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In this LMScast episode, Kurt Von Ahnen elaborates on the notion that corporate training is a continuous process that changes with the company rather than a one-time event. He argues that many businesses put off documenting their procedures because they think things will change all the time. However, when teams expand, this kind of thinking frequently results in confusion, inefficiency, and knowledge loss.

Kurt Von Ahnen is known as a highly skilled corporate training and e-learning specialist who has worked with LifterLMS for more than ten years. Before working directly with the LifterLMS team and starting his own company, Manana No Mas, which focuses on LifterLMS and WordPress-based training solutions.

Businesses establish clarity and consistency even when processes change by documenting them early on through lessons, screen recordings, and organized training. Kurt highlights that corporate training reduces risk when people go and stops the emergence of unhealthy “this is how we really do it” workarounds by transferring knowledge from individuals to the firm itself. Beyond onboarding, he notes that training may be used for a variety of strategic objectives, such as enhancing sales effectiveness, assisting with customer education, uniting teams around common standards, and raising business valuation.

By combining training materials into a single, adaptable platform, assigning content by role or group, and continuously improving their internal “business product,” WordPress and LifterLMS enable organizations to transform training from a reactive expense into a key driver of stability, scalability, and long-term growth.

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Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. We’re joined by a special guest. He’s back on the show. It’s Kurt Von Onan from Manana Nomas. He also works directly with LifterLMS. Kurt is awesome. He’s been around the LifterLMS project for a decade or so, a very long time. Uh, Kurt started as.

LifterLMS user started coming to our office hours, then got a job doing some work for LifterLMS. He has an agency called Mon Ana Nomas and does a bunch of lifter projects. Uh, I’ve had the pleasure of spending time with Kurt at various conferences and things. Kurt’s awesome. He has a lot of unique experience.

We’re gonna be diving deep into corporate training and using WordPress and. LifterLMS and other tools to solve a different kind of e-learning use case, which is corporate training, which is very different from being a subject matter expert trying to make money on the internet selling courses to any people all over the world.

Corporate training is very different, but first, welcome back on the show, Kurt. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: Chris, it’s awesome to be back, man. I love having chats with you. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah, I love to get into your experience ’cause you have so many stories and so much unique experience. Uh, from your career and just in life, but let’s start, for those out there listening who may be a little fuzzy on exactly what corporate training is, how, how would you define it?

Both like at the large scale, maybe the medium scale and the small scale? 

Kurt Von Ahnen: Well. Corporate training, it, some people say, well it’s just course creation and it’s not. They’re, they’re, they really are separate entities in how they function, how they work, how they, how they do. So corporate training really is the idea that, you know, any kind of function or process within a corporate frame set should be documented and disseminated to the staff in an organized way.

And, and that’s like, that’s the elevator speech for corporate training. And then from an e-learning perspective, that’s kind of, it’s, it’s almost still like an evolution in process, Chris, because there’s so many things. From an HR standpoint that that haven’t seemed to gotten to, you know, corporate training yet.

There’s so many things that have the potential to be put into corporate training, which in turn would add to productivity, efficiency, and profit for these companies that, that haven’t fully adopted yet. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah, and I like that definition a lot like documenting process. And I was coaching an entrepreneur the other day who was having trouble.

With getting a team member really invested in their standard operating procedures, and I gave them a framework which was, Hey, try to coach this person into the idea that we’re building two products. We have our main product that we sell to the public, but the business is also a product. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah, 

Chris Badgett: so in this case it was a software company, so our users have documentation.

But we also need documentation for the business product and present that in a organized way. Like LifterLMS as an example, is not a Fortune 500 company, as you know, it’s a small business, but we have our own corporate training, which is powered by LifterLMS. We use the LifterLMS private site add-on.

We use the courses in our case to represent different key parts of the business, like. Marketing, uh, support operations and so on. Each of those are courses. And then we use the lesson structure for individual trainings or standard operating procedures. And the cool thing with corporate training in my small business use case, it gets really, it can be hard to get the momentum going, but it gets to be kind of fun when people start using it, contributing to it, and not just like.

