The Art of Selling Online Courses

210 How I Built an 8-Figure Business (Heath Adams interview)

• John Ainsworth • Season 1 • Episode 210

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Heath Adams, better known as The Cyber Mentor, built an 8-figure training business and sold it. In this episode, he shares how he did it starting from scratch with no sales team, no ad spend, and just pure organic content.

We talk about how he grew 50% year over year, why he believes authenticity beats algorithm hacks, and how he scaled from a one-person operation to 30 employees before the acquisition. Heath also gets into why he focused on one channel first, how he structures his email promotions, and what he's learned about pricing from selling everything from $30 subscriptions to $2,500 live trainings.

If you're building a course or training business and want to know what it actually takes to scale to 8 figures, this one's worth your time.

🌐 Check out Heath's work at https://academy.tcm-sec.com
🔍 Follow Heath on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/heathadams/ 
🔍 Follow The Cyber Mentor on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/thecybermentor

If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe and leave a comment letting me know your biggest takeaway. And if you want help growing your own course business, check out what we do at Data Driven Marketing - https://datadrivenmarketing.co

See you next week.

SPEAKER_01:

From twenty nineteen to present, we've grown pretty much fifty percent at least year over year. That's scaled tremendously. We've crossed into eight-figure revenue, which is kind of like the magical point for a lot of acquisitions, scaled it from just a one-person operation into 30. All the traffic was inbound from the academy or from YouTube. We didn't have to really do advertising or ad spending to hire anybody. It just all came organically inbound from having the content. We launched a course, it went incredibly well. And kind of overnight we became a training company that did consulting. It's had hundreds of thousands, if not a million plus customers at this point, million plus views on those videos. If you want to say a hundred thousand plus on the newsletter, 170,000 followers there. We're targeting 25% to 35% really. So we get to 50 games, fantastic.

SPEAKER_00:

Hello, and welcome to the art of selling online courses. We are here to get a winning strategy top performance in the online courses. My name's John Antwort, and today get better nodes cyber and entrepreneurs expanded career making cybersecurity more approachable. He started ETM security for track and grew up an eight figure company before. And along the way, he created hands-on courses and certifications that helped thousands of people break into industry and advance their careers. And these days, focuses on teaching, mentoring, and building communities that support the next generation of cybersecurity professionals. Heath, welcome to the show. Hey John, thanks for having me. So talk us through this. A lot of us don't know anything about cybersecurity. So who are you helping with the courses? What kind of problem are you solving for them?

SPEAKER_01:

Sure. So my background is in what's called ethical hacking. So there's a bunch of different sides to cyber, but mine is basically where companies pay us to hack into them and we get to pretend to be the bad guys for a day, which is fun. So I started in that background, started in around 2017. And when I was going through, training was incredibly expensive. And it really wasn't all that practical, it's more of what we call a capture-the-flag style of training. So you go in, you do things that you'll never realistically see in the real world, and you capture this flag and you solve a problem, but you're not actually doing what you would do in the world of a consultant. So the idea came around of working the job when I got to the job, just being incredibly unprepared to actually work in the field and remembering what that was like and just creating content and courses initially around, hey, what is it like to be a practical hacker in this field? And that's that's really where we started. Interesting. And how when did you start creating courses on this then? So around 2019, I think formally in 2018, I started creating some YouTube content. And so uh actually started a nonprofit organization in 2018 called VETSEC, which was for military veterans looking to transition into cybersecurity and started just posting on YouTube there just basic computer networking courses, like intro to hacking. And it was really for that community. It wasn't for anything that was supposed to be bigger than that. And for me, that kind of just took off unintentionally on YouTube. So from there it started turning into live streaming, uh, which turned into the company that I was working for started getting uh inbound leads from me. And always saw Heath on YouTube. We want him to do our engagement or work with him as a consultant. Uh, I saw no no thank yous, no revenue kickbacks, nothing from that. So that's kind of where the light bulb went off to go and do my own thing. For for me, initially, it was I'm gonna go be a consultant and do a consulting company. Uh, there's a lot of downtime early on in that part of the process. So I started creating content and courses during that downtime. And um, in I think it was December of 2019, um, may have been December 2018, think back. But uh, we we launched a course, it went incredibly well. And kind of overnight we became a training company that did consulting as opposed to a consulting company offer training.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. So that's cool. And how was that from a mindset point of view? Was that something that you were like, oh great, I love this idea, let's move over to this, or did you have to like kind of come to terms with that idea at the point? I love both.

