Course Lab – Episode 100
Scaling Impact with B2B Courses (Oliver Gleeson)
Abe Crystal: On the one hand, this enables a much higher price point, right? So he’s charging $3,500 per team member. You know, that’s a lot. And that means you can have really meaningful revenue from the course without having to sell it to thousands of people.
Ari Iny: Hello and welcome to Course Lab, the show that teaches creators like you how to make better online courses. I’m Ari Iny, the director of growth at Mirasee, and I’m here with my co-host, Abe Crystal, the co-founder of Ruzuku.
Abe: Hey there, Ari.
Ari: Today, we welcome Oliver Gleeson to the show. Oliver is a consultant, executive, coach and trainer who helps the next generation of leaders to think, act and perform like C-level executives. Thanks for joining us, Oliver.
Oliver Gleeson: It’s great to be here. Thank you.
Ari: So the way I like to kick things off is to ask all our guests, could you give me kind of a 30,000-foot view of you and how you came to the world of online courses?
Oliver: Okay, sure. So once upon a time, I was an early career professional, and not a very good one. I began my career as a lawyer and learned very quickly that traditional law was not for me. So I got out of that, traveled the world, lived in Japan for a year and a half. And when I returned to Canada, I joined a sport and event marketing company where I worked for 15 years. Here, I became battle hardened as an executive as I took on virtually every role, from strategy to sales to operations and legal, and just about every professional discipline that makes up the functions of an organization.
And it was also during this time I developed a true and authentic joy for mentoring early career professionals. In 2016, I went out on my own, created salient map, and through consulting, coaching and training, I helped organizations and their people succeed and develop the skills and confidence to become great at growing their business. And this work was very rewarding. But it was around 2018 that I learned about the world of online courses and how big this industry had become. And I also learned that something I’m truly passionate about, developing early career professionals didn’t have to be a one-to-one exercise and could be done at scale.
I eventually became part of a coaching group called ACES that had expertise in course creation, and they helped me take what I’ve been doing intuitively for the better part of 20 years and turn it into a juiced up, impact filled online course. I ran my pilot a couple years back, feedback was incredible. So now, almost exclusively for the past year, I’ve been running the course and have had several cohorts or graduating classes complete the program. And I’ve been extraordinarily energized by the impact the program has been having for both the participants and the organizations for which they work. My goal is to impact 10 million early career professionals, and I want to make this business my unique dent in the universe.
Ari: Amazing. I have a bunch of questions. So the first is, before you went into online courses and kind of discovered online courses, were you supporting early career professionals one on one, or were you mainly supporting people higher up the totem pole?
Oliver: So in my consulting practice, I was usually working with CEOs or executives and their teams. I would always find myself distracted. So as we’re sitting around the boardroom table and we’re dealing with some high-level corporate matter, I would see an early career professional working on something. And I would have to say, just give me a minute here to look over at them and say, I got to help you with this right now. And so I was always drawn to that. So I loved working with the high-level leaders, but also working with their teams.
Ari: So it sounds like through the vehicle of online courses, you saw this as, okay, I could actually do this.
Oliver: Yeah. I mean, this goes way back, but I was a terrible early career professional. In my early days, I was really frustrated. I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I always felt that there was some greater level of knowledge, and I didn’t know how to access it.
Ari: So it sounds like supporting early career professionals has been something that you wanted to do for a very long time. It’s just that once you had the vehicle of online courses or learned about the vehicle of online courses, it became possible. Because I’m assuming early career professionals can’t pay that much.
Abe: Well, you are also saying that you struggled yourself as an early career professional. That was what motivated you to pursue this.
Oliver: You got it right, Abe. Like this whole practice started from my, let’s call it my early childhood trauma, professionally speaking. And that’s when I started my career as a lawyer. When I was a first-year lawyer, the lawyers used to get together on Fridays and have a bunch of beers, and they used to mock this one lawyer who was considered the town imbecile. Terrible wording, their words, not mine. And I found myself in court going up against this person, and I thought, oh, this is going to be a slam dunk. But I was incredibly embarrassed and humiliated by this lawyer in front of the judge, in front of my clients, in front of all these other lawyers who were waiting for their turn to go next.
