PODCAST - the best businesses in the world are education businesses
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Today on the show, I wanna share with you what the best businesses in the world have in common. This is something I've been thinking about a lot lately, the importance of education in your business and mine. And I really wanted to see if I looked at the top businesses in the world, if I would see a correlation there as well.
Well, after evaluating the top five businesses in the world based on market valuation I can confidently say that the best [00:02:00] businesses in the world are education businesses, which is why you and I need to model our businesses off of the greats. So first, I'm gonna go through what the five top businesses are in the world, and how each of them is an education business, and then I'm gonna share with you how you can harness the power of education and leverage it like these five organizations are leveraging it in your company as well.
You may be a business owner, you may be an enterprise leader. Either way, we can learn from these businesses. The first is NVIDIA. As we're recording this video, NVIDIA is a $4.72 trillion valued business. This is the most valuable business in the world. They also have approximately 42,000 employees. This is actually a lot smaller than the other businesses on the top five for employees.
But when we look at NVIDIA, what is NVIDIA? NVIDIA [00:03:00] creates computer chips, and who is the biggest purchaser of computer chips right now? AI companies. Without NVIDIA, you and I wouldn't have access to our personal robots that we're able to learn from on demand on a day-to-day basis. NVIDIA empowers education for all of us.
Without NVIDIA, and other companies like NVIDIA, we would not be able to learn. We would not have AI as it is today, and AI is a tool that you and I can use to educate ourselves and to educate others with. So NVIDIA is highly invested in the education industry. Now, the next two tend to flip-flop depending on when you look at the market valuations of these companies.
But number two as of recording this episode is Alphabet/Google. The valuation of Google as of recording is somewhere around 4.4 to $4.5 trillion, and there's approximately [00:04:00] 190,000 employees. About five times bigger than NVIDIA, and that could be for different reasons. But really, when I look at Alphabet/Google, the biggest reason why there's more employees is there's more product lines, there's more service lines.
And when we're looking at this list that I'm sharing with you today, Alphabet/Google is really made up of three major education platforms. The first one is Google. Recently, we got Gemini, and then of course, YouTube. Well, when you combine these three we get the biggest compository of on-demand website, of on-demand search in the world, which really allows us to search whatever we wanna learn about and to get delivered blog posts, news articles, podcasts, Reddit threads, Substacks, et cetera.
This [00:05:00] is a way for us to go and research and learn about whatever we're asking. And recently, Google has combined Gemini with Search, which has made this even more powerful 'cause you can harness the power of Google's AI and Search at the same time. This may be the best way for you and I to learn about anything quickly and efficiently by harnessing these two pieces of softwares together.
Then you layer in the biggest video library in the world. And you have a powerful learning management system that all of us would like to have integrated into our business. Well, the great thing is Alphabet has done this for us, and more importantly, it's proven a business model that education is here to stay.
Education may be the most powerful thing that you and I do when interacting with customers, employees, and creating change in the world. This is the core reason why Alphabet is worth almost $4.5 trillion. [00:06:00] It is the second most valuable company in the world. Apple is very similar value-wise to Google. We're looking at the same range of 4.4 to $4.5 trillion.
And like I said, this fluctuates where they go back and forth on which is actually number two. And it's really recently where Nvidia has jumped to the top. It used to be Apple and Google fighting for number one and number two. Now they're fighting for number two, and you know they may catch up to number one.
When we look at Apple, we're looking at about 170,000 employees, so similar size to Google, which makes sense because Apple also has lots of different things that it does. While Nvidia powers the technology of education and Google's product is education, Apple is the best example of what I'd call a free university, and you and I can really learn from [00:07:00] this.
Have you been into an Apple store recently? Well, a couple of months back, I decided that I'd take some old computers, some old headphones, just some old Apple products, and I found myself at the Apple store. And while I was waiting to really see if I could get some store credit or if I was just gonna recycle these products, I noticed something that I haven't really noticed before.
Most likely because typically in the past when I've gone to an Apple store, it's been to try out a product, talk to someone about a product, which is very interesting because basically everyone who works at Apple is a teacher, and their job is to educate you about Apple products. So when you look at Apple stores, really they're free universities.
