August 13, 2025 • 38 mins
If you want Hector’s help starting or growing your own trade school, fill out this quick form: https://form.typeform.com/to/Fz6CExfS
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I sat down with my friend and neighbor Hector to talk about how he built and scaled trade schools using little-known government grants. We covered how states pay $5,000 to $15,000 per student, why white labeling courses leads to huge margins, and how he’s helped schools in industries like nursing, CDL truck driving, pest control, IT tech sales, and more. We also discussed how existing business owners can bolt a school onto their operation, solve staffing shortages, and get paid to train their own employees.
Enjoy!
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
You market it to the general public for $3000.
Still big margins. You sell one a week that
replaces somebody's income like that, the grant will pay as high
as $15,000. He does 6 to 8 jobs a day.
So one man show that it's doing 300 a year.
I'm like, why not just do this online?
It's going to be more profitable.
Based on what I researched, I spent $0.00 on marketing.
We scaled it to about 2.4 million our first year on just
(00:21):
grants. Oh my gosh.
One of my clients has AIT school.
He's doing about 2.52 point 8 onthe school side and another one
point 5 on the placement. Side million a year.
Yes, yeah, about 5 million combined.
It's so many grants out there that people don't realize
there's business grants and people talk about it.
They make it complicated, but man, it's as simple as just.
(00:44):
I've got a friend named Hector. He lives 3 minutes down the road
from me. He's my Chipotle buddy, and he's
in a really interesting line of work.
He helps people start trade schools, and he started a trade
school before. And the magic and genius about
trade schools is that the state covers all of it.
No one pays for it except the government.
And his niche has been in learning how to navigate these
regulatory bodies that will pay entrepreneurs 5 to $15,000 per
(01:08):
trade school course that you canbuy and white label from other
course companies for hundreds ofdollars.
Insane offer. It's a very high ticket product
that the buyer doesn't have to pay for.
The state pays for it. And so this is a great episode
if you're thinking of starting abusiness because he talks about
how to start your own trade school and navigate this
(01:28):
regulatory aspect of it and how to find customers, what types of
organizations to partner with for referral partners.
And it's also a great episode ifyou already own a business that
is in high demand for good employees.
Because if you do own a businessin a handful of different
niches, you can get paid 5 to $15,000 to train your own
employees, and then you can get paid 5 to $15,000 to train other
(01:51):
people that will be employed foryour competitors.
So whether you're a business owner or an aspiring business
owner, you're going to love this.
It's very interesting. You've probably never heard
about this niche. It's kind of a goldmine.
Please share with a friend. I bought an insurance franchise
that failed miserably, but I gota a phone call that changed my
life and it was an ex colleague of mine saying Hey, I need truck
(02:12):
driver insurance and school insurance.
And I was like, well dude, I can't help you with neither of
those. I only sell home in auto.
And I was like what? You know, back up a little bit.
What do you mean school insurance and truck driving
insurance? And lo behold, he owned the
truck driving school like ACDL school, which we see everywhere.
And that's when I was like, huh,interesting.
(02:33):
But what caught towards the end of the the phone call, I was
like, dude, I got to go see this.
We weren't entirely shut down yet, but when I saw him in a
parking lot of a church with 18 other people there, 2 trucks, I
was just memorized by the whole concept of trade schools.
I didn't know it was a business.Right before I left, he kind of
whispered to me, he goes, Can you believe the state of Texas
(02:56):
is paying me money for each of these guys here?
And I was like, what do you mean?
There's two? There's this grant called WIOA.
And if you're a laid off worker,you know, impacted by a justice
system on food stamps, there's all this money that people could
go get and they'll teach them a new skill set.
And I was just like, talk about not sleeping.
(03:17):
I literally tanked my insurance franchise because of this one
sentence. I didn't know that part of your
story. And I love hearing stories about
like that first conversation that just got us thinking about
something differently. And then you had that
conversation on the phone and hewas just calling to ask you
about insurance, and you dug a little deeper, which shows how
being curious can be profitable.Then you went on site and you're
(03:41):
like, you're picturing some school.
You're probably picturing something more formalized,
right? But you just show up to a
parking lot with an 18 Wheeler and dudes paying thousands of
dollars and then you find out that these dudes aren't paying a
dime. The state is covering all of it,
right? Yep.
OK, you said a lot better than me, but yes.
So if you hadn't just had this negative career experience, you
(04:04):
wouldn't even be in a position to be curious about this or to
go down this rabbit hole, right?OK, cool.
Do you want a quote or not? Next right.
Yep, Yep. OK.
It's just interesting how thingscome together like that.
Probably the best silver lining of my life, man.
Yeah, just one of those moments.OK, So what did you do after
that, after you learned that there's this grant that the
(04:24):
government covers? I couldn't sleep, didn't know
what to do. Spoke to a buddy of mine just to
kind of wrap up things. It well let me back up.
I helped him scale his school because I was genuinely
interested because I really wanted to do this for myself.
We tried to work out a deal. We had different visions.
(04:44):
I wanted to do the online only because I'm like, why not just
do this online? It's going to be more
profitable. Based on what I researched,
We're shutting down. We're going to be shut down.
So it was one of those things where online school just made
sense. But no, I wanted to go to online
school route. It was just a lot more
profitable. I didn't need parking lots or
spaces or anything like that. And I did my research and just
to be careful, slain the story. We raised some money.
(05:06):
We probably didn't read raise money, but we did it anyway.
Valuable lesson there. You know, when you look at
movies and you see shareholders and meetings, it's not all
rainbows and and good stuff, butit taught me that side of
things, right. And then I took an exit from
that school as well. But man, whatever experience it
was, you know, doing those and operating those and then that
(05:28):
led to Twitter. Our buddy Spencer goes you got
to get on Twitter. That's where it's at.
I'm like there there's no way itlike I don't have any social
media. I'm meeting social media, but it
just, I got on Twitter, booked my first call.
It was a school, a flight attendance school in Minnesota
that needed help. And I'm like, I can't believe
that's a thing. And we scaled it to about 2.4
(05:48):
million our first year on just grants all across Texas.
Being an online school, it was we get to market all of Texas.
You don't have to stay in your backyard like a brick and mortar
like in person school. And man, it just caught
wildfire. I did everything that no one's
ever done. I went, I spent $0.00 on
marketing. I just went knocking on church
doors and getting involved with church groups and, you know,
(06:10):
helping nonprofits, their audiences, and it just caught
wildfiremen. What made you want to go to
churches for this? At my church, you know,
obviously we tithe and stuff like that and you could choose
where your money kind of goes to.
And we had already chose a certain percentage go to women's
shelter. And I knew, you know, through
church about these shelters and then what they go through.
(06:31):
So I'm like, you know what, a lot of these nonprofits need
something to do while they're recovering or, or, or live
transitioning. They already qualify for this
grant. They just don't know about it.
So I pitched it to them. They all loved it.
And I quickly noticed some something wasn't right because
their their login history wasn'thigh at all.
(06:52):
And what I noticed is that they didn't have laptops.
So that's when I threw in the laptop like, hey, free training,
a free laptop. And they just blew up after that
even more like right when it, right when I thought like, this
is it, then I'm like, Oh my gosh, if I just fix this
pinpoint, it's going to blow up even more.
And then it just, it did. I started getting a lot of
community partners and I partnered up with them.
And again, the goal was just to bring awareness to this grant,
(07:14):
whether they wanted to use our school or not.
That wasn't the mission. The mission was like, hey,
there's this grant, go learn a trade.
We're so behind on trades. And I think we talked about this
yesterday, for every 5 tradesmenthat retire only once getting
replaced no matter what it is. Yeah, let's talk about the unit
economics. How much is the grant?
(07:34):
Let's and let's talk about your last business, How much is the
grant and what were the trades? So is HVAC, electrical,
plumbing. And then tell me about like the
the Oculus that you would send them and then what were you
paying for the course? Million questions in one, but
you you'll sort them. Out.
Good. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So every state has different regions, right?
And every region treats as grantindependently for whatever
(07:58):
reason. Same grant and that means same
different cost. So like say Central Texas will
Max out at 7500 per student. That's what the school makes.
Our investment is these goggles right here, which you could find
for like 2-3 hundred dollars or a laptop.
And like I said, when we first started the school, it was
(08:19):
mainly medical billing and coding, pharmacy technician, IT,
help desk. It's just stuff that you could
generally do remotely. When we first started the
school, we were writing the curriculum.
Then you could find, we found out that you could white label
it. And what that means is you
produce a bunch of courses, I buy them from you.
Let's just say for 800 to $1000,I slapped my school name on it
(08:42):
and the rest is margin. So the grant will pay as low as
about $5000 in some areas and ashigh as $15,000 in some.
Areas on both the region and thestate, right?
The region and the state and thefield.
So they're not going to pay a ton of money for something
that's not as much as high end demand, but still needed.
(09:04):
But like like you said, anythingin the trades, welding, a
certain kind of technician, whether it's solar and it's also
regional. So for example, if you go down
to Houston, Galveston, it's going to be very marine based
like underwater welding, boat technicians, boat repair, like
very like that. If you go to West TX, it's going
(09:24):
to be oil and gas, like driving the trucks to deliver gas and
oil, wind turbine technician, CDL.