The owner is creating everything. Everybody’s working on it, making it better, like basically making the business product. And like you said before we started hitting record, I found interesting when you said it, that a lot of companies get into corporate training way late in the game. If I could wave a magic wand, like I didn’t, we didn’t even do this until like more than.

60% through the current life of the business. Before we’re like, Hey, maybe we should document what we do and how we do things. And sometimes that starts kind of sloppy with like, well there’s a Google Doc here. There’s a note over here. There’s a slideshow presentation. Check out this YouTube video over here.

It’s very disorganized. But yeah, I just want to pass it back to you on. Why you love it. It can sound like sort of a stodgy topic, but it’s actually really exciting when you think of the business as a product and you document it and the efficiency gains and the knowledge transfer and everything. Like what?

What makes you excited about it? 

Kurt Von Ahnen: See now you’re, you’re kind of incorporating there. There’s parts of me that I can’t separate. So while I’m very focused on e-learning and corporately, I loved being like the publications and training manager at Suzuki, motors of America. That was like a great job, right?

Great title. But I couldn’t separate the marketing or the entrepreneur person from the education manager in that company. And so for me, I get really excited with corporate training because it’s. People, a lot of business owners in the corporate space, they see it as a necessary evil. They see it as an expense.

They see it, you know, in, in the world of debits and credits. They only see it as the debit. Instead of recognizing that, corporate training can very much be a marketing tool that can drive performance. Ambition within your staff. Restore or build, corporate culture, right? So, so that you reduce your turnover.

Uh, it can also be a really, really great marketing tool for the sales side of things. So if you’re a company that has a and I, and I might be going. I might be like fast forwarding us through content right now, but if you’re a pr, if you’re a production company that does consumer goods, you automatically have three verticals of courses that your company requires.

You’re, you should have, uh, training so that people in the field can effectively sell your product to the consumer, right? So you make something that’s somewhat technical. You assume people in the field are familiar with it or they’re enthusiasts and they know how it works. What you really need is a features and benefits type course for them so they know how to sell the product.

Then you need public facing courses where people buy the product and they can take a course that tells ’em how to properly use the product. And then you need a separate vertical of courses for all of the people that are in the, the backend, what we call fixed operations, what we call, you know, after sales in some companies, and that’s people that are in staff or in the field that would have to fix whatever that product is, if it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do.

And a lot of times. The people that make these decisions, the people that are in the position high up in these companies, it’s taken them a long time and a lot of effort to get to where they’re at. And they, they deserve all the respect for getting there. But the thing is, is that they haven’t stayed crisp on all the other nuances of what business can do when they got there.

And training is usually one of the last things that they consider on the budget, uh, items. ’cause they’re mostly concerned about how do they make more sales, how do they move more units? You know, how do they monitor, you know, the customer service lines? How do they, there’s, there’s all this business operations that seem to take that, that that urgent classification rather than the important classification.

And if they focus on what’s important, instead of urgent training, kind of bubbles to the top. And if they trained everybody, all that other noise would quiet down. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And you and I have a history of just being in like management and leadership positions. And one of the things that makes me so excited about it is like 99% of companies, when a new hire comes on board, their, their solution to corporate training is follow bob around, Bob, tell, tell this new hire everything, you know?

And then, and then another new hire comes, and now Bob has to stop working. And be shadowed again, which is good. That’s part of training and mentoring and things like that, but that whole thing can get so much more efficient. And what if Bob quits? What if Bob goes to a competitor, you just lost Bob. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: What if Bob opens up his trainer onboarding with this is the way they want us to do it, but this is the way we really do it.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, even worse. Yeah. And that’s, that’s how you get into toxic c corporate culture, right? 

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah, absolutely. And, and so a lot of people think that maybe I’m a little too oversold on, on the whole training thing, but it really has become quite a passion point for me. I love to train, I love to teach, I love to help with curriculum development, so a lot of that is kind of just instilled, I guess.

But when I see the actual benefits. Of corporate training when it’s used from a different perspective than necessary evil or bottom line on the budget thing, when I see it actually leveraged as an asset, that’s when I really see growth at the corporate level. Like I said, that change in internal culture is huge.

