PODCAST - Every Business Is an Education Business (Here’s How to Grow Yours)
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AI is rising and so are we
Now let's dive in
I believe every business in the world is an education business. This is supported by the top businesses in the world by market cap. When you evaluate the number one goal for your business and my business, it becomes extremely clear. The number one job of your business is to educate the world why you exist.
It's that simple. [00:02:00] This is why you exist. Now, I went to business school. I studied accounting. I took a ton of classes on entrepreneurship, and along the way, I learned a lot of amazing things. I'm so grateful for that foundation and how that empowered me to get an amazing job at PricewaterhouseCoopers. I also, during that time, was able to study and become a CPA.
Well, all of this has really laid the foundation for what I do today. I wouldn't even be in education without all of that. Education has always been so, so important to me. Well, guess what? University of Denver, education company. Guess what? PricewaterhouseCoopers, an education company. They not only have a deep belief in paying for the education, the continuous professional education of all of their employees, their whole job is to educate their clients on [00:03:00] how to properly exist financially in the world.
That's it. That is what consultants do. This is what every business does. Your business does this. And if you don't believe me, then you tell me if this is what your business does on a daily basis. Don't you need to educate your customers to buy your products and services? Don't your customers need to know that you exist?
Well, just remember, there was a time when your customers didn't know that you existed. There was a time that every business has had customers that don't know that they existed. And it is your job to bridge this gap. And how do you do it? With education. That's all marketing and sales is. And once we change on what marketing and sales is, and stop looking at it as, "Look at me.
Look at me. Look at me," and flip it to, "This is how we can help you. This is how we can help you. This is how we can help you," everything changes. Well, this [00:04:00] isn't the only thing that you are working on every single day in your business. You also need to educate your employees on how to grow and create the job that they love within your company.
This is why your business exists. It exists to serve your customers and to serve your employees. And how do you best serve them? You serve them by educating them and giving them the opportunity to grow by working with your business. I have a whole episode about how the top companies in the world are all education companies.
I have it linked in the show notes and in the YouTube description, so you can go check that out. It is amazing how powerful education is. And if it works for them, companies like Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Google, then it can work for you. We're all education companies. So here is how to grow now that you know that you're an education company.
Some really simple steps that we can do. Let's start with customers. So we're gonna start with [00:05:00] customers. We'll look at employees next, but let's start with how we can better educate our customers and leverage education as our competitive advantage. That's what we do here at eLearning Partners. All of my clients leverage education to be their competitive advantage, no matter if they're a software company, a real estate company, a medical company, a health and wellness company, a technical training company, a consulting company, a coaching company.
No matter what, they have a physical product, we leverage education as our competitive advantage, and you can too. What you wanna do is you wanna start by showing your customers that you understand and care about their problems even more than they do. This is the biggest thing. When you do this, and you create credibility, and you create a relationship with your customers that your business is the business that gets it.
And you don't just get it, you get it better than they do. Well, the only way to show this is first you need to educate yourself. You need to educate yourself on their problems and on what the best solution to their problems are, and what the fastest, highest [00:06:00] quality solution to their problems are. This means deeply diving into the lives of your customers.
And I'm not saying in a way that Meta does with getting all the data and all this stuff, even though that's, um, crazy what they're able to do. But what this does mean is that you need to deeply understand. 'Cause when you do that, you are actually able to provide the best solution. You have to fully understand it first, and then you have to educate your customers on that, first of all, you know the solution.
Second of all, you have to teach them how to implement the solution, and this is a big thing I see. You'll have companies with just the best solution. They'll even have customers using the solution, but their customers may not know how to fully maximize the value of the solution. We need to do all of that, and that's really where step two comes in.
This is a two-step process, by the way. This isn't... This is not difficult. Step one is to really deeply understand what your customers need, and then step two is you just need to integrate education into marketing, sales, and fulfillment. So [00:07:00] all the messages, your marketing is the messages, the message that you're sharing with the marketplace.
