PODCAST - how to create elearning that pays for itself in 8 months or less
===
[00:00:00] Learning Transformed is brought to you by E-Learning Partners, your guide to designing transformational learning experiences in the age of ai. For millennia human intelligence was the highest form of intelligence on earth. Until now. Hi, I'm ai. I can process more information in seconds than any human in a lifetime.
This shift raises not only practical questions about the future of learning, but existential ones about the meaning of human life, growth and evolution
on this podcast hosted by me. Johnny Ha. We navigate these questions with clarity, creativity, and confidence. As the most adaptable species on the planet, we cannot only survive the rise of [00:01:00] artificial intelligence, but create better human centered, AI powered learning experiences that elevate humanity to a new era of abundance, transformation and meaning
AI is rising. And so are we
Now, let's dive in.
In today's episode, I'm gonna show you how to build an e-learning program that actually pays for itself. In eight months or less. Now, many e-learning programs take years to bring ROI to businesses or they fail to profit at all. But with my fourth step process, the same process I have used with s and [00:02:00] p 500 companies.
Like CoStar group to make a six figure E-learning investment, not only profitable, but paid back completely in less than eight months, resulting in exponential returns, equating to millions of dollars over time. Step one, define ROI.
Pretty simple. If you want to get a return on your e-learning investment, you gonna start by defining what that return is in the first place. What I find is that people get extremely excited about building e-learning programs, online courses, and learning. Experiences, and a lot of times it's because as educators, as business owners, we want to share our knowledge with the world.
We want to [00:03:00] share our knowledge with our teams. We want the best people on our teams to share their knowledge with each other. So it's very easy to get caught up in the creation of an e-learning program for the cool factor for the. Excitement factor in our business instead of bringing it back to ROI. So what you need to do is take a step back and define what ROI means for you and your company when it comes to bringing an e-learning program online.
Are you looking to create passive income online courses? E-learning programs and learning experiences have the potential to create passive income for your. Business. This means that you build the program once and you sell it automatically without having to hire more people. This is an extremely attractive reason for why [00:04:00] you would want an e-learning program.
Now you have to make sure that you have a program that people actually want to buy 'cause it's not about what you want to teach. Back in 2019, I decided to create my first e-learning program. I had been building out e-learning programs for other people, video-based e-learning programs for other people and organizations for about five years.
And I finally decided I want to create my own. But instead of going to the market and seeing what the market wanted, asking my learners my perfect learner profiles, my PLPs, that I talk about how to define these in my free masterclass LinkedIn description. Below this video, I came up with what I wanted to teach, and what I wanted to teach was how people could build deeper relationships with one another by starting with small talk.
And working their way down to deeper questions to connect. This was it. This was what I was really excited about at the time. So what did I do? I built that [00:05:00] program and no one bought it. No one knew why they needed to buy it because I created a program that I wanted to sell, not a program that people wanted to buy.
So yes, creating passive income. Is an ROI driven result that you can get for your business only if you are creating a program that people want to buy. And if you are interested in passive income and you're looking at building a program to sell, the other thing you need to look at is bulk income. What does this mean?
This means that you build your course and you instead of selling. One-to-one, which passive income is usually gonna be selling one-to-one. We build out your passive funnel. People enter the funnel. You sell one-to-one. It works really great. The problem is you can only sell one program at a time. Now you may have people hit [00:06:00] you up.
Four bulk purchases, but the majority of your passive income sales are gonna be one-to-one. Now you still wanna set it up so that people can purchase as a bulk price. That could be universities like my enterprise learning, accelerator partnership client CoStar does that. Could be businesses like they do, like my VIP coaching experience client, Mario does.
He sells one to many to businesses. His SOS program support over suicide. The point is when you're defining ROI, are you creating the program because you want to teach something or because there's a passive income opportunity and there is a bulk income opportunity, one-to-one and one to many. If you can sell your program, both one-to-one and one to many.
You are going to get ROI in eight months or less. But Johnny, I actually was thinking about creating a new [00:07:00] learning program to train my team members. Okay. Well if that is the case, then I want you to think about. What waste, inefficiencies and INE effectiveness can you eliminate by creating an e-learning program to train your teams?
This is the internal side of E-learning. E-learning has two sides. External selling to your customers and internal. This means training. Your team members. If you are building a program that does both of these things, you are going to maximize your ROI. So I highly recommend that even if you going into this, we're like, well.
I really just wanted to build a program to build some passive income. Whoa, that's really cool. I can make bulk income too. Great. Well, when you pair that with also building a program to eliminate waste [00:08:00] in your organization to exponentially increase the value of each of your team members, you are going to drive ROI even further, step two.
