Meet The Man Who Built a $5 Million Course Business

Today's episode is absolutely fascinating. I'm sitting down with Rich Thompson, who built his online tutoring business from literally zero to generating millions in revenue, and his story is going to blow your mind.

Rich started out as a one-on-one biology tutor charging £200 an hour (about $300 US), which sounds amazing until you realize he could only work with about 10 students a year. He was stuck in this paradox where he'd built this successful tutoring practice but had to physically sit next to students to make money. Not exactly the location-independent lifestyle he was dreaming of.

So he completely re-engineered his approach. He analyzed 10 years of exam papers, figured out exactly where students were losing marks, and created an online program that's now helped over 65,000 students. The growth was meteoric - he went from breaking even at $10,000 in year one to hitting $700,000 by year five.

But here's where it gets really interesting. When COVID hit, the UK government cancelled exams and 95% of his subscribers vanished overnight. Rich watched his entire business almost disappear. He told me if he hadn't been conservative with his spending that year, it would have been the end of his company.

We dive deep into his funnel, his marketing strategies, and some surprising insights about advertising to teenagers versus their parents. He shares exact numbers on ad spend and ROI that will make you rethink how you approach your own campaigns. Plus, we do a live review of his sales pages where I spot some quick wins that could dramatically increase his conversions.

If you're running an online course business or thinking about starting one, this episode is packed with lessons from someone who's been through the highest highs and lowest lows. Rich's honesty about what worked, what didn't, and what nearly killed his business is refreshing and incredibly valuable.

🔗 Check out Tailored Tutors: https://tailoredtutors.co.uk/?utm_source=the_art_of_selling_onine_courses&utm_medium=podcast
🔗 Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@tailoredtutors
🔗 TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@tailoredtutors

🎁 Grab the free download I mention in the episode at https://datadrivenmarketing.co/pages - it's our guide to the 15 elements every high-converting sales page needs to have.

Chapters

• 0:00 Cold Start: COVID Wipeout And Rebuild
• 2:40 From £200/Hour Tutor To Scalable Courses
• 5:30 Cracking Exams: It’s How You Write, Not What You Know
• 9:15 Building The Course Engine And Student Behaviour
• 12:45 Revenue, Growth Spurts, And COVID Shock
• 15:55 Subscription Ethics And Trust In Education
• 18:20 What Makes A Great Tutor And Why Many Don’t
• 22:30 Pricing, Value vs Tutoring, And LTV Timing
• 26:00 Ads, Word Of Mouth, And Attribution Reality
• 30:20 Parents vs Students: Who The Funnel Targets
• 34:40 Landing Pages That Sell Courses, Not SaaS
• 38:55 Seasonality, Channels, And Campaign Design
• 42:20 Differentiation: Exam Mechanics And Real Outcomes
• 46:30 Focus For The Year: Profit, Systems, Not More Content
• 50:20 Founder Fit: Creator Energy vs CEO Reality
• 53:20 Closing, Resources, And Next Steps

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:00

95% of our members just unsubscribe pretty much overnight. So it was pretty heartbreaking. We had to basically go back to zero on that. Had I normally done what I was doing, which was spend up to my limit of my means, I would have been probably 250 grand down, and then I would have had no students, and then I would have probably followed it. Probably would have been the end of me. My dream was a location-independent passive income business, and I was in this like paradox where I'm now only earning money if I'm sitting down physically in person next to a student. I ended up basically at roughly£200 an hour, which was great, but I was only working like 10 students a year. In my first year, I worked super hard the first 12 months and I made$10,000, but then second year, I was like£90k, and then£90k became like£250k, and that became, you know,£250k and then$700K. About 3,000 paid subscribers join us throughout the year. We've had about 65,000 students come to our academy. In total, it's not what you know, it's how you write it down.

SPEAKER_00: 0:57

Hello and welcome to the Artist Telling Online Tworkers. We are here to share winning strategies and superhaps. Top performers in the online course industry. My name is John Ainsworth. Today's guest is Rich Thompson. Now Rich is one of the UK's top science students for over 10 years now. And after achieving a first class degree in biology, he noticed that most students were overwhelmed by the A-level course content at the way that people tested here in the UK at age 18. People were unsure how to answer exam questions, they didn't know what to focus on. So what he did is he analyzed 10 years of exam papers, synthesized a textbook, and created easy-to-understand mini tutorials in an online program that makes expert health accessible without the high cost of individual future. Now his online tool has helped thousands of students massively increase their exam scores, often by more than three grades, while giving them the knowledge and the confidence to succeed. He now lives a digital nomad lifestyle, enjoys tea and intelligent conversation, travelling, music, science, good food, whiskey, and exploring without a mat all the things that we've started business online in order to be able to do live our dream. So today we're going to be talking about how he built his beauty business. Up to 700,000, 750,000 pounds a year, how COVID affected the business, dealing with extreme changes in revenue in different months because of his market, and what he's found about social media marketing. Rich, welcome to the show. Hello, John. How are you today? Are you well?

SPEAKER_01: 2:26

I'm well, yeah. I'm just uh getting some caffeine in me to uh wake up. It's a bit early here. As you said, I uh I'm British, but I actually currently live in Western Canada, so uh it's yeah, eight, eight o'clock in the morning.

SPEAKER_00: 2:36

So, oh thank you for coming on so early. So I covered it briefly there, but can you give us a bit of an expansion on who do you help with your courses and your tutoring and what kind of problem are you solving for them?

