How a WordPress LMS Agency Turned a Family Office Education Site Into a Paid Board Seat

Kurt Von Ahnen describes how, through a project with Prestige Family Office University (PF University), he turned his WordPress firm, Mañana No Más, from a website-building service into a business consultancy and e-learning partner. In this episode, Kurt describes how, without the need for any new programming, he assisted in creating a membership-based online learning platform utilizing LifterLMS, FluentCRM Pro, Fluent Forms Pro, Bunny.net, and Presto Player.

For mentors, advisors, and ambassadors, the platform provides a distinct, member-only training site in addition to several schools, courses, and certifications. He also describes how the customer created hundreds of training films using AI technologies like ElevenLabs and HeyGen to transform existing knowledge and instructional content. Kurt talks on the significance of comprehending clients’ business objectives, offering strategic counsel, and developing into a long-term business partner as opposed to just supplying a website and moving on.

Kurt also offers insightful advice on how to build a profitable WordPress agency, such as how to employ a consultative sales approach, spot chances to add more services, price projects according to value rather than just time, and generate recurring income from hosting, upkeep, and continuing support. He discusses his preference for prepaid projects, how customers may acquire momentum by introducing a minimal viable product (MVP), and why agencies should concentrate on providing outcomes rather than waiting for everything to be flawless.

Kurt concludes by discussing how to overcome challenging business times, maintain consistency in marketing and content production, select customers who share your beliefs, and establish financial security so you can safely decline contracts that aren’t a good fit. He also discusses his goal of starting an apprenticeship program to assist young people in creating profitable WordPress businesses and transferring their expertise to the following generation.

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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 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 good friend and colleague, Kurt VonAhnen. He’s back on the show. Kurt does some work at LifterLMS. You’ve seen him around. He also runs an agency called Mañana No Más. Today, we’re gonna get into one of Kurt’s recent client projects called pfuniversity.org.

Go check that out. That stands for Prestige Family Office University. But first, Kurt, welcome back on the show. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: Chris, man, I- it’s always so much fun. We talk all the time, but it’s really fun when we get to do a show together. So I’m glad to be here. This is cool 

Chris Badgett: Let’s just lay the groundwork for people who don’t know.

What is a family office? G- tell us about the niche. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: I’ll be honest, I didn’t know much about the niche myself. I got the job because I’m an e-learning expert, right? And so this is one of those things that just kinda falls into our net, right? And- and we fleshed it out. And I gotta tell you, these customers blew me out of the water, ’cause it’s a couple of older gentlemen.

There’s a team now, but when it started, it was a couple of older gentlemen, trying out this e-learning thing, and they got heavily involved with using leveraging AI to make a lot of stuff, which was super interesting, ’cause like I said, they’re older gentlemen. And we started talking about family office management.

For the first two meetings, Chris, I barely even understood what family office management was. Like, and it’s weird, because I didn’t have, I didn’t have an entitled upbringing. I- I came up, I hate to say poor, we weren’t a family of means. And so this whole concept of family office management is like family is a business.

And typically, not all the time, but typically the patriarch of the family is the CEO of the business, and then that family has, multiple assets. Maybe different companies. Maybe it’s like they own a landscaping business, a distribution company, and they’ve got investments in stocks and bonds and things.

They’ve- they’ve got wealth acquired somehow, and that has to be managed, and that’s what this family office management thing is about. It’s about teaching everybody in the family how to run the family like the business, and- and secure the wealth for future generations, and not just a flash in the pan and it’s gone.

It’s kinda when you watch the movies and- and you’ll see someone talk about, “Oh, that’s new money,” right? “That’s new money. That’s old money.” That’s, yeah. I- I always think of this, this family office management thing to me is “Oh, that’s old money.” These people know how to manage their wealth, and they know how to- to protect themselves.

But I think kind of the purpose of the website was really to expand that concept and maybe introduce new money into this kind of circle of- of managing income and wealth and- and assets. 

Chris Badgett: So when it comes to things like investing and wealth preservation, that’s an area, or finance, personal finance, family finance, these are areas that, really require a lot of education, especially if you’re gonna try to pass things down generation after generation.

People need to learn how to manage things. So what did you build at Mañana No Más for pfuniversity.org? What does the site do? 

Kurt Von Ahnen: I think this is the part that other people might hear and go, “Oh that’s different.” I pride myself on problem-solving and being the professional in the room, and the needs assessment side, right?

Really listening to the client and figuring out, what are the root things that we’re trying to address on this project? And so we determined pretty quickly that, yeah it’s an e-learning project, right? So it’s e-learning. It’s definitely membership based, and they kept referring to what you and I would call a course track, they call a school.

They have the School of Family Office Management, the School of Stewardship, the School of… And th- that’s a course track with a certain number of courses. And so I was like, okay, so we’re gonna need course tracks. We’re gonna need courses. We’re gonna need membership. We’re gonna need, obviously, certifications and things like that.

