The Koerner Office - Business Ideas and Deep Dives with Chris Koerner - This $15K/Person Grant Feels Like a Cheat Code⏐ Ep. #208

Episode Date: August 13, 2025

If you want Hector’s help starting or growing your own trade school, fill out this quick form: ⁠https://form.typeform.com/to/Fz6CExfSCheck out my newsletter at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠TKOPOD.com⁠⁠��⁠⁠ and join my new community at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠TKOwners.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.I sat down with my friend and neighbor Hector to talk about how he built and scaled trade schools using little-known government grants. We covered how states pay $5,000 to $15,000 per student, why white labeling courses leads to huge margins, and how he’s helped schools in industries like nursing, CDL truck driving, pest control, IT tech sales, and more. We also discussed how existing business owners can bolt a school onto their operation, solve staffing shortages, and get paid to train their own employees.Enjoy!---Watch this on YouTube instead here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠tkopod.co/p-yt⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Ask me a question on or off the show here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://tkopod.co/p-ask⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Learn more about me: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://tkopod.co/p-cjk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Learn about my company: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://tkopod.co/p-cof⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Follow me on Twitter here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://tkopod.co/p-x⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Free weekly business ideas newsletter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://tkopod.co/p-nl⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Share this podcast: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://tkopod.co/p-all⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Scrape small business data: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://tkopod.co/p-os⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠---

You market it to the general public for $3,000. Still big margins. You sell one a week. That replaces somebody's income like that. The grant will pay as high as $15,000. He does six to eight jobs a day. So one man show that it's doing 300 years. I'm like, why not just do this online?

It's going to be more profitable based on what I researched. I spent $0 in marketing. We scaled it to about $2.4 million, our first year on just grants. Oh my gosh. One of my clients has a IT school. He's doing about 2.5, 2.8 on the school side. And another $1.5.5. on the placement side.

Million a year? Yes. About $5 million combined. There's so many grants out there that people don't realize. There's business grants. And people talk about it. They make it complicated. But man, it's that simple.

It's just... I've got a friend named Hector. He lives three minutes down the road from me. He's my Chipotle buddy. And he's in a really interesting line of work. He helps people start trade schools. And he's started a trade school before. And the magic and genius about trade schools is that the state covers all of it.

No one pays for it except the government. And his niche has been in learning. how to navigate these regulatory bodies that will pay entrepreneurs five to $15,000 per trade school course that you can buy in White Label from other course companies for hundreds of dollars. Insane offer. It's a very high ticket product that the buyer doesn't have to pay for. The state pays for it. And so this is a great episode if you're thinking of starting a business because he talks

about how to start your own trade school and navigate this regulatory aspect of it and how to find customers, what types of organizations to partner with for referral partners. And it's also a great episode if you already own a business that is in high demand for good employees. Because if you do own a business in a handful of different niches, you can get paid $5 to $15,000 to train your own employees. And then you can get paid $5 to $15,000 to train other people that will be employed for your competitors. So whether you're a business owner or an aspiring business owner, you're going to love this. It's very interesting. You've probably never heard about this niche. It's kind of a gold mine. Please share with a friend. I bought an insurance

franchise that fell miserably, but I got a phone call that changed my life. And it was an ex-colleg colleague of mine saying, hey, I need truck driver insurance and school insurance. And I was like, well, dude, I can't help you with neither of those. I only sell home and auto. And I was like, what, you know, back up a little bit. What do you mean school insurance and truck driving insurance? And lobehold, he owned a truck driving school, like a CDL school. which we see everywhere. And that's when I was like, huh, interesting. But what caught towards the end of the phone call, I was like, dude, I got to go see this. We weren't entirely shut down yet. But when I saw him in a parking lot of a church with 18 other people there, two trucks, I was just memorized by the whole

concept of trade schools. I didn't know it was a business. Right before I left, he kind of whispered to me, he goes, can you believe the state of Texas is paying me money for each of these guys here? And I was like, what do you mean? There's this grant called WIOA. And if you're a laid off worker, you know, impacted by a justice system on food stamps, there's all this money that people could go get and they'll teach them a new skill set. And I was just like, talk about not sleeping. I literally taint my insurance franchise because of this one sentence.

