Using LifterLMS To Create Repeatable eLearning Income Streams in a Huge Niche with Jim Hankins

Chris Badgett and Jim Hankins discuss how Jim and his wife, Doreen, developed a flourishing e-learning firm in the firearm safety teaching area. Training was an important part of the company when they first opened as a gun store. They eventually discovered their love for teaching and switched to weapon safety instruction. Doreen swiftly rose to prominence as one of the best educators in the field. Using her knowledge to expand their company. To assist other instructors and other companies increase their web presence. She even penned a book called “The Firearms Marketing Toolkit“.

They sought to have their courses approved by regulatory bodies so that they could become the preferred supplier of weapon safety instruction, as handgun training frequently entails both legal compliance and required knowledge.

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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 Jim Hankins. He’s from cribops. com. Jim is a shining example of what I call an education entrepreneur who has found a niche successfully deployed e learning and repeated ways in the firearm safety niche.

And he’s done this business with his wife and there’s so much to unpack here, but first welcome to the show, Jim. Thanks Chris. It’s great to be here. So tell us about when I saw you, when you reached out or we connected and I saw you had so many sites. I was like, this is awesome. It’s hard enough for some people to get one site off the ground.

Tell us about the genesis of firearm safety training and how you were able to. Figure go into this niche, but also do it in a repeated manner in different contexts.

Jim Hankins: Sure. So my wife and I started this business firearms training business actually starting as a gun store, as a retail outlet with training as a.

Big part of the business, but yeah, so it’s, yeah, 17 years ago. Then we just over time decided that we actually really liked the training aspect of it and gave up the, the retail side of it and just went a hundred percent for training. Doreen is a marketing genius when it comes to just relationship building and local local marketing, cause that’s a very local business, and so she just became pretty successful over time. And in the firearms training business, there’s, certifying bodies that create the content that the States we’ll say, yes, this meets our criteria and and they oftentimes have other services that they provide that they sell to customers and Doreen became one of the top instructors in that space.

So yeah, long story short, she then wrote a book. There’s a book an Amazon called the firearms marketing toolkit, if I remember correctly. That’s focused on helping firearms instructors really, it applies to any local business on how to, how to be found on the internet.

And we started. Providing services, coaching services and hosting services for CRM, marketing, automation, those kind of things, anything to help them make the most of the time because they’re usually solopreneurs, right? Or there might maybe a husband and wife, team they oftentimes have a, main job and this is a side hustle they do on the weekends, right?

So anything they could do to help automate that process of, user sign up and those kind of things. We started recording content for them that they could in turn sell or give away to their customers to get them moving in the direction of using e learning as another aspect of their business.

Dream was getting pretty successful with that concept in the state of Michigan, she created a renewal class that could be taken online. So now that could be purchased anywhere in the state. She created a real estate agent safety. Class that actually she went through the process of getting it approved for continuing education.

And so now you get to see credits for that. She just started pushing that type of content out to other instructors. And then that became, a whole another business of hosting, web hosting and CRM hosting for the class. For the instructors. Yeah. Yeah that’s how we got into the, learning management as a service and providing it to other customers.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, you guys create the content or you’re using licensed content or a little bit of both.

Jim Hankins: We’re creating all of our own content. Then just literally providing that over to them as a white label and they can, sell or. Or give away as a lead magnet. In some cases, it’s really short just for the purpose of lead magnets.

It could be content that helps the students become acclimated to the vernacular before the class. They have a little, 30 minute class that they can take at their option. Before they join if they’re new to that world. And yeah, so that’s what we do.

Chris Badgett: What, like I see a lot of people who are in the mandatory education space.

It could be for a job like to keep a license or get credits or it could be like I’ve seen stuff in the court systems. But I think one of the biggest things you have to figure out and one of those is if there is a governing body, how to work with them or find them or help get them to promote you once you’re approved and just build that relationship.