SPEAKER_01: 2:46

Probably I want to start with my individual tutoring journey. I was like a travel junkie, that was kind of my background, and then I would travel until my money ran out, and then I would come home and then be an A-level biology tutor, tutoring students individually one-to-one. My dream was a location-independent, passive income business, and I was in this like paradox where I'm now only earning money if I'm sitting down physically in person next to a student, and uh the only time I'm earning pounds. And so basically, I was like radically trying to think of how I could do something different. I also, the only way you can earn more money as a tutor is just by charging more per hourly rate, basically. And so I got really good, I was in demand, and my rate went up and up and up, and I ended up basically at roughly 200 pounds an hour, 300 US an hour roughly at the time. Which was great, but I was only working with like 10 students a year that could afford my time, and I'm working with very privileged students who are at private schools anyway, and then they're paying us all this money for additional sheet sheering. It wasn't really my my values and my ethos that I really wanted to promote. So I basically looked, read Tim Ferriss's four-hour work week. And when I was working with those students, I was noticing all the time that I would train them on the content and I would quiz them and I would know that they knew it really well. I would say, hey John, what's the answer to this? They would know it. And like inside out, back to front, I did a good job as a tutor. Yeah, good go on me. Then they would do their exams and they'd get a C and I'm like, John, what's what's going on? I I know that you know this, but you're not getting the grades for it. And so basically, after about two or three years of tutoring and doing that and making those same mistakes, seeing those students not achieve their potential, I was like, something's wrong here. It must be me. Like, there's something wrong with the way that I'm doing it. And so I essentially totally re-engineered my entire approach to teaching and especially training students for an exam. It is like a hoop that they have to jump through. I see it very much as a game. The students don't very much see it as a game because it's pretty arduous and popular. For me, it's very much a game. And as soon as you can get to see that, oh, there are certain mechanics of this exam that when they say this, they actually mean that. And the questions are kind of opaque. There's a lot of challenge to understanding the questions in how you write it down. I say to my students all the time, it's not what you know, it's how you write it down because their grades are 100% based upon their exam performance. And so I re-engineered everything I did, started with those exam papers, as you said in the introduction, basically digested everything. Exam papers are all over the map, multi-topic, they're kind of hard. And so it was a huge amount of work to like pull and synthesize all those, not just the questions, but obviously the answers to those questions, pull it all together, and then that became the bedrock, the frame by which I would teach something. Because the course documents, what nearly all teachers do is start with the specification. This is the government document. These are the things that you need to know to pass this test. But they're very vague. They're not an exhaustive list of tick boxes, this fact, that fact, this word, that word. That's not how they work. They're pretty, pretty general. So when I'm looking at the exam answers that are set on those spec points, I can see, oh, when they say this spec point, what they actually mean is these eight bullet points of facts and these eight bullet points of application of those facts. And so I can basically do quite a lot of the complex thinking for the student, and I can then teach them that material in such a way that it is in the same context that they're going to get when they get to the exam. So when they get to the exam, instead of just regurgitating words which are vaguely on the money, they're now using the words pretty much lifted off the mark schemes, and they're now, for the essentially the same amount of work, getting way more value from it. So that that was sort of my whole philosophy switch very early on in my sort of teaching career, which basically has then built the foundation of more or less everything that I do to help students. And it's I was a lazy student. I was the kind of student who was pretty smart but didn't want to work. My sister, on the other hand, she's a pretty smart and she loves the work. So she came home and she's three and a half years older than me. She would come home from school, we would five minutes walk away from school, so be home at 3:35, and then she'd be studying till 6 p.m. every day, and then usually after dinner some more studying, and that wasn't me. I wanted to do the absolute bare minimum. And so I basically created courses for people like me. Most students, obviously, it's a bit like going to the gym. Everyone wants to be buff and to be fit and to be good looking and have all these attributes. But when it comes down to it, most most people don't want to go to the gym two hours a day every day. And so it's there's we see a lot of analogies with actually like gym memberships, is that the aspiration of what the people want isn't necessarily that well aligned with what they actually kind of are willing to do.

SPEAKER_00: 7:15

And give people an idea of the size of your business now, whether that's like annual revenue or or size number students, whatever.

SPEAKER_01: 7:23

Okay. Um annual revenue these days, actually half a million dollars US, about 400,000 pounds. Fluctuates a fair bit, especially since COVID. Yeah, the first five years we were just like growth on growth on growth. I started the company with$10,000. And in my first year, I worked super hard for 12 months and I made$10,000. So I was uh breakeven after 12 months. And but then second year, I was like 90k and with very little investment. So it was like that that and then 90k became like 250k, and that became, you know, 450k, and then we were up to 700k revenue a year in five years, something like that. So that was like pretty meteoric growth, and then COVID came along and uh cut us off on the knees a little bit. I'd say this year we tend to have about 3,000 paid subscribers join us throughout the year, but as we'll probably get into at some point, that it's not a standard subscription model basis in that our students are training for an exam, and once they have done that exam, they have no need for us anymore. We literally send emails to our students after their exam saying, remember to cancel because we're not going to cancel it for you, which is probably pretty unusual for a subscription-based business to do that. But yeah, having good trust and having, you know, being being trusted in the space is something that's really important to us. And so otherwise, what happens is that students don't cancel um because it's out of sight, out of mind. And then three years later they say, You've been billing us every month for the last three years, can we have our money back? And nobody likes that. It's a bad experience for them, bad experience for us. So it's just much easier to be transparent with people from the get-go. We've had about 65,000 students come through our academy in those in in total. Um, we actually have more free members. We give a lot of our basic learning materials to schools, academic, like high schools in the UK. So we have probably about 8,000 school members who are basically free members signed up by the school, because I mean I do really just want to drive education forward, like evolving education, pushing it to the you know, it's a it's a archaic system, it's very Victorian education systems worldwide. So like doing anything I can to drag it's kicking and screaming into the 20th century, let alone the 21st century, would be would be tested from my perspective. So yeah, I'd say total students 10 to 15,000 a year, but probably only three to five thousand of them sort of as direct paying subscribing customers.

SPEAKER_00: 9:38

Got it. Yeah. My mum's uh was a teacher, she's retired now and she's still tutors. And I have long conversations with her about how dreadful I think the education system is. I'm like, this makes no fucking sense. It's like, what are you doing? How is this the way how do you think this is the best way of doing it? Like, are you out of your mind that you have each individual teacher as responsible for coming up with and explaining the thing when it's like, have you heard of the internet? Have you seen that there are resources? Have you seen like, oh my god, well, I don't know what it's like now, but when I was at university, the the tutors, the the the lecturers would write on a chalkboard and we would copy it down. And I'm like, for 50 minutes, that was what would happen. And I'm like, have you heard of photocopiers? This is insane. Have you heard of books?

SPEAKER_01: 10:22

Anyway, but uh on a slight side note to that, I I passionately believe this might be something that you that is a bit contrary to that to some extent, in that post-PowerPoint. I think PowerPoint was one of the worst educational tools ever invented because teachers do exactly that. So they create their presentation, and then for any repetition of teaching that lesson, they stand there and they click next. And so the students who've got the handouts printed out and they are not thinking, they are not writing notes, they are not engaging with it. We know now the pedagogy is that handwritten notes are more memorable than type notes, especially if you're a competent typer, because typists can type more or less at the speed of someone speaking, so they can write verbatim notes, they're using the part of the brain called the short-term sensory store, so they're just like just transcoding, basically. They're not actually synthesizing. So handwritten notes are slow. And so you have to decide which words am I going to write down, which words am I not going to write down. You have to do more cognition in the process of writing notes, which is that hard work that is lifting those weights at the gym, which might be not so pleasant at the time, but that is the stuff that is doing the literal, like synaptic connecting changes in the brain. So, yeah, for my for my opinion, just repeating PowerPoint notes is not necessarily an impact. Like if the teacher's creating it themselves, they're going at a pace that is more synthesizable to the student. So a little bit of like, but I totally agree. Most of the education systems that we use are nonsensical, they are outdated, teachers are overworked and underpaid, so there's very little, you know, you have lots of heroes out there doing working to my both of my parents were state school teachers, so just regular school teachers in the country. My dad would ended up being a head teacher, so all of our dining room conversation was always about education. I've just been immersed in it since I was born, and the frustrations of it, the systems that don't allow people to. My parents loved teaching pre-national curriculum. So when there wasn't a fixed document of what you had to teach, you could, as a teacher, express yourself. Oh, my mum was a biology teacher as well. So the apple didn't fall too far from the tree there. But she'd go out and, you know, go into the field and go to the pond and do surveys and all this kind of stuff. You could like inject passion into it. And then the national cricket comes along, which because I mean, let's face it, as someone who teaches science, we we know that most teachers, teacher quality falls on a bell-shaped curve. There's a standard distribution of teachers, which means 2% of teachers are awesome. It also means that 2% of teachers are absolute garbage. And so the the national curriculum is great for the people who are less than good, you know, less than average good, and it's not so great for the teachers who are, you know, gonna do a good job anyway. And they would probably be able to inject more personality and more more pizzazz into their teaching if they had free reign. But again, there's there's so many issues with mainstream education in basically all the countries that I've I've lived in Australia, I've lived in I've lived in quite a lot of countries now, lived in Canada, lived in Indonesia, lived in South America, and yeah, it's a challenge everywhere. It's one size fits none.

