cause. I think it’s really funny because all these pharmacists like went to school to prescribe and they verify prescriptions.

Like you would think that the first thing they want to do is say, Oh, we’ll take this prescription. This is what’s going to affect you. And it fixed you the best. But when you look at when, if you look at a customer or like a patient, at the, with the root cause of what might be ailing you. And then they do blood work and then they try to figure out, okay, it probably is this, or maybe you have a gluten intolerance and that’s what’s causing your stomach tissue.

So they’ll do some elimination diet and they’ll do some things along those lines. And so that’s what functional medicine is. And so my wife has a couple of different businesses. One is this continuing education, but the other one, there’s another piece where she’ll actually see patients virtually online.

And we came to the conclusion that there’s no real good education piece for pharmacists or doctors or whatnot to figure out how do I learn how to practice functional medicine? Like you can’t just go to Walgreens and start this. You can’t, like that’s not really a thing. And so my wife has been in doctor’s offices before and she has these longer appointments, like a patient appointment might be 90 minutes and she learns as much history as they can and then they’ll send it.

the stuff off for blood work or whatnot. But the whole premise came on. Nobody was offering this type of CE pharmacists named. I think it’s in Ohio. It’s different in every state. I think it’s 60 hours every five years for continuing education to keep your pharmacy license. And so that’s where the niche is.

It’s pharmacists or doctors or nurse practitioners that need continuing education, but they’re interested in functional medicine in learning how to do that more patient root cause approach. And so that’s How the site started.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And my dad’s actually a pharmacist and I’ve seen him do continuing education my whole life.

And I know there’s like different percentages. It probably varies by state on how much has to be in person versus online. Do you, what is it in your state? Do you know?

Dustin Hartzler: No, I do not. But I know that I think it’s based on live and on demand, I think is the way that we do it. So like we’ll have, we’re having a symposium, which is the first weekend, the first Saturday in November, which is seven hours of live CE.

And so via, even though it’s via zoom, if they’re logged in for the whole time, they get live CE credit. Otherwise they can log in and they can watch it later. And then they just basically we’ll watch the education and then they will take some sort of quiz or validation. And then they’ll get that CE approved based on the state that they live in.

So I don’t know the exact numbers. I just know that we as a company should be marketing more towards the end of the year. I think this is an idea that’s probably good. Hey, it’s. October 1st, we should probably send out a reminder Hey, you got three months, if you need some CE here, this is what we’re offering on our site.

And so there’s lots that you could do along that line. But yeah, there’s some sort of live versus on demand, but I don’t know what that is.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Tell us a story of how this started. Like it’s one thing to be a pharmacist, but then how did Melody make the transition to becoming an educator?

Dustin Hartzler: Yeah, it, she actually started like right after she graduated, she did a residency at the VA in Columbus, but then like her first full time job was a pharmacy professor at a school of pharmacy. And so that’s where the. The education piece came in and so she taught students and then that was a rabbit hole of these millennials that are like, what’s going to be on the test and just tell me what’s on the test so I can study that.

And it’s she’s that’s not how pharmacy works, right? You have to learn it so that in case. That comes up someday you know how to treat your patients or whatnot. And then and then she moved into a clinic aspect. And then the clinics she was working for, like her and the doctor didn’t really see eye to eye very well.

Then it’s okay, like we’ve been doing the FX med thing for a few years and it’s okay, this might be a good time to jump, but this site started just because she saw nothing else in the space. I think it was two, we did a conference November of 2019. And this was before COVID, of course.

And it was, it was like our wildest dream, right? We hadn’t not much of a list. And she had, I think, six, four, four to six speakers or whatnot. She did maybe one of the sessions. And we sold the tickets we’re just like making this up as we go, right? Like, how much should CE cost?

Maybe 199. Let’s try 199. And we sold 80 to 90 tickets at 1. 99. You’re like that’s a pretty decent payday to do that. And then and it was all recorded via zoom. She has to, it’s a little different in the fact that she doesn’t teach everything on this site. She teaches maybe one session of the four or five.

Sometimes it’s two, sometimes it’s none, but she normally has to pay a pharmacist to do this. And it’s a thousand dollars or 2, 000 depending on what the pharmacist like will, they charge for their hourly time or whatnot. And then we record everything via zoom and then I make it look pretty and then load it into an LMS so that we can so people can see it on demand.

Then again, if our marketing funnels were, Proper, like we should be making money in sales like daily on this. That’s not really the case right this second. We do more, I think people are more engaged in live details and Hey, this is a live thing. We’re going to do a Q and a after each session.

And people, I think enjoy that more, but every once in a while, it surprises us that someone will come in and Oh, I’ll just buy the annual pass and I’ll get all of the CE and that’s five 49 for the year or whatnot. And so it’s a good Hey, we don’t have to do any more work. It’s all there.

But yeah, so that’s the general gist of how this started. And so we’ve done. Two to three conferences every year since 2019. We did see a big drop after COVID shut everything down. Like more people were doing things online, but it seemed like it, less people were coming to our online events.

I think sometimes it’s scheduling we’re like, Oh, this works well for us, but may is a very busy time. So all the graduations and stuff. We’re like, okay, maybe not may, or, this is around too close to Thanksgiving. And so there’s just different things As an entrepreneur, we’re just, just trying to figure it out.

We did do a course on a cruise boat this year which was pretty cool. That was a dream of my wife. Like, how can we do a tax deductible trip like that? So we went to Seattle and then did an Alaskan cruise. And when the cruise was on, like when we were out at sea, Which was like two and a half days.

They would have CE conference, like just at the back of the boat, they could see the icebergs and stuff out the back of the boat, which was really cool. Then I’m working on getting all those videos updated and sent out. And then that might actually be a, like kind of a live in. live cohort type class.

And we might try to do this year to Hey, if you need 14 hours of CE before the end of the year, watch two videos a week, and then we’ll have a live like Q and A at the end of it. So we’re still trying to kick around that idea. But again, like the whole entrepreneur space is just this work, will it not like, let’s see, let’s give it a try.

Chris Badgett: You definitely hit demand with those first 80 people for the ILT or instructor led virtual training. That’s awesome. Quick side note. Did your cruise ship stop in Juneau, Alaska?

Dustin Hartzler: It did.

Chris Badgett: I used to, I lived there for eight years. I used to run sled dogs on a glacier up there as part of a tour business thing.

But that’s cool. I love that idea.

Dustin Hartzler: Absolutely. I think we had, I think there was 19 people that came with us. And Is that huge? No. Would we rather have a hundred maybe, but it was a cool, like intimate group. And we kept seeing those people all across the boat too.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been on a cruise before, but it seems like whoever you see when you’re getting on the boat, you’ll see them a hundred times throughout the cruise or Hey, we’re having in this group. So we always saw those people all over the place, which was really cool.

And then some of them had kids there that were our kids age. And so they would hang out and do stuff like on the boat while the moms were like doing the CE. So that was cool.

Chris Badgett: Nice. And I just want to double click on that idea that you can do live virtual and create a on demand back catalog of training content.

You can do both. That’s really cool. I think some people get focused on one or the other, but you’re doing the best of both worlds simultaneously, which is cool.

Dustin Hartzler: Yeah, it’s cool.

Chris Badgett: How does functional medicine CE get clients? Like, how’d you get those first 80 people?

Dustin Hartzler: Yeah, I think we originally, we started out, we used somebody on Facebook for a while, like that was able to, generate some leads there, paid for advertising, those people are like so expensive.

It’s like our monthly fee is 1, 500 and we recommend you spend 1, 500 on ads. You’re like, Really? And that’s not really like the best use of our time and money. And then it’s slowly grown. I think my wife finds that sometimes like just being in different Facebook groups, there’s like a functional medicine pharmacist, mom’s group or something, or just even pharmacist moms.

And she’s in there and just, just commenting and just people finding her that way. I think that, so we did that. We did some LinkedIn advertising. We think that LinkedIn is a little bit better for this audience because more professionals are on LinkedIn. I think I’m a kind of a professional, but I never use LinkedIn.

So I don’t know if that’s really a thing. I think the hardest part is like you spend money, but it’s did they really get it from there or did they see the ads and get emails from us? And then, I don’t know, like you don’t really ever know, was our ads been worth it or not? And then recently it’s we’ve been partnering with some supplement companies and some bigger name type things.

So they’ll pay us to do like some of their content for the year. And then. As part of their contribution, they get two webinars, one or two, depending on like their level. Then they will market to their audience, this free webinar. We market to our audience for free webinar. And so then sometimes we’ll have, a webinar will happen and we’ll have 400 people registered and then there’ll be added to our email list or whatnot.

So those are some of the things that we feel that are working, but again, like I don’t know. Is it really working? Is it not? So I think that’s I don’t know how those, where those first 80 people came from. Like I think it was just I think there was some Facebook marketing involved.

There was, for a while we were offering a free signup on our site or, people might be just searching for functional medicine CE or, like that’s the name like is exactly what the URL is. So that is helpful. I think two, we were on a podcast. A friend of ours went to college that we went to college with has a, they call it your financial pharmacist.

And so they do like financial stuff for pharmacists and talk about like student loans and student loan forgiveness and stuff like that. Like we talked about the business on there. And so that was a very targeted audience. And so that might’ve been where some of the people came from, but we try to do as much like free stuff as we can.

Chris Badgett: Is there, when you say free stuff, you mean like content marketing or

Dustin Hartzler: Yeah, exactly.

Chris Badgett: So what kind of free stuff?

Dustin Hartzler: So it’s like getting on those podcasts or I’m doing free webinars for different people. Or, do you have sometimes it’s even like creating an event on Facebook. I think that sometimes gets people to come and then Oh, we’re going to, they were, I think they were doing like Instagram or Facebook lives for a little bit like, Hey, we’re having this conference in two weeks.

This is the stuff that we’re going to do. Here’s some of the things that you’ll learn during this conference and whatnot. So those are some things I feel like as a, it’s just, husband and wife duo. And then my wife has a couple of pharmacists that help write some content and write some newsletters and whatnot.

And it’s we’re way overstretched. Like we should be able to like, if we had somebody that could come up with, here’s our strategy for the year. Here’s like how we’re going to advertise or here’s how we’re going to market. Here’s going to be our content marketing strategy. I feel like we could do a lot better.

But then also it’s this is only like a third of all the things that she’s doing. And so it’s should we just put our blinders on and just really focus or what does that look like? But I think she’s so passionate about so many different things, like helping pharmacists, more pharmacists doing this is better, for the world, or for patients.

But then also it’s she also wants to see patients so she can have those Hey, we taught this person this and now they are, they’re feeling so much better. They don’t have to take this medicine or like we reversed IBS or, like not that’s really a thing, but like lifestyle modification is a big Passion of hers.

And so she dips her toe into a lot of different aspects there.

Chris Badgett: Let’s talk geography. I know some continuing education stuff is on a state by state basis. You mentioned you’re from Ohio. Are you guys doing the whole us? Is there any international action? What geography are you serving?

Dustin Hartzler: So we can, anybody can listen to the content, but you only, Can be redeemed in the U. S. States and all 50. Yeah, exactly. I don’t think there’s any limitations based on the C. E. Companies are licensed to do to validate. So basically what happens is like we have this conference coming up in November. My wife had to come up with an outline.

Here’s the sessions. Here’s the things we’re going to talk about. Let’s put bullet points to each, here are the key learning objectives. And then they, she submits that to a professional CE company and then they can say, yes, we approve all of these things we will authorize. And then then when somebody goes through all the content, then they can submit their CE and then it’s registered.

So I think as a pharmacist, you can have a few different logins to collect all of your stuff. I don’t know how all the reporting and the dashboards, I basically like inside of our LMS, we’ll take the. Take the details. Here’s what you need to do to submit CE and then open it in a new tab and they have to fill it out themselves.

So there’s no like certification that we do. We just partner up with a company who’s, they do that full time.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Where do you see like, where do you want to go with this from here?

Dustin Hartzler: Up into the right. Is that the right terminology? Yeah, I think, I think we, like I said earlier, I think it would be great to have multiple sales a day without us doing anything continuing that, just building that brand awareness or whatnot, or like even working on the, what does the funnel look like as customers come in? Okay. They signed up for an email list and now they’ll get emails, but there’s no like really onboarding flow or like, how do we promote and how do we like how do we like sell the next course?

Somebody comes and they buy something for November and we’re going to have a conference next year. Like, how do we get them engaged in? We do have a handful of customers that pretty much anything that we bring out, like they will buy, they’re one of the first customers and that’s a very loyal following.

But I think the, the weird part is, and we’ve talked about like the, Oh, some of the LMS is, or some of the E learning platforms are like, you could buy a subscription for 200 and then, you get all access to all the content to do all the things. And it’s that doesn’t quite work in what we’re doing just because we have to pay for every CE that’s redeemed.

Like we have to pay for that. So if everybody was getting all the CE, like that gets to be a little costly on our side. So we’ve jumped around different ideas there, but it would be great to have a You know something that’s very recurring and very regular on a month to month basis versus oh, We made four sales this month or oh, we made 400 sales this month Like it being more consistent in and that’s where we’re thinking I don’t know thinking is the right word but just working with these big internet partners and showing that hey There is value in this list that we have I forget if we have It’s probably under a thousand people that have purchased any one thing but if all a thousand people bought everything we offered, like that would be pretty good, right?

Like that would be, an amazing thing. But I don’t know. I feel like we sometimes like just are like, what’s the next thing? I was telling you earlier, it’s I’m just fixing this site for a conference that’s happening in 30 days. This should have probably been done three months ago.

So we could have had a three month push of here’s all the, like here’s how we could promote this upcoming conference or whatnot. So again, I don’t know. It’s a full time job. And like for me and she’s doing all these things and kids and stuff, it’s just we can’t put the full effort that we really want to on this site.

Chris Badgett: How much of the audience or customers come back? Cause there’s recurring in the fact that they need to get this every year, every two or whatever. How does, cause that’s a snowball that can build over time.

Dustin Hartzler: Yeah, exactly. I would say, I haven’t really looked at the numbers, but maybe 20 percent of customers have bought multiple things, but it’s not a, so we’ve been doing it, Since 2019, say we’ll call it five years, probably two per, so that’s, there’s probably 15 old, 15 whole things that we’ve done.

And I don’t think anybody, but maybe a handful of people have done more than four or five. So there’s some and maybe it’s the topic too. Like some people aren’t interested. Like we had one on men’s health and we had one on women’s health. And this next one is about lab testing. My wife thinks this one is going to be a really big one just because so many people need to know.

The lab part of things. And that’s where you get a lot of information, just getting blood work and getting those results back in. So if anybody’s listening, that is also a WordPress creator and and a functional medicine pharmacist you can find out more, but but yeah, so that’s the, that’s the thought process about like where we go as a business and whatnot,

Chris Badgett: can you talk about, speaking of being spread thin, you mentioned bringing in other subject matter experts to teach. It sounds like maybe the majority of the content you mentioned they get paid, but how does that relationship work? Or how did you develop? Cause it can be overwhelming, all the stuff to create this kind of business and getting help with the educational content is a big thing.

Dustin Hartzler: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: So how did that come together? So now all these people contribute.

Dustin Hartzler: Yeah, I think that was some of the relationships she’s formed at some of these different conferences that she’s went to. There’s like a I4M I think is the Institute of Functional Medicine. So there’s lots of educators there that she’s reached out to, but one of them that’s coming for this conference is like one of the sponsors.

And so one of the things that she put in her sponsorship agreement is you’ll pay us this many dollars plus provide a speaker for this session. So that’s like a, Company got to pick who would be the best representation for them. Or she might find out that, Oh, this person is really good with hormone replacement therapy.

Like we’re going to talk about hormones. Let’s reach out to her or Oh, this person is world renowned in gut health or whatnot. And so it’s a lot of times like you find the person and then you like. Say, Hey, are you available this day? Or would you be interested? And then they talk about the price.

And I think it’s anywhere between a thousand and 2, 000. Like we pay these educators because their time is valuable, right? Like they have to spend time if they’re a doctor, like not only do they have to practice, but they have to come up with slides and they have to, meet the learning objectives and then they have to.

The slides have to be done like a few weeks in advance so we can look at them and make sure that are all okay. And I think the first or second one, like my wife did maybe two or three of the sessions, and she was just like completely dead because she has to do all like the back end paperwork and get all the stuff ready and then Promoted and all that kind of stuff.

And sometimes she’s Oh, this one’s going to be really easy because I don’t have to promote and present anything. I just have to get to sit in, I get to learn. And so that’s a valuable piece too. So she gets to learn and she gets educated. And so it’s the best of both worlds that we’re paying for all these people to get education by this specific person, but then she also will learn and she can add that to her tool bag of like things that she knows or how she can practice and whatnot.

Chris Badgett: So Dustin, you’re a podcaster. I remember listening to one of your episodes a long time ago that as a non developer, I’m like, finally, I understand what the database does and how that works and stuff. So just a question related to functional medicine CE, does Melody have a podcast for the niche? Or have you thought about that?

You’re like pro podcaster.

Dustin Hartzler: Yeah. So her other business is it’s called farm to table farm to table dot life, and there’s a podcast over there. And so that one is talking about social interview, some of her team. So that business is pharmacists are basically like, they can only practice in the state that they are licensed in.

This education piece, like you can teach for, for anywhere, but Actually do patient care. You have to be licensed in different states. So on that side of her business, she has 40, some like 1099 employees. And then, so she’ll have like conversations with them. They call it the table talk. And so it’s basically like people sitting around the table, talking about different health things or like stress or meditation or movement or things like that.

And we’ve done it that way because we feel like patients are more likely to want to learn more about fixing their gut health or fixing their, learning more along those lines, but we haven’t done it for this business per se, mainly because the podcast editor in this household, which is also me, is way behind on that podcast and my podcast per se.

But but yeah, there’s always ideas and I don’t know If that would be a really, that could be a good free content marketing strategy too, to do podcasts or even should we do like a 30 minute snip of here’s this course. And then that would be probably pretty easy.

Like here’s the first, 30 minutes of this lecture that you could get for free and then you can buy it for the rest of it. So that could be a strategy too. Wow. Yeah. There’s just never enough time for all the ideas. And so

Chris Badgett: repurposing existing content to like, Hey, get the full thing and get credit.

That’s cool. That another way to reuse it. Yeah, I think,

Dustin Hartzler: I think the hard part for me is I’m not the, I’m not the pharmacist. And so I don’t know what’s most important. So like I would have to have somebody help me like, Hey, of this hour long session, and I do use the script. So like I could plug it into the script and give the URL to somebody and say, Hey, tell me what time codes are best to put in a podcast.

And then we could put a little intro and an outro and then go from there. And so that could be, and. That’s a really good idea that we just generated on the fly. And maybe I’ll do that. Maybe I’ll set that up during my sabbatical coming up.

Chris Badgett: Nice. Nice. What year did you start your podcast?

Dustin Hartzler: Your wordpressengineer. com. It’s actually your website engineer. We don’t want to mess with the trademark dealio. That’s going on. I funny story though, it was like in 2010 when I started, I submitted to 99 Designs and I said, my name is your website or your WordPress engineer and or the WordPress engineer, or something like that.

And luckily somebody on Upwork, or it wasn’t Upwork, it was 99 Design, said, Hey, that’s a trademark infringement. You cannot use that in A URL. And so I switched and I pivoted, and this. In what we’re talking about in WordPress these days. But I switched to your website engineer. That was when I started freelancing.

That was December of 2010, I think is when my first episode came out. And I was very consistent up until about 500 ish. There was some gaps in there close as I got closer to 500. And then the last couple of years has been a dumpster fire with my content creation strategies, just because there’s so much more I felt like at the time it was a really good way for me to get clients because they’re like, I understand what you’re saying, but I don’t want to do it.

And then also that was my contribution back to WordPress. It’s I’m not gonna I’m not gonna be able to fix code or, contribute to core, but I can spend some time like giving free education. And so that’s that’s where my spin was. And I love doing it. I still enjoy doing it.

I still like Just don’t have the bandwidth as much as I’d like to. And so I did commit officially unofficially on my show that I’m going to come back. I do have a, I mentioned I have a sabbatical coming up and part of my sabbatical is switching all my themes from old school storefront to like new block themes.

And I want to report back of Here are some gotchas or here’s some things to think about. Or like you might not remember, think through these things when you’re making that type of transition. So I might have some time, but it’s really hard to justify Hey, this is me, like spending two hours a week creating free content, but like I could spend two hours a week Tweaking and optimizing different workflows for something that it might actually generate monies.

But I still enjoy podcasting and I enjoy like the WordPress space. Of course, I’ve been to the last, I think six WordCamp U. S. and just being able to hang out with people in person and like chat and learn how they’re using WordPress and whatnot has been really cool and exciting for me.

Chris Badgett: You and I are obviously big fans of the podcasting medium, and it’s, I find people find their content personality type, whether that’s YouTube, podcasting, writing, social media, like people have their different flavors that resonate the most with them.

But how have you as a podcaster benefited the most? Focusing on that medium and being consistent and creating all this content.

Dustin Hartzler: Yeah. I think that, I think creating podcasts is the easiest person.

Chris Badgett: Once you’re set up, once you’re set up

Dustin Hartzler: and you’ve got the gear and whatnot. And I was, My show was anywhere between 15 and 22 ish minutes is what I was shooting for.

And I was trying to get it done in 90 minutes. That was really my, if I could prepare, I could record and I could edit and get it out in 90 minutes. Like I felt like that was good. And you write a

Chris Badgett: high quality blog post in 90 minutes, right? Yeah, exactly.

Dustin Hartzler: And if you get really good, after maybe the first hundred episodes, there’s not a lot of editing.

editing. I even got to the point where my edits were like, Hey I’m talking about the news or I’m talking about this plugin that I want to share. I just flubbed up. And I was like, yeah, I’m just going to restart the whole section over again, instead of like me having to go back and listen. Descript makes it really easy these days where you can see the exact words that you’re talking.

You’re like, Oh, I can see, let me just remove that. That’s pretty simple. But like back in the day, it’s I don’t want to have to just say Oh, the first announcement was good and now I have to go to the second one. I had to find that. And that way I could just like chop whole sections of the show out.

Then that made it a lot easier to like edit. And a lot of times I didn’t even edit, you get very comfortable with not saying or the, like stuttering around or whatnot, and then you can get it out faster. I felt like that was always good. I always felt too, that.

If you wanted to create a high quality blog post, especially in WordPress, you needed either some sort of like video or you needed some sort of Oh, I need these nine screenshots to really emphasize what I’m talking about. Then you’re like these screenshots are going to be outdated. And then it’s like now the whole thing’s, the audio medium is really good. The fact that yes, the content sometimes gets outdated, like you don’t visually see that as much. I just felt like that was the easiest way for me to get in. I loved listening to podcasts. And I, when I first got out of college, I got a iPod, like video, a video iPod with the wheel that I could download podcasts because I had an hour commute each way and I was like, okay, let’s start listening to podcasts.

And so I’d listen to those through my like tape deck. Converter type dealio. And I was like, this would be really cool to start someday. And so then I did and I was like, Oh, this is really, it’s a fun thing to if you put time and effort into meeting people, like doing videos like this is really cool.

Or sometimes it’s like I just don’t have the time to coordinate all of those things. And so that’s why I went to a solo show for probably the last 300 we’re all solo shows because it’s I don’t have time to coordinate and like with kids schedules and whatnot. And I think now I’m to the point where my day is really like pretty open.

The kids are at school all day. And then I have meetings at work, but I can set up like Calendly and get those all around there and whatnot. So I think that it’s a good medium and it’s a one that you don’t have to prep for as much, like you can make show notes in 15 minutes about the things you want to talk about and then you can just riff on them.

So that’s where I found like the most benefit for me was the easiest. And I felt since I’m a. Podcasts consumer, like I feel like I could take bits and pieces from a lot of podcasts and then turn them into my own.

Chris Badgett: Nice. That’s just almost said Justin, Dustin Hartzler. Go check out functionalmedicinece.

com. It’s a great example of continuing education. And check out the podcast, your website, engineer. com. Dustin, thank you for coming on the show and thank you for being a shining example. And with your wife, Melody being an education entrepreneur, you’ve got to wear a lot of hats and it’s amazing what you guys have done.

And I know it’s like intense and busy, but I’m so glad that you found product market fit and yet that launch. The initial launch, you got 80 people and have just continued to iterate, test things out. That’s really a cool thing. And it’s great that you can do that with your wife.

Dustin Hartzler: Yeah. I think it’s super fun.

And for me, like it also gets that, Hey, how can I best use WordPress to make it easy for the people that are managing the site? And so there’s some cool things like, Hey, we should probably instead of doing it this way, maybe we should use some. Post meta field, create some custom boxes so they can just put the information in and then I can use a template and then pull that information in properly or whatnot.

So there’s lots of cool overlap. And so I don’t have to be the knowledge worker and I don’t have to know everything about the CE and whatnot. And I just, here’s what we want. Here’s what we’re going to try. And I get to do that as the tech guy. So it’s super fun. There’s no like conflict with my day job and there’s no Yeah.

What do I want to say? There’s no limits like and there’s nobody saying Hey, this isn’t the right path. Or, if you work on a team and you get to develop a feature and they’re like, no, do it this way, do it this way, do it this way. Like now there’s no one like that. So I can just tinker and play.

And there’s always room for improvement. I think that’s maybe one of the. The best examples of I know we connected over Lifter LMS because like I was, I originally started this with a custom post type and I was going to customize like each of these things, like each course was in its own thing.

And then I moved to LearnDash and then I’ve done Sensei and I’ve looked at Lifter and I’ve, I’m like, I think Lifter is where I want to be. And so like there, it’s never static, right? There’s always things that be improved and changed. And as WordPress continues to develop or, the different plugins and stuff, I think that is really the neat thing.

Working at automatic, like the. The first line in our creed says I’ll never stop learning. And so I think that’s really cool. Oh this thing, new thing is out here with WordPress 6. 7 and I have 550 podcasts that I’d like to implement it. So I’ve got to go in and have to redo all of my posts.

There’s all kinds of things that you could always do and always be improving. And so I think that’s one of the cool things about WordPress. It’s a cool thing about having an e learning platform that just experiment and try and, Do surveys to your customers and figure out do they find it valuable?

Do they not? What are they looking to learn things along those lines? And once you slowly grow a list, like you’ll have people that will give you feedback and so yeah, it’s been super cool. It’s been a cool adventure and I’m excited to keep it going up into the right and maybe someday we’ll be wildly successful and we won’t have to do anything, but just crank out CE content and instead of the beach all day.

That might be a little while.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. And it’s cool that functional medicine is about helping people improve their lives so that I’m sure that gives a sense of purpose and mission and all that stuff too. So it all comes together. Dustin, thank you so much for coming on the show. Really appreciate it.

Wish you and your wife all the best success.

Dustin Hartzler: Thanks so much. Appreciate it.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide

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In this LMScast episode, Chris Badgett and Kurt Von Ahnen discuss LifterLMS’s Black Friday and Cyber monday deals, which runs throughout November and ends on Cyber Monday, December 2nd.

This year, LifterLMS is offering an exclusive 60% discount. By using the coupon code: BLACKFRIDAY24 you can enjoy an extraordinary 60% off LifterLMS products.

The LifterLMS Black Friday and Cyber Monday deal will go live on November 1, 2024, on the Black Friday landing page: LifterLMS Black Friday.

Additionally, there will be a lifetime discount of 70% on Cyber Monday on the Infinity Bundle. This lifetime offer will only be available on December 2, with a price of just $3,000, including bonuses. The bonuses include essential YouTube and marketing courses. These resources equip prospective course developers with the tools they need to successfully connect with their audience.

Here’s Where To Go Next…

Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide

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Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a repeat guest. His name is Kurt Von Annen from Manana Nomas. Kurt is a LifterLMS expert. He also does work at LifterLMS itself. Today, we’re going to have an interesting discussion about what’s going on this time of year, but first Kurt, welcome back on the show.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Oh, thanks Chris. It’s great to be here, man. It’s always good to talk to you.

Chris Badgett: Let’s go ahead.

Kurt Von Ahnen: You go, I was just going to say. You wanted to get together. You invite me on the show. It’s awesome. And every time this time of year rolls around, it’s always interesting to see what we’re going to do this year.

People would say, why have black Friday deals? Why have sales? We all know people expect it. And so a Lifter LMS has always risen to the occasion. And I don’t think this year anybody’s going to be disappointed. I want to Just let’s just get it out of the way, man. Say it up front.

Like what is the black Friday deal this year? Some people have already taken advantage of it as the month already started but overall for people that don’t know yet, what’s the deal?

Chris Badgett: The deal is for black Friday at lifter LMS. And we do things a little differently. We like to remove the urgency and all that stuff.

So we actually do a black Friday sale for all of November. And this year, and typically that runs through cyber Monday this year, black or cyber Monday is actually on Monday, December 2nd. So the sale runs from November 1st through December 2nd. And the deal this year is the biggest discount we’ve ever done, which is 60 percent off of LFTR LMS.

You just have to use the coupon code black Friday, 24 at checkout. And you can go to Lifter LMS. com forward slash black dash Friday, and you’ll see all the deal details. Anybody who makes a purchase is going to get access to the bonus pack, which is 2, 000 worth of bonuses. If you purchase between November 1st and December 2nd, and we’ll go over what those are in a little bit.

And the cherry on top, the last part of the deal. Is something we do exclusively on Cyber Monday only, which is. A lifetime deal promotion. So at Lifter LMS, we offer a lifetime deal for the Infinity Bundle, which is the everything bundle. It’s everything Lifter, LMS makes. It’s for unlimited websites, and we’re doing that at 70% off.

So go check that out. That’s for three K $3,000. You can get your lifetime deal for everything. Lifter LMS makes unlimited sites. And that one is only available cyber Monday only. So if you’re thinking about that you want to mark your calendar for December 2nd, cause it’s only going to be available on that day.

And if you’re already a customer, by the way, whether you want to take advantage of the regular black Friday offer, let’s say, and get the universe bundle or get the infinity bundle on the annual subscription we can prorate and discount the value of your current license. You just have to send an email to team at Lifter LMS.

com. We’ll hook you up with a special coupon code so that you can get. Prorated for the value of your current license and also get the discount on either the regular Black Friday deal or the 70 percent off on the lifetime deal in addition to your proration. But that is a deal this year. You’ll see links to all this stuff on the Lifter LMS website on the pricing page.