Use time as a tool. Dr. Benjamin Hardy, author of the Science of Scaling 10 x is easier than two x, and the audio book time is a tool, explains the psychological importance and power of. Time and really takes Parkinson's law to the next level. Parkinson's law explains that work expands. To the time it is allotted.
This means that if you don't have clear ROI set for your program that there is no urgency to [00:09:00] make your money back at all. So how are you supposed to get any return on your investment in 12 months, eight months, or six months or less if you don't limit the time allotted? The other way to look at this is when you set a goal, for example.
My VIP coaching client, Mario has a company called Sell A Soul, focused on wellbeing for all and together we have been uncovering how to half the world suicide rate in the next three years by 2028. Well, in order to do this, we are harnessing. Time as a tool, Dr. Benjamin Hardy talks about if you have a goal that is longer than three years out, then you are not using the power of [00:10:00] time.
If you have a goal that's even shorter a year. Eight months, six months, 90 days, you are creating additional pathways in your mind, in your brain, you are harnessing the power of your brain to problem solve towards the goal. So. When we looked at this goal of haling, the world suicide rate in the next three years, it became extremely clear that we couldn't just lean on creating a passive income type learning business while we are putting a funnel in place to sell one-to-one passively and to let people know.
That their organizations can purchase the SOS program in bulk. We know that in order to create worldwide impact, in order to hit this goal of haling the world suicide, right? In the next three years, we need to sell our program. [00:11:00] To companies, we need to sell our program to companies with a hundred plus employees, a thousand plus employees.
So what we've done is we've created different tiers for purchasing. We have our individual purchase, we have our a hundred license purchase, and we have our thousand license purchase. And each of these. Tiers comes with different things. A individual purchasing a course has different needs than a company.
A company purchasing a course needs help getting the course distributed to their employees. It's kind of like you're selling an external program and you're integrating internal program, internal distribution strategy. The company's purchasing your program in bulk, and then you are helping them distribute it to their employees.
So this is how you harness time as a tool. If your goal is to get your program to pay for itself in 12 months or less. Then [00:12:00] set that as a goal. Come up with how much you spend on integrating the program. So let's say you spend 200 K to launch your program and you want to make 200 K in the next 12 months or less, or eight months, whatever it is, eight months or less.
Then what you need to do is sell 200 K worth of courses in that timeframe. If you're like my client over at CoStar, we sell their flagship course at different prices, depending if you're a student, a professor. Or an industry professional. Now, CoStar Group is a international real estate data and software company, and the specific programs that we have built together are certifications on data analytics related to the hotel, restaurant and [00:13:00] tourism management industry.
And in these courses we leverage CoStar's software. So. Our goal with a $200,000 investment, let's say on average, they sold their flagship course for $300 a piece. That means we go 200,000 divided by 300. We have to sell about 667 courses to make our money back. Well, is it easier to sell this to 667 individuals, or what if we sold it?
To multiple universities or multiple companies, because universities will actually purchase a hundred to 200 courses at a time. If a university is purchasing this [00:14:00] much like Cornell, or if a company like Marriott is purchasing something like this, then we really only need to sell three to six deals to make the entire investment back.
In eight months or less. This is how we did it with CoStar, and this is just on the external training side. On the internal training side. At the same time, we integrated these exact same courses into training their staff. So when you approach this at multiple angles and you harness time as a tool, it becomes extremely clear how to get your ROI back.
Quickly. Let's move on to step three, perform in 80 20 and a 64 4 analysis on your e-learning program. What does this mean? This means that now that you have your ROI goals set. And you're harnessing time as a tool. [00:15:00] We need to focus our efforts because if we are going to get a payback on our e-learning investment in eight months or less.
Then we need to know what to actually focus on. We know what the ROI we want is and how that's going to translate into paying us back for our investment. And now we know that we need to focus our energy here. Have you heard about the 80 20 rule? Have you heard about the 64 4 rule? Well, they work hand in hand.
And how it works is research shows that 80% of results are created by 20% of efforts, and the reverse is true. 20% of results are created. By 80% of efforts. So if you [00:16:00] only give yourself 12 months or less, eight months or less, six months or less, 90 days or less to get a payback on your e-learning program, then when it make sense to focus on the 20%.
Well, depending on how short your payback period goal is, you may want to even take this one step further. Either way, I highly recommend that you take this one step further. What's 20% of 20%? 4%? What's 80% of 80%? 64%. So if the 80 20 rule is true, so is. The 64 4 rule, meaning that 4% of efforts create 64% of results and vice versa, 64 [00:17:00] of efforts create 4% of results.