SPEAKER_00: 13:28

So talk to me about your model. Because a lot of people listening are selling just courses, right? Do it yourself courses. Some people are selling that plus group coaching programs, and you guys can you talk me through what's your model? How do you deliver that? How much is course, how much is individual, um, and then how does the the pricing for that work?

SPEAKER_01: 13:50

Okay, so um we have traditionally been just course. My dream when I set it up was a passive income business, which is now uh just a joke looking back because it is anything but passive. But um that was the dream. Build a course, sell it, never touch it again, walk away, dance into the sunset. Um, so the courses have very much been the the bread and butter, um, are the format of our courses. I did a lot of research in terms of again, how do I actually deliver something educationally valuable here? So they're all filmed on pen and paper, um, with a camera, top-down camera, and so it's a hand draw creating a page of notes. They're all landscape, which is actually a bit different. Most students are going to be writing like portrait like style notes, but their landscape, which is a little bit different, helps again, difference is more memorable. I tend to try to be a little bit shocking, like controversial where I possibly can. I use the colour-coded system with consistency of what colours mean things, as opposed to just making using colour to make things look beautiful. Predominantly it's courses, um, and that we've only introduced the individual teaching and tutoring in the last two years. So that is a growing sector of our business. Looking to capitalize on, we would constantly get asked, do you do one-to-one tutoring? Can can I pay you for tutoring it? I was always too busy and my teachers were always too busy to actually take that on. So the answer had always been no. And then eventually I was like, Well, I'm just turning away money here. I just need to start saying yes to these people. And so we have added in tutoring right now. I would say that the in terms of the revenue side of things, tutoring is just gonna catch up, but right now it's probably only like 20% max of our revenues coming from those one-to-one tutoring. We're effectively acting as a tutoring agency. So we are meeting the clients, interviewing the parents, meeting the students, finding out what their goals are, finding out what their blockages are, and then we have a team of highly vetted quality tutors who we then pair to that individual. We find a lot of issues with the tutoring industry because it's unregulated. You know, John, you could sign up today, you could become A-level biology tutor at£100 an hour and just put your profile online, and that could be you. And um, yeah, essentially there's a lot of it, but it often is. And a lot of time the university students who are we find three things make really good tutors. Um again, slight side note here, you have to know the subject really well. Now, that's not usually the issue. Normally don't people don't sign up to be a tutor if they actually don't know the material. You have to be able to understand the student, that's the joy of one-to-one private tutoring. And most importantly for us, you have to understand the exam. And that's where we find a lot of student tutors don't have the quality, is that they don't deeply understand the exams like a true, like an examiner is going to see students, they're gonna mark a thousand scripts a year, a thousand papers a year, and they're gonna see students just throwing marks away, not for their knowledge. But I was like, you haven't understood this little bit about this question, and that's why you've dropped four marks here. And so people with that kind of experience just make better tutors on the whole. So because tutoring's unregulated, we find a lot of parents paying for tutoring,£20 an hour, it's really a bargain. So cheap, he's doing a great job. My students learning more, they're understanding it, their confidence is growing. So it's not of zero sum, but their grades don't change. And ultimately, as a tutor, you're you are paid to deliver results. And I think that's why I got so successful so early in my career, is because I really understood. Aside from those first couple of years when I was just a student tutor making all those mistakes like everyone else seems to do, as soon as I figured out how to actually get students better grades, that's when my tutoring career took off. And so I to go back to your original question, we were 100% course-based for the first five years, um, doing adding more and adding more and adding more to our courses, which I think honestly was a bit of a mistake in hindsight. I wanted to make it the best tool it could possibly be. I was really wanted to be proud of the quality and the what it delivered. But I think I made it too big. It in the beginning, it was roughly 250 10-minute videos, really concise, really targeted at a specific thing. It was very easy what to do. Watch the videos, write the notes, job done. Then we added quizzes on every lesson. So then there's 250 quizzes, and then we started filming all the exam paper questions, and there's 10 questions per year, and three on three different papers, that's 30 questions per year. You go over 10 years, you're gonna have 300 exam questions that now people get inside it, and it's this giant ecosystem of quality resources, but it's less obvious. What do I do? I get students who join all the time. It's like, Rich, what what should I do next? It's like, oh, it's it depends on you, and like you can use it in so many ways. But there was a there was something nice about the simplicity of just having uh basically a click next. Do this, do that, follow this pr program. Um and I I don't know. I if I had my time again, I would probably definitely keep it a bit more simple. I think we I got a bit carried away with adding volume. And how much do you charge for the if they just get the course? Um okay, yeah. So sorry, I I'm very easily distracted. One subject is£76 a month for the subscription to the course access. Um so if you buy a second subject, it gets cheaper than that. So if you have biology and chemistry together, it's£120 per month, which when benchmarked against tutoring is you know awesome value. You know,£120 a month is£30 a week, which is an hour with uh with a tutor. And I can genuinely say that even when I was£200 an hour, if a student engages with the course and uses our courses, because it's unlimited, they can they can do 10 hours a day if they want to. Obviously, I wouldn't recommend it, but like because you you can do that, it is more effective than I was as a tutor. Yeah. And it's it's 70 quid something a month versus being you know 200 pounds an hour. So it I can when not when I can look a parent straight in the face and say, like, this is this is better than I was as an individual tutor at those prices, it's it's a relatively easy sell.

SPEAKER_00: 19:28

So how do you sell it? So obviously you're gonna get some word of mouth, you get some younger brothers and sisters who like their older brother and sister who went through it, you get some like I've bought the biology, now I'm gonna buy this other, this other course as well. But in terms of getting new Well, I I guess do you know what percentages, like repeat customers and word of mouth and what have you, and what percentages from other marketing you're doing?

SPEAKER_01: 19:56

I have sort of very uh like what's the word I'm looking for? I have like estimated numbers, I have kind of like gut feel numbers on those things. We word of mouth is massive for us. Obviously, our students are our students at a school, so they're sitting at a classroom, like with their classmates doing the same thing. So they are talking in in the classroom, in the playground, so there is uh very lots of networking between our students. So I think word of mouth is particularly important for spreading stuff between students. Although, strangely, when we introduced a refer a friend deal, it basically I think we've probably had 20 sales ever through our refer a friend program, which is was surprising to me, to be honest with you. Um I think initially it was online ads, it was Facebook when it was actually Facebook and not Meta, was the main ad platform that we used because our students were mostly there. Obviously, that's transitions now to be nearly all TikTok at sort of Gen Z demographic. Our students are 17, 18, so hardly any of them are on Facebook anymore. That's where the parents are. Um so the old folks like like me, I won't include you in that category necessarily, John, but uh yeah, the old fogies are on Facebook and the the young kids are on TikTok. Uh so now and probably drives in. I've just done a big analysis actually of last year's September campaign. So September's the back to school kind of time, and we run like a a free month basically for new users. And from that we generated uh I think about 400 people used the free month coupon, of which about 85% were new. And that was driven by 12 grand's worth of ad spend to give you some numbers there.