What kind of general advice do you have about? Being seen and working with a, like a governing regulatory body. Yeah. So it’s

Jim Hankins: all about income producing activities is what I’ve heard others say. Yeah. So you have to look at what can you do on a daily basis to reach out and expand your business to be found, it’s hard to. For people to find you if you’re not doing anything to to make that happen. I’ll give you a simple example, as you mentioned, the court systems. There are people that uh, do things they shouldn’t have and get in trouble with the law. As it relates to firearms training, one of the simple things that Doreen did was she.

That can in fact, she just did this last night dropping off a bunch of mailers to the the bail bondsman’s and the, various court related folks to tell them about our court ordered firearms safety training as an option. And so the, and then she does that, right.

Those are typically live, but that’s an example of, just reaching out into your community and figuring out, what can you offer at, one to many. That that enables you to, satisfy a need and create a niche all by yourself. I’m pretty confident there’s probably nobody else doing that because they just haven’t thought of it and she’s able to, yeah.

Do those classes all throughout the week. And it makes it easy for the court system, right? Cause they’ve already had these court ordered, firearm safety training, but then the people go to the trainers looking for the offering and they’ll say, yeah, we don’t have that.

Yeah. So she doesn’t remote. And there’s no, no, obviously no firearms involved because these people are, have been now precluded from having, a firearm, but they still need to have the aim to understand what they did wrong. As it relates to the law. Yeah.

Chris Badgett: It sounds so simple, but find a need and fill it, do outbound sales and find the people that are talking to the people that need what you have and just develop that relationship and scale that.

It sounds so simple, but yes. It’s not like locals, local people.

Jim Hankins: All the things that used to work still work in local, like the tear offs printed on, cork boards and outside of grocery stores and things like that.

Business cards at the local diner. She still does all those things. And, when we go and frequent those diners, as we do. We look and there’s one tag left on the tear off up time to, put the new one, out there. So yeah, it’s just yeah, basic blocking and tackling on the local side.

Chris Badgett: Tell us about, you have a lot of websites in the firearm safety. Like why are there so many sites? I know you have ranges, you have. Trainers, individual trainers. Like how do you, how did you scale this thing and why are there different sites and all that?

Jim Hankins: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: There,

Jim Hankins: like I said there’s two kind of large training organizations that create the content that instructors then use.

And, they’re certified to be an instructor by those those organizations, and then they just, put the we’re open sign out front of their business and off they go. There’s about a, it’s hard to say that how many are active. There’s probably about 145, 000 instructors in the U S that do this and maybe, maybe half of that number are active.

I don’t, I don’t know. And, and so there, yeah, there’s no regional requirements. In fact, we had a, in our brick and mortar classroom, we had another instructor open up three doors down in a, like a strip mall area. So it’s a very competitive market, but there’s just, it’s predominantly the people states where there’s a requirement for for training to get a license.

Yeah that’s the bread and butter. Then there are organizations that just do training, just safety training in general. Families will bring their kids in and those kinds of things businesses will bring their employees and depending on the type of business, like if it’s a security business or really anything.

And yeah, the instructors are there to, to fill that need. And we’re essentially helping them with the marketing. Tool set the learning content and even the concept that they could have make their own content or use something other than what they’d been teaching. That’s for whatever, it’s funny.

The light go light bulb goes off in their mind. They’re like, Oh, you mean I could create my own content? I was like yes, you can. You don’t just have to focus on the state. The state license based content, you can do all these other things, like as the example, one of the courses we provide is that real estate agent safety class that they can use.

They don’t have to go off and get it certified in their state for CE credits but they could, if they wanted to but yeah, anything like that.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, I think it’s interesting how my, my, I got started in all this actually in a niche gardening niche. It made me realize, and this was like almost 15 years ago, I think.

We may be super technical people here on this call, but there’s a lot of industries that are still digitizing, still, figuring out scaling systems and automation and things like this. Can you give us a sense, maybe some figures of how big the niche is? Cause when I think of safety niche I’ve seen a lot of like martial arts, personal safety training on LFTR LMS and stuff like that.

