Compliance LMS For UK Trucking Case Study Using LifterLMS With Richard Dunbavand From MDR Training

He describes how MDR Training first offered in-person training for the heavily regulated transport sector in the UK, where drivers, transport managers, and company owners must meet certain requirements in order to be compliant. When classroom instruction ceased during COVID-19, it was the most significant turning event. After one of his trainers found LifterLMS through a YouTube video, Richard swiftly transferred the instruction online.

He taught himself WordPress and LifterLMS and created the complete training portal on his own, despite the first learning curve being difficult. Approximately 15–20% of the UK transport management training market is served by MDR Training, which now has about 5,000 students on the platform with 200–300 new students enrolling every month.

The significance of assignments, tests, active learning, and teacher feedback is a central topic in Richard’s narrative. MDR Training incorporates multiple-choice tests, case studies, homework, and hand graded assignments with live classroom and Zoom instruction, as opposed to just recording class sessions and posting them online. Through the LMS, tutors may receive student contributions, evaluate them, offer comments, reset tasks, and keep track of students’ progress. According to Richard, the first-time pass percentage for their self-study students is less than 25%, whereas the rate for students who receive classroom or online teacher supervision is about 86%.

Additionally, Richard describes how LifterLMS has enabled MDR Training to grow outside the confines of traditional classroom settings. They can now train over 150 individuals each month in online sessions, with students coming from Saudi Arabia, Nepal, and all throughout Europe, as opposed to just a few people in a classroom. Assignments, tests, reports, alerts, certifications, cohorts, and the Sky Pilot theme are among the features that have grown to be crucial components of their operations. He especially appreciates reporting as it enables the staff to spot pupils who are struggling or falling behind and take action before the final test.

Here’s Where To Go Next…

Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

Episode Transcript:

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high-value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show

Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Richard Dunbavand from MDR Training in the UK, which is compliance training in the transport industry. Richard has been using LifterLMS for a while. It’s really cool what he’s done. He’s self-taught himself WordPress and LifterLMS, and made a really interesting training company that’s very needed in his industry.

Richard, welcome to the show. 

Richard Dunbavand : Chris, hi. Thanks for having me on. And you didn’t hash my surname quite as badly as I expected you to, so that’s good. 

Chris Badgett: I had a little bit of practice. 

Richard Dunbavand : Yeah. But yeah. Well- No, thanks for having me on. 

Chris Badgett: You’re at mdrtrainingportal.com. And- Great … tell us we, LMS we’re always around three letter anacronyms.

What is MDR stand for? And just tell us, like what a transport manager, CPC, and all these things are. Give us the context- Sure … of the type of training you do and what it is. Yeah. 

Richard Dunbavand : No worries at all. So MDR isn’t very exciting, I’m afraid. So originally, we were a recruitment agency years and years ago, and the recruitment agen- agency was called Midlands Driver Recruitment, MDR.

We set up a training arm of the recruitment company, and the logical thing was to call it MDR. Sadly, what we didn’t realize is there’s a medical qualification called Medical Devices Regulation. So initially, my SEO was borked because everybody was searching- Ah … was searching for that, but thought we were a medical devices company.

It’s not the best in the world, but so we specialize in transport training. Okay, so in the UK it’s a highly regulated industry whether that be the driver, the transport manager, the business owner, whatever it may be. And it’s very easy to fall foul of that compliance, in which case you lose your license, you lose your ability to drive, ability to run your business.

So we’ve set up a, a range of courses to help people stay compliant and stay abreast of the rules. The, the biggest course is our Transport Manager CPC. It’s the equivalent, and I don’t know what the equivalent would be in the US, but it’s the equivalent of an A level- Sort of between college and university, which is tough for guys. Most people who sit our course, the average age is roughly 40. A lot haven’t been at school for a long time, haven’t learnt for a long time, and some of them haven’t been in front of a computer for a long time. So it’s interesting. But we were del- w- we delivered classroom courses originally.

People would come to us within an hour or two’s travel time. They’d come to our classroom, and that would be about, about as far as we could grow. COVID hit. As with a lot of provider, training providers, the world stopped. It got to… It was a bank holiday here, so it would’ve been mid-March, and Kevin and I sat and had a conversation, and it was, “We’ve got nothing left,” so I cobbled together an online course and we put it out there. Not using LifterLMS, just something we did ourself. Cobbled it together and that was the beginning, we picked up Lifter– When did we pick up Lifter? So one of the trainers actually watched one of your YouTube videos.

