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Matt Feret (00:00:02):

Hello everyone. This is Matt Feret, author of the Prepare for Medicare book series, and welcome to another episode of The Matt Feret Show, where I interview insiders and experts to help light a path to a successful retirement.

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Come say hello at themattferetshow.com for show links, notes, websites referenced, quotable quotes, and the complete show transcript. You can also check out prepareformedicare.com and my new site, prepareforsocialsecurity.com. Both support the books, Prepare for Medicare and Prepare for Social Security. I also offer Social Security consulting access on the prepareforsocialsecurity.com website, as well as a searchable database of every Social Security office in the country. Sign out for my monthly newsletter on either website and you'll get free Medicare and Social Security checklists, which you can also do on the show's homepage, themattferetshow.com.

Do you like to teach others? Do you enjoy coaching or helping others enhance their lives and hone their skills? Over your lifetime you've gained years of experience and expertise in your field. Thanks to leaps and bounds in online course creation, technology and distribution over the last few years.

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It's easier than ever to use your skills and background to create online income. No matter your age, maybe you're doing some consulting or part-time work in retirement. Creating an online course can be a very powerful way to attract new customers. Today, you can literally reach a worldwide audience to create income for yourself by sharing your skills, knowledge, and passion with people who want and need it. Lucas Marino is a veteran author and CEO of Marino Consulting Services, a company that helps individuals and organizations create and publish online training. On this episode of The Matt Feret Show, you'll get an insider's guide to creating pricing and launching an online course to monetize your life experience and skills. Enjoy.

Lucas, welcome to the show!

Lucas Marino (00:02:06):

Thanks, Matt. I appreciate you having me on.

Matt Feret (00:02:09):

So, tell everybody what you do, how long you've been doing it, and how you help people.

Lucas Marino (00:02:13):

So, I'm a, you could say serial training entrepreneur. I own a few training platforms, training companies, and I've been doing this for about five years post military. I was in the Coast Guard for 21 years and that's where I got my start with training because between operational commands, they try to send you ashore, and when I was ashore I was in a few training assignments. So it's been a blast. I've enjoyed being an entrepreneur and I get to do something now that I wasn't able to do before I retired from the service.

Matt Feret (00:02:49):

So how do you help people? What does training look like and how do you get training out for folks?

Lucas Marino (00:02:55):

Yeah, it's a really good question. So we have established multiple ways to meet multiple clients, and it's a cool thing because I can help other people do the same thing whichever way is best suited for their business. But we meet some of our clients online through virtual courses, online delivery, and then some of my clients I work with one-on-one to help them develop their own training platforms, their own training courses. And then we also deliver live training and hybrid training. And hybrid training is a mix of live and online courses. And so we have students that we educate, we have clients that we help launch training platforms and training businesses and online courses and all the things. And then we also have the government, we teach the US Navy and the US Coast Guard some [inaudible 00:03:47] stuff as well.

Matt Feret (00:03:49):

Wow. So give me a 101 on the training infrastructure. I see articles on CNBC, and we hear about people creating Excel training and then living in a mansion in Arizona. And you've got different platforms out there. So give me the training 101, what's the current state of online training today?

Lucas Marino (00:04:17):

Yeah, so it's a massive industry and it's grown very quickly because in part because of the pandemic, which forced a lot of people into the internet to make money, and it forced a lot of businesses to move their operations from local onsite type work to the internet as well. So you see a progressive but rapid growth of online training for both individuals and small businesses and even large businesses now. And so you've become empowered as an individual to be able to do this because of the technology that's advanced alongside that industry. So now you've got learning management systems, which are pretty simple software that help you package and deliver your online training to any client anywhere in the world. And it's pretty powerful. And right now you and I are using video capture software, which will rename nameless, but it's pretty common and everyone probably uses it at least once a week.

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It rhymes with boom. And so things like this, five years ago if I told you to meet me there for a meeting, you just said, where is that and what is that? And now it's a household name. So the industry has grown very quickly because the technology has made it possible and people are motivated now to share what they've learned to help other people in a way that maybe they didn't think was possible several years ago.

Matt Feret (00:05:54):

You mentioned platforms, so what type of a popular websites are out there? I know I get in the mail sometimes and these guys have been around forever. Great courses, and you can either sit in live training or take online training about the wonders of the ancient world. And that's been around for a while, but what about other platforms or other websites out there for training?

Lucas Marino (00:06:18):

Sure. So there's these things called learning management systems, which are software that are specifically designed to house and deliver courses. And they come with all the features and functions that you need to deliver online training, whether it be live or prerecorded, texts, audio, all of these different types of files, pdf, anything you want to share with somebody in the process of delivering a course, you can use these learning management systems to do that. And there's a bunch that are out there now, but there's a few that are probably more common amongst entrepreneurs and small business owners. Companies like Thinkific, Kajabi. If you have kids in school right now or even grandkids in school, you're probably familiar with the name Canvas. And Canvas has taken over for Blackboard and it's really easy to become overwhelmed by all the options that are out there, but that's a good thing that we have all these options that shows how rapidly the market's maturing.

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The way I would recommend you choose it is almost every one of these companies offers a free account to get started and to trial with. And so you want to pick one that's intuitive and user friendly. And some of these come with markets that actually sell your courses. So you may be familiar with Udemy, a couple of other platforms where if you build a course on their platform, they put you into a marketplace where people can see your courses if they're shopping around on that marketplace. And that's helpful for some people that are first getting started. If you don't have your own website, your own home site, these platforms can provide that to you as well. They've even become so expansive that you can build chat rooms and communities and all these things on these learning management systems. So the capabilities are growing rapidly and it's really putting all the power in the hands of people that are watching or listening to this show. You now are the beneficiary of all of that great technology and every day they're making it easier and easier to use. So if you're listening to this or watching this and you're like, dude, all that sounds crazy and a bit intimidating, it's actually the inverse. It's becoming easier to use and you have options which are pretty easy to narrow down just by taking the time to do some free trialing.