Self defense, like safety is a huge niche and firearm safety is like a sub niche within that. But like, how big is this thing? Cause I, the human mind just can’t comprehend the scale of certain niches,

Jim Hankins: yeah. I don’t have those figures off the top of my head. But it is quite large.

And then you can extend out to facilities, security, and all those kinds of things. It just balloons just there, there’s so many different, yeah, sub niches of the of safety in general. So I, I came from. A fair amount of focus. I mentioned that I left my wife to run the firearms training business while I had one of my apps acquired and it was safety based.

So in fact, it was called safety grid. So it was a panic button that was I joined a company that did satellite emergency notification coordination. You pressed a button, a panic button on a satellite device, and it would, they coordinate the the response, right? Pull you outside the mountain, out in the middle of the ocean, wherever you happen to be, right?

And so I, I. They took the kind of intellectual property that I had for a group based alerting system that I called group safety. The reason why they brought me in was it was, this was post Sandy hook. And so I was listening to the 911 recordings and trying to figure out what kind of technical.

Solutions could have been brought to bear to increase the response time and to better coordinate the information because there was a lot of confusion as you might imagine in that event. And so when I and the company that I joined. At the time was my service provider to do the monitor alert.

I would send the alert to them. They would, do the the event coordination. And I called them and I said, Hey, I’d really like it. If you’d be able to facilitate me sending you a group based alerting so that I could tell which building somebody was in and coordinate that. And then I had.

Communication between all the parties that they could communicate themselves silent observation. Of what was happening those kinds of things. And they’re like, yeah, this is really interesting. Can you join us? Uh, we’re going to have a meeting here and we’d like to get more information.

I was like, Oh, I guess I could. And it ended up being in Morocco where they had their the meeting, the gentleman, one of the gentlemen lived there. And then, yeah, the rest was history. They asked me to join and, I, build a product in that space. So yeah, so I’ve been in the safety space on the technical side, building, life and limb services.

So I built their cloud infrastructure for that. And then Garmin bought them, bought the assets of that business back about three years ago, I had my exit. Now here I am one trick pony again building other messaging services.

Chris Badgett: Nice. And am I correct? All the, or most of all this, these businesses and projects have been just you and your wife one of the things I’ve noticed in some successful e learning businesses are that there’s often like a technical person and then like the marketing sales and expertise and stuff.

It’s just interesting. Tell us about the dynamic in that partnership on the business side, like how it how you guys complement each other,

Jim Hankins: right? Yeah, and you’re right. So there’s that whole, creative and marketing, brain side, which is not me. I’m more of the technical guy. And yeah, we just we leverage each other’s strengths and it’s tough as a a husband and wife to, kind of balance that okay.

Now works off. Sometimes that’s really hard to turn the work off. It never really is totally off, but yeah, we just, wake up and what are we going to do today? And, you’re going to do this and I’m going to do this. And occasionally we meet in the middle and then get things done.

Yeah.

Chris Badgett: As a technical person, I’m super curious, like how did you get into WordPress? For example, you could have built like a custom LMS solution or whatever. Yeah. How did you get to WordPress?

Jim Hankins: Yeah. So I did have a period of my life where I worked at an ISP and then I owned my own ISP.

I did have some on the hosting side I had, hosting WordPress, as they say, I think it’s, I think you could say that. Yeah, I was providing services that included. Hosting WordPress. So I had that some kind of familiarity with it as a kind of back end job or C developer, WordPress wouldn’t normally be my first thing I would reach for a solution, but in the context of the, like the firearms trainers, they already have a a WordPress site.

Many times, or they’re on Wix or something else. I’ll usually pull them into WordPress from that. It’s sometimes better to just. You know, accept the world that you live in and figure out ways that you can optimize it. With a very small amount of coding on my side, I can drop in something that connects their WordPress site to something else.

