Intro

In this LMScast episode, Kurt Von Ahnen offers insightful advice on how to grow online education companies, especially when it comes to focusing on bigger, business-to-business (B2B) prospects rather than just individual customers.

Kurt also highlights the need to think wider and concentrate on scalability, using examples from relationship, health, and wealth courses to show how individualized training can be stretched into more extensive B2B services.

Additionally, he also talks about his own experience of increasing the cost of his training after realizing how crucial it is to match value and price to draw in more serious customers.

Episode Transcript

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 Badgett. I’m the co-founder of Lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS casts. I’m joined by a repeat guest. It’s Kurt Von Annen from Manana No Mas. Kurt is a Lifter LMS expert. He helps us out some at Lifter LMS. And today we’re going to talk about thinking bigger about selling to businesses, thinking about your learning management systems projects, and even how you approach life as an entrepreneur more at scale.

We’re also going to talk about agency life, but first welcome back on the show, Kurt. Dude, thanks so much for having me back. It’s always a pleasure talking to you. When I first met you, you were coming to Lifter LMS office hours. You were working at a big company. You were like, you would drop into the call in a cubicle area.

I think it seemed like on the floor. And you’ve always been like, around business and your niche and your industry of power sports, but you’ve also had this Insane obsession with, WordPress and building websites. I think you got into WordPress before I did in 2008, I think you came in 2006 or something.

I can’t remember. 2004. Four. Okay. Yeah. So you’ve been around this show for a long time and you were not just because of WordPress or Lifter long before that you’ve been into leadership, education, training. Improving teams, management systems, and all that stuff. So let’s dive in there. As an education entrepreneur, whether you’re creating an LMS website for yourself around your own subject matter, expertise, or you’re advising a client who’s putting together a course, how do we think bigger?

How do we think about scale and, creating more leverage and impact when we’re creating online education and businesses around that?

Kurt Von Ahnen: That’s a big question. This could be a big answer when you are thinking about being a course creator and creating your content. I know you’ve made tons of content on who is your avatar and who are you selling to and who is your target audience and who are you speaking to?

And that’s all a hundred percent, but there’s another side of it. And it goes and I learned this the hard way with the power sport Academy. It’s you might know who you’re going to be working with. You might know who you’re going to educate. But is that the customer? And I think that’s where I really started to embrace this idea of a B2B sales model, or I hate to call it like learning brokerage or something.

But that kind of feels like that. Whereas I had to work really hard to identify. Who’s the customer? Who’s going to pay me for this service? And then how do I offer this service or this product in the best way forward for the actual students that are going to take the, and that happened. I was doing, I used to be the corporate trainer for Ducati.

Then I was the corporate trainer for Suzuki. I’ve worked with BRP. I’ve done a little bit of work with Triumph and Polaris was one contract I had. And so I’ve worked a lot with these bigger companies that have dealerships. And then someone has to train the people that works at those dealerships.

So if I’m training technicians or if I’m training service managers, the normal course creator thinks that’s their customer. And that was the mistake I made. That wasn’t my customer. My customer was the dealer owner that hired the service managers and the technicians. And then at some stage I realized in some cases, it wasn’t even those dealers.

In some cases, it’s an organization that runs groups of dealers, or it’s an OEM that supplies product to hundreds of dealers. And then you have to start rethinking what that scale looks like because you mentioned scale in the question. So is my client one dealership? Is my client a group of dealers that work with a specific product?

Or is my client Actually, all of the dealerships that fall within a giant organization. And then you start to think in terms of what is that financially? And that’s where things can get, if you’re not careful, you can become overwhelmed because you start counting the money before you make it.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Yeah. And just to put some concepts out there from Lifter LMS has something called groups. It’s an add on, you can get it by itself or it’s part of the infinity bundle. Where a group, you can offer training to groups that then invite their members in, and those, that group may be a business and they have employees who need to train the group admin can invite people in, manage those enrollments in their group and view their reporting and progress and things like that.