And LifterLMS. com forward slash black dash Friday. All the info is there.

Kurt Von Ahnen: I’m having like flashbacks because I remember and people that know me probably think I’m a very grounded person that makes really good decisions. Wink. But I’m pretty sure. I did a black Friday deal almost like nine years ago.

It’s either eight or nine years ago when I signed on with Lyft or LMS, you’ll have to look up my order and see how old I am. But I signed up and I got the bundle, the extra things. Those have an incredible value that I don’t think enough people really leverage, as someone that does the weekly office hours call we do the ask me anything calls, I don’t know of any other software company that.

Does live support like live group support in a mastermind kind of situation, has the support tickets has social support like through Facebook pages. As a customer, when I first came to LifterLMS, I remember just thinking anything I need to know is in the knowledge base. Like anything that I tried, any kind of obstacle I ran into, I want to do this.

I want to do that, I want to connect this thing. I want to do that thing. There was something in the knowledge base that kind of put me in the right direction. Back when I was using crappy themes, I didn’t have sidebars working. I was frustrated for a little while, but the information was in the knowledge base those extra goodies that come, right?

So you’ve got marketing one on one for course creators. That’s a course, right? Yeah. And then you’ve got what the, something about YouTube traffic systems. Yeah. So the YouTube, go ahead. That’s another course, right? Yeah. All right. Between those two things, do you think, and just put it out there, someone’s new, they’re like, I don’t know if I want to be a course creator.

It looks really hard. Some guy parked next to a Lamborghini on Facebook said I should have my own online course somewhere. And then they go, okay, I’m going to do it. I personally think the marketing one on one course and the YouTube training course, I think that’s enough background information in combination with Lister LMS.

To launch a course creator initiative.

Chris Badgett: Absolutely. If, and if I can just pick one, if you want to get excited about one of the bonuses you get, if you purchase during the sale, all of November and the first two days of December, it would be the YouTube traffic system because. It’s one thing to build a course as a subject matter expert, but if you don’t have a way to get leads and build an audience and get people over to your website, the YouTube traffic system breaks it down exactly how to do that without becoming a full time YouTuber.

It teaches you the principles, the strategies, and the tactics to make four, just four strategic YouTube videos. That if you make those for your target audience and put them for free on YouTube and have proper call to action and linking to your course or your website or your contact form or whatever.

It’s going to set you up for some automated free marketing and traffic growth to your website. If I could do one marketing strategy as a course creator, it would be the YouTube traffic system.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Awesome. Awesome. Now the other one that I’m partial to that I see value in, and it’s, I think it’s another one of these unsung heroes.

I’m an agency. I work with a lot of other course creators trying to make their product. So you’re constantly dealing with different serial entrepreneurs that they’re out there. Let’s just face facts. If you’re an entrepreneur, you’re probably a bubble off, right? You’re not like mainstream society.

And so your communication bullet points are all over the spectrum. And I’ve noticed. People lean into their strengths and try to ignore their weaknesses and they come at a, they come at a project in a way that leaves them really vulnerable to certain gaps. And you have that online education company startup checklist.

And that to me is, that is gold for someone getting started. Because you might be really focused on really cool graphics or really focused on integrations or really focused on video or whatever it is. And there’s going to be something in that checklist. That’s going to be a gold nugget for you. That’s going to go, Oh crap.

I didn’t think about that. And then you make sure you fill your gaps and then you launch as a fully, empowered, ready to go entity, ready to do something.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. The startup checklist was born out of, my 15 years of being an entrepreneur and seeing a lot of pain and working with a lot of clients of.

Maybe they’re down the road or they’re getting in the weeds on this thing, but, oh, we haven’t even set up banking for the business or we haven’t really structured our website and our domain name and thought about email and all these like key things that if you don’t. Do in the beginning, just create a world of pain.

So even though this is not like a huge thing, it’s not a big time investment, but if you go through the checklist and make sure you check all these off, your future self will thank you later for building a online education business that you got these things done correctly in the beginning.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. Now something that some people might think is like an also ran category but you give it away as part of these bonuses is.

And I dismissed him at the beginning as well. But then it’s amazing. Cause at the end of the project, these things bubble to the top and you’re like, Oh, I wish I had that. And you have it. That’s the you’ve got the graphic set for certificates, but also for the achievements. Now I’m not a. By nature, I’m not a gamification person.

So when I created my first few projects, I didn’t even think about gamification. I was like achievement badges. Who needs it? You got the, you came here to learn something. You learned it move on. But as it turns out, as I grew in my. e learning career, I came to realize that not everybody’s wired that way.

People aren’t just motivated by the information alone. They still, some people still require that dopamine hit of I accomplished something, I got a badge and it’s pretty cool that you’re able to provide that for people so that they don’t have to overthink it or burden themselves with it in development.

Chris Badgett: A hundred percent. And if you’re not a graphic designer, It’s great just to have a, a catalog of graphic assets that you can use. The achievement badges are great. Those are like pop up graphics that you can have when people complete lessons, sections, or courses, and that can add gamification.

And even if your subject matter is serious you can still incorporate these things and it does provide a little reward dopamine hit for the learner. The whole idea of achievement badges, this is a United States reference, but there’s something we have called the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts, and they have this like sash they wear, or their shirt, and they have all the badges of all the things they’ve accomplished, and they’re pretty proud to show that off, and when they learn a new skill, they get the badge.

But if I could offer one, just one, I would say take a second look at certification if you haven’t thought about it. Some of the most financially successful LFTRA LMS websites are where people are selling continuing education or some kind of certification that allows their learners to either get a job or keep their job and So you can add certificates and even if you’re not in that direct use case having a certificate of accomplishment Is nice to have, even if it’s like a fitness program or a cooking class or whatever, it adds a little bit of that gamification.

It gives somebody something they may even print it out and hang it on their wall and stuff like that, or share it on social media and help get you more customers. So check that out. And then I also just wanted to mention the bonus office hours mastermind event we’re running. That’s something. That you get no matter what level you purchase that by default, you get that.

If you have the universe bundle or infinity bundle or higher, which is the lifetime infinity, but even if you just purchase one add on for LFTR LMS at a 60 percent discount, you’re going to get access to one of those calls so that you can get your questions answered live. In a group format with other great people trying to do similar things as you.

And it’s just a super valuable resource to get direct help. So that’s something else you’re going to get in the bonuses.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. In my almost a decade of playing in the masterminds and stuff, it’s amazing. How much more quickly you can develop as a professional. It’s that, iron sharpens iron thing, right?

It’s not just lifter people in there. And it’s there’s a group of people and you get ideas and feedback from multiple people, which is a really great setup.

Chris Badgett: Absolutely.

Kurt Von Ahnen: So can we switch gears? So first off, we could talk about deals in general and why even having deals is important. We hit on the people expect it.

But I’m really curious why we do the lifetime deal with Lifter LMS.

Chris Badgett: So the reason we do a lifetime deal and by the way, I always said I was never going to offer one Because the reasons for not offering them are it can be helpful in the beginning of a company when you’re just trying to get new users and get started But when I started thinking about lifetime deals, oh, it’s really too late and technically from a financial standpoint It hurts the value of your company to have people that are receiving ongoing benefits that aren’t You Paying on a recurring basis.

But at the end of the day people have been asked about it forever. So we decided to offer it cause Hey, that’s what the people want. And I’m in the business of giving people what they want and helping people. And I don’t have plans to sell Lifter LMS. So honestly, I don’t really care about the valuation.

I’m here to help people. And even if, providing lifetime deals, quote, hurts the valuation of the company, we have no intention to sell. Why not? People are asking for it. They want it. They want the unlimited sites they believe, and they know that their platform is going to be here to stay for years, if not decades.

So why not invest upfront cap? That expense is what it is. And then you’re good to go with lifetime access to the tools and the support. So people want it. We offered it in order for us to offer it. It does cost us money to support people, improve the software, maintain the software, keep it secure and everything.

So it is of a higher price. But for Cyber Monday only, we wanted to make it as accessible as we possibly could to the most possible people. So a lot of people who are on the fence are thinking about getting a lifetime deal, Cyber Monday for our one day, super big discount, lifetime deals sale, it’s really the time to get it.

If you’re looking to get in and get it for the best price. Now,

Kurt Von Ahnen: I want to touch on this because I am a sucker for a lifetime deal.

Chris Badgett: We all are. I have lifetime deals. Like it makes sense. If you’re going to use a tool for a long time and the price is right, go for it.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. And here’s what I’ve noticed.

I’ve noticed that a lot of lifetime deals that I’ve got from a certain AppSumo kind of company sometimes You buy the lifetime deal and it just shrivels up or it’s not feature packed or it’s not what you expected. But I just want to hit, I just want to hit it square on the head for people.

Like maybe people are thinking are they going to fade? Are they going to go away? Are they going to this, going to that? And I think just looking at the last. Year to 18 months with LFTR LMS, it would be anything, but things have, I think things have ramped up. Maybe I’m maybe my perspective is skewed cause I work with you guys, but I know that we’ve got a new version of groups coming.

I know I’m getting really great feedback from that new feature notes. How long did notes come out, Chris?

Chris Badgett: It’s been several months at this point.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah, but not years, right? It’s a few months. Favorites, the idea that users favorite and read a heart over a lesson and then other students can read a heart and then that’s just really cool.

It’s an interactive feature with favorites around all the lessons. One that I haven’t used much, but I’ve heard great things about is advanced coupons. And that’s only six months.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. About

Kurt Von Ahnen: that. Yeah. About six months old there. And I think one of the most recent things is a thing that we’re calling instant courses.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Courses that you can suck into your website, import them in, and you can do whatever you want with them. They’re real courses. You can add your videos, you can resell them, you can modify them. Yeah you’re right, Kurt. The pace of. Development, not just of making new features and new add ons is increasing, but also improving what we already have, listening to user feedback.

I got to give props to the lifter on this team. That’s really working hard and developing all these things. Cause you’re right. It is accelerating, which is one of the reasons to get a lifetime deal. Because if you like the pace of things and you like seeing the trend we’re on, you can lock it in and ride that train forever without having to have an annual subscription.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. I, some people, sometimes I find the lifetime deals offered too early. In the journey for some folks. But in Lyft LMS’s case I, when you finally offered the lifetime deal, I was like, it was a mature enough product already, and then it’s just continued to mature and the customer base has continued to have an influx of new folks.

And just me being me, I speak. Transparently, vulnerably. I just think that I don’t think stability is an issue. Like I think the community is super healthy and we see the greatest people come to the calls. They asked me anything calls and the mastermind that we do. Now let’s go, here’s the subject I hate because I’m going to jump on Thursday’s mastermind call and everybody’s going to ask me when.

But as far as like upcoming. What’s on the roadmap for LFTR LMS development wise, what could people look forward to?

Chris Badgett: There’s a lot. And the way we figure out what to build next at LFTR LMS is really by listening to the people, to the users, to the customers. And we look for patterns. We look for trends.

We look at our own insights, what we’re seeing in the industry. And we use the software ourselves and have like our own opinions of what we think needs to happen next. But some of the areas that you’ll see more focus is more stuff happening in e commerce land, just optimizing e commerce. That’s always a priority because we want to help you out there watching and listening to get paid and have the best e commerce experience.

Quizzing and assignments is really big for some people. There’s a lot of evolution and advancement we can do there. What we have already is already really good, but we’ve gotten some good feedback around those areas. The social learning aspects, the online community, not just selling courses, but also community, improving our social learning add on is an area we’ve got queued up for focused, as well as coaching.

In addition to courses and community, many people offer Coaching. And that can take many forms. And we have an add on for that called private areas with a lot of fresh ideas and things to add and focus on that. So those are just some of the areas that we’ll be focused on. And that whole time we’re always improving the lateral and that’s core.

For example we’ve done a lot lately and we’ll continue to do more advanced privacy and media protection and security features and all those things to protect your intellectual property and stuff like that. So it’s really a constant innovation train, but those are some of the highlights.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. And again, thinking about last year, as far as updates to what we consider core, I remember there was an update to the user experience in the course builder.

Chris Badgett: So now

Kurt Von Ahnen: we pre populate the course builder with a certain amount of lessons and a section and some of those intuitive prompts. And then we also now have the drip feature available for the whole course. Instead of having to go through each lesson and set it up individually. And so people might not think that’s a big deal, but if you have a website with a hundred courses on it, that just became a really big deal.

So that’s super cool. As we start to wind down, Chris, I want to encourage you tell us the deals like one more time. It’s November. It’s almost Black Friday. Okay. You could have already have taken advantage of the deal and gotten 60 percent off, but we’ve got something else coming cyber Monday and you have the codes that people can use.

So let’s run through this again.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. So it’s black Friday, all November sale. So that’s 60 percent off. And that’s on any add on bundle. That you want and that’s from november 1st to december 2nd because that’s when cyber monday is this year on december 2nd So to get that you just need to use the coupon code black friday 24 that being said if you’re looking to get the infinity bundle lifetime deal, which is everything lifter lms makes that is only going to be available on cyber monday, which is december 2nd And you’re going to get 70 percent off the full retail price, which is 10, 000 is the full price.

So you’ll be able to get it for a 3, 000. I think it might actually come in at 2, 000 9, 9, 9, but you get the gist of what I’m saying. And that’s the cheapest you can get the lifter LMS lifetime deal. You can come, but you can always come back later and pay more for the lifetime deal. But if you’re on the fence and you’re thinking about, I think I’m my platforms here to stay and I want to get the best deal mark your calendar for December 2nd to get the lifetime deal and whether you get the lifetime deal or just a regular black Friday.

60 percent discount. If you purchase between November 1st and December 2nd, you’re going to get six bonuses valued at 2, 000. And everybody gets that no matter what you purchase. So that’s just another benefit for taking advantage of this. And if you’re listening to this, I also just want to thank you.

I know this time of year, we do send a lot of emails. It’s an important part of marketing, getting the word out, making sure people realize there’s a sale going on. There’s this lifetime deal opportunity. It’s on this day and all that. All the email traffic and stuff will come down. You’ll in the future, you’ll just be getting more spaced out emails about LMS and all that.

So thank you. As we do this important aspect of marketing for our business with promoting the black Friday. And Cyber Monday period.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Perfect. And then just one last time, folks, you can go to LifterLMS. com forward slash black hyphen Friday forward slash black hyphen Friday. And Chris, I think that kind of wraps it up, man.

Chris Badgett: That’s it. It was great to chat, Kurt. I really appreciate it. And thanks for helping spread the word and get into this Black Friday all November sales event that we do really appreciate it.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Oh, no worries. I’ve been a member of your community for going on a decade, and it’s always great to welcome new folks in.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. Go to lifterlms. com forward slash gift.

Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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The post Announcing the Cyber Monday Only Lifetime Deal and LifterLMS Black Friday All November Sale appeared first on LMScast.

In this LMScast episode, Brian Town highlights the loneliness that comes with entrepreneurship despite its apparent success. He talks about the psychological effects of managing a company, fixing difficulties all the time, and dealing with impostor syndrome even after years of expertise.

Brian Town is a video marketing specialist and seasoned businessman, best recognized as the founder and CEO of Michigan Creative, a full-service creative firm that specializes in web development, branding, and video production. He published a book called “The Lonely CEO“

Brian openly discusses his battles with burnout, providing details on how the constant pressures of managing a company may negatively impact both mental and physical well-being. He emphasizes the value of self-care practices like meditation, consistent exercise, and even taking breaks when necessary in order to have a good outlook.

Additionally, Brian draws attention to the strain many entrepreneurs endure in juggling their personal and professional life, where work frequently takes precedence.

Here’s Where To Go Next…

Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

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Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program, I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co founder of Lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Brian town is the author of the lonely CEO. You can find that at the lonely ceo. com. He’s also the founder of Michigan creative. That’s at Michigan creative. com. It’s an agency. We’re going to talk about some things that people don’t talk about when it comes to being an entrepreneur, being lonely.

The challenges there. We’re going to talk about entrepreneurial mindset. We’re going to talk about marketing and branding and just see where we go from there. But first welcome to the show, Brian.

Brian Town: Chris, appreciate it, man.

Chris Badgett: Let’s start with I don’t want to say dirty little secret. It’s more just like the taboo thing that people don’t talk about as much, which is.

The loneliness part of entrepreneurship because entrepreneurship gets a lot of acclaim and you know There’s a lot of people we put on the pedestal some of the great entrepreneurs of our time even in the smaller world in our towns and cities and stuff. We may be recognized as a success. We have a successful business whatever that means But it can be super lonely.

Let’s dig in there. What compelled you to write an entire book about that topic?

Brian Town: A mental breakdown.

My, my wife is a entrepreneur. She runs her own business too. And she won an award pretty recently. We won an award pretty recently and people were like, Oh man, you guys are the power couple.

We’re like, I wish they could come by our house. And, Sometimes you see like how stressed out we were and how worried one of us is on any given day and how we’re wondering if we, that imposter syndrome, we talk about that a lot and I just think it’s just a lonely place. And luckily I have her and she has me, but I think, every business owner that I’ve talked to, they have that same kind of.

Worry. It’s just, there’s so much, as you start to grow, she has nine employees. I have 16 and that just, there’s so much that you’re thinking of. And my biggest fear has always been, and we’ve had a handful of times, three, four, five, six times where I was like, I got to go pick up a check.

I got to find some money to make sure that we’re making payroll stuff is the things you lose sleep over. And it’s not just Oh, wow. That didn’t work out. Shut it down. It’s a little deeper and I think, your friends don’t get it. Everybody thinks you’re great success. Cause on paper and in reality, like we are successful, like things are working, but there’s been some months that most recently too, that we’re like why are we doing, What are we doing?

And I think everybody listening right now probably sometimes has felt that way and maybe be feeling that way right now. So I think that dirty little secret is it probably one of the hardest things that I’ve ever done. Yeah. Same thing. My wife says the same thing. Now, that being said, there’s so much good that’s come from it.

Whether we, let’s pretend that everybody fires us today and all my employees are like forget you, we’re leaving 14 years running an agency. Through the pandemic, my wife’s starting a business and becoming really successful pretty quickly. That’s success. We don’t see it that way.

There’s always gotta be more and what aren’t we doing?

Chris Badgett: Yeah. I think the concept of enough is like a thing to meditate on. What does enough mean?

Brian Town: And I think that’s the thing is like this last couple of months, I’ve been really off my game and I haven’t been meditating and I haven’t been.

Eating very well or sleeping very well. And, I think when is enough, I think is one thing that I need to do more of, but then also, I’ve been better about this over the last couple of days, but, really looking back at all the great things that you have and the great things that you’ve done, like this building, for example if I’m real stressed out, cause we didn’t get this one client or something.

I, I need to go look around, like there’s, 12 people working here right now, and it’s beautiful. And our clients, love everything that we’ve done for most of them. And so I think it’s that we all need to do a better job of not just if you’re a business owner, but I think appreciating and having gratitude for what we’ve done and what we have.

Because it’s great. And I think it’s hard to do as a business owner, because the minute we get off this call, or if you’re done listening to this, you’re thinking, all right, who’s emailing me that needs something, who’s mad, whatever, we’re always trying to think of that next thing. Why we have all this other stuff to deal with, because we’re parents and, we have tons of animals at home and it’s just It’s a stressful thing.

Chris Badgett: And the entrepreneur is a problem solver. So when you’re done with one problem, feed me another problem.

Brian Town: That’s what it is. My wife said it the best. She’s I thought I’d start this med spa and it’d be great. She’s a PA and it’d be a great thing. And it’d just be a lot of fun doing it.

It is, and it’s been really successful, but it’s always something. Most of her day, when she’s not seeing patients, I work over there one day a week. It’s solving problems. Employees go, Hey, what do you think about this? What color do you want this? And what are we going to do about this package?

And it’s all day long. You’re solving problems. So then when you get home and your fifth grade daughter needs you to help solve problems. This very complicated math, you’re like, man, I don’t know if I’m up for it.

Chris Badgett: I’ve had too many problems today. I get that.

Brian Town: Oh yeah.

Chris Badgett: How does you mentioned imposter syndrome.

I think it’s different in the very beginning, but it never goes away. Like, how has that changed for you over 10 plus years?

Brian Town: Yeah, it never really has. I’m terrible. I’m a classic case of imposter syndrome. Nobody would know it. But it’s, for me, it just, I think a really good example is when we were pitching just on Monday to Jiffy mix, which is a huge, if you’re from Michigan, they’re they are in Michigan, but they’re all over the country.

At first when they sent it to us, I’m like, okay, we’ll do this proposal. And then they asked us to come in and pitch. And then we were getting ready to pitch. I was like, we can’t do this. There’s gotta be the Ann Arbor or Detroit agencies that it’s pitching on this as well. Like we’re just here from Lansing and We’ll give it a shot and, so dumb, like I’m thinking that and then as we start to put the proposal together and showing case studies, and I looked at it Monday morning before we had to go and I was like, yeah, man, maybe we are the only ones that they should go with.

And it went really well and the pitch went really well and. We were ourselves and we do have that type of work and we can do it. And I think I don’t know why I get like that and I don’t know Necessarily if it’s a bad thing we talk about this a lot too is like I think if we didn’t have This imposter syndrome our whole entire lives maybe we wouldn’t be where we are today because I’m always trying to better that imposter because I’m, I’m worried.

I’m like I’m going to have to outperform him then because just in case they find out who we really are. And, sometimes it gets in the way a little bit, but a lot of times it’s just been how I’ve run my life and always. It always tried to get better and better. So I don’t know, man.

Chris Badgett: I’ve heard a saying that behind every entrepreneur, there’s like a trauma or a shame story or something. And maybe that’s where that imposter syndrome was born. I don’t

Brian Town: know.

Chris Badgett: Loneliness is for real. Like it’s interesting. You’re married to an entrepreneur. My wife has her own business. It’s a side thing she started, but she’s not like crazy entrepreneur person like me.

So we have me and then we have a normal person in the house. But I’ve definitely found a lot of solace in spending time with other entrepreneurs and, And then I don’t feel so lonely and all the weird stuff we think about or ways of being in the world or, common ground and it doesn’t feel so lonely anymore, but how’s that been for you in terms of fighting loneliness, like what are some things you do

Brian Town: Yeah, I think you’re right.

I think being with other entrepreneurs has been super helpful and, talking to people that have been through it. And, for me, I need to probably start my podcast again, because that was always very helpful and doing these kinds of things too, like podcaster. Good for me too, because I can, I get, it’s the only opportunity I get to talk about like the good stuff that we do and that I’ve done, and I remember when I was going down this journey of the book and then building my personal brand, when I was.

Working with a ghostwriter for the personal brand and posting and those kinds of things. I was just telling my normal story. Like I was a teacher, I had four kids, had a kid in college, decided to start a company one day. When I got done telling that, they’re like, Jesus, man, like you’ve got a lot of you’ve got a really interesting history and you’re really got a lot of great things.

But we just hang out and. And talk to other people that are still doing it. So we just think everybody can do it.

I was like, Oh, do I, Really? And because for us, man. It’s I just, we just hang, I think one of the things that we have to realize is that not most people don’t start companies and even that small few that don’t make it. So the percentage of you and I being able to still be here today, is pretty small.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, it’s normalized.

Brian Town: Yeah, it is for us, and I, I think for me, having her be an entrepreneur now too, cause before it was like safe and, she was the.

But, I even think, I remember when she was working on her job and there were still, I think a lot of employees today are feeling entrepreneur ish too, because they have to do things on their own. And so I don’t know, I think for me, the writing, the blogging, the posting, and then doing podcasts has been super helpful.

Because it’s just an opportunity for me to maybe think I know what I’m doing.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Brian Town: Sometimes.

Chris Badgett: I know one person who like has that list that you gave to your ghostwrite content person about your life and they actually keep it in their like on a note on their phone. And before they ever have to go speak or be a guest.

They read it to like get in the mindset of Oh yeah, I haven’t done a lot of stuff. I’m worthy to be here. People want to hear what I have to say or whatever. It’s easily forgotten that where you’ve come from or everything you’ve done.

Brian Town: I just think mindset is a crazy thing. I probably would have been done a great job a couple of weeks ago and faked my way through this, but.

I wasn’t at a spot where now when I’m talking to you and telling you about these things, like I actually believe it and feel it. Cause there was just a lot of stress going on a couple of weeks ago and a lot of things that I was just like, I don’t even know if I want to continue to do this, I get like that every once in a while and it’s like, all right, nevermind, things are good, and it’s that mindset piece that. When you get out of that, it’s hard to do the things that, you need to do to stay in it. So like I wasn’t meditating. I wasn’t exercising, I wasn’t writing very much and I’ve noticed that over the last week that I started to pick those things up again because I felt like doing them Mindset’s totally different.

Chris Badgett: What other mindset tips do you have? You mentioned a lot there like your routines of self care meditation exercise just acknowledging that, Hey, maybe you’re at a low point and it tends to go back up, but what else?

Brian Town: Yeah. My morning routine it’s in the book, we, I make fun of all the gurus and stuff for do an ice bath, man, and wake up at 4am and then, go get a two hour massage.

I’m like, all right listen, I got pooping all over the house. My daughter’s mad cause she can’t find her backpack. It’s that’s not happening. I, I’ve got a couple of meditation apps that I use. And so really my routine in the morning is pretty easy. I try to get up coffee and then do a little bit of meditation for about 10, 15 minutes.

Try to write down a couple of things that I’m grateful for and thankful for and what I’m looking forward to that day. And then a winter two from yesterday and then exercise. And, that’s, that, those are the things that it doesn’t have to be like tons of weights or whatever, like just something that, that gets me in that right moment.

The other thing that I wasn’t doing for a while and now I’m back in it and I’ve got a card in my pocket. That’s just my moonshot card was what I call it. And it just, there’s a, it just says, Hey, I’ll be making million dollar, million dollars a month in a calm and creative way.

And it’s just something that I read in the morning and a million dollar month is like crazy, right? Like we’re nowhere near that. And, but it’s one of those things that, is in my pocket that I can just remember and I can feel it. And so when things are coming up where I’m like, eh, maybe I shouldn’t reach out to this client or I don’t feel like doing this or whatever, I’m Oh, hold on a second.

Is that really fit to where I want to be? And so for me, getting back into that routine and keeping those things going have been super helpful.

Chris Badgett: You mentioned calm, that’s cool. Like for such a short statement to add calm in there makes a lot of sense. Cause you could make a million dollars a month creatively and be totally like at your wits end.

Brian Town: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So like it’s a little folded piece of paper. That’s just my third grade handwriting that says a million dollars a month, I’m so grateful that I’m making over a million a month at a calm, creative or calm, confident and creative way. And so I don’t know if I’ll ever hit a million dollars a month, but yeah.

It’s like that moon shot. Like it’s crazy. Like when Kennedy was like, we’re going to go to the moon. We don’t know how we’re going to do it. And we’re going to do it. It’s called, yeah, there it is. And it’s just funny how, like when I was not in the right mindset, not even did I not put it in my pocket.

I was like I’m not going to put that in my pocket. Cause it’s never going to work. And that’s so stupid, like a child.

Chris Badgett: What what causes people to feel stuck as a founder or entrepreneur? We’ve touched on some of it, but what else is in that bag of. Corrects.

Brian Town: Yeah. I think for me, it’s the pure chaos that you can control, right?

So you can control that chaos. When you’re in the mode that you don’t think you can, or it’s not going well, it can get out of control pretty quick. So I’ve been, I’ve done a really good job at really mastering my calendar. And blocking things to get things done and outsourcing tasks and not doing the things that, you shouldn’t be doing.

And it sounds easy and it sounds common because you hear this all the time, but it’s an art.

Chris Badgett: I feel like I’m still mastering my calendar and I’m pretty good at it, but it’s like constantly evolving. I don’t think it’ll ever stop.

Brian Town: Yeah. And I think doing the high level things that you should be doing as a CEO, and then we can’t always do that.

I’ve got these bills. I’ve got to talk to this client. I probably got to write something. Those are not really on my to do list that should be, but, having time that real good focus time to build your company and to vision think about, put those in your calendar.

Because if you don’t, especially if you have lots of employees and clients, like it’s just going to get filled with zooms.

Chris Badgett: Once you get some work done on yourself. Part of self is leadership. So what, 14 years into an agency and you, I believe have many, or if not all team members in the building with you whether they’re remote or in the office, leadership is required. What have been some of your leadership lessons and fumbles along the way?

Brian Town: How fumbles we, I don’t know how long this is, but I’d write about those a lot in the book too, because, I think my, so one of our core values is that, we’re all leaders and A great leader makes everyone around him or her better than they are. And that’s something that I’ve used when I was a high school teacher.

I use that same statement. I used it when I coached youth football it was just all these little pieces that I think my job is to make people leaders in this company. Then their job is then to make other people that they’re working with leaders as well. So I’ve surrounded myself with people that are better and smarter and brighter than I am.

One of my business coaches told me this, and it really stuck with me. But he was like, I was talking to him how I was worried and I was down. I was like, and he’s like, Hey man, I’m telling you, your team is going to feel it. And he’s like, if you’re down 10%, And I said I’m down a lot more than 10%.

He’s like, all right, listen, if you’re down 10%, your team’s going to feel it by 40%, and I was like I get on our team calls and I’m usually inspirational, but it’s not working. Nobody’s listening. He’s it doesn’t matter. He’s your job as a leader is to always be that one that is not necessarily pushing or, getting people to do things.

It’s to inspire them to be great. I’ve always done that in every classroom that I’ve been in, and every speech that I’ve given is my job is to inspire someone to do something and to be great. I think that’s what a leader is. And the issue with leadership today is like, when I tell this in all my classes and everything that I’ve done, it’s you’re not taught leadership, right?

And none of us off the top of our heads, especially young people can think of a good leader. I can think of a ton of really bad leaders. Bye. They can’t really think of well, who’s a good leader. And so it’s something that has to be taught a lot. And I think for me, my when I get in trouble with my leadership is, when I’m not trouble, that’s not what I meant, but the things that I’ve been really good at is taking ownership of going, Hey, I was not following the core value on this.

I was not doing this and that was really poor leadership. And so here’s what I’m going to do, to rectify that. And that alone fixes 99 percent of the problems. Like a politician, like you’d want them just to Yeah, I did that. That was terrible. And I shouldn’t have done that.