So just it, it just changes up and they make it extremely
complicated. And then I was able to simplify.
That's where you found success or that's where you found your
edge or your alpha because you saw all this friction, all this
(09:46):
bureaucracy and red tape, and you said, all right, I'm going
to sit down. I'm not going anywhere until I
figure this out because I think that the prize at the end of the
rainbow, if I figure this out, is very large.
For sure, 'cause if you look andyou're driving around and
you're, you're seeing this, you'll hear schools promoting on
the radio, you'll see them in commercials, you see them on
social media. That's expensive.
It's extremely expensive. I was doing a guerrilla
(10:08):
marketing. I'm going to the church,
speaking at a church. Hey, anyone want to go to school
for free? Want to learn a trade?
And they were like, what do you mean?
Like it took me a while to get them to understand, 'cause
everyone was like, what's the catch?
Like there has to be a catch. And I'm like, no, just like food
stamps has existed this whole time.
This grant exists because the the wild card here.
The purpose of this grant is to get you off government benefits,
(10:31):
get you into a livable wage, learn no new skill set in the
trade, and start making decent money because they want your
future taxes forever. So it's a pretty good investment
on on the government. And they don't want to be paying
for your food stamps forever either.
It's a double win. So it's like, it's not the
government being a philanthropist.
It's like we're going to, we're going to put up 7500 bucks, then
we're going to save all this money from food stamps, all this
(10:51):
money from Section A housing, Then you're going to pay US
taxes on top of that. It's an investment for the
government. But it is the government is so
complicated that it's hard for entrepreneurs like you and I to
navigate, get our way through itright.
Correct. Yeah, you nailed it.
And and and think about it, whenyou say win, win, it is a win
win because our audience that this grant targets is anyone in
warehouse work, retail work, fast food work.
(11:13):
So we're just trying to get people out of not flipping
burgers anymore and into a trade.
Yeah, and make 346 times as much.
At least the average graduates making 25 to 30 bucks an hour.
That's insane. Wow.
OK. So one thing that I think is
interesting about all this is like you don't have to be in the
course business. You don't have to go put
together this course about HVAC,which you probably know nothing
(11:35):
about, right? I mean no, you did fix your
HVAC, but other than that. I did.
I did. I took the course for the first
time after five years and took that one section and I was able
to fix my own HVAC for 20 bucks.Yeah, who would have known?
It works. That's the whole beauty of this
is like you, you figure out how to work this system in a
compliant way, and then you figure out how to just white
(11:58):
label courses, which is just a fancy way for saying find a
school, buy the courses from theschool, put your logo on it.
That's it. Then you put the parties
together. And then I guess the third
critical element of that is finding referral partners,
churches, workforce development centers, Chambers of Commerce,
anyone that in like regularly interacts with people that might
want a, a free education, right and to better their lives.
(12:21):
Once again, you said a lot more prettier than me, yes.
So why don't we talk about the trades that are in the highest
demand from like most to least demand that most States and or
regions will pay for? Yeah, it's anything with the
word technician in it. So whether that's solar
technician, forklift repair technician, pool technician,
(12:48):
free technician, the whole pointof the grant is what's paying
the most out there that people aren't really talking about.
We know that HVAC electrical employment are popular and it's
always needed, but man, it's theunderlining ones that don't
aren't commercialized that are are needed.
Pest control technician, I mean just about anything that has the
word technician that secretly they earn really good hourly
(13:11):
wages and just nobody wants to do it.
Like it's 30 jobs that no one wants to do, but they pay well
and for a reason. Well, you were just telling me
about it, a dog groomer, which Iwould never think would be
relevant to this, but they're like vet technicians, right?
Yeah. And so that counts.
I helped a guy up the street from us in Princeton, TX and he
opened up a dog grooming school.I didn't I didn't believe him.
(13:34):
I was like dude I can't help you.
Little that I know that when I looked up like the requirements,
the grant pays for a vet tech, which is just an assistant to a
veterinarian person, but it alsoqualifies for these dog groomers
because there's certain things that I won't really get into.
It's kind of gross that they have to do during the grooming
session. And this guy's booked out like 6
(13:55):
to 8 weeks in advance, charges 250 per trim because it's, he
specializes in doodles like golden doodles, Laba doodles.
And I can't believe that man. He's going to, we, we, you know,
he's weeks away from going live with the school.
He's going to train and do his own curriculum because it's,
again, it's white labels. He's going to train his own
curriculum, pick from the cream of the crop, keep those and the
(14:19):
rest get certified and go find work elsewhere.
Which is there anyone with With certifications, it's not hard to
find a job. Yeah.
So you're saying that there's anopportunity here for aspiring
business owners to start their own school and which we'll get
to in a minute. But then there's also an
opportunity for current businessowners that maybe has a hard
time finding qualified employees, maybe hires people
(14:41):
with a job title that have the word technician in it like this,
these vet technicians. And so you help them set up
their own school to where a theycan find the best people in the
business they can, and they're getting paid to train their own
employees, right? They're getting paid by the
government to find the best employees that they can.
And then for all the leftover, like they call it, sell your
(15:02):
sawdust, right? Let's say they have they have
more applicants than they need to hire.
They can still get paid by the government to train them and
then they can just farm them outto all their competitors or they
can go get jobs elsewhere. Yeah, here's a case study for
you. I had through mutual Connections
on helping an adult, a boutique adult day care business,
(15:26):
extremely lucrative business. And the number one pinpoint he
has is that he never has enough Cnas and what CNA means a
certified nurse. Assistant.
Grueling, grueling job. I mean big turnover rate because
you're just bathing old people, taking care of them,
unfortunately changing diapers and they don't get paid the
best. Usually the ranges is from like
(15:47):
16 to $18.00. But he does have a career
progression. Like if you stick with them for
like a couple months, he gives you a raise, another couple of
months, another raise. Come to find out, you know, 25
out of his 30 Cnas weren't even certified.
Almost like a home health aide. You just take a little boot camp
course. Is that legal?
Yeah, because it's kind of like home health aide, like you're
just like a glorified babysitter, I guess, if you
(16:09):
will. But yeah, I mean, he's going to
get 7500 for every single staff member he certifies.
He needs to certify anyway. So once he stands up to school,
he'll probably make 300,000 in additional revenue fixing his
own pinpoint. But you brought up a good
question. How many people do you think are
really certified out there doingthe work all the time?
(16:31):
And we talked about the forkliftrepair guide man, he, he's not
certified. He, he just done it for 30
years. The guy that fixed my dishwasher
here in the town of Wiley, he came to fix it.
It took him 15 minutes. He bills me 450 bucks, which is
insane. But he's the only one that
picked up the phone out of five people.
I thought, I mean, literally theonly one picked up the phone and
(16:52):
he, he could be here the next day.
And I paid whatever it was, spent 15 minutes here.
I literally hung up a call that was on and I had to go ask him
like, hey, where'd you go to school?
This is what I do. Hold on.
He's like, I didn't go to school.
I started fixing my own stuff eight years ago.
My wife put a post on it and it just took off from there and
I've been doing it since. I'm a one man show.
He does 6 to 8 jobs a day. So one man show.
(17:14):
That dude's doing 300 a year. There's just so much demand for
it. So much demand.
I mean I had to call 5. People some dude watching
YouTube videos is making insane money.
All the time. I mean, that's that's what you
post about all the time. It's just people overcomplicate
it. They never start and they
overanalyze it. Just don't start stuff, man.
I mean, we're here to tell people, start stuff.
All right, so we'll get to like the starting a new school from
(17:36):
scratch in a minute, but I'm I'mthinking about Amazon right now.
Like one of the most brilliant things that Amazon did to grow
was they took all of their cost centers and turn them into
profit centers. So, you know, two decades ago,
they're like, jeez, we're spending all this money on
servers. Like why don't we buy our own
servers? And then we'll buy extra.
And if anyone needs our servers,we'll call it AWS, Amazon Web
(17:57):
Services, and we'll, we'll charge money for people to use
our servers. And now AWS is a multibillion
dollar business in and of itself.
And then they were like, jeez, we're giving UPSUSPS and FedEx
all this money every year. We're growing so fast.
Why don't we just buy our own trucks?
And that was our biggest cost center.
Now, you know, other companies pay Amazon to deliver their
stuff. Now it's a profit center.
(18:18):
So this, this CNA example, he was spending 10s if not hundreds
of thousands of dollars a year recruiting Cnas like subpar, not
even certified Cnas from other like head hunting agencies.
And you went to him and said, hey, how about you take that to
0. And in addition, you will get
paid for training your own employees.
(18:39):
In addition, if you don't need all the employees that you're
training, you can just farm themout.
So could he get paid to train someone and then get paid to
place them at a competitor as well?
A. 100%. If you really wanted to lean
into that. Well, he did it because he's,
you know, he's going to exit in five or ten years and he's
buying these residential lookingbeautiful homes, turning them
(19:02):
into adult daycare, livings or elder care and he's buying them
up. So he's always going to need
Cnas. As he scales, he needs more and
more Cnas. And sure, if they don't work
out, he could send them other, well, other places because
again, what people are understanding is they just want
that piece of paper. That piece of paper is a foot in
the door and a near career progression, right?
