How Bizversity CEO Dale Beaumont grew to $26.9K revenue and 160 customers in 2018.

hello everyone my guest today is Dale Beaumont he's an award-winning technology entrepreneur international speaker and the author of 16 best-selling books he started his first business on 19 has been building companies ever since one of those companies now a multimillion-dollar enterprise which has enabled Dale to become an investor philanthropist and to step foot in more than 80 countries today Dale is the founder and CEO of biz versity a product which gives direct access to the world's best business training anywhere anytime Dale are you ready to take it to the top yeah let's do it all right so tell us about biz versity at first glance it looks like what might be a udemy or a creative life might look like for business people is that accurate I yeah we we basically started around three years ago I've run it business education company for the last like 10 years called called business blueprint which is based around training entrepreneurs but through primarily live events we run about 60 live events per year so about three years ago we thought how can we build a platform that can provide training to business owners all around the world and we realized the world doesn't need another business training website so many out there but everyone has a mobile phone and so we decided to build the mobile first video learning platform to provide training to business owners we don't have over a thousand videos even the library covering really everything from how to read financial statements to how to hire staff to how to run Facebook ads and we now have a thousand videos that are available through the through the learning platform okay and what's the revenue model are these are is this a recurring size model or one-time pays you know kind of thing yeah for the first 18 months we made the platform free however in the last month we've just turned on notarization and so it's a subscription model similar to again their flex $14 a month and you can access all of the content that you want and also there's a whole bunch of special features that are only available to the premium members such as the ability to download content to be able to watch offline the ability to create your own playlist to speed up playback and a whole bunch of other things that are only available to subscribers so you get in two weeks free trial or you oh you can eat and then you can decide if you want to continue okay and walk with you I mean how many people are now paying for that service yeah so we don't have about 160 people that are paying for that service this is in our first month so it's sort of brand-new in terms of monetization and so now it's just a matter of how we can continue to grow so we'll do that by having those individual accounts every single person either signing up directly what we're now actually looking at talking to many companies as well about getting a company-wide account and also we've had a lot of interest from franchise groups that are looking to provide training to their franchisees because most of them when they buy a franchise they really they they get a product or a service but they really don't get a lot of business training and they come in sort of very very green and lacking a lot of business training so it's a really low cost way to be able to provide a lot of information to especially first-time entrepreneurs so we see that's the kind of way that we'll probably scale faster in the future is buy more of them sort of b2b style transactions okay and give me a sense of before the SAS model so in 28 to 30 2017 biz versity has its own unit how much revenue did it do so business little said last year was all of us was just about building the platform thankfully I've got another company which is my advanced business which is very very profitable sort of fun it's called business blueprint okay yeah business blueprint so that's been around for ten years and it's it's a great great business so I've been able to take some of the revenue and to put it into busy City to this build the platform which we have have done so it's all just been about you know building out the other the software and and now it's really around how do we make you know biz versity start to to pay for itself and then obviously become profitable and then to expand from there yeah yeah okay good so the you are just now really introducing pricing to biz versity and that pricing is $14 a month like Netflix 160 people at about 2200 bucks a month I'm Rev right now correct okay how do you how do you anticipate making people sticky on this anytime some lunch is a Content site or membership site the hardest thing is trying to through the roof especially relative to real SAS companies that are software based how do you keep turned down yes so that's something that we're really trying to attack aggressively so obviously there's a bunch of the things that we're we're looking to do so having intercom built into obviously the website but also the app as well having lots of kind of conversations with with people almost providing like a concierge service so people can just search for what their bigger this problem or challenge is and then we just send in the direct video that solves that problem so by trying to have more of a direct relationship with every single user through through live chat then we hope that that will will help the other thing that we've done is we've built in a bunch of different gamification modules as well we have a badges that people can unlock based on their consumption we also have a new content which is coming out kind of every week and the other thing we have is like a global leader board as well so they're all trying to make the product as sticky as we can but we're still got yeah so we really know that yeah in this area often times the average lifespan you know is three to four months and so we've got and also giving people a substantial discount for doing foregoing twelve months in advance as well there's nearly a four to forty percent discount if you pay upfront so we hope to lock people