Then we developed further and I quickly realized they’re gonna need a way, like you said, financial stuff usually requires additional training, so we’re building up mentors, advisors, ambassadors for this program. And so there’s actually a hidden training portal in this website that deals with people that wanna come into the group and be mentors, advisors, and ambassadors for other people wanting to get into family office management.

So it’s a two-layered site. There’s a front end of the site, and there’s more like a, a hidden portal that’s it requires a different membership to see that content to become a mentor or an advisor. So I think that’s pretty cool. The other thing that we knew was that we wanted a way to manage the email list, the email blasts, and some automations.

We wanted to do that within the website, so I knew that was gonna add the CRM, the form tool and go with our normal tech stack there I think to answer your question in a way that I think surprises other people when I say this, Chris, I didn’t custom develop anything. Everything in this website is, it’s out of the box, man.

It’s LifterLMS out of the box. It’s FluentCRM Pro out of the box. It’s Fluent Form Pro out of the box. W- we used the LifterLMS native payment gateway. We didn’t do any fancy shopping carts or automations in that way. And to do the videos, we- they have a ton of video. They’ve got over 30 courses.

Each course has multiple lessons. Each lesson has four videos. So there’s a ton of content. And so there’s like 840 videos or 850 videos or something like that in this website, just so far. I know they plan on expanding. So we did Bunny.net and Presto Player for that, and Presto Player runs that media hub in the site.

And when I turn this back to the client for any kind of, management or content management, it makes it really easy for them to not have to jump between sites to do stuff. 

Chris Badgett: And you mentioned something interesting that we can just park on for a second, which is these older gentlemen are, like, pretty heavy into AI.

And you mentioned, I think, that they were using 11 Labs to help with content generation. Tell us what these folks have been up to, and for those that haven’t heard of 11 Labs or whatever what are they doing? 

Kurt Von Ahnen: So let’s take the two gentlemen in, in question. And I’ll call them by name, Dan and Tom.

Dan and Tom. Dan and George. George, I love George to death. He’s like the CEO. And then Dan and myself, we make up the executive committee of this project now. And when I first started working with them, I thought George was in his 80s. For some reason, I had it in my mind that he was 84 or 86 years old.

Turns out he’s 92, and he is prolific in his content. Back when like– So you’re familiar with Myers-Briggs and DiSC and all those kinds of things. Before that stuff was released, he used a book written in the ’30s to make kind of his own kind of personality training traits training system, but it was before DiSC was out.

So he wrote a book on that, and he has a lot of content on that, and he’s just prolific in the content and the wisdom that he generates. So he’s basically generated most of the content in the website. And then Dan has taken that content, and he’s leveraged like Eleven Labs, HeyGen, things like that to create these avatars that actually deliver the training.

And in some respects, we would say maybe the videos are bland. Not just being, I’m not crit- I’m not being critical, right? I’m just saying it’s on purpose. They’re done very well, right? It’s financial training. You’ve got a plain background, a talking head, gives everything, gives all the information through a series of four videos for each lesson, and then each lesson also has the written version of it.

So it’s if you wanna read or study, if you prefer to learn that way or keep notes, we use the Lifter Elements, LMS Notes package for that, right? So you can copy and paste notes, add to notes, do whatever you want in your own account, and it’s all right there. I gotta tell you, I was blown away that they used AI at such a high level to make the content, but it goes deeper than that because this is one of my first clients where George will say, “Hey, I had a conversation with ChatGPT today, and I think it’s important I share this with you.”

And I think this is something agencies need to get ready for. The amount of content that comes to me for review, for like textual review, like I’m s- I’m supposed to familiarize myself with like what they’re doing now, right? The amount of content generated by AI that gets forwarded to me to like review is immense.

So I think as agencies, when we’re looking at working with people going forward, we should be like, “Hey, what are you using for ideation? What are you using like– What, what’s gonna be my role in how you want me to audit what you’re generating in AI?” ‘Cause there’s a big difference between a guy like writing a few bullet points on a napkin and then making a Word doc and sending you a sheet versus AI sending you 19 pages of a conversation.

Chris Badgett: Tell us more about the relationship as a agency with Prestige Family Office University i- in terms of a lot of agencies are like, “Yeah, I’ll build a website for you.” And really good agencies, what happens is y- like you said, you do the needs assessment, you listen. Oh, they don’t just need a website, they need these automations, these, you know, marketing or sales motions.

They need help just with their own organization internally and all these things. It, this doesn’t seem like a $500 website, and it sounds like you’re also a partner. You’re a trusted advisor and partner. You’re not just delivering a website, a great website, and being, “Thanks so much.