Watched the video, and he said, “Look,” “we should have a look at this.” So I did. We took a trial. I think it was a £1 trial or something along those lines. Took… Oh, the dollar trial, sorry. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. 

Richard Dunbavand : Took the dollar trial. I looked at it, panicked, thought, “I’ve got no idea what I’m doing here.”

But slowly, over the last Three years. We’ve built a portal and a, a, a product or a group of produ- products that we hold about 15, 20% of the UK market for transport management. So it’s going well. Lifter was key to that because with any learning, the only way you can confirm that you understand something is by practicing it, and the courses that we do, they’re exam- there’s exams at the end. So they would do case study exams, written answers or assignments using your plugin term, multiple choice quizzes. Again, quizzes is perfect. So it’s grown from there. I, I think we’ve got just shy of 5,000 students on the portal at the moment, and it’s growing. We, there’s 2 or 300 joining us each month, so it’s positive. We’re getting there slowly. 

Chris Badgett: Wow that’s awesome. And tell us take us back to the beginning. I think this started around 2007, if I’m correct. 

Richard Dunbavand : The 

Chris Badgett: business? 

Richard Dunbavand : And- Yep, yep … 

Chris Badgett: and you had- So that was-

like real classrooms as well. And that’s what COVID threw a, a challenge towards. 

Richard Dunbavand : Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: We, we- But like how did it begin? 

Richard Dunbavand : We were, like I say, we were a recruitment agent first, so we were supplying drivers to companies, and then the EU brought in a a regulation that every driver had to do a day of training every five years.

One, a day, a year, every five years. So f- five days over five years. And initially we thought, well- If we get our drivers trained, they’re more saleable, they’re trained, they’re qualified, they’re good to go. So we started doing that, and that was classroom. We were hiring rooms, we were hiring village halls, we were hiring whatever we were doing which isn’t really scalable.

Y- it isn’t scalable. You could, you … how many people can you fit in a classroom? 20, and that was about as far as we could grow. And then somebody approached me, one of our customers approached me and said, “Can you do transport management?” Being a salesman, I said, “Yes,” without actually knowing what it was.

So w- within three months, we had to scrabble together and put a course together, get our approvals, get the regulations up which we did. And we ended up with three people on the first course, and two out of the three passed, so we had a 66% pass rate, which compared to the national average of 40, we were in the sort of upper echelons of what we’re doing, and it’s just grown from there.

Like I say, we now have around about 150, 160 people a month sit their exams. And then there’s all the courses that come off the back of it. They have to do refresher courses. Business owners have to do awareness courses, and it’s just grown from there. And again, every course has got its space on the portal.

The testing’s done through there. They’re accessing their course material, course notes. We’ve created … We- audio files have been fantastic for us, because people can listen to that in the car. You listen to a live session with a tutor, and then on your way home, you press the but- press the go button, play it through your car And you get it back.

So we’ve… it’s exciting at the minute. It’s ever so exciting, i’m still waiting for the wave to crash, because that’s, I’m mildly pessimistic, but, it doesn’t seem to be going at the moment. 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And you do things a little differently. Sometimes, particularly in a COVID situation, people try to film the classroom and then just b- basically- digitize everything, but you do something different, where… I’m g- what I wanna get a sense of is, like, all the different ways you make content or training, and then- Okay. Yeah … what your team looks like. So for example, y- you do live training, virtual Zoom, or some kind of- Yeah … meeting training. Yeah.

And then you have tutors, and then you do assessments with LifterLMS. What’s the stack? 

Richard Dunbavand : Okay, so how it works is, So we still run classroom courses as well, so we’ve got a team of tutors, trainers, who a- who are delivering the courses on a day-to-day basis. Whether that be in the class over Zoom.

We have quite a few distance learning students as well, so I guess you’d call it a, almost like a correspondence course, where they get feed- fed back again through the portal. So they go from, once they’ve had their tutoring, whether that be in the class or whatever we then set them homework to do.

We set them multiple choice c- practice papers. We set them case studies, which are long-form answers. And all that’s done through the portal. It’s, they the great thing about this is they can submit a piece of work, whether that be right or wrong or whatever, it’s submitted.

The tutor gets it, so the tutor that’s taught them will then get their homework, he’ll get their homework, and he’s able to mark it. He’s able to feed it back to them. He’s able to get them to redo it if they’ve, if they’re making mistakes. But the, the feedback is so important, and that’s the how people learn is by doing, you can t- you can talk to somebody until they’re blue in the face, but until they’re practicing, until they’re making mistakes, because you make mistakes, that’s how you get better. And that’s what this has enabled us to do, it’s enabled us to, each block of sessions we can test it. We know that they’ve understood what they’ve been taught, and they can apply what they’ve been taught into an exam.