All without ever going into the backend of WordPress. I just want to know, as of this live recording, mid September, 2024, We’re just about to release the automated checkout and automated group setup aspect. Lots of people are already using groups, but this is going to make it even better. And just a quick example I like to give in a video I just made, I was showing how to sell a course for 500 or to sell that same course to a group that has 100 people that need to take it for 50, 000.

So in one sale, you can, that’s how you think at scale. Yeah,

Kurt Von Ahnen: it’s, I was an early adopter of groups and one of the things I like most about it, Chris, was this idea that I could sell at an enterprise level, 50 seats, 25 seats, 30 seats, whatever. But. Because I assigned the client as the group leader to the group.

So they can get front end reporting. I no longer have to play like LMS manager and pull weekly reports and make all these pretty documents that say, you’re 17 people didn’t show up for class this week now that they can manage it directly through the site. And the client treats it like, like it’s a privilege, like it’s a perk rather than an obligation.

So it’s actually like a feature not. Even though it’s taken work away from me, it’s still a feature for the client. So it’s a win.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. It’s not like you couldn’t do this before, but gosh, has it gotten a lot easier with a lot more automation? Let’s play a fun game and help the course creators out there.

Start thinking at scale a little bit. I’d like to give the examples of health, wealth, and relationships. Let’s say you’re really into health. So you’d be thinking about wealth while I’m talking. But let’s say you help people with fitness, right? And that’s your thing. You were a personal trainer and you help people with a certain kind of fitness plan, whether it’s lose weight or whatever your niche focuses.

You can do that all day and you can sell a hundred dollar courses. But if you think bigger, if you start thinking at scale, how do I create, how can I take my same course content and actually sell to gyms that have, you Lots of people there going to get who would benefit from some online training as well.

So just think bigger. Some courses and memberships are really not meant for a la carte individual purchase and group, but I think you’d be surprised how many. Things that we teach could just be thought about a little differently and sell the exact same thing to a bigger organization. How about you give us a business or wealth example?

Kurt Von Ahnen: The business example selfishly is that power sport Academy deal. If. And you know what? Everyone plays with pricing a different way. So is it okay if I’m a little transparent with pricing? Yeah, let’s do it. All right. So when I first launched the power sport Academy, I was willing to train dealerships for 1, 500 for a year with live coaching and access to the course and all this stuff.

And I thought there was going to be like 200 dealers that would sign up and I’d have to beat them off with a stick. And that’s not what happened. As I, when I just said at the beginning of the show, I was approaching the wrong customer. So I didn’t have the right flow. I didn’t have nothing was right.

So I did a proof of concept, had some people in and the feedback was it’s way too cheap. My boss would never buy this because for 1500 bucks, they’re assuming there’s no value. It’s got to hurt. It’s got to be 10, 12, 13, 000. So we raised the price to 12, 000 and then we improved. We added a couple of courses.

We made it better and better. And over the course of five years. To train one dealership to train all the employees in one dealership with a year’s worth of live consulting, homework, and access to the six courses it’s 45, 000. And so some people might be listening to this or watching this episode and going, who is this guy that he thinks he can sell some web course for 45 grand?

But you have to understand what you’re selling. You’re not selling the course is the course, right? What I’m selling is most dealerships that take our course, see an increase in revenue of between six and 800, 000 in their service departments after taking this training. So if they’re going to see a 600, 000 increase in revenue, why wouldn’t they pay 45, 000 to train their staff?

Because the side effect is also, increased company culture, reduced employee turnover. higher margins, higher customer satisfaction scores. If you take a look at all of the side effects of the training, it ends up being a triple win all the way around. And so don’t ever be afraid of what the number is.

Remember what you’re selling. Remember the results that you’re selling and remember the audience that you’re selling to. So if we fast forward to how we were talking about business to business and groups and scaling, that’s a year’s worth of training, live consulting, homework to review. I don’t believe in passive income really, right?

I believe in putting skin in the game and anything that I’m selling for a retail price. So this business to business deal that we recently made is an organization that represents a group of dealers. They have about 60 dealers in their network. They needed training. And so what we negotiated was A sharply reduced admission for the courses.