It's a place where you have zero pressure to buy. Your job at the Apple Store is to experience the Apple product. And [00:08:00] this goes much deeper than just every Apple associate being available to answer your questions and to provide you support, and to give you hands-on feedback on how to get the most value out of your devices.
Did you know that every Apple store also has classes that are free for you and I to attend, and to learn more about how to get the most value out of our devices? This is something I never noticed before. The last time I was in, there was this one woman who was giving live lectures to anybody for free, where you could go and pull up a seat Take out your device and learn how to use the device.
And it wasn't even a lecture. She would come up to these people and show them right on their device how to do these different things. And she was even tailoring it special to the people that were there. So instead of teaching generally, [00:09:00] she would go and see what kind of challenges people were having, and then she would address those challenges with her presentation.
I thought this was a one-off thing, but then I looked a little deeper, and I saw that there was a schedule for these courses with different themes, different products that they'd be teaching throughout the day, throughout every day of the week. So I looked a little bit deeper. And this isn't a new thing.
Apple has really been cultivating this strategy of the Apple stores being a hub for education for years, and this has really been a hallmark to them being such a successful company and, for the longest time, being the number one company in the world. And they're close. They're... It's a rounding error between Apple and Google, and they're very close to Nvidia.
And Nvidia is just so high because it's supporting all these AI companies. But really, Apple stores are lecture [00:10:00] halls. There's interactive workshops. So what can we learn from Apple? Well, when you are able to educate your customers on how to get the most value out of your product, you are creating value.
This is one of the reasons why Apple is able to charge a premium. Well, they also kinda have to charge a premium because this is a free service, but this is part of creating that premium experience for Apple users, for Apple buyers, and really creating this end-to-end ecosystem where you not only buy the product, you are empowered to get the most value out of the product.
Next, Microsoft is a little bit smaller, and it has really gone a different route as an education company. Microsoft is still a multi-trillion dollar business Somewhere around a $2.8 trillion business as of recording this episode. In addition, [00:11:00] Microsoft has more employees than Apple and Google, somewhere around 230,000 employees.
And this, yet again, is probably because Microsoft is in a lot of different sectors, from newly entering the AI business, to being the software backend, to S&P 500 enterprise small businesses all over the world, to selling direct to consumer, direct to you and I, to selling hardware and software. Microsoft does a lot of things, and even so, what I have found is Microsoft's success has come from education.
It was around 2009 when I first realized that Microsoft was an education company. I was a freshman at the Daniels College of Business at the University of Denver, and I had chosen at that point to be a business major. I also majored in film, so ultimately I got my BS in accounting and my BA [00:12:00] in film production, and then went on and earned my MBA as well.
As a freshman, I was already required to take specific classes to learn business software, and I believe I started with Microsoft Word, then I learned Excel, and then Microsoft PowerPoint. And how the college was set up is every Friday I'd have to go to these specific classes to learn how to use these softwares, and the end goal of these courses was to be certified in these softwares, to get Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint certified.
And the reason why the University of Denver offered this to me was because it was a way for me to boost my resume and put a certification on my resume as a freshman. This set me up to get really good internships, like working for Jones Lang Lasalle and PricewaterhouseCoopers as an intern while I was still in business school.
[00:13:00] And this was really the selling point to me as a student. And now that I know how the education industry works and how these organizations harness the power of education to create these win-win-wins, I know that what ended up happening is Microsoft either approached the University of Denver or with some sort of educational campaign showed universities across the country and across the world that by setting your students up with these certifications, it would make your students more marketable.
Well, what do universities care about? They care about their students getting jobs. 'Cause the more students at a university that gets jobs when they graduate, the more students that are gonna come to the university in the future, the more a university can charge to bring more students in, the more a university can go out and ask their alumni for donations because they're more powerfully serving their students.
So what Microsoft is doing here is creating [00:14:00] certifications to both educate and make a little bit of money. So you know how Apple is offering basically these free universities at malls and other retail outlets that you find Apple stores in? Microsoft is doing that, and they're charging students, professors, and industry professionals for these certifications.