You mentioned the stuff that you do with Lifter. I do the same thing with Ana Nomas. When I started my agency, I thought, well, anybody can have an agency, like, you know, everybody’s nephew knows how to make websites. So if I ever wanted to have an exit strategy from Manana, NOMAS, what would set it apart?

What would make it different? Than any other agency. And we have a similar thing. We have a backend course in the back of Ana Nomas, and every time we add a new process to Ana Nomas, I do a screen share with one of our staffers. We create a quick lesson about it and we add it to a section in our course.

That way, if I ever need to sell Ana Nomas, or if I get hit by a bus and someone in my family wants to sell money, Noma, they don’t have to learn how an agency works. They can just say, Hey, this agency’s turnkey, and it comes with the complete directions on how to run it right here. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah, that’s a great point.

And you mentioned earlier that some higher ups in bigger companies may see corporate training as an expense. I actually see it as the opposite. Like you, it is actually an asset. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: But in terms of company valuation, no matter what kind of company it is, uh, when somebody buys that, they’re not just buying whatever property is there.

The staff that are working there, but they’re buying the process. It’s actually the most important thing that you’re selling as a company in many, many cases. It’s how you do what you do. And is that documented somewhere? Uh, that’s, that’s key. And e-learning comes in because e-learning implies structure.

And it, you know, you can be flexible. Just get it in there somewhere. But if it’s spread all over, like massive Google Docs folders or spreadsheets on somebody’s computer and not here and there, it’s, it can get messy really quickly and not unified across a company, particularly a bigger one with multiple divisions.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Well, and, and a big component of, of what you’re alluding to but haven’t said is expensive. Because each platform that some department head decided to use or incorporate or, you know, create an addendum to came probably with some kind of subscription expense. And so, for instance, when I worked at Ducati and did their training, there was three or four different e-learning platforms that were used, and then there were multiple.

Physical external hard drives that were like backed up and kept secure on site. You know, we had an IT guy that, you know, you had to get a certain, a certain privilege to be able to access this sacred documentation. And at the end of the world, you know, that’s, that’s not the efficient way to run stuff.

That’s not the affordable way to run things. When you have something, you know, like to throw the commercial in for Lifter right here. When you have something like Lifter that can consolidate all of that information and different types of media into something that’s structured it, it takes away the needs for all those other channels.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And then you throw in WordPress, which lifter needs as well. That’s a content management system with things like categories for organization. And, you know, lifter builds on that further in the e-learning context. But I think it’s sort of like, you know, if I could wave a magic wand, the moment a new company starts, they should build two websites.

One for their marketing site or their business, and then another for their company. That’s internal training or corporate training and like start from day one that way. But it never happens that way. The training always comes like years and years and years later, right? 

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah, it’s a lot of times people hesitate in a new startup or a younger company, they hesitate for the documentation part because they assume everything’s gonna change.

They assume, we’re constantly gonna change, we’re constantly gonna evolve. You know, if, if we stay still, then we’re going backwards. We gotta keep moving forward. And those are great catchy sayings. But at the end of the day, if you don’t, you know, if you don’t take a bite out of it and start. Really starting to track the things that you’re doing.

It can spool outta control pretty quickly. 

Chris Badgett: It just popped in my head too. I wanna mention, like, I wanna fight against this thing that, like corporate training is an expense. ’cause it’s not. So for example, uh, let’s say you, you bring in an outside sales expert that teaches sales to your sales team. All you have to do is be like, Hey, if it’s all with you, I’m gonna film this training session.

So that we can review it later and the team can review it, and then that means every year you don’t have to hire the same sales trainer to come in or a different one. Like you’re, you’re, you’re creating an asset and you’re capturing value. And organizations are messy because people come in and out or go to a competitor or things happen in life.

So it’s, it’s like curating value and like the wisdom. Because we call it, you know, like in software or any kind of company really, there’s something called the guardian of the black box. The black box, which often for a startup is the founder. Everything’s in their head. So they need to get it out of the black box and get it public and like known, like how does this thing work?

How do, how do we do this? How do we sell this? How do we make this, how do we do the back office operations? Like, what is it? It’s not always just, well just go ask the founder or the manager or whatever. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. Yeah, and I think it’s important to recognize that when we start talking about this topic, we’re not just saying, oh, create a course, but everything in one course and everybody gets access to it.