And that’s the key. 

Chris Badgett: So the tutors, how do they give the feedback? 

Richard Dunbavand : That’s all done through the portal. So they’ll receive an- receive the assignment. We’ve not twiddled with the plugin in any way, shape, or form. Chris Badgett will do his case study on driver scheduling. That will come through to Richard.

I’ll get an email. I’m able to go… I click a link in the email, it takes me straight to the portal. I can review what they’ve put. I can tell them whether it’s good, bad or horrible, and then we can work from there. Do they need to do it again? I can reset it. They can do it again. Have they got the, the required marks?

If they have, then we can move to the next. It’s that engagement that’s key because we do sell one of the courses, which is a straight home study course. You buy the course material, it’s about 130 pound. You buy the course material, you’re on your own. You get access to the multi-choice through the portal.

But the case studies, you’re on your own. The pass rate between that, the first time pass between a, a, a self-study course and our classroom or the online course, self-study is less than 25% of the people that buy it go on and pass and become a transport manager. With the classroom and online, it’s 86% because we’re supporting them.

We can see what they’re doing. If you study on your own, you don’t know you’re ready for an exam until you sit the exam, and invariably you find out you ain’t, but using this system that we’ve got here, we can… We’ve got the engagement with the students that we can get them to a position where they understand they’ve seen everything that the examiners can throw at them, they’ve made those mistakes and it’s like I said earlier, mistakes are key because that’s how you learn. 

Chris Badgett: That’s really awesome. It shows the power of feedback loops. Absolutely. Like self-study is great, but you’re gonna do a lot better with tutoring and feedback and, getting busy with assignments and case studies and things like 

Richard Dunbavand : that.

There’s no comparison, Chris. There’s no, there’s no comparison at, at all. So yeah, it’s, What we’ve got it’s working, always needs tinkering, always needs a bit of playing with, and we can always evolve a little bit, but w- we’re getting there slowly. We’ve got we’ve got a, a, a new person that’s joined us, and she’s really taking on the creation of these assignments, which is fantastic because, again, it means the more we can offer people, the more they can see, the more they can physically do through the portal, the better they’re gonna be. 

Chris Badgett: That’s fantastic. Take us back to the the moment where you were… you decided to go with LifterLMS and WordPress.

And I’m also super 

Richard Dunbavand : fascinated- I prefer not to ’cause it was hellish. 

Chris Badgett: Why was it hellish? I’m curious. Is it 

Richard Dunbavand : because of- it wasn’t. That’s not true. Oh, okay. So it, One of the trainers, Brad, he watched one of you guys vid- YouTube videos. It popped up in a, I think… I, it was… we’d been talking about e-learning.

We were using… I forget who we were using before, but we were using somebody and it was very basic. Very basic. And anyway, Brad showed me this video. I thought, “I like the look of that,” obviously, you had a fully-fledged system with, bells, whistles. I thought, “That must be easy,” so we took a trial. And I forget the length of the trial and I knew nothing about WordPress, I knew nothing about LifterLMS, I knew nothing about plugins, anything. So it blew my mind, it literally blew my mind initially. But watching, picking up YouTube videos, picking up, things that I read online, you slowly start to get an understanding of how to build.

The… When you guys changed to the… I forget the new tem- the new theme that came out. Is it- Skypilot … Skypilot? Yeah. Skypilot. Yeah. Fanta- absolute game changer because it just… Everything felt easier. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

This episode of LMScast is brought to you by Popup Maker, the most powerful and trusted popup solution for WordPress. Whether you’re selling online courses or building a membership site, Popup Maker helps you grow your email list, boost conversions, and engage your visitors with highly targeted customizable popups.

You can create smart popups for things like LifterLMS or WooCommerce cart abandonment recovery, sales, course engagement, activation, targeted offers based on exactly what your students are doing inside LifterLMS. I personally use Popup Maker on all of our websites at LifterLMS for lead magnet opt-ins, cart abandonment, upsells, downsells, and guiding users to the right next step.

Popup Maker is essential for growing my email list and making more money through my website. Are you ready to take your website to the next level? Head on over to wppopupmaker.com/lmscast to save 15% off on your order. The discount automatically applies when you visit through that link. Popup Maker also has a free version, so you can start with that too.

