The Secret World Of Continuing Education Entrepreneurship

Kurt Von Ahnen discusses in this LMScast episode that continuing education (CE), which is one of the most reliable and scalable options in online learning, is basically corporate training provided in accordance with certification or licensing criteria.

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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 Badget. I’m the co-founder of lifter LMS, 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 LMScasts. I’m Chris and I’m joined by a special guest, Kurt Von Onan. He’s back on the show, and today we’re gonna go over the world of continuing education, doing it in WordPress, and really get into the opportunity. Of continuing education and how to think about it, how to do better at it, whether you’re a continuing education provider or an agency who’s assisting a continuing education provider with delivering the product.

But first, welcome to the show. Kurt 

Kurt Von Ahnen: Chris. Yeah, it’s amazing, dude. I’m so glad to be back. It’s always fun to chat with you. 

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Yeah. And this is good stuff ’cause you have a lot of experience with continuing education clients at Manano, NOMAS and a lifter for over a decade. We know that the people that are the most successful with our product are in the continuing education niche.

That doesn’t mean you can’t be successful if you’re a coach or course creator or a school. But based on what we know from our interviews and everything, the continuing education platforms that are successful are sometimes very successful financially and also in terms of the impact and reach they have.

One of the first things I wanted to ask you you had a great insight on differentiating the difference between corporate training and continuing education. So I like, where you went with that, tell us how you see those things as being different, but very related. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: So I, I think that’s interesting actually, Chris, because I don’t know that a lot of people would see things the way that I see things, but it’s because I’ve had the benefit of being I was the corporate training manager.

I, I am the agency owner and I do. I’m a course creator so, I have the, view, the perspective of all three. And when you are making continuing education, you are basically a corporate trainer, but it’s under contract. And a lot of people just don’t make that connection. They don’t really, they think corporate training is this weird, sterile, like some other kind of platform, some other weird thing that they’re taking where it’s mandatory training or whatever.

And then they think that continuing education is, some kind of other product. And then we think of course, creators as being like. This like soft cuddly I’m really committed to this is my passion and I wanna share knitting with you. There’s, like a lot of overlap between those things.

And continuing education to me is corporate training. It’s just, it’s corporate training under contract. You’re doing it to, certify people for another realm of expertise somewhere. 

Chris Badgett: And it’s also course creation, right? 

Kurt Von Ahnen: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, A lot of the services that we offer at Manana, NOMAS deal with not just course creation, but we think of course authorship or we think of instructional design or whatever the phrase is you wanna put on it.

But a lot of times we deal with clients that have some kind of overarching, like large training content, and maybe it’s some kind of legacy content that they had before, but they need to figure out like, how do we take this legacy content? And how do we chop it into pieces so that it could be like micro learning that fits in the modern learning environment.

And then when we take that large legacy content and we cut it down into those pieces and, we make that’s what becomes. For this conversation. That’s what becomes the continuing education, right? It’s okay, so we can take this giant course, we can block this down into three courses with micro learning lessons, and then the summation of those lessons become a course tracked, which become a certificate.

And then they take that every year or every two years, and that becomes the recertification to stay within that industry. And it’s. Gosh, I just realized everything I said probably sounds like a foreign language to a lot of people watching or listening, but that’s like how continuing education works.

It’s a major corporation or a major vertical in an industry is saying we require a certain amount of education and a certification for people to be qualified to do something, and then you have to create something online that says, yes, I have taught them. I validated their expertise and here’s their certificate, and then that certificate needs to be renewed every one year, two years, or three years based on whatever the continuing education requirement is.

And lifter LMS with the new continuing education add-on, just it nails it. Perfect. Chris? Yeah, 

Chris Badgett: and we just did an episode on validation, and this is one of those things like. I knew before we created continuing education specific software add-on for lifter LMS, that it was gonna be a home run. Because you know what, these people showed up 10 years ago.

They were using lifter LMS to deliver continuing education. Through all our interactions, we knew what their pain points were. We knew how to better serve things like credit tracking. Expiring access and recertification, making sure the certificate was perfect for what people who take continuing education, like my father who worked in the in pharmacy, he had to take, he still maintains his pharmacy license even though he is retired and my entire life I’ve heard my dad say.

I gotta go take a CE course and he would go to a hotel conference room and then they started doing some online. And then during COVID they did more online. And it’s just always, it’s a thing that’s been around forever, like so many license licenses, like nursing doctors, different healthcare positions.

