Creating a Pharmacy Continuing Education Business with WordPress

In this LMScast episode, Dustin Hartzler discusses creating a performance continuing education business. Dustin launched a firm focused on continuing education for functional medicine, which will be directed by Dustin’s wife, Melody.

In order to accommodate people with more demanding schedules, they first experimented with virtual live events such as symposia, which enabled pharmacists and other medical professionals to participate in real time. Later, they modified the content into on-demand courses.

Dustin highlights the value of community involvement in marketing in addition to the format of their classes. They also look at specialty marketing techniques like customized advertisements and professional LinkedIn communities.

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Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Dustin Hartzler. I first found Dustin many years ago, probably a decade ago on his podcast, which is your website engineer. That’s at your website, engineer. com. I’ve seen Dustin around WordPress for a long time.

And recently I found out that his wife has a continuing education business. So I want to do a chat with Dustin today and talk about building that type of business, just story of how it all happened and what, how it all works it’s, as I look into the LifterLMS user community, some of the most successful platforms.

From a financial perspective, our continuing education projects. And so when I learned about this with Dustin, I wanted to chat with him about it, but first Dustin, welcome to the show.

Dustin Hartzler: All right. Thanks Chris. Thanks for having me.

Chris Badgett: So your wife, Melody has a business functional medicine, CE. com. CE stands for continuing education.

Frame us in on the niche here. What is. Functional medicine. And why do these people need CE or continuing education credits?

Dustin Hartzler: Yeah, for sure. And maybe I’m going to probably butcher exactly what it is. I’m just the tech guy here. But but my wife is a pharmacist and she is an entrepreneur and she has her, hand into lots of different things.

And so the functional medicine aspect side of things is basically doctors can practice functional medicine. Pharmacists can provide do functional medicine, nurse practitioners and whatnot, but functional medicine is addressing the root cause of any type of issue that you may be having. Like you could go to your doctor and say, Hey, my stomach hurts.

It consistently hurts when I eat these foods or anything along those lines. And a conventional doctor will say, Oh, you probably have I don’t know, IBS or like some sort of something. Here’s whoops. Here’s some medicine. Take that and your symptoms will go away. There are symptoms might go away, but they might crop up at different things.

There might be different avenues that, now something else hurts or, something along those lines, or maybe you’ve got heart medication. You have all these things. things. What my wife does and what she is teaching pharmacists to do is to look at the root cause. I think it’s really funny because all these pharmacists like went to school to prescribe and they verify prescriptions.

Like you would think that the first thing they want to do is say, Oh, we’ll take this prescription. This is what’s going to affect you. And it fixed you the best. But when you look at when, if you look at a customer or like a patient, at the, with the root cause of what might be ailing you. And then they do blood work and then they try to figure out, okay, it probably is this, or maybe you have a gluten intolerance and that’s what’s causing your stomach tissue.

So they’ll do some elimination diet and they’ll do some things along those lines. And so that’s what functional medicine is. And so my wife has a couple of different businesses. One is this continuing education, but the other one, there’s another piece where she’ll actually see patients virtually online.

And we came to the conclusion that there’s no real good education piece for pharmacists or doctors or whatnot to figure out how do I learn how to practice functional medicine? Like you can’t just go to Walgreens and start this. You can’t, like that’s not really a thing. And so my wife has been in doctor’s offices before and she has these longer appointments, like a patient appointment might be 90 minutes and she learns as much history as they can and then they’ll send it.

the stuff off for blood work or whatnot. But the whole premise came on. Nobody was offering this type of CE pharmacists named. I think it’s in Ohio. It’s different in every state. I think it’s 60 hours every five years for continuing education to keep your pharmacy license. And so that’s where the niche is.

It’s pharmacists or doctors or nurse practitioners that need continuing education, but they’re interested in functional medicine in learning how to do that more patient root cause approach. And so that’s How the site started.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And my dad’s actually a pharmacist and I’ve seen him do continuing education my whole life.

And I know there’s like different percentages. It probably varies by state on how much has to be in person versus online. Do you, what is it in your state? Do you know?

Dustin Hartzler: No, I do not. But I know that I think it’s based on live and on demand, I think is the way that we do it. So like we’ll have, we’re having a symposium, which is the first weekend, the first Saturday in November, which is seven hours of live CE.