So go to wppopupmaker.com/lmscast now to save 15% or sign up for the free plan, and start getting more leads, sales, and student engagement today. Now back to the show.

Richard Dunbavand : Everything felt easier. And again, that could just be because I was learning more as I was going, but that, when that came out, all of a sudden the site looked more like how I wanted it to, I felt like I could, it, it… we could match it to the brand, we could match it to how we want it to be. So yeah, it was… I say hellish, it was great fun, I made a huge amount of mistakes. I deleted courses by mistake. I lost quizzes. But that’s part of it, and it’s…

I can look back now and say it was fun. My gray hairs wouldn’t agree with me, but, so yeah it took- It probably took about three months of prep to get us, to get to the position where we had a course that we could put out to people, we the, there was there were enough quizzes, there’s enough assignments, and we knew what to do with those assignments.

Yeah it’s … If, i- if anybody’s curious about anything I’d definitely, I’d say have a go, because what’s the worst that can happen? The worst that, the the it changed our business completely,

Chris Badgett: it sounds like it took you about 90 days to really kinda give yourself permission to learn and figure it out.

It’s not like- Yeah … it just, you understand it all in the first day. It takes a while. 

Richard Dunbavand : No, there’s a the, the learning curve from, just for WordPress itself was quite steep, yeah. I was used to, I’d used Squarespace and Wix, and the, as website builders before.

I’d never had any sort of contact with, a plugin system or that sort of daunting back end when you see a dashboard that none of it makes a huge amount of sense. So y- I, you just have to play. You have to play with things. The good thing about- W- WordPress, Lifter and so on, you can’t really break it.

Yes, you can make mistakes. Yes, you can delete things, but everything’s recoverable. Play with it, and y- if I can do it, most people can do it. 

Chris Badgett: That’s what I would say If in terms of like building the site, not doing the tutoring and reviews and things like that, is that all you or is there somebody else on your team or did you get outside help or it’s all- 

Richard Dunbavand : No

Richard 

Chris Badgett: right here? 

Richard Dunbavand : I do no tu- I do no tutoring at all. Yeah. I’ve never done it. I I’ve jumped into one or two courses especially during COVID when, all the staff were furloughed and, or off or whatever. And it never goes well. I’m much better doing this, doing a…

i’m a salesman and a self-taught web person, yeah. But no, we’ve got a team of trainers, so we’ve got six, six people that train for us now. I do all the building with the site, with the LMS because that’s it’s become my favorite thing to do strangely. 

Chris Badgett: I can totally relate- ’cause when- … when I first got into WordPress, which was a long time ago it was around 2008, which is ancient, but I became… I wasn’t trying to, but I became obsessed in the best way. “This is fun. This is really fun.” “And by the way, I’m building something very useful that helps a lot of people.”

That’s- 

Richard Dunbavand : Mass- massively. And it is rewarding. You see these guys come through this course, and a lot of time, a long, a lot of the time, for us particularly or for this industry, if these people don’t pass this, their business is gone. They can’t operate without it. We’re kinda keeping people going, which is, it’s a good feeling.

It’s a great feeling. And you’re right about WordPress. You’re always looking at it going, “Can I make it better? If I do this, will this help? If I add this, will this help?” And it’s almost addictive in a way. Yeah … in a good way. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. That’s awesome. Is there what, which parts of the LifterLMS tech do you find the most useful or that has the most impact?

I’ve heard you mention just the core LMS system, of course. For sure. Then you’ve mentioned assignments quizzes- … and then the Sky Pilot theme. Is there any other area features or any of our other add-ons that you find essential? 

Richard Dunbavand : Some that I’m playing with at the moment.

I’m just starting to play with the new new events. I, I- Yeah … haven’t got my head around it yet. That because at the minute we send out a list of Zoom links to people. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. 

Richard Dunbavand : Bit messy. It’s messy. What I want is, for each module that we’ve put together on the portal, each module there’s a link there, so that’s gonna take some toying with. Certificate generation, that’s one of them. We use that a lot, because for the smaller courses, they’ll they get a certificate at the end of it. It’s a case of click a button, you get a thumbs up notification, you’ve completed a course, download your certificate.

It’s done, it’s templated, it’s tidy. I really like that. What else do we use in there? Obviously, payment gateways are a, an essential part, but for us the biggest thing by a country mile is the testing ability, I still have got lots to play with, do- 

Chris Badgett: Are you primarily doing multiple choice and then when you say assignments, are they doing the essays or uploading PDFs or what are  they doing? 