Real estate. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: Banking, all this stuff. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: Dentistry, 

Chris Badgett: sure. Yeah. It keeps going. And it’s funny you mentioned dentistry because if somebody is just, I’ve always heard it in the online business space or really just entrepreneurship space is if you can get a dentist as a client, you can do really well.

’cause they financially you every time, I don’t know about you. Every time I go to the dentist, I’m shocked at the bill and the dentist is there’s a nice car outside and they’re, doing well. Basically what I’m saying is there is a lot of money in continuing education and it’s also a recurring problem.

I say problem in the sense that just like my father, he had to re, he had to get 15 hours or credit hours, whatever, every single year for an entire career. And by the way, there’s a lot of pharmacists on planet Earth and that’s just one niche. The pharmacy continuing education need. Yeah. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. That drives me.

I’m always struck on these talks that you and I have, how that comes to like personal experiences, but. Think about Dr. Obie that I’ve mentioned to you, right? She’s I think she’s skill, skills made easy.com or whatever. I, by the way, I am very good at doing sutures with, scorm, by the way.

She has a SCORM related course. It’s continuing education. It’s all about every couple of years nurses in the field have to re-certify in how to properly suture a patient. And so her course is like how to properly suture a patient. And so we have this a SCORM related course that’s continuing education every couple of years people gotta dive back in, get re-certified.

And the idea that the platform tracks. Expiration dates when they’re due again, sends ’em a notification that says you’ve gotta recertify and resells the course. Again, it just keeps that recurring income thing going from a business perspective, but it’s deeper than that. Like you didn’t create a course on suturing people and being in the medical field unless you were attracted to that in the first place, and that’s somewhat of a passion for you.

So if you’re the course creator that went that direction, you now have a platform. That takes care of your passion and treats your people well, and keeps people on time, keeps ’em certified, keeps ’em working, keeps ’em employed and keeps ’em making their money. And that’s like such a cool thing. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And the other thing too is like in all these industries, whether it’s pharmacy or other healthcare or real estate.

There’s technology and like everything is just changing, so there’s retaking things the way a lifeguard needs to have a CPR, the same CPR training every year and so on. But there’s also industries like I’m sure the pharmaceutical continuing education. A lot of it’s changed in the past 30 years, and there’s just a lot of new drugs and technology.

Illness, understanding of illness and disease and things like that. It just, it’s a constantly evolving so, not only do they have to re-up every year, they have to stay current on their changing industry. So it’s a very sticky business that’s like essential. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: I am a mountain bike coach with the NICA organization.

So we, work with students between sixth grade, fifth grade, sorry, fifth grade this year, fifth grade and 12th grade on mountain biking. And that sounds oh, you’re a volunteer, you’re a volunteer mountain bike coach. That’s gotta be great. No, it’s a pain in the butt. I have to certify every year on if you’re not alone with the student, there’s always an adult present. You don’t touch kids in weird ways you like. And then once you get past all that, then it comes into this is how you ride a mountain bike. This is how you go over a rock. This is how you go over a route. And so you have to do this certification every year to be qualified to be able to volunteer.

And work with these, kids. And just from the standpoint that sometimes when we talk about these e-learning projects, we talk about it from a revenue standpoint or from a money standpoint or from a career standpoint. And sometimes it really is just as simple as I just wanna volunteer and add value to people.

But you have to be qualified to be able to put yourself in those spaces, and that’s what continuing education helps us do. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. What else makes ’em so sticky? Part of it is that it’s, not, in some ways it’s direct to consumer because, but it’s not really, ’cause a lot of times, like in your case, even though you may have to, it depends on whether the business or the individual has to pay for the CE or continuing education.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: But there’s usually like a business or a licensing body or a corporation or something that requires this thing. So it’s very much a much more of a business-like version of e-learning. It’s very business heavy in terms of. Like the transaction, like I’m doing this to keep my job, but also to be the best I can do at my career, which is my, the work I do, it’s my career.

Kurt Von Ahnen: See, that’s the weirdest thing about continuing education is as you create your continuing education courseware, you’re not really sure who your customer is. And I’m just throwing that out there, honestly. So for instance. When I want to be a mountain bike coach, I’m the mountain bike coach, I gotta do it, period.