And I realized very early on that I was missing, you know, two very important things. Real world skills and experience. And I really could have used some that day. And I left the courtroom feeling empty, feeling frustrated, thinking that I was fairly intelligent at the time, did well in school. But something was missing here, and I knew there was some piece of knowledge I couldn’t get. I didn’t have the mentorship I was looking for, and that really stuck with me. And when I gave the backstory of working for that organization for 15 years, we reinvented ourselves five or six times during my tenure there. We became, like, five or six different organizations.
And I was always at the forefront of this sort of reinvention, was sort of the machete, cutting through the woods, getting us into new spaces, new territory, and helping grow our business. And I would find so often that we would work alongside other partner clients or organizations or agencies, and I would come across this great game changing piece of knowledge. And when it was finally imparted to me, I would have this underwhelmed feeling of, like, that’s it. Like, someone couldn’t have told me this five or six years ago, how further I could be if I knew this. I spent the better part of 20 years pulling early career professionals into the room saying, look, this took me five years to learn. We’re going to learn this in five minutes.
And that’s always been a tremendous joy of mine, to see the eyes light up and to see these early career professionals say, okay, I get this. Now I can see the front of the jigsaw puzzle box. I’m ready to rock. And that was really powerful and rewarding. But it always seemed to be done on a one-to-one basis. One to one, one to three, etcetera, at a team meeting. I never knew that you could do it at scale with millions of people, and I wouldn’t have even begun to think of the format in which I could have done it. And so working with my coaches, they were incredibly helpful in helping me through instructional design, take what was up here in my head and turn it into a format that I can really energize and impact early career professionals.
Ari: Amazing. So now that you are doing that and have been doing that for the last few years, is this the entirety of what you do at the moment?
Oliver: It is now. I loved the work I was doing as a consultant, coach and trainer. And I guess the key difference for me is that even though I was having great impact with these organizations. I was a practitioner, and let’s call it globally, best practice, strategic methodologies like scaling up 40 x core value equation, if you’re familiar with any of these. And these organizations that I worked with mostly were privately owned organizations where things can really get done quickly. I really loved working with their business owners and their teams, and I found their employees were much more invested in privately owned organizations.
But these methodologies, they could not learn themselves, they could not implement them themselves. And so that’s what the bulk of my work was. But this work was not my original work. It was great work, it was rewarding work, but it was not mine. And like being a singer songwriter, this work that I’m doing now with early career professionals is my life lessons that I’ve learned throughout my career and working alongside hundreds of really, really successful executives, CEO’s, coos, et cetera. I feel this is where I can have greater impact. And that level of fulfillment is just so much deeper when it’s your original work as opposed to somebody else’s.
Ari: So tell me a bit more about how you go about selling this and filling the cohorts and kind of attracting the early career professionals. Are they seeking you out individually? Are you going into organizations and kind of selling it to the organization to support a whole range of early career professionals within the organization? How does that work?
Oliver: That’s a great question. When I started this process, I had visualized in my mind I had this great dream where I was going to be like the Pied Piper of early career professionals. But when you get into this business and you’re doing online courses, it’s a slog. When you go business to consumer, and maybe for listeners that aren’t familiar with those terms, the consumer, in this case, being the early career professional, to try to get them one by one by one is really difficult. And that’s where I had started, and that’s what I thought my intentions were.
But my coaches persuaded me that the opportunity wasn’t so much with the end user, which is the early career professional, but it’s with the business. And that took me some time to get my head around it because I had this wonderful vision of it, as I told you earlier about being the Pied piper. But once I started to turn my mind towards business to business, I realized that this impact can happen much more quickly, and I can accelerate that impact. And I’ve learned a few things in terms of talking with organizations is that they are in a war on talent right now we’re dealing with the great resignation, quiet quitting, and people cannot retain their best talent.
