PODCAST - how companies should use education to increase profits
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Today on the show, I'm gonna share with you how companies like yours should use education to increase profits. I've been in the education industry for more than a decade, and I've worked on every side of it. I've worked on the internal side, training employees. I've worked on the external side, selling e-learning programs, selling online courses as a product.
And I've worked on course design, content creation, LMS selection and implementation, and even overall [00:02:00] strategy. And what I've learned over the past decade working with solopreneurs all the way up to S&P 500 companies, and powerfully serving my clients, who are all doing amazing things in their industries, is that there are so many different ways that are untapped in a lot of organizations that you can leverage education to grow, and more importantly, to plug profit leaks in your company, to increase profit in your company.
Because the reality is the more profit your organization is bringing in, the more impact you can make in the world, the more people you're able to serve, the more people you're able to bring in to help you serve. I know a lot of people say that profit shouldn't be the most important thing in your business.
Well, I think that profit is what makes our businesses thrive when executed properly, when utilized properly, when utilized to support your employees [00:03:00] and to serve your customers powerfully. So how can you and your organization leverage education to grow your profits? Well, first, we gotta break education, e-learning, training, whatever you wanna call it, into two areas in your business.
We have internal education And external. If you're listening to this as a podcast, I got a line drawn in the middle of the board here with internal on one side, external on the other. Well, internal and external are very different, and they should be utilized in, and both of these should be utilized in your company.
Usually, when I start working with a client, they're typically either focused on internal or external, internal being training employees, contractors, teams. We're gonna say employees for short, though. On the other side, I'll be working with organizations who are [00:04:00] harnessing education externally, which means serving customers.
That's really the difference here is internal is serving employees and external is serving customers. What we need to do is leverage both of these things, and there's very important reasons why. Let's start internal. Now, maybe you already have internal. That's fine. Bear with me. I bet you I share something with you right now that you may not have thought of before.
And if you're waiting for me to say the external side, just give me a few minutes, and you'll get some value there as well. But you really need to fold both of these into your business. When we look at internal, when we're looking at training our employees, creating value for our employees, that's what we're really doing with education is we use it as a way to create value for whoever we're educating, our learners, or I talk about learners as perfect learner profiles, PLPs.
These are the people that you're serving with your education strategy. Internal. When we look at employees, we can really [00:05:00] leverage education to increase the effectiveness and increase the efficiency of our employees. When we do this, we wanna make sure that we do it in this order because what this means is leveraging education to first empower our employees to be more effective at their job.
That means that they are doing The right things, especially as your business grows. Even if you're small and you have a couple of VAs that work for you, a couple of contractors that work for you, maybe an employee or two, it is important that everyone's doing the right things that grow the business. And, uh, I talk about this a lot on this channel.
My clients know that one of the core concepts that we go through in my Plug the Profit Leak challenge, in my VIP consulting and advisory [00:06:00] program, and of course, in my enterprise learning partnership program, where organizations will pay me multiple six figures per year, plus give me a partnership interest in their education strategy.
And they really get the most value because I have enterprise learning partnership clients saving millions of dollars over time by leveraging education in their business. It's pretty amazing. And how we do this is really looking at what the ROI for the business is and aligning that with the ROI of our employees and the ROI of our customers.
Call this concept ROI PI. And if you wanna learn more, I invite you to come to my Plug the Profit Leak challenge. I do these challenges throughout the year, and you can buy your ticket to be in the next challenge. I've had challenge attendees within two days putting two hours of work in, finding more than $100,000 of [00:07:00] profit in their businesses.
So I invite you to grab your ticket to the next challenge by going to plugtheprofitleak.com, or clicking on the link in the show notes and in the YouTube description. But really, we wanna make sure our employees are doing the right things, and then we wanna empower them to do things right. So you can do things right and them not be the right things.
You can do the right things and not do them the most efficiently. That's why when we build our education program and we leverage education in our organizations, we wanna tackle both of these things at the same time. First, effectiveness, then efficiency. And when you do that, you're gonna see the KPIs, the key performance indicators, in your organization increase.
But the only way to do that is if you start with the KPIs. This is what we're doing, increasing effectiveness and increasing efficiency. But in order for this to be valuable for your organization, you need to define your KPIs. What are they? Are you [00:08:00] looking to increase sales? Are you learning to decrease your spend in different departments?
