E12: Case Study: Starting a Certification Program with Natalie Gingrich

From San Antonio, Texas, and have spent the last seven years in my own entrepreneurial journey, really honing in and using the gifts that I innately have, but also on top of that, really coupled with the experience that I had in my 15 year corporate experience as well. So, all that means that I got here by leveraging my operational skills, which sounds super nerdy and unattractive, but believe it or not, they're desirable.

And there's a large contingency, specifically of females, who have the opportunity to use these as well. So I've taken all of those experiences and I've spent seven years in this phase of my, I call it Natalie 3.0.

And when you kind of zoom out and, and maybe you have a different understanding of it from what my corporate experience was, but when I came into small business operations, again, for small business, you're running leaner teams, you're running smaller operations, and sometimes even more meaningful and passionate filled operations and businesses, your operations are a lot wider than just logistics and some of those pieces that I had attached to them beforehand.

But when we look at operations today, we're really looking at five disciplines specific to small and online businesses. And that's the operational strategy, you're looking at human resources, which is a huge discipline underneath, but we'll just summarize it there. Project management, data and financial. So those five disciplines fall underneath operations and all five of those are desperately and significantly needed in any size of business.

If you are a solo entrepreneur, or if you are, you know, in corporate America, those are all disciplines that have to be a part of what you do and how you perform, how your business is stood up. When I came into the online space, I was really helping businesses in all of those and Erin, I didn't know that I had anything different than the next person.

I have a background in my corporate experience, afforded me the opportunity to work in human resources and project management for that time period. But even those were very silo disciplines inside of corporate America, because frankly, you just have a lot more resources in large organizations like that.

When I translated that into small businesses, I started to see how, we can't afford in businesses like mine and yours, we could not afford somebody to be a disciplined owner of those five disciplines, because you still have another whole side of your business, which is marketing, right.

And I just was doing what I always did, and I apprised that and really pulled that back into my corporate experience because, you know, even though I was working in one discipline, they were all very cross-functional and the skills of an operator are all very cross-functional.

Getting to, to answer the question of what is a director of operations, they leverage those five skill sets and hard skill training areas and pull them into one person come and sit next to, from a strategic level and a strategic partnership, they sit next to the CEO and the visionary to help the visionary and the business to scale faster, to be more profitable, to optimize, to find efficiencies. That's what a director of operations does.

There's many different levels of an operator and arguably they're all very, very important. You know, you can have an operations coordinator and operations manager. And honestly, there are so many different terms for what these people do. I have landed on a director of operations to show the significance at the strategic level, but also the breadth of not just being a project manager and not just being an HR manager, pulling all of that together at the strategic level.

That's what makes a director of operations. Yeah.

You know, I like venue lawyers. we don't think in terms of systems, you know, we kind of think in terms of, you know, what we know and, and our precedent, things like that, but systems are not kind of at the forefront of what we do. And so having someone to help put those pieces in place is made, made a huge difference. I can say in my business, and we are gonna talk a little bit later about the value of DOOs in businesses, but I wanna start with talking about your business.

First from kind of a high level perspective about like why you started your business. There's a couple of things that I have noticed. I mean, you did mention that you mostly work with women. And so one, and that was my experience all the dos that come across are women. Now, was that intentional? Is there something inherently feminine about DOOs, and do you see any shifts around that?

I didn't have a big, you know, significant dollar amount that equated success to me. I really wanted to be able to be available for my children in a different way, and still at the same time contribute financially to our household. But I did not have crazy expectations of making 5 billion or six figures or any of the things that we are commonly equating to success.

I wanted to do this in the way that was most authentic to me, and you don't have those opportunities when you work for a larger institution. And so I wanted to do it different. And I initially was attracted to working with women who were course creators in the online space. And that was completely foreign to me. I didn't even know that this was an opportunity or a business that was just booming. I had no idea when I was in corporate that this was happening.

And so I fell into working alongside and being a partner to people. When I was doing this in a one to one capacity, the people who leveraged me best and most often were females. And so, you know, I think that's where it organically was created. You know, some people will say, oh, I bet you were just sick and tired of the male, energy that happens in corporate and to no surprise, it was actually the females that made it way harder than the males, but we'll save that for a different day.

So that's who I was working with and, in the online space in general, I was finding that It was easier for me to talk to, and to educate and to partner with women. And so I work with people for a long time and I was not exclusive to working with females. I just found that there was better energy and, and ease about it when I was working with other females.