in for at least the year which is enough yeah you know get people really hooked on the on the product and and then hopefully you know continuing for many years after yeah I mean that's a whole thing I've seen with a lot of these kind of craters is you know they'll use those exact words force them into an annual plan because they know they're gonna turn up for three months if they don't and then what happens is there's just more regret because they don't end up consuming enough content and then it's interesting model go out for him Chris see if you can make it work you know especially just understanding creative lives business model and udemy's business model they're you know they're constantly trying to use pricing leverage to get new people and retain by just like discounting discounting discounting and it's like a race to the bottom yeah and so that's where we sort of believe that the the will will be able to achieve our sort of goals faster is through law of the enterprise plans for four companies as once you know you're a franchisee with a franchise group we're talking to now with 700 franchises and so once a company like that is then sort of on board why would they be on board though daily do you have unique videos specific to their French are like why wouldn't they just sign up to like create their own videos or use YouTube or yes so most of them will have a very basic sort of training like the company that were speaking to at the moment they have about 40 videos that just cover the core sort of aspects of how to how to basically run a gym so they provide training around that area of expertise but most first-time business owners again they really don't understand a lot of the sort of fundamentals whether that be about their time management or how to read a balance sheet or could be around how to you know use social media in order to grow their business how to create a marketing plan that's they don't provide any of that sort of training they just sort of say you know here's a big business model and kind of good luck and so on one of them is the fact that we provide a very broad range of education content covering kind of everything that someone could possibly want to know and then the second thing is everyone is sort of focused on creating great content and I would sort of say that that's a bit of a commodity now there's great content everywhere on every platform well we've tried to do is really focus on how do we remove the friction to actually consuming content and so like for example if you've got content on a website oftentimes it doesn't work very well on your mobile or if it does it's hard to watch videos on a mobile that come through a website oftentimes if you start a video it won't remember your place when you come back you can't speed it up you can't download the videos directly to your device you can't set up terms like playlists or forward videos so we've just tried to make it how do we make it as easy as possible for people to consume anywhere anytime another cool feature that we've created as well within the app is if you're watching a video you can tap a button and it actually goes into like carplay mode and you can listen to it while you're driving in the car while you're going to the gym while you're walking the dogs and then when you get back to a place where you can watch you can another button and it goes back to two or video so we call that come alone switch where you can just kind of learn anywhere anytime either in video mode or audio mode for the same piece of content god it makes good sense um so this is where you're going this is what you're building busy I want understand quickly your other platforms right we understand business blueprint it's an events business so are you producing the events you're taking a hundred percent of the ticket revenue all that jazz it's a typical events business or though it's a little different yes so it's a it's basically a leveraged business coaching model it's a sort of twelve month business program where we teach entrepreneurs and small business owners how to better use technology to improve their business so we have over 600 people now that pay on average $10,000 a year for our business education program and it operates all across Australia and in New Zealand so that model has been proven to be really successful however because of that we're limited to the number of people that we can help us select a high-touch high-cost model and so that aim with biz versity was how do we make business education how do we make it more accessible to people how do we make it more convenient and how do we make it more affordable for people to learn the skills that they need in order to grow their own successful business business 600 people paying 10 grand a year I mean that is six million a year is a tall margin for you we have a big team there it's it's low margin yeah I've got a team of now with we have about 10 10 staff some in the Philippines another six staff in Australia so we try to run that very very lean and it's a great business it's very profitable so what we've been able to do is take a portion of that revenue and to be able to diversify and invest in in biz versity so we give it the best chance of success yeah very good and then lastly you mentioned the bio books she said 16 best-selling books what's the title of one that's on the best called secrets of successful entrepreneurs I composed so back I did a whole series of interviews with around 250 people and it put them in us in a series of books compilation style books that I produced and so we've covered whole bunch of different topics person learn to the leadership ones and samples ones on marketing ones on public speaking just a whole bunch of of business related topics that were all compilation style books okay and more these you said best-selling are we talking New York Times Amazon what do you mean my best-selling yeah best-selling in Australia is you know where the best-selling comes from so best-selling in Australia is to sell 10,000 copies per book so but with the whole series we sold 250,000 so a quarter of a