But of course they’re never going to do that, but for owning up, owning up to things when you’re not, you’re doing things that don’t meet the core values, that’s leadership.

Chris Badgett: It was about 10 years into my entrepreneur journey where I really learned the value of company values or core values, and it’s particularly powerful if you can get them to overlap with the same ones you would carry in your personal life.

And I was reading on your website before you came on. One of y’all’s is everyone we come in contact with should have a better day. And I was, I thought that’s a cool one, that’s really cool. And that the way I learned it, you can hire and fire against your core values. So it’s what you look for in the team you want to build and they’re in the character of the people.

And if it actually, nobody likes firing people. But when you see the values, and examples over time, it’s and you try to correct and change and learn and grow. And if it’s not happening, it’s, it makes that whole process easier just to have those.

Brian Town: That’s like I said, there’s lots of things that, that if we shut down tomorrow, I would be proud of.

Those core values would be one of them. And, really we help companies write their core values because I love to do it. The, the core values, the stupid core values are like customer service and integrity, like bullshit. Bullshit, that’s stupid. And so what I wanted to do is make sure that we had core values that were written in a way that.

I wanted people to be like that at work and not at work because those are the type of people that I wanted to work with. But I also felt like core values should be able to help people as well. And I think for me, that core value is my favorite. And I’ve taught that to my kids. My, it came from my dad and it was just, it’s for them too.

So look up, help somebody open a door. Be nice, whatever. If even smiling at people in the store today is like unheard of. And so my son does that all the time. And his girlfriend is so annoyed. He’s like, why are you like, why does everybody want to talk to you? And why is everybody friends with you at the store?

He’s no, I just look at people and they want to talk to me, and but for me, I was always telling people it’s not necessarily for them, but it’s. It’s for you to, it’s for you to feel like, okay, maybe you have made a difference today. Maybe you are a good person. And so I think those core values for us are the only way that we review and rate our employees.

And then we use them on all of our pitch decks as well.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Yeah. As I look at these and I’m transitioning to the marketing part of the conversation. About what your customers want to know before they engage with you or buy from you. And for me, like before talking to you on this podcast, I’m scanning the website and I saw the core values and I’m like check on all the ones that are there.

I’m like, this is going to be a good conversation. I’ve always felt like the about page is really important to a business. But yeah, tell us more just for whether it’s an agency or anybody in any business. Creating online, like what what do customers need to know and feel before they engage?

Brian Town: Yeah. I, our new site, which is this one that you’ve been looking at I’m really happy with the way that is. I think, for us, like what we always felt is that. I’ll go back to the Jiffy Bix thing is and I told this, there was a room of 15 people and. I was like, how do I separate myself from someone that’s going to come in here and be super technical and have 50 sites this big that they’ve built is I felt like they probably wanted to work with someone that they felt like they could work with.

For people that had good values because that’s a value based company, right? And for me, I think today it’s very, it’s very difficult today to separate yourself from your competitors because everybody has the same tools, right? We can all make our websites look great. We can all say that we have X amount of combined experience, which is the dumb thing, don’t put that on your website.

I think people want to know that they’re going to work with people that. That are like them, that have the same values that they have, but more importantly, that they have somewhere in their culture that they’re helping their employees with these values and we expect certain things.

So like a good example of customer service would be everyone you come in contact with should have a better day. So instead of putting customer service on there if that’s the thing, whether they go with us or not, I want them to have a better day because they met somebody.

Chris Badgett: And that’s visceral.

You can feel that. It’s not like 99. 9 percent customer satisfaction. It’s a different, has a totally different feel to it.

Brian Town: Yeah. And I just, my favorite, I’ve always wanted, cause I read a lot of detective novels and my dad and I used to watch a team together and I always wanted to be that guy that’s got a problem.

Oh man, you should just really talk to Brian or Michigan creative. And that’s what people do. They’re like, eh, I don’t know, you know who you should talk to. And that’s, I wanted to have that piece. I also felt that, one of our core values is creative and it’s in our name and obviously it’s what we do, but I just think there’s such, such a great value in being creative.

I think people like you and I, and probably the majority of your audience takes it for granted, cause they’re just, that’s all they’ve been all their entire lives. They were the ones that did videos for school projects and, just the weirdos and

Chris Badgett: I was like, yeah, I remember the first video I did for a school project with a VHS yeah, I did the same thing.

Brian Town: That’s why I’m sitting here right now is because we used to do videos with my mom’s little VHS camera tape to tape editing and my 11th grade English teacher, Mrs. Eichel said, Hey man you ought to go into video production. That’s what I did. I went to college for video production.

That was my first job. I taught video production after that. And now, we do a ton of videos. But anyway, I think, not only your core values, but really, they want to work with a company that they think they could work with. And then also getting that brand and message, we’ll. My favorite exercise to do with clients is what we call finally. I think everybody on this could do this with their brand is. I, we made the mistake of the same thing is that we wanted to be every, everything to everyone all the time. And I still think we’re not as niche down as I would like to be.

That’s why I love what you’re doing. The niche, is great. I think if I could start all over again, I’d really think about niching to one particular group. We’re doing that more in the manufacturing space and the food space, which I’m loving. But, that finally exercises what I love to do with customers, because, as we have a couple of seconds to grab somebody’s attention.

And so what, what would it take for someone to come to your website or see an ad for a couple of seconds and for them to go and they’re on their phone on the couch at eight o’clock at night and they’re scrolling through stuff and they see your ad and they’re like, ah, finally, I’ve been looking for a company just like this, or I’ve been looking for a product just like this or a service just like this.

And that’s what I think We all need to work at, and it’s just funny because even some of the biggest companies that we’ve worked for, like they’ll come to us and they’ll go our website and our messaging is fine. It just doesn’t really tell who we really are. And I hear that over and over again.

And I’m like, great, that’s what I like to do. I love to do that. And I think, some of these really large manufacturing companies that we work with, one of them was like that. They said that same thing. Like we are the leader in the world in what we make and everybody knows it.

And, but if you go to our website and our social media and our videos, like you wouldn’t know it and they’ve got competitors that are coming up and their websites look awesome, videos look awesome, but their products aren’t as good and they’re getting pissed, so I think for me what is that message that you’re trying to get to that right person at the right time? On the right device in the right moment is what marketing’s always been. It’s really never changed. We just somehow with that gets lost because we’re trying to do so many other things.

I think

Chris Badgett: speaking of a couple of seconds to make an impression how can you help like a business owner? Think about having a more visually appealing logo and website. I’ve, I, as an example, I’m not a great designer myself. I love naming products in business. I think I have a really unique there, but yeah.

And when you talk to a potential client or existing client, they don’t necessarily have the tools and the language to tell you exactly what they want or what they think they want or what’s going to make them happy. And more importantly, their customers are prospects happy. So how do you approach the strong visuals, particularly in the logo and the web design?

Brian Town: Yeah. Yeah. So I’ll tell you an easy path to that. And then I’ll tell you a story of how I think it matters, I, it’s asking a lot of questions. Like my job is, has never been to. Come up with a great idea for you necessarily. We get to those, but I think what we found is that by just asking a bunch of the right questions, somebody usually says like that perfect tagline that’s in the business, they say that perfect, like here’s what I was thinking it should be.

And from that, those brainstorming sessions and the forms that we have, people fill out that says, why should I be your customer? If you’re at a coffee shop and someone asks, what do you do? What do you tell them? Like all these little pieces and things that we do. It’s just awesome to see people say things cause they know they just, they’re busy with everything else and they don’t have, they don’t know what to do with it.

I think our job is to take those great ideas. And build it into something that can be visual and creative and work on a bigger, in a bigger scale. And I always, I always try to, and it doesn’t always work for every client but I don’t know, maybe it does. Like I always try to get them to think about a symbol.

Like we want your logo and brand to be a symbol for something. And it’s really easy to do and fun to do with nonprofits. And we, I think how I even noticed talk like this, like I’m not classically educated in brand and marketing. I’ve learned all this stuff through figuring it out as we go.

It really came to us when we were doing some work for a company or a nonprofit that used to be called Wayne County safe and Wayne County safe, this is like ultimately one of those stories where Hey man, if we don’t do any other work, we’ve made our, And this was years ago. And I knew somebody that worked there.

So it was a small nonprofit that was in charge of in the beginning. The story goes that there was a PA Kim that worked at an emergency room in Detroit and she got assault victim in there and she had to perform or use a rape kit on her. This sounds terrible, but she was like, I’m a PA and I don’t know how to do this.

She was like, how can that be? And so she started Wayne County safe, which was in charge of getting the backlogs done that happened in the city and trying to get all these kits processed. It turned into a assault center turned into a mental health facility for women. Now it’s the largest, one of the largest assault And women’s health centers in the country.

So they came to us and they’re like, Hey, we got to change our name. It can’t be called Wayne County safe anymore. Cause this kid

Chris Badgett: first told me, I thought it was, it sounded like a armored car service or something.

Brian Town: She’s it’s too big. They’re in Wayne County, but it’s, we’re starting to do more.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Brian Town: And we need to rebrand and we need a new website and we want you to do it. And she’s we’re gonna have to go through the process and, whatever. But we ended up getting the contract and our job was to come up with a new name and a new brand. And so I remember talking to my staff.

I said, look, we got to come up with something that’s a symbol for hope. When someone sees it, we want them to go, all right, maybe I’m going to be okay. So when I’m going through all the workshops with the staff, I kept talking about that and getting them to tell us the stories. And some of the stories are awful, right?

But there is light, tons of light that’s been there. We came up with a new name called Avalon and I don’t remember how we came up with it. So Avalon healing we’re like, okay let’s do our research and let’s pitch it. Our designer at the time came up with a logo and They, they ended up going with it.

And so we built the website and the brand and flash forward a couple of years. I’m helping them with a podcast and I’m just, I got my headphones on and I’m over at their office and there’s some guests and one of the guests who didn’t know who I was like telling his story and he was like and then someone said, Hey, check out Avalon.

And then he went to their website and then he went to their building and he saw their brand and logo and he was, or he saw the logo and he’s yeah, then I thought. Man, I just felt like I was going to be okay and I was like, what did he say? I didn’t say anything, but I was like, I told my staff, I was like, you guys, we did it, and so then that approach, we were making that up as we went.

Of course I was like, Oh yeah, we do this all the time. And my staff’s what are you, what do you mean? We haven’t done this before. I’m like, don’t worry. And now that story I tell a lot, and I still take that, that into even whatever manufacturing business or whatever, I think the idea here is that you want to be able to see their logo or wordmark or whatever, and be able to understand that it’s there.

It’s the best or it’s high quality or that’s the only company that you want to get to and we’ve been like that our entire lives it’s all about brand like the nike talk about the big brands. It’s the same thing.

Chris Badgett: Oh, that’s awesome You mentioned story. How do you help clients with storytelling?

Brian Town: Yeah, they’re historically, they’re typically not very good. And what they say to us all the time, we have

Chris Badgett: products and features and services.

Brian Town: Yeah. They always talk about what they do but not who they are. I have to go and speak again to the association of general contractors. I think it’s in Colorado this year.

My talk is about how to attract millennials to the trades, or I’m sorry, Gen Z to the trades. Millennials are old. And the, when I did it in Atlanta, I was like, there’s 80 people in the room. I was like, how many people here have a picture of a building or some construction tools on your homepage?

Everybody’s hand raising, great. That’s what you do. And that’s great. But they know that’s what you do. Like people know that’s what you do. And but who are you? As a company. And why should I come work for you? Getting them to think about telling that story of who they are as a company and why they do what they do, it really helps because I’m like, what happens is people first come to you because of that, and then they’re going to go start to research and see if you have the right products and services, but they’re always going to come back to that.

That’s one of the things they say to us, which I love is they’re like that’s why we hired you. We’re not creative. Yeah. I’m like, I know,

Chris Badgett: I don’t know your story, you got to talk to me, man.

Brian Town: And so a couple of different ways that we do it, I think, one of the ways that are really helpful is, if we can record videos of them telling that story, that’s great.

But the process that we have works really well. Where, we have them just answer all these random weird questions and give it to as many people as you can. And then we’ll take all that and we’ll make a summary out of it. Then I’ll go back in and start asking questions. And that three step process seems to work pretty well because.

People know it, it’s just, they have to be asked. It’s like a, it’s like a high school classroom. Like you can’t, the thing I always used to tell new teachers, if I was training, I’m like, don’t ever say, does anybody have any questions? Like at the end of talks to that’s the dumbest thing to ever leave for question.

No one has questions. No one wants to ask questions. You have to ask the right questions to get them to answer it the right way.

Chris Badgett: Very cool. Yeah. I think, Nike, part of the reasons that strong is Michael Jordan’s story, right? Like the story of his life and many brand champions or influencers or whatever, it’s about the story.

Brian Town: Yeah. Apple’s the same way. Yeah.

I’m going to put a hundred songs in your pocket, and it’s the same thing. That story and really their product, their product’s cool and whatever, but it’s just. I think how they were able to do it. It’s the idea of having an Apple, having that was a status symbol.

It’s not as much anymore, but that’s how they, you were cool when you had a Mac desktop, you were that cool weird guy.

Chris Badgett: Especially if it was the green one or the orange one or whatever. I have to ask you as an agency person, who’s done a lot. How do you get clients?

It’s a, the biggest thing I hear from people who are particularly if they’re earlier on in their journey. Yeah,

Referrals are great, but what else can you do?

Brian Town: Yeah. And that’s what I spent the most of my time doing as the CEO and in a chapter in the book, I talk about sales and that’s all that matters.

And sales to me is something that I think, we’ve tried to outsource sales. We’ve tried to hire salespeople. Not much success. We’ve got one right now that she’s pretty good. So Liz, if you’re listening to this, I’m not talking about you. But is, I think there’s multiple approaches to how you get good clients.

The easy things that you have to do and as marketing companies, for whatever reason, we don’t seem to do a great job at this. But is, you have to make sure that your search engine optimization or SEO is good. Yeah. We do AdWords for ourselves. We always wanted to make sure that our social media was the best.

Cause I didn’t want somebody to go there and go, I’m not going to hire you to do that. For us, that was all those pieces, but then as a CEO and as the owner, a couple hours a day, an hour a day, every day, you need to be in charge of doing some sort of sales activity and it’s a learned, Thing.

I took some bunch of courses for years in Sandler and read tons of sales books because I had no idea how to do sales and sales is probably one of the hardest jobs that you’ll ever do because we’ve, we’ve tried sales people and that are new and hear me thinking, Oh shoot, we’ll just give a young person some little bit of salary and a great percentage.

And they’ll kill it. I could make 200, 000, they only got to sell four websites or whatever, whatever it is. Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Brian Town: But what they don’t understand is that they’re going to get a ton of nose and their percentages are terrible for closing, no matter how good you are. And so I think, always having those sales activities in the pipeline and always following up.

And so my job every day. I have a, I think an hour and then a half hour blocked off to do sales activities. And sometimes it’s just going into the CRM and following up with proposals that I’ve written, have written. Sometimes it’s reaching out to customers. Sometimes it’s prospecting for other ones and sending random emails, but a couple of big, easy wins that I think that we don’t think about doing is we always think about getting new customers.

I’m guilty of that too. When I’ve got, I don’t know, I think we host 200 some WordPress websites right now, and we’re starting to do better at this, but I should be going back over every single one of those and start reaching out to go, Hey man, here’s what I’m thinking. Let’s rebuild this. You’re not doing SEO with us.

What do you think about that? Or, Hey, did you know we do AdWords and, I’ve got a pipeline of customers that have been with me for 10 years that know and trust me. And I’m looking for someone that has never even heard of me. And so I would work your list of your current customers and then also.

We know we say referrals and referrals that come in are great. And it was funny because one of my sales trainer one, one time was like, Hey man, how many referrals did you get this year? And I’m like, I don’t know, 30. I have no idea. 30, let’s say 30. He’s cool. He’s like, how many of those did you ask for?

That’s why I didn’t ask for any of them. What do you mean? I said, no, man, that’s not how referrals work. They just come in. He’s no, dude. He’s call up your friends and call up your best customers and call up your colleagues and go, Hey, how’s it going? It’s okay, cool. Let me know if there’s anybody else I should be talking to that might be a great fit and they’re usually pumped.

If you’ve done a good job for them, they want. To help someone else. And they’re like, Oh man, you should call Rick. Rick’s got this manufacturing company. He’s getting fed up with, whatever. I’m going to, I’m going to email you too. And he’s going to be, and he usually is Hey man, you guys got to call Brian.

He’ll take care of you. And that’s almost like. A done deal, but you got to ask. And I love giving her, that’s like my favorite thing to do. Like I love giving referrals. If someone treated me, really well, like my insurance guy, you’re happy to do it. I’m man. I’m like, I do it because I know that’s going to make me look good.

Yeah. Cause they’ll call him and go, man, was took care of us in a half hour. I’m like, I know. But so I think working your current customer. The list doing sales activities every day. I’m being okay with getting nose as soon as you possibly can. Yeah. I want nose. I’d rather I want nose. Yeah. Like I just want them to go, look, man, I don’t like you.

Your goatee is weird. I don’t want to go with you. I’m like, great. Don’t pretend. And then not. Email me back. And so I think that’s important. And then get some training, get classically trained in sales. It is one of the hardest things you’ll ever do.

Chris Badgett: What what’s in your agency stack?

Cause I know a lot of folks. Yeah. Particularly over here in WordPress, like they just build websites, but it sounds like you do paid ads and other things. Like what is on the menu at Michigan creative?

Brian Town: Yeah. Sometimes I’m like, man, I wish we just did WordPress websites. That would, cause when we started and I didn’t know, like I quit teaching.

On a Friday and started this company on a Monday. I had no ide, I had no idea what marketing was. And I didn’t know how to build websites. I ran into a former student a couple of months later and he, and I’m like. Hey man, what are you doing? He’s Oh, I just graduated, but I’m not really working. And I’m like, do you know how to build websites?

He’s yeah, I think so. And he was my 10 year, 10 year employee, WordPress developer. But so yeah, so we, we started and just being like, we’ll do everything. But for us right now, what we’re really trying to focus on is WordPress websites. Video production is a big part of our business.

I’ve got two full time producers and a director.

Chris Badgett: And what’s that? Is that like the sort of like the homepage video or social media video or what is What, how are you using video for your clients?

Brian Town: Yeah. What we really like to do. So yes, to all that. And what we really like to do is create brand anthem videos.

So it’s like that 92nd Superbowl, like commercial voiceover, the thing that you’d watch. And get inspired to, to work with that company. So we do a lot of brand anthem videos and I love doing those. So storytelling so we do some commercial work and some social media videos as well, but a lot of our work is, and we do a lot of interview videos too, but a lot of our work is in brand anthem and I love video because it’s that’s what I started in.

But I also really like it because these guys that I got now Matt, Zachary and Anne Marie, they run it like a, it’s entire separate company.

Chris Badgett: It’s like a division. Yeah, I

Brian Town: don’t even have to be a lot of these shoots and even recently they’re like, Hey, is there any way we could just start writing the scripts?

I’m like, wait, what do you mean? You don’t like my script writing? I got a little bit. They’re like, no, it’s just I think it’d be, I’m like, fine. But So I love that department. They’ve done just such a great job and the work they’re putting out is really cool. And I get to go sometimes and I love to ask questions of people like sit across from them on the camera and just get them to tell their story.

Like I love doing that. But then we do a ton of brand and graphic design and then also, digital digital ads, mostly social ads. We do some pay per click and then SEO.

Chris Badgett: A question about the brand anthem. I’m curious here. Is it, is the, is your agency doing the narration or you’re bringing in like the founder or somebody, or is it like hands off for the company or are they like the talent or I’m sure they have input and stuff, but how does that come together?

Brian Town: Yeah. A real brand anthem, what we do is we end up. Interviewing them and talking to them and then we’ll write the script. And then once they approve the script, then we’ll assign shots to the script, the shot list. And sometimes it’s a day, a full day shoot. Sometimes it’s a couple of days.

So we’ll go in there and let’s just say it’s a manufacturing plant. We’ll go in there and get all the shots of, employees working on the machines the CEO, people doing and interacting and just trying to make it look, good. Cool is not a good enough word, but try to make it, we want somebody to watch it and we want it to do a couple of things.

We want it to go, Oh man, like this is the company we’re looking for. Or it also works really well for employment videos too, where they’re looking to get people interested in coming to work there. And then typically what we’ll do is we’ll hire a professional voiceover person. Sometimes we’ll let them pick, do you want male, female, old, young and then we’ll just put that voiceover in.

With music and with the shots that we’ve taken. Once we have that day shoot, like they’re pretty much out. Now we have done videos where we’ll interview the CEO and that’s a little bit of a different where we still are using B roll interview, the CEO, the marketing director, whoever, CEO.

And we have done those. My favorite ones to do are just the brain anthem with voiceover music. I think every company should have a brain anthem.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, that’s awesome. Yeah. So for you out there watching, if you have an agency, maybe consider adding that to your stack.

Brian Town: And they’re great.

Cause they turn out really cool every time. Like I haven’t made a brain Anthem. We haven’t made a brain Anthem that the customer wasn’t like, Oh my God, this is awful. Like they always turn out really good.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. This has been awesome. Brian, if I want to take it back to the lonely CEO, if somebody out there, whether you’re running an agency or whatever your company is, or your education entrepreneur, if somebody’s feeling stuck alone, a little lost and they have all this chaos going on around them, number one, they should get their book, your book.

It

Brian Town: still has the not for sale copy, but it’s still there. Almost there. It’s like a real book.

Chris Badgett: What’s the first action they should take. It, they get your book, but what’s the first like tactical thing, even if they just turn off this podcast and they’re in that headspace, what’s a possible next step for them?

Brian Town: Yeah, I, man, I love kind of thinking out that five years, that 10 years, like, where do you want to, like, where do you see that company? Cause that’s fun. Throw it out there and just be like, this is where I want to take us and this is why, and then come back to that day and, reflect on how far you’ve already gone.

And I think I want them to understand I really want you to understand because no one, like I can. Tell you a quick story about how this will maybe resonate with your audiences. I was doing, I do a little bit of coaching and I was coaching this entrepreneur Stephanie and she was her husband ran a gym and in front of the gym was her business, which was a smoothie shop, coffee shop.

Whatever. And she was like, I was sitting in there with her and I was just helping her. And she was really getting, it was really tough. She just felt she’s I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t think anything that we’re doing is good. And I’m like, hang on, man just look around you.

This is beautiful. Like you’ve got your own shop, man. You got. There’s been like 10 people that have walked through here while we’re talking. And I said, you’re doing it. You’re making it happen. You’re the right person to do this. It’s just that self confidence I think for her, knowing that there’s a way to do it, she felt like she was trying to do everything and all at once and it wasn’t working.

And so I think. And this is from the e myth, but this, this is where I got it from, but Michael Gerber said it, when you’re in that small business and it’s just you or you and one other, you’re having to wear multiple hats but plan that out. So from nine to 10, you’re the CEO, from 1030 to 12 or whatever, you’re the marketing director and start to put in those things in place in more of a scheduled structure way.

So you don’t feel like you’re having to do everything all at the same time. And I think lastly, just. Realize that you are the one to do it. And everyone else is feeling the exact same way that you are right this moment, like as successful as I sound, I don’t have any of this figured out. Like I’m worried about the same stuff that you’re worried about.

Which when people used to tell me that, I’m like, Whoa, that doesn’t sound good.

Why am I still doing this? Like when those commercials come on from a bank and they’re like, yeah, start your dream and start our own business. My wife and I are like, yeah, don’t do that. Yeah. Are you sure? But yeah, just realize that you’re the one to do it. What’s the worst case scenario. I told that to someone, one of my clients, coaching clients.

I said, what’s the worst case scenario. Worst case scenario is you’ll, she was doing a, and it’s very successful. Just in the last year, a golf simulator, brand new business. She had no idea about how to do it. And I go, what’s the worst thing that’ll happen? The worst thing that’ll happen is it won’t work and you’ll shut it down.

And you got a couch, you had a master’s degree. You’ll either do a different business or you’ll go work for someone that’s it. That’s the worst case scenario. It’s we’re all pretty smart or we could all probably get jobs. It wouldn’t, we would hate it, but that’s the worst case scenario.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. The worst case is often not as bad as it feels if you like really think about it.

Brian Town: Yeah, but as a failure for us, if we had to shut down, it’s, we didn’t make it. 99 point whatever percent of the people never even started.

So I don’t know how that’s a failure. I’ll need to watch this and remind myself of this.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Yeah. That’s awesome. That’s Brian town. He’s from Michigan creative.

You can find that at Michigan creative. com. Go check out the book, the lonely CEO. It’s got its own website, the lonely ceo. com. Brian, thanks for coming on the show. Is there anywhere else people can connect with you or any final words for the listener?

Brian Town: No, man, bryantown. io is a great place. It’s got all our links on there.

And yeah, no, I don’t think final words, I think that simple realization that you’re the only person to do it and you’re the right person to do it, I think is something that I wish I would have heard years ago. I think sometimes that’s enough.

Chris Badgett: Thanks, Brian.

Brian Town: All right, man.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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The post Overcome Entrepreneur Loneliness and Master Marketing with Brian Town appeared first on LMScast.

In this LMScast episode, Eric Davis gives a concise rundown of sales funnels and explains how WordPress and LifterLMS customers can maximize their earnings by using the Upsell Plugin.

Eric Davis is the founder of Upsell Plugin, a tool designed to help businesses maximize sales by optimizing their checkout processes. He explains that a sales funnel is a set of procedures intended to lead potential buyers through a buying process by employing strategies like order bumps, upsells, and down sells.

The Upsell Plugin improves this process by allowing firms to build various sales routes while strategically increasing average order value. Although cross-selling is not the plugin’s main purpose, Eric recognizes it as related product offers even if the plugin’s main focus is upselling.

Here’s Where To Go Next…

Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

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Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program, I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co founder of Lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Eric Davis. You can find them over at upsell plugin. That’s upsellplugin. com. You can also find upsell plugin on the Lifter LMS add ons page. Today we’re going to talk about upselling sales funnels, how to do it in WordPress and dive into the magic that is upsell plugin.

But first welcome to the show, Eric. Awesome. Thanks for having me, Chris. Yeah, it’s great to be here and chat with another person. Who’s into marketing and helping people make more money and stuff. Absolutely. Let’s lay the ground floor for people who may be unfamiliar with sales funnels, upsells, downsells, give us a high level education of, key concepts of a sales funnel.

Eric Davis: Absolutely. Maybe I overthink it, but it’s pretty straightforward nowadays. Essentially you have somebody that’s coming to your website. You’ve gained their trust already for getting them to your site and they’re ready to purchase something from you. Specifically, let’s say a course via LifterLMS.

So now that you have them strategically and they’re engaged in your website. You’re going to want to sell them more. And there’s no better way to sell more to somebody while they’re actively checking out on your website. So What the upsell plugin allows you to do is while they’re checking out. You can take them to a separate page after they purchased that initial product and offer them an additional, course product. Whatever it is that might, help that person achieve whatever results they’re trying to accomplish.

When it comes to sales funnels, again it’s a, it’s a term that’s became more hot over the past five or so years. There’s the order bumps, the upsells, the downsells, that stuff. So somebody is going to land on your checkout page. You have some order bumps and the order bumps.

What I like to describe order bumps as is if you’re going to your grocery store and you’re checking out, there’s the gum, the men’s, that kind of stuff. So it’s like an impulse buy. You want to grab that piece of gum, add it to your cart. You’re increasing that average order value, that order value of that customer.

After they check out, you essentially send them to another page where we call it an upsell offering them another, lifter LMS course. Do you want to add this to your order? Yes or no. If they say yes, you just upsell them on a new offer. And if they say no, you essentially can take them to a downsell.

Your sales funnels with the upsell plugin can have as many. Pieces as it wants, there’s no limitations, but that’s a high level approach of a sales funnel. Hopefully it made sense.

Chris Badgett: That makes sense. One where I get confused and maybe you can shed some light is I get upsell, I get downsell, but what is a cross sell?

Eric Davis: A cross sell is more of so it all goes hand to hand, at least in my mind, the way I think about it. But a cross sell is essentially, offering them a product that’s similar already to what they’re checking out for. But when it comes to upsell plugin, we don’t really offer cross sells typically with that.

It’s more of, taking them through a strategic checkout path. A cross sell from my experience at least is more of, something that’s popping up during that process of the checkout and selling them on another product or service.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Let’s look at some like Lifter LMS examples.

And by the way, we’re going to be doing, this is a podcast episode. So you’re watching us talk, or you’re most likely listening in your earbuds. But we are going to actually do a video demo that you’ll find on the Lifter LMS YouTube channel. It’s going to be a separate video. So we’re going to be talking about ideas and concepts here. But if you’d like to see this in action Eric’s going to do a demo and that’ll be on our YouTube channel as a standalone video.

Look out for that, but just to go over some other ideas, just to get the gears turning on how you could use upsell plugin with Lifter LMS. One example is you may like it. Let’s start at the beginning. Let’s say the first upsell is a course. Maybe you have an ebook that you’re selling, but then you want to be like.

In the checkout, like upsell from that, getting the ebook to also get a course or, and just, I’m just going to keep going up the chain. If you’re selling a course maybe you have a membership that includes private coaching or group coaching. So great. You’ve got the a hundred dollar course. Do you want the coaching for a hundred dollars a month or whatever it is?

And then you can upsell that way. Downselling is also fun. Let’s say let’s say you have an expensive membership to your academy of courses that has, five, 10, 20, a hundred courses in it. And somebody. It’s too much, It’s not right. It’s overwhelming for them. They could downsell into just a single like introductory course.

That’s much cheaper. So just throwing out a couple of ways to think about this.

Eric Davis: Absolutely. And if I can add on to that a little bit, cause again, as you mentioned it’ll make more sense when they see it in action. But one of the reasons I developed the upsell plugin as well. I’m not trying to bash WooCommerce for example, or anything, WooCommerce is an amazing tool. I use it for some of my own personal projects, But when it comes to, let’s use Lifter LMS again, as an example, and it comes to selling courses and membership, I’m a big believer in helping your customer obtain whatever results they’re looking for.

So when it comes like WooCommerce, for example, and letting them pick and choose what courses they want to add to their cart, to me, you’re doing a disservice to your customer. Because by overwhelming them and bombarding them with so many courses, they’re probably going to get too sidetracked and too much, information coming in overload that they’re not going to be able to reach whatever they’re trying to achieve.