A lot of people at the corporate level have different, tiers of information they wanna share with people, and you’re able to do that through, you know, most learning management systems. You’re, you’re, you know, when it comes to corporate training, you could say. Directors get, you know, these courses and managers get these courses and clerks get these courses.

So you can be super, super specific and distribute the training in a way that makes sense for your business. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah, and even tools like LifterLMS groups can help with that. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: Oh yeah. 

Chris Badgett: And, and in terms of like, oh, well this is. This is for like, if you have multiple franchises with locations and each location is a new group and so on.

There’s so many different ways to organize it and make sure you control the access the way you wanna, the way you want to control it. Why, what, anything else about why you think WordPress is a great fit? ’cause I gotta, like in the early days when we launched Lifter. It’s predominantly the creator economy, like the YouTuber, the coach, the subject matter expert.

These were our first customers, but then Kurt showed up in his office cubicle interested in like getting really excited. Tell us more about that moment of like, why WordPress, why LifterLMS.

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Kurt Von Ahnen: Well this is probably the number one target channel for our agency Mana No Mas. And it’s because of my experience at the corporate level.

These corporate companies that I worked at, where I was in charge of the learning programs, the learning, you know, learning departments, their budgets were, I mean, for me. I started to get used to the numbers, but for a person outside of corporate training, the numbers seem huge. So when, when you look at, you know, hey, we’ve got this commercial product that you know, we need to train.

2,500 people on, and, and you think, okay, and they build that up. These corporations, again, they made these decisions maybe 8, 12, 15 years ago, and they, they made a decision that said, we’re gonna use, you know, this type of software and this type of platform, and this is, you know, how we’re gonna afford this, right?

How we’re gonna, we’re gonna budget for this. What a lot of people don’t recognize is these companies are literally budgeting. A quarter million dollars a year to a half a million dollars a year to run these e-learning websites. And so part of my enthusiasm when, when Chris met me in the office hours was, here I am this guy who’s authorizing $400,000 a year for hosting and maintenance of a learning management system for a corporation.

And I’m sitting there thinking to myself. I can host a website in WordPress, you know, super cheap. But for corporate enterprise purposes, let’s say even if I paid three grand a year for the hosting, that’s $3,000. And then I was looking at the price of LifterLMS and a couple of CRM tools and a couple of things I’d like to plug in.

And now let’s say I spend another. $2,000 on software for the year, let’s just say that, right? So maybe I’m at $5,000 for the year for the software, the hosting, and now it’s just my time that, that it’s gonna go into like the, the maintenance side of it. And, uh, I really started to look at it as an opportunity.

And not that I’m gonna take $5,000 in costs and, you know, a couple hundred hour, couple hundred hours of my life every year and sell that to a company for $400,000. That’s, that’s not, that’s not the picture that was in my head. The picture that was in my head, Chris, was we can create. E-learning now in WordPress with Lifter that looks better, feels better, functions better, can play the same legacy content that some of these companies insist on keeping and using, which I fully understand.

And we can go from three to $500,000 a year on maintenance and hosting to, I can run that as an agency for a company now. 60, 70, $80,000 a year. Our margins are strong, our product is superior, and the company is, you know, saving 65 to 80% of their e-learning costs by using us. So that’s how I got excited.

So, so when I started to plan and exit from the corporate world and do my own agency, I was like, there’s a whole world of, of corporate clients. That are paying for purpose-built SCORM websites, or they’re in Learn Upon, or Bridge or Blackboard or something, but those e-learning sites that they’re paying the retail plus dollars for, they don’t have all the features that a WordPress CMS delivers with an LMS embedded in it.

And so we’re able to give them something much, much better and more fulfilling. For less of the investment. And it’s, it’s kind of a backwards thought for a lot of the people that run the businesses. So a lot, it’s too good to be true kind of thing. It’s, it’s almost a hard sell. It’s 

Chris Badgett: too cheap. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: But once we get them and we treat them well, they’ll never leave.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And the cool thing about Mana No mas too, like I know the WordPress freelancers and agencies out there listening are like, they’re getting excited because they’ll be like. I love life coaches as an example, but that’s an example of a subject matter expert with a particular expertise. There’s only so much a life coach would be willing to pay for an LMS website.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: But if you start, if you do it for a corporate client, it’s just, it’s much higher value to their business impact and to their. Value generation and asset protection and stuff like that. It’s a different game altogether, but they’re not just hiring you to put the best hosting theme, WordPress plugins together.