SPEAKER_00: 21:32

And do you know have converted, or is it too early in the state?

SPEAKER_01: 21:37

So this is last year's, I was doing analysing last year's campaign in to to influence how am I going to do things differently this year in this September campaign, which is obviously just kind of just pretty much wrapping up here. And yeah, so direct money from the coupon, this is quite interesting. So sales that directly attribute to the coupon generated about 30k of revenue, which is obviously yeah, but if you actually take the user IDs of the people who were brand new to us from that coupon, though they never appeared to us in our subscription log before that, and then you say, tell me all the revenue that's derived from those users since then, because they were obviously new at that point, we get about 80k in revenue from that 12 grand ad spend. Obviously, some of those people were word of mouth. There's no real way of knowing exactly how much of them came directly from the ad. We are trying to recapture the click IDs of the Google and TikTok um the ad IDs, but it's very hard to do the attribution modeling to actually figure that out. But solidly ROI positive for sure. Because we see a lot of user behavior where they'll sign up and then they'll cancel. And then they'll sign up and they'll cancel. If they do that, the coupon doesn't follow them through for the rest of the for the rest of their history.

SPEAKER_00: 22:45

So um, yeah. And so what's the margin like for you in terms of delivery? I mean, is it just is it like a standard course business? It's basically all margin because you um there's no extra cost per person, or is there is there any extra cost per person who's in the program?

SPEAKER_01: 23:00

We do quite a lot of support for our students so they can ask us questions and get answers. They are highly qualified exam experts and I believe in paying people fairly. So, you know, my competitors are paying students to answer their questions on their, you know, when they get questions from from the students. And when I say students, they're using university students to answer those questions at basically minimum wage or maybe 12-15 pounds per hour. My tutors are, you know, one of them has a PhD, two masters, been examining for years, teaching for 30 years. I'm paying them like 40 quid an hour for answering those questions. So it is uh there is a significant cost in terms of supporting our students. Um our SAS bill is pretty damn expensive.

SPEAKER_00: 23:43

So it's definitely there are but that probably doesn't change based on usage, does it?

SPEAKER_01: 23:48

I mean, not a no, not a huge amount. Not not a huge amount. So there is definitely something with Vimeo, if if I were to exceed a whatever it is, 20 terabytes of bandwidth in the year, and then it would go up. But you know, that they're probably fairly minimal relative to the actual number of students coming in.

SPEAKER_00: 24:06

Uh so that sounds like a great win. Like it sounds something like 80,000. Is it? Do you think it is a massive win? And did you spend more this year in order to try and go further with that? Um yeah, I I have a good habit of spending money, Joe.

SPEAKER_01: 24:21

I don't know quite exactly where it will go. So I have lots of spreadsheets telling me where the money goes, but it seems to um yeah, up until this point, as I said, I've been reinvesting everything. So I have, yes, it's been profitable, but I have been sinking that money back in into like building new courses for us to like take on a new teacher. It's basically two years' work full-time for a teacher to create a course for us. That's how like intensive they are. So if you're paying them, you know, generally that salary is gonna be 40 grand a year, 50 grand a year cost of the business ish. So that's like£100,000, you know, if you know, plus the equipment, cameras and whatnot. So you're probably talking 100, 150k to build a course. So yes, it's been profitable, but a lot of that's been resunk back into you know building more courses, essentially.

SPEAKER_00: 25:00

Um remind me of your question of you just asked me. Well, was did you it was it a big win in terms of your margins, and what did that change in terms of the campaign you ran this year? Okay, yes.

SPEAKER_01: 25:12

So the campaign we ran this year, I wanted to know how much of that traffic was kind of passive versus from the ads. So we split the campaign this year. This year we've done a public-facing campaign that we've run through our social media channels, that through our publicly on our website, sending out emails to our email marketing list, and have generated roughly about 150 people in basically without spending any money whatsoever. You know, tiny bit of TikTok promotion here and there, but you're talking like hundreds rather than thousands. And then starting basically next week, we are going to run an ad-based campaign running to landing pages which are not public. And we are then going to the only way people will find out be new coupons, it will be a completely separate funnel. There's only ad traffic. So we'll essentially know that traffic, anything coming from there, will be from the ads, and that will allow me to decipher how much the actual ROI on those ad spend is for real, rather than it being merged with all the word of mouth and stuff that we we can't really account for right now. So, yes, it's pre-AY positive. And this year I am basically instead of trying to grow and add more and make things bigger and better, I've decided that the courses are big enough and plenty good enough, and that we're going to streamline our processes and really have a better focus on revenue generation. My my goals so far have been not just wildly make profit, haven't just been like chase profit for the sake of making money. It's been profitable enough for me to pay myself and all the salaries of all my staff, and the company's been totally fine revenue-wise. But this year I want to I want to make it into a more mature, more systematized, more profit-making company to just stand it in better stead for the future.

SPEAKER_00: 26:58

I think that's great. It's it's you said how easy it is to spend money, and I see it. I see it in myself, and I see it in all of my business friends, is that it's it's so easy when things are going well to go, well, we should definitely get one of these things then, shouldn't we? Ah, this this the search engine work is going well. Definitely if I s if I spend 50 grand on an SEO agency, it's going to go better. And sometimes it does, and that was a very good decision, and that was that was exactly what you should have done. And sometimes it was just like uh you you just you just threw money away and it didn't work because whatever, there was there was a number of other steps that needed to be in place first, or you need to be involved more, or that was you'd already reached the limit on that channel, or whatever it was, and then you look around and you go, where the fuck has all my money gone? And it's like, oh my god, it's so easy for it to happen. I've been working a lot over the last couple of years with my business on like how can I make it so that the standard is the same for customers, that the team is still happy, and we make more profit per month from it. It's like, what can we streamline? What can we do more efficiently? What can we get AI to help with? Like, what processes can we get in place which mean one person can deliver 40% more work at the better standard without just hiring more team members, which I've done so many, like, oh, we're gonna hire more people, and oh look, we the prop there's no profit. I'm an idiot. What the fuck am I doing?

SPEAKER_01: 28:26

Okay, I'm I'm an unnebbing, which we're coming out very bad on the podcast um because I didn't want to speak over you, but yeah, 100% agree. I've I feel that I have lived that experience, I have you know, and sometimes I've hired people, and you know, those people have been fantastic and leveraged us to be able to, you know, serve more people and generate more revenue. Sometimes I'm hired people and I'm sure some of the customers are getting a slightly nicer experience, but it's done absolutely nothing for my bottom line. And ultimately, if they weren't doing that job, probably it wouldn't have made any difference to the company, other than I would have had their salary in my bank account and not theirs.