(19:22):
So yeah, he's going to turn it into a cool little not not only
value add to his business when he goes to sell, how cool is to
how many businesses, businesses out there go sell and say, hey,
I also have a school with it. So you'll never have to worry.
About something yeah and then you know if the the negative way
of looking at that from the potential acquirers perspective
is I don't want to be in the school business I just want to
(19:44):
be in the CNA business. Well, it's like well you're not
like you're in the training employees business this quote UN
quote school just means you're actually getting paid to do it,
which none of my competitors areright.
If if you want to lean into the quote school part of the
business, then you feel feel free to grow that as much as you
want, but I would rather get paid to to train my employees
than. Otherwise right.
(20:06):
Not only get paid, I mean that'sPart 2 to this grant that I
really just started promoting. Now is we're so behind the 8
ball on trades that now there's additional grants for the
employer to get free paid labor.And we talked about this.
If you hire a graduate that tookthis grant, most regions, area
(20:26):
cities, workforce offices, we'llpay you up to 100% of training
wages up to 20 bucks an hour for$300.00 an hour.
Worst case 50% other wages. The reasoning behind this is
they want to help small businesses, but also they want
these graduates to have work experience and that way they
call it test driving each other.The employer test drives.
Hey, is this person going to be a good worker?
(20:47):
They going to show up because the bar's so low.
And if they do, we'll keep them if they don't work out.
Dude, you just got free labor and they get to put experience
on the resume so they go move onto their, you know, career path.
Crazy. So HVAC companies could, they
can have free labor basically that no, no people learning.
Now, if you were to guess because you've been, I know
(21:08):
you've been cold calling, what percentage of HVAC companies
even know that this is an option?
Zero. What percentage of businesses
know zero in our backyard? I was telling you that workforce
office has about $1,000,000 theyget every year specifically to
help employers and fix this gap.And they struggle to spend the
money. Like it's, it's so many grants
(21:29):
out there that people don't realize there's business grants
and people talk about it. They make it complicated, but
man, it's as simple as just go register to be a training
provider at the workforce, get free labor.
If you're trying to scale, there's no better way to scale
for free and it's a win win. They get experience out of it.
You maybe find a good employee out of it.
Is there a way for people to monetize playing a middle man on
(21:50):
this, on the on the job trainingside of things where like you
could help the city of, you know, Plano, TX, place people at
John's HVAC company and, and make a margin there?
Or is that not really a thing? No, probably.
I mean, that's, that's kind of what I where I fit in, right.
But yeah, sure. I mean, here's the difference,
right? When I told you I cold called
(22:11):
HVAC companies, 'cause they havea dedicated person that does
this for them and they struggle.Keep in mind how much training
goes into it. I mean, look what it sounds
like. Hey Chris, would you like some
free labor? You just have to register at the
workforce. You get 300 hours and then
you're like, you're too busy. You're like, I don't get it.
Sounds like a. Scam.
Kind of sounds like a scam. Yeah, That's your biggest
competition is it? Sounds like a scam.
(22:32):
So I have decent sales experience.
I cold called. I cold called 10 HVAC companies
and I said, Hey, you know, I'm doing this project, not
necessarily in in this order, but I'm like, Hey, what size is
your business? Who runs it?
How do you find technicians? Are you looking for technicians?
And then whether they say yes orno, it's like, Hey, would you
mind getting a technician at at no cost to you?
(22:54):
And it comes to a workman's comp.
And again, I'm I'm messing this up in the order it is.
But what was astonishing is out of the 10 company I called, I
left messages for seven of them.Still haven't heard back.
It's been a month. The three that did pick up the
phone, there were mom and pop, maybe owner son, owner 1
technician. And they're like, no, we're
(23:15):
good. I'm like, but this is your busy
season. Isn't like, don't you want extra
labor, like extra people to go in Audix so you don't have to?
It's not I I I think we're fine.Like it's just, it's small and
we're we're doing OK. You know, I'm like, yeah, I
mean, but doing OK isn't, you know, this is free labor.
And that's when I I started asking questions because I was
almost getting annoying. I'm like, what am I missing
here? Like what are you saying no to
(23:36):
it? 300 hours of free labor up to 22
bucks an hour with workman's comp.
Even if you just used them for your busy season and you call it
a day? Knock out five houses in one day
versus 1. I didn't get it.
I didn't get it. Let's talk about some school
owners that you know that you'vehelped and how much money
they're making and how they're making money.
(23:57):
Like what are they white labeling?
What's the industry? What are they selling it for?
How are they finding customers? Let's go there.
Perfect. So one of the first schools I
helped was a nursing school. They were out of Georgia.
And to describe this case study,they were charged.
They're just grossly under charging and not even using the
(24:18):
grant. So they.
Were charging like $2000 for like a like a medical assisting
nursing, like just basic phlebotomy, like basic four week
boot camp style schools and theywere doing decent.
They're doing like 10-12 people a month at $2000.
But what's unique is that most trade school owners are
tradespeople themselves. Yeah, they're not business
(24:40):
owners. Kind of like small business
people, right? Like they create a business,
they create this school and thenthey get stuck working in the
business. They never get to work on it.
They're the instructor, they're the marketing person.
They answer the phone during class.
Like they just don't know how toscale and they get stuck in it.
But they but they they love it. It's their passion.
That's usually the common thing.So when we met, I was like, hey,
(25:03):
Atlanta, I mean Atlanta. Well, yeah, it's Atlanta.
Atlanta pays 10,000 per student.Why are you only charging 2?
And she goes, I tried using the grant.
It was complicated. It's a nightmare.
I just, I, I charge the general public 2000.
I stay busy. I want to stay, I want to stay
busy. I'm like, OK, but if you add an
extra course and you just changeyour pricing because your value
(25:26):
add is you're an ex nurse and you're getting them job
placement. The value is in your network of
job placement. They could go to other schools,
but they're not guaranteed a job.
You're almost telling me to guarantee the job and you're
going to give them two or three courses package or bundle.
We did that. She changed her pricing to $9999
and she went from doing 2025 thousand a month to about 150 a
(25:47):
month. Oh my gosh.
And that's when I gave it away because I was like too eager and
naive to and I'm like, this is what you got to do.
And and when she started sendingme screenshots of the scaling,
I'm like, Dang it, I think I'm on to something here.
No more free. So she's just like making her
life so hard because she just like, I don't want to figure
(26:08):
that out. So people are coming out of
pocket to pay $2000, which is a lot of money for the type of
people that is her customer, right?
That's a lot of money for them. Meanwhile, this whole time, she
could charge five times as much and the only one paying for it
is the US government. Like, correct.
That's crazy. And you know it, it's kind of
like, you know, we talked about she comes from a rough
(26:29):
background, she's trying to impact her community and she's
putting him on this long paymentplan, hoping they pay her back
when they get a job, which like 50% did.
Like tough thing to gamble. And I get it.
It's, it's like we're going to open a lot of eyes today with,
with this podcast because everywhere you look now you're
going to see Chris CDO truck driving school, teen driving
schools. And those things don't go out of
(26:50):
business like they're, they needmore of them.
My goal is we need trade schoolseverywhere.
Just like you see those Kumans and kids coding schools, like
why are they, why are there 5000of those but not 5000 of adult
schools? I don't get it.
Didn't you say there's like in the city of Phoenix?
There's like 1 masonry school total.
There's one masonry school in the whole state of Arizona.
(27:11):
Right. There's one appliance repair
school in the state of Texas. No.
In person, yeah. Everything else is online or
virtual. No, it doesn't exist.
The other school that's in person is in Ohio.
Like there's so many opportunities.
There's no such thing as see, everyone goes, well, I don't
need that with anything else, right?
I don't need to be certified. I just need to do the work.
(27:32):
Well, all those HVAC people out there illegally operating, I
think you're one of them. If you fix your own AC, if you
touch Freon, you broke the law, my friend, because you need an
EPA six O 8 universal to touch and handle refrigerant as an
example. But a lot of, you know, Osha's
cracking down. They're going on work sites for
various reasons, but these people are cracking down.
(27:55):
And you, you really do need to be certified.
I mean, if you want to charge a value add, some of these
companies and contracts want to see your credentials.
And that's what we're hoping to solve.
And no matter what the field, itis, like I said, flight
attendant school, pest control school, pull technician school,
dog grooming school. I helped the guy start a
telematics company. I mean, a telematics school.
(28:16):
I don't even know what telematics was.
I'm like Spasmatics, like the the band and songs, but no
Telematics, which is basically they're dealing with low voltage
and they're putting technology and GPSS and fleets of vehicles
that technician so behind six months behind on work because he
can't find technicians. Oh my gosh.
(28:37):
Garage door repair companies, sobehind on technicians, we know
that's a big hot topic right now.
Window techs. I mean, anything in the trade is
a technician any way you want to, you know, call it or dice it
up. Do these blue collar businesses
like garage door repair? Do they pay like placement fees
to find good technicians? Some dude.
(28:57):
The big ones, dude. The big ones, dude.