I didn't know that part of your story. And I love hearing stories about like that first conversation that just got us thinking about something differently. And then you had that conversation on the phone. And he was just calling to ask you about insurance. You dug a little deeper, which shows how being curious can be profitable. Then you went on site and you're like, you're picturing some school. You're probably picturing something more formalized, right? But you just show up to a parking lot with an 18 wheeler and dudes paying thousands of dollars. And then you find out that these dudes aren't paying a dime. The state is covering all of it. Right. Yep. Okay. You said a lot earlier than me.

but yes. So if you hadn't just had this negative career experience, you wouldn't even be in a position to be curious about this or to go down this rabbit hole, right? Never need to exist. Okay. Cool. Do you want a quote or not next? Right. Yep. Yep. Okay. It's just interesting how things come together like that. Probably the best silver lining on my life, man. Yeah. Just one of those moments. Okay. So what did you do after that? After you learned that there's this grant that the government covers? I couldn't sleep, didn't know what to do, spoke to a buddy of mine. just to kind of wrap up things. Well, let me back up.

I helped him scale his school because I was genuinely interested because I really wanted to do this for myself. We tried to work out at Vio. We had different visions. I wanted to do it online only because I'm like, why not just do this online? It's going to be more profitable based on what I research. We're shutting down.

We're going to be shut down. So it was one of those things where online school just made sense. But no, I wanted to go to online school route. It was just a lot more profitable. I didn't need parking lots or spaces or anything like that. And I did my research. And just to be careful explaining the story, we raised some money. We probably didn't raise money, but we did it anyway.

Valuable lesson there. You know, when you look at movies and you see shareholders and meetings, it's not all rainbows and good stuff. But it taught me that side of things, right? And then I took an exit from that school as well. But, man, what have experienced it was, you know, doing those and operating those. And then that led to Twitter. Our buddy Spencer goes, you got to get on Twitter.

That's where it's at. I'm like, there's no way. Like, I don't have any social media. I'm needing social media. But it just, I got on Twitter, booked my first call. It was a school, a flight attendance school in Minnesota that needed help. And I'm like, I can't believe that's a thing. And we scaled it to about 2.4 million, our first year on just grants.

All across Texas, being an online school, it was, we get to market all of Texas. You don't have to stay in your backyard like a brick and mortar. like in-person school. And man, it just caught wildfire. I did everything that no one's ever done. I went, I spent zero dollars in marketing. I just went knocking on church doors and getting involved with church groups and, you know, helping nonprofits, their audiences. And it just caught wildfiremen. What made you want to go to churches for this? At my church, you know, obviously we tithe and stuff like that. And you could choose where your money kind of goes to. And we had already chose a certain percentage to go to a women's shelter. And I knew, you know, through church about these shelters and then where they go through. So I'm like,

you know what? A lot of these nonprofits need something to do while they're recovering or life transitioning. They already qualify for this grant. They just don't know about it. So I pitched it to them. They all loved it. And I quickly noticed some, something wasn't right because their, their login history wasn't high at all. And what I noticed is that they didn't have laptops. So that's when I threw in the laptop. Like, hey, free training, a free laptop. And they just blew up after that even more. Like right when I thought, like, this is it. Then I'm like, oh my gosh, if I just fix this pinpoint, it's going to blow up even more. And then it just, it did. I started getting a lot of community partners. And I partnered up with them. And again, the goal was just to bring awareness to this grant.

Whether they wanted to use our school or not, that wasn't the mission. The mission was like, hey, there's this grant. Go learn a trade. We're so behind on trades. And I think we talked about this yesterday for every five tradesmen that retired only once getting replaced no matter what it is yeah let's talk about the unit economics how much is the grant let's and let's talk about your last business how much is the grant and what were the trades so is hvac electrical plumbing and then tell me about like the the oculus that you would send them and then what were you paying for the course million questions in one but you'll sort of good yeah yeah so every state has different regions right And every region treats this grant independently for whatever reason.