And over time, when it came time for me to take my intellectual property and do something with it again, I got to redefine what, what looked good and felt good to me at that moment. And I continued down the path of working with females, and here is why. It's not because males cannot be operators. Actually, in my corporate experience, most of my peers were males. They weren't females. But I will say that when I started to stand this up myself, I loved the community aspect of what we were doing.

And I don't wanna get super woo here, but there was energetically something about the way that I knew I was going to build this business around community, around support, around mentorship, and if I was gonna be let's call it the chief mentor, the head mentor, I knew who I mentored easiest and best. And so I put some parameters on myself, which, you know, I'm sure every coach I've ever had is like, why do you do that? You could make so much more money, blah, blah, blah.

And maybe that's the case, and we've had so many men who apply, who want to join us and they would possibly be phenomenal fits. It just breaks the energy and the confidence and the leadership training that we're providing when we, you know, when we, when we distract ourselves with that. So anyway, that's, that's the long story as to why we have built this around females.

I also know that from my own, really like heart to heart, it is the females and my peers in our gender that don't see the value that they can bring to other people.

I never thought about, I could build a business to sell. I never thought that there could be assets in my business.

We've never had a budget for anything in my business and you're managing the team so well, like, do you think that you could take on another project and another project? And so before you knew it, I was fully encompassed into the business and really at the driver's seat. And so there's a whole lot of lessons that went into this because I didn't initially position myself as a director of operations.

I was really just like a bleeding heart showing up to serve clients, which I love about the core of me, but at the same time, it took some time to get to the place where I even saw that I had intellectual property, that would be valuable to somebody else.

So, there's a lot of coaching that I'm sure you could look back on my journey and be like, yes, NAD But, so then I came in at this higher level and I got to work with, I mean, dozens and dozens of phenomenal businesses and those people, those leaders that I was working with, were having conferences and masterminds and whatnot. And so as organic networking traditionally happens, you know, I found myself having the opportunity to be able to speak to large groups, being on stages.

This is pre pandemic. So travel was a totally different, you know, actually business was quite different at that point, too. Marketing was very different too. So I think in 2019 I spoke on 19 stages and that, yes, I mean, life was completely different. Now I think I've spoke on three in the last so many years, so... but when I had the opportunity to do that, it really opened up the floodgate of helping women or business owners to see that they could use this support and then where to find it.

Well, that generated an, just a plethora of leads for me. However, there was a capacity thing and remember I was doing this from a legacy perspective. My very busy kid's sports life does not lend me to having just a ton of clients. So, I started to think, you know what? I'm gonna put this into a course because people are coming to me and they're asking me, Natalie, I need a Natalie. Where do I find a Natalie?

And I hadn't run across a lot of people who had a super similar background to me or the same skill sets that I have, but I did find a lot of people who were eager to use parts and pieces of it. So I was like, you know what, I'm gonna solve the problem. I'm gonna create a course. And I'm an operator. I am not a marketer. And so when it came down to it, I did a lot of work into figuring out how I could put this into a course.

And that's a fun experience that we could probably jam on for another hour. But I put that into a course and had an absolute beast of a time trying to sell the thing because I'm not a marketer. We had a couple people buy it and I received great feedback. The hard part was that I would then. Like connect people and say, oh, Erin, you're looking for somebody? Well, here's this person who has purchased this course. And I had, never interacted. It was truly a quote unquote passive product.

So I didn't know the people that were coming in there was no qualifications for them to come in here. And so Erin, who is trusting me as a peer to say, Hey, Nat, who do you have? I wouldn't necessarily match y'all, but I would say, Hey, Erin's looking for somebody. Hey, here are these five people, Erin. Y'all go figure it out. So I wouldn't necessarily have massive ownership, but I was making a recommendation in jest and I have a very empathetic soul.

So Erin as a peer would come back and say, you know what? You matched me with Sally. And at the end of the day, Sally didn't do this. She didn't know this. She was whatever. Well, I felt terrible for both Sally and Erin who are now in this partnership or trying to unwind outta this partnership. And, you know, money is spent, heart, time, you know, all that stuff is really valuable and even more so valuable in a small business when resources are very thin.

So, I went to work with again, how to solve that problem because people are still coming to me at this point. And I'm thinking, how am I gonna do this? So the course model didn't feel good to me, both from an experience perspective, a sales mechanism, and also it didn't solve the problem of how can I recommend strong people to this contingency of women and people who want an operator in their business? So that's when a very wise friend of mine said, have you ever considered certification?

We were at an event and I was sitting on a bus. We were going to dinner and I, my mind exploded. I could barely think for the next two days at the conference, because I knew that that was when I say ticket, I don't mean in a financial way. I knew that I was actually going to solve the problem that had been, just itching me for the last two years.