Matt Feret (00:08:41):

Let's talk about the audience you mentioned, and I'm 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, and I'm listening to this, or I've got a grandparent or someone I'm providing care for, or you're just involved in their life and I'm interested in this, but I'm not sure if what I know after 20, 30, 40, 50 years of work of what I have to offer. If I'm like, gosh, I'm really good at X, do I do some market research? Do I poke around and see if there's already 800 courses out there? Where do I begin to think about whether or not the skills that I've learned along my career, whether or not they're transferable to opening up a course and charging somebody money for it?

Lucas Marino (00:09:29):

Sure, yeah. That's the golden question for a lot of my clients, especially those that haven't been in business for themselves for a while. Oftentimes, if someone's been in business for themselves or they've worked in a company where they were highly valued for their unique capabilities and there was a high demand on that company for their skills, they've already hashed some of that thinking out. But for those that are just starting that process, one of the ways to do is to go out, like you said, and do a little bit of market research, see what options are out there right now, see what differentiates you. By the way, the answer to that is you. You're the differentiator, your personality, the way you talk about and present your material, there is a course out there for everyone and for every course there is someone that wants it.

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It's just whether there's the right number of people and the right people that you want to be interacting with daily in your business. And so there's some pretty simple stuff you can do. You go out there and you can see how many people are in the market teaching what you teach. That number could be high, that number could be low. Both of those states of being can be green lights or could be caution flags depending on what your expectations are for pricing and serving people as far as the volume. So how many people you want to work with. So when I first retired from the military, I was in this very niche engineering world and I thought, well, there's no one teaching this out in the industry right now. The world is my oyster, and this is a very powerful thing for large organizations to do if they have expensive assets.

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And what I realized was no one knew what I was talking about. That's why there was no one in the industry. It was a brand new, novel approach that made me valuable, but it also made it hard for me to sell initially because I had to educate people on what the heck I was talking about in the first place. And so sometimes a market with very little presence in it can be a very powerful opportunity, but it also comes with the burden of having to be the first one to market. And so you just have to look at that balance and say, well, how many people are coming to me asking me to teach them this or asking me to share this with them? And if the numbers are pretty significant, you better hurry up and get that course together before they go find someone else to talk to.

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And I think that you should be confident in knowing that your own strengths are what make the opportunity great for you. So if you know that you get along well with people, people like to come to you for advice, for constructive criticism, for project work, for collaborations, then you are absolutely in the right spot to start considering teaching. And I like that you brought up, people have spent decades developing this capability, this knowledge base, these subject matter expertise, and now they just need a way to communicate it with others. You can actually develop the product, the course or the coaching program or the consulting program rather quickly. And that's going to be the easy part for you because you do have that deep expertise. And once you get around the technical part of creating the course, the creative part's a blast and you'll have fun doing it, but then you get to be a business owner, you get to sell the course, you get to provide services to clients, and you get to keep people happy. And that's kind of where it all comes together and pays off in the end.

Matt Feret (00:13:10):

So if I'm watching or listening and I'm like, well, I've always thought about some level of teaching, or I've got some level of expertise and experience that very few people have, how do I go about thinking about its value to the population? I know market research, but what if I'm talking myself out of it even as I think about it, how should someone think about this in their brains? They go, okay, here's what I've done over my life and over my career. Here's what I think would be valuable for someone to know. In your own brain, how do you think about that value? Because if I'm sitting here, I might think, well, I've done X for 30 or 40 years. It's not really transferrable. Nobody really needs to know what I'm doing. I know that's negative talk. So how do you go about thinking about whether or not what you've learned is valuable first?

Lucas Marino (00:14:01):

So this is the whole supply and demand consideration. It's like is there really a demand for what I know? And if I put it in this form in the form of a course, will people want to consume it as a course? Which is different than saying maybe I should write the book or maybe I should just have a free blog or whatever. So you wrap all those questions together in your head even though you may subconsciously not realize you're doing it. And so the way I usually recommend people approach this is to use your existing networks and your existing audience to test this out a little bit. If you have a social media presence, that's great. If you don't, that's fine. You have a network of people you've been meeting for 20, 30 years, maybe even longer that you've been working with and you that they are interested in what you do.

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You can reach out to them and have one-on-one conversations and say, hey, look, if I put something together like this, do you think it would be valuable for people? You want to get honest feedback. So sometimes the way to do that, because people may feel like they're going to hurt your feelings if they say no, is to do what I call a pre-sale or a pre-development launch, which means I only need to put together a website page, a course outline, and one or two chapters of content. I'm not going to develop the whole course and I'm going to test this. I'm going to bring it to the market at a very reduced price, maybe even beta test it for free with some people. I'm going to identify who that ideal person is and I'm going to go talk to them about this and I'm going to hash the concept out before I go into full development and launch and end up spending a lot of time and energy building something that I'm not sure people are actually going to buy.

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So that's one of the ways you can do it. You can also hire firms to help you with this. You can hire training consultants or you can hire marketing agencies to go out and figure out what the need is and who's willing to come to you to fill it. And that can get time-consuming and a little expensive, especially if you're hiring an agency to do a lot of work for you in research. But honestly, I think most people look right past the most obvious resource they have. You have all these relationships, you have all this experience, you have all of this knowledge, you know all these people. All you have to do is get in contact with them and start working through those questions like, hey, does this sound appealing? What about an opportunity for you to test this out with me? Does that sound good to you?

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And have fun with it. Don't put the pressure on yourself to be a knock it out of the park sail wizard right out the gate. Your goal in the initial part here is just to drive the proof-of-concept home and develop something that's solid. And my only advice to people to think about in the background and their heads on this is make sure you develop something you're actually passionate about, that you can actually stand behind and that you actually want to do. There's a big difference between doing something you can do and doing something you should do. And I think a lot of people can do a lot of great things, especially when they have that deep expertise in a field, but they see that as an easy button to push to go out there and create a product to make some money.

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And the reality is they didn't really want to do that work or they don't really want to do it that way. And then once it succeeds, they feel like they've created this burden and I'm like, oh man, that is a tough world to be living in because you now are obligated to provide that to people. So, I always tell people, think about something you're passionate about, think about something you would love to do. It's fun and you can engage the right people the right way. And then just go talk to those people and tell them what you're up to and see if they're interested. You can do surveys if you want, if you're not comfortable talking to people, you can do mass surveys. If you have an email list, you can send that survey out to your email list. You've got all kinds of options. So I don't want to overwhelm you with too many here, but doing a little bit of research up upfront is a good thing, but mostly with the people and can trust in your network.