SPEAKER_01:

I love teaching a lot, I love being a consultant. So for me, it was uh a different pathway. So we never had to really hire a salesperson because all the traffic was inbound from the or to the consulting side at least, was all inbound from the academy or from YouTube. And so all the clients that we got were hey, I saw you on here or you somebody posted about you on LinkedIn or Reddit, and we didn't have to really do advertising or ad spend hire anybody. It just all came organically inbound from having the content. So uh it was a nice sales funnel to the other side of the business while while still having a profitable side of a training business.

SPEAKER_00:

So YouTube, it sounds like was like the first channel that you'd really focus on. I see you've got like nearly million subscribers on the YouTube channel. One of the things you said is that you thought you should dominate one channel first, and then once you own it, you can branch out. How did you come to that conclusion?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I think you can overwhelm yourself by doing too many things at once. And there's different forms, and YouTube's kind of adapted now. Like shorts are more prominent than they were when I first started. But if you're trying to do YouTube content, which is more long form, then you're trying to do TikTok, which is more short form, and you have reels on Instagram, and it's just you have to almost recreate the same thing a bunch of different times. And if you don't have the time to do it, or an editing crew or the resources available to you, you're going to just overwhelm yourself. So it's really better to focus all of your effort and energy initially into one thing. And then as you build and scale, cool, you can hire people, you can branch out, they can do these things for you, and it's a little bit easier for you in being able to diversify.

SPEAKER_00:

Another thing that you'd said before, I thought was really interesting. You'd said most people think audience growth comes from gaming the algorithm. And in reality, algorithms end up rewarding people who are authentic and deliver value. If you're chasing hacks, you're already playing catch-up. Do you see this a lot in the way that other people are creating content?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, absolutely. It's especially in the world of AI now, it's very easy to pick out when people are just using AI to write things, and it just comes off as, I don't know, as lazy or maybe like there's good ways to use AI, don't get me wrong, but it comes off as just inorganic and I feel less trustworthy with you immediately. Like if you're just being your natural self, you write that post or it feels like you wrote that post, it goes a lot better. Uh, same thing with comments. I'm seeing a lot of people on LinkedIn commenting with AI, and it's just like I feel like I'm talking to a bot. I don't feel like I'm interacting with a person anymore. So if you be your authentic self, I think you can play that in in people value authenticity online, and it goes a long way.

SPEAKER_00:

And so how does that work for you? You have like other presenters, other people like doing videos on your your channels, right? How does that how do you do do you need to like police it at all? Do you ever find like they might start using AI for writing their script or like well, how do you think about this, you know?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, we we train them. So when we bring them in, we we kind of train them. We have uh a whole marketing team now. So um posts are ran up the chain. There's somebody that looks at copy, nothing is just like somebody posting, even a lot of times on my LinkedIn anymore, if it's like a sponsored post, there's a bunch of people that are reviewed it. It's not just me, including the client, right? So uh like you have to balance that. Like sponsored posts, for example, you can't have your whole profile be that, it has to be you as well. And so you have to like really balance the the authenticity. And we we train to that. We have a team to to help with that and just kind of build that guidance along the way and and our team learns uh what is authentic versus what's uh what's using AI too much and so forth.

SPEAKER_00:

Hmm, interesting. And then what with your courses, how does that work? Do you have a lot of courses? Do you have just a few like key ones that are the the flagships? Like how do you think about like how many to create?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, so I'm a believer in flagship and not diluting your brand by having too many things, right? Not initially at least. So when we first started, we had one prominent course, and then we uh had four or five more courses that initially launched alongside of those, and they were all on the same topic or subtopic. So we we've got hacking, and then we had a a course around what's called OSIN or open source intelligence and going out and just finding information that's publicly available and how that ties into hacking, and then just playbooks around hacking. And so we weren't spreading out too much. Once we built our academy, we started inviting other creators in the field of cyber, and then we really curated that. What we didn't want to be was like Udemy where anybody can come put a course on. We wanted to make sure that we retained value. So if you came and you bought a course from us, you knew that you were going to get something incredibly valuable, worth your money, and you didn't have to worry about, especially on launch, about the reviews about it, because we had gone through uh meticulously made sure that the course was ready and that it was good for the audience, a lot of beta testing and so forth. So it was a really slow build-out. Even now, when we bring in out outside creators, it's very rare, but it's making sure that it stays within the brand of what we're building and the content that we're building around to that theme. We don't want to just have any course on our platform and dilute our brand.