This episode of LMScast is brought to you by WP Fusion, the powerful WordPress software that connects your website to your CRM and marketing automation platform, whether that’s HubSpot, Salesforce, ActiveCampaign, GoHighLevel, and many, many more. If you’re selling online courses, memberships, coaching, digital products, and more, WP Fusion turns your WordPress website into a smarter, more personalized, and more automated online business.

With deep integration into LifterLMS, WooCommerce, the popular form plugins, and many more top WordPress tools, WP Fusion lets you automatically create and tag contacts, unlock course and membership access, track student progress, recover abandoned carts, and trigger powerful automations based on what your users are actually doing on your LMS website.

We use WP Fusion ourselves on our LifterLMS website, which is powered by WooCommerce for selling software subscriptions. But we also use WP Fusion on the LifterLMS Academy, where we are selling access to courses and memberships powered, of course, by LifterLMS. WP Fusion connects our websites and CRM seamlessly together so that we can create a better customer journey, deliver the right offers, and automate follow-up based on user behavior.

If you wanna sell more, personalize the learning experience, and build a more connected, automated online business, check out WP Fusion today. Go to wpfusion.com and use the coupon code LifterLMS to save 15%. Now back to the show.

Richard Dunbavand : It, I use the essay template, for want of a better word. So they will be asked a question. So I type out the question. I don’t know schedule a driver’s time, driving time from point A to point B.

There’s a basic schedule, and then they’ll be t- they’ll be typing that out through there. And that, and again I’ve tried to structure it in the framework that I can. I’ve tried to structure it to match their final exams, because there’s no point in me giving them practice work to do without it looking and feeling like the final exam that they’re gonna sit.

So yeah, they’re key. Trying to think which other elements that I use. They’ve probably just become natural to use now. I don’t really think about what, which, which ones I’m using. You know- 

Chris Badgett: It sounds like you’re using the notifications somebody submits something- Absolutely

you click the link, you go right to it. That’s- Yeah … a feature. You’re probably using the reporting a little bit just to check in on people. 

Richard Dunbavand : Reporting is essential because- Yeah … if, so on a Monday the trainers will walk into several hundred assignment submissions, the multiple choice or the the quizzes, they’re all self-marked, as which is, again, that’s another great thing. It’ll give them feedback at the end. It’ll tell them what they’ve got right, what they’ve got wrong. We can give them pointers. But with the assignments, we have to mark it by hand because- If a system couldn’t mark it because you’re asking somebody to translate their understanding onto a paper, so you could get 15 different answers to the same question.

So with the system, the tutor gets, or the, the trainers get emails to say, “Chris Budget has submitted his financial management case study. Richard has submitted his,” whatever it might be, case study. You can literally click a link in your email, it opens up this, opens up the reporting tab, and you can see their submission.

You can mark it, you can grade it, you can feed it back. And like I said, Eddie, that feedback’s key. So yeah, reporting is really important. Y- without it we’d be stuck. I I with the, a system that we used before, we tried people submitting PDFs to us, and it took away from what we needed.

You know what I mean? I can see s- I can see how that can work, if it is a very structured thing. But that engagement on the site, it works for us 

Chris Badgett: You sound a lot like me, where you fall in love with technology, and you’re, like, a self-directed learner. But it sounds like you, you also have trainers that need to log into the LMS- 

Richard Dunbavand : Yes

Chris Badgett: who may or may not- And 

Richard Dunbavand : that’s fun sometimes. 

Chris Badgett: Who may or may not be as technical or enjoy it as much as you do. Like, how do you help onboard your team into using the system? 

Richard Dunbavand : I give them as little access as possible. 

Chris Badgett: Okay. 

Richard Dunbavand : No but in all seriousness, yeah. The guys with WordPress, and again, this is something that I discovered after a while that you can, you can give d- people different account levels, account access, and so on.

The, the trainers have an instructor-level access, which means they can see what they need to see. We’ve actually white labeled this. Eh, they used it for about six or eight months, but it didn’t work for them. But I white labeled our portal for a, a training company that we’d worked with before, and was able to give their trainers the training to be able to use it, and it doesn’t take long.

For somebody as an instructor, an- as an instructor to use this system, it’s a piece of cake because it is email, click in it, click a link in an email, answer what you need to do, click submit, you’re done. So they don’t need to have any real technical know-how. Barring the training that I’ll give them, which like I say when we did it for the other company, probably took me two hours to get them to a position where they could mark their own work, they could gauge their students’ progress.