Manano Nomas also has like the knowhow of how corporate training works and where the friction points are. And 

Kurt Von Ahnen: yeah, because 

Chris Badgett: you, you, I know you end up not just building a website, but actually. Kind of coaching your clients through the transformation of installing, uh, effective corporate training in the organization.

Not to mention the fact that it’s not just getting the technology implemented and, and the business buy-in, but you also know how to structure e-learning content ’cause you’re a trainer. So 

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: You know how to just help remove all that friction and coach them to success. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. It’s a thank you, that’s flattering.

But yeah, having some curriculum development expertise where you can come in and, and you can do a needs assessment with them and based on their, based on their vertical for industry, you know, is it an industry that has an appetite for long form training, which some still do, that’s great, but you know, hey, do we take this existing legacy content and break it down into, you know, more of a micro learning situation where we really.

Take advantage of some of that learner psychology. We know about, you know, about dopamine hits and, and little short wins and, and making things happen. Do we gamify it? Do we give people, you know, badges and prizes for accomplishing certain things? You see corporate training’s completely different than course creator.

You know, marketplaces, if we think about corporate training, it’s all about course completion. It’s all about, you know, current certification in a certain job set and. The corporate training that they offered previously on those outdated websites with the old legacy content. It’s not entertaining. It’s not fun.

There’s no dopamine hit, there’s no leaderboard, there’s no, there’s no engagement. It’s, you do it ’cause you need to do it. This needs to be done by Wednesday. Hey, if you don’t have this done by Wednesday, I can’t give you a check on Friday. Like that. That’s like corporate training has this like overlord sensation to it.

You know where, where everyone kind of dreads it. But there’s a way to reinvest in corporate training. And, and again, this makes me sound overly hopeful. I think sometimes, but I still say it this way. People could reinvest in corporate training. Leverage the tools of WordPress on a platform like lifter, LMS, you, you can gamify it, you can make it fun.

You can create micro learning. And then with corporate training, what’s really, really important is a lot of corporate training needs involve blended learning, which means you want to have a, a strategy to reduce costs and, and cost corporately refer to like travel, hotel per diem, you know, all that stuff, right?

And so, you want to create content that gives them as much effective theory online as possible. And then once they complete and certify themselves in the theory side of it online, then you bring them in for a consolidated, succinct in-person practicum where they demonstrate whatever those skills need to be.

So a perfect example of that is the work I did at Ducati. When I worked at Ducati. Their training was contract based and it was kind of scattered. It was, they did like local in-person trainings. Uh, and it was like a two week session for technicians to get certified as, as a motorcycle technician. What, what I did in my first year at Ducati was I took all the theory from that course.

And I built a curriculum where the technicians could certify themselves for theory online. First, they had to successfully complete and test out of all the online training first. Then they came to a one week practicum course where we refreshed the training, reviewed some high points of the training, just to make sure everybody was on the same page.

Then we put him in a workshop and we said, okay, each technician gets an opportunity to display the skills. They learned through the online training and once we could witness that, they actually could, you know, perform the skillset, we could certify them so they could work on customers motorcycles.

Corporately, the benefit was we cut the training budget in half from 2013 to 2014. We cut the budget in half, but we certified twice as many technicians. So when you look at that from a corporate expenditure standpoint, that is not. That is not an expensive training. That is an asset of training. 

Chris Badgett: I love that.

And one other note on the asset thing is sometimes when you get really good at corporate training, you actually create a new product that you can sell. Like you would know better than me, but. For example, a lot of people have studied the Toyota production system, which is a, uh, it’s like how Toyota does what they do.

Their stuff is so good that made Toyota so effective that it became stuff that other companies would invest in. I don’t know who wrote the book on it, or if Toyota actually sold it or licensed it or whatever, but. You can’t, your corporate training can be so awesome in how you train your salespeople that you can just train.