So What they've done is they've set it up where when you have these certifications on your resume, it tells an employer, okay, that you know how to use Excel, Word, and PowerPoint, especially earlier on in your career. This is a requirement when I went and worked for PricewaterhouseCoopers. This is one thing they had looked for on my resume, that I not only knew how to use Excel, but Microsoft has certified me in using Excel, and there's a lot of value there.
One of my long-term clients, CoStar [00:15:00] Group, has done an amazing job with this as well, also S&P 500 company. We've created various certifications to certify an even more niche group of professionals, starting with students, professors, and ultimately industry professionals as well. And this is great because this creates a win-win-win.
It's a win for Microsoft because Microsoft gets to make a little bit of money selling the certification. It's a win for Microsoft because when you and I are certified in their softwares, we are more likely to continue using the softwares. Fast-forward 17 years later and I'm still paying $100 a year for my Microsoft products.
When you take that over hundreds of thousands of students and times 17 years, this is a lot of money. In addition to I had to pay for the certifications themselves. It's a big win for Microsoft. It's a big win for me 'cause I got a really great internship at Jones Lang LaSalle, [00:16:00] and I got a job at PricewaterhouseCoopers, and it wasn't just because of this, but this helped boost my resume to get those jobs.
It's a win for the school to make sure that these are offered because if it's easier for me to get a job as a student, then the university gets credit for offering that certification. This is huge when you and I are looking at educating our customers and figuring out how we can best serve them. We wanna create these win-win-wins.
When we do this, we create a business that can grow, and maybe you're not gonna become a $2.8 trillion a year company, but you are gonna be able to impact more people more powerfully in the world Well, Microsoft also has harnessed the power of Copilot, which is their AI platform, which is a way for Microsoft to plug in AI support into their already great software ecosystem.
Now, as of recording this, Copilot is one of my least favorite [00:17:00] AI generative softwares to date, but I still really like that Copilot is integrated into the Microsoft ecosystem. I believe Gemini is integrated even better into the Google ecosystem, and really how Google has integrated Gemini into search is phenomenal.
But this is really the goal of Microsoft as well, and as we continue on this AI journey, and Microsoft continues to harness the power of AI as an education tool for their organization, Copilot's gonna become even better and better, or maybe it'll be called something else. But really, when you look at Microsoft, what you and I need to learn is how can we harness the power of certifications or education in general to help us educate our learners, educate our customers, set them up to be more successful in their lives?
And ultimately, when we're able to do that, they're gonna buy more from [00:18:00] us because we've built trust. Education builds trust, and that's really what Microsoft has done for decades. Now, I know what you're doing right now. You're trying to count out, all right, we've talked about NVIDIA, Google, Apple, Microsoft.
What is the fifth company? Is it Meta? No, it can't be Meta. What is it? Amazon. Amazon is number five, and Amazon has a long history of education, and specifically customer education. But they've gone about it a different way than Apple and Microsoft. Well, before we get into how Amazon has become one of the most powerful customer education companies in the world, as of recording this, we've got somewhere around $2.6 trillion is the value of Microsoft.
Even crazier, Microsoft employs 1.5 million employees. It is huge. I think it's pretty obvious why they have [00:19:00] so many employees. It's because Amazon has to deliver packages all over the world. There's a lot of human power that is needed in order to run the company. And recent news has come out that Amazon also has one million robots that work for the company.
Amazon is a huge powerhouse of an organization, and it's all built on customer education. Well, when Amazon first started, Amazon started as what? Online book retailer. That's how Amazon started. And depending on how long, or maybe you're a leader at an enterprise organization. Well, the longer you're in business or the longer that you're serving the customers that you're serving, the more you learn about your customers.
And this is Amazon's story, is Amazon started as, hey, we're gonna sell books online to everyone, which really, that is the root of [00:20:00] education. Before e-learning and all these things, we learned everything from books And that's really what Amazon went to the market doing, is Amazon wanted to make purchasing any book that you could ever want easy so that you no longer had to go to the bookstore.
You just go on amazon.com and buy whatever book you needed. Well, what Amazon did, though, is started collecting data on its users. Started saying, "Okay, well, we're selling all these books to people, but they wanna buy other things. Well, how can we make sure that we offer these other things that our customers wanna buy?