I just gotta do it right. If I am a mortgage broker and I want to keep my mortgage licensing active. Gotta, I’ve gotta pay to take those courses and be certified and do those things. If I want to be a real estate broker. If I wanna be a dentist, I’ve gotta pay for those things. But there’s the other side of the coin, and that is like the continuing education.

That was like my other, my, my previous life when I was the, training manager for Ducati and Suzuki. When I worked for Ducati and. Likewise, when I worked for Suzuki those companies paid for the training for all of the technicians to be able to, update their licenses, right? So to be able to say, yeah, I’m fully qualified to work on this year, make, and model of motorcycle so that I can do warranty work in, these areas.

And so when you get into the continuing education. Vertical of e-learning. You have to understand who is your customer, who’s actually gonna pay you and how do you approach those people, which Chris, I’m gonna make it sound like a commercial, but I can’t help myself. Lifter LMS has continuing education.

But it also has the groups feature. And so if you can combine continuing education and groups, now you’re not just selling to individuals, you can sell to those groups. And then the people that manage those groups externally of the LMS, like so. say somebody at Ducati wants to do training for 2,500 technicians, they can buy 2,500 seats of training.

They can buy a group. Invite the 2,500 students continuing education and manage all of it through a page on the front of lifter LMS. I don’t know of another LMS that lets me do that out of the box without custom development. And that’s just me, like me being like totally both feet in with the lifter LMS thing.

I know I’m biased, but that’s you guys are knocking it outta the park. It’s great. 

Chris Badgett: I appreciate that and I just wanna say like sometimes. Because Lifter, LMS is built on WordPress in continuing education markets. It seems too good to be true from a price point because it’s relatively cheaper than some other software as a service that’s super expensive with these enterprise contracts and all these things, it’s like how is that?

How is that possible with at lifter LMS price points to get all that and much more customizability and everything. I realize that it’s because a lot of the costs are not embedded in the product. So what I mean by that is because WordPress is open source software with a whole ecosystem, just the WordPress core software that has been built as a open source project.

Now, there are people that are paid to work on that from different organizations to kind of sponsor. The, common core software that we all use and build on top of. But if WordPress Core was a private company, it would be hundreds of millions or billions of dollars to build what has become the WordPress core.

But because it, the foundation is that open source software with a huge ecosystem of community contribution, some paid some unpaid. That’s part of the reason why the price is so approachable to what some continuing education providers see as a sticker shock. Not the bad kind, but the low kind. It seems too good to be true, but this is it.

It just takes an understanding of the WordPress open source community project and then what things like lifter LMS does on top of that. It’s, affordable, but. Don’t mistake that price for being a lack of effort and skill and contribution put into the underlying software. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: I feel like you are goading me.

Okay. I feel like you’re dragging. I’m into the conversation. Chris, 

Chris Badgett: I’m not goading you. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: Let’s just have it out, right? So the people that are listeners and viewers that are watching LMS cast, now, I’m just gonna say it, when I was the corporate trainer at Ducati, at Suzuki, I did work with BRP, with Triumph, with we’re talking about big companies.

I’m in charge of their budgets. I’m literally the guy that has to write the purchase order to buy whatever the next year’s maintenance and hosting is for the e-learning package. And. This is why I came to lifter LMS in what, 2014 15 when I was watching our company spend $400,000 on hosting and maintenance for e-learning, but still ran a department of six people to manage the e-learning.

That didn’t make any sense to me because think this through, right? If you have six people on salary, even if they’re a hundred grand a year, that’s $600,000. So that’s 600 grand a year just for salaries to manage the content of the learning, and then 400 grand a year that we’re spending on. Maintenance and hosting, and that was for these like weird, like SCORM specific custom learning platforms.

And for a lot of companies, especially in the continuing education space, this seems to be true where, they’re paying anywhere from $75,000 to $250,000 a year for hosting and maintenance. They’re still responsible for all of the content. Chris, part of why I got so excited and why I relaunched Ana Nomas the way I did when I left Suzuki is because I looked at that and I said, those numbers, the math ain’t mathen.

The math ain’t mathen. If I can have really good hosting. Even if I pay $3,000 a year for hosting for a company with 2,500 students let’s go crazy. Let’s just say I need the best hosting I can possibly get. I’m gonna pay three grand a year for the hosting lifter. LMS is 1500 bucks a year. I’m at 4,500 bucks.

