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How San Francisco Business School Offers Affordable Business Education Around the Globe
- Who: Julia Khvasch
- Website: sanfranciscobs.com
- Course Topic: Business Education
- Interesting Stats: Preparing a one-hour course content requires 25-30 hours of total work
Who are you and what digital training company have you created?
I am Julia and I am working for San Francisco Business School. I have a B.S. degree in Economics and an MBA degree.
San Francisco Business School has been formed by business professors, business professionals, and industry enthusiasts to offer premium and affordable business education to professionals around the globe.
Our vision is to be the go-to internet platform for executive professionals who need to enhance their competence.
Our mission is to deliver affordable and high-quality courses for professionals seeking to advance their salary and career.
What market does your digital training serve?
San Francisco Business School offers comprehensive, online, and self-paced business programs for professionals. Our programs include, but are not limited to executive leadership, strategy creation & execution, marketing strategy, decision-making, problem-solving, project management, finance for non-finance managers, and schedule management.
Our programs are targeted for:
- Early and Mid-Career Professionals – Prepare for managerial and leadership roles in marketing after working as an individual contributor or functional specialist.
- Managers and Directors – Build greater self-awareness and explore ways to generate new marketing strategies to overcome challenging business circumstances and sail into new oceans.
- Consultants and Investors – Develop techniques for assessing the current marketplace, generate effective marketing strategies, deploy your marketing strategy, and continuously evolve through the way to success.
- Professional Certification Holders – SFBS offers continuing education credit programs for professional certification holders to maintain their certifications. Programs cover recertification courses for PMI, Scrum Alliance, ISACA, ISC2, EC-Council, and other certification bodies.
What’s the biggest benefit of taking your online courses?
SFBS programs just got upgraded with Generative AI modules. Cutting-edge curriculum designed in guidance with industry and academia to develop job-ready skills are the biggest benefit for our prospective students.
Our programs come with a Diploma and a Certificate. So, you can highlight new skills on your resume and LinkedIn profile.
Certificates prove your proficiency in a particular area, making you a more attractive candidate to potential employers. They are powerful to highlight your commitment to continuous learning and self-improvement. Boost your resume with a Certificate of Completion from San Francisco Business School.
LinkedIn users who’ve added certifications to their profile increased by 44% in the last two years. Having business certificates on your profile or resume can set you apart from other applicants.
How did you get into the market?
The idea came out of a group of business professors, business professionals, and industry enthusiasts. These people are actively teaching in reputable business schools and online training platforms. They curated the best of their content to form SFBS programs.
Why did you decide to create a digital training company?
Because we are living in a digital age. Everything is accessible online. Premium business education should be accessible and affordable for all professionals around the globe.
If so what made you turn it around and do it anyway?
We did not doubt our programs. They are premium and comprehensive. However, we had struggled to reach an online presence level. We had to pitch our platform on different media outlets until we reach a sustainable traffic.
What are your online courses like?
Our programs are mostly consisting of self-paced videos. However, handouts, case studies, AI generated quizzes, cheat sheats, and guides are available as study materials.
Each video is around 10 minutes long.
How long does it take you or your team to create a new course?
The duration to create a course program heavily depends on the content of the course. Roughly, preparing a one-hour course content requires 25-30 hours of total work.
Our program development team is an in-house team. We have some outsourced teams for creatives, images, etc. However, the course content is critical and developed by our team.
Tell us a little about the process of launching your first course and getting your first enrollment(s).
It is not easy to convince people to purchase a digital product. Our sales funnel is roughly 15 days.
To warm our audience, after preparing the course program, we prepared one-hour mini-programs for each program we developed.
When visitors land on our pages, we direct them to enroll in our Free Courses if they are not ready to purchase yet. Then, we warm the student with emails, testimonials, and other materials.
Do you have a lead magnet?
Yes, we have Free Programs here.
When student shows an exit intent on our web pages, these popups try to get student to enroll in our Free Programs.
What’s the traffic strategy that works best for you?
Our best strategy is creating useful organic content. PPC works as well, however, it is costly.
What online course platform are you using?
Our LMS is on Teachable, and our blog is on WordPress.
Do you like it?
Teachable has some limitations, but overall, it is not bad.
Are there any features you wish it had?
Yes, for example setting a thumbnail for some pages are not possible on Teachable. If you create a custom page, you cannot set thumbnails.
What made you decide to use your chosen platform over others?
Running an LMS on your own is cumbersome. After checking the other alternatives, we’ve decided to proceed with Teachable.
WordPress for sure gives more control, however, enabling CDN, struggling with capacity issues when you have high traffic is not easy.
What other tools do you use to run your digital training business?
We are using Mailerlite for email marketing, Sumo for website banners, cloudflare for web security, buffer for social media posts, Adwords for paid marketing, Facebook ads for retargeting, and Canva for creating creatives, images, etc.
What books or training programs have you found useful on your journey to a successful business owner that others might find valuable too?
I’m a pretty good internet surfer. I follow many blogs and search on the internet when I want to learn something. I cannot say a single resource, but I heavily depend on internet resources when I want to learn new skills.
Do you have any big mistakes you’ve made along the way that you’d be willing to share?
As far as I remember, I do not remember a big mistake we made.
Please share some idea of revenue for your digital training company.
As these numbers are confidential, I can provide a ballpark range. Every day, we have thousands of visitors on our platform.
Please tell us a little about what the money you’ve earned from running your digital training company has done for you.
It took a few months to reach positive cash flow for our company. - Julia Khvasch Click To TweetAll of our team works remote and sustains a good life. Some bought new homes, some new cars.
What has creating your digital training business done for you personally?
Seeing every single registration is priceless. Because our programs change the lives of our students. They enhance their career opportunities, they are promoted to a better role, increase their salary, or start up their own companies.
Seeing all these happening with our programs is invaluable.
What advice do you have for people just starting out?
The key to being successful in the digital training ecosystem is, teaching what you are an expert at. - Julia Khvasch Click To TweetBecause there is harsh competition in the market, and the audience is brutal for subpar content.
Learn more about Julia Khvasch of sanfranciscobs.com:
