Logan started teaching CPR on the side in 2021, while he was still in med school. He picked it up the same way most instructors do, through another shop that needed a body, and eventually decided to run his own. He formed Heartbeat Heroes in 2023 and worked out of a single co-working office in downtown New Orleans.

For the first stretch, the business was go-out-to-dinner money. Five to ten students a month, mostly one-on-one ACLS sessions, scheduled around classes and rotations.

The pre-Hovn process was the one half the country is still running. He’d post a class to AHA Find-a-Class, get a notification when someone wanted in, approve the registration, send a Square invoice from his phone, wait for it to clear, send the next email. After class, he’d hand-format the roster and upload it. He was answering most of it from between rotations.

“I would constantly be checking my email. I still do, but for different purposes now.”

He hit a fork last summer. Either keep it small as a side hustle, or go pay for software and try to make a real business out of it.

“I had a choice here. Either I can lean in and grow into something, or I can just keep it small and just do the bare minimum.”

He went with Hovn and took a second office down the hall to use as a classroom.
Started working the business between rotations the way he’d been working med school.

“I really leaned into it.”

Here is what happened to the volume.

September: 17. His first month

October: 23

November: 15.

December: 37. He was finding his footing.

January: 120.

“After the first of the year, we had a professional image. Now we have repeat clients. People see we’re a real deal now. It’s not some homemade setup.”

February: 80

March: 158

Mid-April: 122 and climbing.

He went from twenty cards in June to projecting close to 2,500 cards by year end. B2B grew from one account to roughly ten. Local EMS programs, transportation companies, large clinics, nursing homes, and a behavioral health hospital.

The AHA account manager called him unprompted to tell him he was trending toward TC status and offered to help him become one. He’d never asked.

He was able to start purchasing cards at volume which helped with pricing.

“Now we’re able to actually lower our prices And that drove in more business and we were able to hook more people.”

Logan didn’t change his teaching. He didn’t increase his ad spend (he tried Google Ads early on, lost a chunk of money, never went back). He didn’t launch new courses. The classes he teaches are the same classes he’s been teaching for years.

What changed is that his classes were findable on Google, his operations were on one platform, and his student experience was polished. His website stopped looking like the average AHA TC website (Logan’s words: “designed by a teenager in a basement”) and started looking like a real shop. People landed on it, read it, and booked.

“I stand out. I have a nice platform to interface with, and that builds trust with people.”

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The dual-cause question is fair to ask. He got Hovn AND he leaned in. Which one did the work?

The answer is the order. He bought the software first, the nightly admin stopped eating his evenings, and that capacity is what funded the lean-in. The classroom rent, the assistant who handles the parts of his life he no longer has time for, the W-2s he just brought on, the 10th-floor suite he’s about to sign for, the NAEMT training center approval that brings PHTLS, AMLS, and EPC under one roof. None of that was sitting on his calendar a year ago. The software didn’t replace him. It gave him the time back, and he chose to spend that time growing a business.

I asked him what he’d say to an operator sitting where he was last summer, doing five or ten or fifty cards a month, weighing whether to switch.

“Just decide. Just do it. You’re going to come back later and think about that same decision, and you’re still going to be having the same problems. That’s your decision.”

If you’re running a CPR training business on AHA Find-a-Class, Square invoices, Squarespace, or some patchwork of all of them, and the volume isn’t matching the work you’re putting in, the problem might not be your marketing. It might be that your classes are invisible to the people searching for them right now.

Logan didn’t market harder. He chose to stop running the business off his phone, the volume showed up, and he leaned into it.

Here’s what we’re doing for training centers right now:

Class Visibility Audit

In about 20 minutes, we:

• Pull up your current class pages (Squarespace, Enrollware, AHA Find-a-Class, custom site, whatever)

• Show you exactly what Google can and can’t see

• Compare that to how Hovn-powered classes show up

• Identify the 2–3 biggest fixes

No fluff, no “you need a rebrand.” Just: here’s where you’re leaking students, here’s how to plug the holes.