Because everyone's moving into this boring space now and
everyone they're going to have to compete.
They're looking for sign on bonuses and all kinds of stuff.
There's blue collar staffing companies out there that are
killing it that I didn't know was a thing.
You think staffing company, you'd think of white collar, you
know, corporate jobs and stuff like and there's some blue
collar staffing companies comingout of nowhere that have always
existed that's secretly been been printing money this whole
(29:19):
time. Are there any people that you've
helped that are making money by,you know, starting a school
selling courses and in addition paying to place people like a
staffing company doing both? Yeah, I know of one of my
clients has AIT School and the staffing that's owned by his
wife company. So he graduates them and Staffs
(29:41):
them to some pretty lucrative companies, but by the names of
Microsoft, T-Mobile, Verizon. So you would call that double
dipping? I would call that genius.
What do his unit economics look like, both to sell the course
and to place that? Created his own course.
So he's like a Unicorn. He created his own IT courses
that he also white labels to others.
(30:03):
So he created his own IT courses.
So I'm sure there's a cost to create it at some point, but now
it's like pennies to to resell it and it's all margin.
And then on the staffing side, he's collecting 7500 to 15,000
per placement. And then what's he charging for
the program? Anywhere between 5 and 10,000.
The state of Arizona has their own region, so.
Holy cow. He's probably doing about 2.52
(30:25):
point 8 on the school side and another 1.5 on the placement
side. Million a year.
Yes. OK, Yeah.
About 5 million combined and it's a five man show, four of
them being offshore, so. Unicorn.
It's just like Unicorn Unicorn. Pure profit, almost gross
profit, man. Disgusting profit.
(30:47):
I know, I know, I know. All right, so if someone's
listening to this and they're like, all right, I want to start
a school, I want to start a trade school, what advice would
you give them? I would say first, what I've
noticed is the best school operators are already good
operators. It's like they have a business.
So I would think for those that have a business and are
(31:09):
listening, listening to this, ifyou have the pain point of
finding staffing and you want tomake additional really good
revenue, you know, we should have a conversation.
And if it makes sense, there's some states that are really easy
to throw up a school and bolt iton to your existing business,
like our backyard. Texas is an easy school, easy
state. Arizona is an easy state,
(31:30):
Montana, Arkansas, Missouri, just to name some.
Then there's some states that are just tough.
They make you 2, wait two years to even operate or make your
first enrollment just cuz they have their own politics.
Stay out of Florida, California,New York, Washington, go figure.
Those are tough states, but doesn't mean it's impossible.
(31:50):
It just means you have to wait. You got to wait longer, Yeah.
And then there's a bunch of states kind of in the middle,
right, kind of somewhat difficult 6 month wait time.
Yep, but in the meantime, doesn't mean they don't open it
up. That should open up their eyes.
Like maybe you open up your own cademy internally because you
want that anyway. You know, you're going to train
your guys the way you want to train them, the way you want to
(32:11):
do your process anyway. And that's the cool thing about
online schools with the virtual reality goggles, people, There's
no way you can learn to trade bywatching virtual reality.
I'm like, what do you think YouTube is doing for us this
whole time? We watch a video, we learn how
to fix something. And the reality is this is just
a shortcut to get the certificate.
And then once I go to work at Chris's multiple companies,
you're going to train me or youroperator is going to train me at
(32:32):
the way you guys want stuff done.
So this is just a piece of paperto get me to that job.
And then before you throw me keys to the work truck, you're
going to want to train me on howyou do your processes.
Yeah. So if I'm living in Utah or or
California and I want to start like a tree technician school or
a vet technician school and I find a white label course, I
don't want to make it. I find one say it's 500 bucks.
(32:54):
Cool. I can like start the process now
and then I can go to friends andfamily, I can make calls and
people can pay cash for this, right?
The only thing I really have to wait for is the reimbursement
from the state. I can still get rolling before I
get that right. Some states you could just start
selling to the general market like most schools do until the
grant kicks in. And there's a lot of different
(33:14):
ways to collect. There's community partners that
are willing to pay you for that.I have a client in Utah that's
working with the prison system and they're trying to sell
courses at these. You know, prison systems is just
big, big business that they're trying to buy.
And so there's so many ways to use this and utilize this.
It's just, I think it's the codeon, on fixing the paint point of
(33:35):
finding staffing and the staffing shortages.
I mean, they, they've set the bar really low.
I've talked to, you know, business owners out there and
they're like, man, we really just want a good attitude.
If they have credentials, that'sa bonus, but we just want them
to show up. Want them to show up?
Yeah, so I think another way of looking at this is if I'm in New
York or or California or Florida, the three most
(33:56):
populated states. Well, then Texas, it's like, all
right, two year wait. Cool.
That means like no one's going to be doing this, right?
If I'm willing to wait, if I canspend the next two years
grinding, trying Facebook ads, trying referrals, trying friends
and family, I can do buy now, pay later.
Stripe has buy now, pay later. Klarna people can do monthly
installments with a firm. I'm going to do it the hard way
(34:17):
for two years because I know I'mgoing to have very few
competitors. And then two years from now,
it's easy mode because the state's going to be paying me
for these and I can charge even more.
I wouldn't say hard mode becausethat's what normally people do.
That's normal. Business high.
I mean, you go to any truck driving school out there and 90%
of them are charging 3 to $5000 and they just rely on volume.
(34:40):
But the margins are still high. I'm not a big fan of those in
person schools because of the margins.
But like if you bought, like yousaid earlier, a medical front
desk course, which medical, any way you could fit that in?
The dentist offers dermatology anywhere.
If you bought this course, let'ssave for $500 and you market it
to the general public for $3000,still big margins.
(35:03):
You sell one a week that replaces somebody's income like
that. Is there any of these trades
that have to be done in person, or can all of them be done
virtually or remotely? Some have to be done in person
welding. We haven't cracked that, that
code yet. And some of them are just, you
know, you, you have to do it in,in person.
Some of them is a combination oflike, hey, get you could do 90%
(35:26):
of the hybrid and it just offer a two week externship.
So like the CNA course, you could learn it online.
But at at a certain point when it comes like needles and
certain procedures, you're goingto have to just, you know, like
phlebotomy, you're going to haveto do so many pokes before you
could fully graduate. And that's when you just partner
up with employers or stacking companies.
That's the easy part, yeah. Now, what about tech Didn't or
(35:46):
or sales? Didn't you say that you know a
guy doing like enterprise tech sales with this?
Yeah, I have a client that does IT tech sales courses and he
crushes it. Anyone looking to get into tech
without a degree? It's a big push right now.
Not saying there's anything wrong with college degrees, it's
just for the longest time peoplesaid, well, I can't get into
tech without a degree. And he he was able to debunk
that and now he sells a course. It's IT tech sales course, and
(36:10):
it helps people get into some really cool jobs at T-Mobile.
Work from home. A lot of that is transition for
work from home. Everyone's scared of all this
return to office talk. There's still plenty of remote
work out there, just people don't know where to look.
OK, so to recap, like you're doing this insurance thing ended
poorly. You had a conversation with the
(36:31):
truck driving school. It was very interesting to you.
You raised money, you started your own schools.
It did really well. It ended now like your full time
job slash business is helping people start their own schools
and or like like start their ownschools from scratch or like
basically incubate their own schools at their own companies
to better vertically integrate, right?
(36:53):
100% and that's with everything 'cause like I said, you know,
most of these school owners are tradespeople themselves.
They didn't have ACRM. They're not using a sell script.
They're just, you know, John andMary just.
Oh, yeah, come down. We teach, you know, how to
become a technician. We'll teach you how to become a
nurse. And yeah, come on down anytime
and click like, no, you got to capture.
(37:14):
They called. You got to capture that.
And it's just like I I'm involved with their sales
training. I'm involved with their
scripting, their e-mail campaigns, their funnels.
The government stuff. Yeah.
I'm sure you got to like, you got to kind of know who to talk
to, like how to work the system.And I said, I don't mean that in
like an unethical way, but like how to work navigate this
bureaucracy that is the government.
(37:36):
That's what I'm saying like if you Google trade school
consultants, you're going to find people that'll show you how
to become a school, become regulated and just like it is
for businesses, but but they don't teach you then well, how
do you go find students? How do you talk to say how you
enroll? It's very much a cell, like it's
really cells and the skill becoming cells.
And a lot of these school owners, they don't, they don't
(37:56):
have that dialed in. And I'm able to help them get
that dialed in. A lot of them don't utilize the
grant cause they've heard it's aterrible experience.
But what isn't when you're dealing with the government, if
an individual walks into these offices and centers, they get
they're like, hey, I want to take that grant.
After they ask four different people, maybe they get lucky and
one of them hands on like 18 forms, that individual goes home
(38:18):
and they're like, dude, where doI start?
Don't even not fill this out. What do I say?
And it just dies there. So.
We're bringing awareness by let's really help those people
that need this, get them off benefits you, get them learning
a new trade because we desperately need more traits for
you in every sector. Oh, OK.
Well, Hector, did we miss anything?