And so via, even though it’s via zoom, if they’re logged in for the whole time, they get live CE credit. Otherwise they can log in and they can watch it later. And then they just basically we’ll watch the education and then they will take some sort of quiz or validation. And then they’ll get that CE approved based on the state that they live in.

So I don’t know the exact numbers. I just know that we as a company should be marketing more towards the end of the year. I think this is an idea that’s probably good. Hey, it’s. October 1st, we should probably send out a reminder Hey, you got three months, if you need some CE here, this is what we’re offering on our site.

And so there’s lots that you could do along that line. But yeah, there’s some sort of live versus on demand, but I don’t know what that is.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Tell us a story of how this started. Like it’s one thing to be a pharmacist, but then how did Melody make the transition to becoming an educator?

Dustin Hartzler: Yeah, it, she actually started like right after she graduated, she did a residency at the VA in Columbus, but then like her first full time job was a pharmacy professor at a school of pharmacy. And so that’s where the. The education piece came in and so she taught students and then that was a rabbit hole of these millennials that are like, what’s going to be on the test and just tell me what’s on the test so I can study that.

And it’s she’s that’s not how pharmacy works, right? You have to learn it so that in case. That comes up someday you know how to treat your patients or whatnot. And then and then she moved into a clinic aspect. And then the clinics she was working for, like her and the doctor didn’t really see eye to eye very well.

Then it’s okay, like we’ve been doing the FX med thing for a few years and it’s okay, this might be a good time to jump, but this site started just because she saw nothing else in the space. I think it was two, we did a conference November of 2019. And this was before COVID, of course.

And it was, it was like our wildest dream, right? We hadn’t not much of a list. And she had, I think, six, four, four to six speakers or whatnot. She did maybe one of the sessions. And we sold the tickets we’re just like making this up as we go, right? Like, how much should CE cost?

Maybe 199. Let’s try 199. And we sold 80 to 90 tickets at 1. 99. You’re like that’s a pretty decent payday to do that. And then and it was all recorded via zoom. She has to, it’s a little different in the fact that she doesn’t teach everything on this site. She teaches maybe one session of the four or five.

Sometimes it’s two, sometimes it’s none, but she normally has to pay a pharmacist to do this. And it’s a thousand dollars or 2, 000 depending on what the pharmacist like will, they charge for their hourly time or whatnot. And then we record everything via zoom and then I make it look pretty and then load it into an LMS so that we can so people can see it on demand.

Then again, if our marketing funnels were, Proper, like we should be making money in sales like daily on this. That’s not really the case right this second. We do more, I think people are more engaged in live details and Hey, this is a live thing. We’re going to do a Q and a after each session.

And people, I think enjoy that more, but every once in a while, it surprises us that someone will come in and Oh, I’ll just buy the annual pass and I’ll get all of the CE and that’s five 49 for the year or whatnot. And so it’s a good Hey, we don’t have to do any more work. It’s all there.

But yeah, so that’s the general gist of how this started. And so we’ve done. Two to three conferences every year since 2019. We did see a big drop after COVID shut everything down. Like more people were doing things online, but it seemed like it, less people were coming to our online events.

I think sometimes it’s scheduling we’re like, Oh, this works well for us, but may is a very busy time. So all the graduations and stuff. We’re like, okay, maybe not may, or, this is around too close to Thanksgiving. And so there’s just different things As an entrepreneur, we’re just, just trying to figure it out.

We did do a course on a cruise boat this year which was pretty cool. That was a dream of my wife. Like, how can we do a tax deductible trip like that? So we went to Seattle and then did an Alaskan cruise. And when the cruise was on, like when we were out at sea, Which was like two and a half days.

They would have CE conference, like just at the back of the boat, they could see the icebergs and stuff out the back of the boat, which was really cool. Then I’m working on getting all those videos updated and sent out. And then that might actually be a, like kind of a live in. live cohort type class.

And we might try to do this year to Hey, if you need 14 hours of CE before the end of the year, watch two videos a week, and then we’ll have a live like Q and A at the end of it. So we’re still trying to kick around that idea. But again, like the whole entrepreneur space is just this work, will it not like, let’s see, let’s give it a try.

Chris Badgett: You definitely hit demand with those first 80 people for the ILT or instructor led virtual training. That’s awesome. Quick side note. Did your cruise ship stop in Juneau, Alaska?