If you want me to walk through your setup, hit the button below and pick a time. We’ll look at your real pages, not hypotheticals, and you’ll leave knowing whether this is the right move for you.

Free Class Visibility Audit

Want to see a video of what Google actually reads on your class pages? » Here’s a 3-minute walkthrough.

Subscribe now

This conversation is about that gap. The one between running a class and running a business that happens to deliver a class. If you’ve ever felt like you’re the instructor, the operator, and the sales team all in the same body, this one is for you.

It’s also the first SitRep episode where we brought on somebody who sees the market from the other side of the table. Different vantage point, same throughline: be intentional, or the market will be intentional for you.

1. Walk the facility before you teach the class. 0:00 – 12:00

Anthony’s opening frame is that most instructors stop at delivery. They show up, run the class, hand out cards, leave. The ones who build businesses use the class as a way in, then do discovery on the building while they’re inside it.

• Where are the AEDs? Are they blinking green, or have they been on the wall for twenty years with no pads?

• First-aid kits, bleeding control, locations, shift patterns.

• Who’s your point of contact and why did they book this class? Was it a scare two weeks ago? A two-year renewal? A new hire?

• Parking lot, door entry, sign-in, cameras. Situational awareness is a thing you model, not a slide you read.

“The good ones use the class as a way to get in the door, and then once they’re in the building, the value they can create is what keeps ‘em coming back.”

The move Anthony wants instructors making is from transactional vendor to trusted advisor. The class gets you in. What you notice while you’re there is what keeps the phone ringing.

2. The instructor is the product. 17:00 – 21:00

A lot of the industry is drifting toward smart mannequins, self-guided modules, heavy facilitation with less human in the loop. Anthony is having none of it at the provider level.

• Curriculum is standardized. Thirty compressions, two breaths. Every brand has to meet the same objectives.

• Difference between a good class and a great class is the instructor, not the curriculum.

• Two classes with the same card at the end can be completely different experiences depending on who’s running the room.

“The instructor is not really, they are the product. They are the ones that are delivering the class.”

Anthony’s point isn’t anti-technology. It’s that the delta between an average training and a memorable one is the person standing in front of the room. You don’t get muscle memory for “did this person leave confident” from a device.

3. Devices supplement, they don’t replace. 22:00 – 30:00

Shubs pushed on this. His wife is a physician, takes CPR every two years, and Shubs admits he took one class years ago and wouldn’t feel confident running a real code today. Once every two years isn’t enough reps. So where do the smart mannequins fit?

We discuss watching a NASCAR crew change tires as a masterclass in repetition. Muscle memory on the tactical skill so everything else, the chaos, can get the attention.

• Objective feedback on compression depth is genuinely useful. That’s signal a human can’t give in real time.

• Devices are great for the tactical rep. Not great for the scenario.

• The instructor’s job is to add the situational layer the device can’t. Shop floor vs. fifteenth-story office. Dry hands vs. wet hands. Lights on vs. lights off.

“I’m a big proponent of technology, but in an additive manner or supplementary manner.”

The car wins because the crew is trained. Not because the wrench is smart.

4. Cheap training is expensive. 30:00 – 34:00

One of Anthony’s most-engaged LinkedIn posts was the line that cheap training is the most expensive training. We asked him why it hit a nerve.

• Price is a point-of-transaction variable. Readiness is the outcome.

• When someone calls asking “what’s your price,” the question behind the question is almost never price. It’s “am I going to get what I’m paying for.”

• Competing on price is a race you lose by design. Somebody is always cheaper, and in most cases they’re cheaper because they’re cutting quality.

“You’re selling readiness. You’re not selling a certification card.”

“You compete on price. If you win on price, you will lose on price. Someone’s always gonna be cheaper.”

The reframe is simple. When the moment of truth hits, nobody is going to say “but we saved money on the training.”

5. Segment on purpose. 42:00 – 50:00

Anthony’s masterclass walks new training centers through audience definition first. Not because it’s trendy, because it’s the thing people skip.