Matt Feret (00:18:20):

So being specific and niche or niche, I'm not really sure how to say that word or very broad and generic. I think of broad being maybe leadership and a niche or a niche being engineering for the Navy, that's very specific. And I think you've probably heard this phrase before, the riches and the niches, a lot of people through their career find themselves in very specific niches or niches like you did when you're coming out of the military. And like I did with the Prepare for Medicare courses and the Prepare for Social Security courses, very specific, very niche topics. Is it really niches? Wait, what did I say? Riches are in the niches or is it better to be a little bit more broad? And yeah, what's your take on that?

Lucas Marino (00:19:15):

Well, you can do both, but you're going to probably have to choose one to do first. So, it really comes down to what people need. Now, the reason that the riches in the niches works is that you have a very specific targeted audience in mind. You know exactly how to give them this thing that they need. And there are a certain number of them that need that, and it's very specific. So there's very little ambiguity in what you're offering, in what problem you're solving and what type of outcome they'll achieve if they can implement a solution to their problem and get to where they want to be. So that's part of the reason that the riches are in the niches works is you have a specific problem that you're addressing with a specific solution. It leads to very clear outlined outcomes. And those people are very easy to communicate with because you're communicating with them in not so much in generalities, but in very specific language.

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And they can see the value in that and they can, I guess you could say relate to your message very easily. And that's one of the reasons why the riches in the niches works. Now with that being said, there are people that are able to niche down and then become more general or be general and then niche down in certain fields. And it all comes down to the supply and demand thing again. If you can be general, but you're still specific enough where you can give someone actionable that makes some type of impact in their life, they'll be interested in what you're offering. If there's a large enough community and you can communicate well with that community and obtain the know, like and trust with them, that is essential to them investing in your course. So that's part of the game with the niches are in the riches or the riches are in the niches, is that when you can speak specifically, people are more likely to relate to you faster.

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They're like, this person gets exactly my situation. And a lot of people feel like their situation is unique. And then when you have depth of expertise in that niche, you stand out usually pretty quickly because the more general a topic, the more options there seem to be for buyers. So sometimes being niched down really just helps narrow the field. It's less competitive, it's easier for you to establish your no and trust factor, and it's very easy for your client and you to connect and relate to each other. So that's one of the reasons that works so well. Now, I don't want people to confuse that with something that's popular. So you could be niche down, we talked about Excel. So there's a Kat Norton who's Miss Excel. When she came out with the Miss Excel personality and her training programs, I thought, well, that's pretty brave taking on Microsoft products because everyone uses Microsoft.

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There's tons of people out there that teach this stuff and know about it. But what she did was she niched down to a certain audience, specifically to millennial aged, college type students that could relate to her and the specific cases in which she was teaching them how to use Excel. And that's one way she niched down in a very general market, a big market, and immediately gained the know, like and trust factor with those people. And it was relatable. So yeah, you just have to view that for your own unique industry and your own context. I made the mistake of being too broad when I first started and when I niched the industry down that I was targeting, even though I didn't niche the content down, I was able to make success happen in my business faster. So sometimes the topic can be a bit more broad, but the audience that you target can be more focused and niche. And sometimes that's really the way it works for people that are working in more general industries. They just need to niche down the audience. So, yeah.

Matt Feret (00:23:21):

So where have you seen some examples before of niches that worked? You talked about market research, and I've been in this position where you go look at the market research and there's not a lot. And you go wait, why's there not a lot because it's not needed or there's not a lot because I really am an expert and nobody else is doing it? Where have you seen these things? How much of that is a leap of faith and how much of that is really just focusing in and going for it?

Lucas Marino (00:23:55):

Yeah, that's a really good question because the leap of faith I think happens, it's almost inevitable. I've seen people with really strong market potential be hesitant to jump and you're like, what are you doing? And it's really because they're just afraid of taking on the risk of leaving something stable and going into something that's seemingly less stable. And that fear is driving them to make a decision based off of a false sense of security. They don't think that their company could fire them in a week, just doesn't seem very probable to them or that they've done something for so long that they're just not comfortable changing. And sometimes they underestimate their ability to change. I think some people feel like, well, no one wants to hear it from me, or no one wants to hear from someone in my unique situation. And you're absolutely incorrect.

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Normally in that assumption, there's someone for you and there's a market for your course. Finding that amongst that market research like you were talking about can be the interesting part of it. You do have to be willing to step off the ledge or step off the curb at some point, and then that point at which you decide to step off the curb might change for you over time. As you get more familiar with what's happening out there, you may be more willing to step or you may be less willing to step. So for specific examples, I'll use my own business for example. We created this really impactful course and we were trying to sell it business to client, to customer B2C, business to consumer, if you will. And so we had the same course in place, the same marketing strategy, everything all B2C focused.

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We were using social media, we knew the market was ripe for this solution. All the people that were interacting with us on social media were super interested, but we weren't selling classes and we were trying to figure out why isn't this thing selling? So rather than abandon ship and toss the course in the trash and say, well, we've made a terrible mistake here, we decided to shift our tactics and go B2B. And that's because we realized almost a little late in the game, nine months into this that what we were really selling was an organization solution, not an individual solution. Even though the individual had to be the one to learn it and go through the course and then do the work that individual was normally not self-employed. They were normally employed by a company, and so we needed to be selling to the company and then they would give this student the course and that we would have the ideal learner.

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And so once we realized we just needed to sell to businesses rather than individuals, we quadrupled our sales. So it wasn't that the course wasn't the right course or that we were targeting the wrong learner, we were targeting the wrong buyer. And so the reason I tell that story is don't assume that off of your initial effort or campaign or whatever you've tried everything. You may have missed something, a little course correction might take you down a different road that is wildly successful. And the world of entrepreneurship is really one of experimentation, which is fun and exciting, and we're in a good position, by the way, as people that have done a whole lot and are now moving into other parts of our life.