Same grant. And that means same different costs. So like say Central Texas will max out at $7,500 per student. That's what the school makes. Our investment is these goggles right here, which you could find for like $2,300 or a laptop. And like I said, when we first started the school, it was mainly medical billing and coding, pharmacy technician, IT help. desk, it's just stuff that you could generally do remotely. When we first started to school, we were writing the curriculum. Then we found out that you could white label it. And what that means

is you produce a bunch of courses. I buy them from you, let's just say for $800 to $1,000. I slapped my school name on it and the rest is margins. So the grant will pay as low as about $5,000 in some areas and as high as $15,000 in some areas. Depending on both the region and the state, right? The region and the state and the field. So they're not going to pay a ton of money for something that's not as much as high in demand, but still needed. But like you said, anything in the trades, welding, a certain kind of technician, whether it's solar, and it's also regional. So for example, if you go down to Houston, Galveston, it's going to be very marine-based, like underwater welding, boat technicians, boat repair, like very like that. if you go to West Texas, it's going to be oil and gas, like driving the trucks to deliver

gas and oil, wind turbine technician, CDL. So it just changes up. And they make it extremely complicated. And then I was able to simplify it. That's where you found success or that's where you found your edge or your alpha because you saw all this friction, all this bureaucracy and red tape. And you said, all right, I'm going to sit down. I'm not going anywhere until I figure this out. because I think that the prize at the end of the rainbow, if I figure this out, is very large. Oh, for sure. Because if you look and you're driving around and you're seeing this, you'll hear schools promoting on the radio.

You'll see them in commercials. You see them on social media. That's expensive. That's extremely expensive. I was doing a guerrilla marketing. I'm going to the church, speaking at a church. Hey, anyone want to go to school for free, want to learn a trade? And they were like, what do you mean?

Like, it took me a while to get them to understand because everyone was like, what's the catch? Like, there has to be a catch. And I'm like, no, just like food stamps has existed this whole time, this grant exists because the wild card here, the purpose of this grant is to get you off government benefits, get you into a livable wage, learn the new skill set, get into the trade, and start making decent money because they want your future taxes forever. So it's a pretty good investment on the government. And they don't want to be paying for your food stamps forever either.

It's a double win. So it's like it's not the government being a philanthropist. It's like we're going to put up $7,500 bucks. Then we're going to save all this money from food stamps. all this money from Section A housing. Then you're going to pay us taxes on top of that. It's an investment for the government. But the government is so complicated that it's hard for entrepreneurs like you and I

to navigate our way through it. Right. Correct. Yeah, you know, and think about it. When you say win-win, it is a win-win because our audience that this grant targets is anyone in warehouse work, retail work, fast feed work.

So we're just trying to get people out of not flipping burgers anymore and into a trade. Yeah. And make three, four, six times as much. At least. The average graduates making 25 to 30 bucks an hour. It's insane. Wow. Okay. So one thing that I think is interesting about all this is like you don't have to be in the course business. You don't have to go put together this course about HVAC, which you probably know nothing about, right? I mean, you did fix your HVAC, other than that. I did. I took the course for the first time after five years and took that one section and I was able to fix my own HVAC for 20 bucks. Yeah. Who would

No, it works. That's the whole beauty of this is like you, you figure out how to work this system in a compliant way. And then you figure out how to just white label courses, which is just a fancy way for saying, find a school, buy the courses from the school, put your logo on it. That's it. Then you put the parties together. And then I guess the third critical element of that is finding referral partners, churches, workforce development centers, chambers of commerce, anyone that regularly interacts with people

that might want a free education, right, and to better their lives. Once again, you say it a lot more prurier than me. Yes. Okay. So why don't we talk about the trades that are in the highest demand, from like most to least demand, that most states and or regions will pay for? Yeah, it's anything with the word technician in it.

So whether that's solar technician, fork lift repair technician, pool technician, three technician. The whole point of the grant is what's paying the most out there that people aren't really talking about. We know that HVAC electrical and plumbing are popular and it's always needed. But man, it's the underlying ones that aren't commercialized that are needed. Pest control technician. I mean, just about anything that has the word technician that secretly they earn really good hourly wages.

And just nobody wants to do it. Like it's 30 jobs that no one must do, but they pay well and for a reason. Well, you were just telling me about a dog groomer, which I would never think would be relevant to this, but they're like vet technicians, right? Yeah. And so that counts. Yeah, I helped a guy up the street from us in Princeton, Texas, and he opened up a dog grooming school.