Dustin Hartzler: It did.

Chris Badgett: I used to, I lived there for eight years. I used to run sled dogs on a glacier up there as part of a tour business thing.

But that’s cool. I love that idea.

Dustin Hartzler: Absolutely. I think we had, I think there was 19 people that came with us. And Is that huge? No. Would we rather have a hundred maybe, but it was a cool, like intimate group. And we kept seeing those people all across the boat too.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been on a cruise before, but it seems like whoever you see when you’re getting on the boat, you’ll see them a hundred times throughout the cruise or Hey, we’re having in this group. So we always saw those people all over the place, which was really cool.

And then some of them had kids there that were our kids age. And so they would hang out and do stuff like on the boat while the moms were like doing the CE. So that was cool.

Chris Badgett: Nice. And I just want to double click on that idea that you can do live virtual and create a on demand back catalog of training content.

You can do both. That’s really cool. I think some people get focused on one or the other, but you’re doing the best of both worlds simultaneously, which is cool.

Dustin Hartzler: Yeah, it’s cool.

Chris Badgett: How does functional medicine CE get clients? Like, how’d you get those first 80 people?

Dustin Hartzler: Yeah, I think we originally, we started out, we used somebody on Facebook for a while, like that was able to, generate some leads there, paid for advertising, those people are like so expensive.

It’s like our monthly fee is 1, 500 and we recommend you spend 1, 500 on ads. You’re like, Really? And that’s not really like the best use of our time and money. And then it’s slowly grown. I think my wife finds that sometimes like just being in different Facebook groups, there’s like a functional medicine pharmacist, mom’s group or something, or just even pharmacist moms.

And she’s in there and just, just commenting and just people finding her that way. I think that, so we did that. We did some LinkedIn advertising. We think that LinkedIn is a little bit better for this audience because more professionals are on LinkedIn. I think I’m a kind of a professional, but I never use LinkedIn.

So I don’t know if that’s really a thing. I think the hardest part is like you spend money, but it’s did they really get it from there or did they see the ads and get emails from us? And then, I don’t know, like you don’t really ever know, was our ads been worth it or not? And then recently it’s we’ve been partnering with some supplement companies and some bigger name type things.

So they’ll pay us to do like some of their content for the year. And then. As part of their contribution, they get two webinars, one or two, depending on like their level. Then they will market to their audience, this free webinar. We market to our audience for free webinar. And so then sometimes we’ll have, a webinar will happen and we’ll have 400 people registered and then there’ll be added to our email list or whatnot.

So those are some of the things that we feel that are working, but again, like I don’t know. Is it really working? Is it not? So I think that’s I don’t know how those, where those first 80 people came from. Like I think it was just I think there was some Facebook marketing involved.

There was, for a while we were offering a free signup on our site or, people might be just searching for functional medicine CE or, like that’s the name like is exactly what the URL is. So that is helpful. I think two, we were on a podcast. A friend of ours went to college that we went to college with has a, they call it your financial pharmacist.

And so they do like financial stuff for pharmacists and talk about like student loans and student loan forgiveness and stuff like that. Like we talked about the business on there. And so that was a very targeted audience. And so that might’ve been where some of the people came from, but we try to do as much like free stuff as we can.

Chris Badgett: Is there, when you say free stuff, you mean like content marketing or

Dustin Hartzler: Yeah, exactly.

Chris Badgett: So what kind of free stuff?

Dustin Hartzler: So it’s like getting on those podcasts or I’m doing free webinars for different people. Or, do you have sometimes it’s even like creating an event on Facebook. I think that sometimes gets people to come and then Oh, we’re going to, they were, I think they were doing like Instagram or Facebook lives for a little bit like, Hey, we’re having this conference in two weeks.

This is the stuff that we’re going to do. Here’s some of the things that you’ll learn during this conference and whatnot. So those are some things I feel like as a, it’s just, husband and wife duo. And then my wife has a couple of pharmacists that help write some content and write some newsletters and whatnot.

And it’s we’re way overstretched. Like we should be able to like, if we had somebody that could come up with, here’s our strategy for the year. Here’s like how we’re going to advertise or here’s how we’re going to market. Here’s going to be our content marketing strategy. I feel like we could do a lot better.