Anything I forgot? No, I mean, I mean, we could
(38:38):
probably nerd about this Part 1 and then part 10A year from now,
who knows. But dude, let's go impact some
lives. That sounds great.
We will link to all your stuff in the show notes and we'll go
from there. All right, if you want to reach
out to Hector, I've got a link to him in the show notes.
Thanks for hanging out on the Kerner office.
You market it to the general public for $3000.
Still big margins. You sell one a week that
replaces somebody's income like that, the grant will pay as high
as $15,000. He does 6 to 8 jobs a day.
So one man show that it's doing 300 a year.
I'm like, why not just do this online?
It's going to be more profitable.
Based on what I researched, I spent $0.00 on marketing.
We scaled it to about 2.4 million our first year on just
(00:21):
grants. Oh my gosh.
One of my clients has AIT school.
He's doing about 2.52 point 8 onthe school side and another one
point 5 on the placement. Side million a year.
Yes, yeah, about 5 million combined.
It's so many grants out there that people don't realize
there's business grants and people talk about it.
They make it complicated, but man, it's as simple as just.
(00:44):
I've got a friend named Hector. He lives 3 minutes down the road
from me. He's my Chipotle buddy, and he's
in a really interesting line of work.
He helps people start trade schools, and he started a trade
school before. And the magic and genius about
trade schools is that the state covers all of it.
No one pays for it except the government.
And his niche has been in learning how to navigate these
regulatory bodies that will pay entrepreneurs 5 to $15,000 per
(01:08):
trade school course that you canbuy and white label from other
course companies for hundreds ofdollars.
Insane offer. It's a very high ticket product
that the buyer doesn't have to pay for.
The state pays for it. And so this is a great episode
if you're thinking of starting abusiness because he talks about
how to start your own trade school and navigate this
(01:28):
regulatory aspect of it and how to find customers, what types of
organizations to partner with for referral partners.
And it's also a great episode ifyou already own a business that
is in high demand for good employees.
Because if you do own a businessin a handful of different
niches, you can get paid 5 to $15,000 to train your own
employees, and then you can get paid 5 to $15,000 to train other
(01:51):
people that will be employed foryour competitors.
So whether you're a business owner or an aspiring business
owner, you're going to love this.
It's very interesting. You've probably never heard
about this niche. It's kind of a goldmine.
Please share with a friend. I bought an insurance franchise
that failed miserably, but I gota a phone call that changed my
life and it was an ex colleague of mine saying Hey, I need truck
(02:12):
driver insurance and school insurance.
And I was like, well dude, I can't help you with neither of
those. I only sell home in auto.
And I was like what? You know, back up a little bit.
What do you mean school insurance and truck driving
insurance? And lo behold, he owned the
truck driving school like ACDL school, which we see everywhere.
And that's when I was like, huh,interesting.
(02:33):
But what caught towards the end of the the phone call, I was
like, dude, I got to go see this.
We weren't entirely shut down yet, but when I saw him in a
parking lot of a church with 18 other people there, 2 trucks, I
was just memorized by the whole concept of trade schools.
I didn't know it was a business.Right before I left, he kind of
whispered to me, he goes, Can you believe the state of Texas
(02:56):
is paying me money for each of these guys here?
And I was like, what do you mean?
There's two? There's this grant called WIOA.
And if you're a laid off worker,you know, impacted by a justice
system on food stamps, there's all this money that people could
go get and they'll teach them a new skill set.
And I was just like, talk about not sleeping.
(03:17):
I literally tanked my insurance franchise because of this one
sentence. I didn't know that part of your
story. And I love hearing stories about
like that first conversation that just got us thinking about
something differently. And then you had that
conversation on the phone and hewas just calling to ask you
about insurance, and you dug a little deeper, which shows how
being curious can be profitable.Then you went on site and you're
(03:41):
like, you're picturing some school.
You're probably picturing something more formalized,
right? But you just show up to a
parking lot with an 18 Wheeler and dudes paying thousands of
dollars and then you find out that these dudes aren't paying a
dime. The state is covering all of it,
right? Yep.
OK, you said a lot better than me, but yes.
So if you hadn't just had this negative career experience, you
(04:04):
wouldn't even be in a position to be curious about this or to
go down this rabbit hole, right?OK, cool.
Do you want a quote or not? Next right.
Yep, Yep. OK.
It's just interesting how thingscome together like that.
Probably the best silver lining of my life, man.
Yeah, just one of those moments.OK, So what did you do after
that, after you learned that there's this grant that the
(04:24):
government covers? I couldn't sleep, didn't know
what to do. Spoke to a buddy of mine just to
kind of wrap up things. It well let me back up.
I helped him scale his school because I was genuinely
interested because I really wanted to do this for myself.
We tried to work out a deal. We had different visions.
(04:44):
I wanted to do the online only because I'm like, why not just
do this online? It's going to be more
profitable. Based on what I researched,
We're shutting down. We're going to be shut down.
So it was one of those things where online school just made
sense. But no, I wanted to go to online
school route. It was just a lot more
profitable. I didn't need parking lots or
spaces or anything like that. And I did my research and just
to be careful, slain the story. We raised some money.
(05:06):
We probably didn't read raise money, but we did it anyway.
Valuable lesson there. You know, when you look at
movies and you see shareholders and meetings, it's not all
rainbows and and good stuff, butit taught me that side of
things, right. And then I took an exit from
that school as well. But man, whatever experience it
was, you know, doing those and operating those and then that
(05:28):
led to Twitter. Our buddy Spencer goes you got
to get on Twitter. That's where it's at.
I'm like there there's no way itlike I don't have any social
media. I'm meeting social media, but it
just, I got on Twitter, booked my first call.
It was a school, a flight attendance school in Minnesota
that needed help. And I'm like, I can't believe
that's a thing. And we scaled it to about 2.4
(05:48):
million our first year on just grants all across Texas.
Being an online school, it was we get to market all of Texas.
You don't have to stay in your backyard like a brick and mortar
like in person school. And man, it just caught
wildfire. I did everything that no one's
ever done. I went, I spent $0.00 on
marketing. I just went knocking on church
doors and getting involved with church groups and, you know,
(06:10):
helping nonprofits, their audiences, and it just caught
wildfiremen. What made you want to go to
churches for this? At my church, you know,
obviously we tithe and stuff like that and you could choose
where your money kind of goes to.
And we had already chose a certain percentage go to women's
shelter. And I knew, you know, through
church about these shelters and then what they go through.
(06:31):
So I'm like, you know what, a lot of these nonprofits need
something to do while they're recovering or, or, or live
transitioning. They already qualify for this
grant. They just don't know about it.
So I pitched it to them. They all loved it.
And I quickly noticed some something wasn't right because
their their login history wasn'thigh at all.
(06:52):
And what I noticed is that they didn't have laptops.
So that's when I threw in the laptop like, hey, free training,
a free laptop. And they just blew up after that
even more like right when it, right when I thought like, this
is it, then I'm like, Oh my gosh, if I just fix this
pinpoint, it's going to blow up even more.
And then it just, it did. I started getting a lot of
community partners and I partnered up with them.
And again, the goal was just to bring awareness to this grant,
(07:14):
whether they wanted to use our school or not.
That wasn't the mission. The mission was like, hey,
there's this grant, go learn a trade.
We're so behind on trades. And I think we talked about this
yesterday, for every 5 tradesmenthat retire only once getting
replaced no matter what it is. Yeah, let's talk about the unit
economics. How much is the grant?
(07:34):
Let's and let's talk about your last business, How much is the
grant and what were the trades? So is HVAC, electrical,
plumbing. And then tell me about like the
the Oculus that you would send them and then what were you
paying for the course? Million questions in one, but
you you'll sort them. Out.
Good. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So every state has different regions, right?
And every region treats as grantindependently for whatever
(07:58):
reason. Same grant and that means same
different cost. So like say Central Texas will
Max out at 7500 per student. That's what the school makes.
Our investment is these goggles right here, which you could find
for like 2-3 hundred dollars or a laptop.
And like I said, when we first started the school, it was
(08:19):
mainly medical billing and coding, pharmacy technician, IT,
help desk. It's just stuff that you could
generally do remotely. When we first started the
school, we were writing the curriculum.
Then you could find, we found out that you could white label
it. And what that means is you
produce a bunch of courses, I buy them from you.
Let's just say for 800 to $1000,I slapped my school name on it
(08:42):
and the rest is margin. So the grant will pay as low as
about $5000 in some areas and ashigh as $15,000 in some.
Areas on both the region and thestate, right?
The region and the state and thefield.
So they're not going to pay a ton of money for something
that's not as much as high end demand, but still needed.
(09:04):
But like like you said, anythingin the trades, welding, a
certain kind of technician, whether it's solar and it's also
regional. So for example, if you go down
to Houston, Galveston, it's going to be very marine based
like underwater welding, boat technicians, boat repair, like
very like that. If you go to West TX, it's going
(09:24):
to be oil and gas, like driving the trucks to deliver gas and
oil, wind turbine technician, CDL.
So just it, it just changes up and they make it extremely
complicated. And then I was able to simplify.