So do you and your team want to be focusing on the 64%? Or the 4%. The 4%. So how do we figure out in your organization what you should be focused on? Well, for CoStar Group, when we started working together, we started with the 4%. Yes, they have multiple programs. Yes, you have multiple programs, multiple certifications, multiple learning experiences that you can create to train your team to make them more efficient and effective.
But I guarantee you that there's one program internally to train your teams to make them more efficient and effective. And externally that you can sell passively and in bulk packages that will drive the majority of the [00:18:00] ROI for your business, and it's your job to identify that for CoStar group. It is a certification called the chia.
This is their foundational certification, certification in hotel industry Analytics for another one of my clients, geo Tool. They have multiple programs, but most of their sales, 80% or more comes from their foundations program all about geometrical tolerancing. So what is your chia? Coastal also has a program called The Kata.
This is the certification of advanced hospitality tourism analytics. And while the chia is the 4%, and in this case it's the 4% that drives about 80% of results, the kata drives the rest. [00:19:00] The Kata brings this to a hundred percent results. Maybe this sounds like you, maybe you have one or two programs, and maybe one is obviously the one that you need to bring online.
Let's bring one program online first. What happens a lot of times is people look at it like, if I'm gonna invest in e-learning, I should bring all the things online. I need to sell all the things and need, train all my people all at once. You are shooting yourself in the foot by doing that. Because yeah, maybe you are overspending on your technology, and if you are, I have other videos about it, and I highly recommend that you check out my e-learning platform finder to save you and your organization, five to 200.
X just on your technology investment. What I'm gonna do is match you with the perfect learning management system or learning experience platform for you and your business and your [00:20:00] business needs. Then I'm gonna give you an extended free trial of that platform so that you can start integrating it into your business today without spending a dime.
I'm gonna give you a free course so that you know exactly what to do and how to integrate it into your business. And then once you decide to start paying for the platform, I'm gonna give you my. Platform to profit strategy session where we are going to co-create together your ROI plan to make sure that you're getting the most value out of the platform and your e-learning program as quickly as possible.
Check out my e-learning platform finder so that you. Don't feel the pressure of I gotta do all the things 'cause I'm overpaying or I'm paying X amount on my platform. Even if you're paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for your platform, which you shouldn't, you should be paying less than $10,000 a year on your platform, if not one to $2,000 a year on your platform.
But if you are paying way too much, and that's why the [00:21:00] pressure's on you to be like, well, I gotta put everything up. If the majority of your income of the results in your business come from the 20% and the 4%, then you're gonna make your money back faster by focusing on that one program that drives the majority of results in your business, and I got ahead of myself.
Step four is focus on the 20, or better yet, the 4%. Focus all of your resources. That means money, that means time. That means team. Send all of these to at least a 20. But better yet, if you can identify a four, then prioritize focusing all of this.
It's that 4%. You'll [00:22:00] see exponential results in your business by integrating this four step process into your day-to-day activities. And if you are looking for a partner to help you do all of this, I invite you. To check out my Enterprise Learning Accelerator partnership program with this program, me and my team at E-Learning Partners, we partner with organizations and become their e-learning partner.
We help you do all of this step-by-step, implement all of this step-by-step so that you can focus on what you do best. While we can focus on saving you six figures or more per year. On your e-learning investment compounding to millions of dollars over time, just like we have done with CoStar, and we get these results even after you pay our fee.
So if your company's making [00:23:00] $50 million a year. Has a educational unit or department or profit center in your business making half a million to a million dollars a year, looking to make half a million to a million dollars a year. Maybe you have a program that you started and you want help getting it across the finish line.
Maybe you're just not getting the ROI that you would've hoped with your e-learning program. Maybe that means you haven't gotten any at all. Or you're close to break even, but you want to see a 20% or more jump in your e-learning profit margin. Or maybe you just have outdated technology that you need help swapping out and integrating a technology that is five to 200 times less expensive and higher value than what you have today.
If any of this sounds interesting to you, then I highly recommend that you check out my Enterprise Learning Accelerator program. It is linked in the description below and in the show notes if [00:24:00] you are listening to this as a podcast, and I'll see you in the next episode.
Thanks for tuning in to Learning Transformed Now, if you're designing a transformational learning experience and wanna skip the overwhelm of trial and error. Check out our e-learning platform finder. Just answer a few simple questions and we'll match you with the right platform plus an extended free trial.
And as a bonus, you'll get free access to a course that walks you through building your learning experience on your matched platform. Click on the link in the show notes or go to www.elearningpartners.com/elearning-platform-finder. I'd also love to hear from you. Leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or drop a comment on our YouTube channel.
Thanks [00:25:00] for listening and I'll catch you in the next episode.
AI is rising and so are.