I didn't believe them. I was like, dude, I can't help you. Little bit that I know that when I looked up like the requirements, the grant pays for a vet tech, which is just an assistant to. veterinarian person, but it also qualifies for these dog groomers because there's certain things that I won't really get into. It's kind of gross that they have to do during the grooming session. And this guy's booked out like six to eight weeks in advance charges 250 per trim because he specializes in doodles like golden dutrals lab with doodles. And I can't believe it, man.

He's going to, you know, he's weeks away from going live with a school. He's going to train and do his own curriculum because it's again it's white labels he's going to train his own curriculum pick from the cream of the crop keep those and the rest get certified and go find work elsewhere which is there anyone with with certifications it's not hard to find a job yeah so you're saying that there's an opportunity here for aspiring business owners to start their own school and which we'll get to in a minute but then there's also an opportunity for current business owners that maybe has a hard time finding qualified employees, maybe hires people with the job title that have the word technician in it, like these vet technicians. And so you help them set up their own school to where,

A, they can find the best people in the business. They can, and they're getting paid to train their own employees, right? They're getting paid by the government to find the best employees that they can. And then for all the leftover, like they call it sell your sawdust, right? Let's say they have, they have more applicants than they need to hire. They can still get paid by the government to train them. And then they can just farm them out to all their competitors or they can go get jobs elsewhere. Yeah.

Here's a case study for you. I had through mutual connections on helping an adult, a boutique adult daycare business. Okay. Extremely look at a business. And the number one pain point he has is that he never has enough CNAs. And what CNA means is certified nurse. assistant. Grueling, grueling job.

I mean, big turnover rate because you're just bathing old people, taking care of them, unfortunately changing diapers. And they don't get paid the best. Usually the ranges is from like $16 and $18. But he does have a career progression. Like if you stick with them for a couple months, he gives you a raise, another couple of months, another raise.

Come to find out, you know, 25 out of his 30 CNAs weren't even certified, almost like a home health aide. You just take a little boot camp course. Is that legal? Yeah, because it's kind of like home health aid. Like you're just like a glorified babysitter, I guess, if you will. But yeah, I mean, he's going to get $7,500 for every single staff member he certifies. He needs to certify anyway.

So once he stands up to school, he'll probably make $300,000 in additional revenue fixing his own pain point. But you brought up a good question. How many people do you think are really certified out there doing the work all the time? And we talked about the forklift repair guide, man. He's not certified. He just done it for 30 years. The guy that fixed my dishwasher here in the town of Wiley, he came to fix it. It took him 15 minutes.

He bills me 450 bucks, which is insane. But he's the only one that picked up the phone. Out of five people I thought, I mean, literally the only one picked up the phone. And he could be here the next day. And I paid whatever it was. Spent 15 minutes here. I literally hung up a call that was on. And I had to go ask him like, hey, where'd you go to school?

This is what I do. Obama, he's like, I didn't go to school. I started fixing my own stuff eight years ago. My wife put a post on it and it just took off from there and I've been doing it since. I'm a one-man show. He does six to eight jobs a day. So one-man show, that dude's doing 300 a year. There's just so much demand for it. So much demand. I mean, I had to call five people. Some dude watching YouTube videos is making insane money. All the time. I mean, that's what you post about all the time. It's just people overcomplicated. They never start and they over-analyze it. It just don't. start stuff, man. I mean, we're here to tell people start stuff. All right. So we'll get to like the starting a new school from scratch in a minute. But I'm, I'm thinking about Amazon right now. Like one of the most brilliant things that Amazon did to grow was they took all of their cost centers and turned them into profit centers. So, you know, two decades ago, they're like, geez, we're spending all this money on servers. Like, why don't we buy our own servers? And then we'll buy extra. And if anyone

needs our servers, we'll call it AWS, Amazon Web Services, and we'll charge money for people to use our servers. And now AWS is a multi-billion dollar business in and of itself. And then they were like, geez, we're giving UPS, USPS and FedEx all this money every year. We're growing so fast. Why don't we just buy our own trucks? And that was their biggest cost center. Now, you know, other companies pay Amazon to deliver their stuff. Now it's a profit center. So this the CNA example, he was spending tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars a year recruiting CNAs, like subpar, not even certified CNAs from other like head hunting agencies. And you went to him and said, hey, how about you take that to zero? And in addition, you will get paid for training your own employees. In addition,