SPEAKER_00: 28:59

Okay, let's get back to your your ads funnel. I'm really curious about this. Um, what does it look like? So you've got ads running on just TikTok now, or TikTok and Meta, or where have you got?

SPEAKER_01: 29:11

Okay, two currently, actually, as we speak right now, our business is very annual cycle is completely skewed. So the students sit their exams in June, everything is building up to this crescendo of them passing their exams. It's essentially do they get into university or not, or which university do they get into. So obviously, human beings, by their very nature, quite last-minute. We see most volume in May, but with one month potential lifetime value is one month subscription if they join in May. Whereas if they join in September, the beginning of the academic year, it's much harder to convince students that yes, they need this help and to be paying for it all year. But if they do join, then they are obviously got a much longer road for like delivering subscription value and increased revenue for us. So, right at this point of the year, because we've been doing that promo, which is essentially non ad based, all that information. Internal marketing, social media marketing, that has been what we've been doing, and we're just about to switch ads on. And we will use a combination of TikTok, um a little bit of meta, but that will be nearly all on Instagram rather than actually on Facebook for students and some Google Performance Max and Google Click, uh Google um search stuff for students. We currently don't have an ads funnel for parents to sell the courses. We we advertise to parents mostly on Meta, mostly on Facebook, for um the tutoring side of things. So selling our relatively new tutors, one-to-one tutoring, private tutoring, because that's traditionally that's what parents are looking for, like trying to persuade parents that, oh, instead of doing tutoring, we have to re-educate them that actually this other tool might be cheaper and more effective. It sounds a bit too good to be true, and they're generally a bit skeptical. Obviously, very much depends on the student. If the student is not willing to log in, it's not going to do any good to them whatsoever. So if the student's motivated and sees the value, then sometimes we could persuade parents to do that. But that's why we haven't generally targeted parents very much with the funnel um directly selling the courses.

SPEAKER_00: 31:12

Is that a hypothesis? Is that like have you tested ads to them and they didn't work? Like what have you found? Because I um just before you answer, sorry, I'll come back to the question again. But last time we talked, I mentioned that I had run campaigns um completely different space, you know, trying to get people into fit uh fitness, into fitness classes, um, in my previous business. And I had been the hardest group that we could ever reach was teenagers. It was like, how on earth do you get teenagers to attend this stuff? And they were all interested, they wanted to attend, but they were so disorganized that they never actually like they saw the thing, and then nothing ever quite happened. And I tried every angle I could possibly think of, nothing worked until I started promoting to them parents and specifically to the mums. Like it was much, much higher to the mums than it was to the dads in terms of the results with that. So I suspect, I don't know, but suspect that there is something there of promoting to parents. But you tell me, what's your experience been? Have you tried it a bunch of times and it didn't work? Have you just thought this doesn't look like it's gonna work? What's been your what have you done so far?

SPEAKER_01: 32:18

Um I did try it, but it was so long ago now, probably eight years ago now, that my budgets would have been way smaller than my team. I didn't have I was working with a marketing agency who were actually here in Canada and not in the UK. So they didn't have a sort of an in-depth understanding, a native understanding of the school system there. So basically I did test it. We tested student versus parent, it was one of the first sort of major tests we did. Student was great. We didn't have the budget to really pursue doing both, so we just went all after students. It probably is worthy of a revisiting of that now, despite being the scale that we're kind of at as one of probably the larger course providers. I know that we're in the top hundred teachable schools in terms of revenue. Um, we still don't really have a marketing team. We have two people that work on our marketing, one more on the social media, email marketing, uh copywriting side of things, one on the more ad side of things, running the the digital ads. And even though we have those people, there's we don't really have the bandwidth to have like multiple different funnels, like a student funnel and a parent funnel for both the courses and the online tutoring. We don't uh it's it would be a nice to have, and it's something that I'm aspiring to create. But because our tracking is so challenging, it's very hard to know where we're ROI positive for sure. And so post-COVID, pre-COVID, I was like, you were as you nailed it, that mindset is like I can spend money on this. You know, if I spend 20 grand on ads and I only get 10 grand of that back and I'm 10 grand down, so what? It's 10 grand, you know, like when I had when the money was flowing, and like post-COVID, it's been much uh margins are much tighter, revenues are smaller, the economy's just not as strong, people aren't spending as much money on this stuff. And so it's I've had to be more conservative of my spend because I I didn't I wasn't prepared to to lose that 50% of, you know, I wasn't prepared for an ROI of 0.5, you know, that was gonna be like a problem to us in a way that it wasn't before. Um without definitely having more budget allows you just to be yeah, to be more experimental. And as you say, probably most things don't work, but then occasionally something does. We actually, I could show you a graph of in the early days when we're advertising on Facebook, we got so many clients I couldn't answer all the questions myself. I didn't have a team of people helping me answer those questions, so we turned off the ads, and like literally the April revenue was a big spike, and then May, which is normally our really busy time of year, when we turned the ads off, was a big dip in the revenue, and then we cranked it back up for June, and so we have this very clear like dip in the graph when we turn the ads off, which was like proof to me in my third year that oh, this money is bringing in students without that. Was just all the evidence I needed in a very rude and crudiment uh rudimentary metric that yes, this is working. And so since then I have generally pursued kind of the quick wins of paid advertising. Only this year did we completely rewrite our website for SEO. Um, and like every year I probably, you know, if I'd done that foundational work in the beginning, probably that would have helped us out a lot because it's a more of a slow burn approach. Um, that said, the whole SEO world is kind of being turned upside down by AI summaries right now. So classic SEO in terms of ranking on page one of Google is less important than getting the Gemini um bot to read your site and present you in the AI summary. Um, we actually get quite a lot of referrals via the UTMs from ChatGPT. So students like just querying ChatGPT and then quite a lot of our site traffic. I actually don't have specific numbers for you. I could find out if you want to add that in afterwards from the podcast, comes from Chat GPT. So that's a growing sector in terms of like non-traditional SEO. Nice.

SPEAKER_00: 35:52

Okay, so parents is kind of on the list of that would be great to run that experiment. Definitely might or might not work, like we said, and it might be that it requires lots of iterations within that experiment to get it to work. I believe it would work, but then I don't know your your audience in the same way that you do and what have you. I think there's a decent chance at least it would. Um, what page can you share with us one of the pages that you're sending people to from these ad campaigns? Could we look at that live on the on the podcast for and then if anybody interested in the show?

SPEAKER_01: 36:24

Let's uh where are people coming to? That's a great, that's a great question. I should know the answer to that, as you can tell. I haven't done all I've been watching recently. I mean, our homepage we kind of designed as a catch-all landing page because we get so much of our traffic um comes from. Can I screen share inside this this here? Oh, I see it down the bottom there. Uh so we get so much of our traffic is people essentially googling us. We see like they'll come from an ad, they'll come to our website, they won't complete a checkout on that session, and then they'll just come back to us via direct, and so we don't really get so we had to design our landing page actually as a kind of um as a as a landing page because that's the probably 99% or maybe 95% of our traffic is to this page.