SPEAKER_00:

Got it. That makes sense. Can you give everyone kind of an idea of the size of the business? You don't have to share any specific numbers if you don't want to, but like number of customers or kind of ballpark revenue or anything like that that you're happy to share?

SPEAKER_01:

Sure. Yeah. So from 2019 to present, we've grown pretty much 50% at least year over year. And so that's scaled tremendously. We've also doubled employees pretty much every year. We slowed down last year once we got acquired, but from our standpoint, we we crossed into eight-figure revenue, which is kind of like the magical point for a lot of acquisitions. And uh we were able to, I think, at acquisition time get into 30 employees, give or take. And so scaled it from just a one-person operation into 30, which is a variety of things. But we have a we had a content creation team, we have a marketing team, we have one person on sales team, and then we've got uh like a help desk that's 24-7 for our certifications and our our content. And we have a consulting team as well. So we kind of have different wings depending on what you're doing, but that's all scaled and built up as as the company's grown.

SPEAKER_00:

And what does it look like from a from a marketing point of view? You mentioned that you've got the marketing team there, you've got one salesperson. What's the structure of how you're actually doing the marketing? Are you getting a lot of people from you? Is YouTube your main like audience channel? It it is or was.

SPEAKER_01:

Uh, we we shift a lot of focus to LinkedIn to get more of the B2B side of things. And so uh we had a transition plan in around probably 2021, 2022 to build LinkedIn, which we've got that up to, I want to say last I saw was like 270,000 followers there. And so um, that's a really big platform for us along with YouTube. YouTube is, I don't want to say it's a dying art by any means. There's still ways to be creative on it, but it's not the same that it used to be back in the day. And I think the attention span's getting shorter and moving to shorts, and uh that TikTok vibe is where things are trending. So uh you almost have to kind of shift the way that you are uh that you're creating content in order to be successful there. But for us, yeah, we we started out with just having a community manager and having somebody that was able to respond on social media, LinkedIn, on all the different platforms that we were on, and then just building that out. We eventually hired somebody that was essentially built into like almost a COO type role. So they were looking at the data that was coming in and then how we can utilize that data to either push sales or target certain areas. Eventually, that led to having a digital marketing manager that worked with copy and had email marketing and everything else and just continuing to build out those teams as as we go. Um it's it was a slow process, but you just kind of hire the right person for a particular role and then grow into what you need next.

SPEAKER_00:

Um what do you do from a making sales point of view? Are you trying to get people off LinkedIn and YouTube onto your email list to make promotions there? Do you do much promotion directly on LinkedIn or one of the other social media?

SPEAKER_01:

We do a mixture. Um, from YouTube, we have a lot of courses. That's like if you go look at what's driving the million plus views on those videos, it's it's course-related content. So it's more long form. And so that will drive people to our academy. If you sign up for our academy, that's where you get uh an opportunity to be on the emailing list. Uh, if you sign up for our LinkedIn newsletter, which I think we have, I want to say 100,000 plus on the newsletter, um, that's another place where you you get content. And so it just depends on where you're coming from and the funnel, but we have different funnels that bring into our mailing list. And then once you're on it, you're on it until you don't want to be.

SPEAKER_00:

And then how are you promoting the courses on the email list? You'd said before that you're doing three promotions a week. What does what does each of those look like?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, so it just depends on what's coming up. So if we've got a new course, like we're launching a course literally today, but that is the the email content that's going out. We we had one email go out on Monday for a live training that we're doing on Friday. So it just depends. If we see something that maybe is dragging in sales a little bit, we may make some copy or content around that to push push sales that way. So it's just kind of at the need. We're uh we're very agile in what we do. So we're not planning months ahead of the email copy that's going out unless we're doing a big promotion like Black Friday, we we plan months out, get that ready, et cetera. But if it's it's kind of just agile otherwise of what's the needs of the company and what do we need to push and so forth.