Okay, great. Let's offer more things." So they kept adding more and more and more. Then Amazon realized, "You know what? We can't really sell everything on our own. We're gonna need s- other sellers to sell their stuff on Amazon." So Amazon went from online book re- retailer to let's sell everything [00:21:00] retailer.
Let's compete with all of these brick-and-mortar companies like Walmart, Costco, Target, all these different brick-and-mortar organizations, Home Depot. Amazon's like, "We're gonna create this marketplace, and we're gonna sell everything. We're gonna compete with eBay, but instead of selling used stuff on an auction, we're gonna sell new stuff, and maybe there'll be used stuff, too, but we're not gonna sell it on an auction."
And really, as Amazon grew, they learned another thing about their customers. They learned that customers don't always know what they need to buy next. They know that they need to go to Amazon, or they want to go to Amazon to buy it, because Amazon also found out that its customers want to buy and receive what they buy quickly, which is why Amazon went from utilizing other delivery services to, "We're gonna create our own delivery [00:22:00] service.
We're gonna become a logistics company. We're gonna make it so easy for our customers to buy from us that they don't wanna go anywhere else to buy." But even so, the reason why Amazon has become so successful is because it's not only easy to buy anything from Amazon, it's easy to figure out what you need to buy, because Amazon does that for you.
Amazon educates customers on what they need. Have you ever not really even known what you need, but you know that Amazon probably has it, and that Amazon can help you figure it out? Or is there one or two things you know that you need, and then when you go to Amazon, Amazon shows you, "Hey, you wanna buy toothpaste?
Well, you can also buy this electric toothbrush. You can also buy these flossers. You can also buy this razor set." And it goes on and on and on. Well, the next thing that Amazon tackled, though, is, "All right, so we started as [00:23:00] this online book retailer. Then we became the let's sell everything retailer. Well, if we're gonna sell everything, we need to educate our customers on what they actually need to buy.
And lastly, we need to make sure that our customers feel confident about their purchase." Confidence. Well, how do we do that? Well, we do that by creating a review engine And to take that even deeper, we're gonna utilize AI to aggregate what people are saying about different products and give a little synopsis so that it's easy for customers to know if it's right for them or not.
And we're gonna make it extremely easy to buy all this stuff. Amazon is the ultimate customer education company from the standpoint of an organization that sells everything. Amazon has Amazon Prime so that it can be in [00:24:00] front of you even more. The whole reason why Amazon has invested in different sporting events is so that you keep going back to Prime, you keep going back to Amazon.
The more that Amazon can keep bringing you into its marketplace, the more you're going to purchase. So Amazon's really created this closed loop environment. When you get a package, Amazon uses the package as marketing space to tell you that this sporting event is coming up that Amazon is hosting. When you're watching the sporting event, Amazon tends to market you different other Amazon products, different shows that Amazon has.
So when you and I are looking at our businesses, we need to look at how we started our business, the online book retailer, and where does our business need to go? Well, the only way to know where our business needs to go is to learn from our customers and then educate our customers. We need to [00:25:00] learn from our customers, and then we need to educate our customers about what to buy next from us.
Once you've already made a sale and you've created a customer, the easiest way to grow your business is to sell that customer more, is to serve that customer even more deeply. And that's where you and I need to take it upon ourselves to educate our customers on what they need to buy next, and again, and next, and next, and next.
So now that we've looked at the top five companies in the world, what do they teach us? The biggest thing that I've learned about education and about when you're running a business as a business owner or you're an S&P 500 company executive, what we need to do is look at how can we get the most ROI The most return on investment in whatever we're investing in.
So the whole reason why these companies invest in education is [00:26:00] because they've created these ecosystems in order to get the most leverage or value or return out of the education. So when you and I are looking at getting the most ROI out of whatever we invest in, and when you're looking at integrating education as a competitive advantage in your organization, there's really two sides to education.
There's external, which we talked a lot about today, and there's internal, which we didn't even talk about at all, how these organizations are harnessing the power of education to serve their employees. But this is something that they are all definitely doing. With hundreds of thousands of employees and million...
and, and over a million for Amazon, education is an integral piece to scaling and really keeping all the employees on the same page, [00:27:00] empowering employees to be effective and efficient at their jobs. Effective means doing the right things. You need all of your employees to do the right things, and you also need them to do things right.