So that’s why with the upsell plugin, it’s not like a basket. It’s not, let me, here’s my cart. Let me choose these six.

It might sound great. It might sound like to you as the core seller, the lifted Lifter LMS website owner. Hey, I just sold six courses. It might sound great, but you’re probably going to lose in the long run because by having them add those six courses to your card and checking out, they’re probably never going to really reach what they’re trying to achieve.

So with the upsell plugin, you’re taking them through a strategic path. I want to, I want to learn how to fix an engine on a car. Okay. I’m going to add that course to my checkout. Okay. I just checked out. I now have the course and I’m ready to start learning how to fix engines.

What goes along with that? Not necessarily how to fat fix basketball hoops, but it would probably make more sense on. How to fix, how to change a tire on a car. Okay. That makes sense. Let me, I want to add that to my order. So ultimately you’re helping them probably figure out how to, become a better mechanic or something. Or how to fix cars or how to, more everything’s related to that car.

And then they’re going to become, once you help them achieve that result on becoming a better mechanic and learning how to fix cars. They’re probably going to now become a lifetime customer of yours. So instead of letting them choose how all these different courses on things to do, and maybe that was a poor example, but ultimately what I’m trying to say is if you can take them through a strategic sales funnel on the course that you know, make most sense for them to achieve whatever they’re trying to achieve.

You’re probably going to end up, having a customer for lifetime. And that lifetime value is going to be more than if they just came to your site one time, purchased six courses, added them all to your cart, the cart, and then they never really get any with those. Again, hopefully that made sense, but that’s the process of, the upselling and downselling, you can ultimately do whatever you want with the upsell plugin.

But what I strongly suggest is not just going to upsell them on something just to make more money. You’re going to upsell them and offer them a course that makes sense with what they just purchased from you to help them achieve the results they want to achieve. And now they’re going to be like, I’m, they’re going to love you for helping them achieve what they’re trying to accomplish.

And they’re going to be. A lifetime customer.

Chris Badgett: I love that. Just to expand on what you’re saying there. I think Russell Brunson over at ClickFunnels did a really good job with instilling this idea to the internet marketing world that you don’t need a website, you need a sales funnel.

So it’s. If you’re new to these concepts like what Eric is talking about, having a guided experience. Imagine if you could not put a menu on the top of your website or even footer links and the experience that you’re crafting is they go from one page to the next page and they have decisions they can make Oh, I don’t want this right now, then we’re in a downsell.

Oh, I do want this right now. We’re in an upsell. It’s an extreme example to not have a menu on your website. And literally. The entire thing is landing pages that kind of have a decision tree in them, but that’s the way to think about it and understand it. For example, if you do a ad, you want to send people to a landing page with a specific offer or call to action, not necessarily give people a, the menu and all these places they can go.

You’re trying to do a specific sales funnel that starts from an ad or another call to action from, let’s say a YouTube video or any, anything. Okay. So thinking about that flow and guiding the user through your offer and giving them decisions is a really smart way to think about that.

Let’s talk technically a little bit like, so in the example we’re talking about, typically upselling happens from like a landing page. First there’s an offer on a landing page. There’s typically a call to action button. It’s somewhat good practice to have one call to action so that users don’t get or visitors don’t get decision fatigue.

But where talk about the technicality of upsell plugin in terms of. Handling the checkout, landing pages, WordPress. What are the pieces that come together to make it possible? So

Eric Davis: the beauty in my mind, at least the beauty of upsell plugin is we didn’t want to take over any of the page builders or the websites or the course, lifter LMS.

Everybody has a specialty and they do an amazing job. I would be lying if I said, Hey, I’m going to create a page builder. That’s better than Elementor or better than Divi. I’d be lying about that. But So ultimately, the way that click with the way that upsell plugin works is we integrate directly with everything.

So it’s really just links and short codes. So you can just install upsell plug on your site and use everything you pretty much already have set up. All you have to do is take a short code for the checkout form, plug that into your checkout page that you’ve already designed. And now the checkout form would be populated.

And then when somebody purchases course a, let’s say we created a product inside of upsell plugin called course a, We say, where should they be redirected to? After they purchased this, we can redirect them to a sales page that we created. That is now doing the one click upsell functionality of subplugin with course B.

So when it comes to the integration process with WordPress and everything, Lifter LMS we’re not redesigning anything, essentially. We’re working with whatever you already have in place and allowing you to use, all the amazing tools and features that those other tools already have.

Chris Badgett: And we’ll go into this in in a video, but lift their LMS just technically, if you’re thinking about how do I connect all this together as an example, courses and memberships have an option to have a. A different sales page for your course than the default lifter page. So you have two options.

You could have a custom page or you can embed that checkout with shortcode right where Eric is talking about. And of course you could link, you could have a button somewhere on your site that, or a menu link that goes into the flow that you want people to go into for upselling.

Eric Davis: And then the way that the upsell plugin, and like you’re saying exactly correct, we can even take it one step further because the way that.

Our integration works and it’ll make more sense. Once we do the screen sharing, people see this, but you create a product inside the upsell plugin. That’s again, let’s just call it course a and inside of when you’re creating that plugin, when you’re creating that product, there’s an integration tabs with Lifter LMS that you just simply enable it.

And you say, when somebody purchases this and product enroll them into course a and Lifter LMS. So you can create a sales page however you want and then that checkout call to action Button when they click on it would take them to the checkout form And that checkout form when they go through that process will automatically add them Into a course a on lifter lms because you have the product attached to the course inside of lifter lms

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome.

Let’s talk a little bit about integrations so You have a lot of integrations. Of course you integrate with Lifter LMS, but you also have, for example, MailChimp and active campaign. So how did the email marketing tools like that integrate with upsell plugin? Awesome.

Eric Davis: Yep. So again pretty basic, at least to me, maybe I look at it too much.

But you essentially, add the API keys from MailChimp or ActiveCampaign, for example. And then what we allow you to do is just like we, just like I explained with Lifter LMS, if they purchase a specific product, you can tag them and, or add them to a specific list inside of your email marketing service.

Awesome. So again, let’s work with course a, if a person, if a customer purchases, of course, a, you can add them to course a list inside of MailChimp and tag them course a as well. So now when they make that purchase, they automatically get added to MailChimp. And then again, that’s huge because if we go back, I’m talking about, this customer becoming a lifetime customer of yours, you now know inside of your email marketing system what they purchased.

So you can follow up with them appropriately if they were on your marketing campaign. And now they purchased for say, you can set up an automation now inside of active campaign, MailChimp, all the other ones, we want to remove them from our marketing campaign. We want to add them to our, automation sequence for when somebody purchases a course a, so we can follow up with them appropriately.

We allow you to add your customer to a specific list or tag. With, most of the main email marketing solutions. So you can follow up with them using their powerful automation tools. And we also have a Zapier app as well. So if the email service you’re not using, isn’t we don’t have a direct integration with, we have a Zapier app that will allow you to connect with, pretty much any of the main guys.

Chris Badgett: Nice. And this is a good point to clarify on as upsell plugin creates its own checkout and has its own integration with Stripe and PayPal,

Eric Davis: correct?

Chris Badgett: You’re going to do this. You need to connect to your Stripe and PayPal, even though Lifter has those things. If you’re going to go down this route, it’s totally fine to use the upsell plugins, PayPal and Stripe integration, which is essentially the same thing as the Lifter one, and I’m really glad you created this because Lifter LMS does not have.

These kind of sales funnel like tools. So I’m really happy that you’ve done this. I also noticed affiliate WP on your integrations. That’s popular with lifter LMS users. What tell us more about how that works?

Eric Davis: Yep. So just as most website owners know, having an affiliate program can be extremely powerful.

It just helps you have users drive essentially traffic and sales to your site. So we have an integration, we have a direct integration with two. Affiliate programs. One is or affiliate tools. I should say is affiliate WP, which is a wordpress plug in. And then another one called I dev affiliate.

I think I dev affiliate has a direct integration with lifter LMS as well. But I did affiliate is not a wordpress plug in. It’s standalone solution. But it’s really powerful. And I like it a lot. I personally use I personally use IDevAffiliate, but AffiliateWP is another really good one.

And it’s pretty basic how it works. Again, it’s, just if the customer, you create your affiliate program using AffiliateWP, your customers, clients, whoever you’re influencers, whoever you’re trying to attract becomes an affiliate of yours. They now have their referral links, the referral codes, when they send the traffic to the website, if that customer checks out and purchases a product via upsell plugin, that affiliate will generate the commission based on the commission settings that you have set up inside of affiliate WP.

So again, going back to the page builders and things like that on how we work, we’re not trying to, sometimes people are like, you don’t have an affiliate program. And I, my answer is we don’t have affiliate program because we’re focusing on creating a checkout solution that’s going to convert for you.

That’s going to optimize for you. We can spend our time and try to figure out how to convert an affiliate or create an affiliate program, but affiliate WP does an amazing job. That’s why we would rather integrate with tools like affiliate WP, Lifter, ML, LMS, that does an amazing job. Instead of saying, Hey, I want to create, I own LMS.

I don’t. I would rather say use lifter LMS and use upsell plugin. So it’s the same process with the affiliate program. You use affiliate WP use the idea of affiliate because their programs are amazing. And then use upsell plugin as the checkout process.

Chris Badgett: Nice. I also see you have WP fusion, which is very popular in the lifter community.

Could you step through how that works with upsell plugin?

Eric Davis: Absolutely. So they have an integration on their end and then we actually have a direct integration on ours as well, but it works pretty much the same way as like the email marketing where, you know, that’s, I know WP fusion can be used as a membership tool and things like that, but it all ties back to your email marketing service system.

So it’s essentially the process works the same way where. You can add when it’s all on a per product basis. So if you need to do something with, WP fusion where, when somebody purchases Corsair, you want to enroll them into, tag them on Corsair inside of your affiliate program, or I’m sorry, inside of your email marketing system through WP fusion, you can do so again, it’s, I keep using the word basic. Maybe it’s not basic. Cause I’m just looking at it all the time. But that’s essentially how it works. Everything is like on a per product basis. So you can be extreme, so you can be strategic about your followups and everything like that.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And I just want to throw a pro tip out there. So if you’re thinking about using the upsell plugin, and let’s say you already have, you’re using Lifter LMS as e commerce or the Lifter LMS WooCommerce integration. And you’ve got like a catalog of courses, but you’re trying to get more sales.

You’re trying to experiment with, let’s say, paid ads like Facebook ads or Google ads. And for that, it’s particularly helpful to use more of a sales funnel flow. You’re getting the traffic, you’re paying for traffic. You want a specific landing page. You want to upsell down and downsell that traffic and give them that more sales funnel, like experience that you can control, but also add more clarity, value, and ease to the visitor.

That’s a great way to get started with the upsell plugin. So you don’t necessarily have to like re engineer if you’re already moving, you don’t have to re engineer how your site currently works, but you can actually just add more value by. Doing some ads and doing some upsells. And it doesn’t even have to be ads.

You could be experimenting with, let’s say a strategic partnership with some, somebody else’s podcast or YouTube channel. And you want a specific flow for people coming from the call to action from there, that’s a great way to get started with the upsell plugin. Tell us the story, Eric. How did this all start for you?

Why why create this? Or how did I know people get fastened? There’s a fascination here because like you said, you’re super focused on just the upsell. Optimized checkout flow. How did that start in your story?

Eric Davis: So my story is, as you already mentioned click funnels, for example. So I’ve been developing websites for the past, probably about 10 years now.

And. About five years ago or so when ClickFunnels was really, making their main push, maybe it’s been more than five years now, my clients would come to me and say, Hey, I want to build a sales funnel. I said, awesome. That sounds great. Let’s create a sales funnel. Just like you, Chris, I’m assuming, I love WordPress and I like to stay inside the WordPress ecosystem just cause it’s open source.

If you want to. Do something as long as you, or, you can have a team around you that knows how to accomplish it and create it. You can create it with inside of WordPress. So when my customer, when my clients would come to me and say, Hey, can you help me create a sales funnel at that time?

I would say we can, but we either have to sign up for click funnels or there’s the solutions, with WooCommerce and if you’re selling courses and membership, it’s just. In my opinion, too much. It’s just, we have to buy another six or seven extensions, subscription extensions, things like that. In the beginning, I was helping them with those different, channels, but then, being the WordPress level or lover, I was like, there, I feel like there’s just this missing piece in the WordPress ecosystem for creating and being able to easily, I should say, create a sales funnel.

So that’s why for the past five years, I’ve been spending, my time, my energy, my money on developing the upsell plugin, continuing to maintain it because everything essentially is built into the upsell plugin. So again, you don’t need WooCommerce. It integrates directly with Stripe or PayPal and everything, subscriptions, you don’t have to get another extension through us.

It’s, it’s all right there. It may, to be honest, maybe it’s a poor business decision, having, I should be upselling people and buying more and more modules and things like that. But currently the way that, and for the past five years, the way we’ve been selling the upsell plugin is, everything is built into it.

Yeah. Again, I just thought that there was, there needed, I just thought there was a missing piece inside of the WordPress ecosystem for somebody that wanted to quickly and easily create a sales funnel. So that’s why, ultimately I’ve been. Developing and maintaining the upsell plugin.

Chris Badgett: And I just want to mention too I just went over to the click funnels pricing page and you’re looking at spending about 3, 000 a year with click funnels and upsell plugin, just like in WordPress, like they’re way, way more economical solutions for literally more power and customization and stuff like that.

Just throwing that out there. This has been awesome, Eric. I appreciate our chat. We’re actually going to switch to go create a video together about how specifically with screen sharing to use the upsell plugin with Lifter LMS. So go look for that on the Lifter LMS YouTube channel. Also be sure to check out the upsell plugin.

That’s upsellplugin. com. You can also find it on the Lifter LMS website. In our third party add ons where we recommend tools to help add even more value to your learning management system. But Eric, thanks for coming on the show. Yeah, we’re here to help you make more money like upselling and downselling and all this is can be very powerful and better for your users to have a clear path and give them decisions and stuff like that.

So thank you for making upsell plugin and thanks for coming on the show. Awesome.

Eric Davis: Thanks for having me, Chris.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide

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The post How to Upsell Courses and Memberships with the Upsell Plugin appeared first on LMScast.

In this LMScast episode, Chris Badgett welcomes Mark Szymanski, co-founder of MJSTV, to discuss various aspects of content creation, agency work, and the WordPress community.

Mark Szymanski is a co-founder of MJSTV and a dedicated WordPress Consultant and Digital Educator. With extensive experience in creating tutorial videos. He specializes in the WordPress environment, helping individuals and businesses effectively harness the platform’s potential.

Mark has a strong interest in exploring new markets and emphasizes the value of sharing personal stories through engaging content. Through his business, he aims to help people navigate the complexities of digital marketing and communicate successfully in the ever-evolving world of the internet.

Additionally, Mark discusses how page builders, such as Elementor, Beaver Builder, and others, have made it easier for non-developers to quickly create websites. However, he also highlights how these tools can become somewhat ‘tribal,’ with strong loyalties forming among users of different platforms.

Here’s Where To Go Next…

Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide

Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s Guide

Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program, I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co founder of Lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Mark Szymanski. You can find him at MJSTV. com. Mark and I just met in person at WordCamp U. S. I came across Mark in many places just on social media and videos and through Matt Medeiros and stuff. We’re going to talk about content, we’re going to talk about agency, we’re going to talk about WordPress, we’re going to talk about page builders.

But first, welcome to the show, Mark.

Mark Szymanski: Chris, it is an absolute pleasure. It was a pleasure to meet you in person. Been following your stuff for a while too, man. Love what you’re doing. I cannot thank you enough for having me on the show here.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, you bet. It’s fun to chat. It’s this, a thing happens here in in WordPress land and digital entrepreneurship land. Specifically around WordPress is you come across like other content creators and we’re a niche within content.

There’s a lot of channels and podcasts and things that get it. A lot more views that are more mainstream. But this kind of niche world we live in of building sites for clients. Building solutions, helping people build websites, particularly with WordPress. It’s a niche. So whenever I see another content creator come on the scene and you’ve been on the scene for a while, I’m like, I gotta get that guy on the podcast.

So I’m glad you’re here. Hell yeah. When did you fall in love with creating content?

Mark Szymanski: Oh, man. I would say I’ve been creating YouTube videos for a while. I’ve had a little bit of a, I would say like a past life. Like when we, just as an example, when we bought our house here, I was like renovating some of it and I was just like documenting it.

I think one of the biggest things was I found. Most people have heard like Gary Vaynerchuk when he was like really big. He’s still obviously a popular guy, but it was just about documenting, putting things on social media. Just building your personal brand. I can’t, I have all this written down somewhere. But I feel like it was probably in 2016 or so, or maybe while I was building the agency, like 2018. I was just like, I just want to document this even just for myself.

If nobody watches anything, I just want to document it. So I started doing some of that, and then I started getting involved in WordPress in 2018, building the agency. And very quickly I was like I’m learning things very rapidly, and I know there’s other people out there that could potentially benefit from that.

So I did a little bit of like tutorial content probably in 20 20, 2021, 22. But I was still like just working and trying to build websites for clients. And then just over a year ago, I would say is when I discovered the WordPress community, which is a whole thing in and of itself. Like you could use WordPress for your entire life and never really jump into that realm.

But I decided to, and I don’t regret it. And I was, that’s when I started specifically making content with guys like Matt. And like whether it was technical news oriented, business oriented. I’ve just continued to try to find my way there. And yeah, I guess it’s that’s the, been the trajectory to this point.

Chris Badgett: What kind of content do you like to consume? Great question.

Mark Szymanski: I feel, I don’t know if anybody else has gone through this, but I’ve gone, I’ve noticeable, if I look back at my, I have a big Excel spreadsheet of all, like the big events that have happened in my life that I can remember that I feel like were pivotal or just like in general, if I go back through there, there are actual periods of time.

Like I consume an unbelievable amount of content on a specific topic, right? And I think I’m not, I’m definitely not unique in this fact, but I don’t hear too many people talk about it that often. So I remember I can’t remember the order, but I remember I was in college and I was like, okay I really want to like, know more about like money.

Like maybe it was around the time I had my first job. So I wanted to, I went super deep into like finance content. Dave Ramsey, Graham Stephan, like all these big, YouTubers, right? And it’s funny, and you know this, Chris, because you know how these algorithms like suck you in as soon as you get into one thing.

It’s you’re going to see videos forever until you get into another, hobby or topic. So finance was a big one. That was probably a couple of your stint. I feel like you go from not knowing anything to knowing like 75, 85 percent of it in if you really go hard, you can go like pretty quickly, maybe six months to a year.

And then you know way more than the average person, but then you got to get burnt down. You’re like, I’m tired of listening to this. So it was finance was one of those. Business, general business stuff was one of those more recently it’s been golf it’s just crazy. And then as soon as, it’s like now I don’t see really much any finance stuff, but I get the golf stuff.

Obviously WordPress has been a huge part of that for the past year or two. But yeah, those are my big ones right now. I would say right now it’s, that last year it’s been heavy on WordPress and the golf thing. Yeah. Golf is a lifelong game, similar to WordPress, maybe.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Yeah. I can definitely relate to the binging on niche interest content for a period. Could be months, could be years. And a funny thing happens. Like I remember before I, stepped out of my shell when I was just building some websites for clients and trying to figure out how to build an online business, I would listen to Matt Medeiros podcast, The Matt Report.

And there was a handful of other WordPress podcasts, and I just binged all that stuff. And then ultimately I got into the whole world and stepped into the community and started creating content myself. So it’s fun to, uh, listen to somebody and then all of a sudden, now you’re talking to them.

Now you’re shaking their hand.

Mark Szymanski: Exactly.

Chris Badgett: It’s wild. It’s so surreal.

Mark Szymanski: Yeah, I was like, we were talking before we went on guys like WP crafter and like Paul Charlton, WP, like WP. That’s I was, I’m 28 now. It’s I think back, I was just looking at this seven years ago, I was like just 21, like still in college.

I’m like thinking about like websites and WordPress and stuff. And I’m watching their videos back then. Then I go to WordCamp and it’s cool. It’s so cool in this community where you can just go to an event like that and you just start meeting the people that you’ve been.

Watching and all that stuff for so long. And it’s, it is absolutely surreal.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. It’s like finding your niche. If the niche is focused or small enough, even though WordPress is big in terms of usage, the people that are really, I think Matt Medeiros used to call it small C, big C community, like the ones that are really on the inside.

It’s small if you think about it so you can run into those people. What do you feel like your niche is in WordPress? If you had to pick one thing, what would it be? Or you’re more in exploration phase?

Mark Szymanski: Yeah, I think it’s so big that I feel like I’m still exploring and I actually had some good chats with people at WordCamp US and I think that, I feel like there’s a there’s two ways you can do it.

You can try to find your own niche, or you can just put stuff out there and see if people create one for you, so to speak. And, I feel with that, the latter option there, I feel like people have pretty much, almost, pretty much, pinned me as the guy that like is asking questions and is trying to explore.

Cause I’m like new here, but I also love making content. I’m like, just always like like curious and everything. And some people express that to me, Jamie Marsden being one of them, just saying Hey, just lean into the exploring thing. You know what I mean? Like just go in and just try to explore stuff and be curious.

And people love that because they’re You’re documenting your journey. They’re, they’re learning alongside you. And I just, I think that comes really naturally to me. So I would say that’s probably my main niche right now. The other, the only other things I would say are like, I really do love like process and operation stuff.

Because I think that there’s a lot of people out there that I feel like I’m a very organized individual for the most part. And I think that’s one of the reasons I’m entrepreneurial. So I think that there is definitely a place for that as well. Like I used Exactly. Yeah.

Systems like setting. I love the setup phase. I love the idea of setting up new businesses, business ideas for people or, like the technical pieces of getting everything all your ducks in a row from I’m not a lawyer, but the legal standpoint the financial standpoint, the marketing standpoint.

I’ve often thought about I could probably productize that somehow. But yeah, I would say that exploring and then like building those pieces are some of the things that I’ve thought of, over my time doing it.

Chris Badgett: A framework for that is you can be the role model or the guru, but you can also be the researcher and both of those stories are cool.

Like you might be the role model and okay, these are the systems for this type of business or whatever. And then the researcher just, It’s fun to, go explore with Indiana Jones as they search for whatever. I will say one of the interesting things I’ve seen on YouTube, particularly our views don’t, our videos don’t get a ton of views, but the videos that have been most successful are when we do like a use case video, which involves tools made by lots of different companies, usually.

As a product company, I’m often like really focused on Lifter LMS. But if I actually think about the person watching YouTube and somebody says, I want to build a website like you did me with WordPress. It’s not just a lift or pitch video. I’m bringing in these other like affiliate partner management things like Siren and, some web hosting considerations and email marketing CRM.

You build like an actual business like Udemy, which Udemy has 240 million in funding or something like that. And you could do it for a thousand bucks with WordPress. Like it’s, those videos get the most views. We had a similar thing with. That one got 5, 000 views. The how to build Netflix with WordPress got 9, 000 views.

So if you’re not married to one company or brand, I think that’s some of the most, at least in terms of reach you can get, but individual product tutorials are also cool too. You can go a million different directions.

Mark Szymanski: Yeah, there’s a lot of avenues. If you’re trying to make content, which is like where I’m at now played the agency game.

It’s good. I love the clients that I’ve had. But I think that I’m more suited for we’re talking about offline. That’s I think we’re really more where I’m going. And I think, yeah there’s a weird thing and I’ll be completely transparent, like I’ve always wanted to be like, okay, I have an agency and I have these tools set this is my stack.

I only want to talk about these tools and stuff like that. And while that does make sense. And I feel like it’s like admirable to do that. It’s not super scalable. It’s also like a little I feel like it’s definitely, it would be limiting myself because there are just because I don’t use a tool.

Or I didn’t use a tool. Doesn’t mean it’s not worth looking at. You know what I mean? Like it’s, what I’ve learned is it’s not really that binary. I tried to simplify because I was running something and I don’t want to have 16 different stacks that I have to manage. But at the same time, like if people are, if you have like agency owners or DIYers or whatever, like looking at your content, you should probably tell them there’s some options out there too.

That’s the beauty of WordPress. So I’m always mixed on that, and your point on the type of engaging content, that’s 100 percent true, like we’re like a big community, so to speak, like WordPress is big, but it’s, there’s like a phenomenon where the people that actually care about this stuff is like smaller, and the people that like are researching and know where to look and know who like the sources are and everything like that is like small.

Okay. So trying to reel them in as a content creator is, it can be difficult at times, but those types of things are great. Like I love the idea of rebuilding, like a Netflix or whatever, because it shows the power of what we can do in WordPress. Because sometimes I think people don’t get far enough into WordPress to understand how powerful it is.

So it’s a lot there.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Let’s talk about page builders. So like I came in before page builders and I’m not a developer. I can’t write a single line of code. So that’s why I partner with developers and have team and stuff. But So for me, in the early days of WordPress, it was really hard to make a great looking site.

You couldn’t even do columns without writing code and stuff like that. And and then for me, I was at a time when I discovered Beaver Builder. And We started using beaver builder internally and making some tutorials with it and stuff like that, cause it made it possible for non developers to build great looking sites.

Elementor came on the scene and then, but I was already all in beaver builder and a lot of people use Elementor and lately we’ve gone to a more of the full site native editing approach that we still very much appreciate. Page builders and their different takes on how to do things. But I have noticed like page builders get tribal every, lots of companies and brands do, but, um, there’s a lot of friction in WordPress between page builders, classic editor, native, the new full site editing Gutenberg thing.

You’ve got newer builders on the scene bricks, oxygen, etches getting ready to come. Like, how do you, what’s your view on page builders and how do you think about it?

Mark Szymanski: Yeah. So I think there’s a couple of things like the first bit of it is I came in. As Elementor had already existed, but I want to say maybe it was like at a million or 2 million less than definitely less than 5 million like installs when I came in.

So I came in and paint the picture. I come into WordPress and I’m like, okay, how do I work this thing? And then I see themes and then I install one of the, one of the themes that were on. I can’t even remember what it was at this point, but it was just, I was looking at the pictures, cause, Oh, what do I want? I don’t mind. And I’m looking at the homepages and stuff and I install one, a free one from the repo and I’m like, okay, cool. And then I’m like, oh wait, I can, I can’t like move anything around. I can’t like, affect anything. I have to just like basically replace text, replace pictures.

What if I want like something? What if I’m looking at like a website that I like on the internet, like a Tesla website or something at the time, how can I build that in this theme? I’m not, I didn’t realize I had to become a developer. And then I found like an Elementor and I was like, Oh, wait a second.

This is way better of an experience. I wasn’t even a designer. Like I’m not a designer. I just want the freedom to do whatever. So I find Elementor, I realized what that is and how you can build in the templating system and all that sort of stuff. I’m like, okay, this is fantastic. So I use that from like 2018 to 20.

About a year ago, like 2023 or whatever. Great product and everything like that. But now that I’m looking back on it, as I like switched more to bricks, and I would say that’s my main page builder, I want to get closer to core and I’m on the advisory board for etch. So there’s like a lot, there’s still, there’s a lot happening.

We’re not nearly at the end of the cycle of all that, but it’s interesting to look back. It’s interesting to look back from a product perspective, because this isn’t, I don’t think this is unique to WordPress page builders, but it’s like the people that innovated the Elementors, the Beaver Builders, I wasn’t here for all of them, right?

Like WP bakeries, like they innovated. But now you have a Bricks, or an Oxygen, or a Breakdance, or whatever, that we’re able to just be like, Okay, we can learn, we can go so much further so much quicker because we learned from all like the, any mistakes that like an Elementor would have made or whatever.

And I just feel like that’s really interesting to see it all. Now it’s a little unfortunate that it gets a little tribal at times. I wish that in an ideal world, software wouldn’t divide us like that. But I also think it’s like human nature. Like people really enjoy the things that they use.

And that are honestly, and for a lot of these people, like a bricks, for instance, is literally driving their livelihood. Like it’s, so you can you gotta understand that okay there’s a reason that they’re so like passionate about it. But, it’s I don’t know.

I don’t know how we change that or anything, but I think that the page building space has been quite interesting for the last seven or so years. And I’m really interested to see how Core continues to evolve because I do think that if we can do things, I’ve always said if the core of WordPress could for some way, you wave a magic wand and it could do all those things.

I think a lot of people would go there because they’re not just using page builders for no reason. They’re using page builders because it’s easy to do the things they want to do. So I don’t know. I don’t have a crystal ball, but it’s always an, it’s always a fun topic. The whole idea of page builders and just WordPress in general regarding that.

Chris Badgett: You, you made a good point like Earlier you said like training around your agency stack So when you get comfortable with your tools or your form plugin or whatever Page builder you use it’s just you just get used to it But you’re you like to explore and stuff too, which is great I think having a percentage of your time where you’re just testing and trying things is a you got to stay sharp It’s really easy to get stuck in this world and Not evolve in the sense that you have to evolve, but there’s innovation happening everywhere yeah, Florida a little bit

Mark Szymanski: Yeah, it’s tough when you got to be careful how complacent you get I feel like in that and And one quick Like example of what you said there is I never, right away when I was in the agency, like maybe some of the listeners can empathize with it.

As soon as I got into the agency life, like really, and I was like actually trying to build websites for multiple clients, all that sort of stuff. Immediately, depending on who you’re talking to, you’re going to get requests to do like really intricate stuff. Like when I say intricate, I know people that don’t use like dynamic data and that’s fine.

They don’t have clients that don’t need to use that or what, like they don’t use custom post types. They don’t use any of that. But the first project that I had, I didn’t know how to do any of that, and it, and I look back on it now, I’m like, that would have been, that’s a perfect example some sort of website with articles, white papers announcements just a bunch of those things, right?

And I look back and I’m like, wow, I really enjoyed trying to figure that out, even though I had no idea what the hell I was doing at the time, and I was trying to just use taxonomies and all this crazy stuff. But I look and I’m like, that was the thing that I was naturally driven to do. I was naturally driven to see like where WordPress could go, like how much I could do with it, like with dynamic data and conditions and all the sort of like logic and everything.

And. There’s a model that a lot of agencies have where they just want to pump out like the same, like quick brochure websites for a few thousand bucks, 5, 000 bucks, whatever. And I am like, by all means they should do that if they want to do that. But I just never spoke to me. So I was always in this spot where like I wanted to do agency stuff, but I want to do really complex stuff.