That's where you found success or that's where you found your
edge or your alpha because you saw all this friction, all this
(09:46):
bureaucracy and red tape, and you said, all right, I'm going
to sit down. I'm not going anywhere until I
figure this out because I think that the prize at the end of the
rainbow, if I figure this out, is very large.
For sure, 'cause if you look andyou're driving around and
you're, you're seeing this, you'll hear schools promoting on
the radio, you'll see them in commercials, you see them on
social media. That's expensive.
It's extremely expensive. I was doing a guerrilla
(10:08):
marketing. I'm going to the church,
speaking at a church. Hey, anyone want to go to school
for free? Want to learn a trade?
And they were like, what do you mean?
Like it took me a while to get them to understand, 'cause
everyone was like, what's the catch?
Like there has to be a catch. And I'm like, no, just like food
stamps has existed this whole time.
This grant exists because the the wild card here.
The purpose of this grant is to get you off government benefits,
(10:31):
get you into a livable wage, learn no new skill set in the
trade, and start making decent money because they want your
future taxes forever. So it's a pretty good investment
on on the government. And they don't want to be paying
for your food stamps forever either.
It's a double win. So it's like, it's not the
government being a philanthropist.
It's like we're going to, we're going to put up 7500 bucks, then
we're going to save all this money from food stamps, all this
(10:51):
money from Section A housing, Then you're going to pay US
taxes on top of that. It's an investment for the
government. But it is the government is so
complicated that it's hard for entrepreneurs like you and I to
navigate, get our way through itright.
Correct. Yeah, you nailed it.
And and and think about it, whenyou say win, win, it is a win
win because our audience that this grant targets is anyone in
warehouse work, retail work, fast food work.
(11:13):
So we're just trying to get people out of not flipping
burgers anymore and into a trade.
Yeah, and make 346 times as much.
At least the average graduates making 25 to 30 bucks an hour.
That's insane. Wow.
OK. So one thing that I think is
interesting about all this is like you don't have to be in the
course business. You don't have to go put
together this course about HVAC,which you probably know nothing
(11:35):
about, right? I mean no, you did fix your
HVAC, but other than that. I did.
I did. I took the course for the first
time after five years and took that one section and I was able
to fix my own HVAC for 20 bucks.Yeah, who would have known?
It works. That's the whole beauty of this
is like you, you figure out how to work this system in a
compliant way, and then you figure out how to just white
(11:58):
label courses, which is just a fancy way for saying find a
school, buy the courses from theschool, put your logo on it.
That's it. Then you put the parties
together. And then I guess the third
critical element of that is finding referral partners,
churches, workforce development centers, Chambers of Commerce,
anyone that in like regularly interacts with people that might
want a, a free education, right and to better their lives.
(12:21):
Once again, you said a lot more prettier than me, yes.
So why don't we talk about the trades that are in the highest
demand from like most to least demand that most States and or
regions will pay for? Yeah, it's anything with the
word technician in it. So whether that's solar
technician, forklift repair technician, pool technician,
(12:48):
free technician, the whole pointof the grant is what's paying
the most out there that people aren't really talking about.
We know that HVAC electrical employment are popular and it's
always needed, but man, it's theunderlining ones that don't
aren't commercialized that are are needed.
Pest control technician, I mean just about anything that has the
word technician that secretly they earn really good hourly
(13:11):
wages and just nobody wants to do it.
Like it's 30 jobs that no one wants to do, but they pay well
and for a reason. Well, you were just telling me
about it, a dog groomer, which Iwould never think would be
relevant to this, but they're like vet technicians, right?
Yeah. And so that counts.
I helped a guy up the street from us in Princeton, TX and he
opened up a dog grooming school.I didn't I didn't believe him.
(13:34):
I was like dude I can't help you.
Little that I know that when I looked up like the requirements,
the grant pays for a vet tech, which is just an assistant to a
veterinarian person, but it alsoqualifies for these dog groomers
because there's certain things that I won't really get into.
It's kind of gross that they have to do during the grooming
session. And this guy's booked out like 6
(13:55):
to 8 weeks in advance, charges 250 per trim because it's, he
specializes in doodles like golden doodles, Laba doodles.
And I can't believe that man. He's going to, we, we, you know,
he's weeks away from going live with the school.
He's going to train and do his own curriculum because it's,
again, it's white labels. He's going to train his own
curriculum, pick from the cream of the crop, keep those and the
(14:19):
rest get certified and go find work elsewhere.
Which is there anyone with With certifications, it's not hard to
find a job. Yeah.
So you're saying that there's anopportunity here for aspiring
business owners to start their own school and which we'll get
to in a minute. But then there's also an
opportunity for current businessowners that maybe has a hard
time finding qualified employees, maybe hires people
(14:41):
with a job title that have the word technician in it like this,
these vet technicians. And so you help them set up
their own school to where a theycan find the best people in the
business they can, and they're getting paid to train their own
employees, right? They're getting paid by the
government to find the best employees that they can.
And then for all the leftover, like they call it, sell your
(15:02):
sawdust, right? Let's say they have they have
more applicants than they need to hire.
They can still get paid by the government to train them and
then they can just farm them outto all their competitors or they
can go get jobs elsewhere. Yeah, here's a case study for
you. I had through mutual Connections
on helping an adult, a boutique adult day care business,
(15:26):
extremely lucrative business. And the number one pinpoint he
has is that he never has enough Cnas and what CNA means a
certified nurse. Assistant.
Grueling, grueling job. I mean big turnover rate because
you're just bathing old people, taking care of them,
unfortunately changing diapers and they don't get paid the
best. Usually the ranges is from like
(15:47):
16 to $18.00. But he does have a career
progression. Like if you stick with them for
like a couple months, he gives you a raise, another couple of
months, another raise. Come to find out, you know, 25
out of his 30 Cnas weren't even certified.
Almost like a home health aide. You just take a little boot camp
course. Is that legal?
Yeah, because it's kind of like home health aide, like you're
just like a glorified babysitter, I guess, if you
(16:09):
will. But yeah, I mean, he's going to
get 7500 for every single staff member he certifies.
He needs to certify anyway. So once he stands up to school,
he'll probably make 300,000 in additional revenue fixing his
own pinpoint. But you brought up a good
question. How many people do you think are
really certified out there doingthe work all the time?
(16:31):
And we talked about the forkliftrepair guide man, he, he's not
certified. He, he just done it for 30
years. The guy that fixed my dishwasher
here in the town of Wiley, he came to fix it.
It took him 15 minutes. He bills me 450 bucks, which is
insane. But he's the only one that
picked up the phone out of five people.
I thought, I mean, literally theonly one picked up the phone and
(16:52):
he, he could be here the next day.
And I paid whatever it was, spent 15 minutes here.
I literally hung up a call that was on and I had to go ask him
like, hey, where'd you go to school?
This is what I do. Hold on.
He's like, I didn't go to school.
I started fixing my own stuff eight years ago.
My wife put a post on it and it just took off from there and
I've been doing it since. I'm a one man show.
He does 6 to 8 jobs a day. So one man show.
(17:14):
That dude's doing 300 a year. There's just so much demand for
it. So much demand.
I mean I had to call 5. People some dude watching
YouTube videos is making insane money.
All the time. I mean, that's that's what you
post about all the time. It's just people overcomplicate
it. They never start and they
overanalyze it. Just don't start stuff, man.
I mean, we're here to tell people, start stuff.
All right, so we'll get to like the starting a new school from
(17:36):
scratch in a minute, but I'm I'mthinking about Amazon right now.
Like one of the most brilliant things that Amazon did to grow
was they took all of their cost centers and turn them into
profit centers. So, you know, two decades ago,
they're like, jeez, we're spending all this money on
servers. Like why don't we buy our own
servers? And then we'll buy extra.
And if anyone needs our servers,we'll call it AWS, Amazon Web
(17:57):
Services, and we'll, we'll charge money for people to use
our servers. And now AWS is a multibillion
dollar business in and of itself.
And then they were like, jeez, we're giving UPSUSPS and FedEx
all this money every year. We're growing so fast.
Why don't we just buy our own trucks?
And that was our biggest cost center.
Now, you know, other companies pay Amazon to deliver their
stuff. Now it's a profit center.
(18:18):
So this, this CNA example, he was spending 10s if not hundreds
of thousands of dollars a year recruiting Cnas like subpar, not
even certified Cnas from other like head hunting agencies.
And you went to him and said, hey, how about you take that to
0. And in addition, you will get
paid for training your own employees.
(18:39):
In addition, if you don't need all the employees that you're
training, you can just farm themout.
So could he get paid to train someone and then get paid to
place them at a competitor as well?
A. 100%. If you really wanted to lean
into that. Well, he did it because he's,
you know, he's going to exit in five or ten years and he's
buying these residential lookingbeautiful homes, turning them
(19:02):
into adult daycare, livings or elder care and he's buying them
up. So he's always going to need
Cnas. As he scales, he needs more and
more Cnas. And sure, if they don't work
out, he could send them other, well, other places because
again, what people are understanding is they just want
that piece of paper. That piece of paper is a foot in
the door and a near career progression, right?
(19:22):
So yeah, he's going to turn it into a cool little not not only
value add to his business when he goes to sell, how cool is to
how many businesses, businesses out there go sell and say, hey,
I also have a school with it. So you'll never have to worry.
About something yeah and then you know if the the negative way
of looking at that from the potential acquirers perspective
is I don't want to be in the school business I just want to
(19:44):
be in the CNA business. Well, it's like well you're not
like you're in the training employees business this quote UN
quote school just means you're actually getting paid to do it,
which none of my competitors areright.
If if you want to lean into the quote school part of the
business, then you feel feel free to grow that as much as you
want, but I would rather get paid to to train my employees
than. Otherwise right.
(20:06):
Not only get paid, I mean that'sPart 2 to this grant that I
really just started promoting. Now is we're so behind the 8
ball on trades that now there's additional grants for the
employer to get free paid labor.And we talked about this.
If you hire a graduate that tookthis grant, most regions, area
(20:26):
cities, workforce offices, we'llpay you up to 100% of training
wages up to 20 bucks an hour for$300.00 an hour.
Worst case 50% other wages. The reasoning behind this is
they want to help small businesses, but also they want
these graduates to have work experience and that way they
call it test driving each other.The employer test drives.
Hey, is this person going to be a good worker?
(20:47):
They going to show up because the bar's so low.
And if they do, we'll keep them if they don't work out.
Dude, you just got free labor and they get to put experience
on the resume so they go move onto their, you know, career path.
Crazy. So HVAC companies could, they
can have free labor basically that no, no people learning.
Now, if you were to guess because you've been, I know
(21:08):
you've been cold calling, what percentage of HVAC companies
even know that this is an option?
Zero. What percentage of businesses
know zero in our backyard? I was telling you that workforce
office has about $1,000,000 theyget every year specifically to
help employers and fix this gap.And they struggle to spend the
money. Like it's, it's so many grants
(21:29):
out there that people don't realize there's business grants
and people talk about it. They make it complicated, but
man, it's as simple as just go register to be a training
provider at the workforce, get free labor.
If you're trying to scale, there's no better way to scale
for free and it's a win win. They get experience out of it.
You maybe find a good employee out of it.
Is there a way for people to monetize playing a middle man on
(21:50):
this, on the on the job trainingside of things where like you
could help the city of, you know, Plano, TX, place people at
John's HVAC company and, and make a margin there?
Or is that not really a thing? No, probably.
I mean, that's, that's kind of what I where I fit in, right.
But yeah, sure. I mean, here's the difference,
right? When I told you I cold called
(22:11):
HVAC companies, 'cause they havea dedicated person that does
this for them and they struggle.Keep in mind how much training
goes into it. I mean, look what it sounds
like. Hey Chris, would you like some
free labor? You just have to register at the
workforce. You get 300 hours and then
you're like, you're too busy. You're like, I don't get it.
Sounds like a. Scam.
Kind of sounds like a scam. Yeah, That's your biggest
competition is it? Sounds like a scam.
(22:32):
So I have decent sales experience.
I cold called. I cold called 10 HVAC companies
and I said, Hey, you know, I'm doing this project, not
necessarily in in this order, but I'm like, Hey, what size is
your business? Who runs it?
How do you find technicians? Are you looking for technicians?
And then whether they say yes orno, it's like, Hey, would you
mind getting a technician at at no cost to you?
(22:54):
And it comes to a workman's comp.
And again, I'm I'm messing this up in the order it is.
But what was astonishing is out of the 10 company I called, I
left messages for seven of them.Still haven't heard back.
It's been a month. The three that did pick up the
phone, there were mom and pop, maybe owner son, owner 1
technician. And they're like, no, we're
(23:15):
good. I'm like, but this is your busy
season. Isn't like, don't you want extra
labor, like extra people to go in Audix so you don't have to?
It's not I I I think we're fine.Like it's just, it's small and
we're we're doing OK. You know, I'm like, yeah, I
mean, but doing OK isn't, you know, this is free labor.
And that's when I I started asking questions because I was
almost getting annoying. I'm like, what am I missing
here? Like what are you saying no to
(23:36):
it? 300 hours of free labor up to 22
bucks an hour with workman's comp.
Even if you just used them for your busy season and you call it
a day? Knock out five houses in one day
versus 1. I didn't get it.
I didn't get it. Let's talk about some school
owners that you know that you'vehelped and how much money
they're making and how they're making money.
(23:57):
Like what are they white labeling?
What's the industry? What are they selling it for?
How are they finding customers? Let's go there.
Perfect. So one of the first schools I
helped was a nursing school. They were out of Georgia.
And to describe this case study,they were charged.
They're just grossly under charging and not even using the
(24:18):
grant. So they.
Were charging like $2000 for like a like a medical assisting
nursing, like just basic phlebotomy, like basic four week
boot camp style schools and theywere doing decent.
They're doing like 10-12 people a month at $2000.
But what's unique is that most trade school owners are
tradespeople themselves. Yeah, they're not business
(24:40):
owners. Kind of like small business
people, right? Like they create a business,
they create this school and thenthey get stuck working in the
business. They never get to work on it.
They're the instructor, they're the marketing person.
They answer the phone during class.
Like they just don't know how toscale and they get stuck in it.
But they but they they love it. It's their passion.
That's usually the common thing.So when we met, I was like, hey,
(25:03):
Atlanta, I mean Atlanta. Well, yeah, it's Atlanta.
Atlanta pays 10,000 per student.Why are you only charging 2?
And she goes, I tried using the grant.
It was complicated. It's a nightmare.
I just, I, I charge the general public 2000.
I stay busy. I want to stay, I want to stay
busy. I'm like, OK, but if you add an
extra course and you just changeyour pricing because your value
(25:26):
add is you're an ex nurse and you're getting them job
placement. The value is in your network of
job placement. They could go to other schools,
but they're not guaranteed a job.
You're almost telling me to guarantee the job and you're
going to give them two or three courses package or bundle.
We did that. She changed her pricing to $9999
and she went from doing 2025 thousand a month to about 150 a
(25:47):
month. Oh my gosh.
And that's when I gave it away because I was like too eager and
naive to and I'm like, this is what you got to do.
And and when she started sendingme screenshots of the scaling,
I'm like, Dang it, I think I'm on to something here.
No more free. So she's just like making her
life so hard because she just like, I don't want to figure
(26:08):
that out. So people are coming out of
pocket to pay $2000, which is a lot of money for the type of
people that is her customer, right?
That's a lot of money for them. Meanwhile, this whole time, she
could charge five times as much and the only one paying for it
is the US government. Like, correct.
That's crazy. And you know it, it's kind of
like, you know, we talked about she comes from a rough
(26:29):
background, she's trying to impact her community and she's
putting him on this long paymentplan, hoping they pay her back
when they get a job, which like 50% did.
Like tough thing to gamble. And I get it.
It's, it's like we're going to open a lot of eyes today with,
with this podcast because everywhere you look now you're
going to see Chris CDO truck driving school, teen driving
schools. And those things don't go out of
(26:50):
business like they're, they needmore of them.
My goal is we need trade schoolseverywhere.
Just like you see those Kumans and kids coding schools, like
why are they, why are there 5000of those but not 5000 of adult
schools? I don't get it.
Didn't you say there's like in the city of Phoenix?
There's like 1 masonry school total.
There's one masonry school in the whole state of Arizona.
(27:11):
Right. There's one appliance repair
school in the state of Texas. No.
In person, yeah. Everything else is online or
virtual. No, it doesn't exist.
The other school that's in person is in Ohio.
Like there's so many opportunities.
There's no such thing as see, everyone goes, well, I don't
need that with anything else, right?
I don't need to be certified. I just need to do the work.
(27:32):
Well, all those HVAC people out there illegally operating, I
think you're one of them. If you fix your own AC, if you
touch Freon, you broke the law, my friend, because you need an
EPA six O 8 universal to touch and handle refrigerant as an
example. But a lot of, you know, Osha's
cracking down. They're going on work sites for
various reasons, but these people are cracking down.
(27:55):
And you, you really do need to be certified.
I mean, if you want to charge a value add, some of these
companies and contracts want to see your credentials.
And that's what we're hoping to solve.
And no matter what the field, itis, like I said, flight
attendant school, pest control school, pull technician school,
dog grooming school. I helped the guy start a
telematics company. I mean, a telematics school.
(28:16):
I don't even know what telematics was.
I'm like Spasmatics, like the the band and songs, but no
Telematics, which is basically they're dealing with low voltage
and they're putting technology and GPSS and fleets of vehicles
that technician so behind six months behind on work because he
can't find technicians. Oh my gosh.
(28:37):
Garage door repair companies, sobehind on technicians, we know
that's a big hot topic right now.
Window techs. I mean, anything in the trade is
a technician any way you want to, you know, call it or dice it
up. Do these blue collar businesses
like garage door repair? Do they pay like placement fees
to find good technicians? Some dude.
(28:57):
The big ones, dude. The big ones, dude.
Because everyone's moving into this boring space now and
everyone they're going to have to compete.
They're looking for sign on bonuses and all kinds of stuff.
There's blue collar staffing companies out there that are
killing it that I didn't know was a thing.