What are you trying to achieve? And then we work backwards into creating your program, and it ends up being increasing effectiveness and efficiency to support the KPI. Some other things we wanna look at when we're looking at leveraging education internally at our company is we can leverage education to increase employee retention.
Maybe this is a KPI you're looking at. I mean, when I look at KPIs, I'm really looking at departments. I'm looking at your sales department, your sales team. And even if you're small, your KPI may be increasing your conversion rate. I talk to 10 people right now, I close one. I wanna increase that to two.
That would be a KPI increase, a key performance indicator increase, 10 to two versus 10 to one. Employee retention could be a KPI at your company, but really this is just [00:09:00] something that becomes really important for us to focus on as we grow because employee retention means a lot of different things. But the biggest thing that it means for you and your organization is that if you have employees leaving all the time, it costs a lot of money to hire new employees.
It also costs a lot of time, and these are the two things that you're really missing out on when you have low employee retention, is you're missing out on money And time. Your time, their time, your team's time. So when you increase employee retention, you're actually increasing your money and increasing your time.
You're empowering your organization to utilize its time better so you don't have people leaving all the time, which this is one of the reasons why my clients focus so heavily on leveraging education, because one of the reasons why employees leave is 'cause they're not learning anymore, or they're stuck and they don't know how to solve a specific problem, [00:10:00] or they're stressed out all the time.
Well, why are they stressed out all the time? Maybe because they're not doing the right things. Maybe because they're not doing things right, the most efficient way possible. You can empower your employees to do these things better, and then increase employee retention. You win, your employees win, your customers end up winning, too, because they're used to engaging with the same employees over time.
Now, if you have a bad employee, then you don't wanna retain them. But if you have good employees, great employees, you definitely wanna retain them. That really brings me to one of the first decreases that we can focus on and leverage education for, and that is decreasing time to competency. This actually in hand increases employee retention because it takes a team member less time to get up to speed with what their job role is, with creating value for your company.
You win, and they win. Because people want to [00:11:00] perform. People wanna do a good job. So when you decrease time to competency by empowering your employees to have the answers they need when they need them, and to powerfully serve your customers, your profit will increase dramatically. Because instead of it taking one or two years for your employees to get to a place where they're break even with what you're spending on them, and you cut that to six to 12 months, you have given yourself a huge raise.
You might be saving $100,000 or more just on their salary. Then you look at your time, your team's time, holding their hand. You don't have to hold their hand anymore. This can increase the profits of your business significantly. And then we're also decreasing hiring and recruiting costs. It can cost a lot of money and time to hire and recruit, but you need employees.
Employees are the most important asset that your business has. Your team is your most important asset that your business [00:12:00] has. So this is a necessity, but only if you're not retaining and they're not competent. But when you retain your employees, decrease how long it takes for them to become competent, this is no longer a problem.
This is no longer a cost. You eliminate this cost, your profits will increase dramatically. And then, uh, this is one we've kinda talked about a little bit, but it's important to highlight, is you're gonna retain- Knowledge. This is something that people don't think about with employees, especially letting employees go.
It's something I've run into over the years unknowingly until it happened. When you lose employees, you lose knowledge. You lose knowledge that you may not get back. A lot of times you won't get it back. There's a lot of value there. So yeah, we wanna make sure that we get rid of bad employees. That could be bad because they're not effective or efficient at their job.
Could be bad 'cause it's not a culture fit and they drag everyone else down. Maybe they drag [00:13:00] you down. But if you have good employees, you wanna retain them. You wanna retain the knowledge, and let's just empower them to perform even better. That's why we started with effectiveness and efficiency. Let's get our KPIs set and leverage education to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the work that our employees are doing.
Now, we wanna do this, and we also wanna leverage education externally. So if you already have an internal program, I invite you to think about how you can leverage education externally. But when we look at external, the obvious we'll get to. We'll get to the obvious. You know the obvious, I know the obvious.
Your aunt and uncle know the obvious. What we need to look at is how can you strategically leverage education, how the top five organizations in the world do it. This is what Amazon's doing, Microsoft, Apple, Google. They're all doing this, and you can do it, too. What we wanna do is we wanna increase, leverage [00:14:00] education to increase product adoption.
And yeah, if you don't have a product and you have a service, then what we're really doing is increasing customer Acquisition. We want more customers, and, uh, we want customers talking about our products, our services, uh, fruitfully. Well, what I've been able to do over the years with small businesses all the way to S&P 500 is empowering businesses to increase the amount of people using their products by leveraging education.