But then also it’s this is only like a third of all the things that she’s doing. And so it’s should we just put our blinders on and just really focus or what does that look like? But I think she’s so passionate about so many different things, like helping pharmacists, more pharmacists doing this is better, for the world, or for patients.

But then also it’s she also wants to see patients so she can have those Hey, we taught this person this and now they are, they’re feeling so much better. They don’t have to take this medicine or like we reversed IBS or, like not that’s really a thing, but like lifestyle modification is a big Passion of hers.

And so she dips her toe into a lot of different aspects there.

Chris Badgett: Let’s talk geography. I know some continuing education stuff is on a state by state basis. You mentioned you’re from Ohio. Are you guys doing the whole us? Is there any international action? What geography are you serving?

Dustin Hartzler: So we can, anybody can listen to the content, but you only, Can be redeemed in the U. S. States and all 50. Yeah, exactly. I don’t think there’s any limitations based on the C. E. Companies are licensed to do to validate. So basically what happens is like we have this conference coming up in November. My wife had to come up with an outline.

Here’s the sessions. Here’s the things we’re going to talk about. Let’s put bullet points to each, here are the key learning objectives. And then they, she submits that to a professional CE company and then they can say, yes, we approve all of these things we will authorize. And then then when somebody goes through all the content, then they can submit their CE and then it’s registered.

So I think as a pharmacist, you can have a few different logins to collect all of your stuff. I don’t know how all the reporting and the dashboards, I basically like inside of our LMS, we’ll take the. Take the details. Here’s what you need to do to submit CE and then open it in a new tab and they have to fill it out themselves.

So there’s no like certification that we do. We just partner up with a company who’s, they do that full time.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Where do you see like, where do you want to go with this from here?

Dustin Hartzler: Up into the right. Is that the right terminology? Yeah, I think, I think we, like I said earlier, I think it would be great to have multiple sales a day without us doing anything continuing that, just building that brand awareness or whatnot, or like even working on the, what does the funnel look like as customers come in? Okay. They signed up for an email list and now they’ll get emails, but there’s no like really onboarding flow or like, how do we promote and how do we like how do we like sell the next course?

Somebody comes and they buy something for November and we’re going to have a conference next year. Like, how do we get them engaged in? We do have a handful of customers that pretty much anything that we bring out, like they will buy, they’re one of the first customers and that’s a very loyal following.

But I think the, the weird part is, and we’ve talked about like the, Oh, some of the LMS is, or some of the E learning platforms are like, you could buy a subscription for 200 and then, you get all access to all the content to do all the things. And it’s that doesn’t quite work in what we’re doing just because we have to pay for every CE that’s redeemed.

Like we have to pay for that. So if everybody was getting all the CE, like that gets to be a little costly on our side. So we’ve jumped around different ideas there, but it would be great to have a You know something that’s very recurring and very regular on a month to month basis versus oh, We made four sales this month or oh, we made 400 sales this month Like it being more consistent in and that’s where we’re thinking I don’t know thinking is the right word but just working with these big internet partners and showing that hey There is value in this list that we have I forget if we have It’s probably under a thousand people that have purchased any one thing but if all a thousand people bought everything we offered, like that would be pretty good, right?

Like that would be, an amazing thing. But I don’t know. I feel like we sometimes like just are like, what’s the next thing? I was telling you earlier, it’s I’m just fixing this site for a conference that’s happening in 30 days. This should have probably been done three months ago.

So we could have had a three month push of here’s all the, like here’s how we could promote this upcoming conference or whatnot. So again, I don’t know. It’s a full time job. And like for me and she’s doing all these things and kids and stuff, it’s just we can’t put the full effort that we really want to on this site.

Chris Badgett: How much of the audience or customers come back? Cause there’s recurring in the fact that they need to get this every year, every two or whatever. How does, cause that’s a snowball that can build over time.

Dustin Hartzler: Yeah, exactly. I would say, I haven’t really looked at the numbers, but maybe 20 percent of customers have bought multiple things, but it’s not a, so we’ve been doing it, Since 2019, say we’ll call it five years, probably two per, so that’s, there’s probably 15 old, 15 whole things that we’ve done.

And I don’t think anybody, but maybe a handful of people have done more than four or five. So there’s some and maybe it’s the topic too. Like some people aren’t interested. Like we had one on men’s health and we had one on women’s health. And this next one is about lab testing. My wife thinks this one is going to be a really big one just because so many people need to know.