And it allowed me to have qualifications up front to really present a curriculum that I could control and then provide an experience where people could really have a transformation so that they could stand up and utilize this information in a way that could be transformational and, and helpful for them and their legacies, which ultimately is, the biggest driver I have.

So I had, there was no qualification of this is gonna be right for you, or this is gonna be wrong for you, which, from a transaction perspective, felt really bad for me. I was like, Natalie, I'm taking people's money and they can't use it. But then on the other side, when they're coming back to me, it's like, well, now I almost needed like a mastermind or coaching sessions to actually help them to bring that to neutral. And honestly, I wasn't really a good course creator either.

I didn't really know how to teach people. I didn't know how to break this material down. I was really downloading this, you know, 15 years of experience and four degrees into something that I just didn't have the instructional design to be able to deliver it in a way that was going to be best used. Just so everybody knows, that course has come off the market as soon as possible. I think we sold it 16 times and tied that baby up.

Which has now become eight other modules that support this. And so we start looking at those hard disciplines, the HR, the project management, data, financials, all of those. I went to building out the curriculum in, you know, a really in depth way and we've never stopped adding to it. We won't stop adding and refining to it. And we started with our first, with our beta round and that was in 2018.

And you know, that informed a lot of what we would be doing moving forward that, from there, we do this in a cohort style, so it's not an evergreen product. That is something that doesn't authentically feel good to me. I love having controlled sizes of groups. I never anticipate being in business without having a one-to-one connection with the students, because I really value that.

I know I would make a lot more money doing it in a different way, but it wouldn't feel good to me and that that's, what's most important to me. So we have delivered this, we've built out a full team around it, Erin. There's a delivery team and an operations team that does a lot of the program coordination, but our delivery team, we have coaches in addition to myself that are discipline experts in all of the areas that we've talked about today.

We also have a support team, accountability advisors, and that's been an evolution. Like we didn't pop out with all of that. I didn't have the financial means to do that either. So,

I think my email list was like 700 people at that time, which I had already poured five years into. But you know, my audience had changed several times because I went from being a one-to-one service provider, right, to looking for my peers of service providers. And so that shift was interesting and something we still put a lot of effort into.

We know some of the stats of, you know, percentage of completion in courses and stuff, but this was a whole different experience because we were walking students through. We continue to walk students through every single step. And so we put some graduation requirements in place. We have actually expanded those with more cohorts that have gone through. We continue to look back and to see what that looks like.

The other piece that I have spent a significant amount of time and passion around is the acceptance requirements, the application requirements, because there's actually a lot of metrics that go into who is right for this. I wanna make sure the people who are joining me are going to be qualified DOOs. I don't want them giving me money and me feeling bad about them not having success.

And so the way for me to protect myself is, and this is the emotional part, not legally, but was to put some requirements in place up front from the application so that I could do as good of a job as I know, to attract the right people, and to when I say repel, to guide them on a different path, anyone who doesn't qualify, we have some partner programs that we can refer them to.

But we continue to do a lot of work to see who is the best person and seeing what kind of data we can get from them, to get them to qualify to come in. And then we have graduation requirements. Over time, looking at those graduation requirements, we have looked at milestones and so we have put some milestones in place to help us as a coaching team to direct and coach them to the path which we see as the greatest success for them.

And, all of that has been really valuable, and I believe helps us to have really high success rates, too.

Like after they graduate, are they continue to be part of a community? And, and I know Annie who who's working for me, like she always has a resources that she can pull on. Uh, when we have questions.

So mm-hmm yeah, that's a, that's a huge piece.

And so, first of all, do you have intellectual property? Secondly, have you protected the intellectual property and third now start thinking about what that looks like for you. And, you know, there's a lot of different certification models out there, and it's, it's a really small subset of the course kind of market, but figuring out what works best for you and how you and the curriculum that you're teaching and the market that you're teaching to, how you set and design that up it's step three.

And most people come to me. With that in mind and I'm thinking, no, no, no, no, no, it's not about that. You have to go back to step one, which is my advice has been the IP and making sure that you've got it. Number two, that you protect it and then start looking at the way that you're gonna set this up and design it. Because the design and the program coordination is the fun part. Like, that's the fun creative part and I get that. None of it will matter if you don't have the first two.

I found a lot of resistance in really getting very, very niche in my marketing until I had done all the IP work that I did.

I'm definitely about impact. And so these were just critical steps to helping me stay in alignment with who I am and what I want.