We still do live training and homework and consulting, but instead of a year, we reduced it to six sessions over three months. So if you break that down by the hour, I’m only putting in nine hours of live work. Plus, I’m checking some homework and I’m sending a couple of emails here and there.

The system is set up through the CRM tool to do an email sequence for reminders, notifications, class times, and all that stuff. That’s all set up in advance. Nine hours of live coaching, over three months, and I don’t want to give away all the sauce, but if I do that every quarter, that’s almost six figures for a course that, I created five years ago.

Wow.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. We’re going to come back to talking a little more about partnerships, but just to finish the example let’s say in the relationships niche, imagine you help people find the love of their life. And by the way, we have a course inside Lifter LMS that you can just click a button, import it to your site called the soulmate attraction course, and you can, it’s white label.

You can do whatever you want with it. And you can sell it as is give it away for free to build your list. You can add your take and videos and modify the content. But just going back to that example. You could sell to individuals who are looking for help in their dating life. Or you know what, if you think a little bigger, think about the hundreds or thousands of dating coaches on the internet that have, two, 10, 20, 10, 000 of their own clients who could then you could make their lives easier by selling to those groups.

They didn’t dating coaches. It could then add value to their business by bat. They could buy back some of their time and enroll. People in your course. So just I just wanted to complete that thinking at scale example,

Kurt Von Ahnen: The way that you phrase that I think you miss a core element of how you describe that.

That is people often lose focus of what their skill set is or take it for granted. And so they assume everybody can do it. So you might, like in that example, how many authors have written a book on relationships, right? What helps sell books, sister courses that go along with those books, right?

So they have an audience, they have a website to sell their book, and now they could have a sister course alongside that book, but they probably don’t have it. The web building chops to make it, or the thought processes to break their content down into courses. Thinking like an instructional designer is a skillset.

And there’s so many things that we take for granted as course creators or web developers or WordPress people that we think, everybody’s, Oh, my nephew could do that for me. No, your nephew can’t do this for you. This stuff takes skill. It’s skin in the game. It’s decades of work. And so when you stop taking it for granted and you affix the value to it, that’s when I think more of the opportunities open up in front of you.

Chris Badgett: Another thing that makes opportunity open up in front of you is something that you’re good at, very good at Kurt, which is relationships. And I know with your, you had a recent partnership that helped bring those dealers in and share the workload of pulling off the big scaled power sports training situation.

Can you tell us how that partnership evolved and how that happened and, how people could think about, maybe I don’t have to do it all alone.

Kurt Von Ahnen: So I tell Chris all the time when we have our private talks, I think there’s a lot of value in understanding what your own limitations are. And even if it’s not your limitation, maybe you just don’t like doing it.

Like people assume because of all the lives that I do and the work with WP tonic and lifter and all this stuff that I’m just this gregarious guy that would be awesome at sales. I hate selling. I love conversation. And if conversation ends up in a product sale, that’s phenomenal. But I hate calling up a stranger and asking them for money.

I just, it’s not in me. A gentleman reached out to me not long ago, a couple of months ago. And he said, Hey, we had a phone call three years ago. I told you I was going to build this organization of dealers. It’s called a 20 club, which means we put dealers in groups of 20. He goes, Hey, it’s worked out pretty good.

We’ve got 63 dealers so far, but some of them want training. So here’s where I’m talking about skill sets. He obviously has the chops to sell and build relationships with dealers, right? Something that I wasn’t being very successful at, but I was really successful at putting a thousand hours of my life into building this really cool online curriculum.

So I have what he wants and he has what I want. Like I want access to his 63 dealers. So we had a conversation and I think I said, We first talked three years ago and then he just called me back and spurred this conversation on. So this is another lesson on seed and harvest and being patient with what you create.

And so we worked out a deal where I said, so you’re going to sell to your people. You’re going to enroll everybody. You’re going to take care of the transactions and the transaction fees and all of the headache that goes with selling stuff. And he said, yeah, I’m willing to do that. If you’re willing to help my people.