That’s the other key thing as well. With this, you can see Chris Badgett has only done 1% of the course. I can know then, I can say, “Oi, come on, you need to be getting on, you need to be doing this stuff.” Or you can see who’s engaging, who’s struggling. Y- and you can pick those people up, or you can spend some extra time with those people to make sure they understand it.

So yeah, reporting’s key, and we’d be nowhere without it. 

Chris Badgett: And that’s the difference too between the 25% completion rate on the self-study versus the 85% when a tutor or a trainer is looking at it and helping people get unstuck and learn from their mistakes. Absolutely. 

Richard Dunbavand : Yeah, ab- absolutely, because it’s adult education, a- and as I said at the beginning, some of the guys that come to this course, they may have driven a truck for the last 40 years and haven’t been to school for 52 years. What- whatever it may be, different… Everybody’s different. Everybody needs a certain level of massaging to get to the right position.

Some people, reasonably hands-off. You can let them run with it. As long as you’re telling them what they’re doing right and wrong, they’re good. Other people, they struggle, and that’s, it’s part of the job, it’s part of adult education. It’s getting people to a level where they can get this qualification that they need, yeah. 

Chris Badgett: Do you have a sense… people like you and I we’re gonna do most of our work on a laptop or desktop computer. Do you know if the students, are they mostly on laptops and things, or are they taking classes on the phone or on the iPad or whatever? 

Richard Dunbavand : I try and dissuade them from using a phone.

You can, th- they can do multiple choices fine. If they’re using LifterLMS, do that on your phone. In fact, it’s a great thing you do. You’re having your lunch, you can have a sandwich and you can do a multiple choice, we try and stipulate that the… And again, because we’re trying to replicate the final exams, you’re on a laptop, you’re on a PC, you’re on a m- whatever it might be.

And it- the system’s scalable enough that you can, you could, they could do a case study online or on their mobile phone or on the cell or what- whatever you guys got, a mobile phone. They could do a case study on there, but it doesn’t give them the same- experience as their exam.

So I try and d- I try and dissuade it, but for the most part, yeah, you’re in front of a computer, you’re in front of a laptop with a webcam, with a microphone, and they’re able to access this as they go. But with, like I say, with the courses, the basic courses where it’s just multiple choice, mobile phone’s perfect.

You can log in, you can see it, they get their feedback, everybody’s happy. 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I wanted to dig into an area, like the reason we built LifterLMS, like our core thing we’re trying to create is impact, income, and freedom. And what I mean by that is freedom is like creative freedom.

That’s you. That’s somebody who loves messing around with technology and- … creating automation and scaling a business. And you get to- … work from wherever and, … do, do your thing. It sounds like there’s a lot of impact. I think you said something like 5,000 students and 20%- … of the industry in the UK maybe.

Richard Dunbavand : Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: And then- 15, 

Richard Dunbavand : 20, yeah … 

Chris Badgett: income i- is interesting ’cause it’s it sounds like once you get a customer, they have to come back for refreshers over time. So that’s like a very sustainable way of doing business. Absolutely. But maybe unpack more income impact, freedom types of things. I- Like what have you achieved there?

Richard Dunbavand : There is… if you take where we were- What would it be? Four years ago. Pre-COVID. Let’s go pre-COVID, ’cause that seems to be… It’s like AD to BC, that, that’s the change. But pre-COVID we had small classroom, we had, we could hire places, but we were so limited on what we could do.

We were limited by volume, we were limited by everything, we were limited by everything. Fast-forward to now, and that, obviously there was income expectations for that, you could only have, let’s say you could only have 10 people in a classroom, you earn the equivalent of what 10 people do.

Now I can have 150 people over online sessions, in a ve- in… We do three times that. It… So we used to do 10 people in a classroom once every quarter. Very little, but now we’ve got 150 every month. I’ve got a, a lady with- in Nepal studying with us. I’ve got two guys working on the NOOM project here in Saudi, or were working on the NOOM project in Saudi.

You we have a lot of guys, European guys, because they can come to the UK. Online training has enabled us to do that, because it doesn’t matter where you are, you can sit in front of a computer, like you and I are now, we’re halfway across the world, but this works as a training medium, it’s, it ju- it’s opened so many borders. Financially, for us, there’s no com- it’s worked really well. We’d be… I’d be in a much smaller room if I was still doing the classroom. 

Chris Badgett: And on the impact front, you, you’re creating careers for people, which is a very satisfying thing to do, right?

Sure. That’s gotta feel fulfilling to help somebody get an awesome job and maintain their job and grow. That’s pretty cool. 