• “My customer is anyone who needs a BLS card” is not a customer definition.

• Dental offices, childcare, schools, corporate. Each one has a different buyer, a different compliance posture, a different renewal cycle.

• Your website, your outbound, your pitch should look different per segment.

The opportunistic part stays. You don’t turn away the construction company because you said you target dental. But your targeted message, your reputation, the referrals you build, all of that lives inside segments.

“Market segmentation is critical for success. Understanding who your different audiences are and what your message is to each one of ‘em, because it’s should be a little bit different.”

The flywheel kicks in once word-of-mouth starts moving inside a segment. People change jobs. A dental hygienist becomes an office manager somewhere else and brings you with her. That only works if the segment knows who you are.

6. Build the portfolio, not just the class. 50:00 – 1:06:00

Anthony’s whole career model is what he calls “high, deep, and wide.” You walk in for one thing. You leave knowing the other five things the building needs.

• CPR is the compliance anchor. Pediatric CPR for childcare and schools. BLS for dental. AVERT for active-shooter readiness. Stop the Bleed as a standalone ninety-minute course that goes beyond tourniquet basics into packing and pressure.

• HSI’s online safety catalog (top twenty courses across slips/trips/falls, sexual harassment, workplace safety) gets layered in as blended, not as a replacement.

• The partnership play matters. You don’t have to own every vertical. You do have to know who to call when your customer asks.

“I want them always asking you first and foremost. And then you start developing relationships. Maybe it’s not even inside your own training center, but other companies that do different services that still fit within the safety genre.”

“I may not always have the solution that they need, but I want them to reach out to me first to ask. And if I don’t, I’ll say I don’t, but let me do some calls for you to see if I can find somebody and help.”

The mental model that kept surfacing is portfolio-shaped. Anthony’s not answering “do you do this?” with yes or no. He’s answering with “tell me what you actually need and let me figure out how to get it to you.”

7. The key to the bathroom stall. 1:11:00 – 1:13:00

The episode closed with a story that’s been in Jon’s head for months. A customer told us once that when they walk into a new site for a class, they ask for the key to the bathroom stall. Not because they need it. Because the question itself is the pattern interrupt.

Everyone prepares like the emergency happens in the conference room. Odds are it doesn’t. The person passes out in the bathroom, door open inward, stall locked, and the clock on the AED is already running.

“You wanna create, as an instructor, environments that bring a little bit of stress, but help them understand what that’s gonna feel like without truly replicating that emergency medical situation.”

Tourniquet with your eyes closed. Compressions with wet hands. Rescue in a building you can’t fully get into. Those are the conversations that separate a certification class from a readiness session.

Anthony’s close

“There’s still a lot of opportunities for us to do better as a whole, and it takes all of us together trying to help keep pushing that.”

Anthony posts on LinkedIn Tuesdays and Thursdays. He calls it therapeutic. It’s also one of the more consistent operator-facing voices in the training industry, and worth following.

• Anthony Corwin on LinkedIn: Connect with Anthony

• HSI Masterclass: Training Center Master Class

• Past SitRep episodes worth your time:

  • Live | Build It Worth Buying with Mike Andolina

  • Live | You Don’t Have to Be the Biggest with Ryan Johnson

When you’re done, hit reply and tell us which part landed hardest for you. If you walked your last client’s facility and found something you hadn’t noticed before, we especially want to hear that.

Jon & Shubs

Evan runs OhioCPRCerts out of Columbus. Four locations, six instructors, and a large network of affiliated instructors. He’s been teaching for fifteen years, running the business for almost seven. He also has a full-time job and a family.

For most of those seven years, he ran the whole operation on Squarespace.

Every class was a product listing. Student buys, Evan copies the registration into a spreadsheet. After class, he downloads the roster, reformats it into a CSV, uploads it into the learning center, issues the cards. Every class gets manual reminder emails. Every reschedule means moving a name from one tab to another.

At eighty to a hundred students a month, it worked. It was an hour or two every night after the kids went to bed.