And I said, dude, I’m more than willing to help the people. In fact, let’s do this. Let’s just split the revenue. Let’s just take whatever I would charge and we’ll split it. And he goes that’s pretty generous. But here’s where I come back with people like some people would say a normal affiliate fees, 20 percent or a normal affiliate fees, 30 percent an affiliate makes a referral.

This gentleman’s not making a referral. He has access to his own group of clients, and he is very much influencing those clients use our product. And he is finalizing the sale. He’s doing the transaction. He’s doing all of the hard work, which I say is the hard work for me. For me, the easy work is hosting the classes, building relationships with his people and teaching his people how to make more money in business.

And so I focus on my strengths. I leverage someone else’s strengths and we do the revenue split and by giving him such a generous portion, he has completely sold out a hundred percent skin in the game to help me find success in training his entire network.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And just to put some math behind what we’re talking about here, there’s a company value that Lifter LMS has, which is learner results first, which just means that we always want to take care of the people that are actually taking the course, but I was just doing some quick math with chat, GBT and the average U.

S. dealership sells 500 to 800 new units per year, which if you’re in doing 60 dealers or whatever, that’s 30, 000 in people’s lives that are interacting with a dealership for sales or repair or whatever. And that’s how, that’s where the money comes from. This isn’t like magic. It’s, you’re just having a really big impact.

And this is the difference between Selling like one course to like B to C to just an individual consumer about how to take care of your car versus thinking at scale at this business enterprise level you’re a fit, you’re affecting just such a large number of people as you go through what the training does, the jobs that it creates, the raises that people get, cause they do better advancement in their career, safety on the road, whatever, it just goes on and on, which is

Kurt Von Ahnen: cool.

I should hire you to make me a commercial. The the thing that I come away with and part of the reason why I’m so vested in this particular project, and as I’m involved with the Marine Retailers Association and I got a background in automotive and things like that as well.

When whatever it is, if it’s a boat, a motorcycle, an ATV, a car, when you take that vehicle in for service and you have to talk to somebody and try and tell them what’s wrong with it or what you think is, or what problem you’re having with it. And then you give your car to these people and then you’re hoping they communicate to their technicians what you said, right?

Like what was the problem you were complaining about? You’re looking at the paperwork. The paperwork doesn’t make sense. The guy that was talking to you didn’t speak to you the way you wanted to be spoken to. The appointment process was probably a little painful. And then when they sold you the work, you weren’t even sure if the work they were selling you fixed your root cause problem or not.

You probably thought it was overpriced when you picked it up. When you picked it up, you probably weren’t real happy with the work that was done. I’ve been in the industry since I was a kid. So I published a book on the subject. I’ve, become the trainer at Ducati and Suzuki and all these places.

And my goal has always been, I want people to have a heightened experience. I want the customer to have a heightened experience when they go to a dealership that I trained. And I want the people that work at that dealership to have that heightened experience and that positive relationship with the consumer.

And that only happens because we train people to do that. When you think about a technician or a mechanic, if you think about it, when did that person ever have professional communications training? They never did. They could be the smartest person and know how everything on a car works, but if they can’t pick up the phone You know, and nicely say, thanks for calling ABC shop.

How can I help you? Or when would you like to bring your car in if they can’t execute, what we consider best practices in retail, then we assume that they’re subhuman, that they’re not capable of things, but they are, they’ve just never been trained in how to deal with the public. So that’s part of what our training brings to them.

Chris Badgett: Leadership has always been a topic that you’re really good at into written books on teach on a lot of this stuff you’re talking about is like being good manager and leader and employee and stuff. You said something I don’t know, about a year ago about how. In dealerships, sometimes the different departments are in war with each other, but you have a way to turn that around.

And there was just some really valuable leadership lessons in there that, that don’t, that can apply to anything where there’s a, where there’s kind of conflict within an organization. Could you share that?