That's what marketing is. Sales is the process you take anyone who likes your marketing and inquires for more, it's the process that you take them through to ultimately promise the fulfillment. This is what we're doing. We're educating them, our customers, on every part of this cycle, from marketing all the way to fulfillment.
Well, there's different ways to do this. How I do this, I do this in my business, I teach my clients to do this, and I see amazing companies do this. Well, when we're looking at marketing, what I do is I harness the power of social media. I say social media, but I really... I'm not on everything. I'm not on Instagram.
I'm not on TikTok. Maybe that's good, maybe it's bad. What I do is I use YouTube That's why you're here. I'm educating you right now. This is my marketing. Education is my marketing. I [00:08:00] also use Podcasts. And I have my own podcast. This is a podcast. You might be listening to this right now, you might be watching it on YouTube as a podcast, whatever it is.
But podcasts or stages is another place to educate. Now, it could be yours, this is mine, but I'm also a guest on podcasts, and I'm a guest because I want to serve, I want to educate. And, uh, I do believe that for the right client, my services, eLearning Partner's services, they are the best fit for the right client.
You may be the right client, you also may not be the right client, but if you are, you're going to get exponential returns by working with eLearning Partners. Well, the only way to know is if I educate you, and then you decide. You get to decide. So those are two ways we use marketing. And then blogs. I still blog.
Blogs were huge back in the day. Well, they're still extremely powerful for educating, and just creating content that then AI can look at, and then educate others for you, and [00:09:00] hopefully link to you. This is how I leverage education in my marketing, but let's look at some other things. Let's move to sales.
So for me, I have various free programs, and you can too. Free programs that I give to anyone who is interested in any of the software that I consult with. Now, I... That isn't all I do, it's one of the three pillars of eLearning. There's content, technology, and distribution. Technology is one of the three pillars.
Content and distribution are equally as important, but when it comes to the technology, I want to be able to serve as many people as possible powerfully. I have almost 300 businesses on TalentLMS. I have over 100 on Talent Cards, and I have about 35 on Kajabi, and 35 on LearnWorlds. Well, I can't serve all these people on my own, but what I can do is offer free programs that are focused on helping my [00:10:00] clients get the most out of the software, and I give these programs away for free in addition to a free trial of these softwares.
'Cause my goal is to educate you so well on how to use these softwares that you not only get the value that you were looking for in the first place, I want you to get even more value than you even never thought you could get, so that you not only start paying for the software, but you continue to pay it for the long term.
I want you to win, because when you win, I also win. That's what we're doing. That's what education allows us to do. It empowers us to... It empowers everyone to win. So free programs. Now, this is really cool. Maybe you're a company like Apple and you can put together free workshops. I invite you, if you haven't been into an Apple Store recently, or even if you have, maybe you haven't noticed this, go into an Apple Store and find out when all their free lectures are, their free workshops.
Well, last time I was in an Apple Store, I looked and it looked like on the hour every hour there was a workshop on how to do [00:11:00] something. With your Apple product. With an iPhone, a tablet MacBook, AirPods, MacBook, et cetera. They're literally teaching you how to use these things, and that's just the basic stuff.
Teaching you how to do advanced things with these devices. Well, this is brilliant. This is not only incentive to purchase once, this is incentive to purchase for the long term. So you don't even have to pay anything to learn how to use it. Yeah, you're gonna pay a grand on an iPhone, but then guess what?
We're gonna learn, but then guess what? We're gonna teach you how to get everything you possibly need out of it and more. This is why Apple is so successful. 'Cause they know that if you know how to use their product, you're not only gonna continue to use it, you're gonna tell other people how to use it.
They're gonna buy it. More people are gonna buy it. When more people are educated on your thing, they know how to use your thing, more people are gonna buy your thing, and they're gonna continue buying your thing. This is where we can really connect the sales and fulfillment process. So many times, and for [00:12:00] years, I think I even looked at my own business as sales and fulfillment being separate.
Well, sales and fulfillment need to be connected. And when you look at this, fulfillment, free workshop is also fulfillment. The free program is also fulfillment. These are part of what your people, your customers are getting with working with you. It's not just in the market. It's not just in the sales process, in the fulfillment process.
