How to Build a Continuing Education Business With Tim McIvor

In this episode of LMScast, Tim McIvor, the developer of SchoolPsych.com, a website that offers professional development for school psychologists, joins Chris Badgett. He discusses how to build continuing education.

Tim emphasizes how LifterLMS has been essential to his platform, allowing for features like quizzes, automatic certifications, and organized lectures that adhere to accreditation requirements.

He has enabled school psychologists throughout the world to enhance their practices and have a beneficial influence on the pupils they serve by utilizing technology to make training more accessible.

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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 Lifter LMS, 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 LMS cast. I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Tim McIvor. He’s from school psych. com, he’s a creator. He’s doing a lot of cool things in the education space. We’re going to get into his story. We’re going to learn about the impact he’s making, how he’s using LFTR LMS, but first, welcome to the show, Tim.

Thanks so much for having me, Chris. I’m really excited to talk to you. I love seeing people find success and build cool platforms. Can you tell us what schoolpsych. com is all about?

Tim McIvor: Absolutely. It’s a professional development platform for school psychologists to renew their license through my recorded webinars.

So basically there is a national association of school psychologists and they give out a different accreditation system where you can become a provider and approved provider for this national association. And then once you get that. Like schoolsick. com currently has that once you get that, you can provide certificates that school psychologists can then use to renew their license.

So it’s all built around this system of school psychologists needing these certificates in order to renew their license.

Chris Badgett: Is the license something they have to renew every year or every three years? And they need

Tim McIvor: 75 hours of professional development.

Chris Badgett: Wow. That’s awesome. And is this I don’t know the industry really well.

Is this like. All public school psychologists need this or how does that work?

Tim McIvor: So pretty much all public school psychologists need this if they are considered a nationally certified school psychologist. And school psychologists are very motivated to be nationally certified school psychologists because it’s an important credential to have for getting good jobs.

And then on top of that, you usually get a stipend for having that nationally certified credential. It’s not technically necessary to work in public schools. It can just there’s a lot of benefits to having it, getting better jobs, getting stipends.

Chris Badgett: Very cool. And just to better understand the industry correct me if I’m wrong, but not every public school has a school psychologist, like where do they operate or do they, does every school have a school?

Yeah.

Tim McIvor: It’s something we get a lot because we go on behind the scenes. So although not every school has a full time five days a week school psychologist for every single public school in the United States. There is a school psychologist assigned to that school. For me personally, for the past 10 years, I’ve worked at three schools.

And so it’s always been two days at one school, two days at another school and one day at the last school. So yeah, we’re behind the scenes. As students, they might not know who I am unless they work directly with me. Okay. And so they might feel like they don’t have a school psychologist or they don’t have this because we are typically assigned to multiple schools.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And just to better understand what school psychologists do, like what are some of the most common psychological issues that the industry helps with in the United States?

Tim McIvor: So basically we’re not the school counselors who are doing all like the counseling and all the scheduling and all the help with the school college applications.

We’re doing the special education evaluations. And we’re doing all the testing. We were writing up reports and determining if students qualify. For services. So our job is very rewarding in that sense, in that we are directly able to work with students who are referred to us, test them on these different tests that we’ve been trained on and determine whether they qualify for additional services under Different special education categories that they might qualify under such as a learning disability autism.

There’s ADHD It counts under the other health impairment category and then of course we do more than this job But as far as the primary role I would say is the special education testing But of course we do a lot of consultation with teachers crisis prevention data analysis and so on and so forth

Chris Badgett: Awesome tell us your story because it sounds like you were a you are were a school psychologist, but you decided to get into the the education side to meet the need of continuing education.

How did you make that turn or what inspired you to, get involved in education for certification and all that?

Tim McIvor: Yeah. It started in graduate school where I was asking around how do you get the best jobs in school psychology? And one of the head people of the Boston Public Schools told me that if you volunteer in a professional development association and she was referring to the Massachusetts School Psychologists Association specifically you would be able to network very well.