if you don't need all the employees that you're training, you can just farm them out. So could he get paid to train someone and then get paid to place them at a competitor as well? 100%. If you really wanted to lean into that. Well, he did it because he's, you know, he's going to exit in five or ten years and he's buying these residential looking beautiful homes turning them into adult daycare living or elder care and he's buying them up so he's always going to need CNAs as he scales he needs more and more CNAs and sure if they don't work out he could send them other well other places because again what people are understanding is they just want that piece of paper that piece of paper is a foot in the door and in your career progression right so yeah

he's going to turn it into a cool little, not only value add to his business when he goes to how cool to how many businesses out there go sell and say, hey, I also have a school with it, so you'll never have to worry about. Yeah. Yeah. And then, you know, if the negative way of looking at that from the potential acquires perspective is, oh, I don't want to be in the school business. I just want to be in the CNA business. Well, it's like, well, you're not. Like you're in the training employees business. This quote unquote school just means you're actually getting paid to do it, which none of my competitors are, right? If you want to lean into the, quote, school part of the business, then you feel free to grow that as much as you want, but I would rather get paid to train my

employees than otherwise, right? Not only get paid, I mean, the part two to this grant that I really just started promoting now is we're so behind the eight ball on trades that now there's additional grants for the employer to get free paid labor. And we talked about this. If you hire a graduate that took this grant, most regions, area, cities, workforce offices will pay you up to 100% of training wages, up to 20 bucks an hour

for $300 an hour. Worst case, 50% other wages. The reasoning behind this is they want to help small businesses, but also they want these graduates to have work experience, and that way they call it test driving each other. The employer test drives,

hey, is this person going to be a good worker? Are they going to show up because the bar is so low? And if they do, we'll keep them. if they don't work out dude you just got free labor and they get to put experience on the resume so they go move on to their you know career path crazy so hvac companies could they can have free labor basically that enough people learning now if you were to guess because you've been i know you've been cold calling what percentage of hvac companies even know that this is an option zero what percentage of businesses no zero right in our backyard i was telling you that workforce office

has about a million dollars they get every year specifically to help employers and fix this gap and they struggle to spend the money. Like it's so many grants out there that people don't realize there's business grants and people talk about it. They make it complicated. But man, it's as simple. It's just go register to be a training provider at the workforce. Get free labor. If you're trying to scale, there's no better way to scale for free. And it's a win-win. They get experience out of it. You maybe find a good employee out of it. Is there a way for people to monetize playing a middleman on this on the on the job training side of things where like you could help the city of, you know, Plano, Texas place people at John's HVAC company and make a margin there or is that not really a thing? No, probably.

I mean, that's that's kind of what I, where I fit in, right? Yeah. Sure. I mean, here's a difference, right? When I told you, I cold called HVAC companies because they have a dedicated person that does this for them. and they struggle. Keep in mind how much training goes into it. I mean, look what it sounds like.

Hey, Chris, would you like some free labor? You just have to register at the workforce. You get 300 hours. And you're like, you're too busy. You're like, I don't get it. Sounds like a scam. It kind of sounds like a scam. Yeah, that's your biggest competition is it sounds like a scam.

So I have decent sales experience. I co-called, I co-called 10 HVAC companies. And I said, hey, you know, I'm doing this project. Not necessarily in this order, but I'm like, hey, what size is your business? who runs it. How do you find technicians? Are you looking for technicians? And then whether they say yes or no, it's like, hey, would you mind getting a technician at no cost you? And it comes with workman's comp. And again, I'm messing this up in the order it is. But what was astonishing is out of the 10 company I called, I left messages for seven of them. Still haven't heard back.

It's been a month. The three that did pick up the phone, there were mom and pop, maybe owner's son, owner one technician. And they're like, no, we're good. I'm like, but this is your busy season. Isn't like, don't you want extra labor? Like extra people to go in the attic so you don't have to. It's, nah, I think we're fine. Like, it's just, it's small and we're doing okay. And I'm like, yeah, I mean, but doing okay isn't, you know, this is free labor.