And one of the things that I’ve recognized being on this journey is because training infrastructure, at least the way I used to know it when I was a very young boy, has really dissipated in the professional organizations. I mean, in the 80s and 90s, people still worked at organizations for life. And the training infrastructure was incredible. And that just sort of started to fade away after a while as people became more transactional in their corporate lives and organizations had more and more difficulty holding on to great people. And it costs so much money to replace someone. And these organizations truly do care about their people, but they just don’t know how to get started.
And so when talking to businesses, and I have this think, act and perform framework with my course; think, act and perform like a C-level executive. It was sort of like being in Jerry Maguire, you had me at hello, because there’s somebody in this organization that is charged with learning and development and quite often it’s beyond their job description. It could be somebody that’s in HR and they’re like, I’m in HR, I’m not in learning development. But how did this fall on my plate? And people are screaming for development. They want training and they just don’t know where to get it.
So working with businesses, this can activate this course so much faster. It can activate and impact early career professionals, because instead of dealing one to one, an organization will say, we need something, can we send ten? And that’s going to make a greater impact. So that’s where I’ve been starting with businesses and I think that’s where this will continue. We’ve opened up a stream for the consumer and we give the end user, the early crew professional, the tools to say, hey, here’s something that you can take back to your manager, your boss, your employer, and say, I could really use this course. This is how it will benefit me. This is how it will benefit our organization. So that stream is always open for business, but it’s way more efficient to be going through businesses than consumers directly.
Ari: Interesting. So it sounds from what you’re saying, you are mainly focused on the business-to-business side. The intention in both places is for the business to pay, not the end consumer themselves.
Oliver: The end consumer could pay if they wanted to, if they really wanted to invest in themselves. But this is retail currently for roughly $3,500 USD, and it’s a high impact program that delivers a great ROI.
Ari: Right.
Oliver: And if I’m going to impact 10 million early crude professionals, I have to build a viable business model that will allow me to impact 10 million early career professionals. So I have to make sure that this is priced at a viable price point for the value that it is delivering. And more often than not, businesses, and it’s really interesting, businesses will have budget for early career professional development, but it is so random from a really developed process of here’s how we go through procurement internally and through HR to, hey, yeah, just walk it up to your manager and say, hey, I’d like to do this. And it’s everywhere in between.
So every conversation I have with either an early career professional or the managers or their bosses or the CEO’s is really unique because there is nothing consistent from one business to the other.
Ari: One of the things that people in situations like yours where they want to support people within organizations, they should go in kind of expecting to need to be nimble in how they’re approaching each individual company based on their response and their own process. So it isn’t, here’s my one way of selling this. There’s the, okay, let’s have a conversation and figure out how to fit this into their way of buying something.
Oliver: Yeah, pretty much. And that’s still a learning experience. Right? And we’re going to learn as we grow, and eventually we’re going to narrow that funnel and we’ll find some consistencies as we bring in more business partners to have a more efficient process so that we can start to identify the types of businesses and the types of professionals within those businesses that are more likely to buy in a more efficient manner. Like, I have really, like three different client avatars right now.
One would be, I would call it the small organization, business leader or executive. So that’s somebody, maybe it’s a company, 200 employees or less. They know training is an issue. They want to grow. They make decisions. Things get started. Things happen when they say, let’s go. And if you can have conversations with those people, when they say, we want to go, it goes downstream. And whoever is charged with that assignment in the organization makes it happen. They know that they need to keep their best people because the turnover is killing them if they want to grow. So that’s one avatar.
The second avatar, I’ll call it the overwhelmed HR professional in a small or mid-sized business. It doesn’t really have learning and development background, but it’s so funny that HR seems to be a catch all location for so many organizations. And when I speak to a lot of these excellent HR professionals, they are absolutely overwhelmed with their job description and 24 things that are outside their job description. They are just almost desperate to find something that can move the needle because they’re very stressed knowing that somehow this is on their plate and they have to make something happen.