That would be one of the best ways to be able to get a good job. And she was absolutely right. People were able to. Pull strings for me to get jobs that were in demand. But that actually ended up being only one benefit. The other benefit is I get to learn how a professional development association works in school psychology.

And then when I went out to Nevada. After I got a job out there, they didn’t have one of these state associations, but because I had done all that volunteer work for MISPA sorry, for Massachusetts I helped create one with about five other very passionate school psychologists, and we created the Nevada Association of School Psychologists is a nonprofit, and we basically Helped the state run a whole bunch of professional development conferences.

It’s still going strong to this day. And I was the president of it from its inception for the first two years. And that’s when I really learned how to build a professional development association from the ground up.

Chris Badgett: That’s very cool. And how long ago was that, that you set out to build the association?

Tim McIvor: That was 2014. And that was actually as my first year as a school psychologist. Yeah. I was doing that and so I was the president of an entire state Simultaneously while being a first year school psychologist probably i’m probably the only person to ever do something like that It was just crazy. But people had a lot of respect for me for doing it Obviously very motivated hard working and it worked out very well.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I’m guessing you were in this industry of continuing education, did you start by delivering it at in person? Why yes. Continuing at events.

Tim McIvor: Yeah I did the traditional route the entire time I was president just doing these in person conferences, but I knew that, with go to training, go to webinar type platforms, you could totally do it live and it would make it so much easier than having to book a venue.

Plus Nevada is such a rural. State in so many parts that for them to all have to fly to one place for professional development, didn’t seem very smart. So after those two years as president, I started looking into how we could make it more accessible for that nonprofit. And I was also taking notes for my own to create a business.

And that’s exactly what I did that the year after I was president in 2017 I created a business where. I was launching live webinars on GoToWebinar, on GoToTraining. But I noticed that I, after the webinar, I wanted somewhere where we had these recordings to put it up for people who missed the training, who missed the webinar.

And that’s where LifterLMS came into play.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. So what was your history with WordPress? Was this your first WordPress site or were you already using it for something else?

Tim McIvor: No, I actually had built like five websites by then. I’m one of those crazy people who graphic design is just a passion of mine.

And so like any chance I could get to build a website for example, during my internship year, I was like the tennis coach for the high school tennis team. And I was like, let’s build a website. Like I would find any reason under the sun to build a website. And so I just love building websites and I knew it would be good because I knew I wanted to get into the business aspect of school psychology eventually.

And yeah, I did have a little bit of a background with WordPress prior to this.

Chris Badgett: So tell us about the story of how you decided to use Lifter LMS. Sometimes people get a little overwhelmed with all the LMS is out there and there’s this decision fatigue and like figuring out which tools or plugins to use.

Tell us about how you figured that out and ended up with Lifter.

Tim McIvor: I remember watching a YouTube video in early 2017 about how to create an LMS platform. And it was literally the first YouTube video I looked up was by a guy named Adam and I’m trying to remember the name of his platform.

It was like, WP something crafter, I think crafter. Thank you. WP crafter. Awesome guy created a great video. I think he, he now owns Presto. You know what I’m talking about? Yeah. Yeah. Awesome guy. Really appreciated his videos. Never talked to him or met him in person, but I could just tell he’s a very upbeat, nice guy.

And He showed step by step how to use Lifter LMS and how to set it up. And I was sold. I didn’t actually have to look at any other platform. I did later just because somebody else who I collaborated with, who wasn’t good with technical skills, wanted a platform. And I helped her find Rizuku and Kajabi and things like that.

But for me, I felt very strongly that right from the get go, that Lipter LMS checked all the boxes. And there were a lot of boxes to check because the National Association, in order to be an approved provider and give these certificates for school psychologists to renew their licensure, you had to have quizzes, you had to have evaluation feedback, you had to have, Generated certificates.

The lessons had to be structured in such a way and everything that they required Lifter LMS had. And so I never ended up looking elsewhere. I’ve been a loyal Lifter LMS customer since 2017.