SPEAKER_00: 37:09

Uh despite the fact that the the home page of Tailored Tutors at the moment, which is tailoredtutors.co.uk.co.uk. Okay, great.

SPEAKER_01: 37:18

Our courses are so specific to the British A levels. Like I get asked all the time, why don't you sell this in America? Why don't you sell this in other countries? It's like, no, I have this course is completely curated for the British A-level exam. We sell it to other countries that do the A-level exams. There's some in like China and in Hong Kong and uh, you know, Abu Dhabi and lots of sort of franchised British private schools teaching the British education system overseas. But unless you are doing that, it is it's not of no value. The biology is still the biology, but people don't study courses for fun. You know, there's a cliff edge. There's a reason why people are doing this thing, is to get the grades, you know. So, like teaching a for I used to teach English as a foreign language, and like I could create an English uh as a foreign language course. If it's just for general holiday English, it's gonna have no traffic. If it's to, oh, this is the IELTS exam because you need a six in your IELTS to get into an English-speaking university, now there's a market driver behind you need that number six piece of paper, and so now I can teach you, and uh now you will part cash to buy my course. So I think for people who are thinking about creating online courses, why would your users how do they benefit? What is in it for them? You know, if you can open up a pathway to more money or to, you know, more opportunities by them completing your course, then you're you stand a good chance for actually making money. There's a driver behind it. Whereas if it's just a general interest, if you're teaching how to paint watercolour, obviously some people will do that, and power to you for doing it, but you're gonna see most people actually commit money to something where there's a tangible benefit from them. Um so you can see now we basically have these twin streams. One is private tutoring and one is a free trial of our academic courses in terms of um the and they all want a guarantee. It's very hard to offer that, but we we work really hard to make sure that we know that our course is very effective. So if students follow the plan of work that we lay out for them, we do say that if you don't get your grades, then we will give you our money back, which is you know, we don't have actually many students do that, um, as it turns out. And then we run into some KPIs to build trust, basically, off the bat. So you can see some of the the core numbers there. We have lots of five-star reviews. Um, yeah, probably, I think well, we're probably over a million, honestly, learning hours at this point. This this was written maybe a year ago. We have such high volume of people consuming our lessons that um, yeah, the this number's going up and up and all the time. As I mentioned before, 65,000 students. We have an obscene number of videos. This is again, this is an underestimate. We had to do a video migration from Wistia to uh Vimeo. I think we had 19,000 unique videos that we had to migrate. It was an absolute night. That's that's where the money goes.

SPEAKER_00: 40:04

Stuck on the too far, right?

SPEAKER_01: 40:06

Yeah. Well, this is across multiple. So again, uh we have I teach biology, but there's in the UK, there's multiple different exam boards, which are a bit like regional exams if you're from, maybe from like other countries, you might have different regions that different provinces that do different style exams. In the UK, it's kind of similar, but it's not regional. So there's an AQA exam board and there's an OCR exam board, and they're actually different exam papers. So I this this number represents three subjects in three exam boards. So this is actually nine courses, so you could roughly divide that by nine to get the number of videos per course as a as a rough estimate. Here I am in all my glory. Um, in so we yeah, sort of introduce our tutors, and again, one of the main things that stands us apart is sort of the the the quality and the experience of our teachers. So this is Elena, our chemistry teacher, PhD, multiple masters, um, lots of teaching experience. And Ronnie, she used to write the actual mark schemes for the A-level exams for that the students would be sitting. She didn't write the papers, which means she's still allowed to teach, but she would write the mark schemes, and so that the answers based decide what because in maths, it's not necessarily if you just write down the right answer with no working, you don't get full marks. You have to show your working and go through it. And like so, she again, this is the sort of intimate detail of the mechanics of the exam that you need to be able to. Sometimes she would even teach not shortcuts, but long cuts. She would see students make using the shortcut method, and it leads to a higher error rate. They would often make a mistake, they'd miss a step or something. I don't know, I'm not a mathematician. So she would sometimes teach a longer method in order to get students to the right answer with less mistakes or fewer mistakes, as I should say, as I'm making a grammatical mistake right there. Um we were basically trying replicating TikTok style, uh video testimonials. These all used to be landscape videos in a carousel, and you know, that's so, you know, whatever, 2010s probably. So this is just much more TikTok style. Um student interviews, lots of testimonials again, trying to build trust with the with the audience here. Um there's very few words on the page. When you actually analyze a website page, there's actually very few words that people are actually going to read. We're trying to distinguish our sort of USPs here, but again, people don't read it on the whole. Again, more sort of trust-based stuff here with reviews from all the different sources, trust pilot, Google, Facebook, and the university. I mean, we have students, we have thousands of students getting into honestly, this is a bit of a joke. Some students say, I I signed up because you know, I see students get into Cambridge. It's like, well, we have uh probably, you know, as I said, 10,000 students a year. So we get students getting into every single uh university pretty much in the country. Um and then our pricing, which is a bit challenging to be honest, um, we do mostly it's monthly subscriptions. And then you can choose their subjects, as I said before,£76 a month for one subject, uh£120 for two subjects, and then£140 if they want three subjects, and we offer a free trial on basically everything. That's our main avenue for the funnel, is basically add to free trial.

SPEAKER_00: 43:16

So the page that you would send somebody to. Now it's not this page, because you said it's gonna be a page that nobody else is gonna be able to see, and as if from the ads. Yeah, but it would be similar to this page.

SPEAKER_01: 43:28

Um I wonder if I have one. It's just not going to be in the menu. I can definitely show you the page that we're sending tutoring parents to in terms of our um, I kind of don't want to give this link to anybody because it might mess up your analytics.

SPEAKER_00: 43:44

Yeah, sure. Even if like 30 of our listeners went and looked at it, it's like that's the danger, isn't it? But I mean interesting.

SPEAKER_01: 43:51

Yeah, so in terms of parents, obviously we're speaking to the parent with your child. Um we had a video on our Hulo header before, and it got such little view count that I actually took it out. You know, people, the attention spans are so short now. Um, let me um I'm just gonna show you actually what we did instead of putting in um I don't even know what the URLs are because we changed. So this is like one of our subject pages here. So we went with this kind of more kind of animated style, like more pop art style to try to sort of demonstrate the a video. And like down here we've added in.

SPEAKER_00: 44:28

Oh, I think you might not be sharing that screen.