You can then sell that training to other people who have salespeople, which is 

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: In the franchise space, that’s super, super common where the, the main company will make, like addendum training, right. So like different specialty training, and then they’ll sell that to their franchisees as upgrades.

Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. See, it’s an asset. You, you know it, I know it. We’re trying to get every, everybody to know it. The reality is, if you really think about it, every company in the world is an education company. They just, a lot of ’em don’t realize it. So once you realize that it’s, it’s really mind blowing when you think about it.

Kurt Von Ahnen: I was gonna say, I actually do a local talk here for entrepreneurs about why every company needs to have a learning management system. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: Just onboarding people. If I hire a new contractor to come into Ana Nomas to help me with social media or SEO or you know, helping build things in zip wp, I literally just send them to a section of our course and say, this is what I hired you for.

You know, I’m gonna pay you for the time to take this section of training, but then you have everything you need to perform the task I hired you for. 

Chris Badgett: I love that. Yeah. That’s that’s awesome. Tell, tell us about, the kind of corporate training clients that you work with at your agency. Like, who’s a good fit and what do you offer and how should they get in touch with you?

Kurt Von Ahnen: Do, do you want the secret mojo on, on how to work through the nonsense or do you, do you wanna just know what I do? 

Chris Badgett: Uh, all of it. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: So usually when you work with corporate, the first person you talk to is not the person that you want to talk to. Someone reached out to you, or your marketing landed in somebody’s mailbox and, and it, and it got the actual, you know, web form filled out or the lead came in somehow.

So when you work with corporate clients, it’s super important that before you start doing like. Needs assessments and proposals and, and really getting wrapped up in what this project could look like. You gotta make sure that you have the actual stakeholders within your circle of communication. So sometimes it’s harder than it seems.

Uh, but, uh, Chris will tell you I’m a pretty direct communicator, so, uh, I just ask people, I just flat out ask people. I have a really good story that maybe I’ll share sometime about how I landed the actual position at Ducati. It’s pretty funny ’cause I basically just told the whole room of people, I said, I’m pretty sure whoever makes the decision isn’t in this room right now.

So we can have a conversation later. And thank goodness I said that ’cause it worked out perfect. Working with corporate clients, you gotta find the stakeholders first. You have to, you have to find them, identify them, and then make sure that you have their attention or their buy-in. Like I said, corporately, the people that really make the decisions, the people that really, you know, draw out the spreadsheets and the budgets for their different divisions or departments, typically they’ve been in the game for a bit.

They, they, they’re, they’re tired. They’re, they’re just trying, they’re not really looking for changes, right. We, this is the way we do it. ’cause this is the way we’ve always did it. Right. So it’s, you, you’re trying to overcome that. And I’ll be honest with you, Chris, if I feel that there’s. Too much of an obstacle there, or this has taken too much of my personal energy to educate them on why this is a great move for their business.

I just move on to the next lead. You know, I, I don’t try to convert people that aren’t really looking to be converted. I want people that very willingly are looking forward to the breath of fresh air that we give their company. So. Working with corporate clients, the main thing is finding the right person inside the company.

And then the next step, Chris, is something I think that most free, most freelancers. Bail and, and totally dismiss it, but I think a lot of agencies do too. And that is, you gotta sell discovery. You, you, it’s not like you’re gonna talk to some dude for 30 or 45 minutes and then know what the project’s gonna be.

You gotta, 

Chris Badgett: well, you don’t instantly know like, okay, well you need exactly this corporate training after this kind of. Implementation after a quick conversation. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah, I mean, you can, you can dream build with somebody pretty quickly, but when it comes to, Hey, what’s the scope of work actually gonna look like?

I think the only way to really tackle that is through paid discovery and where you say, Hey, I’m gonna need 4,000, 5,000, $8,000, whatever you. Think you can, you can muster, but, and you have to come up with work that justifies the expense, obviously. But you are going to interview multiple stakeholders within the corporation, depending on the size of the corporation, because marketing’s gonna want one thing.