Richard Dunbavand : And that’s the key, it is… the industry that we work in, or the industry that we train in is hugely run by compliance. Because- The, the reason is you’ve got people in a large truck, which who knows what can happen in a large truck, things can happen, things can go wrong. So there are a huge amount of rules, regulations that these guys have got to adhere to. Now, most people come into this, a bit like I did coming into LifterLMS and WordPress. I didn’t really have a clue. I knew what I needed to achieve, but didn’t really know how to do it.

We can give the guys the structure, the scaffolding that they need to be able to go from one truck to three trucks to 10 trucks, and it is it is satisfying, if you get feedback from… or the trainers get feedback at the end of the courses and, it’s pass or fail.

They’re happy with the service that they’ve had, they’re happy with the resources that we’ve provided them. Yeah, it feels good. It feels good. 

Chris Badgett: And there’s only so much that Richard can do, so you have a team. At a- … for a training company, compliance company of this size- 

Richard Dunbavand : Yeah … 

Chris Badgett: how would you just…

There’s you and there’s trainers. Is there anybody else, like- 

Richard Dunbavand : Yeah … what’s- So we’ve got ad- so we’ve got admin teams as… We’ve got admin guys as well who are, sending out course material, who are doing the, everything that comes at the back end of the course. Obviously the accounts and so on.

So it’s… we’re taking on one or two members of staff a year, which considering we were a team of three for 12 years, it it’s, we, it’s enabling us to grow. It’s enabling us to keep moving forward and offer more courses, w- we’re always looking at the next, what can be the next addition to this, it has to be transport-related ’cause that’s what we’re known for, but what’s next? And being able… This level of growth is enabling us to take on more people, take on more trainers, take on more students. Whatever it might be. It’s a good snowball to be in. 

Chris Badgett: What what advice would you give somebody else who’s in a regulated trade industry and they’re ki- they’re in the classroom situation and they’re looking to figure out online?

What would you recommend based on your experience of figuring all this out? 

Richard Dunbavand : Just do it. Yeah. Just do it. It’s as si- it’s as simple as that. Don’t sit on your hands, it’s, it is the difference between, as I said a minute ago, the difference between a semi-regular class of five or six people to, innumerable numbers of people on courses, you know.

You’ve, obviously, your infrastructure’s gotta grow with you. But the, there was only Kevin and I, during COVID when we started doing the started doing the online courses, I was delivering them really badly. But we needed to have something, because that’s the way it wa- And we, we put it together and it just it gets easier, it’s really daunting, but get in there, get your hands, get your hands mucky with WordPress. Get your hands mucky with Lifter. There’s so many… You guys are brilliant for YouTube videos, Feature Fridays, those types of things that come out. When you’re sitting there scratching your head thinking, “I haven’t got the foggiest what I’m doing here,” I can put something in- into YouTube and your face pops up, and all of a sudden, 10 minutes later, I’ve got that little bit of direction.

So yeah, don’t be scared of it. Get into it. Get into it because the rewards are there. 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And you mentioned earlier, I think, you may have done, you don’t do a lot of customization outside of what the tools do, but maybe you’ve done some custom things. Yeah, 

Richard Dunbavand : sure. Sure. Have you done 

Chris Badgett: any mods, modifications 

Richard Dunbavand : or anything?

I have. Yeah. We’ve done quite- Yeah, tell us about those … They’re a- and it’s becoming more and more. Mostly so the, the biggest one is and it’s a follow-on from the assignments, but so what I took is I took a, an exam paper and created that as a, a standalone plugin that the guys…

And again, along the assignments route, but they were able to do that, and it mimics the it mimics that online exam. A lot of stuff that we’ve modded is really to enable me to link students with the CRS that we u- CMS that we use, with the notification systems that we use. There’s so much you can do with it.

And that’s one of the great things about WordPress that I never knew was how much you can… Y- you can do what you want with it, you can create pretty much anything, as long as you’ve got- A vague idea or support or whatever it might be, but barring the core, nothing…

We’ve not really modded barring looks, the you- how we brand things, the core is the core. Any modifications that we’ve done are to to build on that core, to build it, to enable me to know who’s doing courses who’s contributing, who’s not, to enable me to bill people properly, because a lot of ours, although you can purchase through LifterLMS obviously and purchase through the website, a lot of… Because it’s a relatively expensive course, people wanna talk about it first, so people will ring me up, “I, I wanna do this course,” and sometimes it’s a two, three-week process to get them to that position.