The lab part of things. And that’s where you get a lot of information, just getting blood work and getting those results back in. So if anybody’s listening, that is also a WordPress creator and and a functional medicine pharmacist you can find out more, but but yeah, so that’s the, that’s the thought process about like where we go as a business and whatnot,

Chris Badgett: can you talk about, speaking of being spread thin, you mentioned bringing in other subject matter experts to teach. It sounds like maybe the majority of the content you mentioned they get paid, but how does that relationship work? Or how did you develop? Cause it can be overwhelming, all the stuff to create this kind of business and getting help with the educational content is a big thing.

Dustin Hartzler: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: So how did that come together? So now all these people contribute.

Dustin Hartzler: Yeah, I think that was some of the relationships she’s formed at some of these different conferences that she’s went to. There’s like a I4M I think is the Institute of Functional Medicine. So there’s lots of educators there that she’s reached out to, but one of them that’s coming for this conference is like one of the sponsors.

And so one of the things that she put in her sponsorship agreement is you’ll pay us this many dollars plus provide a speaker for this session. So that’s like a, Company got to pick who would be the best representation for them. Or she might find out that, Oh, this person is really good with hormone replacement therapy.

Like we’re going to talk about hormones. Let’s reach out to her or Oh, this person is world renowned in gut health or whatnot. And so it’s a lot of times like you find the person and then you like. Say, Hey, are you available this day? Or would you be interested? And then they talk about the price.

And I think it’s anywhere between a thousand and 2, 000. Like we pay these educators because their time is valuable, right? Like they have to spend time if they’re a doctor, like not only do they have to practice, but they have to come up with slides and they have to, meet the learning objectives and then they have to.

The slides have to be done like a few weeks in advance so we can look at them and make sure that are all okay. And I think the first or second one, like my wife did maybe two or three of the sessions, and she was just like completely dead because she has to do all like the back end paperwork and get all the stuff ready and then Promoted and all that kind of stuff.

And sometimes she’s Oh, this one’s going to be really easy because I don’t have to promote and present anything. I just have to get to sit in, I get to learn. And so that’s a valuable piece too. So she gets to learn and she gets educated. And so it’s the best of both worlds that we’re paying for all these people to get education by this specific person, but then she also will learn and she can add that to her tool bag of like things that she knows or how she can practice and whatnot.

Chris Badgett: So Dustin, you’re a podcaster. I remember listening to one of your episodes a long time ago that as a non developer, I’m like, finally, I understand what the database does and how that works and stuff. So just a question related to functional medicine CE, does Melody have a podcast for the niche? Or have you thought about that?

You’re like pro podcaster.

Dustin Hartzler: Yeah. So her other business is it’s called farm to table farm to table dot life, and there’s a podcast over there. And so that one is talking about social interview, some of her team. So that business is pharmacists are basically like, they can only practice in the state that they are licensed in.

This education piece, like you can teach for, for anywhere, but Actually do patient care. You have to be licensed in different states. So on that side of her business, she has 40, some like 1099 employees. And then, so she’ll have like conversations with them. They call it the table talk. And so it’s basically like people sitting around the table, talking about different health things or like stress or meditation or movement or things like that.

And we’ve done it that way because we feel like patients are more likely to want to learn more about fixing their gut health or fixing their, learning more along those lines, but we haven’t done it for this business per se, mainly because the podcast editor in this household, which is also me, is way behind on that podcast and my podcast per se.

But but yeah, there’s always ideas and I don’t know If that would be a really, that could be a good free content marketing strategy too, to do podcasts or even should we do like a 30 minute snip of here’s this course. And then that would be probably pretty easy.

Like here’s the first, 30 minutes of this lecture that you could get for free and then you can buy it for the rest of it. So that could be a strategy too. Wow. Yeah. There’s just never enough time for all the ideas. And so

Chris Badgett: repurposing existing content to like, Hey, get the full thing and get credit.

That’s cool. That another way to reuse it. Yeah, I think,

Dustin Hartzler: I think the hard part for me is I’m not the, I’m not the pharmacist. And so I don’t know what’s most important. So like I would have to have somebody help me like, Hey, of this hour long session, and I do use the script. So like I could plug it into the script and give the URL to somebody and say, Hey, tell me what time codes are best to put in a podcast.