I’ll see you guys later.” So what is … Tell us more about the relationship with this client. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: Chris, I think I gotta give you credit for this again. You hit me with this a few years ago. We had done a case study, you and I, before on a … Inner Treasure Hunt was one of the projects we did a case study on.

And you pointed out then, you were like, “You’re not really just making the website. Y- you’ve become this working advisory consultan- consultative partner.” And in reviewing the work that Mañana Nomás has done over the years, ’cause I think we’re at 19 years now of being an agency, most of our clients are, we serve a consultative role.

In fact, when I introduce myself to people at the local entrepreneurial thing, I don’t say, “Oh, I own a WordPress agency.” That doesn’t even come out of my face. What comes out of my face is, “We’re a local business consultant, and a lot of times the product we deliver ends up being a website.” And it’s … ‘Cause n- not every consultation ends in a website. Sometimes it ends in I think you need to hire a salesperson first, or maybe you need to work on some internal training. Maybe you need to go get certified. Maybe you need to form an affiliation with the BNI group to get more leads or

There’s always something, right? But I really consider the work that we’ve done to be more from a business consultative and leadership perspective, and then the knowledge of everything we do with the web, with the internet, that just comes into that whole portfolio picture and it allows us to deliver, I think, at a higher level.

I use a, a contractor model as an agency. So I’m the face and the communication with the client for the agency, and then a lot of the work I end up doing myself. Admittedly, I should pawn it off to somebody, but I end up doing a lot of stuff myself. And then there’s times where we bring contractors in, especially on repetitive iterative type stuff.

If you’ve got 850 videos to put into a website, you put that to a process and you go, “Okay, here’s the process. I’m gonna hire you. Here’s the bunny.net, here’s the, you know, here’s the Presto player, here’s the list of courses, here’s the videos. They’re all segmented in the bunny.net account. I just need you to place all these videos into all these lessons.”

And then that frees me up to do what I think the real value of Manana No Mas is, which is run the consultative meetings, the update meetings, keep everybody informed, and then obviously keep selling and promoting the work that we do at Manana No Mas. In this particular instance, we used the good, better, best pricing strategy on the proposal, something that you’ve, you know, advocated for a long time, and pretty quickly they said, “This best option sounds good to us.”

And I was like, “Okay, you realize I put wish list in the proposal? I didn’t expect you to say yes to everything.” And they said, “No, we’re good. We’ll just say yes to everything.” And I was like, “Okay.” And so that already put us in, like you said, better than a $500 website. This is a pretty good package.

But then working with them, they said, “We really like working with you. You seem to have, good insight, good advice. You’ve really…” They were looking at some other things. They were looking at like maybe doing an AI course. And I’d said I don’t think I would do an AI course for this program.”

And they said, “But everyone wants to use AI and are all interested in AI.” And I said I get that, but at the rate that AI is changing, do you wanna be responsible to be up to date on AI training for people using AI and running this family office management thing tied to their family’s wealth? I don’t think I’d wanna, I don’t think I’d wanna put that kind of liability on myself.”

And they were like, “That’s really in- That that was really insightful. Thanks for saving us that time, energy and embarrassment.” That’s just one example, but so they said, “We want you to be on the advisory committee.” I said, “Okay.” Then they said, “We’d like it if you’d be on our board.” And I was like “Is this like a free thing?”

And they said no, it’s a paid board position.” I said, “Okay. Hey, that’s great. This is awesome.” And I gotta tell you, I felt a little out of place ’cause I’m not a college professor, I’m not in these roles, but I have working, world knowledge, right? So they wanted that. And then more recently they just said, as the two founders George and Dan were like, “We’re gonna form an executive committee, and we just want it to be the three of us.

We’re gonna meet once a week, and we wanna make decisions on the board, the advisory committee, the mentors, the people we bring on as salespeople, as ambassadors to the program. We want your help to build those programs, to build those processes, and to really vet the people that we allow into those circles.”

And it’s been a really great learning experience for me but it’s also it’s humbling, Chris, ’cause you don’t… Sometimes you’d say to yourself, “I don’t have the skill,” or, “I don’t have the, I don’t have the, I don’t have the certificate hanging on the wall.” You g- you, you let that what do they call that syndrome?

Imposter syndrome take over and you go I’m not qualified for this.” But then you realize, “I’ve already been laying it out there. I’ve already demonstrated expertise in a certain area that they feel they’re lacking.” So that just naturally fills that space, and it’s just we’ve really gelled to work well together as a team, and I really like the project.

So yeah, I’ll help them all I can. 

Chris Badgett: I know for the agencies out there listening or watching, they wanna know, how do you get clients like this? And so what, like how did this client, get on your radar or enter your world or you enter theirs?

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Kurt Von Ahnen: They’re gonna say, people listening are gonna say it’s an unfair advantage ’cause I’ve been in your back pocket for years already, right?