Kurt Von Ahnen: That’s a really big topic for me. And that’s another one that goes deep. In fact, I’m thinking I might even write a whole book just on that topic.

And it’s. It’s an epidemic. I saw it in the office at Ducati, I saw it in the office at Suzuki. I saw it at the dealerships I worked at. I’m not making this stuff up. And people in the industry would tell you it’s exactly true. You could have a service representative meeting with service reps from all over the country come into a main office to have some kind of, annual rah meeting and the company would bring them pizza.

With no plates. And you’d be like, do you guys have any paper plates? And they would look at you with a straight face and say it’s not customary for us to provide utensils with the food you should have brought your own plate. Like it’s like totally ludicrous stuff. And then when the sales team comes in at, at 1130.

They’re packing up and saying, Oh, we’re going to run over to Mendocino farms, or we’re going to go to some restaurant, for lunch, we’ll be back at one 30 and they all go in the company flips the time, right? Because there’s such a sales focused industry and services always in the background.

That becomes. Just the state of being all the time, right? Where one department thinks they’re higher up than the other. When in reality, it’s the department that’s lesser thought of that has more influence over the relationship with the customer and the overall revenue that comes into the store.

So it’s a really interesting kind of like dichotomy relationship. So when I spoke. I spoke at dealer week last year for the Marine Retailers Association. And one of my talks was interdepartmental harmony. And the whole talk was on how we can use leadership skills and run our departments in a way that communicates with the other departments that lends, not just credibility, but lends positive relationship to each of those things.

So I teach when I consult with dealers, I’m like, if you’re the service manager, you need to have a daily meeting. with the parts manager. You need to have a daily meeting with the general manager and you need to be proactive. You need to say, Hey, what units did you take in on trade last weekend? Which ones need to be reconditioned?

Which ones are going to go wholesale? Meaning are they going to go to auction and get liquidated? Hey, I gave you the estimates to recondition these three. When are you going to approve those? We can work them back through the shop. And. Yeah. If you’re from the service side, if you’re proactive with the sales department and with the parts department, they’ll hate you at first.

Cause they think you’re nagging them or pushing them, right? You’re getting pushy over a 30, 60, 90 day span. If you were to look at how it’s transforming, it becomes a very positive relationship where they recognize, Oh, cause here’s what happens in a dealership Friday afternoon, three o’clock sales, sell something.

And it’s an emergency. Everything in the service department has to stop and you got to stop what you’re doing and prep this unit so that sales can sell it and let it, get delivered the same day. And sales always has emergencies on Friday afternoon and Saturday. But if we think about it, it’s not really sales is fault that they always have sales emergencies on Fridays and Saturdays, because if you didn’t, if you work service and you ignored that department for four or five days prior in the week, that’s your own fault.

If you would have talked to them on Monday or Tuesday, you would have known that, Hey, we need a couple more units prepped for the sales floor. We need a couple more units ready to go. This is what our inventory looks like right now. And it’s that. It’s that communication that’s lacking. And when we fill in the gaps with better communication, we get better processes and better processes, equal margin and profit.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. There’s some valuable lessons in there and going back into leadership. The base layer of leadership, in my view, is how you lead yourself and personal development and, work on yourself, basically. You do a lot of different things. You have a lot of skills. And you have an agency, you’ve got some jobs, you’ve got your own information, online education, businesses and partnerships you’re working.

Tell us about how you lead yourself and manage all that, particularly having a product like an educational company and A agency.

Kurt Von Ahnen: I think the first thing to identify with listeners, especially that might not know me yet is I’m a really big proponent of using what I sell or represent. I’m really big on that.

So almost to a fault. Cause my own website, manana nomas has morphed five or six different iterations in the last decade. Most companies would be more stable with their website, but I look at it like I’m representing product or I’m building product for customers and I want to show that I use that product.

So right now my website’s based on bricks. I just did a bricks exercise to make sure that I could use bricks and that I understood it and that I could see the advantages of using bricks as a page builder before that it was a buddy boss website. And I didn’t have any real social stuff built into my website presence, but I thought, you know what, let’s do a buddy boss thing for a while and show people that we can build community, that we can build, learning products embedded with community and we can make it work.