SPEAKER_01: 44:30

Okay, share this tab in stage. You're quite right. Okay, so um so yeah, with this this is the hero header on our subject specific page, giving students more detail about that, the actual subject um course that they might be signing up to. So, like this kind of more almost like pop art style, uh, we worked with an animator to do that and to create these like gifts essentially to simulate a video, but without actually requiring them to watch a video. So you can see kind of like it's giving them the essence of the that dynamic moving stuff. Because we found from the analytics on our previous site that putting a video, like a 90-second video explainer, people weren't watching it. I honestly, I think attention spans are so short right now, people are not really that engaged. Looking at this now, it'd be nice if these were maybe slightly animated, although I don't know if it'd be too much, it might just be a bit bit over overwhelming. Testimonial videos now that Rich was just uh hovering over. These are student testimonials that we recall with students and like the students that use it, they genuinely are glowing and and you know, they just once as soon as they understand the value of it, they're they're so appreciative of it. But it's very hard to communicate that because basically everyone in the world says, oh, look at our course, we're the best, you know. Like it's it's very difficult to differentiate ourselves against our competitors. I think if you're really informed and you you use both, the differences are quite obvious. But it's you know, it's very difficult to actually just communicate that and and get students to believe you. That's why selling to parents on phone calls is much more, it's obviously much more labor-intensive. You have to have a one-to-one phone call with them. It's a completely different funnel, which I'm just starting to learn about. But they speak to me, it's clear that I know what I'm talking about. I can I can tell them what their problems are before they tell me what their problems are, and then that instantly resonates with them. You know, they if I can tell them that most of the time we see more students dropping marks for stuff that they do know when they're looking at the mark schemes or the the answers to these papers, like probably 60% of the marks that they're not getting, they already know. Those facts are in their head, which is testament to the fact that it's knowledge itself is not the problem here. You don't understand what the question is asking you. You didn't understand how to interpret that graph. You didn't write down your equation in the right format to hit the method mark for that maths paper. So if I can start communicating these things to the parents, like I know your problems, because I've been there, seen it, got the t-shirt, I'm telling you these are now the solutions. Instead of just spending 99% of your time learning content, you need to actually be practicing that to exam papers as early as possible. You're gonna be bad at doing exams. And then an analogy that I often use with him. John, John, do you play an instrument? Yeah, uh bass. You play bass. Okay, so you're like most people say no to that question. So piano, any experience with piano? What's an instrument that you'd be really uncomfortable, like no idea. Oh, trumpet. Trumpet. Okay, so let's say we're gonna learn trumpet, right? We're gonna do six hours a day book study on trumpet every day for for a year. You know, both you and I, we're gonna, you know, you can probably already read music, but if you didn't play an instrument, you're gonna do all the theory, but you're not gonna touch a trumpet for the first 12 months. You then pick up the trumpet. Are you gonna be playing John Coltrane immediately when you first pick up the trumpet?

SPEAKER_00: 47:39

Gonna be a very unpleasant experience at that stage, yes.

SPEAKER_01: 47:42

Okay, so you're gonna be bad at playing a trumpet no matter how much book study you've done. And so playing the trumpet is a skill, it requires some knowledge, and so it's not like we can just get away with zero knowledge entirely, but you have to know what each of those three notes are and how they work. But essentially, you're gonna have the same is true for exam papers, and we'd try to communicate to students immediately like you're gonna be bad at it no matter how many hours you spend learning facts. When you start doing an exam paper, you're gonna be bad at it. And like that's okay, but be bad at it now and practice it a bunch, and then you'll be better at it in when you've done your 50th paper, you're gonna be better. But most students, because they never achieve sort of perfect knowledge. I I know that I've got knowledge gaps, I can't possibly start doing exams until I know all the stuff. Then they never start papers, and then they only do them as an afterthought with you know two weeks to go before the exam, and then they realize, oh, I'm actually really bad at all these other skills, which I didn't even know that I needed, and it's too late, it's stressful. It's capitulation. It's a bummer. Um let uh if you I I can just log into the back end of our site here and see if I can find a landing page from if that's useful, but I yeah, I think from from what you showed me there, and apologies to anybody if you were listening and we we didn't describe it well enough.

SPEAKER_00: 48:56

You're kind of not sure what we were showing there, but like if you look at the tailored tutors homepage, you'll see a lot of kind of what's what's on there. I think that you could probably increase your conversions on those pages dramatically by including some sections that you just don't have at the moment. Okay, so I mean you want to see the conversion rates to check, because obviously if they're doing great, then maybe I'm wrong. But you look like you followed more the kind of structure that a SaaS landing page would have than uh courses, and there's certain things that in my experience course pages need to have in order to uh uh convert better. So I'm I would love to see one of your actual landing pages.

SPEAKER_01: 49:45

We're probably about to redo for the for the ad funnel, like we'll have a template that we're gonna probably review and iterate on. But I'd love to hear your thoughts and we can probably build some of those things in. We might even be able to do a split test and then we can feed back to you some real data on it.

SPEAKER_00: 49:58

Yeah, I think that there is a a a much longer form. So here, okay, there's something that you mentioned there about like nobody watched the video, nobody reads all the stuff on the page. That when you spend as much time working on sales pages as I do, you you kind of find out there are certain there's that's some of these things are true, but it's not enough it's not enough on its own. There's like other there's other nuance to the information about it. So most bits on a page, most people won't read. But what you're doing on a sales page is you're trying to get across to somebody the information that you would do on a phone call, the same information you're trying to get it across, getting them to take that information in. But when you're talking on a sales call, you can tailor it to the person. On a sales page, you cannot tailor it. You have to have one page for everybody, and therefore, you have to have everything that you would say on a sales call on the page. And then you have to help people to find the bit that they want to read about. So some people will want to know what exactly how does it work and how many um how many videos are there, and what how long does it take them to go through it each day and what have you. And some people will want to understand the emotional journey. And some people will want to see lots of social proof. You've got lots of social proof on there. That's that's excellent, that's something you've done really, really well. Some people will want to watch a video, but only about 8 to 10% in our experience. But those eight to 10% really would like to watch a video. And it's like, so there's all of these elements that you kind of have. And so that's what so we have found that doing these long-form sales pages, even though most people won't read most of what's on there, convert better than having the short form ones. And so there's that there's like uh 15 crucial elements that we've identified in a in a high performing sales page. And there's some of those bits in there that you kind of have have missed out in sake of making you've got a very beautiful page, you've got a lot of social proof, you've explained the kind of concepts of it, but there's some parts that I from what I could see as quickly kind of going through it, you just kind of don't have. So, for example, and I can send you through lots more detail about this afterwards. I can do that. Please do, yeah, I'm interested. Um the pain agitation solution section. So very few people have this. This is not a common section to have, but copywriters like really understand this as a um uh an element of psychology that is very, very important. People will not believe that you can solve their problem until they believe that you understand the problem.

SPEAKER_01: 52:26

I've heard that described as he who describes the problem the best basically is the person who gets the sale.

SPEAKER_00: 52:32

Right, exactly. And you've been saying, like you can say to parents, you can tell them what the problem is before they've even really understood it properly themselves. You understand it better than they do. And it looked like, and I might be wrong here, but it looked like that section was was kind of missing. And we'd always put that after the fold. So if you're looking on desktop, the section just after they start scrolling, you've got headline, you've got call to action button, you've got maybe a video, maybe like an image like you've got at the moment, um, you've got a subheadline, you might have a tiny bit of text explaining this the solution. And so the people who are just like, yeah, I'm ready to go, they can click the button and get started. And then after that, you get into this pain agitation solution section where you describe the pain point, and then you describe how that is affecting them, which they almost, that second part, the agitate, they almost definitely won't understand themselves because you've seen, I don't know whatever number you said, like 50,000 students or something like that go through this process. They've seen probably one, which is them or their their son or daughter or what have you, right? And so they don't have the context, whereas you can be like, not only are they not doing this thing or they're studying or whatever, but that means this, which is probably causing you these emotions. And if they start to go, oh shit, yes, I am having those emotions, then they're like, okay, cool. I'm on now, they're really on board and they want to know more about it. And then you get into the presentation of what it is you're actually doing. But I'll send you through afterwards like a loom video. I'll get someone in the team to do a loom video of like a breaking that down for you of like, here's what I would suggest including, so you can kind of run that, run that split.