Chris Badgett: Okay. Oh, awesome. You’ve been around that long. Very cool. You mentioned a lot of the things like.

Quizzes and certificates. What other features do you like most about LFTR or use the most?

Tim McIvor: Yeah, absolutely. I really like just starting off the bat the user friendly nature of the platform. And I love how in the dashboard, it just permanently stores your certificates. I can tell you that school psychologists, yes, they’re interested in professional development, but ultimately, They’re most interested in just making sure they get those certificates and that they can find them three years down the road when they are looking to renew their license.

And so for them to see that it’s all just stored with the name of the certificate, the date, and just how easy it is to auto generate these certificates on my end so that I don’t have to email each person really gave me an edge in creating this. Platform because there are other school psychologists who tried to do this type of thing, but didn’t really know how to because they figured, they might have to email individually the certificate and oftentimes what these nonprofits do is after a live conference, they’re, printing out certificates.

I’m going to write the name down. It’s very it takes a lot of time. It’s very time consuming. But the way lifter LMS just sets all this up as very auto generated help save me a bunch of time. So I could focus on. What I really care about which is just teaching school psychologists, best practices.

For me, the passion is all about how can we get school psychologists, the best possible training from the best possible people to make the largest amount of impact on the students we serve. And that to me is A big passion to know that I can be part of having a major impact, not just on the three schools I work at, but also globally.

There are school psychologists across the entire world who are using school psych dot com right now.

Chris Badgett: Oh, so cool. How do you handle the situation where if you’re used to like a webinar or a filmed event where it’s like one presentation. It’s not necessarily a course with multiple lessons.

Are you creating like a sort of a mini course that just has one lesson per course? Yeah, so one hour

Tim McIvor: webinar, followed by a quiz followed by an evaluation feedback and you’ll see that all of my webinars are set up the same way. It’s three lessons and second lessons quiz third lessons evaluation feedback But yeah, it really is just that one First lesson.

That’s the webinar. That’s the content. I’ve never had to use multiple lessons. There are some features on literal mess. I know that would be helpful for like university professors. But for me, it’s just simplified in that sense.

Chris Badgett: Do you do all the website stuff yourself or does somebody help you with it?

Tim McIvor: Yeah there were very few times where i’ve had to go on what’s that website called like code press or something like that Yeah codable where you ask the software engineer To help you fix something, but it was never related to Lyft or LMS. It was related to like security and things like that.

Making sure my website is secure from hackers. I was having an issue with that for a bit. But yeah for the most part, just learning things on YouTube that the one thing that I wanted to make sure I said today was that every time I would. Reach out to your support team. Since 2017, I’ve always gotten great responses.

I’ve even sometimes gotten video tutorials tailored specifically to my website on how to do something, which I’ve never seen a company do before. I’ve never seen a support team that specific in helping their customers. And so that’s why I’m a huge fan of Lyft or LMS. I think that’s where. You guys really stand out.

You have a great product and then it just the best support team I’ve ever seen.

Chris Badgett: I appreciate that. We we think about support, like it’s not a cost center to be minimized. It’s actually a feature of the product. So like we try to go big there.

Tim McIvor: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: You have you do a lot and that’s part of your story.

Hey, I started my first job and built an association at the same time. But like when it comes to content creation. I guess in theory you could teach everything, but you have other people teaching and you teach some, or tell us about how you gather and source all the material.

Tim McIvor: I think at first I thought that I could just do it all.

I did 12. I was broke at the time. School psychologists don’t necessarily make a ton of money. So I didn’t have money to pay speakers. And so the first, 12 webinars I made were all me. And then I noticed that once I started reaching out to guest speakers there was a lot more interest in the website because, I specialized in technology and school psychology and one person I’ll never forget how they explained this to me.

That’s like almost eating your vegetables. Like it’s good for you. School psychologists. should be learning about technology and school psychology, but in reality, they want like the meat and potatoes. They want the behavior interventions. They want all these topics that are highly in demand that I couldn’t necessarily be the expert and give them.