So that’s another great place to start is the HR professional, and then I would say a business unit head in a mid to large organization. So when you are working with, let’s say, Apple, like a company, like Apple has, Apple University, they have a really well-developed learning and event development module. But let’s take a company, a thousand employees, etcetera, you know, they’ll have the mothership, the procurement, where you have to go for whatever their learning and development curriculum is. But somebody, as a head of a business unit, head of sales, head of marketing, will have their own independent budget where they can spend to their discretion and say, look, I know we have to go through the mothership for these types of policies.
But over here, I want Ari, I want Abe, I want them to be part of this course. This is my budget. You guys get in there, go do this course. So there’s different ways of selling it in, and it’s still a learning process for us as we’re having hundreds of conversations with business owners and business leaders on cracking the talent code with this program.
Ari: Thank you for sharing that. That is helpful. Anything would be helpful to the people listening. Abe, any questions?
Abe: I guess we’ve been talking primarily about the product or offering and the business model itself. But maybe you can speak more to what has it been like teaching inside of these organizations and what have been the benefits of doing that and what have been the challenges of working in that format?
Oliver: Well, maybe it will help just to talk about the model, which I’d say I learned from the experts through my coaching. But this is an online course. It’s a hybrid course, which, for those who don’t know who are listening, is the new style. And when I learned back in 2018 about online courses and how big it was, I also learned that I could go to bed at night and just listen to the cash register go cha ching, cha ching, cha ching. And I learned very quickly that that’s not how it happens. The do-it-yourself courses have a high degree of failure. People don’t complete them. They don’t grow. You’re not making the impact. You’re not getting word of mouth.
So the hybrid course is one where there is online course materials, but there’s also live coaching. My program has four critical components. The first is excellent content, because without excellent content, you’re not going to engage and teach your audience. The second is live coaching. So it’s a 13-week program and every week we have a live coaching session. And in this program the cohort is capped at 20 because we want to make sure that everybody has voice and everybody can have impact. The third element is accountability. So with each week there are reflective exercises that the participants have to do and in order to get certified as thinking, acting and performing like a C-level executive, they need to do the work. Without the work, they don’t get certified. And if their employers are paying for the program, it behooves them to get the work done and report back to their business because their employers are going to ask me about it.
And then the fourth component, and this has really been the secret ingredient, has been this aspect of community. And so within the live coaching, the cohort could be from any organization, any industry. More often than not it’s a blend of people from heavy industry, hospitality, professional services, and the learning is not just north south from me to them, but it’s east west amongst each other. And when they do those reflective exercises for the accountability piece, many of their answers have to go onto a community board where they all see each other’s answers. They’re all sharing and learning from each other. And that community board becomes the launch pad for our weekly coaching calls where we go deeper into the curriculum.
And so it’s that type of learning that’s making it really impactful for the participants and the organizations. The early career professionals, they love the program because they are getting the precise training, they desperately crave to help them make the impact at work they desire. That keeps them happier, more motivated, and most importantly, maximizing their production and their potential. Employers are exceptionally enthused because the program drives value across a number of fronts. From a training, learning and development perspective, we’re filling an organizational void that companies know require attention, but they don’t have the infrastructure to support it and do it themselves.
So this program provides relief for those responsible for driving these learning and development initiatives. It’s the right program at the right time. And by providing high potential early career professionals with elite plug and play training, they actually want and value. We’re helping companies demonstrate their commitment to the growth and development of their key talent, helping build loyalty, trust and most critically, retention, because that’s the issue they’re trying to solve.
And then we help companies grow quicker because now they can trust their upskilled and confident early career professionals with greater responsibilities and higher value projects, reducing the dependency on senior leadership to drive the business forward. So now our senior leaders are not firefighting. They are actually doing the things that they are supposed to do that maximize their value to the organization.
Abe: Yeah, it makes sense in terms of the benefits of the program. Can you speak to what have been some of the challenges you faced in terms of getting people engaged or progressing or getting to those outcomes, and how have you evolved the program over time based on what you’ve learned?