And make it happen. It’s great that Lifter because it’s of its existence. It makes it super easy for us to incorporate that e learning content, which is part of our offer. With, super, super easy, stamping those those solutions out and hosting them and centrally managing that stuff.

So you have a great product as it relates to, all the features and the API, which we leverage to to make it easier as we start to stamp more and more of these sites. Out there and each of them, have their own little niches in the. In and of themselves. If it’s a range, then they’re going to have a completely different, requirements than just a regular instructor.

Chris Badgett: Do you know can you think back to how you chose lifter LMS? And decided I think this is the option for us.

Jim Hankins: Yeah. So very specifically the, one of the requirements we had was we got approached by one of the national training organizations that had an underwritten product that they.

I wanted to start enabling ranges and some instructors to resell. And they asked us if we could do that, that the integration with them and enable it, be an enablement partner for them in that space. And so the product needed to be at that point WordPress based because we’d already cross that line. But it also needed to have a concept of membership. And I preferred not to have, to, to play with multiple products if I didn’t have to as for my, enterprise, days of knowing that, you know, having. One source as close as possible to have, the solution is, the cost of delivery is going to be less.

And yeah, you have that membership feature, the group feature, which was super interesting. And we just integrated with the the events that come from enrollment. To build a custom offer that did the integration to allow them to resell the membership. So we WordPress becomes a single point of truth for this national organization with hundreds of thousands of members today to enable their, many thousands of instructors to resell their product offer.

Chris Badgett: Tell us more about the unique way you’re using memberships.

Jim Hankins: Yeah so in, in the case of the the ranges. Many of them already have a concept of a membership and the national. To use their the range, get a discount, guarantee they’re going to have a slot or what have you.

So the national training organization obviously is looking. Helping them have more door swings, increasing their membership. And in most cases, the the ranges didn’t have an automated. Way of selling this membership. You came in, you had to go into the store and, they’d probably write you down on a, a three ring, VIP piece of paper, sticky note, the side of the cash register, who knows, they’re usually one or two person, shops, so they’re not, huge conglomerates. So we come in and provide an ability for them to sell those memberships online, which, they haven’t done yet. But then also have those memberships have more stickiness because of that that membership offers like an underwritten product that You know that the members would like, right?

And then their website becomes the single point of truth to come in and update their payment information, add more members to their memberships, et cetera. So we had that piece then. And then the next thing that, of course, that came, which we Surprisingly, I didn’t think of right off the gate because this move so fast was you have the people at the point of sale that need to be able to look up those memberships.

And yeah, we’re working on making that a little more less of a need to log in directly into the WordPress back end to. Just have that, checkout experience. So yeah, so it’s just central to the to the part of them being able to sell memberships both on premise at the cash register, point of sale.

One of the ways we did that was with a foo point of sale and using the WooCommerce integration and Lifter LMS, so that kind of, that, that kind of. Another example of trying to find something off the shelf that we could quickly get together and connect the dots. And so that it would check the box of, point of sale slash selling the service online.

So yeah, that’s a,

Chris Badgett: another. Such a small world. I was I literally had a meal. Both in Taiwan and in Portland, Oregon at a WordPress event with the founder of Foo. Okay, great. It’s neat to see people using the tools together. You mentioned memberships, groups. I know you’re using courses.

Are there any other key features of lifter? For example, are you using the certification, like certificates or anything, or

Jim Hankins: some instructors ask for those things, usually the, these certificates in their case are like really state governed. So they’re usually, their paper ink signed.

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Jim Hankins: And they haven’t started asking for that too much. We’re not using those features. It’s mostly around the the ability to event on when they’ve signed up so that you know, like for example, if they sign up for an in person class, we might use foo events for listing that event and then use that to trigger the.

The pre training that they’ll get, so we’ll auto enroll them based upon that to give them access to training, and then we’ll link those events to the CRM to do the suggestive sale after the fact for nurturing to, suggest either other in person training or, e learning training.