I’m nowhere near $400,000, 

Chris Badgett: right? 

Kurt Von Ahnen: And so, that is where my head went. And then as I began to, relaunch m and Omas and help people transfer their SCORM content to WordPress and use lifter LMS and do things in different ways. And I realized that this call might be going a different direction than what we originally said.

To me, it was a whole, for an agency perspective, it was a whole other market to look at. And the weirdest part is when you talk to people and you say, Hey, you’re currently paying $300,000 a year for your e-learning platform. I can do it for 60 grand a year. It sounds like for people in the WordPress space, 60 grand a year seems like a lot of money, but for people in the e-learning space.

60 grand a year sounds like it’s too good to be true. It prob it can’t possibly be good and what we’re actually delivering is. A learning management system surrounded by a content management system that gives us a premium student experience and gives us the ability to add features to our LMS that corporations haven’t had in years.

And it’s the same with continuing education, a lot of continuing education. People are still locked into finding a platform that will run scorm. Which means they’re learning at Learn upon Bridge Blackboard, things like that. And so they’re looking at these other platforms instead of realizing, Hey, I could move this over to WordPress, surround it with a complete CMS, put marketing information and blogs around it.

Add community features for learners if that’s what my client needs, and I can give them a much better experience for, I don’t know, 40%. 35% of what their initial budget was. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah, 

The Secret World Of Continuing Education Entrepreneurship: it’s, 

Kurt Von Ahnen: I went crazy. I’m sorry. 

Chris Badgett: No, that’s good. It’s, mind blowing. I appreciate the way you frame that in. I want to talk a little bit about like the who, like the, who is involved in continuing education.

One of the thing I’ve noticed in lifter LMS community is that I’ve seen this pattern enough times that I see it as a pattern. Sometimes people work in a job that require continuing education and maybe they ultimately have that moment where they realize they want to become an entrepreneur, they wanna do their own thing, and they’re probably far along in their career, they’ve mentored a lot of people in their, job and they maybe they think that the continuing education that they’re getting.

That they have to take, they’re not that happy with it. And they have this idea like, you know what? I think I could do a better job or, do a good job and make continuing education for my industry. Which by the way, I really understand because I’ve been doing it for 20 years or whatever, and I’ve watched so many entrepreneurs pivot from employee to continuing education provider, and they get going with WordPress and Lifter LMS.

Then the funny other pattern that I see a lot of them say is something like, geez, I’m I’m not great at marketing, but this business is so successful and I’m just, I’m not even, I don’t even, I’m not even good at sales, or I’m barely even selling, or I do something like. When it’s time in a certain niche to get your ce, you got, you go to your, like your licensing board and they have approved providers and you have a menu of, companies that you can source your continuing education from that are like approved.

Like I know someone who did something where they their entire marketing strategy was, they went to the board. The board was like, oh, that’s awesome. We need some new fresh content in the space. Can I get access to see what you got? The content gets reviewed and they’re like, this is great.

We’re gonna add you to the list. And that is the entire marketing strategy. And it works in building huge, these entrepreneurs like X employee entrepreneurs or maybe they’re transitioning out of their active role. I’ve watched them become CE providers and it’s, fascinating.

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Kurt Von Ahnen: I, people are gonna get mad, but that, that to me is like the who not what you know, situation.

There’s a lot of who you knows that really find great success in the e-learning space because to your point. They’ve become experts in the field. They’re tired. So I come from a technical background working on cars, working on motorcycles, working on diesel trucks, airplanes. I have an aviation background.

And so what happens is a lot of these people, their backs hurt. They’re just tired. Their bodies are tired and, but. Through 20 years or 30 years of working in an industry they, that 

The Secret World Of Continuing Education Entrepreneurship: they 

Chris Badgett: care about. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. That they 

Chris Badgett: love. Yeah. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: That they care about, that they love they, end up knowing the fixed operations director of X, Y, and Z.

Right? And they go, you know what I really think I could just create a course about this and teach people how to do what I do without me having to do it all the time. And it’s a really good exit strategy for some people to get out of the whole idea of. In the power sports field, the best mechanic in the shop, the absolute, the the most knowledgeable, wonderful, most awesome mechanic in the, repair center is probably the worst person.

To be the service writer and the service manager in the service department. It just doesn’t work because you’re taking someone from the physical hands-on portion of it and you’re trying to squeeze them into a relationship position with customers and a lot of times that doesn’t work.