Oliver: Well, truthfully, the program hasn’t evolved that much. It started off gangbusters. People are really engaged with the materials. I’m conducting surveys after every course; we’re getting really detailed answers of what they are looking for in the course and how they’re responding to the materials. Interestingly enough, the program is broken into 13 weeks, 41 chapters. In the final session, I ask everybody to go back and review two modules of the course, and that’s part of their survey. Almost everybody has two different modules, so they’re all plucking out what’s good for them.
But I would say the biggest challenge right now is just getting in front of more people. We’ve been very lucky to get started in front of businesses and organizations we know. We’re now cranking up our LinkedIn, marketing, etcetera. So really the biggest challenge is getting people into the program, because once they’re in, businesses are sending more people. So we’re trying to develop this back-end element where people can remain engaged with the course for upwards of another nine months. So it’s like one year in the course, and so after 13 weeks, you’re certified, and for a lack of a sexier term, you’re platinum certified if you stay in the course for a year.
But we’re trying to find impactful ways to engage people with other recalls of the cohort, little binge watching of certain episodes or modules throughout the year. And we’re still struggling to really nail how do we continuously make the impact because I want this program to be sticky. So I guess the challenges are on the beginning, the front end, getting more businesses and people into the course, and on the back end, how do we keep that stickiness and the impact? But the middle portion, the course itself, has delivered above expectations so far.
Abe: What are you working on in terms of that idea of stickiness or continued engagement?
Oliver: I’m working with cohort graduates, so we’re talking to them on what would you like to see that would keep you more involved? Beta testing a few things, like getting people back into sort of graduating class. Let’s get back once every two months or once a quarter onto a call, having people, as I mentioned before, binge watch certain modules with more accountability exercise to keep the most prominent aspect of that module front and center. But it’s always a balance.
I’m a solopreneur still. I worked with teams of people. But when you’re balancing three things, sales, delivery, and then follow up, you sort of swing and you toggle back and forth between the three. So it is something, I think, that really needs to be amplified to make this course everything that I visualize for it and what it really needs to be to have the maximum impact.
Abe: Cool. Thank you.
Ari: So you mentioned the certification. We’ve actually heard from another person who is on the show that’s also selling into b2b, that they also offer certification. So to what extent do you feel that that’s something that companies are looking for versus, sure, we threw that on because why not? And you don’t think it makes a difference?
Oliver: Well, I think the certification is twofold. I think for the company, they don’t get the certification unless they complete the course to our satisfaction or the rules of engagement that we have with our participants. So that tells the employer that the employee did the work and they should see a difference in that employee. For the employee or the participant standpoint, surprisingly, it’s a real badge of honor. They’ll throw it up on LinkedIn. I just completed this course. I’m now certified to think, act, and perform like a c level executive.
So the certification is really helping on both ends. It helps that employer feel confident in their current role, but it’s also a badge that helps them get into their next role. And if I can be successful in this impact 10 million early career professionals, the certification has really real cache to it.
Ari: Awesome. Thank you so much. Where should our audience go to learn more about you and your training?
Oliver: LinkedIn is a great place to find me. Oliver Gleeson. Gleeson with two e’s and salientmap.com. S-A-L-I-E-N-T-M-A-P.com would be the places to find me.
Abe: Again, that’s Oliver Gleason. G-L-E-E-S-O-N.
Ari: Alright, awesome. Oliver, thank you so much.
Oliver: Thank you.
Danny Iny: Now stick around for my favorite part of the show, where Abe and Ari will pull out the best takeaways for you to apply to your course.
Abe: All right, Ari, what jumped out to you? Oliver has a pretty interesting program that’s different than what a lot of people think of when they think of the idea of an online course.
Ari: Yeah, absolutely. I think there’s a lot to learn here, especially for people who are interested in the business-to-business side of things and kind of selling a course into organizations. Honestly, the one thing that I want to start with is a throwaway comment that he made that we didn’t really dwell on during the episode, is that, you know, he’s been having hundreds of conversations with people to market this, essentially.
And just that’s kind of the scale that I want people thinking about when they’re thinking about marketing their own courses. Because as Oliver said, you know, building an online course, he imagined he’d be the Pied Piper. People would just flow to him. Didn’t quite work that way, and it never does, really. Yeah. Just that lesson of, you need to be out there actually having those conversations in order to make this happen.