And it’s very hard to do complex stuff by yourself at scale and for the amount of money that you need to do, you need to, Be paid in order to do those things. So I was finding myself just wanting to do complex things, but at the same time, like just, it just didn’t, the calculation and the way I had it set up just didn’t all work.

Like I didn’t think I could scale it super long term. So I’ve pivoted slightly because this is like a new. Place that I could be in where I could constantly explore, provide value and potentially do like website builds as well. But I really just like building my own stuff.

Really, and that’s an end educating people along the way.

Chris Badgett: So that’s fun that that kind of happened to me. I was just naturally decent at marketing and sales. I get a project and they’re like, can you do this? I’m like, I can figure that out. And then I’d go try to find a tool if I couldn’t.

Oh, I think I might need to hire a developer to help me with this. So I do that. Oh, this is beyond my. Capabilities. I need to get some real designers on board here. And next thing I have had a big agency, but it’s, it was fun the whole time. And when you look back on it, it seems wild. Wow, you said yes to a lot of stuff that you had no clear path on how to get there, but you got them there about being resourceful,

Mark Szymanski: 100%. Yep.

Chris Badgett: Definitely. Let’s talk a little bit more about how your like YouTube process, like how do you think about that? Cause I know a lot of people, some of this audience are like course creators and they’re like, I need a YouTube channel. And they need to build process around how to do that, how to commit to it, how to like source topics and things like that.

Tell us about your YouTuber evolution.

Mark Szymanski: Yeah. I was, like I said, I was making YouTube videos for a while. Like just like older stuff that just didn’t have anything to do with WordPress during the, I want to say the COVID lockdown times and all that. Like I was actually like just doing a daily live stream, just like at night, just like at my desk, just going over like my.

daily recap of what I was doing and thinking about some stuff. Nobody was watching at all, but I just really enjoyed that. What do you like about

Chris Badgett: going live?

Mark Szymanski: I have no idea. I think, I like going live. I think I like going live because I, the, there is zero editing. Like I just don’t like, like I hate video.

I don’t hate video editing, but I really dislike it. I’m not a video editor. So I don’t like the idea of taking the time to do it. And I never hired an editor. So I don’t take like the time, the idea of trying to do it. And then edit it. I feel like that’s just tough. The other thing is This is super counterintuitive.

Kind of, I feel so much less pressure when I’m live than when I’m trying to make a prerecorded video, because I’m trying to, I’m in this mindset when I make the prerecorded video, especially if it’s for another channel or for a brand or something like it has to be like good like when good, like almost perfect.

I’m not stuttering. And I just feel like I get in more of a flow, as you can tell here, because I love to talk. I just get in more of a flow when it’s live. And I just, I don’t know, I just have a it’s just, I don’t know, maybe it’s just a skill I have or something like that. But I just, that’s one of the things, is I’m just like, way less pressure.

When I’m just like, yeah, let’s just go live, let’s talk. It’s like you’re talking to somebody. That’s the thing I love about WordCamp US. It’s we watch everybody on YouTube on X or whatever. And then we get to talk to him in person and everybody’s, a lot of people are the exact same. It’s just, you’re just talking to him in real life.

It’s like you’re on a live stream with him. I don’t know. It’s cool. But I think that’s a big part of it. I think there’s some people doing it really well. Yourself included Kevin Geary. Obviously, like I was watching his live streams before I started doing mine. I think the live aspect.

Is really valuable because if you’re trying to build any semblance of an audience or community, they can engage with you one on one. And again, like in a digital age where we don’t get super opportunities to meet up, like altogether, like we did this past week, it’s very vital to build those connections.

And I think the live setting as well is a really good one. It’s a little different than the YouTube comments. You know what I mean? The live chat is a little more synchronous, so that’s a huge thing. As far as like the video content that’s not live, I would say that my, my strategy there is pivoting to a degree trying to go more like affiliate and sponsorship routes while also covering, any sort of like news stuff and things like that.

And educating just in general, but it’s just, if you’re going to play the content game, you have to, you literally have to be cognizant of making money. So without hopefully shilling stuff, there’s a fine line there. So yeah, I would, that’s where, I don’t have a hard and fast answer on the process for the video side necessarily, because I’m still feeling it out.

But yeah, that’s the overall process I would say at this point.

Chris Badgett: What gets you excited about Etch?

Mark Szymanski: So I think the thing that gets me excited about Etch is, one, I met some of the developers this weekend, Andrea and Mateo of Kevin’s team, and I love those guys. And I think the thing that I’m most excited about Etch is, one, I do believe in Kevin and his team.

They’ve done great stuff. They have a track record. And they actually care about moving things forward, regardless of whether you agree with Any of the approaches, I feel like they’re a team that like, they want to do, they want to do better. They want WordPress to continue to succeed. They’re bought in.

They’re not just here for whatever. The bigger thing though, I think about at just more little meta is that I’m actually really excited that it’s not like a page builder, like another page builder, so to speak. And that’s no disrespect to Elementor, Brix, Devi whoever.

That’s not disrespect there. It’s just my thing was when I moved to Brix, I was like, Okay, this is better, in my opinion, for what I was doing than Elementor was. But it’s not really there yet because it’s still like super it’s still like disconnected, proprietary the stuff is in the database rather than flat file, like whatever you want to say, like flat files, like whatever you want to say.

So I’m like, I want to use, like I want to use the core experience because I feel like most of the time the native way is the best way from a Like a cohesive experience, if you had an, if you have an iPhone and you use like a native Apple, like app versus a third party app, it’s probably gonna be better generally.

It just does like a silly, analogy there. So I wanted to use that, but at the same time, like it’s not there as far as everything you can do with the page motor. So what I think, and again, like we’re in the, we’re in the building stage of that right now, the team is building it.

I think. I know what the vision is and the vision is to build a UI and extend the block editor and extend the core piece of it that will, create a better working experience, a better unified development environment, everything like that, but also not lock things away.

The idea would be that you can build with etch and you can just take it away and you’re still good. There are probably some other products that are doing that to an extent. But, I don’t think we’re talking about like custom, we’re talking about custom blocks like core blocks, but they’re not like, we’re not dropping in blocks that you can’t utilize your, if you get rid of it, then those blocks are gone, stuff like that.

And I don’t know every single detail cause I’m not like a hundred percent like the limiting, I have a limiting, limited experience within direct core, which is one of my. My next endeavors here. We’re going to dive in there full throttle. But but yeah, that’s just, those are some of the big reasons I’m excited about it and we’ll just, we’ll see how it goes.

Chris Badgett: What are you excited about or how do you use AI with websites?

Mark Szymanski: So I’ve used chat GPT. I think I have a pretty sure I have a subscription to chat GPT and Claude currently. And I’ve used. The cool thing. Okay. So I made a couple of videos about Claude. So Claude, I love like their artifacts thing where you can type it in and then it’ll give you a big synopsis.

It’ll give you the code. You can see it right there. Sometimes if it’s like a website or whatever, like it’ll even run it. Like if it’s like some HTML or whatever, but what I really love about Claude is you can build like literally plugins with the thing. If you give it the right documentation, you could create like a custom plugin that adds like conditions to like bricks or something or whatever.

So again, a couple of videos were like. When I’m alive on YouTube, reach out to the YouTube API and, make a condition that like dynamically shows or hide hides this section on my website that says, Hey, I’m alive. So something like that, right now it’s tough not to go off on a tangent with the AI thing, but it’s tough because if you’re not like a developer, you have to really have a developer’s touch to make sure that it actually works and like debug and all that sort of stuff.

But it’s normally pretty good, especially if you feed it the right information. So I would say that’s a big thing that I’ve used. That I’ve experimented using AI with for websites, maybe some image generation to the tough part. I feel like we’re in right now and it might level out or might continue to just exponentially go crazy is everything’s moving so fast.

I’m wondering like, Hey, what’s the best, what’s the best model? Is it Claude? Is it GPT? And then they come out with new models and it’s where am I, where am I getting the best information and things like that from? Copywriting, image generation, code generation, there’s just a ton out there.

Then the one other thing, I feel like this is a little bit of a, Less talked about one is like something like 11 labs. Where you can clone your voice and you can clone different things about that. Now that’s, we start to get a little scary, as far as the AI thing goes. But I think that I would really love, cause if you had a community.

Those people like once your knowledge and they watch your YouTube videos and they see this stuff, their stuff, your time, eventually as your community scales, you have, and this, you have less time because you have more people seeking that time. There’d be a really cool thing. I know a couple of people that are already trying to create like AI’s of themselves, like AI knowledge bases.

And you could basically chat, like you could chat with Chris. You could chat with Mark and it’s you’re basically going to get similar answers.

Chris Badgett: All your content.

Mark Szymanski: I would love that. You know who had that first is not exactly this, but like you could search anything from all of Gary Vee’s content, like the Gary Vee search engine.

I don’t know this guy, he like announced it, but a long time ago, but I don’t know how much it ever went, but it’s probably crazier now. Cause it’s way easier. He had it before. Like anybody was talking about this. You could search any word, any phrase, like, where did I hear that? And it would search like all of his Tik TOK is.

Instagram, YouTube or whatever. And it was amazing. I was like, I need that when I have more content, because again, the, this, I know, this too, like we’re, we we run in the same circle of content here. There’s so much good content. That is deep, buried and it’s just how it is.

Like it’s buried in the channel. That’s really good. And people would care about it. How do we resurface that, how do we recycle that? How do we reuse that? And then that all of that coupled with this is I need to leverage this more. I, the problem with the live content is not everyone wants to sit through a two hour thing or they don’t know, right?

That’s an investment that they’re not willing to make. We need to, the clips are like of the utmost magnitude. And there are some really good AI tools that are doing that now. I’m just not leveraging them well enough. Opus clip, I think is one that I’ve tried. I don’t know.

That was a big rant there, but I would say that there’s a lot of these tools that are actually just taking what people were doing manually and just making it easier and the people that leverage them are going to, it’s going to get pretty far ahead because they’re going to have way, way more efficiency built in.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a reason to become a content creator.

Mark Szymanski: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: I joke that I started this podcast around the same time as Tim Farris. So I did 10 years ago and I’ve interviewed a lot of people with a lot of great stuff. A lot of great conversations, but it’s like discovering the old stuff is really hard for the regular user.

And I don’t know, I think 2, 000 videos on our YouTube channel, if you count into lives, there’s a lot of content. A lot of good content

Mark Szymanski: in there. 100%.

Chris Badgett: And then if the AI could mix and match Oh when he was interviewing Mark, he said this about this topic and this other person and this other person and amalgamate that into it’s, yeah it’s going to get really interesting.

It already is, but it’s going to get really interesting, but that’s why it’s important to create original content.

Mark Szymanski: A hundred percent. Yep.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. I wanted to ask you for the agencies out there from your agency experience. I know you’re doubling down on content, but what was working for you in terms of a niche, like what types of sites like e commerce, WooCommerce sites, main street businesses, membership sites, like what, what was, what were some of your favorite agency projects that paid well and the client was really happy with?

Mark Szymanski: Yeah, so I the one I would say I go a couple different ways here. I would say the one that I fell into was more of like complex sites, so to speak. The biggest like one of the biggest projects that I did was like, I did a website for a like a wealth advising firm, basically.

Kind of like a redesign, rebuild, and stuff like that. And then they were like, okay we want to take, All of our knowledge is a really meta thing that happened here that we want to take all of our knowledge that we have and we’ve built in our firm and we want to create a another website, another brand that teaches and educate other wealth advisors.

So I’m like, all right, that sounds pretty cool. So it was like a, it was like, and this was years ago, a few years ago at this time. And it was like, okay, we’re going to create a website. That’s going to be obviously members only marketing side on the front, but obviously like the actual website is members only.

It’s subscription based. Everything that you do on a day to day basis, Chris, I’m sure like a learning management platform. Like they actually initially pitched it as we were like looking and researching other things they were looking at some other ones and it was using like a, like almost like a buddy boss type platform where there’s a lot of like social pieces too.

Cause you know, this is again, a couple of years ago at this point, maybe you go with a circle or maybe you do like a lifter element. It was just, it was like, There’s so many, there’s so many options, right? So what do you do? What, what features do you want? Not one. Cause that’s huge, right?

If you don’t want the social stuff, then maybe you don’t put all that overhead in there, right? You already have to have subscriptions, memberships, the e commerce piece, the actual courses just custom posts and stuff like that. Cause there was a podcast involved and it’s just it’s a lot of stuff.

It’s like literally just take all the buzzwords and just throw it in. And I loved building that. Like I loved the challenge. But the problem is that I ran into maybe the agency owners won’t run into this. The problem is if you don’t, if you, it was one of those projects where I had not done stuff like that to the nth degree yet.

And when you’re in that spot, you don’t know how much to charge. And you don’t know how much of, you don’t know how much of a pain in the ass that’s going to be to figure all that out. That is a real hurdle. So always charge more, but it’s difficult. It’s a double, double edged sword. It’s hard to say more and then not get it because it did teach me a hell of a lot.

And I know all that now, but once you have one or two reps, then you start to feel it. So I don’t know if that was exactly an answer, but that would be the niche that I found myself in was those more complex ones. What I did also have though was more, and I would actually recommend people try to more go this way is.

more repeatable things that still potentially scratch that itch for you. And I found like the best, probably the best client project that I’ve had was one of my more recent ones where it was like a small to medium sized business in a, in a industry that, makes money. Yeah.

Meaning like a, like nothing like, Oh, your buddy has a an idea for a apparel store. Spin them up a terrible idea. Like just tell them to go to Shopify or something. That’s probably blasphemous, but just, yeah, be careful. Just tread lightly there. What I’m saying is like something in like a tried and true thing.

Like lawyers, obviously people have different ideas about whether you should build sites how that industry goes, but like lawyers or like maybe doctors or like oil and gas like engineering, like those types of things, those big ones like that, where that is a, is an industry where like it, in order to succeed there, you have to be making money.

Like if they’ve been in business for 50 years, 10, 15, 20, like this company I was dealing with, like 50 years, like they’re established. You know what I mean? And they’re probably technologically

Chris Badgett: behind, right?

Mark Szymanski: Exactly. Exactly. They’re established and they need you. And they have some money.

Now, I’m not saying I’m not saying charge them an arm and a leg, go create don’t like gouge them, but I’m saying like, if you want to sell like websites or more, I feel like if I was going to redo everything, I’d probably focus on those types of people and we could talk about how you get those types of people.

Cause there’s a million ways for that too. But I’m saying like, those are the ones I would really look out for because the startup game is tough. The the new age businesses are tough, even younger businesses, younger people are tough just because. Like they’re either starting out or they, the whole WordPress thing could be like confusing to be like, it’s just, those are the ones that I feel like are really good because they, it just, I just feel like they fit extremely well and they normally have the money to pay and they’re normally pretty, pretty chill people.

Depending that’s super generalization there, but if you manage that process well, I think that’s probably been some of my best experiences to be honest.

Chris Badgett: I’m smiling laughing a little bit because Matt Madaris just dropped a comment. I don’t know if you saw it.

I can tell you guys are friends This guy yeah, you’re breaking the flow Matt you’re breaking yeah, come on man

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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In this LMScast episode, Funk Roberts shares insights into his journey as a fitness influencer and entrepreneur. He also shares strategies for building strong online communities by focusing on results and tribe-building techniques.

Funk Roberts is the founder of the multi-million dollar Over 40 Alpha Brotherhood, co-creator of the Tribe Method, and co-author of the Tribe Secrets book. He’s a certified digital marketer and community expert with over 20 years of experience in building thriving online communities and membership sites. Funk has shared the stage with industry leaders and recently won an Expy Award from the National Association of Experts, Writers, and Speakers.

His mission is to help course creators and membership site owners grow their audience, improve retention, and create engaged, lifelong customers through proven psychological strategies. Funk’s unique Tribe Method focuses on retention and engagement by fostering deep emotional connections, shared identities, and transformational experiences within communities.

Frunk gathered almost 15,000 members to his society, of whom over 10,000 made monthly payments. He also highlights that he’s developing a certification program for people to train men over 40.

If today’s conversation on retention and engagement resonated with you, don’t miss out on grabbing a copy of Funk’s co-authored Tribe Secrets book, where The Twins and I dive deeper into the 27 proven psychological strategies to build thriving, engaged communities while turning your customers, clients and students into a Tribe of loyal customers that never leave you, then Head to www.tribemethod.com to get your copy and start transforming your course, brand or membership today!

Here’s Where To Go Next…

Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

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Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of Lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. We’re joined back again on the show with Funk Roberts. Funk is a fitness influencer. He’s an internet marketer. He’s an entrepreneur. And he’s one of the most charismatic people I know on YouTube. Welcome back on the show. Funk.

Funk Roberts: Thanks so much, man. Thank you, Chris, for having me.

Thank you for all those listening. I’m really excited today to yeah, just share some knowledge.

Chris Badgett: We’re going to talk about your online education fitness empire, but we’re going to zero in and focus on building community, building tribes, being a tribe leader, designing tribes. But first before we get into the tribe aspect, give it, if someone hasn’t met you before, what did you do on the internet?

Funk Roberts: Yeah. Okay, great. Yeah. So I so I was a professional athlete before then I got, became a, did the nine to five stuff, but I was always in fitness, loved fitness. And then when. Probably 2007 when the YouTube started to take off, I, started to dabble in, blogging and then putting videos up on YouTube.

And I went away to Thailand to train for Muay Thai and realize that a lot of fighters out there who were MMA fighters didn’t really know how to work out. So I created funk MMA. com cause I came back with a, with my mind’s okay. I’m going to create a website called funk MMA. com and this website is going to be where any fighter on the planet, no matter what.

They do can go there and get strength and conditioning came home, funk, MMA. com launched, and it was just posting workouts and videos and all kinds of things. And I had a little, I had a program and that went really well, that, that brand of funk MMA really grew. And. Throughout those years, I’m learning about, I’m launching other programs.

I’m also a metabolic trainer. I would do metabolic training workouts for men and women. So I just throwing out workouts here and there. And then somebody said to me, Hey, you need to do a membership. You need to have a membership site. Put everything in and that’s that monthly revenue.

So I created funk university, funk fitness university. And that went well at first, but I had to, it fell, it crumbled. We don’t have to go too deep in that, but it crumbled because I was using a, the wrong strategy. And then six, seven years ago, I created the over 40 alpha brotherhood. I moved from strength and conditioning for fighters to.

specifically men over 40, because I had a story that, that was similar to a lot of men who were struggling, right? So they were struggling with their weight, low testosterone, et cetera. But I looked on the website and the internet and there was nothing out there. So I created the Over 40 Alpha Brotherhood, but this time I focused on transformation.

I focused on helping them get results. So I built out a one year program, workouts, follow along workouts, nutrition, but really focusing on the brotherhood part of it. And all of a sudden people were getting there when I first launched it, it wasn’t really good. So I asked these guys to come and help implement some, tribe secrets, et cetera, that we’re going to go into a little bit later.

But then I, after 10 months of training, there was 700 people who were still in the membership going, Hey, what do we do next? So I had to create another 12 months and then another 12 months, three years. And the point I’m making is that memberships have been a big thing for me. Of course I’ve done certification courses.

So that’s why I use LMS life for LMS, which I love because I created a certification course for trainers on how to train men over 40 and I also created a certification for metabolic training. So using all of those tools online to. Stay in my niche, but fill it up as much as I can where the weather where there are holes, if that makes sense.

So I’ve been online since 2007. I’ve been In the, following the big, the greats throughout the years and in the fitness industry, I’ve been around forever. Yeah.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And tell us just a little bit more about the results of over 40 alpha. For example, I think I saw you got a two comma club award from click funnels.

You have 740, 000 people on your YouTube channel. I think I got that right. Can you tell us more just about, cause I want people to know we’re going to talk about building community, the scale of the community that you’ve built.

Funk Roberts: Okay. Yeah. Okay. So the over 40 alpha brotherhood program has brought me three two comic club awards over, I think almost, we’re hitting almost getting to the eight, eight figure mark.

I have over 15, 000 members. So these are 15, 000 members and not all of them are paying members because some of them became lifetime members because I would run a lifetime. By the way, this is tip number never run a lifetime membership promotion. Because with a membership, do not do that. Do not do that.

Anyway. So I have 15, 000 active members, about 10, 000 of them or 11, 000 are paying every month between 29, 39 or 49 a month. So you can, it’s almost 300, 400, 000 a month that the membership’s bringing in. And it’s based on. This method, right? Because I, and also the key for them, the reason why I built this membership, the way I have and why it’s so successful is because I focus on the results that these guys are getting, not on the transactions on.

Bringing people in because that’s what I was doing before. Oh, let’s bring people in. Let’s bring people in. I’ve already built out the memberships. I don’t have to worry about those people. But they’re the ones that are going to, they’re going to cancel. So when I switched my focus on being inside my membership and implementing some of these things, that’s when everything changed.

And now, to this day. I created my own supplements. So now we’re talking about different streams of revenue because of the membership. I have my own supplement line that I only sell to my members. And that’s a seven figure business just because of the, because I have a lot of members and they trust me because I’ve got them results and they want supplements.

Also, I have my resistance bands and I have my weight vest because that makes sense for my members. Some people want to move from. Dumbbells to resistance bands easier on the joints because I’m working in the 70s. So you start to see oh, wait a minute. I have all of these I can add more streams of revenue when I have a Membership that’s retention based right?

That’s really truly. Getting results for people and helping transform and including something that, that creates more than themselves, right? Like they’re doing this for more than themselves and that’s what keeps them going. So that’s been great. I’m literally in the beginning of next year, we’re going to be creating a certification for.

For people to train men over 40, but more than just the regular shirt. It’s literally you’re going to be a coach. Because now I have guys in my membership who won’t become coaches. And I did not expect that either, when guys start to retire, they want these and they know so much and they’ve transformed and they’ve learned so much from hearing me every single week for six years.

It’s you know what? I think I can do what funk does. And I a hundred percent, they can, they just need a little bit more guidance. So I will be using life for LMS again to build that coaching certification.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. That’s awesome. Let’s talk about the audience or the tribe selection process.

You’ve, for example, like one question I have is how did you go from MMA to men over 40? You also mentioned, it was like you you’re over 40, your own. So you’re working with a market you understand cause you’re in that spot too. But tell us about what it means to pick the right audience and how do we do that?

Funk Roberts: Oh my God, this is the most important thing. This is where you have to check your ego at the door like 100 percent but you have to have faith to know that if you’re only targeting the exact people that need what you. Are going to provide to them, believe me, you’re going to not only get them results, but they’re going to stay.

So the reason why I moved from fighters to men over 40, it was because I did that when I was about 46, 47 years old. And I started to think, okay, fighters don’t have a lot of money. So I’m just going to be spinning my wheels here, trying to generate a ton of money on fighters. No disrespect to any fighters.

Cause I do work with the UFC as well, but So I thought, okay let’s go on. Let’s, men over 40 was still something that was in the back of my mind because a lot of my friends were, are now in their forties too. And people are now that are in their forties are asking me questions, but I wasn’t really digging too deep into that at that time.

But then I went online. So I went online to see what was out there for men over 40. And there was still nothing. There was only one other person doing anything for men over 40 at this time. And I went back to my own journey. Because here’s the other thing. When people see me, I’m 40, when I’m launching this, let’s go back to 47 when they see me, I’m lean, I’m ripped.

So guys in their forties, fifties, sixties, seventies, they’re not going to relate to me because they’re going to think, Oh, this guy’s the next professional athlete. Of course he’s ripped, but I can’t get, he’s not gonna, he’s not going to understand why, but I had a transformation journey. And this is important when it comes to building and attracting the right person, if you have a story of transformation.

So for me, I suffered from low testosterone. I was heavy, like a 39 years old and a big belly. It was 215 pounds. I’m usually 185. I got deep into a depression because the girl I was leaving. Living with, she left me, I started going, partying, doing drugs, and I got really very bad from it.

And it wasn’t until I went to the doctor that he told me, Oh, you have low testosterone. You have testosterone of a grandfather. And I didn’t know what that meant at the time. I didn’t know that testosterone had everything to do with my health, me losing weight, losing fat, muscle energy, feeling better, having that drug because I’d lost all of them.

So when he told me that, and obviously he wanted to provide me with drugs, but because I was a professional athlete, I know I knew all of the negative effects of using steroids. So that wasn’t an option for me. I started to talk about, I asked him, can I do this naturally? He’s a hundred percent.

You just do this, and this. And then I went deep down and I transformed my body at that time from what, 215 pounds to 185. I was in the best shape of my life, which is why I went and trained Muay Thai. I fought Muay Thai. So my forties were like. I was in the greatest shape, I got married in my forties.

I started this business in my forties, but again, I was still doing the MMA thing because, that’s where my heart was at the time. So I just went back to that and I realized that first called my program over 40 shred and it wasn’t. No one was joining and I couldn’t understand why.

And then I realized, Oh, wait a minute, men don’t want to be shredded at this point. They just don’t want to, they got to get rid of this belly fat. They got, they want more energy. They’re maybe if they’re in the gym, they’re having problems building muscle or they’re, they’re skinny fat, they’re very soft.

So I had to change like, what about being over shred? It’s about, being where they’re at, understanding, okay, wait a minute. But I also went through what these guys went through. I had a big belly, I had no low testosterone, I was getting injured. I was having a hard time building muscle.

And I had no energy and drive and I was suicidal and I had depression. So that’s where all these guys are at. And so I changed everything. I changed my message and I made sure that the people who I was targeting, the men over 40, were not the men over 40 that were in the gym because I also realized that those guys already have, Yeah, doing something.

So why would I waste my time trying to convince? I don’t want to convince anybody, right? My goal here is not convincing you to come join. My goal is I’m going to help you with the pain, with your struggles, with your thing, with, whatever challenges you have, but I’m going to create, I’m going to give you a program that you’ve never done before.

Cause that’s the other thing. So first and foremost, I’m really dialing in on who I’m targeting based on my. And my experience, if you have a transformation story, the reason why you’re creating courses or whatever, that’s what you need to lean on. And that’s what you need to target, right? Or if it could be a story that you helped someone very close to you, but you also have to dig into what struggles they were going through, right?

Because that has to connect with people. So when I’m talking about my struggle, so many guys, when they came into the program Oh my God, like I didn’t realize you had that you were, Literally again, speaking to me, I could totally relate to you when you said that you’ve masked your manhood.

Cause that’s one of the things I did. I masked my manhood by going out to strip joints and getting hookers and doing all that stuff because my girlfriend left me and I could, my libido was low. So what do I do? Let’s go to strip joints because that’s going to make me more of a man. Not right.

Obviously not, but that’s as men. Sometimes we do very irrational things. So I can relate to them and I’m very open with everything. So that I think is another thing. I’m just myself. I’m not trying to be a somebody I’m not. So that’s the second thing, just be yourself because you’re going to connect with the people who connect with you.

Not everyone connects with me when I’m, not everyone connects with me. And that’s amazing. There’s other over 40 programs out there where you can connect with other guys who are going to help you. I only want the people who are going to, who, are going to connect with me who connect with my story.

And Yeah that’s the first thing is really making sure that you dial in your target. And here’s another amazing tip is survey your list. It doesn’t matter if they’re your current customers, hopefully you’ve built a list. So survey that list and ask them questions about what their struggles are, what their, what their pain points are, what their goals are, and that will give you a very.

A clear picture of what the top things you should be starting to using in your ads and on your sales page, in your marketing, when you’re talking to people in podcasts, et cetera, that’s how you really dial in on targeting the right audience.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. We’re going to come back to it at the end, but I wanted to plant the seed for later.

Can you go ahead and give us a quick summary of your new venture tribe method. com. So you built a fitness empire and this transformation for men over 40. What’s tribe method.

Funk Roberts: Sure. We just, we have a book that we, myself and the twins, these two twins, Mike and Rick Tielmans, they’re the ones who really gave me more clarity when I launched my over 40.

When I first launched over 40 shred, they were the first to say, you can’t call it over 40 shred. You got to give it a name that will give an identity to somebody. Who are they going to become? So they have these 27 psychological strategies. And throughout the years we have, massaged it to create the 27 tribe secrets.

These are the things that if you implement these into your brand, into your membership, into your courses, you will be able to create lifelong customers, like a collective, a tribe of people who will never leave you. And so not only have we done it with my membership, but we’ve helped other people to do it just, on the side, giving them ideas.

And now when you go to tribe method. com, you can get this book. This is the foundation. It gives you the psychological, each secret, for instance, to give you an example, shared beliefs and values. That’s a secret. You should create shared beliefs and values based on what you have and the value, and they’re going to have those same shared beliefs and values because that’s who they are.

My over 40 alphas, we are different from other men over 40, because we, Treat women right. We look for solutions, not problems. We, there’s certain things that we do and that we believe in. We’re here to provide, protect, procreate. That makes us different. And we all share that same belief.

So we’re all on the same, all 15, 000 of us are on the same. We know what’s going on here inside the brotherhood. So they will, they talk about the psychological Reasons and why that works and how other companies use that same strategy And I in this book will literally show you this is exactly how I used it inside my brotherhood.

So this is a foundation book it’s a pdf and then then we move into helping People build their tribes build their tribes. Yeah, and i’m excited about that

Chris Badgett: Yeah, so go check out tribe method. com. We’ll talk about it more as we go through this, there’s a framework I use funk.

That’s about like what you need to be successful as an online education entrepreneur. And you check all these boxes. I call it the five hats problem. You basically have to wear five hats or build a team around these challenges. The first is being a subject matter expert. You’re obviously a fitness expert.

The second is being a teacher. You are already like a coach and like you had teaching skills and speaking skills and kind of curriculum or training program design skills. Then you have to be an entrepreneur. You got to build a business. And you got to market, you got to sell, you got to build systems. You got to go get all up in the weeds of technology whether that’s ads and websites and email marketing and all kinds of stuff.

But the fifth hat is the one that’s least understood and that we’re talking about today Which I call community building Which is the tribe thing and I look at it before and after the sale like the tribe might be Like part of the product but also you’re building all this community on the front end and goodwill like in all your free stuff and everything Tell us more about just, like the mistakes people make when they’re like, all right, particularly if it’s going to be part of their program okay I’m going to have training, but I’m also going to have a community and I’ll just create a Facebook group, but there’s so much more that goes into it.