But if that person with a high tech background says, you know what? I could make technical training that shows other technicians how to do what I’ve done for the last 20 years and shortcut the, pains and, the mistakes that I’ve made. If I could take the 20 years of mistakes out and just give them the highlights, I could help them fast forward their own progression through the space.

Those are the people that seem to, that come up with really good courses that seem to be able to sell things really well to people at the higher levels. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah, and a funny thing happens when you make the pivot from employee to entrepreneur is you wake up one day and you realize, oh my gosh, now I’m just as busy and I’m just as overworked and stuff.

But then there’s something else interesting I’ve seen with these continuing education providers is they will start. Partnering or paying a subject matter expert to come in, they’ve figured out like lifter, LMS and like how to actually do it. They will license content to include in their courses. Maybe not the whole course, but like we need this piece or this template to show people and so they start building team around the project whether, and that could just be outsourced content or whatever.

I see some of them. There’s also a huge opportunity with continuing education is a slow moving industry that takes a while to catch up. So it took the COVID pandemic to cause or to basically force the CEU. You can’t just stop, like you gotta get your hours. So it forced it to go more online, which was a part of.

LMS and other continuing education industry tool growth because of ’cause of COVID. But the transition from continuing education being delivered in hotel conference rooms or in business parks or corporate offices and things to online is still very much unfolding if you’re very tech forward. You may think it’s all already been done.

Everybody’s online. No, they’re still going to these conference rooms. So sometimes all you have to do, and this is, part of my story with Lifter and starting in the organic gardening. My whole strategy with the permaculture thing that I did back in 2012 or whatever, was to actually go to this education thing.

This wasn’t actual continuing education. It was more classic course creator world. I would show up with my video camera. I would take the offline world, bring it online, make it available to the whole world through the internet. So there’s lots of great educators who operate in the continuing education world that have no interest in starting their own continuing education company, but would be glad to contribute to somebody else’s continuing education platform, ideally getting paid either a one-time fee or a royalty.

Or something like that, so you don’t have to do it alone. And I also notice a lot of times this is a classic setup, not just in continuing education, but all the e-learning niches. I’ve seen this so many times. There’s a partner, like a husband, wife or whatever, and one of ’em is a tech person and one of ’em is a subject matter expert.

So they’ll work together. Like I, I’m thinking of one continuing education platform where the wife. Is the subject matter expert has all those connections you’re talking about, knows all the speakers used to organize the conferences also worked in the field of that industry, but the husband is like the tech person and they bring it all together so that as a husband and wife, they start this continuing education company and one person isn’t trying to do it all.

You can pull it off. I’ve seen it done where you can have a one person continuing education business. More than, more likely than not, there’s a couple players involved. Somebody to manage the tech, the subject matter experts, business strategy and so on, and or like they can do all that except for the tech and they work with an agency to bring it all together for em.

They’ve already decided on the value of WordPress and lifter LMS and this continuing education features and certification and all that. So if you’re excited about this, you don’t necessarily have to do it all alone. I just wanna put that out there. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: You as, you were talking, Chris it, really took me back to my experience 2013, 1415 with Ducati.

And when I originally went to Ducati, they had a, contractor based training system, meaning everything was external. So if you were a Ducati dealership and you wanted to train your technicians, you had to send your technicians to whatever city. The, training was in, and so there was training for people to go to, and they would go to a live training.

It was typically two weeks long and it was theory and practicum. It was, theory and workshop oriented stuff. And then when I got the job with Ducati, my job was to, how do we bring this, all this contract training? How do we bring this into an in-house platform? That makes sense, right? And so this is an example of what continuing education could be for somebody to just let you know the benefits to the main company and to the people getting the training.

What we did was we took all of the theory, all of the theory from the classroom, and we put it into an online platform. That online platform was people could learn at their own pace. It was DYI, baby, it was you do, you go in, you take, you train at your own pace. That’s fine. Then you test and you quiz, and we make sure you know what you’re talking about before you come to the, in-person practicum.

So for a lot of continuing education platforms, hybrid training is the thing. So there’s gonna be something online and something in person. So what I want people to realize is the old system had people traveling for two weeks at a time. So that’s hotel rental, car per diem meals, the whole thing, right?