You think staffing company, you'd think of white collar, you
know, corporate jobs and stuff like and there's some blue
collar staffing companies comingout of nowhere that have always
existed that's secretly been been printing money this whole
(29:19):
time. Are there any people that you've
helped that are making money by,you know, starting a school
selling courses and in addition paying to place people like a
staffing company doing both? Yeah, I know of one of my
clients has AIT School and the staffing that's owned by his
wife company. So he graduates them and Staffs
(29:41):
them to some pretty lucrative companies, but by the names of
Microsoft, T-Mobile, Verizon. So you would call that double
dipping? I would call that genius.
What do his unit economics look like, both to sell the course
and to place that? Created his own course.
So he's like a Unicorn. He created his own IT courses
that he also white labels to others.
(30:03):
So he created his own IT courses.
So I'm sure there's a cost to create it at some point, but now
it's like pennies to to resell it and it's all margin.
And then on the staffing side, he's collecting 7500 to 15,000
per placement. And then what's he charging for
the program? Anywhere between 5 and 10,000.
The state of Arizona has their own region, so.
Holy cow. He's probably doing about 2.52
(30:25):
point 8 on the school side and another 1.5 on the placement
side. Million a year.
Yes. OK, Yeah.
About 5 million combined and it's a five man show, four of
them being offshore, so. Unicorn.
It's just like Unicorn Unicorn. Pure profit, almost gross
profit, man. Disgusting profit.
(30:47):
I know, I know, I know. All right, so if someone's
listening to this and they're like, all right, I want to start
a school, I want to start a trade school, what advice would
you give them? I would say first, what I've
noticed is the best school operators are already good
operators. It's like they have a business.
So I would think for those that have a business and are
(31:09):
listening, listening to this, ifyou have the pain point of
finding staffing and you want tomake additional really good
revenue, you know, we should have a conversation.
And if it makes sense, there's some states that are really easy
to throw up a school and bolt iton to your existing business,
like our backyard. Texas is an easy school, easy
state. Arizona is an easy state,
(31:30):
Montana, Arkansas, Missouri, just to name some.
Then there's some states that are just tough.
They make you 2, wait two years to even operate or make your
first enrollment just cuz they have their own politics.
Stay out of Florida, California,New York, Washington, go figure.
Those are tough states, but doesn't mean it's impossible.
(31:50):
It just means you have to wait. You got to wait longer, Yeah.
And then there's a bunch of states kind of in the middle,
right, kind of somewhat difficult 6 month wait time.
Yep, but in the meantime, doesn't mean they don't open it
up. That should open up their eyes.
Like maybe you open up your own cademy internally because you
want that anyway. You know, you're going to train
your guys the way you want to train them, the way you want to
(32:11):
do your process anyway. And that's the cool thing about
online schools with the virtual reality goggles, people, There's
no way you can learn to trade bywatching virtual reality.
I'm like, what do you think YouTube is doing for us this
whole time? We watch a video, we learn how
to fix something. And the reality is this is just
a shortcut to get the certificate.
And then once I go to work at Chris's multiple companies,
you're going to train me or youroperator is going to train me at
(32:32):
the way you guys want stuff done.
So this is just a piece of paperto get me to that job.
And then before you throw me keys to the work truck, you're
going to want to train me on howyou do your processes.
Yeah. So if I'm living in Utah or or
California and I want to start like a tree technician school or
a vet technician school and I find a white label course, I
don't want to make it. I find one say it's 500 bucks.
(32:54):
Cool. I can like start the process now
and then I can go to friends andfamily, I can make calls and
people can pay cash for this, right?
The only thing I really have to wait for is the reimbursement
from the state. I can still get rolling before I
get that right. Some states you could just start
selling to the general market like most schools do until the
grant kicks in. And there's a lot of different
(33:14):
ways to collect. There's community partners that
are willing to pay you for that.I have a client in Utah that's
working with the prison system and they're trying to sell
courses at these. You know, prison systems is just
big, big business that they're trying to buy.
And so there's so many ways to use this and utilize this.
It's just, I think it's the codeon, on fixing the paint point of
(33:35):
finding staffing and the staffing shortages.
I mean, they, they've set the bar really low.
I've talked to, you know, business owners out there and
they're like, man, we really just want a good attitude.
If they have credentials, that'sa bonus, but we just want them
to show up. Want them to show up?
Yeah, so I think another way of looking at this is if I'm in New
York or or California or Florida, the three most
(33:56):
populated states. Well, then Texas, it's like, all
right, two year wait. Cool.
That means like no one's going to be doing this, right?
If I'm willing to wait, if I canspend the next two years
grinding, trying Facebook ads, trying referrals, trying friends
and family, I can do buy now, pay later.
Stripe has buy now, pay later. Klarna people can do monthly
installments with a firm. I'm going to do it the hard way
(34:17):
for two years because I know I'mgoing to have very few
competitors. And then two years from now,
it's easy mode because the state's going to be paying me
for these and I can charge even more.
I wouldn't say hard mode becausethat's what normally people do.
That's normal. Business high.
I mean, you go to any truck driving school out there and 90%
of them are charging 3 to $5000 and they just rely on volume.
(34:40):
But the margins are still high. I'm not a big fan of those in
person schools because of the margins.
But like if you bought, like yousaid earlier, a medical front
desk course, which medical, any way you could fit that in?
The dentist offers dermatology anywhere.
If you bought this course, let'ssave for $500 and you market it
to the general public for $3000,still big margins.
(35:03):
You sell one a week that replaces somebody's income like
that. Is there any of these trades
that have to be done in person, or can all of them be done
virtually or remotely? Some have to be done in person
welding. We haven't cracked that, that
code yet. And some of them are just, you
know, you, you have to do it in,in person.
Some of them is a combination oflike, hey, get you could do 90%
(35:26):
of the hybrid and it just offer a two week externship.
So like the CNA course, you could learn it online.
But at at a certain point when it comes like needles and
certain procedures, you're goingto have to just, you know, like
phlebotomy, you're going to haveto do so many pokes before you
could fully graduate. And that's when you just partner
up with employers or stacking companies.
That's the easy part, yeah. Now, what about tech Didn't or
(35:46):
or sales? Didn't you say that you know a
guy doing like enterprise tech sales with this?
Yeah, I have a client that does IT tech sales courses and he
crushes it. Anyone looking to get into tech
without a degree? It's a big push right now.
Not saying there's anything wrong with college degrees, it's
just for the longest time peoplesaid, well, I can't get into
tech without a degree. And he he was able to debunk
that and now he sells a course. It's IT tech sales course, and
(36:10):
it helps people get into some really cool jobs at T-Mobile.
Work from home. A lot of that is transition for
work from home. Everyone's scared of all this
return to office talk. There's still plenty of remote
work out there, just people don't know where to look.
OK, so to recap, like you're doing this insurance thing ended
poorly. You had a conversation with the
(36:31):
truck driving school. It was very interesting to you.
You raised money, you started your own schools.
It did really well. It ended now like your full time
job slash business is helping people start their own schools
and or like like start their ownschools from scratch or like
basically incubate their own schools at their own companies
to better vertically integrate, right?
(36:53):
100% and that's with everything 'cause like I said, you know,
most of these school owners are tradespeople themselves.
They didn't have ACRM. They're not using a sell script.
They're just, you know, John andMary just.
Oh, yeah, come down. We teach, you know, how to
become a technician. We'll teach you how to become a
nurse. And yeah, come on down anytime
and click like, no, you got to capture.
(37:14):
They called. You got to capture that.
And it's just like I I'm involved with their sales
training. I'm involved with their
scripting, their e-mail campaigns, their funnels.
The government stuff. Yeah.
I'm sure you got to like, you got to kind of know who to talk
to, like how to work the system.And I said, I don't mean that in
like an unethical way, but like how to work navigate this
bureaucracy that is the government.
(37:36):
That's what I'm saying like if you Google trade school
consultants, you're going to find people that'll show you how
to become a school, become regulated and just like it is
for businesses, but but they don't teach you then well, how
do you go find students? How do you talk to say how you
enroll? It's very much a cell, like it's
really cells and the skill becoming cells.
And a lot of these school owners, they don't, they don't
(37:56):
have that dialed in. And I'm able to help them get
that dialed in. A lot of them don't utilize the
grant cause they've heard it's aterrible experience.
But what isn't when you're dealing with the government, if
an individual walks into these offices and centers, they get
they're like, hey, I want to take that grant.
After they ask four different people, maybe they get lucky and
one of them hands on like 18 forms, that individual goes home
(38:18):
and they're like, dude, where doI start?
Don't even not fill this out. What do I say?
And it just dies there. So.
We're bringing awareness by let's really help those people
that need this, get them off benefits you, get them learning
a new trade because we desperately need more traits for
you in every sector. Oh, OK.
Well, Hector, did we miss anything?
Anything I forgot? No, I mean, I mean, we could
(38:38):
probably nerd about this Part 1 and then part 10A year from now,
who knows. But dude, let's go impact some
lives. That sounds great.
We will link to all your stuff in the show notes and we'll go
from there. All right, if you want to reach
out to Hector, I've got a link to him in the show notes.
Thanks for hanging out on the Kerner office.
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