So that’s why I realized in order to truly make this website great I needed to start reaching out. And after I had created those 12 webinars. I had just taken any money I had made from that and put it into guest speakers. And now we’re up to over 50 webinars on the platform.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Do Do the webinars remain current and usable over time, or do they have a shelf life?

Tim McIvor: Yeah, I would say after about six, seven years, some of these webinars need to either be redone or just taken off the platform. And then for my technology webinars, because I did them, I could just go in and update them where needed, which I’ve done over the years.

Chris Badgett: If somebody is thinking about recruiting other Kind of content creators.

Do you now do you like pay them or do you pay them a royalty? Or are they just happy to do it to get exposure or experience? At

Tim McIvor: first, I was looking mostly for people who would do it for exposure. Maybe they had a book. And then there were a few school psychologists who were pretty well known. Who I was just really good friends with and they didn’t mind doing it at a cheaper price.

In fact, one of them I had quoted a pretty high price and said, Oh, you don’t have to pay me that much. I’ll do it for this. Like just very nice people in general, the field of school psychology is not your typical. Tech, this textbook business people. They’re just extremely nice people who are very passionate and have similar passions to mine.

I’m just wanting to get the word out of how to best help kids. But then again, there’s also very high in demand speakers who I don’t blame them for charging very high speaker feeds because everyone is wanting them. And it It’s a big range but as my website’s grown, I’ve been able to get speakers that who are more in demand and charge a higher price.

And so it, it’s grown over time what I can pay people.

Chris Badgett: Is this become your full time thing or you’re also still a school psychologist?

Tim McIvor: As of this as of this year, I actually stopped my full time job as a school psychologist. This along with just some part time consultation with the Boston Public Schools as well as just a few other more minor business ventures is my full time thing.

So basically it was getting to the point where this was doing better. than my full time job as a school psychologist. I felt like I had more impact here globally to help Children. It just aligned with my passions. So I had been a school psychologist for five years in Nevada full time, then a school psychologist for five years in Florida full time.

This is my first ever school year where I’m not actually in the schools anymore. So yeah lifter illness is, has helped me substantially. And in getting to that goal, which is just a dream of mine.

Chris Badgett: Wow. Awesome. Congratulations on that. Thank you. How do I know people who do like professional development or are thinking about it?

What they often ask how do you get clients or how do you get in the flow of people needing continuing education credits? Like how did you Get that going. And what do you continue to do?

Tim McIvor: Yeah, that’s one of the areas where I think I thrive. The most is the marketing component because I am competing with about a thousand other professional development associations that there’s maybe not a thousand, but there are so many different providers who provide these NASA approved certificates.

There are also the APA, which the American Psychological Association, which provides certificates, and our National Association counts those as well. So if you count all the providers from the A. P. A. Then it’s well over 1000 who I’m competing against. But one way I’ve found to really stand out. Is I’m extremely active on social media.

I was watching a few YouTube videos. I remember back in 2020 that had said in order to stand out, you need to add humor. You can’t just constantly promote your webinars. People won’t like it. They won’t follow you. They’ll just get bored of your page. But if with a few exceptions, of course, who are super passionate about professional development.

But if you can incorporate some really funny humor or really meaningful, valuable resources into your social media posts, that schools that call this can find a lot of value. And then every once in a while mentioned that you’ve got a new professional development webinar on your platform. That has been the key to my success.

I’ve gotten over 10, 000 followers on both Facebook and Instagram that way. And they even. In that YouTube video had mentioned these are some of the accounts where they’re using humor and they’re getting like 100, 000 followers. And it was like this accountant, this like random accountant Twitter page that was using pretty good humor.

And I just learned how they did it and then applied it to my page.

Chris Badgett: Wow, that’s cool. Is there seasonality to this continuing ed or is it just always happening? People are signing up or do people tend to get their credits at a certain time of year or whatever?

