Case Study: Anatomy of a $10M Online Education Business

I believe that the currency of life is experiences, and when we are in our old age, we will judge our life based on experiences we’ve had (not money in the bank)

For StoryLearning, diversification of revenue streams was something that happened more organically than by design, to be honest. It began when I learnt from Dan Kennedy about the concept of unused capacity. This is the idea that we all have assets in our business which are underutilised, and can be put to work in one way or another.

think new entrepreneurs often get lured into diversifying because they don't know how to grow. That's why you see people with so many side-hustles. But side hustles are for people with jobs who want to earn a bit of money on the side. Side hustles are not for people focused on growing a new business. Think of it like this… If you actually knew how

The entrepreneur should think of the word diversification in a very different way. Here's my view in a nutshell: ● Don't even think of diversifying your core business until you're making at least $1 million per year ● Between $1-2 million per year, start diversifying ● Actively diversify your business model from $2-10 million

Adding a community to your products is likely to cause you a lot of pain at first! But providing you have the resources to actually act on this feedback, it is the single fastest way to improve your products and continually improve the student experience.

one of the things I learnt from this exercise is that a business can be seen as having three main functions: ● Finance ● Operations ● Marketing I drew these out, starting with the roles.

have found that having a team that is focused on product, tasking them with listening to student feedback, and then, most importantly, empowering them to take that feedback and make direct changes to the product themselves, has been one of the best things we have done. Our programmes have improved way beyond anything I could ever have done myself,

I was talking with my friend and coach, Eric Partaker, and he asked me a transformational question: “What would the $10 million version of StoryLearning look like?” This question upgraded my thinking about business in an instant. I went away and thought about what the business would be doing at the $10m level, and sketched out the imaginary org cha

This is a big lesson I've learnt over the years, and something I try very hard to do – identify upcoming bottlenecks in our strategy, and put people in place to alleviate them early. Putting people in place early makes sense from a strategic perspective, but it's also necessary because people take time to settle into roles. In my experience it's us