million books have been sold in there secrets exposed series and we're how those happen because like when I look these up on Amazon like they have you know most of them have like 0 or 1 or 2 reviews like and the rankings very very low are you putting these sales through some other channel yes all of those sales happen through book shops in Australia that were all release between 2005 and 2007 so it's kind of we only just put them on Amazon actually probably around about two years ago so they were all sold through book shops in Australia and not through Amazon Amazon really wasn't you know even in Australia until last year yeah and did you decide to did you set up your own publishing company to manage that or who decided you to deal with yeah I self-published all of those books and that you know now would mean oh obviously control the the content and to be able to have a direct relationship with the distributor and book shops and yeah that was something that I did over ten years ago a lot of publishers I just went through this process and signed a deal with Random House and the pit you know part of the pitch they give me as a sign with us and you have a chance to be actually be New York Times you know these besties bestseller lists and we'll put you actually on bookshelves they were insinuating that you couldn't essentially do that if you were self-published so how did you get yourself on the Barnes & Noble bookshelf in Australia self-publishing yes so most most publishers like for example Random House are actually publish to distributors they publish and they distribute into all the book shops however there is if you break up the food chain there is a series of independent distributors out there that all they do is they just do distribution meaning they have sales force around the country to get the book into book shops so they work with either international publishers or only need distribution in that particular market or they deal with self-published authors that have a book they know how to produce it they know how to print it and can get a ready-made product and they take it and distribute it into book shops so I use a the largest independent book distributor in Australia to be able to take the books and to get it into book shops so essentially I was not the author but also the publisher as well I see that makes it and what type do you give the distributor already Pam so they normally you get 35 percent normally as they um if you go through through a major publisher you know we get a 10 percent royalty and that's it if you go directly to a distributor you'd get 35 percent out of which you take your costs so if your costs are around about you know five to sort of seven percent then you're probably left with just a little bit more maybe 15 to 20 percent is kind of what you're left with and that means that potentially you can you know double the amount of money that you make per book but the real benefit of you know doing what I've done which is which is self-publishing is that you basically are buying your book at cost you're buying your book at two dollars where if you go over to a mainstream publisher oftentimes they'll sell the book back to you the author that's a 50% less retail and if we Taylor say $20 they sell it back to you for say ten but the only actually they're buying at normally in about a dollar fifty when they're doing those sort of like print runs so often times certainly in Australia and in America that you get like maybe three months maybe if you're lucky six months worth of book shelf time but then it kind of disappears from the shelves and then basically it's it's a kind of up to you so over the life of a book five to ten years you actually become the number one consumer the number one purchaser of your own book why why would you why would you purchase your own why would you buy a bunch of your own well if you're going to be speaking for the next ten years of conferences and events and you want to have a book to actually sell you'll have to buy your own book back from your publisher in order to then sell that book in in at live events and and expose trade shows those type of things so if you have distribution which you do either online or through conferences and events then you're buying your book back at at $10 instead of the cost price of a dollar fifty well why wouldn't you just bond when you're on stage tell everyone to open their phone go on Amazon a buy your hard cover book you can if you then want to send them send them straight to Amazon but you know you could in that moment if you had your books physically there people would spend twenty twenty-five dollars whatever the cost of the book if you had a hardcover it could even be up to thirty and you can you can kind of sign it or have you send them to Amazon you'll probably make what a dollar fifty maybe two dollars if you're lucky because you get like a ten percent retail instead of the RRP so if the book sells for $20 then you know you're getting two dollars so it's just you know how much money do you want to make and do you want to have that convenience of kind of do analog the book around the other country until everyone goes yeah that's right up to you yeah very good so you've got that the book business you've got the speaking business which is sounds like your is your big when they're at six million revenue team you know base throughout the country and then you're kind of using profits from that and your and your influence from that to build is versat e sounds like a healthy growth model Dale let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book favorite business book is the e-myth by Michael Gerber number two is their CEO you're following or studying right now probably be Larry Page number three is their favorite online tool you have for building the business it would be intercom intercom configures are there a number of core how many ARMs is he for anything every night probably seven seven as you as you jump on at five a.m. where are you right now I mean Indonesia in Bali right now so its size for I am here so I probably had about five last night