Now, the reason why being effective is more important than being efficient is because you can do things right and them be the wrong things to grow your business. So when we look at NVIDIA, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, their employees need to buy into the vision, and these organizations need to empower their employees to know what the right vision is, what the right things are, how can they be the most effective at their jobs.
And once you do that, and the whole reason why Amazon has such an efficient delivery system, delivery [00:28:00] process is because their employees are doing things right. They're doing... They know what the effective... They know what the vision is. They know what the vision is, and they know how to do the vision correctly, and they're educating their employees how to do this.
Now, what we have talked about today is how these organizations are externally harnessing the power of education, and really, when you're looking at doing this, you want to do both. You get more ROI when you leverage education internally and externally. So when you look at NVIDIA, NVIDIA is harnessing education by being the technology behind education.
We call this support. It's a supporting product, a supporting service. In this case, supporting product that you can create... But what you can do is harness the power of education to support [00:29:00] other businesses, to support other products, just like NVIDIA supports OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, Google, Apple. It supports all of these organizations because it knows that education is the most powerful way to grow your business.
So it became a supporter in that process. And by becoming a supporting organization, they become the biggest organization in the world. Next, we look at Alphabet/Google. Well- What Google has done is it's created the biggest learning platform in the world. This is literally education as a product, and it's education as a product, as a product free and paid.
You have to pay for different versions of Gemini, and ultimately there's a pro... And even though YouTube is free and Google is free, [00:30:00] they're giving away the information for free, the education for free, and then selling ads to make money. This is how Google has harnessed the power of education. Then we look at Apple.
Apple has harnessed education as a marketing tool, and this is extremely powerful. Apple knows that, hey, we're actually not gonna charge for our education. It's all gonna be given away for free. But by giving it away for free, we're going to empower our customers to want to purchase more from us because they understand the value, they understand the ROI, they understand what's in it for them.
And when they understand what's in it for them, they buy more. We increase customer retention. Well, we also increase product adoption. So really, when we're looking at marketing and using education as a marketing tool, this is what so many of my customers are doing and why [00:31:00] organizations pay me multiple six figures per year to work together.
Because what we do is we harness what is already working in their business, which the organizations I work with usually already have the best products. They already have the best services. They just need a little bit of help making sure that, that the customers know about their products and services, and not just know, but understand why they need it.
So marketing as an adoption, product adoption, and retention tool. Apple is the best at this. Next, we look at Microsoft, and Microsoft is doing something that we call certifying or creating certifications And I talk about this in my Plug the Profit Leak Challenge program that I invite you to grab a ticket to.
It is linked in the show notes and in the description if you're watching this on YouTube. What we do is in this multi-day [00:32:00] live group consulting experience, we dig into your business and we find how you can leverage education to become even more profitable. And one of the things we talk about is the certification revenue accelerator, or CRA.
Well, this is exactly what Microsoft has created by selling certifications. They're certifying their customers, and by certifying their customers, their customers are going to continue to use their product. This is a retention tool. It can also be an adoption tool. When we look at Microsoft, and lastly when we look at Amazon, we're looking at an organization that educates its customers on what to buy next.
What to buy next. Because once you've created this relationship with your customer, they're gonna want to buy more from you, but [00:33:00] only if you offer it to them and they know that they need it. Well, that is your next step once you've created this relationship. Once you've already served your customers powerfully, you need to show them, you need to educate them on how to work with you deeper.
And with that being said, if you want to work with me deeper, I highly recommend that you grab your ticket to my next Plug the Profit Leak challenge. I do these challenges multiple times per year with amazing groups of business owners and enterprise executives, where we really look at your business and we look at how we can leverage education to not only save you $100,000 plus per year, but increase your profits by multiple six figures per year.
I've had business owners on the challenge on day two uncover $100,000 in their business, and I want that for you too. So go grab your ticket to the next challenge and go to plugtheprofitleak.com, and I'll see you in the next episode.
Thanks for tuning in [00:34:00] 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.
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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 for listening, and I'll catch you in the next episode[00:35:00]
AI is rising and so are we