Tell us about it.

Funk Roberts: Okay. So listen, when I’m talking right now, everybody listening, I’m not. I’m, it’s not your fault. And I’m not like, I’m not hammering you. Okay. I’m just, but I’m the type of person I’m going to tell you exactly what’s going on. So what are the mistakes? The first mistake is thinking that you just need to put the community up there and people are going to come.

That’s that will never happen. People may join. What are you, what do you expect them to do if you’re not telling them what to do? You’re just putting it up there. And this is probably one of the biggest the biggest challenge that most people have with community. This is probably one of the biggest I’m part of the membership Academy, which is a membership for membershippers.

And that is one of the biggest challenges. How do I get people to engage in my community? So number one, the biggest mistake is just putting out there, not. Doing anything. So what do you do instead? You have to, when you put that community up, whatever you use, I use Facebook, there’s a few things you got to think about in order to ensure that you get engagement.

Okay. So first you, again, we’re thinking, we’re talking about transformation, right? You have to have a transformation mindset when you’re building your courses. That means that you’re not. It’s not about transactions. It’s about what are we going to, what am I going to do to make sure these people get results and that community is going to be very important.

The first thing you want to do is you have to be inside the community. Which means you have to post and what you have to post. What you post is what you want everybody else to post. So if, for instance, we have rituals, okay. That’s another thing, create rituals. Okay. Because. Remember, I have a lot of people in my Facebook group the community portion of it.

So I don’t have to keep, I don’t ever post Hey guys today is I don’t know, workout Wednesday or, Hey, I got a question for you or, we never that never happens. In fact, we had 60, 000 posts likes comments last two months ago. All organic because we have rituals.

Rituals, what are they? So for instance, of course, accountability Sunday, right? So account, but the rituals have to make sense. They’re not just random rituals. The reason why we do accountability Sundays is because if they are accountable, that means they’re planning for the week. They pick their go to foods.

They know what days are the days are going to work out that week. And they know what challenges are. So the accountability is actually a template. What they do is they’ll take a picture of themselves. They’ll post the picture hashtag accountability Sunday, and they’ll go through, okay, this week I got I got a wedding to go to, so I got to watch out for this here are my carbs.

I’m going to buy this week, my protein. So that’s. And everybody does. Everyone does accountability Sunday because the people who do accountability is basically the people who get the results. So that’s one ritual that’s already on Sunday. We already have people posting. The second thing I have, we have is called sweaty selfies.

Okay. What’s a sweaty selfie? A sweaty selfie is after every time you work out, you’re going to just take a picture. With our sign, cause we have signs too and post it. And generally what happens is these guys post the picture. They just say, Oh, I did workout day 12 phase 22, blah, blah, blah, workout, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And it’ll just be a picture. I’m so you, if you went to our Facebook review scroll and you’ll see a whole bunch of guys, like looking like they just got beat up, but they all are sweaty. That’s called a sweaty selfie. That’s a ritual. We also have alpha meals. Why do we do alpha? So why do we do sweaty selfies?

Because accountability, right? Like I got my workout done and it also keeps them accountable. Hey, I want to show everybody else. I got my workout done too, right? The meals, alpha meals. So people post their meals and they break down the carbs, the proteins, the vegetables. That’s called alpha meal post.

Why do we do that? Because I know people post their meals and what foods they’re eating. They’re going to be more successful with nutrition. And. If you go to our Facebook group, you’ll see all the meals there. So again, that’s another post. We have birthday burpees. When someone has a birthday, they put up their video camera and these are men, 40, 50, 60, 70.

These are young guys. They’ll put up their phones, right? Not most, not the most technically savvy crew, but they’re getting better. Because they do use their phones more and they’ll do their burpees. And and the only reason why they do that is because I do the same thing. I post my accountability every Sunday.

I post my sweaty selfies, I post my meals. And I do everything like I’m part of them. So funk is the leader, right? This program is not about funk, but funk’s our leader. So if funk’s doing it, we’re going to do it too. So that’s why That fosters the engagement already because everyone is posting, you have that many people, they’re going to be posting all the time, right?

They’re going to be posting their sweaty selfies, et cetera. And then the comments, oh my God, comments. So many people are commenting because remember we’re all on the same journey. So of course, Hey, great. Oh no, maybe someone had a challenge, right? And they had a challenge that, Oh man, today was a tough day.

I didn’t feel like working out, but I still got it done. It wasn’t the greatest. Okay. Awesome. Jim. Oh, that’s amazing. That’s awesome. That’s amazing. So that’s how you show up for your community. You have to be right. You have to mirror what you want your members to do. And then it’ll just start.

That will just start to happen, but you have to be in there for a while. Cause when I first did it, it was, okay, there’s hardly anybody here, but then you’ll get a couple that start to do it. And everybody has that FOMO, right? Everyone has that fear of missing out. They don’t want to be left out when they’re in a collective community of people who are getting results.

So that’s the first thing you want to try to create rituals. The second thing, and I advise every single course creator on the planet to do this is to. I would say weekly coaching calls or lives or whatever you want to call it inside your member Hub, which is for me facebook or bi weekly, but just get on there have a topic just a short topic Okay guys, so we have our brotherhood hangout hanging in the hood every friday 9 a.

m Every single Friday, 9 a. m. We’re in the hood. We’re hanging out. I come with some type of a topic and then I answer questions. So that’s another thing that invokes a lot of a lot of engagement, right? People show up. That’s a ritual. We’ll show up inside your program. Yes. They have a ton of workouts.

Yes. They have all that stuff. But what is your goal creator? You want them to go through the course you want them to finish the course you want them to transform. So showing up for them inside your community makes sense. I don’t spend a lot of time inside my. My, my membership was only 10 hours a week.

And, but the amount of stuff I do in there, we also have something called ask fun. So whenever someone has a question inside the Facebook group, they will put hashtag ask funk. And of course the guys in there will answer the question. We got guys that have been in the, we got alpha OGs. We’ve been in there for a year.

We got alpha savages. We’ve been there for two years. Dream Kings. We’ve been there for three years. We’re going to most likely answer the question, but what, this is a, another great thing for you as a course creator. I, every week I get the questions and then I shoot a video and I answer the questions like podcast style.

Okay, question number one Jim, great to see you, Jim. This is a great question. Jim asked blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Then I answered the question. Okay, great. Next next. So this week, I think we have 11 questions I got to answer. Sometimes there were 30 questions I had to answer, but we, then we repost those.

That video and the questions inside the Facebook group and tag everybody. Oh my God, I can’t believe. Wow. So I answered my question. I imagine if you’re the creator, of course, or you are a creator or a brand, whatever, and the people who are taking your program, you are the one answering their questions that you wanna talk about co the connection that person has to your brand when you can take the time out and it doesn’t take long.

Plus you’re answering questions, right? Plus AI is. Is going through the roof right now. I’ve answered so many questions that when the next chat GBT comes out, I’m going to load all those questions up into the chat, GBT, and the answers and the videos, all the coaching calls and everything I’ve done, and now I’m going to have a AI, I don’t know, bot or something that will be able to help me.

Get, give people answers because they’ve also asked me for that. They’ve said, Hey, do you have some type of an FAQ quickly that people can use to get questions answered right away? Because we’ve done a lot of ask funks. Like they literally tell like me, I’m like, don’t worry. Chat GBD five. So let’s all.

Again, the engagement that you have and the value that you put inside of your community is what keeps your community strong. And then of course the connections, right? The other good thing is if you use zoom zoom, I do all zoom coaching calls as well with our group. And this is not extra, by the way.

None of this is, Oh, you’re going to be in this tier. Oh, you got to pay extra because right away, you’re putting a barrier in front of what you want people to get, which is a transformation, right? Remember transformation over transaction. Don’t always try to monetize every single thing that you have in your courses or in your program until you have a strong tribe, right?

monetize everything before they even have any connections like this guy wants me to pay even more to do this. And I got to pay this level. No, man, make sure that you get them the information. Believe me, they’re going to stay with you. I have, we are one of the guys in our 90 day tribe. This is my other thing that we’re doing to help people build tribes is Rob, big up to Rob.

Rob, my membership five years yesterday, Rob said, one of the things that I was, I started to realize with funks, Membership. Of course, I’ve used the workouts. I’ve transformed my body. I feel amazing. But I felt my, I found myself buying things all the time. Like I was always buying things from funk.

I didn’t know. And I didn’t even know why I was like, Oh, okay, I’ll buy it. Yeah. And then he realized, Oh, wait a minute. There’s more going on here. There’s more going on behind the scenes. And so he has his own business. He wanted to find out what that was. Yeah. Literally what happened, people will be like, okay, you got this new thing.

Sure. Sure. But what happened? That’s what happens when you have tribe, like I’m an Apple person, right? The new Apple phone, iPhone came out. Of course I’m going to buy it because I don’t care what it has. I don’t care if it’s, yeah, I don’t care if there was no update. I’m going to buy it. Or do we are Jeepers, right?

We own a Jeep. If you own a Jeep and you drive by someone with a Jeep and you do this, they always. This is a jeep wave. It’s called a jeep wave. And whenever somebody in the car, they don’t know what that is. They’re literally blown away. It’s every single person and we drive our jeep all over North America.

And it doesn’t matter where we are. As soon as we see someone that cheap and we do this, they do it back. And we also have a bag of ducks in the back of our car.

Chris Badgett: Cause this from another jeep owner.

Funk Roberts: Yeah. Duck, jeep, baby. So this happened about six months ago. This woman, right? She, her and her friend are in the back.

And they’re just talking. They’re just outside of their Jeep. And we pull up for coffee and my wife goes in to get coffee. And I see this Jeep. I’m going to give them, I’m going to give them a duck. So I got my duck out. Now these girls, these women, like totally the opposite. Like I’m this black guy, tank top.

You know coming up to them. They don’t know who I am And i’m like who owns this jeep and one girl’s a guy on the jeep and I just gave this to her She was like, oh my god I can’t believe this. Thank you so much. And then we had a connection and her friend It’s just like standing what the, why is he talking to this strange black guy like they know each other, right?

And that, the connection that we had based on just giving her the duck and then talking about our Jeeps and just we had, it was such a strong connection. I had a strong connection with that girl. I probably will have a connection with her forever based on the fact that she has or had a Jeep, right?

And that’s how tight, A tribe is a community is even if people don’t know who you are if you do something like we have this as our sign I know that the other day I was outside and a car flew by my house Right and put their finger up like this and said funk and I had no clue who it was And then it came to i’m like, oh my god that person must be in the brotherhood because Only people in the brotherhood would obviously they’re driving.

So they can’t do this, but would know to do this. And so the next week I’m on my coaching call and it was James Eberhardt who lives right over. I didn’t have a clue. He’s Hey, that was me, by the way. I’m like, I knew somebody. So that’s how powerful focusing on you being inside your community so that you can foster that connection inside the community and you should want to be there.

Like, why would you not want to be there?

Chris Badgett: Let’s talk about being a tribe leader. You’ve already said a lot. One of them is you practice what you preach, you participate in the rituals, you like hold the space, like for the call or the community. What else is involved in really stepping into that tribal leader role, particularly because I know.

Many creators suffer from imposter syndrome or, fear of failure, fear of success, whatever. How do you, how does one really step into that role?

Funk Roberts: You have to create, you have to know what your values and beliefs are as a person. Because those values and beliefs are going to be this the things that you will show and let people know and share with your community, because if I value health and fitness, if I value integrity, if I value helping others, if I value.

Laughing at yourself, like not being so serious, but also, stepping outside your comfort zone. Those are the things that I value. Always challenging yourself to be 1 percent better. Always being able to, fall and fail, learn from those failures. Those are all things I value.

Be transparent let people know where you’re at. Those are just all my values. So those are the values that I instill inside. My membership, so the people who are coming in right off the bat, they read the manifesto, they read the virtues, so they already know what they’re getting into. Now I can just be my, myself, right?

And as a leader I’m not, it’s not about me. So again, my program is not the funk Roberts program. It’s the over 40 alpha program. It’s their program, but I need to lead by again, just be by living by my values. And my virtues is number one. Number two, transparent. If you don’t know something, Hey, you know what?

I don’t know that right now, but I’m going to, I’ll find out for you. Cause that’s what a leader does, right? You focus on what you’re doing. I’m going to go get that answer. Or if you’re wrong about something, there’s been times where I’ve been totally wrong. The very next coaching, I’m like, guys, I was totally wrong.

I’m super sorry. That’s a man. I messed up. I messed up and I’m sorry, but that’s what a leader does. They come to the table and say, listen, I messed up, man. I thought it was this, but it was actually this. I’m gonna make, I’m gonna, I’m gonna make the changes or whatever. Be yourself. That is because wearing a mask is so exhausting, right?

Because one day yourself is gonna come up behind that mask and you’re gonna say something that they’re not gonna expect. And that’s gonna be like, what? I didn’t know what the hell, I didn’t know that. I thought you were, but you’re. And then you’re going to lose people. If you’re just who you are, you’re only gonna, you’re going to attract those people.

And then you can be, you can focus on those people leading with your own integrity, leading, knowing that, Hey, if I make a mistake, guys, don’t worry. Listen, I’m going to probably make a mistake, but I will make sure to correct it. Or, so that’s number one. That’s another thing as a leader, having values, beliefs, and making sure that the people who come in have those same values and beliefs in regards to whatever program I’m not talking about because remember you don’t know this, but in my program, I have men from all over the world.

I have people who have different religions, different race, different sizes, different backgrounds, but we don’t talk politics. We don’t talk religion. And we don’t do pop culture. We don’t do any of that stuff. We just focus on. Getting each other in the best health and shape and mindset that we can be all of those things are removed.

And we only focus on the commonalities and not the differences that as a leader, I can really truly focus on building an environment and a program based on that. The other thing is, you have to listen. You have to listen. Not here, but listen to what your members or your students are saying. And if they, one or two or three or five students are saying the same thing, okay, we got to change something because everyone’s saying the same thing, or we got to add something, or we’ve got to, when you listen to your students and then implement what they’re asking for, it is, it’s unbelievable. They’re like, I can’t believe Funk heard me say that we need this.

And now. We have it. Oh my God. This guy’s really cares. Yes. And that’s what a leader does. A leader cares for their community, for their tribe. And so a lot of times, even if you think you’re an, here’s the thing about the imposter thing. If all you have to be is like two steps ahead of everybody in your, and I’m not even joking when I say that.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Like I figured this thing out last week and they’re getting question and it’s I got it.

Funk Roberts: You don’t need to be the expert in the world. You just need to know. Enough about and continue to be open to learning more. So let’s say you’re just new to, and you only know a few, enough to build your course out, maybe have this one course.

And then all of a sudden six people who finished that course say, Hey, I’d like a course on this, and this. And you’re like, Oh, yeah. I don’t know too much about that, but what are you gonna do? You’re gonna go and learn about that, learn what you need, and then as the leader, you’re gonna create that mini course, and you’re gonna give them enough to get the results they want, right?

But the point I’m trying to make is don’t, that can never be a barrier, because you’re gonna know more than everybody joining you, and that’s all you need to do, but if there’s more for you to learn, continue to learn, and this is why. I don’t post on social media and I don’t do that because I don’t have time to, I don’t want to be, why would I, and again, no disrespect to anybody using social media content, no disrespect to content creators.

Okay. Cause I love you’re all amazing, but I’m going to tell you for me, I, I don’t. Understand why I would put and put so much effort into tick talk and Instagram and reels and shorts and all those things to people who I don’t even own, because remember, you don’t own the tick tock followers. You don’t own Facebook.

You don’t own YouTube followers, Instagram, you don’t own those people. The email that I gather, I own, and I can take those emails. And I and here’s one thing I say listen, if you to pay your mortgage today. You couldn’t go to the bank and show the bank teller, the grandfather, right?

Facebook, Oh, I’ve got a million Instagram followers. So you need to pay your mortgage, but you know what I can do? I can shoot an email out for a new program and I can get 10, 000. No problem. Shooting an email out for a program or just have a program that I have. Shoot an email out. Hey guys, the sale for this program and generate revenue.

Take that money and go to the bank. Because I’ve built an email list. And so the point I’m trying to make is when you don’t own those people, but you’re putting so much effort, you’re 80 percent of your time is content. I got to put out content. No. I got to put out content. I got to know wait, I got, listen, we just shot 13 videos.

We’re going to slice them up. We’re going to throw them out there. And meanwhile, you got all these people who are paying you. Waiting for you. Oh, why is he out there in Instagram with people who aren’t even paying him? Why is he out there on Tik TOK? People aren’t even paying him. Why he’s spending so much time over there and not time with the people who love and support and are giving him money.

That’s, that was my, when I built the over 40 alpha brotherhood, that’s a hundred percent what I said is I don’t want to be posting out there. So we only have one ad running. The ad runs to the page. And when people come in, I make sure we onboard them properly. ’cause I gotta make sure that they transform.

’cause I got a $1 trial for 30 days. I have a free one, but I also have a $1 trial. Those people who take that $1 trial, man, they, 60% of them will convert at the end of the month because usually it’s about 60% who start. Because people who start. They’re in. So our whole focus is the onboarding piece and making sure that those people, get results.

And then if I have to learn other things and figure things out, again, I’m here with the people who are paying me and not out there. So I don’t know where I was going with that, but the point I’m trying to make is really think about, I don’t know where I was going with that.

Chris Badgett: We were talking about leadership and stuff.

It’s a,

Funk Roberts: yeah. Spending time to improve yourself as a leader so that you can lead your group. You can only do that when you’re focused internally. Not saying not to do any of that stuff, but a lot of times people start to only focus on the things that aren’t really bringing them revenue because the stuff that brings you revenue is hard, right?

Sometimes it’s very difficult. It takes a long time to build things, but you want that dopamine, right? So let me. Post something because I know that I’m supposed to post content. I don’t know if I’m supposed to, but I post the content and then you’re looking at how many likes he got. Oh man. It’s so fresh.

You guys know what I’m, I know if you’re listening to, exactly what I’m talking about.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Likes aren’t dollars or enrollments or members. No,

Funk Roberts: do a podcast. That’s what I always say. That, if that is the best way to, to connect with potential people, to get out there, to practice, research,

Chris Badgett: like you said like maybe you’re gotta get better at something.

So you interview a guest about that topic and

Funk Roberts: yeah, totally.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Funk is one of the best community builders I know on the internet. So go check out tribe method. com and get the tribe secrets book.

Funk Roberts: It’s seven bucks guys. Like literally this, it’s not the physical book, but it’s seven bucks.

You get a lot of great bonuses, but more importantly, this is like the foundation. And I’m telling you right now, if you go through this book, you will find something there that you’d be like, Oh my God okay, that, that makes sense to me. And it’ll start to give you more clarity. on why certain things in your business may not be working and what you can do in order to implement some of those things.

If you need more help, obviously you can connect with us, but this is the foundation. I’m telling you it’s going to be the best 8 U. S. 7. 95 that you spent in your entire life. But specifically if you have a business or a course and don’t have to have a membership. Just as a course creator, it’ll give you so many ideas.

And it’s it’s amazing. Amazing.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Funk. Thank you for coming back on the show. Go to tribe method. com. Get the book. I’m going to get a copy and we’re going to have to do this again sometime. I love touching base with you as your business evolves and as you help all these people and all this it’s really awesome, but thank you, funk.

Funk Roberts: Thank you so much. And again, thank you for a Lifter LMS, man. Cause that’s been a game changer for me. So I really appreciate you with that as well.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at Lifter LMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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The post How to Build a Tribe Around Your Online Education Business with Funk Roberts appeared first on LMScast.

In this LMScast episode, Kurt Von Ahnen offers insightful advice on how to grow online education companies, especially when it comes to focusing on bigger, business-to-business (B2B) prospects rather than just individual customers.

Kurt Von Ahnen is an expert in LifterLM. He is from Manana No Mas. Kurt emphasizes how crucial it is to recognize your real customers while developing courses—not only end users or students but also the companies or groups that will be paying for your instruction. He describes how, after making the misstep of first aiming his Power Sport Academy instruction at technicians and service managers, he discovered that the true consumers were bigger companies that oversaw many dealerships or dealership owners.

Kurt also highlights the need to think wider and concentrate on scalability, using examples from relationship, health, and wealth courses to show how individualized training can be stretched into more extensive B2B services.

Additionally, he also talks about his own experience of increasing the cost of his training after realizing how crucial it is to match value and price to draw in more serious customers.

Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of Lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS casts. I’m joined by a repeat guest. It’s Kurt Von Annen from Manana No Mas. Kurt is a Lifter LMS expert. He helps us out some at Lifter LMS. And today we’re going to talk about thinking bigger about selling to businesses, thinking about your learning management systems projects, and even how you approach life as an entrepreneur more at scale.

We’re also going to talk about agency life, but first welcome back on the show, Kurt. Dude, thanks so much for having me back. It’s always a pleasure talking to you. When I first met you, you were coming to Lifter LMS office hours. You were working at a big company. You were like, you would drop into the call in a cubicle area.

I think it seemed like on the floor. And you’ve always been like, around business and your niche and your industry of power sports, but you’ve also had this Insane obsession with, WordPress and building websites. I think you got into WordPress before I did in 2008, I think you came in 2006 or something.

I can’t remember. 2004. Four. Okay. Yeah. So you’ve been around this show for a long time and you were not just because of WordPress or Lifter long before that you’ve been into leadership, education, training. Improving teams, management systems, and all that stuff. So let’s dive in there. As an education entrepreneur, whether you’re creating an LMS website for yourself around your own subject matter, expertise, or you’re advising a client who’s putting together a course, how do we think bigger?

How do we think about scale and, creating more leverage and impact when we’re creating online education and businesses around that?

Kurt Von Ahnen: That’s a big question. This could be a big answer when you are thinking about being a course creator and creating your content. I know you’ve made tons of content on who is your avatar and who are you selling to and who is your target audience and who are you speaking to?

And that’s all a hundred percent, but there’s another side of it. And it goes and I learned this the hard way with the power sport Academy. It’s you might know who you’re going to be working with. You might know who you’re going to educate. But is that the customer? And I think that’s where I really started to embrace this idea of a B2B sales model, or I hate to call it like learning brokerage or something.

But that kind of feels like that. Whereas I had to work really hard to identify. Who’s the customer? Who’s going to pay me for this service? And then how do I offer this service or this product in the best way forward for the actual students that are going to take the, and that happened. I was doing, I used to be the corporate trainer for Ducati.

Then I was the corporate trainer for Suzuki. I’ve worked with BRP. I’ve done a little bit of work with Triumph and Polaris was one contract I had. And so I’ve worked a lot with these bigger companies that have dealerships. And then someone has to train the people that works at those dealerships.

So if I’m training technicians or if I’m training service managers, the normal course creator thinks that’s their customer. And that was the mistake I made. That wasn’t my customer. My customer was the dealer owner that hired the service managers and the technicians. And then at some stage I realized in some cases, it wasn’t even those dealers.

In some cases, it’s an organization that runs groups of dealers, or it’s an OEM that supplies product to hundreds of dealers. And then you have to start rethinking what that scale looks like because you mentioned scale in the question. So is my client one dealership? Is my client a group of dealers that work with a specific product?

Or is my client Actually, all of the dealerships that fall within a giant organization. And then you start to think in terms of what is that financially? And that’s where things can get, if you’re not careful, you can become overwhelmed because you start counting the money before you make it.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Yeah. And just to put some concepts out there from Lifter LMS has something called groups. It’s an add on, you can get it by itself or it’s part of the infinity bundle. Where a group, you can offer training to groups that then invite their members in, and those, that group may be a business and they have employees who need to train the group admin can invite people in, manage those enrollments in their group and view their reporting and progress and things like that.

All without ever going into the backend of WordPress. I just want to know, as of this live recording, mid September, 2024, We’re just about to release the automated checkout and automated group setup aspect. Lots of people are already using groups, but this is going to make it even better. And just a quick example I like to give in a video I just made, I was showing how to sell a course for 500 or to sell that same course to a group that has 100 people that need to take it for 50, 000.

So in one sale, you can, that’s how you think at scale. Yeah,

Kurt Von Ahnen: it’s, I was an early adopter of groups and one of the things I like most about it, Chris, was this idea that I could sell at an enterprise level, 50 seats, 25 seats, 30 seats, whatever. But. Because I assigned the client as the group leader to the group.

So they can get front end reporting. I no longer have to play like LMS manager and pull weekly reports and make all these pretty documents that say, you’re 17 people didn’t show up for class this week now that they can manage it directly through the site. And the client treats it like, like it’s a privilege, like it’s a perk rather than an obligation.

So it’s actually like a feature not. Even though it’s taken work away from me, it’s still a feature for the client. So it’s a win.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. It’s not like you couldn’t do this before, but gosh, has it gotten a lot easier with a lot more automation? Let’s play a fun game and help the course creators out there.

Start thinking at scale a little bit. I’d like to give the examples of health, wealth, and relationships. Let’s say you’re really into health. So you’d be thinking about wealth while I’m talking. But let’s say you help people with fitness, right? And that’s your thing. You were a personal trainer and you help people with a certain kind of fitness plan, whether it’s lose weight or whatever your niche focuses.

You can do that all day and you can sell a hundred dollar courses. But if you think bigger, if you start thinking at scale, how do I create, how can I take my same course content and actually sell to gyms that have, you Lots of people there going to get who would benefit from some online training as well.

So just think bigger. Some courses and memberships are really not meant for a la carte individual purchase and group, but I think you’d be surprised how many. Things that we teach could just be thought about a little differently and sell the exact same thing to a bigger organization. How about you give us a business or wealth example?

Kurt Von Ahnen: The business example selfishly is that power sport Academy deal. If. And you know what? Everyone plays with pricing a different way. So is it okay if I’m a little transparent with pricing? Yeah, let’s do it. All right. So when I first launched the power sport Academy, I was willing to train dealerships for 1, 500 for a year with live coaching and access to the course and all this stuff.

And I thought there was going to be like 200 dealers that would sign up and I’d have to beat them off with a stick. And that’s not what happened. As I, when I just said at the beginning of the show, I was approaching the wrong customer. So I didn’t have the right flow. I didn’t have nothing was right.

So I did a proof of concept, had some people in and the feedback was it’s way too cheap. My boss would never buy this because for 1500 bucks, they’re assuming there’s no value. It’s got to hurt. It’s got to be 10, 12, 13, 000. So we raised the price to 12, 000 and then we improved. We added a couple of courses.

We made it better and better. And over the course of five years. To train one dealership to train all the employees in one dealership with a year’s worth of live consulting, homework, and access to the six courses it’s 45, 000. And so some people might be listening to this or watching this episode and going, who is this guy that he thinks he can sell some web course for 45 grand?

But you have to understand what you’re selling. You’re not selling the course is the course, right? What I’m selling is most dealerships that take our course, see an increase in revenue of between six and 800, 000 in their service departments after taking this training. So if they’re going to see a 600, 000 increase in revenue, why wouldn’t they pay 45, 000 to train their staff?

Because the side effect is also, increased company culture, reduced employee turnover. higher margins, higher customer satisfaction scores. If you take a look at all of the side effects of the training, it ends up being a triple win all the way around. And so don’t ever be afraid of what the number is.

Remember what you’re selling. Remember the results that you’re selling and remember the audience that you’re selling to. So if we fast forward to how we were talking about business to business and groups and scaling, that’s a year’s worth of training, live consulting, homework to review. I don’t believe in passive income really, right?

I believe in putting skin in the game and anything that I’m selling for a retail price. So this business to business deal that we recently made is an organization that represents a group of dealers. They have about 60 dealers in their network. They needed training. And so what we negotiated was A sharply reduced admission for the courses.

We still do live training and homework and consulting, but instead of a year, we reduced it to six sessions over three months. So if you break that down by the hour, I’m only putting in nine hours of live work. Plus, I’m checking some homework and I’m sending a couple of emails here and there.

The system is set up through the CRM tool to do an email sequence for reminders, notifications, class times, and all that stuff. That’s all set up in advance. Nine hours of live coaching, over three months, and I don’t want to give away all the sauce, but if I do that every quarter, that’s almost six figures for a course that, I created five years ago.

Wow.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. We’re going to come back to talking a little more about partnerships, but just to finish the example let’s say in the relationships niche, imagine you help people find the love of their life. And by the way, we have a course inside Lifter LMS that you can just click a button, import it to your site called the soulmate attraction course, and you can, it’s white label.

You can do whatever you want with it. And you can sell it as is give it away for free to build your list. You can add your take and videos and modify the content. But just going back to that example. You could sell to individuals who are looking for help in their dating life. Or you know what, if you think a little bigger, think about the hundreds or thousands of dating coaches on the internet that have, two, 10, 20, 10, 000 of their own clients who could then you could make their lives easier by selling to those groups.

They didn’t dating coaches. It could then add value to their business by bat. They could buy back some of their time and enroll. People in your course. So just I just wanted to complete that thinking at scale example,

Kurt Von Ahnen: The way that you phrase that I think you miss a core element of how you describe that.

That is people often lose focus of what their skill set is or take it for granted. And so they assume everybody can do it. So you might, like in that example, how many authors have written a book on relationships, right? What helps sell books, sister courses that go along with those books, right?

So they have an audience, they have a website to sell their book, and now they could have a sister course alongside that book, but they probably don’t have it. The web building chops to make it, or the thought processes to break their content down into courses. Thinking like an instructional designer is a skillset.

And there’s so many things that we take for granted as course creators or web developers or WordPress people that we think, everybody’s, Oh, my nephew could do that for me. No, your nephew can’t do this for you. This stuff takes skill. It’s skin in the game. It’s decades of work. And so when you stop taking it for granted and you affix the value to it, that’s when I think more of the opportunities open up in front of you.

Chris Badgett: Another thing that makes opportunity open up in front of you is something that you’re good at, very good at Kurt, which is relationships. And I know with your, you had a recent partnership that helped bring those dealers in and share the workload of pulling off the big scaled power sports training situation.

Can you tell us how that partnership evolved and how that happened and, how people could think about, maybe I don’t have to do it all alone.

Kurt Von Ahnen: So I tell Chris all the time when we have our private talks, I think there’s a lot of value in understanding what your own limitations are. And even if it’s not your limitation, maybe you just don’t like doing it.