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We have some flexibility and the ability to do these things. My pension from the military gives me the opportunity to be a little more risk tolerant than I normally would be if I didn't have that, my mortgage is going to be paid. So I think that you can get out there and you can try a few things and see what works, and just realize that you have a target audience for training and then you have a target audience for selling. And sometimes they're the same person and sometimes they're different people. And once you can identify both, you'll be able to serve both. You'll be able to serve the learner in the course, you'll be able to serve the buyer through your marketing and promotions. So hopefully that helps.

Matt Feret (00:28:01):

No, it does. That's a really interesting story, what do you learn about your target audience? And that's a really interesting point. You can have the same training and go direct to consumer or have the same training and go to a business. How should I think about that if I'm thinking of the skills I've learned over decades, who I'm targeting or does it matter? Do I just make the course and figure out the approach later? How should you go about thinking about that if I've got a skill that I think is worthwhile to get out there in the world?

Lucas Marino (00:28:33):

So it's funny because in hindsight I was like, wow, I could have really saved myself from trouble if I answered some really basic questions. And I think initially I was avoiding those really basic questions because I felt like it was too easy. It can't be that easy, it's got to be more complex than this. And reality was, it wasn't. It just, I overcomplicated it. So if I asked myself, who needs this course? Why do they need it? I would've saved myself a little bit of trouble if I had progressed one more layer and said, well, why should that person buy it? And then really dig into that. Really, is this person going to be spending their money on their employer's problem? And the minute I realized that the answer is almost a resounding no, in this industry, people aren't going to spend their personal money to solve their employer's problem, that's when I could have been like, ugh, I need to be selling to the employer.

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So I have a five key points to a course development that I encourage everyone to follow. The first one is to identify the ideal learner. Who are you going to educate? The second is identify the problem that you're going to solve for that person. The third is your solution. Is it a real solution to that problem? What you teach them, is it really going to solve their problem? How do you know that? How do you know it's a solution to their problem? And how do they know that it's a solution to their problem? That leads into your marketing down the road. The fourth piece of this is, well, what outcome would they experience if this problem didn't exist in their life? If you help them solve this problem, what does that outcome look like? What does that person experience? How does their life get better? And you want to document that. And then the fourth part is, well, what steps would they have to take to implement that solution and reach those outcomes?

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And if I can answer those five questions, I know I've got a really good foundation for a course, but I also have a really good business justification for pursuing the project. If I can answer all those and all the arrows are pointing in the right direction, meaning there is a real clear problem to be solved, my solution does solve that problem, that person needs this solution, values that solution, would love to get rid of that problem and would pay money to do it. And that outcome is highly favorable for them. When I got to that outcome question, if I had done this with my first course, I would've said, well, whose outcome is this? Is it really the engineer or is it the business?

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It was the business' outcome. And so in that example, I would've been like, hold on a second, I need to be selling this to the business. Yes, the ideal learner is the engineer, but the ideal client or customer is going to be the business and they're the ones with the problem and they're the ones that are going to benefit from the outcome, and that would've changed everything for me. So by going through those five questions, you can figure out if the course has a good target audience, who would most likely buy it, how this would benefit their life, and what steps you need to teach them to complete in order to achieve their outcome. And then once you have all that down, you have basically a nice little foundation set for moving forward with a potential concept project.

Matt Feret (00:31:57):

That's awesome. So what goes into a successful training once you've answered those five questions, now what? What goes into it? How do I start? How do I begin to think about laying this content out and what I know and documenting it and begin building something? What are the key components of a great course?

Lucas Marino (00:32:15):

So it's funny because I used to think that there was a pretty, you have all the options in the world and now I realize that people are just people. We love to do certain things. We want to be entertained, we want to be educated. We want to escape a little bit. Think about all the mandated training you've ever done in your life for work. Most of the time you're like, oh gosh-

Matt Feret (00:32:43):

Not good. How quickly can I get through this?

Lucas Marino (00:32:47):

I was in the government, we had some of the best in some of the worst mandated training. Some of it was hilarious, it was such bad quality and it actually made it comical. So you got a little bit of entertainment out of that, and then some of it was absolutely lifesaving. You're like, I need to really pay attention. The key thing here is you want to, and this is hard for people that have been doing something for a long time, you can't lose sight of the objective. The objective is to teach them either how to close some performance gap or how to obtain some knowledge that gets them somewhere they need to be. Achieve something in their life that is a very valuable thing for them to do. And so you want to teach them everything they need to know that they must know to do that, to reach that outcome, but you want teach them nothing more and you definitely don't want to take anything away from them that would keep them from getting to that point. You need to teach them everything they need to know nothing more, nothing less is really what it comes down to. So you need to be very specific on the outcome that you need them to achieve.

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Not that you're going to guarantee that outcome because you can't control their behavior once they've learned, but you can say, look, I'm going to give you all the tools you need to succeed in this. I'm not here to develop a course to impress you with how smart I am, to show you everything that I know on a topic. I'm selling you a course so that you can do something with this knowledge. So I need to give you exactly what you need to know. Nothing more, nothing less. Now if I want to provide them with more resources, I call that additional resources. Here's a list of books you can read. Here's a whole history on this program. Here's all the things that if you're really interested in this topic, you can go dive into later. But for the purposes of the course, I'm going to teach you exactly what you need to know to achieve the outcomes that I know you bought this course to get to.

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So in my opinion, people buy outcomes. They don't buy courses, and I stay outcome focused on the development of the curriculum. Now for you, what does that mean? Well, you have to list this stuff out just like if you write a book, you have to create an outline for your book. What am I going to write in the book? What do I need these people to learn when they read my book? Same thing with a course. I'm going to create a course outline. I need you to achieve this outcome. What objectives do you need to meet to do that? I'm going to list those out in a logical order. It's a logical flow of information. They have to do this, then they have to do this, then they have to do this. Some people find it easy to do a timeline, a step-by-step thing to create this outline.

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This person comes in the door into the course at point A and they want to get to point B. Let's list everything chronologically that they have to learn and do to get to that point. And you can just list them out in order. You're not married to that outline, you can change it later. It's going to evolve over the course of your development of the curriculum. And then what you can do is you can just start capturing the information that you want to teach them in a way that works easiest for you. Well, I think a lot of people when they start creating curriculum, they feel like I have to do this in its final form the first time, and that's not true. You can just jot it all out on a Word Document or on a Google Doc if you want, and you could create a video of you just talking about it.