Tim McIvor: It’s all year round, but I noticed that June is a great Time because it’s pretty much the end of the school year.

They’re wrapping up the school year. The kids are out, but sometimes the school psychologist still need to work another maybe week or so without the students. And so they’re getting around to all the things they wanted to do during the school year, but didn’t have time to. And a lot of that is professional development.

Another one is August. And September at the very beginning of the school year school psychologists don’t necessarily have the busiest schedules yet because usually the teachers are still getting to know their students before referring them to the school psychologist and there’s usually a honeymoon to where the students are maybe behaving much better than they typically do throughout the school year.

Chris Badgett: What’s the business model? Are you doing like just a la carte, individual core sales or how do you, what’s the,

Tim McIvor: that was the main difference between when I was only making a little bit of money on this. And when I realized that certain ways to price it took it exponentially more sales.

And What I realized maybe a year and a half ago is that instead of doing just individual webinars, which there’s still an option to for individual webinars at 25 a webinar, you can purchase an individual webinar or for 99. You can access. All the webinars. And I do the sale about three times a year.

I noticed I get most of my revenue just from those three sales. So what I found is that how you do your pricing dramatically impacts how successful you are, because I would say the first five years, I really didn’t make a lot of money just on the individual 25 per webinar pricing setup.

It wasn’t until I started doing that. All the webinars for X amount that people really started flocking to the website.

Chris Badgett: Do you have a, is there an access period on that? Like you get access for a year or is it lifetime access or what?

Tim McIvor: It’s a one year access to all the webinars.

Chris Badgett: Can people take the same training three years later or do they have to do new stuff all the time or how does that work?

Tim McIvor: Sometimes they do. And then I’ll have to go into the certificate and manually edit it. So I want to give LifterLMS some credit because I know you guys started out where the certificate page was very rigid. And by now it’s just so flexible. One of the best things you guys did was create such a versatile.

Certificate set up because that actually has been extremely helpful. The certificates are probably the most important after the content of the webinar itself, the certificates are the most important component to my website. And so when people are saying, Hey I watched this webinar again, three years later, I can go in and manually edit the date to, to show that.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome.

Tim McIvor: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Do you have any like metrics you can share, like to get a sense of impact, like how many students are over

Tim McIvor: 5, 000 individual users. Over 5, 000 school psychologists and keep in mind, this is a very niche, small field. This is not like school counselors where there’s 150, 000 of them.

There’s only about 30 to 40, 000 school psychologists nationwide. There’s a shortage of us. And so for me to have. 5, 000 users and there’s really only 30, 000. It’s like a six of the entire demographic, which I’m really proud of.

Chris Badgett: Wow. You’ve got 15 percent of the market or whatever. That’s amazing. It’s pretty good.

How do you think about you’ve scaled this thing and it’s going great. Did you start like in Nevada or wherever. And then, like, how did you think about going to multiple states? And you’ve also mentioned international expansion. Like, how do you think about that?

Tim McIvor: Yeah, I just started promoting on these Facebook forums where all the school psychologists talked nationally and internationally.

And I would never promote it on these Facebook forums. I would just basically like share memes to these Facebook groups, wherever all these school psychologists nationally are talking. Then they started following me on Facebook. I noticed for with Instagram, I would just do follow for follow type techniques where I’d follow school psychologists all across the country.

And it really didn’t matter that I was in Nevada because this was accessible.

Chris Badgett: Your ground game is strong. Like you’re doing a lot to get it out there.

Tim McIvor: It was very cool to see what, when I did the Google analytics and see Oh my gosh, this isn’t just in the U S this is everywhere.

I couldn’t believe that.

Chris Badgett: So like you your program’s kind of designed around the U S standards, but like other countries and stuff, except for credit or

Tim McIvor: no, it’s what it is. There’s like a lot of. School psychologists on like military, but US school psychologists like on military bases and they say like without this I could have never kept my kept renewing my national certification for the US.