Yeah.

Chris Badgett: So as a prolific LMS website creator, what are some besides Lyft or LMS, what are some essential like plugins theme? What hosting do you like to use? What are like the key tool sets that you really love working with?

Jim Hankins: So we do our own hosting and we host on Amazon. I’ve spent, many years working on Amazon.

That’s what I built that emergency response system on. Yeah, so we’re huge fans of that mostly so that we have, more control. And if a customer raises a problem, we’re able to get right to, the root of the problem because we own the infrastructure in that case, or the, infrastructure is code, a thing.

Our, we’re huge fans of Jack’s WP fusion. So we use that quite a bit to integrate with our, with CRM and what do you

Chris Badgett: like for CRM?

Jim Hankins: So we’re actually, we resell GHL currently but we are also taking a, we have the Fluent CRM offer, and we’re looking to try to pull that in to make it a little simpler, so people aren’t bouncing back and forth between user interfaces the Fluent Community is super interesting as well, so we’re we’re taking a look at that and then, the kind of, Impetus of launching the new offering for crib ops for webhook processing.

We use that as part of our our tool set as well. We, used it ourselves internally, and now we’ve brought that out to the public for for sale as a software, as a service to so many, WordPress sites use webhooks, in inbound and outbound for various things.

And crib ops basically gives gives you the ability to have kind of a production ready. Place to send a webhook so that you don’t lose messages that are important to your business or to your customer order fulfillment, et cetera, right? So we take we give the ability for the message to be in queued when it’s sent.

So in the event that the actual service that’s supposed to be receiving the webhook is down or is overwhelmed because you got lucky and you’ve got this viral sale going on, right? We’re Production ready buffer in between where you’re sitting the webhook and where you’re you’re processing it.

And that also we call it crib ops tongue in cheek because it is, it also enables you to run those webhook processing things, automations AI enrichment, whatever it is you’re doing on premise you don’t need a you don’t need to open up your. Firewall and expose your network to the world.

It’s a, our software talks to that place where the messages are queued. And it pulls it in and then you send it wherever you need to send it. It could be N8N or things like that, that allow you to not only process, zillions of messages, but do so at, near, near zero costs because you’re just paying for whatever the wattage is of the compute stuff that you have, which could be old servers or PCs, et cetera, that are, laying around gathering dust, wake them up, blow them off put a fresh operating system on and make them.

Put them to work saving you money and providing value to the customer. So

Chris Badgett: for the non technical listener, could you just describe like a web hook and a simple example of how an LMS site might use one? Yeah.

Jim Hankins: So LFTR has actually inbuilt the ability to send a web hooks which are nothing more than you can think of them as notifications.

That’s of interest. And you basically you can go right into LFTR and and tell it, Hey, at the point of enrollment, I would like you to send me that notification because I’m going to go off and do other things in, in, in advance of them, attending or. Because of them attending an enrollment, right?

And that could be like in the firearms training world, that could be, they need to sign waivers or, those kinds of things in advance of, attending a course. And it’s important that the. that the message be delivered at the right time, right? So right within Lifter LMS in the settings there you can, set that up and then in there, it asks for a URL and that URL is the web hook endpoint, what we provide is a way where we give you the option to generate your own web hook endpoint, and then you’ll then be responsible for.

Taking the message in and doing whatever it is. The lots of people use services like Zapier that’s or make Linode those kinds of services that are public automation tool sets, but you’re going to pay. For the number of tasks that you run through, and they generally start with about like 10, 000, or so workflows a month.

But if you’re using the service for things like maybe a reactivation campaign, so you have many tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or a million. Customer contacts that you’re reaching out to on a regular basis that becomes a cost prohibitive to run it through a service like that, or as you could run a service, on premise doing all the same things, enriching it with AI or whatever it is you’d like to do using.