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I have developed full courses talking into my phone and transcribing what I've said, just riffing off of a topic every day and then taking the transcript and then editing it, cutting out the stuff that doesn't need to be there, keeping the stuff that absolutely should be and using that as a way for me to get the information out of my head and onto paper, because some people are better at writing, some people are better at teaching and talking. Some people are better in certain settings. They say, do whatever works best for you to get the information out of your head onto paper and then use that in and put it into that outline, fill the outline, and then you have to start recording. It's just no two ways around it. You're either going to do video and audio or just audio. You can hire people to do animations. You can do animations yourself if you really want to learn that stuff. There's tons of options out there. There are even companies right now, some of them that I've worked with that you can order the whole tech camera set in a box. They'll ship it to you with instructions on how to set the camera up and the microphone, some tips on recording. When you're done, you box it back up, you mail it back to them, and then they'll edit all your videos.

(00:37:11):

There's absolutely no excuse when it comes to capabilities these days, everybody's got an opportunity. It's just what you would enjoy doing. You want to make this an enjoyable process and you just got to get the stuff out of your head and onto paper and then you can organize it.

Matt Feret (00:37:29):

Well, I was going to ask you that next, and you already started to talk about it mean what equipment do I need? We just talked about what makes a good course and how to go about doing it, but what equipment do you need? Is a web camera and a set of headphones enough? Do you need to go invest in a nice microphone? How crazy do we need to get with animation and video and swipes and all that sort of stuff? What's the 101 and what's the 201 and 301 levels of creating your own course?

Lucas Marino (00:38:01):

So we'll stick with the golden rule of making sure you develop something your learners want. We'll just use that as the criteria of what you need to build. So if these folks would be fine with an audio course and a downloadable book that they could go through like a workbook with audio files, then you can build that. And in that case, all you need is the microphone and the recording software. Build out your book, your downloadable workbook, and you could be rocking and rolling. So in that case, the tech stack is pretty small. The technical challenge is pretty low, and you've got a pretty easy to implement thing. Your smartphone is fantastic for that type of recording. You could buy USB mounted microphones for under $200 on Amazon. The Yeti Blue or the Blue Yeti is a really good starter. Well, I shouldn't call it a starter.

(00:38:54):

It's a really good microphone, and you can use that under $200. You can get lavalier mics, the fancy clip on ones, the Samson Mobile, Go Mic $160 on Amazon. You can connect it to your smartphone through one little plugin and it does all the work for you. There are so many options out there. I do cover in my book, I cover three cameras and three microphones, all under $200 on the microphone side, two cameras under $200, your smartphone and a digital video camcorder that you could use, I try to give people some options, but realistically, you need a high def camera 1080p is great. Anything higher than that is fantastic. Anything less than 1080p, be cautious. You need the software to use for recording. You could use something like Zoom or Loom. You name it.

(00:39:54):

If you're comfortable recording with a certain type of software, you could use that. And my golden rule with video and audio is that audio is the most important. So if you have to sacrifice a little bit of quality somewhere, don't let it be in the audio. People do not like bad audio. You can get away with a 720p video resolution with fantastic audio, and people would be like, yeah, I wish the video was a little bit better, but the course was good. But you cannot get away with bad audio ever. So invest in a good microphone. Don't spend $5,000 on a camera. Don't go out and spend $60,000 on professional video unless you've already tested this and that people are going to buy it or you have such a strong market and presence that it's almost a no-brainer.

(00:40:47):

That's the only time I recommend people invest significant amounts of money in production. And then the last part on that is just get comfortable with the fact that you can do this very easily with the technology you already have. If you have an iPhone of the last two or three generations or a Samsung or whatever, if you have a good phone, you already have enough, or if you have a Logitech Brio 1080p $160 webcam, you have enough right there to go film a course, go record a great course. The rest of it is just text. Getting your text files together. You could be off and running in no time. So you don't need a $10,000 equipment investment. You can get away with doing this for under 1000 dollars.

Matt Feret (00:41:34):

Is there a sweet spot in how long a good course should be?

Lucas Marino (00:41:39):

Yeah, I love that question. Videos, I'm just going to handle this by the video file at first. Videos should almost never be more than 20 minutes long unless the topic does not allow you to break that up. For example, I do teach some advanced engineering things in some of my courses, and it takes 50 minutes to walk through that math or walk through that process and describe each thing in detail. And we all know that people can hit pause on the video if they need to, but it's right to package that one video that long. That video is the only video in that course that's over 15 minutes long. Every other video in that course is 15 or less minutes. People like to consume the shortest video and audio content possible to achieve the ends with which they're pursuing the course. So if you can keep your video files or your audio files as short as possible and get the point across faster rather than longer, they're going to love you for it.

(00:42:47):

As far as the course itself, live courses do better than recorded courses do when it comes to long course content. So if you have a week long course and you want to move it to on-demand, you can do it. It's just going to be seemingly a beast of an online course. People are going to be like, wow, that is a big online course. And they're probably right. Most online courses are under eight hours in duration that I work with on an individual course basis. So if I started the course all the way to I finished it, I could probably do it in a day or two. That's the general rule of thumb. Anything more than two days, if it's an on-demand course, I'm going to be encouraging you to split it up into multiple courses. I'd be like, hey, you're getting a little long there.

(00:43:33):

It's like most people don't sit still by themselves in an online course that long. They just prefer not to. If you want to test this before you go into an online format, you can deliver it live. Use live courses to test the market, get people in the room, practice your curriculum, deliver it in a live fashion rather than record it if you're intimidated by recording. Just do it live, get it out there. You can do it locally, you can do it virtually, whatever the case is, and really get through that process and then sit back and go, can people really sit through that online? If the answer is yes, rock and roll, go record it. If you don't know the answer, start recording.