We do the we do the ask us anything call every Thursday. We do the the mastermind office hours call for Universe and Infinity bundles every Thursday. And since I’m on all those calls, I do get a lot of exposure to people in the LifterLMS circles. I’m not gonna take that away from anything. However there’s other people that are on the LifterLMS experts list that tell me they get a ton of leads from the experts page.

And when I ask people, “How did you find me?” It’s not usually like the experts page. So Chris Lasseter, for example, he said he got a ton of leads from the LifterLMS experts page. So there’s different exposure points I think that lend people to different things. I think because I’m so focused on this consultative role, I’m so focused on this, this idea that I’m gonna be a business consultant before an internet expert, I think where my net really thrives is in all of this other content that’s generated, right?

So I’m on the WP-Tonic podcast, the Membership Machine Show, the Agency Action Show. I have the Mañana No Más podcast where we feature, other entrepreneurs and creators in space. And so I think that whole broad network, and 20 years of being an agency, I think that’s where that net comes from.

So when people say, “How do you get your customers?” I honestly think it’s from adding the value or showing the value before I meet them and send them a proposal. I think there’s a certain, I think there’s a certain credibility, there’s a certain value that we’re able to put forth in our proposal that’s already demonstrated from the work that we do putting ourselves in the public face.

Whereas I think if I was starting over again as a freelancer, it might be a little more difficult to say, “Oh, I’m gonna go get me a 50, 60, $80,000 web project.” Like the, it’s hard to go from $500 websites to $60,000 projects. But it’s, I think if we apply ourselves and we put our personality, our face, our ethics, if we put all that out there in the form of, podcasting, social posts, blogs if we really create that content that builds the persona that we wanna represent ourselves as, I think that helps drive the business in the direction you’re really looking to go.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And I wanted to ask you about how these client relationships work through time. So I’m not asking you to disclose your exact, like, financial working agreement or whatever with PF University, but I imagine if I were to gue- guess, you did that thing we love to say to each other, which is land and expand.

If somebody’s looking to move upmarket in the sense of I don’t just build websites, I’m a business consultant- Yeah … and, yeah, a lot of the times it includes websites and e-learning, what is the flow of not just money over time, but there’s one thing leads to another. What are these phases?

You mentioned needs assessment. That’s phase one I’m guessing, right? 

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah.

I’m trying to break this down ’cause I’m trying to think of it from normal projects too, right? ‘Cause I, I know that we focus on e-learning stuff here, and it’s real easy to get into the weeds and talk about process. Yeah. But like even just from the standpoint of I wanna make a five-page marketing website, like that’s…

I just wanna be some dude that does th- those things. When I think about That process, that land and expand. So if I’m talking to someone about, let’s say they want a one-page marketing website, and then I go, “Okay, we could build that for you absolutely. What are some elements that you think should be on this page?”

And then they’ll tell me, and I go, “Okay how far do you want people to scroll on mobile? So if you’ve got a lot of content, that’s a lot to scroll on mobile. Maybe we should break this into two or three pages.” So that would be the homepage, the about us page, and the contact page. Let’s just go with those three, right?

And then I go, “Okay, so are you gonna use this page for the rest of your business?” That’s like the first question. They’re like, “What are you gonna use the website for? Is this strictly for marketing? Is it strictly for lead magnets? Or are you gonna use this for the rest of your business?”

And they go the rest of my business, what do you mean?” Are you paying for Mailchimp? Are you paying for ActiveCampaign? Like, how big is your mail list? Do you plan on growing a mail list? If you’re gonna grow a mail list and it’s gonna go over 5,000 people, you’re gonna save money to put the CRM in your website.

We could do that for you. We have that service. How do you train your new employees when they, when you hire somebody?” And tho- I ask those questions all the time, even just to marketing website customers, ’cause I go, how do you onboard people?” And they go even if we hire them in New York, we still have to bring them to the home office.

Two days of paperwork, a day of meeting all the other managers, and then, we have to train them on everything.” And I go, “Okay, what, it’s two weeks?” And they go, “Yeah.” I go, “But it’s a remote job.” And they go, “Yeah, we advertise it remote, but they have to come on site for the training and the onboarding.”

I go what if we could just set that up through your website? They can do all the HR paperwork, the filling things out back and forth.” We actually set that up, like I w- almost as a course structure where they just step one, step two, step three, step four, and then we take them right into online training, and then maybe you fly them in for a day or two of practicum so they can demonstrate that they can, execute what you’ve taught them online.

I said, “That would reduce your operating budget quite a bit, and it would make your customer that was sold a remote job a lot happier.” And they go I never even thought about that.” And that’s just an exhi- I, it’s just an, an example of land and expand, right? When we sell e-learning packages, so there’s e-learning that’s like somebody wants to teach somebody how to make ceramics, or somebody wants to teach people how to paint watercolors.