And that's when I started asking questions because I was almost getting annoyed. I'm like, what am I missing here? Like, what are you saying no to it? It's 300 hours of free labor up to $22 an hour with workman's comp. Even if you just used them for your busy season and you call it a day. Knock out five houses in one day versus one. I didn't get it. I didn't get it. Let's talk about some school owners that you know that you've helped and how much money they're making and how they're making money. Like what are they white labeling? What's the industry? What are they selling it

for? How are they finding customers? Let's go there. Perfect. So one of the first schools I helped was a nursing school. They were out of Georgia. And to describe this case study, they were just grossly undercharging and not even using the grant. Oh, man. So they were charging like $2,000 for like a medical assistant. They're seeing like just basic phlebotomy, like basic four-week boot camp style schools. And they were doing decent. They're doing like 10, 12 people a month at $2,000.

But what's unique is that most trade school owners are trades people themselves. Yeah. They're not business owners. Kind of like small business people, right? Like they create a business. They create this school. then they get stuck working in the business. They never get to work on it.

They're the instructor. They're the marketing person. They answer the phone during class. They just don't know how to scale it. They get stuck in it. But they love it. It's their passion. That's usually the common thing.

So when we met, I was like, hey, Atlanta, I mean Atlanta, well, yeah, it's Atlanta. Atlanta pays $10,000 per student. Why are you only charging two? And she goes, I tried using the grant. It was complicated. It's a nightmare. I just, I just, I just. I charge the general public 2000.

I stay busy. I want to stay, I want to stay busy. I'm like, okay. But if you add an extra course and you just change your pricing because your value at is you're an ex-nurice

and you're getting them job placement, the value is in your network of job placement. They could go to other schools, but they're not guaranteed a job. You're almost telling me you can guarantee the job, and you're going to give them two or three courses package or bundle. We did that. She changed her pricing to $9,99,

And she went from doing 20, $25,000 a month to about $150 a month. Oh my gosh. And that's when I gave it away because I was like too eager and naive to. And I'm like, this is what you got to do. And when she started sending me screenshots of the skellion, I'm like, dang it. I think I'm on to something here. I'm like, no more free. So she's just like making her life so hard because she just like, I don't want to figure

that out. So people are coming out of pocket to pay $2,000, which is a lot of. of money for the type of people that is her customer, right? That's a lot of money for them. Meanwhile, this whole time she could charge five times as much and the only one paying for it is the U.S. government. Like, that's crazy. And you know, it's kind of like, you know, we talked about, she comes from a rough background. She's trying to impact her community and she's putting them on this long payment plan, hoping they pay her back when they get a job, which like 50% did. Like, right. Tough thing to gamble. And I get it. It's like we're going to open a lot of

I stay with this podcast because everywhere you look now, you're going to see Chris C.D. Oh, truck driving school, teen driving schools. And those things don't go out of business. Like, they need more of them. My goal is we need trade schools everywhere. Just like you see those kumans and kids coding schools. Like, why are they, why are there 5,000 of those, but not 5,000 of adult schools? I don't get it. Didn't you say there's like in the city of Phoenix, there's like one Masonry school total? There's one masonry school in the whole state of Arizona. There's one applying to a pair school in the state of Texas. No.

In person. Yeah. Everything else is online or virtual? No, it doesn't exist. The other school that's in person is in Ohio. Like there's so many opportunities. There's no such thing as see, everyone goes, well, I don't need that with anything else. I don't need to be certified.

I just need to do the work. Well, all those H-FAC people out there illegally operating, I think you're one of them, if you fix your own, A.C. If you touch Frion, you broke the law, my friend, because you need an EPA 608 universal to touch in a handle refrigerant as an example. But a lot of, you know, OSHA's cracking down. They're going on work sites for various reasons. But these people are cracking down. And you really do need to be certified. I mean, if you want to charge a value ad, some of these companies and contracts want to see your credentials. And that's what we're hoping to solve. And no matter what the field it is. Like I said, flight attendant school, pest control school. Pull technician school Dog grooming school I helped the guy start a telematics company I mean a telematic school I don't even know what telematics was

I'm like spasmatics like the band in songs but no telematics Which is basically They're dealing with low voltage And they're putting technology and GPSes And fleets of vehicles And that technician So behind six months behind on work

Because he can't find technicians Oh my gosh Garage door repair companies so behind on technicians. We know that's a big hot topic right now. Window, text. I mean, anything in the trade is a technician. Any way you want to call it or dice it up.