And really, we're not just connecting sales and fulfillment, we're connecting marketing, sales, and fulfillment, and we're connecting these through what? Education. This is why you need education in your business. This is how to grow your education business, 'cause every business is an education business.
This is how we do it with our customers. And yes, you can sell education programs too. Talk about this a lot on podcasts I'm a guest on. I have some podcast episodes on my channel too sharing how Microsoft has done this [00:13:00] so fluidly and how now at eLearning Partners, I partner with organizations to help you take control of something I call the Certification Revenue Accelerator.
By creating a certification for your business that you can sell, that certifies your customers on how to use the thing that your business sells, maybe it's a software, maybe it's a product, and we're creating value by selling the certification because by empowering people, by empowering our customers to be experts at using what we provide, this actually can help them get better jobs.
And guess what? They're gonna tell other people. More people are gonna get certified. You're getting paid not just for your product, but also to educate people on your product or service. It's amazing. Now, but it doesn't stop there. We can also leverage education to educate our employees. Also a two-step process.
You gotta show your employees that you understand that there is much more to life than the work they do for your company. You show them that you care even more. You show them they are important to your mission. [00:14:00] This is the same thing we did with customers. You need to show them that you understand who they are.
You understand that the work they're doing for you, they're doing it because, yeah, they probably believe in your company. They're also doing it because they want time with their friends and family. Think of yourself. Maybe you're a workaholic, and if you are, I invite you, create more time and space and energy in your life for other things than work.
Please, please do it. I used to work 100 hours a week for the first five, six years of this business, eLearning Partners, and there was a point where I'm just like, "There's no way I'm continuing to do this." Now, I work less than 32 hours a week, and most weeks, I work 24 to 30 hours. That's it. And I'm able to take plenty of time off during the year.
I don't really work Fridays. Maybe I work 10 Fridays all year. There's so much more to life than work, and this is what your employees are thinking as well. Well, once you do that, what you really need to do is know that, yes, we need our employees to be more efficient and effective at their jobs, to [00:15:00] produce more, to be more valuable from a bottom line, from a profit and loss statement, from an income statement perspective.
One challenge I see when people try to harness education internally to train their employees is they're going about it the wrong way. They're assuming the employees are just gonna take the education because it's there, but that's not how it works. What you need to do is incentivize any growth and training opportunities within your company with rewards related to what your employees care about most.
Yes, ultimately, if your employees are more productive, you'll be able to give them raises. Well, we gotta make sure they know that. We need to educate them on that. Educate them, by taking this program, your sales are gonna increase, and if your sales increase, you're gonna get paid more commissions. You need to educate.
Well, you're not always gonna be able to educate a direct benefit to your employees. There's some trainings that don't directly benefit your employees. They directly benefit your company. They may not directly [00:16:00] benefit your employees, and that's where the incentivize. This is where you have to incentivize them.
You have to just know what's really important to them. Maybe they want more time off. Maybe, maybe they want more family benefits. Maybe you just need to say, "Hey, by doing this training, you're gonna be less stressed." But you need to educate them on why they need to do the thing. And it might not just be even training.
You can educate your employees on everything in your business that's gonna make their jobs more valuable for the company. This is on you. You are an education business. And when you're ready to take this to the next level, I invite you to grab a ticket to my next Plug The Profit Leak challenge. Together in this live group consulting experience, you're going to learn how to leverage education as your competitive advantage and get the biggest return on investment for your company because you're gonna learn how to get the biggest return for your customers, your employees, and any other stakeholders that your company affects and impacts.
So what we're gonna [00:17:00] do, in just a couple of days, I've had clients unlock more than $100,000 per year of profit in their business by simplifying things and leveraging education as their competitive advantage. You can grab your ticket at plugtheprofitleak.com or click on the link in the show notes or in the YouTube description.
I'm excited to see you in my next Plug The Profit Leak challenge, and I'll see you in another 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 [00:18:00] in the show notes or go to www.e-learningpartners.com/elearning-platform-finder.
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AI is rising and so are we