Those are typically small e-learning hobby-like projects. But if you get into enterprise e-learning, and there’s gonna be 1,200 students, 2,500 students, one of the things that Mañana No Más always offers is, “Hey, how are you gonna provide support to your students? Do you have someone internally that’s, assigned to that?”

And they usually go, “What do you mean support?” This is a job. This is a whole website. There’s gonna be, there’s gonna be members resetting passwords, there’s gonna be peop- you have things that don’t work, they didn’t get their certificate. How do you plan to manage that for a group of people this large?”

And they go we didn’t really think about that.” I go we offer ticketed support for each of our clients. So if you want, we can add a ticketed support tool to your website. Your students, if they have a problem, can fill out a support ticket, and we answer that ticket within 12 hours. And they go how much does that cost?”

And that’s, ding, right? Based on how many people, frequency, you can make up the number, but that’s typically, in the $30,000 a year range that we would offer that to an enterprise client. And that’s just recurring revenue that happens over and over again. And as a, as an agency owner, you can subcontract that out.

You can say, “Oh, I need a VA that’s gonna… Anytime a ping comes in on this email address, I need you to answer it,” and you put them on retainer 

Chris Badgett: So how do you just in general do, like the the expansion in terms of like you’re consulting and being like, “Have you thought about this? Have you thought about this?”

And when they’re like, “Oh yeah, I want that. I do want that other thing, but not right now. I’m not interested in that, and I also want that other thing you mentioned,” do you just do all this like project-based pricing or more like retainers where it includes a bunch of stuff ongoing and we can do add-on projects?

Like, how do you think about packaging your services through time? 

Kurt Von Ahnen: This is the hardest part of our conversation today, Chris, it really is. Because I always go back to working on cars. You know I have this large automotive background, right? Yeah. Technician gets started, gets out of school, he gets a job at a Ford dealership, and he gets his first brake job on an F-150 truck, and the job’s gonna pay him two hours to replace the brake pads and resurface the rotors.

So I’m using terms that everyone should understand. You need to put new brake pads on your truck. The technician’s gonna get paid two hours to put those brake pads on that truck, and it might take him three and a half, four hours. He’s in a brand-new shop. He doesn’t quite have all of his tools selected yet.

It’s gonna take him some time, right? He’s gotta get acclimated. Now, two years into that job, same truck comes in, right? Brake pads and rotors. He’ll have that job done in 18 minutes. He’s still gonna get paid two hours. That’s where I think we’re at right now with artificial intelligence, different tools for efficiency how good you get at using certain tools in your tech stack.

I am so confident and comfortable with LifterLMS and integrating like Fluent Form, Fluent CRM, and Fluent Support. Like that whole Fluent suite works really well with Lifter, and so I’m so confident in how we build those. We’re extremely efficient. Does that mean I only charge $500 to set that up, or is it still like a $6,000 setup?

So there’s a certain thing that you offer that’s value added, right? So there’s a value that comes with what we do. And a lot of times I look at if I create something for a client, do I know they’re gonna be able to 10X the value of whatever I charge them? And that’s a big consideration for me. So if I charge someone $6,000 to build something, am I relatively sure they’re gonna be able to convert that into 60 grand?

If they apply themselves, if they do the work, right? And I do that with the other training projects I have. So it’s like I wanna make sure that I don’t price people out of the ballpark so bad they can’t afford it, but we can’t give away our skillsets either. And so I don’t wanna devalue what other agencies and experts have put the work into building in our space just because I’ve figured out some shortcuts and can do things pretty quickly.

So it’s a very difficult conversation. For us, we generally look at… Now I’m gonna give away too many secrets. We have time tracked everything we’ve ever done over the last 12 years. And so because we have all these different projects, if someone says, “Oh, I wanna do a custom this,” I can go, “Oh, that sounds like what we did for Paula.”

So I can go back into Paula’s account and I can go, okay, we spent four hours on that. So our agency rate’s $190 an hour, so I go, that’s about 800 bucks. We’re gonna pad that by 10%, so it’s gonna be $880. I can figure that up quick math, right? And then kinda add those, those features in. But the way you ask the question also elicits another response, and that is, we want this but not till later.

We know we’re gonna want this, but we might not leverage it yet. We might… So what we’ll do is we’ll say, “Hey, our job is to get you launched.” Like for me, I’m all about momentum. At our agency, we’re all about done is better than perfect. We need to do a minimal viable product. We want people to sample any kind of learning content to build any kind of energy in your project before it’s perfect.

‘Cause if you’re gonna get hooked on perfect, you’re never gonna launch, and then this thing’s gonna die on the vine and you’re gonna spend money before we even get anything going. My main goal is to get you to make revenue, so you’re more comfortable in hiring me to keep doing things that make you more revenue.

