How to Make Your Business More Valuable with Internal Training

In this LMScast episode, Chris Badgett shares about the valuable business tips with Internal training. He shares about LifterLMS new add-on that called “Private Site“. Private Site is a valuable tool for businesses

Chris Badgett emphasizes the significance of capturing systems, procedures, and playbooks, pointing out that doing so improves staff onboarding and uniformity. He emphasizes that having a well-documented business operation increases its overall value greatly, especially in the case of future acquisitions.

He highlights the modernizing of documentation practices and the potential for long-term success in business operations by employing the private site function within LifterLMS.

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 Badget. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Will Middleton: Hello everyone, and welcome back to another episode of L M S Cast. Today I’m joined by a special guest, Chris Badgett, usually the host of the l m s cast. We’ve been mixing it up a little bit. I’ve been doing a few interviews with Chris, and today we’re gonna be talking about LifterLMS private site and how it can help you on your LifterLMS website and what benefits it has to offer.

But first, Chris, thanks for joining me. How are you doing today?

Chris Badgett: I’m doing great. Thanks for having me on the show. Will, I’m excited to talk about helping businesses become more valuable and, and more frictionless. 

Will Middleton: Awesome. So I guess let’s just dive into it. So the first question is, is what is LifterLMS private site for people who are stumbling across this webinar?

Checking out LifterLMS, they haven’t checked out LifterLMS for a while. What is LifterLMS private site? What does that offer for lms websites?

Chris Badgett: LifterLMS private site is a new add-on, a premium plugin that LifterLMS makes. We just released it. And essentially what it does is it allows you to lock down a hundred percent of your L m s website behind the login so that you can control what users get in.

People can’t access any part of your site. Even the header and the footer goes away. The menu’s gone. There’s just a login and it can be used to create an internal company training portal, or really any kind of e-learning website that requires a hundred percent privacy. So Lifter already has all kinds of cool access controls and drip content and prerequisites, membership to bundle courses and all this.

All that’s still there. But the private site is all about just locking down a site a hundred percent. The most common use case for that is for a business that is documenting its systems and processes and procedures so that employees can better onboard and excel in their roles. 

Will Middleton: Okay, okay, so what happens if someone tries to view one of the, the course links or the the page links or just visit something on the website and we have LifterLMS, private site active because we’re trying to lock things down.

Like what happens when they visit via a direct link, 

Chris Badgett: all they get is a login. Okay. That’s it. 

Will Middleton: Oh, so it just completely locks down the entire website. So it’s only gonna be for users of the website, like you have to have a login in order to get in.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, it’s there used to be a term, there still is a term called a intranet, like a private, in like internet or website for a company.

It’s basically that, but it’s on the open internet. It’s just totally secured behind a login, which is good. It makes it easy for employees and team members, especially in our remote work world, to be able to log in and we use it at LifterLMS ourselves and have been documenting our systems and processes across.

Things like engineering, marketing, sales, operations, customer success, and so on. Over the years and over time. It’s become like a super valuable resource for our, our company and different people contribute to it. So it’s become part of our culture as well to basically have playbooks for our business so that we’re not always just winging it or it’s.

You know, new people don’t know where to go. Like we, we’ve documented a lot of things to make working here easier. 

Will Middleton: Okay, cool. Cool. And, and you mentioned like the concept of winging it versus having things documented. Can you speak a little bit to the benefit of documenting processes and having stuff in a playbooks and even having an intranet for your organization and what the benefits of that are?

Chris Badgett: The highest benefit probably for any business owner is it makes your company more valuable. And that’s because when you sell a business, if you ever do, it’s what are you selling? You’re selling the assets. Selling the intellectual property. You’re selling the, the team that knows how to do the work and is skilled at what they do or whatever.

 But the whole operating system of the business, like how it works. If that’s not documented Either the co whoever’s gonna buy you is not gonna buy you. Or you’re gonna get a lot lower valuation because that acquirer knows that once they get the business, it’s gonna be chaotic because there’s no documented systems.

And some companies, you know, do that kind of thing in, in Google Docs. You know, in an actual physical manual or whatever. But You know, just modernizing that whole concept with a L M S like LifterLMS, to create an internal training site with WordPress is the way to go these days. And you know, you can use courses in creative ways, like we use them to capture playbooks and there’s a course for each department, but also in our private site.