So sometimes people have plans to go back to the US after X amount of years and so they might be for whatever reason. In a different country but they still want to keep up their national certification here in the u. s And they say my website’s the best way to do that

Chris Badgett: what just shifting gears back to the tech What other tech is really critical to you like software or plugins or themes or hosting that?

You know a really important part of your stack

Tim McIvor: Sure. I think that videos are the next biggest thing. And I really for, because there are school psychologists who are deaf and hard of hearing, and because we are so focused on helping and accommodating students with disabilities, it would be very hypocritical if I wasn’t accommodating school psychologists.

With disabilities such as those who are deaf and hard of hearing. So closed captions is a must for all of my webinars and there are closed captions on there. And then on top of that features that I would love to have is, with the advanced lift or homeless videos. I’ve looked into it and I’ve actually bought it twice and then realized that there was a certain feature that is making it.

Less versatile. So basically, when you’re watching the video, and then you click out of the screen to, for example, click on a different window, or maybe you’re clicking on the PowerPoint slides, the video stops. And I’ve never really wanted that to happen. I want it to flow. For some of my technology webinars.

I say we’re gonna, we’re gonna learn excel in real time so that you can start to crunch the numbers. But if they’re clicking on excel and then the video immediately stops, or if they’re clicking on Google sheets or Google forms, all these different technology platforms, it defeats the purpose. So one of the things I had.

Wanted to mention in the Lifter LMS advanced videos feedback is that I love a lot of the different features. I just wish there was a way to toggle off the when you click on a different screen, the video immediately stops because I think it actually. loses a little bit of user friendliness that way.

I understand the purpose. We want to make sure people watch it from start to finish. But I also think that if people don’t want to watch something, they’ll find a way they’ll just be on their phones with the thing on silent. You know what I mean? Like ultimately we want to give users some flexibility.

If there is a PowerPoint slides on another tab to look at it while they’re listening to the video. And so I’ve actually bought. The advanced videos and then realized it wasn’t for me because of that feature and you know how you can vote for something to be Updated I put in a vote And I don’t think it did very well But I voted to just give it a little toggle on and off that way we can choose whether we want it To be that way or not.

Chris Badgett: I’ll have to look closely at that I thought we had a that was like an option to turn on or off. But if that’s not Okay, that’s good feedback. I

Tim McIvor: would love, right now my users, when they go to my webinars, I have to tell them in the notes note where you left off, because they can’t remember.

Where you left off and I know advanced videos plugin, it’ll remember where you left off, which is why I really want that plugin. But because of the other component of the plugin, I haven’t been able to use it.

Chris Badgett: All right. Yeah. That’s really good. That’s totally sensible. That makes a lot of sense.

Tim McIvor: Cool.

Chris Badgett: And you asking for that live here definitely helps. Maybe

Tim McIvor: other people will see this and vote for it. That would be great. But yeah,

Chris Badgett: what are you using for video hosting

Tim McIvor: Vimeo?

Chris Badgett: Yeah,

Tim McIvor: that’s

Chris Badgett: the standard. That’s great.

Tim McIvor: I know that Adam is big on from WP crafters, big on w bunny. net. And so I, I. I had made it on my to do list to check that out.

Maybe it’s a cheaper option. Vimeo just raised their prices on us. So who knows, maybe bunny. net is the future. And so that’s one of the things on my to do list is maybe transferring it over to bunny. net.

Chris Badgett: All right. Any other like essential tech, like what do you put your email list on and or any other plugins you love and stuff?

So

Tim McIvor: I, I do love how with the Lifter LMS reporting, I can just download everything to Excel and then upload it to Brevo a email marketing. One of the things that I also wanted to give some feedback on was like the memberships. Sometimes people don’t want the subscription of basically having to have it auto renew every time.

But let’s say those same people, they. Purchase a one year subscription to all the webinars on schoolsick. com and then right before that membership is over, they repurchase a membership for another year. They renew without without it. What am I trying to say without their first membership expiring yet?