Local GPU resources versus paying for it in the cloud to process millions of messages. And yeah, we just sit in front of that to allow you to do that at scale and without losing messages Due to like momentary outages of your internet connection or, your computer tipping over cat takes out the network cable or whatever it is you have going on.

Yeah. So we’ll hold onto that message long enough for you to recover from that, let you know if there is a problem. And then once you get started back up, the message is there to process and do whatever it is it needs to do. Awesome.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Go check out crib ops. com. A few more just final questions for you, Jim.

Can you help describe like the kind of impact you’ve been able to have with your LMS projects? Like something like Number of students, number of courses, like lives touched, anything like that? Just, I just want to inspire people from somebody who’s done lifter at scale, what they’re doing.

Jim Hankins: Yeah. So like in the space with the the instructor field that is a, a passion project for many. And the, it’s the difference between them still being able to do it and not by giving them the opportunity to make additional income, additional revenue sources they hadn’t even dreamed of by taking what’s in their mind and putting it putting it in, into LFTR LMS and providing to the world and.

If you are, out there listening and you’re familiar with LFTR LMS and maybe you’re only doing your site maybe step back for a minute and consider, could you help others do what you’re doing in your niche and provide that as a as a coaching or hosting services to others to make a difference in whatever niche you’re in.

Chris Badgett: How has this impacted like this e learning at scale impacted just your quality of life. I’m assuming you have some like location freedom, like you just tell us about the impact of figuring this whole thing out with your wife.

Jim Hankins: Yeah. So. Obviously the one to many is amazing with e learning, and the re return on the investment of time is just silly. Because you spend more time avoiding creating the content than actually creating the content, you’ll vacillate over, does this just make my, hair look, look okay.

Or my lack of hair. So this is my audio. Okay. Should I put RGB lighting in the background? All these things that people vacillate over, I would suggest just create the content, right? In fact, most of the content she creates there she isn’t even on camera. She’s just doing a presentation recording and audio.

So good audio get the content out there and. And get going, right? You know that, I see that a lot of it on the lifter calls as well, where people are really struggling, with, kind of analysis paralysis of getting the the content out. And I would just suggest you just get the content out there, get get, fail fast, right?

If somebody doesn’t like your content, you’ll know, because they won’t watch it. After sign up, you’ll see how much they they watch. You’ll figure out where they’ve stopped and you can analyze it and iterate and improve. And the knowledge you have in your head is worth something to someone who hasn’t walked in the same exact path as you have, and you can help them and whatever it is you’re out there.

Chris Badgett: And my last question for you, Jim like what motivates you? It seems like you’re having fun and you’ve been doing this a while, like what’s the, there’s lots of different kinds of motivation, but what keeps you going and excited about the future?

Jim Hankins: I think it’s just one I’m blessed to have my family to, to work with me, so it’s super.

Amazing to be able to get up every day and, what are we going to do today? Who, yeah, what’s on our list and the kind of the collaboration that happens I really enjoy that. I like bringing technology to life and training to life and the magic of being able to press a button.

And all of a sudden an audience of, the size of the world can consume it. And I don’t know it’s an addiction.

Chris Badgett: It’s a healthy addiction. Yeah. That’s Jim Hankins. Go check out cribops. com. Thank you for coming on the show and sharing your journey with us today. I’m really proud, honored, and inspired at what you’ve been able to accomplish.

It’s that’s what motivates me to. Like our mission is to accelerate yours and your mission is to accelerate other people and it just keeps going. It’s like a ripple that goes out. And it’s a lot of,

Jim Hankins: it really is. And yeah, thank you so much. One for having us on and to your team for doing a wonderful job in answering questions. About LifterLMS and the business in general of e learning.

They’re super Professional. And I’ve had the opportunity to be a part of calls, watching them, just do an awesome job of helping people through the process as they come in. So

Chris Badgett: thank you. Thank you so much, Jim. We really appreciate it.

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 forward slash gift. Go to lifterlms. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.