Sales is gonna want something different. Uh, operations is gonna be like a whole different channel and world to talk to. And then there’s customer service and then of course hr. And so you’re gonna have to get information. From all of those stakeholders as leaders. And you gotta remember that in a lot of corporate frameworks, it really does come down to almost like design by committee, which is uh, uh.

That’s like a phrase that most people hate. But the trick to this is out of all those people that you interview, out of all those people that you have in the stakeholder circle, you have to figure out how do you make yourself the hub? How do you become the project manager where you’re actually in charge of what’s happening on the project, and they’re just kind of along for the information.

They’re not really making decisions. You’re informing them and you’re telling ’em that you’re the expert in the space. And then if you can make that happen. It’s gonna be a lot smoother sailing for you. If you don’t do proper discovery and you let somebody else, or, or two or three other voices percolate to the top, you’ve got a disaster on your hands and you’re probably gonna get sued at the end.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, and I like what you’re saying too, like about the mindset of

. Group think isn’t always a bad thing. 

Chris Badgett: Like you need to just, you need to get inside like what all these different stakeholders want. ’cause you’re not just building a website, you’re like working within an organization and you need to meet their needs.

And all the stakeholders need to be left better off than how you found them. And that requires a discovery process. You can’t just like. Kind of hold your finger up in the air and guess what would be perfect for this company? 

Kurt Von Ahnen: It’s weird because I know that there’s people that’ll will watch this.

I know that there’s people that, that will listen to what we’re saying and they’ll be like, oh, that’s silly. I’m just gonna need these three plugins. I’m gonna slap those in, and then I’m gonna show them a sample course, and then they can build what they want to fill in the gaps for their courses. And from a freelancer perspective.

That might work for a course creator or that might work for a very small startup or something like that. But if you want to get into the, into the real corporate training space where you’re dealing with department heads and operational managers in, in multiple locations and, and things like that, like imagine trying to sell Audi of America.

A new e-learning platform. I worked at a bunch of different Audi training centers and I know 35 of the people that, that work there and train people. Like you need to have a relationship with those people so that you can do the needs assessment. You can come up with a plan of attack and a strategy, and then you need to relay it to them to get their buy-in where you let them know that, Hey, I’ve heard you.

I know what you’re asking for, but this is our answer to that and this is how we’re gonna proceed. Then you execute and you execute well. You execute on budget, and you execute on time, and you deliver on time and under budget. And then the project has a chance to land and expand to steal one of Chris’s favorite phrases.

That’s that’s one of my skill sets by the way. I land and expand. Hey, what’s next? 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Well, if somebody out there is running a business, whether it’s small, medium, or large. They understand the value of corporate training and they want some help, and they want to leverage the power customizability and affordability of WordPress Lifter and, and work with a leader in the space and an innovator, and a consultant, and an implementer in the space like you and your agency.

What should they do from here? How should they connect with you? 

Kurt Von Ahnen: Our website is manana Nomas, uh, so that’s like tomorrow no more, right? But manana nomas.com. Uh, I’m also the only Kurt Van Onan on LinkedIn. If you’d rather connect on LinkedIn and then see what other things are linked to or who’s in my circles there.

If you wanna research me more before you contact me, that’s fine. And then anything on social media is Ano Nomas or Kurt Van, and I’m super easy to find and connect with. 

Chris Badgett: Thank you for coming back on the show and thank you for bringing the corporate training use case to LifterLMS. ’cause I don’t know if I’ve ever said it directly, like you were the first one I saw where like, oh, this is somebody in this use case who’s here.

Interested, excited, passionate, just trying to help. People and businesses is, it’s awesome. So thank you for, for joining us on the Journey. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: Oh, you’re, you’re very welcome. And, and just to give people a little sense of reassurance about what Chris is saying about the corporate training thing, the free core Lifter plugin is usually sufficient to get corporate training launched.

’cause you’re not selling the training, you’re delegating the training to staff. So you don’t need the, the payment gateways and some of the marketing tools. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and that’s the key with corporate training and SOPs, standard operating procedures and things like that is the key is just a start.

So a good content management system and learning management system together gives you everything you need 

Kurt Von Ahnen: and we can always scale later. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Awesome, Kurt. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Really appreciate it. We’ll have to do this again. In fact, we will likely see you in the next episode.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you [email protected] slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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