And then, so we took the training and we said, let’s put all of the theory online. And then we said, let’s do a practicum course in person, where we just really highlight the features from the online training. And then we take people into a workshop and we put tools in their hands and we say, okay, show us what you learned.

Like shim, this crank set set the gap on these intake valves. Set the gap on these exhaust valves. Set, like there was all these things and we said, you have to do all these things. They would do all these things and then we would take a final test and they would pass. Now for corporations that are listening and, viewing this podcast, what that amounted to was we cut the training budget in half.

Half, and then we certified twice as many technicians in that year. So we went from a model that was twice as expensive and certified half as many people to a system that was half as expensive and certified twice as many people. And that was from using online tools. And now think of that moving forward.

So if you think about it moving forward from a recertification standpoint. They’ve already been in person to certify, like they know how a torque wrench works, and they know how Dandle works. They know how these feeler gauges work. You don’t have to bring ’em back for the impractical personal thing.

Now you just have to refresh them electronically so all that expense is gone. All the per diem, all the travel, all the nonsense is off the spreadsheet and all you’re worried about is paying for the online platform and the cost to make the content. And in Ducati’s case, it ended up being a huge win.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, I think that’s a really important point that a lot of continuing education is not 100% online, but that doesn’t mean none of it is. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah 

Chris Badgett: Just, like in my father’s case with pharmacy, even still, like there’s a certain percentage or number of hours per year that have to be in person, and that’s okay.

It doesn’t mean the online version. Won’t work. And I also want to just mention like in a past episode we talked about validation and sometimes you need to pivot on the who you’re selling to. So for example, if you work in the legal field or the real estate field. And you’re trying to like here’s a, real estate example.

Let’s say you’re trying to sell a course to real estate agents and it’s doing okay, but not doing great. If you pivoted to wait a second, let me look at the National Association of Realtors, or my state chapter of that. ’cause real estate agents have continuing education requirements. I’m gonna take the same knowledge I have.

I might package it a little differently for the CE market instead of direct to agent like, and I’ll go through the need in the existing river of demand that recurs every year to keep a real estate license. That one pivot can make a dramatic impact. So if you’re a course creator, I would, no matter what the niche is.

I would just ask yourself the question, is there value in what I teach to some kind of continuing education market that is out there hungry for training on repeat every year? 

Kurt Von Ahnen: You your phrase of what you know, what’s more efficient, one-to-one sales or one to many sales. Every every time you say that it, shortcuts the whole thing about continuing education, it’s do I wanna sell one to one or do I wanna sell one to many?

Do I want to talk to a person and sell ’em one course, or do I want to talk to a person and sell ’em 50 examples of that course. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: And that to me is okay, I’m seeing it. Like I’m starting to, I, like I start, I’m starting to get it. So now how do I leverage that? Then it just becomes a thing.

Chris Badgett: Then there, there’s also another exponential multiplier here, which is a lot of this continuing education stuff. You, if you think really big, like I may work at one hospital as a nurse and I get excited about continuing education and then I figure out my state or my hospital systems need for continuing education.

Then there’s more hospitals, and in the United States there’s 49 more states who may have like slightly different requirements. I’m not saying it’s easy to rinse and repeat like, oh, I did it in Ohio, now I’m gonna do it in South Dakota. But the scale of where you can go with this is pretty impressive because continuing education and licenses.

Tend to be subdivided by state boundaries as an example. Or even different countries have different requirements or maybe you figure out a model and then you can change the geography. You could potentially change the language oh, maybe I’m gonna hire somebody to come into my organization to do this in Spanish.

And then we’ll go after the Spanish speaking continuing education market for the people that are in the exact same role as the English speaking world. And it just goes when you start seeing all these like layers of how you could expand. It’s really interesting. And, but sometimes, like with a lot of these that I’ve seen, the entrepreneur gets to the point where they don’t need to expand.

They’re I’m good, I’ve. I’m making enough here. I’ve been able to pivot from employee to entrepreneur. I’ve built a team, we’re doing well, everybody’s making enough money, we’re good. But there really is, I’m not saying unlimited upside, but there’s a lot of upside potential for just taking it to a slightly different market or even it’s Yeah.

Or different geography, different language, different niche, even. Because some industries operate very similar I’m trying to think of a specific example. There could be something that happens in a lawyer continuing education that’s also relevant to like a judge or court system continuing education or something that the person who ends up needing that is in a slightly different role. There’s just all these pivots that are just like stacked up and ready to be tested if you have the capacity, desire, and ability to expand. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: We’re so disconnected. My, my brain went right to bartending.