We have other policies and procedures. Our employee manager review system is housed in there. Our. You know, statement of benefits and, and time off systems and all that are, is inside the private side as well. So it’s, it really becomes like a website for the company, but mostly around this idea of helping team members be successful in the work that they do.

Will Middleton: Yeah, and  I think sometimes slowing down is hard to do. Like when we’re in the flow of doing our job, we have so many tasks to get done. And this applies, you know, to course creators or really any business. Is there any like thing you could say to speak to the value of taking the time to slow down and create this documentation about the processes that we do day to day?

Because I think when, one quick thing is when I. New people come into an organization. A lot of times the way they learn is by shadowing somebody else in the organization. Because the documentation and processes aren’t created for them to learn themselves. They kind of have to just hang out with someone for a while and learn how things go.

And that’s kind of a disorganized way to run an organization. Is there any tips for slowing down and taking time to create this value?

Chris Badgett: Yeah, I would say just be like Nike and just do it. And I, I say that in jest because Yeah, it feels painful. Like when to create a playbook or document, a process. You often have to get a little bit more behind in. What you’re doing to actually take the time to make it. But it pays dividends like tenfold in the future.

In the same way, if you use a, a tool like Help Scout or some kind of text expander tool to like create. To make emails easier to respond to with some canned replies or whatever, you have to slow down to create those. But once you have ’em, You’re like 10 times more efficient. It’s that same kind of thing.

And if you know, this business LifterLMS is eight plus years old. And if I could do it all over again. Like if I were ever to build another company. I would create the private site and the documentation or the, the, the playbooks from the very beginning day one. I would slow down and just have that be how we.

How we create, you know, or, or the first time I wish I had one, I would make it right at that moment.

Will Middleton: So cool. Cool. I mean, that, that makes a lot of sense. It makes a lot of sense. So how do you build the, like an internal training website with LifterLMS, with other documents inside? 

Chris Badgett: The first thing I would do is I would.

Just create a website for my business with WordPress. I’d put LifterLMS and install private site on that right away. And and that would just lock it down. So I would start with that. So now I have a website that only I can see. And then I would add, I would just start adding pages or, and lesson content that Y you know, makes sense for my business.

And I like to chop a business up into, you know, departments. So marketing and sales. Sometimes people put those together. Those are obvious. One, like technology or engineering is, is one or customer success is one. So at a minimum I would have three courses. One of ’em would be around like, The product or service we offer.

One of ’em would be around sales and marketing, and the third one would be around delivery or customer success. So that’s the. The fundamental stack I would do in terms of getting started.

Will Middleton:Cool. Is my audio still coming through?

Chris Badgett: It is. Your video’s froze on me, but I can still hear you just fine.

Will Middleton: Awesome. My, my Google Chrome’s kind of freaking out, but it’s great that you can still hear me. Yeah, I think that’s, that’s a really great. Rundown of, of LifterLMS private sites. And I love the term intranet. Like that’s a term we used to throw around a lot with creating a private organization internal training.

And it sounds like LiferLMS private site is a really awesome way to create an intranet system and create some internal training for your, your organization. What would you advise to people who are interested in creating an intranet and interested in trying out LifterLMS private site? What should they do next?

Where should they go?

Chris Badgett: I would just head on over to lifterlms.com and go ahead. And get Lifter in private site and just start setting it up. If you want. You can demo it on our demo servers. The Try LifterLMS for a dollar. You can kind of take it for a test drive if you want, but it does exactly what we say it does here.

It, it locks everything down behind a login screen. So really step one is like coming up with your idea of what do I want to document on my private site? And what’s my plan for creating business playbooks to make my company more valuable and make it easier for team members to work with me?

You know, another benefit is the, the price you pay for not documenting how you do things sometimes is you, it makes it harder for people to work with you. And it makes it harder to find people that are capable of working in a business where it’s chaos and nothing’s documented. The benefits are just there.

And, and I think like every entrepreneur, I, I could wish I could go back in time and start from day one and do this, but the reality is most businesses I’ve seen back into this idea of documenting their processes and procedures after they’re already in motion. So that’s okay. Don’t be too hard on yourself.

It’s not too late. Just get WordPress. Get LifterLMS, get private site and get started today. 

Will Middleton: Awesome. Thanks so much, Chris for joining me on this episode of the L m S Cast. And thanks everyone for listening in, and we’ll see you in the next episode.

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 [email protected] slash gift. Go to LifterLMS.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.