And so we have these things. So I’m a firm believer in using what I represent. The other side of the coin is I found as I got older. A lot of people say the riches are in the niches and you should focus on one thing. And the more you focus on one thing, the more successful you’re going to be. I tried that.

It’s not in my makeup, Chris. That’s not the way I’m built. I’m more of an eclectic kind of person mentally, and I like to have things in different channels, I learned over time that if I focus on four or five different verticals, but I recognize them as very separate verticals and I kind of time block my week accordingly, I noticed that I can skip a lot of the seasonality or a lot of the ups and downs of being in a niche.

For instance, we mentioned the Powersport Academy ad nauseum in this interview today. A lot of dealerships almost closed down for the winter, right? So like October to March, there’s like nothing happening at a motorcycle dealership. But that’s a great time for me to train those people. So that’s my busy time of the year.

I’m not training any dealers in July and August. Nobody wants to come to class in July and August because they’re busy selling motorcycles. So what would I do at that time? Like just not make any money for two months. That’d be silly. So I focus on the agency work. I focus on the public speaking.

I focus on some of the other things that we do with course development and consulting work. And so by keeping those verticals alive, it creates a stability for me and my family. And gives me the mental variety. I need to stay engaged with stuff.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Can you tell us a little bit about burnout and how you avoid that?

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah, I actually have a course on the money. I don’t know. Mosque benefits of saying no. I’m saying no is it’s not only healthy for you. It’s healthy for a prospective client. If you are having a conversation with a client and in your heart, this is not a good fit. Hopefully you have yourself in a good financial position where you can afford to say no because if you say no to the client and do the right thing, refer them to somebody else that you know, find a good fit for them, be nice about it.

Say it’s not really a great fit for us right now. I’ve got another guy that’s in my circles and he’s really good. Now I could refer you to him. Do you want his contact information? That’s how I do that. And I roll those over to other providers. Okay. There’s certain things you just, that it’s not going to be a good fit.

So in some cases over time, maybe you’ve learned, like in my particular case, I am really efficient with startups, like brand new startups. And I have packages for brand new startups with templated websites, and I can launch them for as low as like 79 a month. And they, it’d be like for them having a Kajabi site.

But Kajabi is a couple of hundred bucks a month. And so I can give them the hosting. I put the product in it’s templated. All they got to do is change the text and images, startup people like that’s, they’re just getting started. That’s a really good niche for us. And we have a little bit of growth in that area.

The other area is in SCORM and enterprise education sites where we’re going for much bigger projects. And so when we look at a project that quite honestly, three, four years ago, I would have killed for, a 15 or 16, 000, custom website, they want a lifter site, but they want this custom, that custom, the other custom and community tools realistically.

That might not be the best fit for our agency at this time. So that might be something I would refer on to another provider, but it’s knowing when to say no and what things to avoid. Cause you, you sense it, it, you just have to execute on it. You have to be brave enough to say no and not be afraid of missing out because there’s always something better around the corner.

You just have to be able to get. That space to get around the corner.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. You have I was thinking in my mind about how you say you’re not good at sales and I understand why people are that you don’t like it or whatever it is. But I think I’m thinking back and I think what you possess, I’m just making a comment here, maybe you can react to it is.

Sales just happen naturally around you because you are an opportunity creator. So like when you, when I first met you, you came into the office hours and you were contributing and creating opportunity. And then when you were looking to get involved with Lifter, I’m like, I know this guy he’s already here.

He’s already doing stuff, he’s using the tools. He’s, taking Lifter into bigger brands and stuff like that. And I’ve seen you, be around with WP tonic and with our, with your clients. And it just, you just create opportunity wherever you go. So like sales is just a, instead of creating sales to create opportunity, you create opportunity and it’s the sales are just a side effect.