SPEAKER_00:

Got it. That makes sense. And then what kind of price point are you selling at? Do you sell the courses individually or do they have to sign up to a membership in order to access them?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, so we initially sold on Udemy to begin with, but we sold around$30 course. We sold them individually. That is, it can be problematic in its sense because you you want lifetime value of a customer. And so in order to get customers to come back, you either need to create more courses or offer other things. And if you're selling individually, it becomes difficult. We eventually shifted over to a recurring model, which allowed us to uh get recurring revenue. It's better for if you ever want to go the acquisition route, having the MRR, the ARR is really good. Uh, it allowed us to also be able to afford to keep content up to date. Because once you, if you are an individual model, you can sell it where uh Udemy has it, where hey, you get lifetime updates to this content. Great. Paid$30,$10, whatever it might be, and I get lifetime access. Um when you're a smaller shop, if you're doing that, it's difficult to maintain, especially if you're offering support to people. Uh so moving to that recurring revenue model allows us to say, hey, even if you're paying for a subscription, if you took this course before, we may add new modules or new things to it. You can come back and still use that. So providing value and more value adds to a subscription model is where we ended up going. But price points, we$30 a month is typical price point for that. For certifications, they run anywhere, I think, from$149 to most expensive is like expert level. I think it's$7.99. And then we do some live training classes, and those typically run around, say$2K to$2,500 for the training.

SPEAKER_00:

And how do you how much maybe do you make as a kind of proportional thing from those more expensive offerings? Because I've noticed a lot of people who are selling courses will just sell the low ticket stuff. And I've been like encouraging and working with some of our clients to start selling the higher ticket programs as well, because there's a percentage of people, let's say 10%, something like that, who'll spend 10 times as much money in my experience. And so it can potentially, not always, but potentially like double the double the business. What do you find? But I I think that percentage varies depending on the market. Like, what are you finding in terms of the percentage of people of who will buy those more expensive courses or the percentage of your revenue that comes from that, whatever you can share?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, there is a percentage there. And so I I think there's there's varying business strategies. So part of the reason that we went on the affordable route is because there was nobody in that market. And it was something that was true to our mission. Like my background is that I'm first to graduate high school, only surviving member of my family, grew up incredibly poor, right? So, like philosophy-wise, didn't want anybody ever to be priced out of education. If you ask the business school background in me, I will tell you that I, okay, you have one$300 course or a$30 course. If you have a$30 course, you've got to sell 10 of those, and now you have to cater to 10 people that otherwise you just cater to one on the$300 course. So for me, it's just one of those things where if I'm telling you to go out, I would say, hey, you need to find where your audience is. Where is the competition? Is the competition on already really cheap? Is it commoditized? Uh, is everybody on the expensive side? And figure that out. If you're offering something incredibly niche and something that can't really be found elsewhere, you can charge a lot of money for it. And that's perfectly fine as well. So you you really have to look at your market and understand that to know where the price points should be. But if you know, if I'm starting this from a purely business perspective, I would target a high-end audience if I have a high-end product because it's a lot less people to cater to and you still make a lot more revenue that way. So from percentage-wise, for us, it was a difficult process of becoming, hey, we're a value brand that does offer quality product. But yeah, when you introduce a thousand plus dollar product when most people are spending$30, some of them are, hey, whoa, what's going on? You know, you're not this expensive of a brand. And so it's how you position yourself. But uh we almost had to focus in reposition of live training is a whole different beast. It's not an on-demand course. We're we're here to provide you this value with our instructors who make this day rate, and you're getting what you pay for. And so you establish that, you get good reviews out there, you get people to really leave testimonials and you start driving business that way. So you can reposition yourself. You also can offer other brands or reposition under different brands. It's like BMW has Rolls-Royce and they also have mini. So you have something of kind of like low-end, middle end, high end, and you can do that as well. So it's just how you position yourself in the market.

SPEAKER_00:

Um, what did you find in terms of the way you sell those live trainings? I think you said two and a half thousand dollars. Was that right? Yeah, they they range.