(00:44:21):

Don't let it stop you from creating the course. You can always break it up into many courses later. You can always offer both options, full course, multiple day course, or many courses. You've got all kinds of opportunities, but you do need the files to have opportunities. If you don't have the recordings, you don't have the material, you don't have the opportunities. So don't let it stop you from moving forward. Just be aware of the fact that you want to record it in a way that you can break it up if you need to later.

Matt Feret (00:44:51):

Here's the million-dollar question. How much money is in this stuff? What do you charge for a course? I know you can do your market research basically, you go on these platforms you mentioned earlier and you type in, see your competition is and how much they're charging, how good it is, but what do these courses go for and does it vary on length, vary on expertise, vary on competition. How do you know how to price a course? If I'm doing a course... Again, let's say I'm doing an Excel course. Well, we know Microsoft themselves teaches their own courses for their own software, and there's probably a hundred other people out there teaching everybody how to do pivot tables. So is that a, gosh, I need to undercut the price, or you mentioned earlier it's really you and it's your expertise and it's your personality and it's your background and knowledge. How do you go about pricing this? How much money is this in this? And what are some examples of wild successes, and also failures as well?

Lucas Marino (00:45:52):

Yeah, really big topic. I actually am in the middle right now of writing a book on course pricing strategies because it is the single most subjective part of all of this, which can really drive analytical thinkers nuts. It's like engineer, I really struggled with this when I first started because there's no laws, there's no rules, there's no nothing that really guides us. There's no standard table, of course, list prices, there's none of that. It's completely up to you to determine the price at surface level, at initial view, but then you realize it's really not just you, it's you and your potential buyer. And so what you need to do is I'd recommend you use at least four screening perspectives on this.

(00:46:38):

I call them my four key perspectives on course pricing. And the first is to do market research and find out what the market is yielding for these types of courses. It doesn't mean you're going to adopt those prices, but you do need to be aware. You need to be informed, you need to be educated of what your competitors or your current market looks like. What are people currently paying for courses? And if those courses are succeeding, people are exchanging that money for those products. So that's a good sign that you can sell in those price ranges. Now, again, asterisk. Do not adopt your competitor's price outright. Then don't just be like, oh, okay, they're charging a hundred dollars a class. I'm going to charge a hundred dollars a class. Don't do that to yourself. Write down who they are, write down what they're charging, write down what their you could say, popularity is what their audience looks like. All those things. Do your research. But don't openly adopt the price. The next thing you want to do is you want to look at, excuse me, you want to look at your own, you could say, your own history.

(00:47:50):

Have you been selling this product in a different form? Have you been consulting on this topic? Are you well known in your industry? Have you been out there coaching or consulting on this as an independent business owner or as a senior person in a company? And what people are paying for those services. So you know what the market bears for certain types of approaches to this. That gives you a really good idea about what people may be willing to spend financially on a course. It wouldn't be as much as consulting normally, but it could be quite a bit of money. It could be under that amount in some way, shape or form. And you can get an idea about where that sits in your own world of work. The value of the outcome for the learner is probably one of the most important things to capture.

(00:48:47):

You can't sell a $10 outcome for $5,000 normally. Meaning if I'm going to teach you how to make $10 in your business once and never again, I probably can't charge you $5,000 to do that. What is this outcome worth to people? How much would they spend to achieve that outcome? Why? What makes that so valuable to them? You want to figure out what the outcome is worth to people that is going to be really important in determining how much you think they'll pay to solve their problem. And then you also need to look at industry norms and behaviors. So this part of that first part of market research, my learners, my buyers, they are have become conditioned. Books is a great example. You can sell a book like this is a hardcover version of my book, $25 on Amazon. The paperback is $17.99. Same book, different format, different price. The eBook, $7.99. Well, if it's the same book in three different forms, why is the price different? Because people have been conditioned to pay less for a paperback than a hardback or a hard cover, and they're conditioned to pay less for an eBook than they are a paperback. That's a norm that's been established by that industry and by the buyers in that industry. And there's really not much I'm going to do to change that. So I need to be aware of how that exists in my market. So if people are conditioned to pay a certain amount in a certain industry for courses, then you're going to be a little freed and constrained by those norms. You need to come to expect that in your pricing strategy. I need to build it in a way that people won't be in shock when they see the price. I have clients who have made six and seven figures selling courses. Some of those courses are priced at a hundred dollars. Others of those courses are priced at $3,000. And you go, well, hold on a second. You're both making great money. You're selling for $150. You're selling for $3,000, what gives?

(00:51:00):

Well, the last thing I want you to consider is the relationship between volume and price. If you sell something for less money, you need more of those things being sold to achieve the same amount of money as if you sold it for more money and you had less sales. So if you're in a market, tie it all together, where buyers are used to buying lower priced things, they're at a point in their life where they don't have expendable income and almost all of your competitors are priced in that same range, then you have an expectation to walk into that market somewhere around there or a little higher. And you need to create a differentiator in your business so that you can raise your price a bit. Makes it unique, makes it so that people see you as the most desirable option, and you're always going to provide more value than the sticker price.

(00:51:53):

So that's just a given. You have to do that, and that's the way you can view all of this. You can say, I'm going to go target this audience. What are they used to spending? What are my competitors doing? How much is this outcome worth to the buyer? And how am I going to deliver this? Am I going to do it online or am I going to do it live? If I have to do it live, it's probably going to cost more just because I'm exchanging my time for money. There's an opportunity cost there. If I sell it to you online, I'm giving you the freedom and flexibility to view it online, but I'm also giving myself the freedom to deliver it online, which is better for me as well. So even though the value of the course is the same, just like the paperback and the eBook, one format is probably going to have an easier justification for a higher price live than if it was recorded and self-paced.

(00:52:45):

So yeah, those are the ways I look through pricing. That was a very detailed answer on that. But look at the outcome value for people. Look at the market norms. Look at what your competitor prices are. Don't outright adopt them and look at the way you're going to deliver the course. And if you can put all those together and make sense of it and everything goes, yeah, that looks good, then you're good to go. Now, if you're going to do a beta test, I would take that target price, I would cut it in half. I'd offer a pre-sale one time only. Get in while you can, half price. Use that to test your course, get a bunch of feedback from people, make your course better, increase your price. Go live to market. And that's a very simple approach to doing a pre-launch and then a full price offer.