Like people assume because of all the lives that I do and the work with WP tonic and lifter and all this stuff that I’m just this gregarious guy that would be awesome at sales. I hate selling. I love conversation. And if conversation ends up in a product sale, that’s phenomenal. But I hate calling up a stranger and asking them for money.

I just, it’s not in me. A gentleman reached out to me not long ago, a couple of months ago. And he said, Hey, we had a phone call three years ago. I told you I was going to build this organization of dealers. It’s called a 20 club, which means we put dealers in groups of 20. He goes, Hey, it’s worked out pretty good.

We’ve got 63 dealers so far, but some of them want training. So here’s where I’m talking about skill sets. He obviously has the chops to sell and build relationships with dealers, right? Something that I wasn’t being very successful at, but I was really successful at putting a thousand hours of my life into building this really cool online curriculum.

So I have what he wants and he has what I want. Like I want access to his 63 dealers. So we had a conversation and I think I said, We first talked three years ago and then he just called me back and spurred this conversation on. So this is another lesson on seed and harvest and being patient with what you create.

And so we worked out a deal where I said, so you’re going to sell to your people. You’re going to enroll everybody. You’re going to take care of the transactions and the transaction fees and all of the headache that goes with selling stuff. And he said, yeah, I’m willing to do that. If you’re willing to help my people.

And I said, dude, I’m more than willing to help the people. In fact, let’s do this. Let’s just split the revenue. Let’s just take whatever I would charge and we’ll split it. And he goes that’s pretty generous. But here’s where I come back with people like some people would say a normal affiliate fees, 20 percent or a normal affiliate fees, 30 percent an affiliate makes a referral.

This gentleman’s not making a referral. He has access to his own group of clients, and he is very much influencing those clients use our product. And he is finalizing the sale. He’s doing the transaction. He’s doing all of the hard work, which I say is the hard work for me. For me, the easy work is hosting the classes, building relationships with his people and teaching his people how to make more money in business.

And so I focus on my strengths. I leverage someone else’s strengths and we do the revenue split and by giving him such a generous portion, he has completely sold out a hundred percent skin in the game to help me find success in training his entire network.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And just to put some math behind what we’re talking about here, there’s a company value that Lifter LMS has, which is learner results first, which just means that we always want to take care of the people that are actually taking the course, but I was just doing some quick math with chat, GBT and the average U.

S. dealership sells 500 to 800 new units per year, which if you’re in doing 60 dealers or whatever, that’s 30, 000 in people’s lives that are interacting with a dealership for sales or repair or whatever. And that’s how, that’s where the money comes from. This isn’t like magic. It’s, you’re just having a really big impact.

And this is the difference between Selling like one course to like B to C to just an individual consumer about how to take care of your car versus thinking at scale at this business enterprise level you’re a fit, you’re affecting just such a large number of people as you go through what the training does, the jobs that it creates, the raises that people get, cause they do better advancement in their career, safety on the road, whatever, it just goes on and on, which is

Kurt Von Ahnen: cool.

I should hire you to make me a commercial. The the thing that I come away with and part of the reason why I’m so vested in this particular project, and as I’m involved with the Marine Retailers Association and I got a background in automotive and things like that as well.

When whatever it is, if it’s a boat, a motorcycle, an ATV, a car, when you take that vehicle in for service and you have to talk to somebody and try and tell them what’s wrong with it or what you think is, or what problem you’re having with it. And then you give your car to these people and then you’re hoping they communicate to their technicians what you said, right?

Like what was the problem you were complaining about? You’re looking at the paperwork. The paperwork doesn’t make sense. The guy that was talking to you didn’t speak to you the way you wanted to be spoken to. The appointment process was probably a little painful. And then when they sold you the work, you weren’t even sure if the work they were selling you fixed your root cause problem or not.

You probably thought it was overpriced when you picked it up. When you picked it up, you probably weren’t real happy with the work that was done. I’ve been in the industry since I was a kid. So I published a book on the subject. I’ve, become the trainer at Ducati and Suzuki and all these places.

And my goal has always been, I want people to have a heightened experience. I want the customer to have a heightened experience when they go to a dealership that I trained. And I want the people that work at that dealership to have that heightened experience and that positive relationship with the consumer.

And that only happens because we train people to do that. When you think about a technician or a mechanic, if you think about it, when did that person ever have professional communications training? They never did. They could be the smartest person and know how everything on a car works, but if they can’t pick up the phone You know, and nicely say, thanks for calling ABC shop.

How can I help you? Or when would you like to bring your car in if they can’t execute, what we consider best practices in retail, then we assume that they’re subhuman, that they’re not capable of things, but they are, they’ve just never been trained in how to deal with the public. So that’s part of what our training brings to them.

Chris Badgett: Leadership has always been a topic that you’re really good at into written books on teach on a lot of this stuff you’re talking about is like being good manager and leader and employee and stuff. You said something I don’t know, about a year ago about how. In dealerships, sometimes the different departments are in war with each other, but you have a way to turn that around.

And there was just some really valuable leadership lessons in there that, that don’t, that can apply to anything where there’s a, where there’s kind of conflict within an organization. Could you share that?

Kurt Von Ahnen: That’s a really big topic for me. And that’s another one that goes deep. In fact, I’m thinking I might even write a whole book just on that topic.

And it’s. It’s an epidemic. I saw it in the office at Ducati, I saw it in the office at Suzuki. I saw it at the dealerships I worked at. I’m not making this stuff up. And people in the industry would tell you it’s exactly true. You could have a service representative meeting with service reps from all over the country come into a main office to have some kind of, annual rah meeting and the company would bring them pizza.

With no plates. And you’d be like, do you guys have any paper plates? And they would look at you with a straight face and say it’s not customary for us to provide utensils with the food you should have brought your own plate. Like it’s like totally ludicrous stuff. And then when the sales team comes in at, at 1130.

They’re packing up and saying, Oh, we’re going to run over to Mendocino farms, or we’re going to go to some restaurant, for lunch, we’ll be back at one 30 and they all go in the company flips the time, right? Because there’s such a sales focused industry and services always in the background.

That becomes. Just the state of being all the time, right? Where one department thinks they’re higher up than the other. When in reality, it’s the department that’s lesser thought of that has more influence over the relationship with the customer and the overall revenue that comes into the store.

So it’s a really interesting kind of like dichotomy relationship. So when I spoke. I spoke at dealer week last year for the Marine Retailers Association. And one of my talks was interdepartmental harmony. And the whole talk was on how we can use leadership skills and run our departments in a way that communicates with the other departments that lends, not just credibility, but lends positive relationship to each of those things.

So I teach when I consult with dealers, I’m like, if you’re the service manager, you need to have a daily meeting. with the parts manager. You need to have a daily meeting with the general manager and you need to be proactive. You need to say, Hey, what units did you take in on trade last weekend? Which ones need to be reconditioned?

Which ones are going to go wholesale? Meaning are they going to go to auction and get liquidated? Hey, I gave you the estimates to recondition these three. When are you going to approve those? We can work them back through the shop. And. Yeah. If you’re from the service side, if you’re proactive with the sales department and with the parts department, they’ll hate you at first.

Cause they think you’re nagging them or pushing them, right? You’re getting pushy over a 30, 60, 90 day span. If you were to look at how it’s transforming, it becomes a very positive relationship where they recognize, Oh, cause here’s what happens in a dealership Friday afternoon, three o’clock sales, sell something.

And it’s an emergency. Everything in the service department has to stop and you got to stop what you’re doing and prep this unit so that sales can sell it and let it, get delivered the same day. And sales always has emergencies on Friday afternoon and Saturday. But if we think about it, it’s not really sales is fault that they always have sales emergencies on Fridays and Saturdays, because if you didn’t, if you work service and you ignored that department for four or five days prior in the week, that’s your own fault.

If you would have talked to them on Monday or Tuesday, you would have known that, Hey, we need a couple more units prepped for the sales floor. We need a couple more units ready to go. This is what our inventory looks like right now. And it’s that. It’s that communication that’s lacking. And when we fill in the gaps with better communication, we get better processes and better processes, equal margin and profit.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. There’s some valuable lessons in there and going back into leadership. The base layer of leadership, in my view, is how you lead yourself and personal development and, work on yourself, basically. You do a lot of different things. You have a lot of skills. And you have an agency, you’ve got some jobs, you’ve got your own information, online education, businesses and partnerships you’re working.

Tell us about how you lead yourself and manage all that, particularly having a product like an educational company and A agency.

Kurt Von Ahnen: I think the first thing to identify with listeners, especially that might not know me yet is I’m a really big proponent of using what I sell or represent. I’m really big on that.

So almost to a fault. Cause my own website, manana nomas has morphed five or six different iterations in the last decade. Most companies would be more stable with their website, but I look at it like I’m representing product or I’m building product for customers and I want to show that I use that product.

So right now my website’s based on bricks. I just did a bricks exercise to make sure that I could use bricks and that I understood it and that I could see the advantages of using bricks as a page builder before that it was a buddy boss website. And I didn’t have any real social stuff built into my website presence, but I thought, you know what, let’s do a buddy boss thing for a while and show people that we can build community, that we can build, learning products embedded with community and we can make it work.

And so we have these things. So I’m a firm believer in using what I represent. The other side of the coin is I found as I got older. A lot of people say the riches are in the niches and you should focus on one thing. And the more you focus on one thing, the more successful you’re going to be. I tried that.

It’s not in my makeup, Chris. That’s not the way I’m built. I’m more of an eclectic kind of person mentally, and I like to have things in different channels, I learned over time that if I focus on four or five different verticals, but I recognize them as very separate verticals and I kind of time block my week accordingly, I noticed that I can skip a lot of the seasonality or a lot of the ups and downs of being in a niche.

For instance, we mentioned the Powersport Academy ad nauseum in this interview today. A lot of dealerships almost closed down for the winter, right? So like October to March, there’s like nothing happening at a motorcycle dealership. But that’s a great time for me to train those people. So that’s my busy time of the year.

I’m not training any dealers in July and August. Nobody wants to come to class in July and August because they’re busy selling motorcycles. So what would I do at that time? Like just not make any money for two months. That’d be silly. So I focus on the agency work. I focus on the public speaking.

I focus on some of the other things that we do with course development and consulting work. And so by keeping those verticals alive, it creates a stability for me and my family. And gives me the mental variety. I need to stay engaged with stuff.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Can you tell us a little bit about burnout and how you avoid that?

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah, I actually have a course on the money. I don’t know. Mosque benefits of saying no. I’m saying no is it’s not only healthy for you. It’s healthy for a prospective client. If you are having a conversation with a client and in your heart, this is not a good fit. Hopefully you have yourself in a good financial position where you can afford to say no because if you say no to the client and do the right thing, refer them to somebody else that you know, find a good fit for them, be nice about it.

Say it’s not really a great fit for us right now. I’ve got another guy that’s in my circles and he’s really good. Now I could refer you to him. Do you want his contact information? That’s how I do that. And I roll those over to other providers. Okay. There’s certain things you just, that it’s not going to be a good fit.

So in some cases over time, maybe you’ve learned, like in my particular case, I am really efficient with startups, like brand new startups. And I have packages for brand new startups with templated websites, and I can launch them for as low as like 79 a month. And they, it’d be like for them having a Kajabi site.

But Kajabi is a couple of hundred bucks a month. And so I can give them the hosting. I put the product in it’s templated. All they got to do is change the text and images, startup people like that’s, they’re just getting started. That’s a really good niche for us. And we have a little bit of growth in that area.

The other area is in SCORM and enterprise education sites where we’re going for much bigger projects. And so when we look at a project that quite honestly, three, four years ago, I would have killed for, a 15 or 16, 000, custom website, they want a lifter site, but they want this custom, that custom, the other custom and community tools realistically.

That might not be the best fit for our agency at this time. So that might be something I would refer on to another provider, but it’s knowing when to say no and what things to avoid. Cause you, you sense it, it, you just have to execute on it. You have to be brave enough to say no and not be afraid of missing out because there’s always something better around the corner.

You just have to be able to get. That space to get around the corner.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. You have I was thinking in my mind about how you say you’re not good at sales and I understand why people are that you don’t like it or whatever it is. But I think I’m thinking back and I think what you possess, I’m just making a comment here, maybe you can react to it is.

Sales just happen naturally around you because you are an opportunity creator. So like when you, when I first met you, you came into the office hours and you were contributing and creating opportunity. And then when you were looking to get involved with Lifter, I’m like, I know this guy he’s already here.

He’s already doing stuff, he’s using the tools. He’s, taking Lifter into bigger brands and stuff like that. And I’ve seen you, be around with WP tonic and with our, with your clients. And it just, you just create opportunity wherever you go. So like sales is just a, instead of creating sales to create opportunity, you create opportunity and it’s the sales are just a side effect.

It happens. And I don’t know, like you said, your partnership with that person who first contacted you three years ago. It’s like you created the opportunity and then you helped put it, put the opportunity together and the magic happened.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. Very much a seed and harvest mentality. I try to work with the other thing, during the pandemic, I went live almost every day for two and a half years.

And I just tried drilling into people that you need to find opportunities within obstacles. Like a lot of times we experience an obstacle as a person and we take it as a personal defeat or a personal assault when in reality it’s a training moment. It’s a chance to learn something. It’s a chance to find an opportunity and maybe some growth.

And so I think there’s just, when you say finding opportunities, it’s yeah, that could be a challenge. Let’s take a look at that. And then not for nothing, Chris, I don’t know if this is for you or not, but just for fun, why don’t you roll into the manana nomas. com website and see if one of our packages fits for you.

All right. All right,

Chris Badgett: um you also Moved like a year ago or not even and created more opportunity Better, economic conditions and stuff like that but I also see you in your new town Like networking with the chamber of commerce and getting out from behind your computer going to the local establishments and everything and this is where you’re planting seeds.

You’re just like plant, seed, plant, seed, plant, seed. And stuff comes from all that. Tell us about that. Actually, like in terms of moving, particularly for people that are creating courses on online or memberships or coaching programs or building sites for clients, they do have an opportunity to change their location.

So what are some of the things like going through a location change, moving your family? That you have that are things for people to think about to create more opportunity in your next geography

Kurt Von Ahnen: without getting overly political. We escaped California and got the Kansas a year ago. This month makes a year and think about the amount of changes I’ve been able to make in a year.

Like I’ve made a lot of live posts about it. I’m not very shy about it. We went from, being riddled with debt, trying to keep up with rent out there to being able to pay off all of our debt and buy a house in 11 months in Kansas. That’s really amazing. It’s a complete paradigm shift right now.

If what you said earlier, which is. Pretty flattering. Thank you. We moved here. I didn’t have any expectations of doing local business. I really didn’t because I, in my mind thought we’re moving to Kansas. Thank God. I know the people that lifter L. M. S. And W. P. Tonic and I have a couple bigger contracts because I didn’t think there’d be any business.

We got to Hutchinson, Kansas, which has 42, 000 people in it. And on one of my bike rides, when we first moved here cause I still bicycle I saw a sign called startup Hutch. I said, startup Hutch. I wonder what that is. So I went home, looked it up and sure enough, they had a Facebook page and they’re the organization in town sponsored by the community college to help startup businesses launch in the area.

And so I called him, I said, dude, I love it here. And we had gone out to different businesses and restaurants, and we’d had a great experience at all of them. Like the people here are awesome. The businesses are awesome. Some of the buildings are old, a little creepy, but the people and stuff is awesome. And so I explained that to Jackson square, the guy that runs startup hutch.

And he said, dude, it is so refreshing to hear somebody say such positive things about our town. Would you be willing to come and be on our podcast? So I said, sure, I’ll come and be on your podcast. So I did the podcast and as soon as I was done with the podcast, he said, that was awesome. Would you mind maybe doing a public speaking gig on websites at city hall next week?

I said, for who? He goes we have this group that we run through every year. We take 12 startup businesses and we run them through a 12 week program on how to grow their business and proper, like best practices of business ownership and all of that. And so I said sure. Yeah. I’d love to go and present.

When I went to present. There were two banks, two lawyers couple insurance companies, there was nobody there for digital marketing except for me. And so I got to present to 12 companies and then we all had one on one like speed dating meetings with each of those companies. And that resulted in a couple of people I’m still in contact with today for business to take that another step further.

They also have. second Tuesday of no third Tuesday of every month. They have a startup hutch entrepreneurs meeting at a local bar owned by Pippin Williamson. So we go there and we hang out. We meet all the new businesses in town and then they have minority business meetups, which in Kansas doesn’t mean you have to not be a white guy to go.

They invited me to go. So I went. And it was not a handout. It was a hand up to everybody. They introduced me to everybody. Everybody introduced to me that it was just a wonderful thing. I’ve been to three of those events. The chamber of commerce, like you mentioned, is really strong here. The community college actually tonight is hosting a pitch contest for new businesses to pitch their business.

And the winner gets something like 2, 000 of seed money to help launch their startup. So when I say that my target audience in my new small town is startups. It was a plug and play situation for me. I showed up and there was nobody here in town really pushing WordPress. And now I run the WordPress meetup the second Tuesday of every month.

And I get to network with everybody on that level too.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. That shows the power of getting out of the building, getting out on the bike, getting your health in, being open to opportunity. Hey, what’s this interesting sign. Let me follow that. Yeah.

Kurt Von Ahnen: It, and at no point, and I want to be like super clear here at no point have I ever felt oh, I’m going to take a stack of business cards with me to this networking event and push myself on people. That’s not what I’ve done at all. I’ve just gone in and introduced myself at a brewery. I have myself a nice cold beer. I meet 10 or 15 business owners. Hey, what do you do? That’s interesting. How long have you been in business?

And I’ll ask them, of course I’ll ask them. Hey, what’s your website look like? Do you have an active website? Are you using a Facebook page? Do you have your own URL? What do you do? Have you ever thought that your business could use training for your customers to show how to use your product properly?

Just simple questions. And some people would say that’s selling. But it’s having a conversation and at the end of that conversation, I’m totally fine if they say, Hey, it was great to meet you. And they leave. That’s totally fine. Cause I know I’m probably going to see them three or four months from now at the next event.

That consistency is that seed I’m talking about. And I’ll wait until they’re ready to ask. And when they initiate the conversation then I can set the hook and give them a proposal.

Chris Badgett: You’re also big on LinkedIn. So that’s one, one of the ways I would ask you is if we start planting all these seeds, eventually you’re like, wait, who is that person?

Or how do I keep track of all this? Or at least catalog them in my social network so that I can find them again. But any tips on, managing all these opportunity seeds you’re planning out around your life?

Kurt Von Ahnen: You’re going to make me pitch again. I have a LinkedIn course on manana no mas, but I’ll tell you guys that the number one thing I’ve done in LinkedIn is I stopped pitching people and sending people two and three and four paragraphs in a direct message and all of that stuff that annoys us, why would we do that to somebody else?

So I started treating LifterLMS almost like text messaging. Like I’ll just say, Hey, it’s great to meet you. You want to grab a quick meeting as an icebreaker. Do you want to have a sales free call? Next Tuesday, like just short, very short messages, no paragraphs, no nothing. And I never send people a scheduling link or a calendar link or a meeting link unless they say, Yes.

I’d like to meet with you. Please send me a link.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Like I never send the link until it’s, I hate to say verbalized. But they type it out, but it’s like until they acknowledge, Oh yeah, we’re going to exchange links and set up a meeting time unless that happens. I’m not sending a link. And the moment that I made that my personal.

I’m going to say like part of my personal brand. The moment I adopted that as part of my personal brand, my LinkedIn grew from like 3000 connections to 10, 000 connections in just a couple of years.

Chris Badgett: Wow. That’s Kurt Von Annen from Manana Namas. What are the best ways for people to connect with you, Kurt?

We just talked about LinkedIn,

Kurt Von Ahnen: I know, but I out there I’m the only Kurt Von Ahnen on LinkedIn, which makes it really easy to search me out on LinkedIn. So if you find me, you know you got the right guy. And then if it’s business related, manana nomas.com. I do a lot directly through the website and, we’ve got some training there and we’ve got some packages and you can always reach out and set up a 30 minute icebreaker call through that website, just by clicking on the button.

Chris Badgett: For you out there listening or watching, I want to encourage you to immediately after you stop listening to this or stop watching this to think at scale. So how could you be playing bigger? How could you get more leverage in what you do teaching online or with your agency work, because. There’s so many great ways to do that. Kurt’s story holds a lot of gems and how he’s done that. Kurt, thank you for coming back on the show.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at Lifter LMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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In this LMScast episode, Education Entrepreneur Bradley Morris shares his creative journey, beginning with a low time when he operated a t-shirt business and dropped out of college, which helped him learn the importance of thankfulness.

His artistic career started in 2007 with the release of his viral “Gratitude Dance” video. Bradley became interested in meditation throughout the years, leading seminars and retreats before turning to recording meditations for an audio library that brought in passive revenue.

Bradley Morris is an education entrepreneur and creative visionary known for his innovative approach to building meaningful projects. He is from Majik Media. Bradley discusses how he prefers to work in teams to complete projects rather than working alone.

He strongly emphasizes the value of collaboration and relationships, utilizing the abilities and skills of others to further his goals. These stories were the basis for a children’s book publishing business and an entertaining audio storytelling app that aims to foster creativity, instill morals, and ignite the imagination in young listeners.

If Bradley Morris’s journey inspired you, don’t miss out on his Signature Workshop training, where he dives deeper into building a fulfilling and creative life. Click here to learn more and sign up.

Here’s Where To Go Next…

Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

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Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co founder of Lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest and friend. He’s back on the show. His name is Bradley Morris. You can find him at magic media dot com. That’s m a j I k media dot com. He’s a prolific creator, everything from dance videos to meditation training to all kinds of different things with kids, the magic kids.

We’re going to talk about that. But first Bradley, Take us on a tour of how this all started. I know it started with the gratitude dance video that went viral. Tell us how your creator journey sparked.

I would say my creator journey sparked with rock bottom. I dropped out of College after my second year to start my first business, which was a t shirt business.

and we sold really offensive t shirts on the internet, my buddy and I, and within a year, my life became what was written on my shirts. And, and that set me off on the path of trying Get my act together and make some positive changes and the process I discovered the power of gratitude and my buddy and I, two buddies and I won out and created a video called the gratitude dance.

This was back in 2007, right at the early days of YouTube. And so this was the first video. I ever posted on YouTube and it went viral. and my buddy and I went on a speaking tour around North America for the next couple of years, teaching workshops and speaking on stages. and in that time, I got really into meditation.

after my tour, I went back to Victoria, British Columbia, where I was living. And I started teaching meditation classes based on the request of a friend. And that led me to, teach 500 workshops over the next three years. It was crazy. I was teaching all the time. I started doing retreats in Peru and Mexico and Hawaii.

and by the end of those three years, I was tired of teaching meditation, to be honest. And that was when I wanted to go all in on, on creating on the internet. I wanted to basically clone myself so that the teachings I was sharing with people that had changed my life could reach people. Millions of people.

And that’s what I did. I produced a world class audio library of meditations. we started with 48 tracks, each with custom composed music, and I started licensed those to a whole bunch of different apps and I ended up going. Up through the ranks of Mindvalley’s Omvana app and I was number one on there for six years straight and through that a whole bunch of other apps started approaching me and as a result, over the next coming years and still now my work just keeps spreading, but I’ve reached millions of people.

It’s generated hundreds of thousands of dollars of purely passive income. I’ve never had to build a meditation audience. The apps do it for me. and then I could, I retired from teaching meditation. I went on to teaching creators how to bring their life’s work to the internet, how to create courses, memberships, and communities, how to do proper launches, how to use where, which is where you and I met, how to use entertainment as a vehicle to teach and transform and how to use gamification to get people to actually get the results that they’re trying to get in their programs.

So that has led me on this whole other journey for the last decade plus. And, Just three years ago, my son Soren’s eight, we’re unschooling him. So we’re supporting his educational path by following his interests and pulling in mentors around him and what he wants to do. And as a result, we launched a kids publishing and story company three years ago called Magic Kids.

Him and I have, co written 17 stories, a graphic novel. We’re working on our first audio movie together. he has been a part of our comedy writing team, our advertising and marketing team, and, we just launched our magic kids app in March. And we’re working on producing the best audio stories on the planet.

We have a team of producers that score all the music and sound effects. We’ve worked with over a hundred voice actors, most of which are from my Island on salt spring Island, where I live. we’ve licensed over 700 kids songs from musicians around the world. We have kids meditations and we create curriculum with every story so kids can have a whole bunch of fun integrating the lessons and themes from our stories.

And then, I just launched my, new enterprise with a buddy of mine, just This morning called play cheap all. com, which is a new sport. We’re bringing to the world. So I have been, as you said, I’m on the forever path. Some people play the long game. I’m playing the forever game like you. and so it’s part of my philosophy just always be creating.

and I’ve tried to build a career around following my passions and interests and to keep my artist self and my entrepreneur self happily married.

Chris Badgett: Wow. That’s amazing. You’ve done a lot of great work. And one of the things I hear in your journey is that you’re not doing it alone. And tell us a little bit how you think about that.

So for example, you are not trying to build, you didn’t try to build a meditation audience. people were like, wanted you to come lead workshops and stuff, but you went to the platforms that do guided meditation to distribute for you. You didn’t have to figure out that piece or spend a bunch of time focusing on that.

How do you think about team around projects and community and people?

Love that question. you hit the nail on my exact business philosophy. so I left social media 8 years ago. I have a master class called thriving in business without social media where I teach the 19 relationships based marketing strategies that I’ve figured out or an implement magic media, magic kids, and all the things that I do, but you hit the nail.

it’s relationships. our tagline at magic media is leverage your life’s work. And so many people struggle and suffer in their business because they’re trying to do it all themselves. They think they have to do everything that themselves, and they think they have to keep reinventing the wheel.

And so what I look for, what are the leverage points? How can we leverage what we’ve already created? And how can we leverage our skills? How can we leverage the relationships that we have surrounding us? And so I’ve built everything through partnerships. I’ve always had collaborators to support me because I’m not the best designer.

I’m not the best video editor, I’m definitely not an illustrator. I’m definitely not a web designer or a techie. But I have the clear vision of what I want to be doing. I have the enthusiasm to enroll talented people and that’s what I try and do. And then it’s to figure out the win when you and I met, we were launching the Grady course adventure, which was essentially like Indiana Jones meets Saturday night live and a business development course, which is still available in our magic mind community.

It’s still just as epic as when we made it. And back then when the idea struck, I didn’t have a couple hundred thousand dollars to invest in hiring my buddies who were very talented designers and producers. So I enrolled them in a business partnership. Same goes when I produced my, my, meditation library.

I didn’t have money to hire my buddy for a year to produce and compose all these beautiful tracks. So I made them a business partner on it and paid them a share of the revenue that we made. I’ve always been one who looks for the opportunities to collaborate with other people. And I feel like that’s where alchemy happens is like when you and somebody else combine your magic, that’s when like super magic happens.

That’s when, you share the responsibility, you share the workload, you share. The revenue that happens, you share the marketing like it, when we can share that weight, it’s no longer all just on us. And I do that really well with what we’re doing for magic kids. We have several hundred artists who are contributing to everything that we’re doing inside of the magic kids realm.

And it’s just trying to find. What are the fair ways that we can all be compensated for our talent and time?

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. That’s really cool One more thing

on that just so I feel like this is another important one. So five six years six years ago I think it was now. I got really burnt out from magic media doing these big client partnerships and so instead of taking clients money of 50, 000, 100, 000 to do a project with them.

We started doing partnerships where they would pay us a retainer for 12 months, and then we would get a revenue share for two to three years. We would do these like longer term projects with them that would have this bigger ramp up. And, it’s been amazing and life changing, it’s just been so much better and more fulfilling for me to go on these long arc projects with people.

My entrepreneurial spirit feels more satisfied than like typical client work where it’s we do the project we’re done. It’s okay, goodbye. We’re done with the thing we said we would do. and so that’s been another way that I shifted my business model to just. Lean into partnerships and relationships.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. I love the incentive structure there and how that, how you’re just sharing responsibility and revenue. you also are clearly a visionary. this is a funny question, but what’s your process for vision or does it just strike you? Like where did magic kids come from?

It usually is just it strikes me.

it’s a conversation. it’s, something that repetitively shows up in my life. So with magic kids, for that 1, my son and I were always just making up stories and he’s been growing up with very limited screen time. He gets 1 show a week. He’s eight now. He just doesn’t complain about that. That’s just the reality he knows.

And he’s cool with it, but he gets audio stories. So he’s grown up with audio stories and I found a lot of the audio stories that we were finding were basically junk food entertainment. They were funny, but they weren’t like. helping him to learn values or life skills or lessons or think about the world differently.

The ones that were more holistic in nature were just boring and lame. And so I wanted to combine what we’ve learned at Magic Media about, like, how do you use entertainment as a vehicle to teach and transform? In my opinion, audio is one of the most transformational mediums we have because you can get inside of people’s minds and you can take them on a journey.

You can activate imaginations. And that’s what we’re trying to do at Magic Kids is like, you take kids from the screen time where they’re being fed Through this like strobe light effect, whatever it is that the screen wants to tell them or show them versus an audio story where it’s activating their imagination and they can feel and they can each kid is going to have their own experience of a story that we’re trying to share with them.

they’re going to imagine it in a different way. They’re going to see a character in their mind differently. If you get. 30 kids to all draw the main character of a story. They’re all going to draw it differently. And what was the question again? I was about where vision comes from. Oh yeah. so yeah, that with magic kids, it just, we were making up stories.

And then, so I’ve had this men’s group I started years ago called man ventures and every Tuesday we get together and whatever guys show up, choose what the adventure is the following week and we’ve done. Amazing things. You’re not allowed to do the same adventure two weeks in a row. So on one dark and stormy October night, we had 12 men in my office and we all wrote children’s stories.

Then we read our stories to each other. I wrote a story called the master’s Apprentice about a wizard who looks for his apprentice. And then the apprentice shows up and it’s all rhyming. And, really, I thought it was really cool story that kind of ingrained the, philosophy that to go from good to great practice every day and that when we’re starting out at something, it’s very frustrating.

But if we just keep practicing, we become a master. And that story the next day after I wrote that, I was like, I want to publish this. I don’t want to go the traditional route. I’ve gone traditional publishing routes before. It can take two to three years to get a book on a shelf. I’m going to get 6 percent of the revenue that’s made.