SPEAKER_01:

Like that's the high end. We also have like usually for a one-day class, it's around six hundred dollars and you just pay per day. So if it goes four or five days, then you're looking anywhere from two thousand to twenty five hundred. Um but for for there, it started just with our core audience because we we do have really uh, I mean, we've had hundreds of thousands, if not a million plus customers at this point, uh targeting those initial customers, people that our initial trainings were to our certifications. So, hey, if you're struggling with the certification, if you purchase this, if you really like live training versus on demand, this is something that would be good for you. And so positioning that way, getting those reviews back, getting your net promoter score back and making sure that you're doing things the right way, and then really just scaling that upwards. So started with one class, did it once a quarter, went really well. Okay, we'll add another class in and uh maybe another topic and target more people, more B2B opportunities, especially businesses. They're willing to pay the higher-end product uh prices and they're willing to send people to training. And so that goes really well. It depends on who you're targeting. At a$30 price point, you're targeting more of the individual consumer. At a$2,500 price point, you're targeting more businesses. And so uh it depends on who your end customer is. But it's a slow roll off for us to kind of reposition that.

SPEAKER_00:

Interesting. I was chatting with someone the other day selling business courses, he does it through Udemy. But he's got this like one area that's his his specialty. So he goes into he can go into factories and help them figure out how they're gonna increase capacity without building a new factory. So let's say they've got tons of demand and they're trying to grow it and uh that they want to be able to sell more, but they just haven't figured out how do you increase the capacity there. He can help them with that. And he's like, how do I go from having these Udemy low-ticket, you know,$30 courses to selling this high-ticket thing to like the, you know, maybe not enterprise, but like much bigger kind of organizations. So that's quite interesting hearing how you've gone through that process of selling the low-ticket stuff all the way up to selling the high ticket thing. What did you find? Because you mentioned you focused on your your core audience, the people who'd already bought. Was that the audience who were those the people who were then spending the$2,500 or the$1,500 or whatever it was per day? Or were they then connecting with their boss or something in order to get that that money in? How did that tend to work? Do you know? It's a mix.

SPEAKER_01:

But we a lot of our initial, especially initial was uh strategy or plan was word of mouth. And so if you go tell your manager, especially like around our certifications, hey, let's get our certification on job postings. That's the the thing that's going to really get people to to buy into this as legitimate. And so it was getting people to first try it out, buy it out, offering it to some hiring managers, kind of getting people to see in the value of what we're presenting and then getting that built out. It sounds like the the Udemy guy that you're mentioning too could benefit from if he's running consulting, that's another high-ticket item of, hey, this is how you could do it. I could also help explain to you where your specific needs are. And that's kind of what we do as well. It's like we could teach you how to be a hacker, but if your company needs help with it, uh, we can also come in and do that for you. And so there's a segue into it. But for us, yeah, it's it's getting buy-in either at the lower level and having them push it up to the higher level or even reaching out to some of the higher levels, offering maybe something initially for free for them to test it out and get that exposure as well.

SPEAKER_00:

Did you find that that needed a change in the way that you were selling, not just who you're selling to and the and the wording, but did you have to do sales calls in order to sell the live workshops, or was that still done through email to a sales page?

SPEAKER_01:

It's all email and sales page. We do sales calls if it's a bigger ticket, like if somebody's coming in and they want, say, 20 seats or private training or something, or they want customized training, we'll have those calls. Or if it's an organization that wants to revamp their training program using our materials, we'll have those sorts of calls. But for the most part, if even if it's B2B, we we invoice, we don't really have the sales conversations unless it's uh over a certain amount.

SPEAKER_00:

Nice. Okay.

SPEAKER_01:

That's great. That keeps the margins way better on something like that. Way better. Yeah. I mean, we've historically we've had one salesperson and that's uh only been as of last two years. So that's just to kind of to kind of uh be able to pass down some of the work to him, and he's done a great job with it. Uh, but yeah, mostly inbound, and even his work is all inbound. We don't have him do outbound uh lead hunting or anything because he stays busy enough.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. That's great. I love that. Yeah. What does it what does it look like on a because I just want to kind of go back to this. You mentioned you have like these three three promotions a week. It's quite agile, it depends on what stuff isn't isn't selling. What does a promotion uh but then you also mentioned, sorry, that Black Friday was like you're planning that months in advance is this really big kind of offer. What does an individual promotion look like when you've got like mostly you're selling one low-ticket membership? Like, because presumably there's only so many ways you can kind of package that up and and and talk about it. Are you doing discounts? Are you doing bonuses, or is it that you've got lots of different things because you've always got like, you know, now we've got the certification, now we've got this day training coming up. Like, can you kind of give us more of a picture of it? Yeah, that's exactly it.