Matt Feret (00:53:31):

Wow, that was awesome. That's a ton of awesome information that's really helpful to know and to hear. So thank you. So let me follow up that piece with something you touched on and you said the word consulting. So a lot of folks that are thinking about retiring and what's next, a lot of people turn to consulting and offering their consulting services as an option to work or to generate some additional income in retirement. How can a course help in ways you may not just think. If you're charging $150 for a course, how can you, or is there an opportunity to leverage a course into more consulting or more engagements? Perhaps you're looking for a part-time job and not working full-time. What are the other benefits of making a course beyond just the income you get from the course?

Lucas Marino (00:54:29):

I love this question because it's actually probably much like a book. A course is a gateway drug to the rest of your business. It's also a way for people to get really smart at a lower price point about what exactly you do. So people watching this right now may hear me talking or listening to this, may hear me talking about these topics, and they go, dude, I don't want anything to do with learning all that stuff. I would rather just pay someone to do that for me. This is the same experience I've had several times in my own business where for virtual summits, for example, I wanted to host a virtual summit. I contacted a friend of mine, Ray Brem, who that's what he does. He's the virtual summit dude. He said, I have a course. I said, I will gladly take your course. I think I paid $900.

(00:55:18):

By the end of that course. I said, I don't want anything to do with creating this product by myself. I would love to hire you to do this for me, Ray. Thank you for educating me and giving me the opportunity to make an informed decision. And that investment to get that decision made cost me $900. Now, I could have finished that course and said, I've got this. I know exactly what I need to do. His course was good enough for me to go on and do that myself. But the initial investment in that was a bit of a steppingstone into the rest of his world for services he offers. I see that in my own business where people will come take my course, build your online course program. They get in, they're like, this is great. The course has been fantastic. When can we talk? And I'm like, what would you like to talk about?

(00:56:05):

And they're like, I would love for you to help me put my course together. Okay, great. It's a way for people to get to know you, to learn how to trust you, to experience the depth of your knowledge in your area of expertise. The course can be a really powerful way of non-intrusively showing people the value that your services provide, and they can go through your course and get familiar with you. And then you can do upsells at the end of your course if you want like, hey, I've seen people discount the entire price of the course from their services, meaning you bought my course, you spent, let's say it's just a around number, $200. Then you decide to come to me for services. I discount those services by the price of the course to just sweeten the deal for you being loyal and going from course to consulting or something like that.

(00:56:55):

So yeah, it's a great way to become, you could say, somewhat of a lead magnet for other services, even though people are paying for it. You can also use courses as a free offer to then be a gateway to client services. The only problem with that model to me is people generally don't put a lot of value on free things. So, I'd encourage you to put some price tag on it so they take it seriously and they actually open the course and do something with it. Because oftentimes, if you offer something for free, people will grab it and then they don't really associate any value with it. And it never really gets them to that next point of getting to know you, learning more about your expertise, what you do. The course isn't designed to sell and pitch, but it does that naturally because they get to see you in your element, and they get to realize exactly what it is that they're trying to do, and then they may decide to hire you for that. So as a consultant, courses are a very powerful way to have a steppingstone in your business from nothing to consulting. So it's a bit of a in between step on the ladder there.

Matt Feret (00:57:59):

You mentioned it, and I'm going to ask about it. You have a company. Tell me about it and what do you do for people?

Lucas Marino (00:58:05):

So we have three divisions. It's a training company, the one division East Partnership, we provide government training and engineering training. I have a whole team on that side that does fantastic work. They're one of a kind, they're all 30- and 40-year experts in their fields. Love those guys, love what they do. So do our clients. It's like the best thing ever. And then we have Marino Training, and that's where I help other people build online courses, build their own training products, get their own training businesses launched, that's where I spend a significant amount of my time. It's what I love to do. It's what I wake up doing every day. It's why I wrote the book, it's why I have the courses, it's what I do.

Matt Feret (00:58:47):

So if I'm thinking about this and now I feel like I've got some expertise, I feel like I've got some time, I feel like I have something to share with the world. I've validated it, or I've had it validated through friends and family and maybe even my friends on Facebook, maybe even done a little survey or two with some people I know on email to go to. Maybe even a sample video of just me talking, what do I do next? What path do I take and how do I know which path do I take if I do it myself? Or I email you and go, all right, where do I start and help me? How do I begin to think about that? Is it just a comfort level with the tech or is a comfort level with the... How do I think about whether or not I can do this myself as a lot of people do, or I need to bring in the experts and call you?

Lucas Marino (00:59:36):

Sure. I think that it comes down to commitment. It's what do you actually want to spend your time doing? Because the money is one part of it. You can learn the technology, even if at first you don't know what the heck you're doing, if you spend enough time, you'll learn it. You can take a course and you can figure out how to build the curriculum. That's what I teach in my course. You can figure out everything basically from A to Z on launching a course in a program that me or other people provide. But what it really comes down to is what do you actually want to spend your time doing? If you want to spend your time creating a flagship course and then marketing and selling that course and providing that course, it's a significant time investment. So to me, the purchasing those types of services is like the cheat code for getting it done faster the first time.

(01:00:30):

Because you could develop a course, a minimally viable product, an MVP if you will, a good concept course on your own, get that up and running, test the market, get feedback from people, and then decide what you want to do from there. You'll have some appreciation for the investment, the amount of time it took for you to get where you were. And then if you're like, yeah, I really just don't want to spend that much time waiting. I'd rather just get this knocked out and the time means more to me than the expense, then I would encourage you to seek some type of consulting agreement with somebody to do that. I try to outsource the things that I don't do as well as someone else could for the same amount of time and money. So, I'm not a video editor.

(01:01:22):

I outsource almost all of my video editing. Could I learn how to be a video editor? Sure. Am I comfortable with the technology? Yes. Am I available to spend a week learning it? No. And honestly, it's an opportunity cost. If I spend two months building a course, two months I'm not doing something else. And there's just no replacing you in your business when it comes to you being present, you marketing, you speaking, you interviewing on podcasts, you doing these things. You have to pause everything else to go do those things. So there's times when I say, well, what am I going to keep and what am I going to give away? And if I give it away, will I get it faster and better than if I did it myself? And would that free me up to do something even more valuable?