So I can then go to the, go to Lifter. We’ve got cohorts of stu- oh, cohorts is something that I didn’t mention earlier that’s essential. Okay. The Lifter cohort. So we have a master 

Chris Badgett: class, 

Richard Dunbavand : for want of a better word, okay, and then each month or each course, I’m creating cohorts from that.

The beauty of that is it just copies what you’ve got there and puts in… It puts a new month on it, so you know you’re putting the right students in the right place. And that, co- cohorts is fantastic. But it just… Yeah, the ability to mod and to add extra things is, it’s great.

It’s nice to have,

Chris Badgett: a question for you. S- sometimes people in the compliance niche or continuing education niche are practitioners who are looking at a second act in their career where they wanna move from being practitioner to building an education company, and- 

… 

Chris Badgett: So since you guys were already doing in-classroom training, you were approved by whatever the transport governing body- is. 

Richard Dunbavand : Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: Could you give some general advice if somebody’s just stepping into it without that approval yet? Like, how do you become an approved provider in general? What’s some general advice there? 

Richard Dunbavand : Obviously, my, my experience is UK-based, but in the UK, so it starts with, for us specifically, you’ve got two.

You’ve got two main bodies that we need to be approved by. One is the exam board themselves it’s called the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport. And again, approval is daunting, it’s another thing that people look at and think, “I don’t know whether I can do this,” “i don’t know whether I’ve got that.

Have I got the structure in place? Have I got this? Have I got that?” What you’ve gotta remember is these people will help you, they want your money, ultimately. They want you to pay to be able to get that approval, so they will support you. And it, for us the, the transport industry, the DVSA y- the, m- most people are terrified of them because, they rule the roost.

They are the rule makers, and if you break the rules, they will come down on you like a ton of bricks. But ultimately, these guys do not… They’re not there to take your license away. They’re not there to stop a training company p- training, they’re there to support you to make the industry better.

So again, don’t be afraid. There are… there’s so much support available to people to enable you to get where you want to be that just do it,

Chris Badgett: I love your attitude, Richard. My last question for you is d- are you using AI at all these days? And if so- Yeah.

Yep … what are you using and what do you do with it 

Richard Dunbavand : in your- So- … training company? I I use Claude. Yeah. I use Claude, and I use Claude a lot. It’s become… One, it saves me a huge amount of time. Huge amount of time. I don’t use it for course creation as such, because I l- we need to do that, yeah. We need to do that. We need to know what we… I don’t feel I get enough from it. But if I wanted, like the modding we talked about- Yeah … I c- I can ask Claude to create, help me create a plugin. I know what I want, but I haven’t got the skills to do it. So I say to Claude do this.”

And what would either take me several hundred pounds through Fiverr and, places like that to get a custom mod done or many months of me banging my head against the wall trying to work, trying to learn JavaScript. I can just say to Claude, “This is what I want to achieve. This is why I want to achieve it, and this is how I want to achieve it.”

And, it can… It reads, it takes information from what you guys have created. It uses that, so everything… It links everything together. It’s incredibly clever. Incredibly clever, and I think if you are gonna get involved in this sort of thing, don’t be afraid of that either.

Because, although although there’s a lot of fears with AI, what’s it gonna do next? Are we all gonna have a job? Are we all gonna do this? And A- AI can only be as good as the person that’s controlling it, the person that’s telling it what it wants to achieve. So use it. It’s a huge time-saving tool, 

Chris Badgett: yeah. That’s awesome. Good on you. Thank you, Richard, for being a shining example of a education- I 

Richard Dunbavand : don’t know about shining. I’m getting a bit old for that. 

Chris Badgett: You’re doing amazing, and it’s, I just love the story. You just have a like a nothing’s gonna stop you, no fear, just learn on the go attitude, which is awesome.

That’s what it’s all about. But again- Yeah … thank you for being a shining example of- No worries at all … what we make LifterLMS for. And I’m so glad it’s been able to have the impact for you and the business and everything that it has. 

Richard Dunbavand : I genuinely think that without it, we wouldn’t have been anywhere near where we are, so it’s key. It, it really is key. And I’m ever so grateful that, And I’m glad I found you. I’m glad I f- I’m glad Brad found that video on YouTube, ’cause it made a huge difference,

Chris Badgett: that’s Richard Dunbavand. And that’s at- Oh, then … ndrtrainingportal.com. Thank you so much for coming on the show, Richard.

We really appreciate it. 

Richard Dunbavand : No worries at all. Good luck, everyone.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS.com/gift. Go to LifterLMS.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.