A certification is, is way more thoughtful to me. It's super deep, and I don't think that that's unique to me. I think that that's the way that it should be because when they're buying that certificate, the hope of that certificate, it just has to be a lot deeper that, you know, I, I think that there's just a lot more mental energy that goes into a certification than it does a course. Also the one to one or the one to many interaction in a certification is just so different than a course.

I mean, even if people sell that support as a part of a course, there's a different level of transformation and responsibility that take place in a certification. And I hope that that's the way for every other, you know, certification company out there.

I mean, what the pandemic has done to us has opened up a lot of HR questions that never were even thought. I mean, we didn't even think about these my 15 years in corporate,

It's a really hard place to be. Um, and so eventually you reach kind of that tipping point. And I, I refrain from saying a breaking point because, while that happens, an operator can come into your business and it may not be a doo, but an operator at some level can come into your business and offload the back end of your business. And so, um, being able to partner with you in those areas that are likely either being avoided, which is what happens when you're trying to be seven CEOs at one time.

There are some of those that just don't get any attention and you just kind of cross your fingers and your toes and you hope nothing pops up or bubbles up. Those areas are likely in the area of financial or project management, you know, those things. Yes. Finding efficiencies is not important because the main driver, the place that we put the majority of our emphasis is on the marketing side, generating sales, finding clients, you know, looking for your audience.

That's what a business owner does naturally. And so I tell people that when you feel like you're reaching the point of just capacity, we'll call it capacity more so than stress, which is likely a capacity issue, you know, that's a good time to look for an operator. And the second really good indicator is if your passion is on the sales part or in the brand identity part.

Just be honest with yourself from the very beginning that when you have resources, time, you know, energy investment to place somewhere, you are always, and you should always place it on the opposite side of your strength. So if marketing and attracting people is the number one place, then start looking for an operator. Now, if doing client work, you know, I've worked with plenty of attorneys too. If client work is your passionate area, then you need to do the opposite.

You need to start looking for people to help generate leads for you mm-hmm and in the marketing space. So knowing where your strength is and hiring for the opposite is where we see the, the biggest value for us as operators entering into businesses.

So, yeah, so this is the hourly to exit podcast, you know, where we talk about building a scalable and saleable expertise based business. And so part of that is, uh, two pieces building exclusivity into your business. Intellectual property, which we've talked about. Proprietary, processes, things that you own exclusively, as well as having a unique marketing position. And then also having predictability in your business, independence from the owner, which means having systems.

So where in the hourly to exit journey does having a DOO fit in?

And so that timeline is very different from business to business. But as soon as you start to experience scale, I believe that someone can stand up a business and operate it independently of any labor for as long as they want to.

And if so, you're on the path to continuing to scale, knowing that team has to be a part of it, whether you'll like leading people or whether you don't right, that's just going to be a part of it. So when you start to feel like you're on that uphill, uh, momentum.

Giving yourself the grace and space to time out and looking for support, that's gonna be way better timed than making yourself crazy, stressed out, when you get to the top of that hill and you look backwards and you say, you know what, I'm just ready to burn it all down. This is way too much for me. Yes. We've all been there. Oh, I think that a lot of us have been there and that's not a comfortable place to be.

If they don't need me to drive them anywhere and I start to see, you know, at least the age of retirement coming a lot faster than I did seven years ago. And so through my we'll call it aging journey or experience, I have looked at this and have been affirmed and confirmed that this actually is a sellable asset. There are actually several sellable assets inside of this business.

And I think that that's just the maturity of myself, the maturity of me growing as a business owner and having wise people like you to, to learn from. We're absolutely in the process of taking this from a lifestyle business, to selling either the whole thing or different pieces of it. And I am avidly learning about the different ways of being able to do that and different assets that are available to sell.

And, um, I, I believe that, you know, I was talking to my team recently in the next, you know, 10 to 12 years. I. Probably be hopefully at that exit point. Right.

So, I almost get choked up every single time. I talk about them. It's such a dear community that is available everywhere, right? I mean, there are kids that have these challenges and who never get the opportunities that our kids have had to grow up in sport and recreation. And it's, you know, mostly for the kids, but secondarily, those parents who actually find a community of people as well. So that's our nonprofit of choice and where we spend a lot of time as a family.

And then on the other side, we have another company called the hiring authority, which is actually how you and I had come into contact, which is where we help businesses who are growing their talent. We help them to resource and staff on from a full service perspective. But that's, that's an area of our business that is really, really growing. And, you know, another place that, that your listeners may be interested in.