Okay? So I have a client that has a bartending course. 

Chris Badgett: Does bar do, bartenders do continuing education. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: Turns out that bartenders have continuing education and in the state of California you have to be certified to be a bartender. 

Chris Badgett: Okay, 

Kurt Von Ahnen: I wasn’t aware of this. So one of the things I did as an agency was I connected the state of California’s website to our customer’s lifter, LMS website.

So people actually register through the state of California, they get their student id. That student ID becomes part of their lifter, LMS id, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it goes on. Yeah. But to your point. That client recognized that California is not the only state that requires a certification for that.

And so they’ve worked with other states and we’ve created automations for them that connect the lifter LMS reporting data to those sponsored states, if that’s the way to say that. So that the states sell the training, he gets the revenue. The reporting goes back to those states and the states get copies of their certifications with every recertification and they have to be re-certified every two years.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And you just, 

Kurt Von Ahnen: it’s amazing. It’s just an ATM machine after that. 

Chris Badgett: And I just thought of another PI pivot, which is like public sector, private sector, government sector. Like for example, like doctors or nurses. There’s different sectors. There’s also nurses in the military who need training.

And maybe I don’t, I’m not an expert in military medicine, but there’s still nurses, there’s still doctors. They still need their stuff. And the gov governments do contracts all the time where they’re not, everything is provided 100% in-house. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: So, all these pivots or just verticals pop up once you nail one.

Obviously stay with it, perfect it, but look around a little bit and see where else you can expand into 

Kurt Von Ahnen: land and expand. 

Chris Badgett: That’s it. So if you’re looking to land and expand and you’re looking for, you’re intrigued by this I wanna encourage you to check out lifter LMS and the continuing education. I do wanna mention our continuing education add-on works no matter what you call it.

So this is part of the software and all our research and everything. You can rename it to CME, continuing medical education, pdu professional development units or whatever your, there’s a lot of lingo and vernacular in all this. But like Kurt was saying in the beginning of this episode, it’s very similar to corporate training.

It’s all not as different as you think. It’s just more about the application and the use case and the purpose and who you’re selling to and how they need their certificates and stuff. But the end of the day, it’s still courses that have continuing education attached to them. So check out Lifter, LMS if you want an agency to help you with this.

Kurtz got a very unique set of experience as a education provider himself, as a manager, a leader, a trainer as a website, WordPress lifter, L-M-S-C-E-U, niche, massive amounts of experience in all of that. So check out Manana, NOMAS for that and we wanna hear from you. I love interviewing on this podcast, continuing education entrepreneurs ’cause their stories are so cool.

Not just because they build great businesses, but it’s often a lot of lifestyle stuff. You know what, just like Kurt said, I was, I’ve been in this industry for 30 years. I either wasn’t financially ready to retire, or I just didn’t wanna stop working and I still love my industry, or I wanted to figure out how to do a business with my partner or my friends and make it happen.

I’ve seen it in my local community where doctors are. Conspiring on, we need to get in this continuing education game. I’m like, guys, I got a learning management system over here. Let’s, talk about this. And they’re like, oh, you know about that stuff. I’m like, 

Kurt Von Ahnen: oh 

Chris Badgett: I do. Check out Lifter LMS.

Check out Manna Nomas, and if you have questions about building a continuing education platform or how any of this works, check it out if you’re sitting on a backlog. SCORM content as an example. We have a whole free course on the lifter LMS Academy, how to integrate with that. We also teach you if you wanna do hybrid, if you’re moving away from scorm and you have a, you want to use a more modern WordPress content management system for creating your e-learning.

We show you how to ride in both worlds. Anything’s possible. But thank you Kurt, for coming back on the show. We really appreciate it. And reach out to lifter LMS and Manana nomas with any kind of continuing education question. We’re unique in the space and that we’ve really been around this industry from a long, for a long time in a lot of different angles and have seen people.

Even from the very early days of lifter LMS, which is 2013, immediately start using it for continuing education and our certificate system and making it work. Fast forward 12, 13 years, it’s now super set up and frictionless for continuing education and I just would love to see you use it. Check it out.

Thank you so much, Kurt, for coming on the show. We will do this again down the road. 

Speaker 2: 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@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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