SPEAKER_01: 54:02

Okay, great. Yeah, I'll um I'll I'll as we go through that next phase, which is coming coming up in the next couple of weeks here, to build that landing page to to do that, then I'll I'll definitely incorporate some of those things. Let me make a note.

SPEAKER_00: 54:13

Um so what's next for you? So we've kind of looked through your funnel, we've talked about your ads, we've said you're not building more courses for now until the desire is too powerful and you just do it anyway. But like, what is it that you are focused on? Are you focused on growing revenue? You focus more on the this year.

SPEAKER_01: 54:33

Is very much probably for the first well, in fact, COVID was the first year I was very fortunate. 2019 was the first year that I was like, okay, I'm gonna spend the same budget that I spent last year, and we're growing by 40% minimum per year. So all that increase in revenue is gonna go into the bank account because I would run the account recklessly close to being empty. You know, a VAT bill would come once a quarter, and I've got to find 40 grand, and I didn't necessarily have 40 grand in the account, so I was the founder and owner, I was like putting my own money back into the company to make sure I was covering all the bills. Because our annual cycle is so asymmetrical, I knew that money was going to come back in June, but I didn't necessarily have that money in February. And so that was the first year when I was like, I'm going to live within my means this year and I'll make a fat chunk of profit, ha ha. And then in February, the government announced, or I think it was January, the government announced we're not doing the exams this year because of COVID. And so the entire I was just there, just watched the subscription log and it like 95% of our members just unsubscribe pretty much overnight. So it was pretty heartbreaking, all that time and effort. And because so much of it was word of mouth, it was also devastating that it was a two-year, they cancelled the exams the following year as well, and it's a two-year course. So normally in the common room, you've got all the year 13 students who are doing their exams, like, oh, I found this thing, it's really helping me, you know, that gets handed down to the years at the years below, and then they then sign up the next year. But because two years in a row we had very few students, we had to basically go back to zero on that. Um, so that was I was very fortunate because had I normally done what I was doing, which was spend up to my limit of my means, I would have been probably 250 grand down, and then I would have had no students, and then I would have probably folded. It probably would have been the end of me. Um so this year is another, I've basically been rebuilding since then, and this year is another year where I'm going to be refocusing on making profits, um, streamlining the tutoring business, because I'm still quite heavily involved in that with my time because I am the person doing all those intake calls with parents, which is obviously pretty time consuming. Um, on so my role has changed a lot this year, which has been great. I love speaking to parents and students. It's really nice to have that face-to-face contact time, but it's not sustainable for me to be spending so much of my time directly doing that with clients. I need to systematize that, probably get train someone into that role of you know, I will definitely hire a former teacher or tutor or an examiner, someone who, again, has that lived experience where it's just so obvious to me at least. And quality has always been such an important thing to me that I don't want a salesperson learning my script and then just like selling it to parents just because they've learned the words. You know, it needs to be lived experienced to be genuine and authentic. Um, yes, long answer to a short question, like streamline things as much as possible, not add anything new, focus on making profit, really make the company strong foundation again, and then decide I've been doing this for 10 years now, so like not adding new courses. I don't think I want to do that forever because that it was that creation process which is much more suited to my needs, um to my skills and to my like enjoyment. Running an actual company for me is kind of boring. You know, I don't want to just make a template and stamp it over and over and over again. I like the I like the change, I like the creation. Um I'm a big ideas kind of person, I'm not really a finisher and a detail-oriented person, which is kind of what you need when you know you need someone who's meticulous. And if you've got a got a plan and you're executing it well, it needs to be consistent and the same. And so probably my plan is to, again, put the company in a really strong financial position and then maybe go and do something else. Or build us, you know, get someone to run the company, potentially if it is, you know, consistently turning out money, and then I would do an AI side project or build a sister course or do something else, something that's more suited to what I want to do with my time, rather than just executing running a business. I'm not really a CEO, to be honest with you. I call myself the founder. I have a bit of a gripe with solopreneurs, especially, calling themselves CEO. It's like, oh, how many staff do you have? It's like, oh, it's just me. It's like, you can call yourself a CEO, but you're also CMO and CFO, and you're like what you just arbitrarily picking the one that you think sounds the best. So yeah, I I just call myself the founder. Um, because I still basically am a bit of a multifunctional person within the business.

SPEAKER_00: 58:46

Yeah. Nice. Well, best of luck with that. I hopefully I can help you with some of those sales pages and help you get a lot of things.

SPEAKER_01: 58:52

Definitely, I'd say that the marketing, I'd say just to the audience that the marketing has been a real challenge. For me, the course creation and like building a quality product has been quite easy, relatively speaking. Lots of work, but not many mysteries. The marketing side of things is such a dark art in terms of knowing what does work and and just so many endeavours which don't go anywhere. And like a new project now, like my team laugh at me, because every time someone has a new idea, is like, oh, that's a great idea. Probably gonna cost 10 grand minimum, because like by the time you've actually polished something and spent the time working on it, ideas are cheap, but executing them at a high standard is challenging. Another reason why I think I might move on from Table Shooters at some point is that I love the scrappy startup. I'm I'm not I don't love trying to make everything polished. And now that we have a brand reputation and we're kind of a premium product, that I can't just throw a half assed video out there and sling it out there to my to my audience, and it would, you know, we have to maintain the brand reputation. And so, like that, I just It just adds so much process. The video has to be edited and have subtitles and clean up the audio. And like, yes, it makes for a higher quality product, but the value of the information is still very much the same. I much prefer just like slap it out there and go.

SPEAKER_00: 1:00:13

Yeah. Well, Rich, thanks so much for coming on today, man. I really, really appreciate your time. I know the audience do as well. Um, this is fantastic, fascinating business that you've built. Um, I mentioned everybody the uh 15 elements that an optimized sales page should have. We have a free download about that. If you go to data drivenmarketing.co slash pages, then you can download that um for free. And that's going to give you that kind of summary of what those 15 elements are. As always, thank you so much for listening. We really, really appreciate you. Um, if you've got any suggestions for future episodes, anybody you would like to have come on the podcast, or if that's you you think you should come on the podcast, then message me, John at datadrivenmarketing.co. And Rich, thanks again. Really, really appreciate it.

SPEAKER_01: 1:00:57

John, pleasure to speak to you again. And uh yeah, all the very best. And I look forward to s receiving some of those stuff from you. And I'll uh I'll be following along in the future to uh yeah, I mean, despite all my years of experience, th there's always more to learn. So I think you're doing a great job. Uh love it and see you again soon, hopefully.