It doesn’t trigger an entire new year on all the webinars. It has to say expired before that happens. And basically, that’s one of the problems that I’ve run into. And from your tech support, they said that would be a good thing to work on in the future, but it would be extremely helpful because there are people who pay for my membership and then they end up wondering what happens a few days later when all their webinars expire.

Chris Badgett: Oh, that makes sense. Yeah, that is something to look at. So you’re selling the membership is all access with the annual renewal.

Tim McIvor: So for me, I don’t, yeah it’s an annual renewal, but every time I do a different membership, so I have the spring break sale, that’s one membership. Then I have the fall membership.

Then I have the blacks Friday membership. And then I have a new like 2025 spring break membership. So these are all different memberships. So they go from. The 2024 spring break membership and then by the 2025 spring break membership a few days before their 2024 spring break membership ends and then it doesn’t auto renew all the webinars because they’re not expired yet.

Chris Badgett: I see what you’re saying Yeah, we could look at that and how to smooth that out for you

Tim McIvor: Yeah, I think anytime somebody just buys something it should immediately kind of auto update the enrollment to the new okay, this is when the year starts because they just bought it Even if they bought it while they were still enrolled in it.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, that’s good feedback. You say you were manually adding people to Brevo?

Tim McIvor: Yeah. Yeah. You can do that.

Chris Badgett: I was just wondering if have you heard of WP fusion?

Tim McIvor: No, I haven’t.

Chris Badgett: I’m going to check right now, but WPP fusion just, excuse me, automates. Passing contacts from LifterMS to the CRMs.

Oh, cool. And I’m wondering if if Brevo is on their list.

Tim McIvor: Yeah. Let me check out WPFusion. I chose Brevo just because it’s cheaper. Know it’s maybe not one of the most well known of the email marketing platforms.

Chris Badgett: WPFusion integrates with 50 or so Oh yeah. I’m there.

I’m done. Yeah, they do have a Brevo integration. So that’s awesome. Thank

Tim McIvor: you for letting me know that makes it a lot easier.

Chris Badgett: And they probably have a Black Friday sale coming up.

Tim McIvor: Yeah. Yeah, that’s true. And I give you guys a lot of credit that the 60 percent off. Sometimes the crazy Black Friday sales that you guys do is just always love those.

Always look forward to those. Appreciate that.

Chris Badgett: And I noticed you do a Black Friday strategy as well.

Tim McIvor: Yeah. That, that’s how I said I got the sales from like exponentially higher when I started saying, you can have all the webinars for XML. That was really what was my biggest breakthrough in business so far.

Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. There’s a saying that I always try to remember cause I’ve been doing running sales and doing marketing for a long time that you get tired of your marketing before your market ever does. So just keep doing sales hammering.

Tim McIvor: Yeah. Hammer. And sometimes I’ll do the same meme from two years ago and people will forget that I even posted that meme.

And so for me, it’s Oh, that’s so lame to post the same joke twice. But then it gets three times as many likes. I’m like, Oh, I guess people forgot I did it or something. I don’t know.

Chris Badgett: And there’s new people that come in.

Tim McIvor: Yeah. New people. Sometimes you have to be a little bit repetitive with some of your content and it saves you time that way.

You’re not constantly having to look for new stuff,

Chris Badgett: how just big picture question, how has the school psych. com website and online business and education platform changed your life?

Tim McIvor: Yeah, that, that’s been the biggest component is that with my day job that I had for 10 years, it was just such a grind having to do basically an eight to five every Monday through Friday, and then go home and work on these passion projects at nights and weekends so to be able to have a platform that helped me very quickly get to where my goals were to the point where I’m no longer working my days, I’m able to just solely focus on my passion projects and be creative.

I honestly have never felt happier in my entire life. And I never knew that this could ever happen. Like I would say five years ago, I wasn’t making that much money. So I never saw the true potential of it. Ironically, it wasn’t until COVID that people started really going from these live conferences to recorded webinars.

And that’s when it started to take off.