And so we’re really focused on that. So let’s say let’s say that they go we really don’t have an email list yet. We’re, this is just really just a launch.” And I’m like, “Okay, so but as you build this, where are you gonna wanna put people?” How we… So we’ll build as the MV- MVP, we’ll build in the s- the CRM, the form tool, the, the e-learning, the memberships.

We’ll build all that in and not necessarily push it to the front end of the website, but it’ll be built and ready to implement when they’re ready to implement. And we offer all of our clients training. So we say, “Hey, this package is gonna come with two hours of Zoom training that you can re- record and use when you’re ready to implement these other features that are hidden in the background 

Chris Badgett: Very cool.

Very cool. And also for the agencies out there, walk us through the sales motion, like in terms of okay, you, you have the first contact, like they reached out to you, and then what do you do from there? And then there’s a discovery or needs assessment, which I think you charge for, and then it goes to like phase one or something.

What’s the cadence of what you do from first contact through, getting through needs assessment and actually booking version one of the project?

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Kurt Von Ahnen: We’re pretty dang quick at Manana Mas. Okay. I really shortcut a lot of that, what you just described. 

Chris Badgett: Okay. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: So in some ca- so if it’s a fresh project, a fresh startup project, there’s not a whole lot of lead, of needs assessment to really do, just to be honest, right?

‘Cause we have enough experience in the space. We can front-load the conversation and go like, “How many courses are you anticipating? What, how, how many lessons are in each course? What are the kind of assets you plan on putting in each lesson?” And it, and as those questions are getting asked, w- that ticker’s going in my brain, right?

So I’m like, “Okay, so I know I got, this much content, this many videos, this much to manage, this much to do.” We also charge so we offer the hosting, and in our hosting we give them access to our bunny.net hosting account on a separate kind of thing, sub account. And we can do the same thing with the email sending, right?

So we have a SendGrid account with sub-accounts. And so when we say our hosting includes, updates and maintenance for all of the thing put together, it’s one-stop shop. So we’re able to… They don’t have to worry about 16 other subscriptions, right? They just go through Manana Mas and we take care of that whole thing for them.

So if we jump back to the Prestige Family Office situation we’re doing their search engine optimiz- optimized content, we’re handling some of their social media for them, we’re creating their weekly email blast that goes out. So our agency creates the email blast, we stage it on Monday, they approve it Monday afternoon, it gets sent on Tuesday morning.

And so we’ve set up these processes. To go from the meeting to building the website though, I know that you described something that you would think would be like a month or six weeks or s- like you think of these stages. It was like 7 to 10 days. It was like we had a Zoom call, we familiarized ourselves with each other.

I really liked the guys. I thought the guys were really easy to talk to. They thought I was easy to talk to. It was a fresh build. In this particular case, they had a preexisting website that they were sampling with and playing with and I said, “Look I can tell that this has been a sample or a playground for you.

This will be more of a distraction than just starting fresh. So let’s just start fresh, and now let’s have the conversation. You wanna launch with four schools. Each school has this many lessons,” ba. And then we just, we architected a quick, five-page marketing site, put the LMS in the background, put the CRM in place, built the ticketed support to launch later, right?

‘Cause our goal was a, minimal viable product. We just wanted students to be able to come in and sample the first school. So that’s, the first school for them was the course track for family office management. So we just wanted to get that much done so somebody could come in and take a look.

And that somebody was, like, the guy that runs a college, and so that college already had students interested in taking courses. And so our main MVP goal was, how do we make the website look nice enough as an MVP and have enough training content in it that a guy that runs a college would go, “This is equitable.

This is worth investing in.” And we pulled that off. We got it done by the, under budget, on time. The college looked at it, approved it. The guy running the college actually joined our board, which is really nice. And then we leveraged. We put, another three schools worth of content in, so we launched with four schools to allow s- stu- students to start coming in.

And then we started really concentrating on mentors, advisors, and ambassadors, and built out that hidden program I was talking about for them 

Chris Badgett: Well, just to, tie a bow on it, and if you don’t want to give specifics, that’s fine, but just from an agency mindset, how many times have these folks paid you?

Or is it- Is it … I’m just asking for the agencies who are just like, “Oh, yeah. It’s a website. It costs this much. That’s it.” You have an ongoing relationship. You’re adding other services. Is it- Yeah … has it evolved to a monthly thing and it changes every month depending upon if there’s a bunch of new stuff coming or not?

Kurt Von Ahnen: This particular project we launched in phases. Mañana No Más always works on a prepaid basis. This creates controversy in the space. I have a lot of freelancers telling me, “I could never do that.” And I’m like- 

Chris Badgett: Hey, that … We did prepay all the way- Yeah … at Codebox when we ran our agency. That was the only way 

Kurt Von Ahnen: I used to do, 50%/50%, right?