One of my clients for the past five years, we've been able to leverage education to increase their core product sales by millions of dollars. Now, this was a holistic game plan executed by me and my team at eLearning Partners and their internal education department. Without the amazing people, [00:15:00] employees of their education department, this would not be possible.
But together, we've been able to do this, and you can do it, too. Think about Microsoft. Back in college, I was required as a freshman in business school to get certified in Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, and Word. I was told that why I needed this is 'cause this would help me get a job when I graduated. That is a win for me, the student.
For the school I went to, University of Denver, it's a win for them if I get a better job when I graduate 'cause they get to say that more people that go to their school have jobs when they graduate. Win for the school. The win for Microsoft is ever since I've been certified in these three programs, I've paid them $100 or more per year for my licenses for these programs.
That's for, like, 17 years, and I'll probably continue doing it. Win, win, win. Everybody wins. That's what we're looking at doing in our businesses, and when we educate our [00:16:00] customers how to leverage our products, and we educate other stakeholders, like purchasers, who dictate if someone's gonna buy our products, what is in it for them?
We align the ROI, this whole concept of ROI pie that I teach in my Plug the Profit Leak challenge. We're looking to align the ROI of you, your business, your employees, and your customers, and there's more that I talk about on the challenge. But when we align all of this, we get the slice of pie that we need to focus on with our business, and we need to leverage education to building our business, and this is how we exponentially grow.
This is how we exponentially impact people in the world. Well, along with product adoption, we can increase Customer retention. We already talked about employee retention. We can also increase customer retention because when customers know how to get the most value out of our products we retain them.
They buy more. The best case scenario when a customer of yours [00:17:00] purchases your product or service and doesn't understand how to use it or maybe they know how to use it in the basic level, but they don't know how to get the most value out of it the best case scenario is that they buy it, they hold onto it and they don't buy it from you again.
They don't say anything They don't buy from you again. They bought once, great. The worst case scenario is they tell other people that your product is hard to use. They either do this by word of mouth, or maybe they write reviews or write blog posts or write different things up online. You and I can combat this, though, by empowering our customers to know how to get the most out of our products, and we do that by leveraging education.
We need to educate our customers in our marketing, but we also need to educate our customers after they buy. We need to give them access to the easiest path possible to learn how to get the most out of our product or service. And when we do that, we retain customers. They use our product for longer. They buy more of that product, even.
The other thing this does [00:18:00] is when we leverage education properly, customers know what to buy next. We're taking them on a journey. They've bought from us. They've bought the same thing even multiple times 'cause they love our product, but they also wanna know what is next. We need to make sure we're educating them and showing them and offering our customers a way by educating them what to buy next.
If you harness these three things, you're gonna have a successful company, and that's why, yes, I know you can also sell education as a product. Great, and this can work, but if this is the only reason why you're harnessing education, you're more likely to spend a bunch of money setting this up and not increasing your profits for a long time.
This is actually gonna decrease your profits if this is the first thing you do. You need to primarily focus on what is already making money in your business and accelerating [00:19:00] that. That's what we need to do. We focus here first. So when I start working with a client, I start with what does your business already do?
One of my enterprise learning partnership clients, healthcare company, best product in their industry. Every doctor, every patient that uses their product is impressed, and they tell others about it. What we're doing is leveraging education so that more doctors and more patients know about it, know how to get the most value out of it, and know how they can impact and help others by sharing it with them.
This is the primary focus of leveraging education. And yes, we are also creating a product to sell, but this only works because we're focused on product adoption, customer retention- and letting them know, educating them what to buy next. So when you're looking at leveraging education to increase [00:20:00] profits at your company, we wanna look internal and external.
We wanna do both. This line shouldn't actually be here 'cause we need to do both. If you're already doing internal, I invite you to start working on external. If you're already doing external, let's make sure you're utilizing external to the best of its ability and potential, and then I invite you to start working on internal.
And I also invite you to come to my next Plug The Profit Leak Challenge. Grab your ticket to join my live group consulting experience where clients like my client Darren unlocked $100,000-plus of profit in his business after two hours of the Plug The Profit Leak Challenge. This could completely change your business and change your life.
Grab your ticket at plugtheprofitleak.com or on the show notes and in the YouTube description. I'll see you in the next episode
Thanks for tuning in to Learning Transformed. Now, if you're [00:21:00] 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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