And then we could put a little intro and an outro and then go from there. And so that could be, and. That’s a really good idea that we just generated on the fly. And maybe I’ll do that. Maybe I’ll set that up during my sabbatical coming up.

Chris Badgett: Nice. Nice. What year did you start your podcast?

Dustin Hartzler: Your wordpressengineer. com. It’s actually your website engineer. We don’t want to mess with the trademark dealio. That’s going on. I funny story though, it was like in 2010 when I started, I submitted to 99 Designs and I said, my name is your website or your WordPress engineer and or the WordPress engineer, or something like that.

And luckily somebody on Upwork, or it wasn’t Upwork, it was 99 Design, said, Hey, that’s a trademark infringement. You cannot use that in A URL. And so I switched and I pivoted, and this. In what we’re talking about in WordPress these days. But I switched to your website engineer. That was when I started freelancing.

That was December of 2010, I think is when my first episode came out. And I was very consistent up until about 500 ish. There was some gaps in there close as I got closer to 500. And then the last couple of years has been a dumpster fire with my content creation strategies, just because there’s so much more I felt like at the time it was a really good way for me to get clients because they’re like, I understand what you’re saying, but I don’t want to do it.

And then also that was my contribution back to WordPress. It’s I’m not gonna I’m not gonna be able to fix code or, contribute to core, but I can spend some time like giving free education. And so that’s that’s where my spin was. And I love doing it. I still enjoy doing it.

I still like Just don’t have the bandwidth as much as I’d like to. And so I did commit officially unofficially on my show that I’m going to come back. I do have a, I mentioned I have a sabbatical coming up and part of my sabbatical is switching all my themes from old school storefront to like new block themes.

And I want to report back of Here are some gotchas or here’s some things to think about. Or like you might not remember, think through these things when you’re making that type of transition. So I might have some time, but it’s really hard to justify Hey, this is me, like spending two hours a week creating free content, but like I could spend two hours a week Tweaking and optimizing different workflows for something that it might actually generate monies.

But I still enjoy podcasting and I enjoy like the WordPress space. Of course, I’ve been to the last, I think six WordCamp U. S. and just being able to hang out with people in person and like chat and learn how they’re using WordPress and whatnot has been really cool and exciting for me.

Chris Badgett: You and I are obviously big fans of the podcasting medium, and it’s, I find people find their content personality type, whether that’s YouTube, podcasting, writing, social media, like people have their different flavors that resonate the most with them.

But how have you as a podcaster benefited the most? Focusing on that medium and being consistent and creating all this content.

Dustin Hartzler: Yeah. I think that, I think creating podcasts is the easiest person.

Chris Badgett: Once you’re set up, once you’re set up

Dustin Hartzler: and you’ve got the gear and whatnot. And I was, My show was anywhere between 15 and 22 ish minutes is what I was shooting for.

And I was trying to get it done in 90 minutes. That was really my, if I could prepare, I could record and I could edit and get it out in 90 minutes. Like I felt like that was good. And you write a

Chris Badgett: high quality blog post in 90 minutes, right? Yeah, exactly.

Dustin Hartzler: And if you get really good, after maybe the first hundred episodes, there’s not a lot of editing.

editing. I even got to the point where my edits were like, Hey I’m talking about the news or I’m talking about this plugin that I want to share. I just flubbed up. And I was like, yeah, I’m just going to restart the whole section over again, instead of like me having to go back and listen. Descript makes it really easy these days where you can see the exact words that you’re talking.

You’re like, Oh, I can see, let me just remove that. That’s pretty simple. But like back in the day, it’s I don’t want to have to just say Oh, the first announcement was good and now I have to go to the second one. I had to find that. And that way I could just like chop whole sections of the show out.

Then that made it a lot easier to like edit. And a lot of times I didn’t even edit, you get very comfortable with not saying or the, like stuttering around or whatnot, and then you can get it out faster. I felt like that was always good. I always felt too, that.

If you wanted to create a high quality blog post, especially in WordPress, you needed either some sort of like video or you needed some sort of Oh, I need these nine screenshots to really emphasize what I’m talking about. Then you’re like these screenshots are going to be outdated. And then it’s like now the whole thing’s, the audio medium is really good. The fact that yes, the content sometimes gets outdated, like you don’t visually see that as much. I just felt like that was the easiest way for me to get in. I loved listening to podcasts. And I, when I first got out of college, I got a iPod, like video, a video iPod with the wheel that I could download podcasts because I had an hour commute each way and I was like, okay, let’s start listening to podcasts.