SPEAKER_01:

We we just have a lot of different things coming out all the time. Okay. From a uh either if even if it's course updates or just like keeping kind of keeping you up to date. It's not always selling you something. Like we don't always want to be pushing uh an email that's a sale to you. So it just depends on what it is. We do have things like you could sign up for for birthday discounts. We have abandoned cart discounts as well. We've got different things that go out. We're not always pushing promotions. We don't want to discount or be viewed as a discount brand any more than we already are. So from our standpoint, we run a discount promotion maybe once a quarter with Black Friday being the big discount. It usually goes for us, goes almost the entire month of November into Cyber Monday in December. And so for us, it's it's kind of that's where all hands are on deck. But otherwise, it's just depending on the needs. So sometimes there may be a discount code if we're running a promotion like that. But if we've got course module updates, new certification, new live training dates, anything that may be good to know, we're pushing that out through the funnels.

SPEAKER_00:

That makes sense. Okay. So once a quarter you'll do a discount, give or take. Black Friday's the biggest one. And in between, a lot of the stuff that you're mentioning out to your email list is we've got this update to this course. This live training is coming up. Rather than this thing is on discount, we're heavily promoting it right now. Is that have I understood properly? That's correct. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

It just depends on your positioning. So for us, we're already affordable. So being a you know discount brand doesn't do us any any better there. So it's just we we kind of target and make sure we're selective. We we do sometimes run flash sales, but in reality, it's it's more of that once a quarter kind of progress. Most of the emails that we send out are uh just keeping people up to date with what updates are going on. Gotcha.

SPEAKER_00:

So you're already at eight figures. You're growing about 50% a year, which is like massively impressive. That's fantastic. What's the what's the goal? Is it just keep growing at another 50% year on year? Or like what's the what do you want to do next?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, it gets more difficult as you as you scale up, obviously. But we're starting to hit some some maturity, which is it's good. We're we're stabilizing a bit. So this year, I think we're we're targeting 25% to 35% really. If we get to 50 again, it's fantastic. But for for us, it's kind of stabilization and then looking at verticals or new verticals that we can target. One of the verticals that we're looking at and planning on getting into is more of the B2B side of things. So we have our historically B2C academy, B2C certifications. Live training is a little bit B2B, but getting more into B2B site by offering higher-end products there as well. So we've got our$30 academy. We're adding, which is mostly like homegrown labs. We we give you labs, we tell you how to install them, but it's on your own software and your own system. Being able to have an on-demand lab where you can spin that up yourself, for example, or have cohorts or have the ability to have accountability and tracking of your students from a management perspective, then enables us to go out to companies and say, well, this$30 products now,$100 a month ahead, or something like that. And being able to charge a much higher price point and target those enterprise solutions. So it's where you get from away from maybe six-figure contracts where we do on like the B2B consulting side into more of the seven-figure training contracts. And that's how you scale that revenue up.

SPEAKER_00:

And what's any what's any like bottlenecks or blockages for you guys from a marketing or a funnel point of view? What's anywhere where you're like, oh, we keep working on this bit, but it's not working quite as well as we as we would like it to? Does that come up at all?

SPEAKER_01:

We've we've had some just this year, it's been, I'd say the live training is a little bit harder to sell through through marketing funnels. And I think it's so much of a mixture because it's not anything different in price points, nothing different in terms of content. And so you've got economy things going on, you've got job uh job things going on. Uh, and so I think people are less hesitant to spend. There's been some even algorithm changes on LinkedIn in terms of they're they're favoring more of individual posts than they are business posts. And they're also some of the posts you're not seeing for weeks at a time now when they're getting posted. So it's how do you how do you change the way that you're you're posting on uh either social media or how you're sending emails? Do we give more heads up and notice for for some of these? Instead of emailing a month or two out, are we emailing three months out for a schedule? So one of the things that we're doing right now with that is we're we're posting a calendar of events as opposed to, hey, here's the the four or five different trainings and the next ones. Well, here's those four or five trainings and the schedule for the next entire year or the next quarter. So that way it's not I have to buy this up and coming one, I can buy one in the distant or get manager approval, get time off of requests and just kind of cater that way. So we're just kind of adapting where we need to and just seeing how different things work out. But yeah, even something that works historically can change overnight, it feels like. And you just kind of have to adapt and honestly even ask others. It's good, like we're our marketing team is in like different marketing discords or Slack groups and being able to communicate with other people in the same industry of what's working, what's not, and sharing that knowledge is is really helpful.