Do these blue collar businesses like garage door repair, do they pay like placement fees to find good technicians? Some dude, the big ones do. The big ones do because everyone's moving into this boring space now and they're going to have to compete. They're looking for sign on bonuses and all kinds of stuff. There's blue collar staffing companies out there. are killing it that I didn't know was a thing. You think staffing company, you think of white collar,

you know, corporate job and stuff like, and there's some blue collar staffing companies coming out of nowhere that have always existed that's secretly been printing money this whole time. Are there any people that you've helped that are making money by, you know, starting a school, selling courses and in addition paying to place people like a staffing company, doing both? Yeah. I know of one of my clients has a IT school and the staffing that's, by his wife, company. So he graduates them

and steps them to some pretty lucrative companies put by the names of Microsoft, T-Mobile, Verizon. So you would call that double-dipping. I would call that genius.

What do his unit economics look like, both to sell the course and to place them? So he created his own course. So he's like a unicorn. He created his own IT courses. He also white labels to others.

So he created his own IT courses. So I'm sure there's a cost to create it at some point, but now it's like pennies to resell it. And it's all margin. And then on the staffing side, he's collecting $7,500 to $15,000 per placement. And then what's he charging for the program? Anywhere between $5,000 and $10,000.

The state of Arizona has their own region. So he's probably doing about $2.5, $2.8 on the school side and another $1.5.5 on the placement side. Million a year? Yes. Okay. Yeah, about $5 million combined. And it's a five-man show, four of them being offshore. So unicorn.

It's just like, unicorn, Unicorn. Pure profit almost. Oh, gross profit. Oh, man. Disgusting profit. I know. I know.

I know. All right. So if someone's listening to this and they're like, all right, I want to start a school. I want to start a trade school. What advice would you give them? I would say first, what I've noticed is the best school operators are already good operators.

It's like they have a business. So I would think for those that have a business and are listening to this, if you have the pay point of finding staffing and you want to make additional really good revenue, you know, we should have a conversation. And if it makes sense, there's some states that are really easy to throw up a school and bolt it on to your existing business, like our backyard, Texas is an easy school, easy state, Arizona is an easy state, Montana, Arkansas, Missouri, just to name some. Then there's some states that are just tough.

They make you wait two years to even operate or make your first enrollment just because they have their own politics. Stay out of Florida, California, New York, Washington, go figure. Those are tough states. But it doesn't mean it's impossible. It just means you have to wait. You got to wait longer. Yeah.

Okay. And then there's a bunch of states kind of in the middle, right? Kind of somewhat difficult. Six month wait time. Yep. But in the meantime, doesn't mean they don't open it up. That should open up their eyes. like maybe you open up your own academy internally because you want that anyway.

You know, you're going to train your guys the way you want to train them, the way you want to do your process anyway. And that's the cool thing about online schools with the virtual reality gal was people, there's no way you can learn to trade by watching virtual reality. I'm like, what do you think YouTube is doing for us this whole time? We watch a video. We learn how to fix something. And the reality is, this is just a shortcut to get the certificate.

And then once I go to work at Chris's multiple companies, you're going to train me or your operator is going to train me of the way you guys want stuff done. So this is just a piece of paper to get me to that job. And then before you throw me keys to the work truck, you're going to want to train me on how you do your processes. Yeah. So if I'm living in Utah or California and I want to start like a tree technician school or a vet technician school and I find a white label course, I don't want to make it. I find one. It's 500 bucks. Cool. I can like start the process now and then I can go to friends and family. I can make calls and people can pay cash for this, right? The only thing I really have to wait for is the

reimbursement from the state. I can still get rolling before I get that, right? Some states, you can just start selling to the general market like most schools do. Yeah. Until the grant kicks in. And there's a lot of different ways to collect. There's community partners that are willing to pay you for that. I have a client in Utah that's working with a prison system and they're trying to sell courses that these, you know, prison systems is just big, big business that they're trying to buy. And so there's so many ways to use this and utilize this. It's just, I think, it's the code on fixing the paint point of finding staffing and the staffing shortages. I mean,

they've set the bar really low. I've talked to, you know, business owners out there and they're like, man, we really just want a good attitude. If they have credentials, it's a bonus, but we just want them to show up. Yeah. Yeah. So I think another way of looking at this is if I'm in New York or California or Florida, the three most populated states, well, then Texas, it's like, all right, two year wait, cool. That means like no one's going to be doing this. Right. If I'm willing to wait, if I can spend the next two years grinding, trying Facebook ads, trying referrals, trying friends and family, I can do buy now, pay later. Stripe has buy now pay later. Klarna. People can do monthly installments with a firm. I'm going to do it the hard way for two years