Chris Badgett: Yeah that’s fantastic. What was the timeline from let’s say when you got your WordPress site set up and you chose Lifter to that moment where you it was really working and you were able to like, how many years are we talking about there?

Tim McIvor: Talking about six years where I realized, okay, I can actually quit my job because this is making more money than my regular job. And then I just to be on the safe side, did one more year in the schools. And that was my hardest year because by that point, my website truly was Extremely time consuming.

There’s a lot of people messaging me wanting to, either collaborate with webinars or this or that it was growing. And so it’s to the point where I really needed to be able to work on this full time. So seven years.

Chris Badgett: Nice. And you’re definitely no stranger to hard work. It sounds and is it besides like having outside content creators that are doing webinar content, is it just you or do you have any team members or,

Tim McIvor: so I do have team members, but they’re not necessarily, I’m like.

Pretty much the main guy who runs this thing, but I feel like it’s always important to get second opinions on things. And so I’ve set it up in a way where there are certain school psychologists who have volunteered to help me out. They’re friends of mine, and I’ll go to them for either advice or just a variety of different tasks that are very are not very time consuming, but are very helpful to me to get second opinions and I’ll make sure that they get all the webinars for free all the time for helping volunteer.

Chris Badgett: And what motivates you like, to do a side project and, just keep working on it grinding for six, seven years. And I know it was like getting growing over time, but what kept you motivated at all that to do all that?

Tim McIvor: A big foundation of that and that was my passion for making sure school psychologists knew the correct the correct best practices.

And I’ll give you a story, which is that in the 90s, there were these reading wars, and it’s like, how do we teach kids to read? theory which focused on phonics and one theory that just basically focused on whole words and context clues. And these two groups were basically constantly fighting over school district money because one had a curriculum for whole word, one had a curriculum for phonics.

And then in the nineties they did all this research saying it’s phonics. Phonics is much better than whole word reading. But in the two thousands because whole word reading had such good marketing and they had so much money behind it and it was a lot more books so they could make a lot more money.

So big corporations were very interested. Whole word reading one out in the 2000s and a lot of children were taught to read using whole word reading, which was not the best way. Now there are going to be kids who basically learned it and made the best of it, which is fine. But the kids who had learning disabilities needed phonics, meaning that we weren’t getting at all students with this method.

And as a result, a lot of kids had fallen behind. And so that was just one story that we learned about in graduate school of how important it is. To know the best practices in order to give the best recommendations, and by now in 2024, a lot of those companies that teach whole word reading are going broke because finally, the word is getting out that, phonics is the sole way you can’t just teach kids to read based on context clues, having them guess what it might, what the word might mean.

And basically taking that one story and applying it to all different areas of school. psychology. We need to teach school psychologists to recommend great interventions to teachers great recommendations to parents of what to do at home. School psychologists are involved with so many different areas of the school that if they’re very knowledgeable, they can equip so many other educators and just have an amazing impact on the children we work with.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. That’s definitely something I’ve seen with people who stay the course and find success is, making money and is nice, but there’s got to be that passion and sense of there’s going to be a why,

Tim McIvor: because the amount of weekends in my late twenties, early thirties, and the amount of nights.

That I could have been out doing really fun hobbies or this or that. You have to have a why when it gets tough and I’ve always had that really strong, why

Chris Badgett: Tim, I want to thank you for coming on the show and sharing your story and I’m really proud of you and it’s it’s really inspiring to see what you’ve done and the impact you’re making in the world and what it’s done for your life and stuff like that.

Keep up the great work. Thanks for being a shining example.

Tim McIvor: Oh, absolutely. Anytime. Bye bye. Always happy to be on this podcast. And if you want me out in a future episode, I’d be more than happy to, honestly, I was so honored to be on this.

Chris Badgett: Great. We’ll have to do it again in another couple of years.

Yeah. We can get an update.

Tim McIvor: Where am I? Where am I in a few years? I would love that.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Thank you so much, Tim.

Tim McIvor: Absolutely. Take care, Chris.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. 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 forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.