SPEAKER_00:

So what's what's the I don't want to say secret exactly, but what do you think is like some of the reasons why you've been able to continually scale this business? Whereas a lot of people like that's a this is far beyond where they ever get to with their with their course business. What is you think it's partly the market? Have you been like incredibly strategic about it? What has allowed you to be able to scale that far?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, a big thing is that we listen to our customers in in our community. So it's not it's not always that we're driving the innovation, it's that we're listening to what's needed. And so we'll ask our students like what is it that you want to see? What is if you had an ideal course that you want to see coming out, what would that be? And we try to target to that. And so listening to community feedback, we have channels where we have the ability to say, hey, something is broken in a course or something's just like not working, or I'd love a better explanation here. And and being able to cater to those needs, I think has done tremendously well. Again, authenticity is has done really well for us, being able to just be uh really good at what we do. Like our support team, I said, is 24-7. Our response time is typically less than 10 minutes. And so if you've if you need help with something, we've got somebody working at that time that will respond to your ticket. And and it just feels like in a world where now it takes days at times to get responses to tickets, hey, this company actually cares. They're they're visible to me, they're they're there. All of our training staff, or sorry, I should say, all of our support staff is actually certified in uh a lot of the trainings that we we have. So we pay them increasingly well. Even if they're international, we pay them US funds. So like we we have really good staffing, really good people, and we've we really low turnover. And so it's like it helps build that rapport with the community, the authenticity. You know, people don't typically leave here. And so you get to know each other almost on a they feel like they know you on a personal level. And that really builds your brand and helps you scale and retain loyal customers as well. Amazing.

SPEAKER_00:

What's another thing that you would say as advice to other course creators who are who are maybe just getting going, who are got maybe just a few thousand followers on YouTube or Instagram or something like that? As like a are there any kind of words of wisdom you got for them?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, it's really it's be authentic and listen to your community, kind of like we mentioned, and and just start slow. Like build a really good product first before you go and do something else. Like we built our flagship certification is called the PMPT, which is practical network penetration tester. We started on a like homegrown lab platform for that exam, really tested the market, and we let that run for well over a year before we even expanded into anything else. And so it's it's something of like making sure that you're perfecting a product first before you try to dilute yourself. That's the same thing like we talked about with with YouTube and some of the other things. Focus on one channel, one product, one thing, really get that going and build that brand and that loyalty. And then people are more likely to buy when you release that second product at the first product and the quality and everything there was good initially. So you don't want to dilute yourself too much. And then just work as you scale. You'll you'll start to see, okay, I've got X amount of funds, I need help here. I think delegation as you scale is so important and so very hard because you are you're the content creator, it's your ideas, it's your brand, it's everything's relying on you, and you almost have to diversify to expand that out, and you have to trust other people, which can be hard to do with your baby, and and just being able to delegate and trust and expand as you need to. But initially early on, just focus on on one thing and really trying to be good at that one thing.

SPEAKER_00:

Love it. Heath, thanks so much for coming on today. I really, really appreciate your time. I think it's been a fascinating interview. Um, you obviously built something absolutely fantastic here. If someone wants to go check out your work and what you've been up to, where should they go look?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, thanks so much for having me. If you go personally, if you check me out, it's uh Heath Adams on LinkedIn. And then if you look at the Heath Adams that got like an Instagram and it's just all personal stuff, it's nothing course or content related. But if you want to follow the company, TCM Security pretty much anywhere. If you look up the Cyber Mentor online, that'll pretty much take you to our YouTube channel and those other things. But companies on all the social media pages you can think of. If you have a favorite platform you want to follow us on or check us out at, otherwise, tcm sec.com will get you to our consulting academy certifications, all that from the header page. So those would be the important links. Beautiful.

SPEAKER_00:

Hey, thanks so much for coming on again. And as always, dear listener, thank you so much for listening. We we uh love you guys and we'll see you next week. Thanks so much.