because I know I'm going to have very few competitors. And then two years from now, it's easy mode because the state's going to be paying me for these. And I can charge even more. I want to say hard mode because that's what normally people do. That's normal business. high. Yeah. I mean, you go to any truck driving school out there and 90% of them are charging $3,000 to $5,000 and they just rely on volume, but the margins are still high. I'm not a big fan of those in-person schools because of the margins, but like if you bought, like you said earlier, a medical front desk course, which medical, any way you could fit that in the dentist's office, dermatology, anywhere. If you bought this course, let's say for $500 and you market it.

it to the general public for $3,000, still big margins. You sell one a week. That replaces somebody's income like that. Is there any of these trades that have to be done in person or can all of them be done virtually or remotely? Some have to be done in person. Welding. We haven't cracked that that code yet. And some of them are just, you know, you have to do it in person. Some of them is a combination of like, hey, you could do 90% of a hybrid and it just offer a two-week extern shit. So like the CN8 course, you could learn it online, but at a certain point when it comes to like needles and certain procedures, you're going to have to just, you know, like phlebotomy, you're going to have to do so many pokes before you could fully graduate. And that's when you just partner up with employers or stacking companies. That's the easy part. Yeah. Now, what about tech, didn't, or sales? Didn't you say that you know a guy doing like enterprise tech sales with this? Yeah. I have a client that does IT tech sales courses and he crushes it. Anyone looking to get into tech without a degree? It's a big push right now. Not saying there's anything wrong with college degrees. It's just for the longest time, people said, well, I can't get into tech without a degree.

And he was able to debunk that. And now he sells a course. It's IT tech sales course. And it helps people get into some really cool jobs at T-Mobile, work from home. A lot of that is transition for work from home. Everyone's scared of all this return to office talk. There's still plenty of remote work out there. Just people don't know where to look.

Okay. So to recap, like you're doing this insurance. thing ended poorly. You had a conversation with the truck driving school. It was very interesting to you. You raised money. You started your own schools. It did really well. It ended. Now, like, your full-time job slash business is helping people start their own schools and or like start their own schools from scratch or like basically incubate their own schools at their own companies to better vertically integrate, right? 100%. And that's with everything. Because like I said, you know, most of these school owners are tradespeople themselves. They didn't have a CRN. They're not using a cell script.

They're just, you know, John and Mary just, oh, yeah, come down. We teach, you know, how to become a technician. We'll teach you how to become a nurse. And yeah, come on down anytime and click. Like, no, you got to capture, they called. You got to capture that. And it's just like, I'm involved with their sales training. I'm involved with their scripting, their email campaigns, their funnels, the government stuff. Yeah. I'm sure you got to like, you got to kind of know who to talk to like how to work the system. And I said, I don't mean that in like an unethical way, but like how to work navigate this bureaucracy that is the government. That's what I'm saying. Like if you Google trade school consultants, you're going to find people that will show you

how to become a school, become regulated and just like it is for businesses. But what they don't teach you then what? How do you go find students? How do you talk to you said? How you enroll? Yeah. It's very much a cell. Like it's really sells and the still becoming cells. And a lot of these school owners, they don't they don't have that dialed in. and I'm able to help them get that doubted in. A lot of them don't utilize the grant because they've heard it's a terrible experience. But what isn't when you're dealing with the government, if an individual walks into these offices and centers, they're like, hey, I want to take that grant after they ask four different people. Maybe they get lucky in one of them hands on like 18 forms.

That individual goes home and they're like, dude, where do I start? I don't even off. So what do I say? And it just dies there. So we're bringing awareness by let's really help those people that need this, get them off. benefits. You get them learning a new trade because we desperately need more trades for you in every sector. Oh, okay. Well, Hector, do we miss anything? Anything I forgot? No, I mean, I mean, we could probably nerd about this part one and then part 10 a year from now. Who knows? But

dude, let's go impact some lives. That sounds great. We will link to all your stuff in the show notes and we'll go from there. All right, if you want to reach out to Hector. I've got a link to him in the show notes. Thanks for hanging out on the Kerner office.