• Who: Isaac Prentice
• Website: graceprenticeeducation.com
• Course Topic: Various online skillsets
• Interesting Stats: Through their training people can gain new skillsets in weeks instead of years

Who are you and what digital training company have you created?

I am the Vice President of Strategic Development and co-founder of Grace Prentice Education. Since 2017, I have been working at universities around the country, and with companies around the globe as a kinesthetic infusion educator in industries ranging from Architecture to Business Development and Leadership to Forensic Science. Grace Prentice Education is a combination of kinesthetic learning and in-home education at a rapid pace.

We are teaching our students to practical application versus professional proficiency. This creates an accelerated learning time and a faster turn-around for each skillset.

What market does your digital training serve?

Our online library is built, and continue expanding, for any individual who is looking to build new skillsets. Grace Prentice Education courses are designed specifically to maximize user engagement and hold attention span for each lesson.

What’s the biggest benefit of taking your online courses?

The biggest benefit of taking an online course through Grace Prentice Education is the gift of time. Education and free time are usually seen as opposites, as we’ve been trained to believe that learning new skills takes either months for each course or years for a well-rounded profession. What we’ve created is a unique opportunity to get incredibly valuable knowledge in a quicker, more efficient way than ever before – allowing you to put that skill into practice even quicker.

How did you get into the market?

I’ve run my own education ventures before, and have been tackling the education sector, one piece of red tape at a time since 2017. When first starting in 2017, I wanted to identify the root cause of the education crisis.

While realizing that statistically speaking the problem was in teaching methods and applications, we set out to provide the solution. Fast forward to the year 2020, we’ve been able to identify new ways to deliver application-based, kinesthetic learning through the Grace Prentice Education Platform.

Why did you decide to create a digital training company?

Having worked in education in many different settings, we were able to see the glaring missed opportunity for students of all ages. Most college graduates today, and professors alike, admit that students will not need 99% of the information they learn in college. With the average cost being $41,426 per year and the average student today staying in college for 4.5 years, that is an approximate cost of $186,417.

Not needing 99% of what you learn in college in a professional setting post-college means you are getting the benefit of $1,864.17 of your money. Rather than spend those valuable resources of time and money, we wanted to provide an opportunity to increase learning takeaways while decreasing the necessary time and the financial burden of education.

Did you have any moments of doubt before you launched your training company?

Never. We spent the first 4 months building a system that allowed us to duplicate courses over and over again. Once the system was in place it became a plug-and-play that could easily be replicated for any of our GPEducators which has been done successfully with many people.

What are your online courses like?

Our courses are 95% videos, with an occasional PowerPoint graphic used simply to make a point when necessary. Each of our videos is between 6-16 minutes, done intentionally as a measure of ensuring students’ attention span is kept throughout the entire lesson.

How long does it take you or your team to create a new course?

We have adopted multiple business models and styles for creating courses. In one of them, for courses that take just one week to learn, we can film a course in two day’s time and have it edited and online within one and a half weeks time. For our “drip-style” courses, we will record 2-4 videos initially and release the course and then have put out 1-2 courses per week.

Tell us a little about the process of launching your first course and getting your first enrollment(s).

The process took about 3 months. We had been working on the system to create the plug-and-play methodology, and carefully documenting each part in order to know how to duplicate the settings into another course.

This careful design helped set us up for much of the future success. Only minor changes were needed along the way. We didn’t need to recreate the wheel for the next courses. We used multiple methods of promoting while we were building and just asked for support for anyone who can help and the responses were great.

Do you have a lead magnet?

For all individuals who go to our courses at graceprentice.com, once they create an account they will get the first few lessons of our Business Academy course free. Each course has its own profile and promotions page as well where students can see what the takeaways will be and who will be teaching them. Additionally, for most courses, we give the first lesson out entirely free and create promotional videos around the course, so people know what they are getting themselves into before signing up.

What’s the traffic strategy that works best for you?

Our main method is self-promotion and marketing through Social Media. We use a combination of informative posts, pressing podcast topics, course promotions, and helpful tips to get people to see the site and social media platforms, and have them join our Grace Prentice Education Community. We can generate roughly 10,000 impressions per week while actively engaging with our network.

What online course platform are you using?

Thinkific. It’s an incredible learning platform that given the right resources and knowledge of creation can be made into amazingly useful software. It can do everything we need so far.

Take a Look at Thinkific!

Thinkific is the most popular online course platform used by successful course creators interviewed on coursemethod.com. It’s a complete solution for creating sales pages, uploading all course content, taking payments, and more.

• Price Range: Free to $499/month 
• Most Popular Plan: Pro Plan at $99/month
• Annual Discount: Yes, take 20% off!
• Free Trial: Try out Thinkific’s core features for free.

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What made you decide to use your chosen platform over others?

We tried many of the other popular online learning platforms, but none of them quite gave us the design aesthetic we were looking for. Thinkific has been incredibly easy and adaptable to our platform needs.

What other tools do you use to run your digital training business?

We use Zoom, FaceTime, Microsoft Suite, Google Drive, and finally, Adobe Premier Pro.

What books or training programs have you found useful on your journey to a successful business owner that others might find valuable too?

Here’s my list of top books:

• Zero to One- Peter Thiel
• The Lean Startup- Eric Ries
• Insanely Simple: The obsession that drives Apple’s Success- Ken Segall
• Think and Grow Rich- Napoleon Hill
• Good to Great- Jim Collins

Do you have any big mistakes you’ve made along the way that you’d be willing to share?

The biggest mistake we’ve made early on is being too generous with the payout. We compensate GPEducators very well for each course sale they bring in. This was done intentionally, but will soon shift into a more normalized scaled payout that is beneficial to both Grace Prentice Education as a company and all GPEducators.

Please share some idea of revenue for your digital training company.

We started out selling our courses for $497. Now, with the Covid-19 Pandemic, we ramped up production of courses and cut costs to range anywhere from $19.97 to $49.99. This resulted in solid enrollment in many of our classes. With the new courses in development, many people have reached out and asked for additional training.

Please tell us a little about what the money you’ve earned from running your digital training company has done for you.

All of the money we have made so far has gone right back into the direct growth of the company. My business partner and I envision our name on a building with this company. We are building that “overnight success” one day at a time.

In addition to revenue are there any numbers you would like to share?

We utilize small town Facebook groups to help us build our following. It all started out with friends and family and then began making videos that direct people right to our site. We provide them with useful information and tips and use that to reel them in for full interaction with the company – i.e. purchase a course.

What has creating your digital training business done for you personally?

Creating an online course provides a certain level of legitimacy. It elevates any conversation we are having in regards to our professional experience and company life.

It’s also provided my partner and me with a deeper understanding of our settings. We moved to Raleigh, NC to start this with very little knowledge of the area and said we would build our wings on the way down. I believe so far we have been able to do just that and are excited to continue.

What advice do you have for people just starting out?

Account for and expect that you will mess up. The first course will always be the most mentally challenging.

That’s because you are creating your system of curriculum development and content creation that works for you. Once you have that baseline, use that as your reference point to make tweaks and edits. Make sure you give this you’re all. A half-hearted attempt will lead you to a position of failure. That alone causes most people to lose before they really start.

Learn more about Isaac Prentice of Grace Prentice Education:

• Website: graceprenticeeducation.com
• Instagram
• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• TikTok- @GracePrenticeEduc