Abe: Yeah. Both in the development phase and in marketing as well.
Ari: Yeah, absolutely.
Abe: There’s also just the, not new ideas, but important to reiterate about the B2B business model that, you know, on the one hand, this enables a much higher price point. Right. So he’s charging $3,500 per team member. You know, that’s a lot. And that means you can have really meaningful revenue from the course without having to sell it to thousands of people. Now, of course, the flip side, as we’ve talked about with other B2B interviews, is bringing in those business clients that are willing to license it to five or ten or 50 people is not so easy. It’s a longer sales cycle, and it does take a lot of those conversations, but the potential to really grow, this is definitely there.
It’s important to frame the B2B offer in the language of organizations and to connect to the things that they really care about, right? It sounds like what he uncovered through his conversations is what these organizations care about at the end of the day is retention. Right. What they care about is, can they keep good people who are doing a great job and keep them advancing their careers and delivering more and more value for the organization, as opposed to them leaving to find the next opportunity elsewhere?
And so in terms of how the course is framed and then how his marketing is structured, it needs to speak to that key benefit for organizations. What key benefit for the organization is your course or program going to deliver? And are you messaging that benefit effectively to your business clients?
Ari: I think the most important piece there that you mentioned is because there are many different benefits, but the key benefit, you know, not what you believe is the key benefit, but what currently the market is looking for. And so, yes, at this moment in time, retention is very high up there as far as what organizations are looking for. But it could be that down the road it’s something slightly different. And then it’s a matter of just angling based on at this moment, what are people looking for? And so look at all the different things that your program can support an organization with, and then through the conversations, find out what do they actually care about, what are they asking about, what are they looking for, and highlight those things.
Abe: So that’s all of the kind of the business model side. In terms of the course itself, part of what Oliver uncovered was that it’s not just about the initial benefits the course provides. It’s how do people continue to develop and apply what they’ve learned over time. So the longer-term engagement or stickiness with the concepts that they learn in the program, and that is not easy in any context. And it’s something that he’s still developing solutions to. But the fact that he’s focusing on that and finding solutions, that is really important.
And it’s probably something that’s especially important for making this higher end B2B sale, where if you’re going to ask people to invest tens of thousands of dollars to bring a team of people through your program, you have to be able to make a case as to this is going to have a benefit, not just for the next few weeks, but for the next year, for the next several years. And so what is that kind of story or picture about the longer-term stickiness, as Oliver described it look like? And how are you going to structure your program to actually facilitate that over time?
Ari: And I do find it interesting that both he and I believe it was Danny Ceballos who both have certifications as part of it. And, you know, Oliver was mentioning a secondary tier of certification to possibly keep people engaged. Will that work? I don’t know, but I do think it’s interesting. You know, he’s thinking about multiple avenues to keep people engaged, and I’d be curious to do a follow up with him later on to see what worked.
Abe: Yeah.
Ari: That is it on my list.
Abe: Cool. Oliver Gleeson is an executive coach and trainer who helps early career professionals think, act and perform like C-level executives. You can connect with Oliver on LinkedIn. Again, that’s Oliver Gleeson. G-L-E-E-S-O-N.
Thank you for listening to Course Lab. I’m Abe Crystal, co-founder and CEO of Ruzuku, here with my co-host Ari Iny. Course Lab is part of the Mirasee FM podcast network, which also includes such shows as Once Upon a Business and Making It. If you don’t want to miss the excellent episodes coming up on Course Lab, make sure to follow us on YouTube or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. And are you enjoying our show? If so, go ahead and leave us a starred review. It really does make a difference. Thank you and we’ll see you next time.
All right, Ari, who have we got coming on for the next episode?
Ari: Next time we have Kevin Russell. He was recently on Consciousness Explored. He teaches courses on mindset, subconscious programming, emotional trauma transformation and quantum human optimization.
Abe: Well, I have a lot to learn. I don’t know much about any of those things.
Ari: Yeah, I’m really looking forward to the conversation.