50% deposit, 50% when done. Things never got done. Things always got drawn out. Things always … The, the … You always got, like, strong-armed for, “Oh, I, I … Now I want a custom slider, I saw another site that had it. All you have to do is,” and it’s like, no, you’re … This is way past the scope of what we discussed.

Now, regardless of how simple or hard something is, if it’s outside the scope, y- as the agency owner, you gotta make the decision. Am I willing to give this up to keep the customer happy, or do I need to charge them more for it? But if they’re sitting on the other half of the money now you’re being strong-armed in ways that you didn’t really sign up for.

So back in 2008, we changed our policy to be a prepaid thing, and that’s it, and people think that doesn’t work. We have a sister project called the Powersport Academy. Chris, you’re familiar with that. And when we train a dealership on how to increase parts and labor sales, it costs $45,000 to prepay for the year.

Yeah. And I had a lot of people tell me, “Oh, you can’t do that. That’s never gonna work.” Then we ended up subcontract, subcontracting that service out through a 20 club provider, and guess what? Everything we ever did for them was prepaid. And then over time, we’ve had other companies reach out to us and they say what our company does is we finance that type of corporate improvement.”

So- if you’re at a lower dollar amount, you might have heard of using Link or Affirm or something like that, right? Where someone wants to make a $3,000 purchase they use an Affirm account, so then the vendor gets paid in full and they’re making payments to Affirm, right? They basically took a loan out through Affirm.

When you get to higher dollar amounts in the enterprise training space, you basically form a relationship with financial companies that say, “Oh yeah, we’ll finance your clients to take this training,” because they already know that if a client successfully completes our training, they’re gonna 10X their revenue through their service department.

And so we’ve set up all these agreements where if a dealer says, “45 grand, that’s awfully steep. What if I– Could I just give you 20% down?” I go no, we don’t do that, but we have a financing partner.” So I’ll refer them to that financing partner. They set up the finance agreement with them. We get the 45 grand, and now they’re making payments to somebody else, and our training is giving them the benefits we promised.

So they’re gonna make that money back on the training anyway. 

Chris Badgett: As we land the plane here, I have two f- kind of final questions. One is it sounds like pfuniversity.org is a fantastic client, and I’ll just speak to some things I see from the outside looking in, and you tell me what’s also there that makes this a fantastic client.

One, it sounds like you guys had good chemistry, good communication. Two, they value your expertise very much even to the point of challenging your own imposter syndrome, which is awesome. And then they … Getting the content is sometimes a, a hard part about websites, but these guys have content for days, and they h- Yeah

they’re not shy to make content or whatever. You also took an active interest in learning their niche so that you could best serve and help and consult. And you don’t just deliver websites. You do all kinds of things from the support desk to marketing automation, email, social media web hosting, all kinds of services, and these guys needed all of it.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: But what else makes them a great client? 

Kurt Von Ahnen: We share the same faith. That really helps a lot. This is a faith-based organization, and while not all family office management, sources are faith-based ’cause a lot of it’s financial training they’re faith-based, which I found really attractive.

So they have conflict management and stewardship and, kingdom wealth subjects as part of their training, which really falls in line with a lot of my core beliefs. And that’s just Chris, that’s just a huge blessing. When you sign up to work with people and you share things outside of the work, I think that is that’s a really great reward.

The other thing is these dudes are old. I’m old. It’s funny I turned 59 this year. I’m, my, my beard is changing all kinds of colors. And but, like when the guy told me, when George said he was 92, I was blown away. This guy’s 92. He’s running multiple meetings every week.

He’s taking care of family that’s not well. His depth and scope of knowledge and his clarity of mind is absolutely commendable. And it’s just really fun to work with older people and see them, pass the baton down, right? Warming the bench as we go. And, I… We’ve mentioned it before, but not on this show, I- I’m trying to launch an apprenticeship program to teach other young people how to start their own successful WordPress agencies.

So I’m very much in that mindset of, like, how do we pay it forward? How do we educate younger people? How do we keep that bench warm? How do we pass these things down? And so for me to be able to work with these guys, passing their knowledge down, it’s just been a real treat. It’s it’s really a perfect fit 

Chris Badgett: And last question for you, Kurt.

In the kind of zeitgeist of social media or whatever, it see- it- there’s a lot of agency doom and gloom out there. So the big things are, oh people are just using AI to build websites. They don’t need me anymore. Or the economy is tough, which it is, and people just aren’t buying websites anymore, but there’s some people who are, and you find them.

But … And also you have the portfolio of services, like you position yourself as a business growth or business consultant, not just a website builder. But what allows you to not buy into the agency doom and gloom and also not only not buy into it, but just thrive anyways? 

Kurt Von Ahnen: So in true transparency, there’s good days, bad days, right?