It happens. And I don’t know, like you said, your partnership with that person who first contacted you three years ago. It’s like you created the opportunity and then you helped put it, put the opportunity together and the magic happened.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. Very much a seed and harvest mentality. I try to work with the other thing, during the pandemic, I went live almost every day for two and a half years.

And I just tried drilling into people that you need to find opportunities within obstacles. Like a lot of times we experience an obstacle as a person and we take it as a personal defeat or a personal assault when in reality it’s a training moment. It’s a chance to learn something. It’s a chance to find an opportunity and maybe some growth.

And so I think there’s just, when you say finding opportunities, it’s yeah, that could be a challenge. Let’s take a look at that. And then not for nothing, Chris, I don’t know if this is for you or not, but just for fun, why don’t you roll into the manana nomas. com website and see if one of our packages fits for you.

All right. All right,

Chris Badgett: um you also Moved like a year ago or not even and created more opportunity Better, economic conditions and stuff like that but I also see you in your new town Like networking with the chamber of commerce and getting out from behind your computer going to the local establishments and everything and this is where you’re planting seeds.

You’re just like plant, seed, plant, seed, plant, seed. And stuff comes from all that. Tell us about that. Actually, like in terms of moving, particularly for people that are creating courses on online or memberships or coaching programs or building sites for clients, they do have an opportunity to change their location.

So what are some of the things like going through a location change, moving your family? That you have that are things for people to think about to create more opportunity in your next geography

Kurt Von Ahnen: without getting overly political. We escaped California and got the Kansas a year ago. This month makes a year and think about the amount of changes I’ve been able to make in a year.

Like I’ve made a lot of live posts about it. I’m not very shy about it. We went from, being riddled with debt, trying to keep up with rent out there to being able to pay off all of our debt and buy a house in 11 months in Kansas. That’s really amazing. It’s a complete paradigm shift right now.

If what you said earlier, which is. Pretty flattering. Thank you. We moved here. I didn’t have any expectations of doing local business. I really didn’t because I, in my mind thought we’re moving to Kansas. Thank God. I know the people that lifter L. M. S. And W. P. Tonic and I have a couple bigger contracts because I didn’t think there’d be any business.

We got to Hutchinson, Kansas, which has 42, 000 people in it. And on one of my bike rides, when we first moved here cause I still bicycle I saw a sign called startup Hutch. I said, startup Hutch. I wonder what that is. So I went home, looked it up and sure enough, they had a Facebook page and they’re the organization in town sponsored by the community college to help startup businesses launch in the area.

And so I called him, I said, dude, I love it here. And we had gone out to different businesses and restaurants, and we’d had a great experience at all of them. Like the people here are awesome. The businesses are awesome. Some of the buildings are old, a little creepy, but the people and stuff is awesome. And so I explained that to Jackson square, the guy that runs startup hutch.

And he said, dude, it is so refreshing to hear somebody say such positive things about our town. Would you be willing to come and be on our podcast? So I said, sure, I’ll come and be on your podcast. So I did the podcast and as soon as I was done with the podcast, he said, that was awesome. Would you mind maybe doing a public speaking gig on websites at city hall next week?

I said, for who? He goes we have this group that we run through every year. We take 12 startup businesses and we run them through a 12 week program on how to grow their business and proper, like best practices of business ownership and all of that. And so I said sure. Yeah. I’d love to go and present.

When I went to present. There were two banks, two lawyers couple insurance companies, there was nobody there for digital marketing except for me. And so I got to present to 12 companies and then we all had one on one like speed dating meetings with each of those companies. And that resulted in a couple of people I’m still in contact with today for business to take that another step further.

They also have. second Tuesday of no third Tuesday of every month. They have a startup hutch entrepreneurs meeting at a local bar owned by Pippin Williamson. So we go there and we hang out. We meet all the new businesses in town and then they have minority business meetups, which in Kansas doesn’t mean you have to not be a white guy to go.