They’re going to pay me in advance, which is a debt to the company. I don’t want any of those things. So we’re going to start a publishing company and it’s going to be called magic kids. And it’s going to be a fair pay publishing company where we pay 50 percent of the revenue back to the artists because I’m an artist and I want to be paid well for my work.

And so that was the beginning. We did three or four months of research. I hired two different friends to who had publishing experience to just get me all the facts and all the information. Everybody told me not to do it. I raised a little bit of investment capital to get the first, 12 books paid for with the audio stories.

I thought the audio stories would be, or the books would be the thing that made money. And I was dead wrong. We lost a lot of money on books, but that led us to build the app. My son Soren actually had the idea to build the app. Vision struck him one day. We had a marketing meeting, six of us in my office, and he’s at his little desk whiteboard wall.

And we’re mapping out all the ways that we can get more books sold. And he walks over with his little whiteboard with

Chris Badgett: A rectangle and a circle in the middle of the rectangle. And he said, listen up everybody. This come from a six year old. What we need is a button and he holds up his little whiteboard over his head.

Button buddy. And he’s we need a button. Kids just push a button and a story pops up and starts playing. Oh, like an app. He’s yeah, we need an app. We’re all just like jaw dropped and it was one of those moments where the universe spoke to us and we’re like, okay. We erased everything on the whiteboard and we said, what’s the magic kids app?

And that was when we started working on it and that was two years ago. and then he walked back, Mike dropped moment. He didn’t say another word. He walked back to his desk and kept drawing and we’re just, what was that?

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And that’s M a J I K kids, magic kids. That’s right. And for anybody out there listening, who’s a parent, or knows a kid that might enjoy this, like what’s the.

Target age for Magic Kids

4 to 10 is what we’re going for, but we have friends and customers that like the whole family gather around to listen to stories. We release new stories every Saturday morning to help replace cartoons. Our stories can be 15 minutes. They can be 25. We have 490 minute audio stories that we’re working on that are like audio movies.

yeah. We’ve got several that are around 45 minutes. So there’s like something for everyone. And the way that we’re trying to do the stories is kids are geniuses. So treat them like geniuses. So a four year old can fall in love with the story because the characters and the sounds and the humor that’s in there, the occasional fart joke, and then the parents and older kids fall in love with them because there’s these, Deep life lessons that are being taught through the character’s journeys in the stories.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I want to dig into something you mentioned about quitting social media eight years ago. I think it was, tell us more because I think that. That can almost sound impossible to an entrepreneur, particularly a digital entrepreneur. but you’ve pulled it off. just give us the story there.

Okay. It’s a good story. I wanted to leave three years before leaving, so I created a evacuate Facebook group. I could feel the toxicity back then of what it was becoming of just this, like there was these mixed signals that I was getting. In the space that just weren’t congruent. The idea of, instead of friends, we’re getting followers, the anxiety, people were feeling the loneliness, the screen addiction that was happening for me, my work days were on average 12 hours a day because I was spending three of those hours wasted on social media every day.

there was a lot of things, but I had one, one particular moment. We just had our kids soaring. So he was a baby. We were just launching the Grady course adventure. And I was up on a mountain watching the sunset by myself. It was a beautiful moment. Just reflecting on, I was feeling really lit up in my life at that time.

I was like, first part of my career where my artist and my entrepreneur self were perfectly married through the delivery of the Grady Course Adventure. I was stoked. And so as I’m watching the sun go down, I suddenly started to notice my mind pre writing what I was going to post on social media. In that moment, I realized my brain had been hacked.

My thoughts weren’t my thoughts. My experience was no longer my experience and Mark Zuckerberg essentially owns that experience now, and it felt so out of alignment with the life I want to create for myself and for my son and the freedom that I seek in all of my experiences. That I went home and I told my wife what happened and I said, I’m leaving.

I’m pulling the cord on social media. I’m deleting my account tomorrow. So I messaged all my friends that matter to me most and I deleted and what happened next was the reason why I think so many people don’t leave and I’m grateful for the experience, but it was hard as hell. It was crickets. It literally felt like I got erased.

I erased myself from the Matrix, I no longer existed. And I wasn’t having friends text me. I wasn’t having people call me. Nobody reached out and said, Hey, dude, what’s going on? Is everything okay? Why’d you leave? I saw your account’s gone. I saw your goodbye poster. Nothing. No party invites. No potluck invites.

Nothing. I just spent 10 years developing a following on the internet and it was all a lie. None of it mattered. So that was when I realized I needed to focus on real-world relationships. And so my whole philosophy on life and business changed as a result of being erased because everything that I thought was real, all these followers, it was all not real.

That was when I started my men’s group. My wife, I felt super lonely. So I started this adventure club. my wife started a group on our Island for a handful of moms who all had kids the same age that grew into a group. There’s over 1200 moms in it now from our Island. Our population is only 10, 000 people.

Like it’s the grandmothers of the Island, the mothers of the Island, and they, it’s become this incredible hub for collaborative support on our Island. and so that led me to 19 relationships based marketing strategies and how do we come back to the old fashioned way of valuing relationships and my philosophy when I left was like, I wanna have wealth in my life.

I want to do well. And I was convinced that in order for me to do really well with my work, I don’t need 10, 000 followers. I don’t need 10, 000 people on an email list. All I need is 10.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at Lifter LMS. com forward slash gift. Go to Lifter LMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide

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The post Education Entrepreneur Bradley Morris Shares His Creator Journey appeared first on LMScast.

In this LMScast episode, Shahjahan Jewel shares the story of how FluentCRM started as an internal tool for WP Manage Ninja before becoming a full-fledged product. He also shares insights about marketing automation

Shahjahan Jewel is the owner of WP Manage Ninja, a business recognized for developing well-liked WordPress products including FluentCRM, Fluent Forms, Fluent Bookings, and Fluent Support, was founded and is led by Shahjahan Jewel. Shahjahan highlights that FluentCRM offers powerful marketing automation and CRM functionality at a far cheaper cost than SaaS options like ActiveCampaign since it was developed with small businesses, creators, and WordPress users in mind.

Additionally, he emphasizes how crucial it is to integrate CRM features directly into WordPress so that users can handle all facets of their business including customer interactions and courses in one location and not depend on third-party systems. Shahjahan also covers the difficulties of using WordPress to manage a CRM, particularly for bigger email lists, and how Fluent CRM is designed to meet those needs.

Shahjahan also discusses FluentBookings, another WordPress Manage Ninja product that draws inspiration from Calendly and Cal.com.

Here’s Where To Go Next…

Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide

Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

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Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co founder of Lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. I’m joined by a special guest and friend. His name is Shahajan Jewell. He’s the founder and CEO of WP Manage Ninja, which creates a lot of products. Fluent CRM, Fluent Forms, Fluent Bookings, Fluent Support, and much, much more. This is going to be a fun episode.

We’re going to talk about tech. And we’re going to talk about entrepreneurship. We’re going to talk about WordPress. The first welcome to the show.

Shahjahan Jewel: Hi, Chris. Thank you. Thank you so much for inviting me. I’m really excited to chat with you today. And I think it’s a long time. We chat last time. I maybe that was in Taiwan.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, we had some good chats in Taiwan. And I remember, I think I first met you in Greece in person. Yeah. And I think sometimes when entrepreneurs get together, they have a lot to talk about. So it’s very easy to talk to you in this unique world that we find ourselves in. But first I wanted to get the story behind fluent CRM.

And the reason why this is really important to you out there watching or listening is. In the learning management system space, you can do a lot with an LMS and a CMS like WordPress, but you need a CRM too, to do more marketing automation, broadcast emails, do more advanced stuff with your contact records.

Can you tell us the story of how Fluent CRM came to be? Okay.

Shahjahan Jewel: So it’s a bit different. It was not intended to be a product actually. We started, selling press plugins back to the 18 and then when we released an update then we had to let our customers know.

That we have an update or, promotional email and those type of things. And first we tried, MailChimp MailChimp is really great, simple. The problem was actually like every time we have a sale, we have to, custom coding or, export the CSV and import those of the thing.

And we are not like marketer, but, we are all the developers. So we, we thought okay, How what can we do? Maybe we can just, have a very simple page where you can just type the subject and the body and hit send, and it will send those emails. So that was like the very fast version.

And, we are using it and, our developers and me too. Added use features like one of the, struggle we had like when someone actually send us an email or give us a support ticket, then actually we had to find, which products they bought or what attributes they have in the other system.

Then then we made a system like, okay, if I search by an email. Or, name, I will get all the details of that user. Then actually it became okay, it’s having shape and then actually work for a year on top of that. Then we see that, okay, this is something that we can actually release as, open source and people can use that.

That’s the behind the story. After, really the first version that was like, pretty fast version. When we released to the public we have a very minimal features and then people actually started using it. Give us, lots of requests. Like I need this integration.

And then actually okay, let’s org on it. We had a very, loans of Fluent CRM. And what we did actually, we reinvested all the money that we got from the loans campaign into it, and then we made it a really big so that’s the backstory of Fluent CRM.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I, one of the things that fascinates me about a WordPress based CRM and email marketing automation is how affordable it is.

As an example, I’ve been using active campaign for a long time. I have a somewhat large email list and the pricing got up to around a thousand dollars a month. And then I reduced the level of the plan I had cause I wasn’t using all the features. And then just this month they raised the price on my plan, another 100.

So it just keeps coming. And I’m like, it’s like you mentioned MailChimp. It’s great. We recommend it. It’s a, it’s got a free, easy way to get started, but once you scale it, it’s challenging. And I find it really impressive with Fluent CRM and a lot of your other tools to how Like fluent support is an example.

I pay help scout a lot of money every month. And I just want to get how you think about that. Cause you’re really disrupting the market in terms of providing in many ways, a more powerful solution at a much cheaper price. How do you think about that and design for that?

Shahjahan Jewel: So in a sense, like actually, we, I never reinvent any wheel or we never invented anything new.

The idea behind, all of our products actually, that is, we want to build products that will help the, small businesses like us or a, a shop owner, or, a creator who is, building a course or selling something like that, and, all those tools that exist.

Okay. So like you, you mentioned like active campaign is great. Like fluency RME is very inspired by ActiveCampaign. We actually used ActiveCampaign for months to understand ActiveCampaign, how the automation work. So we tried to mimic the ActiveCampaign automation into Fluent CRM.

And so our idea is actually, there has lots of tools in SaaS services. And many people actually like us want to use self posted services. They want to reduce the cost. They don’t want to give tax for success. Like when you have 2000 subscriber, MailChimp is free, but when you have 10, 000 subscriber, you are paying hundreds of dollars per month.

So that’s the idea, actually, like all the tools we want to. Build those tools. So it worked in self hosted it, use your server and it was great. It integrated with everything. So like fluency and our idea is actually like when you install that in your WordPress, I know you have say like a lift elements in store, so I will, so all the data of library limits into the same red database.

So I can actually easily, query those data. And when you see a customer, you can actually see who is courses this user enrolled, or I want to see who is my contacts are completed is a course or purchased a course. Those type of things like you are hosting your, e commerce, you are hosting your learning management system in WordPress, but you are, managing your contacts in a another server, another instance.

That’s not a, I think, ideal experience for a business owner, because you have to go back and forth to many places. So that’s our idea is actually like you are managing your, entire online business in WordPress. These tools should be in WordPress. So that’s by personal view about the self hosted open source and everything.

Chris Badgett: I love that. I think we, we think very similarly, like at the beginning of Lifter LMS in WordPress. So this is like in 2013 even the inside of WordPress, you had to get, All these different solutions to create a learning management system, like a separate membership plugin, separate e commerce, separate engagement, gamification stuff.

So we started with this philosophy of how can we just make it easier on the user and kind of consolidate? And I think that. With learning management system websites, almost all of them would benefit from a CRM. Why not have it in WordPress? And that just, it makes a lot of sense. I wanted to ask you a technical question about it.

I get asked this a lot and I’m hoping you can help me I can learn from you on how to answer it better. But when you do like you have a web hosting account, you put WordPress on it, you start adding other tools that send emails, a CRM and email marketing automation tool like FluencyRM, especially if you’re doing a broadcast email.

Can you explain the limitation of just WordPress by itself sending email and then maybe using Fluent CRM as an example, how do you give people the confidence that it’s going to handle the email?

Shahjahan Jewel: Yeah, so this is the, this is our Kind of challenge and not technical challenge, but it’s to educate our users.

It can handle your your server can handle , something like that. So IGA is actually for last couple of years, uh, the, we like many users actually, open support ticket okay, I want like friends CRM, but I’m really afraid that, something will break my email will something will be, will go wrong, something like that.

So only thing I actually like say to customers Look, you are selling your products from your WordPress. You are using WooCommerce. WooCommerce is really big and your server can handle that. You can actually host your email marketing tool this way. And the way we build Fluent CRM.

It very like we had to really do lots of overengineering to build FluentJRM. So something like that, say say you have, you are sending like, 50, 000 emails. And you are getting lots of traffic too. And if a friend said, I’m see that your, server memory is up to 70%, it will stop sending email.

We had to do, lots of background things. If we, if it would be a SAS solution, then we could actually easily, solve this technical challenges from our server because we don’t have any, control over the server. So that’s why we had to do this thing.

So influential and we like this, like we have a very powerful automation. We had to find out what’s the super optimal way we can do that. How we can manage something like we want to run only our code when these things happen. So yeah, definitely that’s like challenging.

Sometimes we find like someone actually sending say 50, 000 emails. And it’s say, they’re saying like, okay, how, why is. Taking one day or 12 hours or 15 hours. Then we had to, explain that when we asked them, we suffer you are using, so maybe they are using a like a shared server, like 5 per month server.

Then we had to explain that okay, you are, managing 50, 000 Contacts you are. sending these emails. So better, at least you are, buy a VPS like 20 per month and host that and you will get the full power and there will be no issue. This type of things like educating the users.

That’s currently challenging, two years ago, the things we, faced about this issue. Now it’s much less. I think more of most of the users are more educated now. There has, lots of good software management tools like they they let you connect your VPS.

So some, so there is lots of things, not like shared server, but there is lots of, new server management tools. They also help the overall ecosystem. I think after a few years, this will not be problem because, the servers are getting more powerful, less expensive.

Yeah, I think it’s a good thing.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, and I think the market is maturing too and realizing the difference between a five dollar a month shared hosting account for a brochure website or a Platform that needs more resources and there’s so many great hosts out there that are Doing better and offering, more resources.

If we look at what I call an education entrepreneur, somebody who’s selling courses and coaching, and if we look at coaching specifically the, there’s the booking element of Hey, I’m ready to book my coaching call with the coach. And I love this one because you’ve basically taken what tools like Calendly or acuity scheduling.

Do but you’ve brought it into WordPress. Tell us about that. Like how the About fluent booking.

Shahjahan Jewel: Yeah, so I am a big fan of Cal. com so we used both cal. com and calendly And then I saw there has no plug in wordpress Like this smooth Calendly or Cal. com, WordPress.

And also we are our marketing team actually planning to do sales call. So our idea was actually when someone actually purchased one of our license, select French CRM, then we will do a sales call. They can just, come to our site and then they will, fill up the form and schedule a call.

And then as I am very much, develop developer mindset and, it’s not actually, I would not say it’s a good thing, but, that’s what I am. So okay let’s, build that build a very minimal version just for our use and we can do that. Then, we the first version we started using it we, and then then we said okay, let’s build this as a project product.

And then we like work like seven, eight months. And, we try to. You can say we are really inspired by cal. com. I really love it I love the company how they operate and they are also like open source. They but they’re you know you need you know, lots of things to set up and everything and So that’s you know, like we built fluent booking And I think you know now, thousands of people are using it.

So it’s good

Chris Badgett: Yeah, that’s awesome Another one, and I’m starting to detect a pattern here that, yeah, so you’re scratching your own business problem.

Shahjahan Jewel: actually, like all of our for most of our product, we are the biggest user. A few months ago we released F Boards.

I think we are the, second largest user of that product frameworks like. alternate of, Trello. And so our whole company runs on that in fluent boards as a project management tool. And so fluent support, that’s the same kind of same story. We want to host everything ourself. So when we do, we, we try to find a Open source or paid version of that.

And then we see that if that, what’s for us so the fluent support before print support, we are using, awesome support. It’s a WordPress plugin. We’re using the premium version. The problem is actually they stopped, developing that plugin. So it was like the world is style custom post type thing.

And, our, uh, we could not use those data effectively and as well as it, it just slow for our, support agents. Then we built the fluent support and we tried to optimize that every millisecond level. Like the idea was actually if I, save one second we get like 300, 400 tickets per day and then it will actually help us a lot save time.

So that’s the idea of our products philosophy is actually. We need that. Let’s build it and then make it, sophisticated and then release for the public. And get the feedback as much as possible from the users and all on that.

Chris Badgett: I love that. And just to go over that fluent boards is like Trello, which is project management, which most course creators, coaches, education entrepreneurs need.

And Fluent support is similar to help scout or free scout so that you can manage email with teams and stuff like that, which is super helpful. These are tools we as business owners use every day. What’s your recommendation? Let’s say there’s an, a small business entrepreneur out there. Do you recommend they put it all on one website or have subdomains or how do you?

Like what’s your advice there? We get this question a lot. We see people do both. They like have a site with everything or they move things out. If you could advise, how would you advise?

Shahjahan Jewel: It’s just contextual, right? Different people on to manage different type way, but I can share what I, we do, we host everything in our main domain.

 The leisure is actually, like our shop is in our main domain our user account also there. And our support also there, our CRM is also there because if we, I would, host our CRM and subdomain, then it could again got the disconnect connection, right? We could not use all the data, all the events happening in my main store.

If you go to, our store, buy FluentCRM, I can easily actually, run an automation. I can send the welcome email series for you. I can check if you purchased, FluentForms or not. Then I can, send an email about the FluentForms. And, try to educate you about those type of things.

Now I can actually. Easily feature like who is who are our, main top paying customers, which products they’re using. So that’s for that. We use actually everything together in our main domain. So it’s less moving part. So that’s my, personal preference.

That’s how we actually, design these things.

Chris Badgett: I like that. I started with more separate stuff, but over time, they’ve all been coming back to just keep it simple and just get good hosting and you’re good to go.

Shahjahan Jewel: If we, if I need to upgrade my server, I can easily do that. Because even if I do that, all the things in different servers, I had to buy multiple servers, right?

So instead of buy the multiple servers, I can, buy the big server in it and use it. Let’s talk

Chris Badgett: about some of your entrepreneur journey stuff. Did you, a lot of people in our field start as an agency and building sites for clients. Did you do that or no?

Shahjahan Jewel: Okay. Yeah. So that’s the, my story is the same.

I started WordPress back in 2019. So I just started my university graduation engineering. And then, I I started building websites for myself like how to build the website. I had no idea. Okay. So I started with if you want yeah, so there was like blogger.

com was really like blogspot from Google. So that was like really popular. Then I can customize it. How I can, build something that I can customize. So that, I heard about WordPress. And then I, in 2011 I started my first like agency business. In that time mostly we would we are working with, few different, agencies in USA, basically, and USA, one was USA and another one is in health sector.

We were, building the tools for them. So mostly those project or with Laravel and Laravel just started like version three and people started using it we also, loved it the Laravel. And then I kept that business for, I think 17. And after that, then I see that okay. I built many things. I want to now build the product. It’s like the problem was agency business in that time for me you know, lots of projects coming. I am working on a project after three, four, five, six months. I have to move to another project. And then the same story goes every time and when I stop, working like, my revenue stream is not actually that that way it’s not, anywhere.

So that’s, then I realized that, okay let’s try to, build product for WordPress. Because I, in that time, I have a very great experience with WordPress. And that, that then I started, my first plugin was in 2018. And that, that was Ninja Table.

Chris Badgett: That was which one?

Ninja Table. What was Ninja Table?

Shahjahan Jewel: So you say it is a very, it was, so it was another story actually. So in my, agency, I so I was working on a with the bank. And that bank actually, they have to show some data in their office site at the front end was the banker bank’s front end website was and the idea was actually they have some data and they have to, manage that easily and show that in the front end and that need to be very searchable and also mobile friendly.

So then I could not find a, single plugin that can do it in WordPress in that time. So I think that is like 16 or 17, something like that. I built that plugin very simple like you can manage the data in the backend and it will show on the front end. Then actually I from that, I worked a couple of months and then, released us free.

Within just a few months, it got 5, 000 active installation. I was getting like lots of emails. Like I need this feature. I need this feature. And some people email me, okay, I am using this, plugin. I want to donate you. How can I donate you something like that? And then I thought okay, now.

Maybe this can be my first product

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. You have over or somewhere around 110 team members How did you?Let’s look at today Like what percentage like where are the people in terms of like developers designers marketers?

Shahjahan Jewel: Wow. Yeah. So around 30 percent 35 percent are developer. And another 30 percent is marketer.

Then we have support. So we have lots of support people. I think around 20 to 25 percent support. So that’s the distribution. And, I think it got crazy big. I know even I I don’t know how it got crazy big. So I think most of those hires actually happened in the COVID.

So when COVID started, and. We are getting, getting crazy. Like we are having lots of, sales, support, everything. Then actually, so when COVID started, our team members were like 25, 20 or 25. When we reopen our office, then our team members are like 60. And wow, so then, we try to, so another thing is actually like why we are, we have, lots of people the thing is actually like is a product is actually like a startup.

Normally we don’t share resources. So like a developer, we’re working on friends here and he will never work on fluent homes. And so that’s why every product is like a startup and they have a team. So there, those are like cross functional team. So from developer, marketing, and also the support.

And from this three department, we call it a team. And they have a like team lead and he’s the, managing everything. He’s the general manager of that product and he managed all the things when we, release update from the marketing, how we will, market these things, something like that.

And I think that’s why. It got big. If we share the resources, then maybe we would not be that big because same person would handle multiple things. But the problem is actually like when a person actually handle multiple things. Then he get distracted. So sometimes a product, uh, is not getting enough attention.

So we want all the products to be succeed. And so that’s that’s where we are, so many people.

Chris Badgett: So at your current stage, how do you see your role in what you do day to day or monthly,

Shahjahan Jewel: Developer, I told you, like I am, I still try to, code as much as possible, but I don’t get much time to, code.

So that I said, so all the, People are managed by, his team. And in the last couple of years, I tried to build those team. I tried to build those leaders from his, team. And then I, we also have another level that is like department wise. So like from the developer, I have, I have the engineering manager.

From marketing, I have CMO and also for big product, I have like marketing lead of that specific product from support. I have several leads So in the last couple of years, I tried to build this thing. There’s a structure. So even when I normally every year, I, I love traveling. You already know that.

So when I, go to traveling sometimes I, I never, check my emails or I never check my discord channel what people are doing because they are like autonomous, they are, self sufficient. So that’s that was, I think in my entrepreneur yeah, that was the hardest part, to make those structure.

Chris Badgett: Very cool. Very cool. In terms of marketing and growth, And maybe speak in generalities or specific stories, whether somebody is a course creator or any kind of small business owner or a WordPress professional, what have you found in your growth, like some marketing things that tend to work well for WP managing?

So

Shahjahan Jewel: for us the one thing really worked for us and that is word of mouth. Till last year we had zero marketing paid advertisement budget. We never run any ads this year. We are like testing some, ads social media ads, Google ads, those type of thing.

But auto mount, that really helped us a lot. So something like, so think about it. Some like that, week, one of our customer asked a feature for influence CRM and this week we we had a, a schedule, real estate, and then I asked the team, okay, let’s, try to, build that feature and ship it.

And we shipped it. I think several people asked for that feature, Facebook community. And after we release those user was really happy. And I think this type of experience when a customer get from a from a, plugin vendor on something like they never forget those things.

So when someone will ask for a recommendation or something, he will actually say that. Okay, use the friends here and we’re playing forms, something like that. So that helped us a lot. Another thing really helped. And that is from our support we try to, extra mile for a customer.

So sometimes our support engineers actually like to spend several hours to solve a problem. Even it’s not, our support scope and that is something really, helped us. And and when we, give better support and listen to our users communicate very clearly transparent way.

Then actually they purchase, all of our kind of follow up products. We have lots of customers who, purchase more than three products from us and our retention rate is really high.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I love the saying that the best marketing is a good product and that creates, word of mouth.

And then we get that too at Lifter LMS, cause we try hard and support that like people talk about that. It’s a differentiator. Support is literally a feature of the product. So treat it like that. How do you think about growing so fast? And you also just have like, when you release something, I noticed there’s a lot of integrations.

You just seem to have a lot of speed. So tell us about

Shahjahan Jewel: speed. It’s also a, our own power really, poor thing. So all of our way from the very first in WordPress, lots of the, companies or things there has, they, there has a big, very established business model that make really, lots of money for the company and that is tire based pricing, like if you.

Purchase this then you will get certain add ons. If you purchase, higher, you will get all those features. And the starter is that it’s a pro, but it does not have many features. And that’s really helped for a company to make more money. The problem is actually it’s not the, I think it’s very, my personal thing.

Okay. That it’s not a best expense for you. So from the very first from all, for all of our plugins, what we did actually, we don’t lock any feature for different pairs. So like when you actually, like if you, our, flint share and pricing is, it starts with 129. If you purchase on 29, only restriction is actually like you are getting the license for single license.

Someone is purchasing like 499 is agency. You will get like 50 site license. So that’s the only different and we don’t have any add on. When you actually purchase, fluent ceramic install that if you have lifter if you have WooCommerce EDD or any plugin that we have integration that will be automatically activated.

And that’s the, experience I want to give, I want to give the, very frictionless experience for the user. And I think, that is that also help they get better experience. We get less support ticket and yeah, that is we really like core thing.

I know, if we had like tiredness, We could make more money. Maybe our revenue would grow like 30 percent or 40 percent but that’s the this is the path we choose awesome.

Chris Badgett: I heard you say in another interview that Money is not the most important thing to you. So what motivates you?

Shahjahan Jewel: Yes, that’s true so my theory is actually say I am making X amount of money now next year, if I make five X amount of money, my lifestyle will not change.

I like it will not, it’s not like I have to buy a jet or I have a Tesla or something. The lifestyle I am living that’s the, that’s like constant I will do that. So when I had I have not lots of money. Maybe I, I had a level of my lifestyle, but it’s now it’s the like max, I don’t have anything like, I don’t so it’s not something like I cannot do that for money.

So what really motivate actually, like when I get a review, when I get a good word from a customer, or when I go to an org camp, I meet people and. They are excited about my product. They know me, that’s kind of thing like that really, motivate me. So another story is actually, I think, two years ago I got a very good offer.

Someone wanted to, acquire the whole company. And they really offered an amount of money that, I could go to retirement. I don’t have to, work a single day. And then I realized. Say, I am, selling the company, I am going to determine what I will do, what will my deal look like?

And I see that will be really boring. And I can’t, live without the life I am having. I cannot live with the team member I am interacting with every day. So that’s really very important for me. Like I, I want to, do things that I really love every day that make me like alive, feel alive.

Chris Badgett: So yeah. Creators have to create. So be careful with your company. What in this line of thinking and particularly for you with a large organization, how do you think about company culture and staying positive? Cause it’s easy. There’s challenges when you work on the internet, for example you may have some angry, probably every day there’s an angry customer in support or there is.

A team member who’s maybe burning out or having challenges or you’re having challenges in your life or so. You strike me as a positive, optimistic person, but like, how do you shape a culture? That’s, and it’s okay to have bad days and challenges and everything, but how do you think about that?

Cause that really matters in a company.

Shahjahan Jewel: Yeah, definitely. So yeah, what culture or, environment is really, matter for a company. Or our company, we have very, some core values. So these are values we hold whatever happens, these are super, super important and all of them is actually, we must have to respect each other in our organization.

Orchestrate space. Okay, we have to make sure that it’s really work friendly for everyone. Okay. So that can be, sometimes we get really, very, angry customer from support. And in that case, sometimes I say that our support people, we say that okay, for those customers, assign me those tickets.

And sometimes I had to. Tell my customer like, okay, you are interacting with a human being, so please, if you want, I can, instantly refund you, but please, be social. We are here to help you. Okay. We are not, rob your money or anything. So that’s I try to help my members, I try to understand what my, what my team, what specific team member want what’s their goal, and then I try to help them with their, career wise.

Sometimes, we have, many developer many people in my developer team who started their career support and then they moved to, diff team, and that’s the culture. Anyone can access anyone. So anyone can, come to my, room anytime and ask me a question or anyone can say something.

It’s not like that I say something in my office and everyone must follow that. If someone thinks it’s not the right thing to do, they can definitely, argue that they can definitely tell me that, okay, maybe we can do. This way this is a better way. This is not the best way. So that’s the culture from every step in my office that I I built, and I think that’s very important.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. You’re obviously a visionary and an innovator. Is there anything that you’re you’d like to share about the future or what you’re excited about now, or new products you’re working on or anything like that?

Shahjahan Jewel: Yeah, so yeah, definitely. So we really, invest Almost from the, when we started the company, we always all the money we make profit or revenue.

Most of them actually, goes to reinvestment and I did not, start another business or anything, but within this business. And from to R and D to, hiring more people working on new things, solving problems. We are working with some exciting things and I am really excited for this year.

Yeah, we will have. I think few new product this year. And those are something like really big, like we are working for the last two years for a product. And I am excited.

Chris Badgett: One last question here. How do you think about the small business customer that you’re building for? Who is that person?

And I know it’s you guys so it’s easy. You just scratch what you need, but any other ways you think about that when you’re. Innovating or designing product.

Shahjahan Jewel: When we like building a new product or anything our, ideal persona is actually a small business. So that is a creator.

or someone who has a online shop, who was like, say, you can say maybe the yearly revenue is, a few million dollars 10, 20 people in that team, they’re working something. And that’s when we design something we always think about them can they use them?

And so that’s the thinking we use to design like everything. That’s really help. Like when you have like specific category of the people, like I’m building only for them, then it’s easier to target easier to, create those type of experience.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, that’s awesome. That’s Shah Jahan Jewel.

And I want to encourage you to check out WP managed ninja. com that has all the products. But particularly check out Fluent CRM Fluent Booking, Fluent Support, and Fluent Forms for if you’re looking for a form plugin. And it’s a, it’s an honor to catch up with you. I always enjoy our chats and I’m really excited for what you guys are doing and the way you’re doing it in the world.

Keep up the amazing work. We’ll have to do this again down the road. Thanks so much.

Shahjahan Jewel: Thank you.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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