Yeah. There al- there always is. But,

Chris Badgett: Feast or famine kind of thing … 

Kurt Von Ahnen: yeah, there, there was that famous comedian that was like I want to say it was Steve Harvey, who said, one thing to think about challenges is, if you’re alive today, you have successfully navigated every single challenge that’s ever come your way, right?

And it’s like, all right that’s one way to look at things. So like I said, good days, bad days. We went through an economic winter, like December through March this last year. To the point where the YMCA was hiring a, a membership director that’s local here, and I was like, man, I’d be really good at that, and I’m into fitness.

That would be fun to do. Like you start thinking other things, and that’s really dangerous, like when you find yourself being distracted by other opportunities. Not that… I say it in a weird way, right? But you know what I’m saying. You want to stay focused on, hey, if this is what I chose, I want to make sure I do this thing.

And- It’s really hard to explain, but I knew that if I just kept doing the work, if I kept promoting, if I kept the blog posts, if I kept doing the podcast, even when I was tired, I just knew that if I did the work, if I sowed enough seed, that there would eventually be a harvest. And so that was like December, January, February, March.

April rolled around, and it was like all that hard work for that whole fiscal quarter before, it all just culminated in this giant harvest in April. And when I say giant, it’s not, we’re not, web dev studios money, but we were… It was like it was a lot of money for our little agency.

And I was like, “Okay.” Now, in retrospect, you still gotta pay for the four months you didn’t do anything, right? You didn’t bring any revenue in for four months. But it was like April was so good, I was like, “Oh my God, if we could do this in May. Just imagine if we could do this in May.” I kept the energy going, kept the momentum going.

May was slow too, just to be really blunt and honest. But in June, everyone we talked to in May became a paying client in June. And like I said, everyone at Mañana No Más pays up front. We don’t do payments. I don’t chase people down for money. I don’t have a, an accounts receivable department to go collect for me.

So that made us real, revenue flush again, and it gave us that confidence to be able to execute on the things we know we’re really good at. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again on this show, we used to live in Southern California, and the economy in Southern California had me in this weird position where we had business, we…

I would do work all the time, but we had to say yes to jobs I never should have said yes to. They didn’t have the right ethical alignment. They didn’t have the right financial alignment. They didn’t have the right content alignment. But I had to say yes because we needed every bit of revenue just to hold the line when we lived there.

And when we moved to Kansas, our overhead shrunk by more than 50%. And so really quickly, we were able to pay off debt, get a house, take some of the weight off of our shoulders, and I think that’s should be the goal for other agency owners, entrepreneurs, freelancers in any business, is to put yourself in a financial position where it’s okay to say no to the jobs you know aren’t perfect.

And so the more we said no to certain jobs, certain requests, certain proposal opportunities, the higher the quality of jobs became available to us. So this PF University job is like perfect client, perfect setup, perfect everything. We made a business directory for a local town here. Again, small project, but margin was good, customers were easy to deal with, project went up quickly.

By all accounts, a success, and they’re on our monthly hosting and maintenance program, so it’s recurring, monthly revenue. Almost every job that we’ve brought in the last two, three years, Chris, has resulted in recurring monthly revenue. And so we’ve even given away websites here locally.

A guy came and cut down my tree and I realized he didn’t have a website, so I made him a website. Took me half an hour, so I made him a website and I said, “Here, th- here’s your new website.” And he was like, “Oh my God, this is amazing,” “Why’d you do this?” And I said, “Because you didn’t charge me enough to cut down the tree.

I should have paid you twice as much to cut down the tree.” I said, “This website, if you went to a agency, would probably cost about 2,500 bucks. I’ll take care of the hosting for the first year. If you like the website and it works for you and you want to keep the website and you want to keep it with me, it’s $79 a month.

If you want to take it, it’s yours. I’m giving it to you. You can go to GoDaddy or Bluehost or you can move it anywhere you want. It’s your website. But if you need someone to maintain it, host it, and help you with it, we can do that, and hosting with us is $79 a month and we take care of all the updates.”

So now he’s … You know he’s going to be a customer for life at 79 bucks a month. 

Chris Badgett: I think the biggest takeaway I’m taking from you is just stay on the field. Keep going. Help people. Hold your own personal boundaries. Working with great clients is awesome. Working with bad clients is not a lot of fun.

And- 

Kurt Von Ahnen: And you gotta cut those loose. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah that’s Kurt VonAhnen from Mañana No Más. You can find him over there. The website we’re talking about for family office training is called Prestige Family Office University. That’s pfuniversity.org. Kurt, thank you so much for coming back on the show. Thank you for being a shining example of everything Lifter.

You work here, you do agency work, you give us ideas that flow into the product and you’re an education entrepreneur yourself with all your own education ventures. So thank you so much for coming on. Go check out Kurt at Mañana No Más, and we will do this again, ’cause I can’t wait to see where you’re at and what you’re up to in 2027.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Nice. Thanks, Chris

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