(01:02:05):

If the answer is yes, yes, and yes, why am I doing this myself? Now I will say I'm stubborn sometimes. Just last night I was looking over my QuickBooks going, why am I doing this? Why have I not outsourced my bookkeeping? And I think part of it is because it was hard for me to just let go after all these years. Sometimes you just have to learn to let go of certain things. I'm more keen to let go of something that I haven't yet embraced, and I noticed that about myself. So if you'll let go of something you haven't had to hold onto yet, that can be a lot different than letting go of something you've been holding onto for a while. And the reason I bring that up is some people have been building a course. I get clients all the time that I've been trying to build this thing for six months.

(01:02:57):

I've been trying to build this thing for a year. I've been trying to build this thing for 10 years. I have one client who's been teaching this thing for 30 years, and he is just now building the online course. And he went and jumped in with both feet by himself and said, yeah, this isn't working. And that's when he reached out to get some help. So those are the ways I would think about it and just realize you can make a really cool relationship with somebody if you decide to pick the right people to work with. And it could be something special. It could make your whole experience a little bit different.

Matt Feret (01:03:33):

Lucas, how do people find you on the internet and all of your products?

Lucas Marino (01:03:38):

You can find me on www.marinotraining.com. I am on LinkedIn, I'm on Facebook, I'm on all the little things. You could always just email me at mailto:lucas@marinotraining.com. And yeah, I've got all the stuff, email newsletters, I've got the social media channels, the private community, so got something for everybody. Just pick the poison that works best for you, I'm there.

Matt Feret (01:04:04):

And a book.

Lucas Marino (01:04:05):

And a book. Got a book, brand new book, just came out a month ago. It's called Monetize Your Book with a Course. Yes, it's been sitting here on my desk. I'm constantly referencing my own thing.

Matt Feret (01:04:18):

I did that too. I really did.

Lucas Marino (01:04:20):

What did I say?

Matt Feret (01:04:21):

No, exactly. I've done the exact same thing with my books. I really have. I've gone, that's a really good question. I know the answer to it. Let look at my own book.

Lucas Marino (01:04:29):

Well, especially in your world, it is significantly more complex than mine.

Matt Feret (01:04:34):

Well, I don't know. Everything gets complex in its own way, which is part of course building. You might think, it's not that big of a deal. Well, no, it is because you're the only one or a handful of people that actually know it and can teach others.

Lucas Marino (01:04:45):

Yeah. And your courses are going to be fantastic because you live in a world where almost every single person is intimidated in first contact with the topic. I'm 44, so I'm not Medicare eligible yet, but having read your book and experienced your curriculum, I'm like, oh my gosh, I never would've been able to figure this stuff out this confidently, this quickly, this thoroughly on my own. It is extremely complex, and I can see why people are intimidated by the topic when it's time to step to the plate and start looking at it seriously and when it's time in your life. And it's nice to have someone there that you can trust that knows this in some form, whether it be the book, whether it be the course, whether it be consulting.

(01:05:35):

It's nice to have some resource that you can lean on to instill that confidence in you. And I know that you're actually making the right decision. And so kudos to you for building your course because I think it's going to be tremendously helpful to a lot of people who really just don't want to have to figure it all out themselves. It takes way too much time and energy, and it's coming out the backside. You don't feel any better about it with Medicare. You're like, oh my gosh, I wish there was an easier way. Well, there is, so.

Matt Feret (01:06:04):

That's awesome. I didn't mean to turn that into a promotion for my course.

Lucas Marino (01:06:07):

Oh no.

Matt Feret (01:06:07):

[inaudible 01:06:09].

Lucas Marino (01:06:10):

I'll gladly promote it. It's extremely helpful. I've even shared your book and your curriculum with some people that are at that time in their lives. My own parents, I brought that to my dad and said, you really need to read this, because I felt like they were in a position to make a decision without all the right information, and it was just a fantastic resource for them.

Matt Feret (01:06:31):

Well, I do it to help people. That's it. If you can help people that's the most rewarding thing. So thanks, man. But hey, let me ask you the last question here and get off my own... It wasn't self-promotion, it was your promotion, but thanks anyway. Anyway. Listen, what questions? We've had a really comprehensive conversation. We know how to find you, but what questions did I did not ask that I should have around this whole topic?

Lucas Marino (01:06:58):

What's the one thing that stops most people from doing this or gets in their way? Not really a question you should ask, but it is the thing I see the most, which is the reason I bring it up. You need to be confident you can do this. You need to be confident that you can do any of this. You have come a long way. You have learned tons of things. You have done all kinds of things. You can do this. It may be a little intimidating at first, but it's really easy for you to figure out. You just give yourself some grace, give yourself some time and have fun with it. I think at this point in your life, you're an expert in something. You don't need to worry about mastering the topic. You've already done that.

(01:07:40):

Now you can just focus on how to get it in the right people's hands. And when that feels a little challenging or it feels a little arduous just remember that you can't quit. You have to help people. There's no quitting. You can do this and someone needs you to do this. So get out there, put your course together, write your book, launch your consulting business. Whatever the case is, do all of it if you want. Don't feel like you have to be the master of everything all at once. It doesn't have to be perfect. Just get started. Be confident knowing that you'll get there. It'll happen. And there's tons of resources to help you, and you can absolutely do this.

(01:08:22):

If I wish I could sell every one of my clients one thing, I would sell them confidence. That's really the big thing. I can't give them in a jar, I can't just mail them a box of confidence, but they gain it through collaborating, coaching, working with them on product development, and it's just wonderful to see that confidence build over time. So know that you have that in you. It's not something that you can just go grab somewhere. You can absolutely do this. You can help people. You will help people. You just need to go out and do it. And there's nothing you can't do. You're already an expert. Go for it.

Matt Feret (01:08:58):

Thanks, Lucas.

Lucas Marino (01:08:59):

Yes, sir.

Matt Feret (01:09:01):

Thanks Lucas. Make sure to hit The Matt Feret Show website for links and show notes. Until next time, to your wealth, wisdom, and wellness, I'm Matt Feret, and thanks for tuning in.

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