And so I’d listen to those through my like tape deck. Converter type dealio. And I was like, this would be really cool to start someday. And so then I did and I was like, Oh, this is really, it’s a fun thing to if you put time and effort into meeting people, like doing videos like this is really cool.

Or sometimes it’s like I just don’t have the time to coordinate all of those things. And so that’s why I went to a solo show for probably the last 300 we’re all solo shows because it’s I don’t have time to coordinate and like with kids schedules and whatnot. And I think now I’m to the point where my day is really like pretty open.

The kids are at school all day. And then I have meetings at work, but I can set up like Calendly and get those all around there and whatnot. So I think that it’s a good medium and it’s a one that you don’t have to prep for as much, like you can make show notes in 15 minutes about the things you want to talk about and then you can just riff on them.

So that’s where I found like the most benefit for me was the easiest. And I felt since I’m a. Podcasts consumer, like I feel like I could take bits and pieces from a lot of podcasts and then turn them into my own.

Chris Badgett: Nice. That’s just almost said Justin, Dustin Hartzler. Go check out functionalmedicinece.

com. It’s a great example of continuing education. And check out the podcast, your website, engineer. com. Dustin, thank you for coming on the show and thank you for being a shining example. And with your wife, Melody being an education entrepreneur, you’ve got to wear a lot of hats and it’s amazing what you guys have done.

And I know it’s like intense and busy, but I’m so glad that you found product market fit and yet that launch. The initial launch, you got 80 people and have just continued to iterate, test things out. That’s really a cool thing. And it’s great that you can do that with your wife.

Dustin Hartzler: Yeah. I think it’s super fun.

And for me, like it also gets that, Hey, how can I best use WordPress to make it easy for the people that are managing the site? And so there’s some cool things like, Hey, we should probably instead of doing it this way, maybe we should use some. Post meta field, create some custom boxes so they can just put the information in and then I can use a template and then pull that information in properly or whatnot.

So there’s lots of cool overlap. And so I don’t have to be the knowledge worker and I don’t have to know everything about the CE and whatnot. And I just, here’s what we want. Here’s what we’re going to try. And I get to do that as the tech guy. So it’s super fun. There’s no like conflict with my day job and there’s no Yeah.

What do I want to say? There’s no limits like and there’s nobody saying Hey, this isn’t the right path. Or, if you work on a team and you get to develop a feature and they’re like, no, do it this way, do it this way, do it this way. Like now there’s no one like that. So I can just tinker and play.

And there’s always room for improvement. I think that’s maybe one of the. The best examples of I know we connected over Lifter LMS because like I was, I originally started this with a custom post type and I was going to customize like each of these things, like each course was in its own thing.

And then I moved to LearnDash and then I’ve done Sensei and I’ve looked at Lifter and I’ve, I’m like, I think Lifter is where I want to be. And so like there, it’s never static, right? There’s always things that be improved and changed. And as WordPress continues to develop or, the different plugins and stuff, I think that is really the neat thing.

Working at automatic, like the. The first line in our creed says I’ll never stop learning. And so I think that’s really cool. Oh this thing, new thing is out here with WordPress 6. 7 and I have 550 podcasts that I’d like to implement it. So I’ve got to go in and have to redo all of my posts.

There’s all kinds of things that you could always do and always be improving. And so I think that’s one of the cool things about WordPress. It’s a cool thing about having an e learning platform that just experiment and try and, Do surveys to your customers and figure out do they find it valuable?

Do they not? What are they looking to learn things along those lines? And once you slowly grow a list, like you’ll have people that will give you feedback and so yeah, it’s been super cool. It’s been a cool adventure and I’m excited to keep it going up into the right and maybe someday we’ll be wildly successful and we won’t have to do anything, but just crank out CE content and instead of the beach all day.

That might be a little while.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. And it’s cool that functional medicine is about helping people improve their lives so that I’m sure that gives a sense of purpose and mission and all that stuff too. So it all comes together. Dustin, thank you so much for coming on the show. Really appreciate it.

Wish you and your wife all the best success.

Dustin Hartzler: Thanks so much. Appreciate it.