They invited me to go. So I went. And it was not a handout. It was a hand up to everybody. They introduced me to everybody. Everybody introduced to me that it was just a wonderful thing. I’ve been to three of those events. The chamber of commerce, like you mentioned, is really strong here. The community college actually tonight is hosting a pitch contest for new businesses to pitch their business.

And the winner gets something like 2, 000 of seed money to help launch their startup. So when I say that my target audience in my new small town is startups. It was a plug and play situation for me. I showed up and there was nobody here in town really pushing WordPress. And now I run the WordPress meetup the second Tuesday of every month.

And I get to network with everybody on that level too.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. That shows the power of getting out of the building, getting out on the bike, getting your health in, being open to opportunity. Hey, what’s this interesting sign. Let me follow that. Yeah.

Kurt Von Ahnen: It, and at no point, and I want to be like super clear here at no point have I ever felt oh, I’m going to take a stack of business cards with me to this networking event and push myself on people. That’s not what I’ve done at all. I’ve just gone in and introduced myself at a brewery. I have myself a nice cold beer. I meet 10 or 15 business owners. Hey, what do you do? That’s interesting. How long have you been in business?

And I’ll ask them, of course I’ll ask them. Hey, what’s your website look like? Do you have an active website? Are you using a Facebook page? Do you have your own URL? What do you do? Have you ever thought that your business could use training for your customers to show how to use your product properly?

Just simple questions. And some people would say that’s selling. But it’s having a conversation and at the end of that conversation, I’m totally fine if they say, Hey, it was great to meet you. And they leave. That’s totally fine. Cause I know I’m probably going to see them three or four months from now at the next event.

That consistency is that seed I’m talking about. And I’ll wait until they’re ready to ask. And when they initiate the conversation then I can set the hook and give them a proposal.

Chris Badgett: You’re also big on LinkedIn. So that’s one, one of the ways I would ask you is if we start planting all these seeds, eventually you’re like, wait, who is that person?

Or how do I keep track of all this? Or at least catalog them in my social network so that I can find them again. But any tips on, managing all these opportunity seeds you’re planning out around your life?

Kurt Von Ahnen: You’re going to make me pitch again. I have a LinkedIn course on manana no mas, but I’ll tell you guys that the number one thing I’ve done in LinkedIn is I stopped pitching people and sending people two and three and four paragraphs in a direct message and all of that stuff that annoys us, why would we do that to somebody else?

So I started treating LifterLMS almost like text messaging. Like I’ll just say, Hey, it’s great to meet you. You want to grab a quick meeting as an icebreaker. Do you want to have a sales free call? Next Tuesday, like just short, very short messages, no paragraphs, no nothing. And I never send people a scheduling link or a calendar link or a meeting link unless they say, Yes.

I’d like to meet with you. Please send me a link.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Like I never send the link until it’s, I hate to say verbalized. But they type it out, but it’s like until they acknowledge, Oh yeah, we’re going to exchange links and set up a meeting time unless that happens. I’m not sending a link. And the moment that I made that my personal.

I’m going to say like part of my personal brand. The moment I adopted that as part of my personal brand, my LinkedIn grew from like 3000 connections to 10, 000 connections in just a couple of years.

Chris Badgett: Wow. That’s Kurt Von Annen from Manana Namas. What are the best ways for people to connect with you, Kurt?

We just talked about LinkedIn,

Kurt Von Ahnen: I know, but I out there I’m the only Kurt Von Ahnen on LinkedIn, which makes it really easy to search me out on LinkedIn. So if you find me, you know you got the right guy. And then if it’s business related, manana nomas.com. I do a lot directly through the website and, we’ve got some training there and we’ve got some packages and you can always reach out and set up a 30 minute icebreaker call through that website, just by clicking on the button.

Chris Badgett: For you out there listening or watching, I want to encourage you to immediately after you stop listening to this or stop watching this to think at scale. So how could you be playing bigger? How could you get more leverage in what you do teaching online or with your agency work, because. There’s so many great ways to do that. Kurt’s story holds a lot of gems and how he’s done that. Kurt, thank you for coming back on the show.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. 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 over at Lifter LMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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