A lot of it happened on his phone during the day.

“A lot of it was me tethered to my phone. Booking comes through, copy it into the spreadsheet. Takes ten, fifteen seconds every booking. But you do that eight times a day.”

He signed up for Hovn early. Then sat on it for months.

When I asked what he was waiting for, he told me straight:

“We do [a lot] of revenue per month right now, and I still need feature XYZ. I’m just not ready to pull the trigger.”

That hesitation is the most common thing I hear. The current system “works.” It’s painful, but it works. The risk of switching feels bigger than the pain of staying. Until it doesn’t.

For Evan, the tipping point was scale.

Four locations. Classes every Thursday night and Saturday morning. Instructors texting him results. Reminder emails he’d forget to send. Roster spreadsheets that needed formatting before he could issue cards.

“I felt like every night I’m trying to remember: do I need to send out reminder emails? Classes completed, so now I get to download the spreadsheets, reupload them, issue the cards.”

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He finally cut over in the fall. First bookings through Hovn went live December 1st. No drama. Just started routing new classes through the platform instead of Squarespace.

Here is what happened next.

January: 113% increase year over year.

February: 108%.

March: 80%.

April, thirteen days in: 17% and climbing.

Classes that used to run at six or seven students were filling to capacity at twelve. Not because he added more classes. Not because he changed his schedule. Same Thursday nights and Saturday mornings he’s run for six, seven years.

He didn’t increase his Google ads budget. Still spending three hundred a month. Didn’t start running social ads. Didn’t launch a new marketing campaign. Didn’t add new class types. Same CPS posting he’s always done.

Let’s read that again:

The same instructor, same locations, same schedule, same ad spend, same class posting service. The only variable was where students land when they find him. And classes doubled.

His theory is the same thing we’ve been writing about for months: when Google can actually read your class data, students find you. When your classes live inside a Squarespace product listing that Google sees as a generic ecommerce item, they don’t. Each class on Hovn becomes its own indexed page with structured course data, dates, location, price, seats available. Google can verify it’s a real class from a real provider. That matters in CPR because training falls under Google’s YMYL category (your money, your life), where verification carries extra weight.

The search intent is there. Seventy percent of CPR searches happen within fourteen days of when someone needs the class. They’re not browsing. They’re buying. The question is whether they find you or someone else.

Evan started seeing students he’d never seen before. Not referrals. Not repeat customers. People who weren’t in his pipeline at all, finding his classes through search and booking directly.

“They’re being found better by SEO. We didn’t increase any spending on Google ads and haven’t done any social media ads. Nothing different, nothing more.”

The other side of the story is time. Admin went from an hour or two per night to five, maybe ten minutes. The line that stuck with me was this one:

That’s what infrastructure is supposed to do. Not make you busier. Make the business run even when you’re not thinking about it.

He compared it to the way small restaurants grow.

“You see it with small restaurants, coffee shops. They do it all homegrown. And then all of a sudden they’re popular and busy, and suddenly now they put in a real point of sale system. It’s really not different. At a certain point you get enough volume, you need the systems to help you track what you’re doing.”

Evan’s now building out B2B classes in Hovn. Seven private sessions booked for the next two months. Employers enter their own rosters. No more spreadsheet back and forth. No more reformatting phone numbers and misspellings. A few clicks, cards are issued, class is done.

“Before, it would be an hour or two a night. Now it’s five to ten minutes. I can close out a class and move on with my day.”

Here’s why I wanted to write this up. When I asked Evan what held him back from switching sooner, his answer was simple:

“Part of my hesitation was I wanted to see some other people say, ‘Yeah, this is working great.’ When I saw a few of those, I was like, okay, this is the right thing to do.”

If you are running a CPR training business on Squarespace, Enrollware, or a patchwork of tools and spreadsheets, and your classes aren’t filling the way they should, the problem might not be your marketing. It might be that your classes are invisible to the people searching for them right now.

Evan didn’t market harder. He just made his classes findable. And they filled.

Here’s what we’re doing for training centers right now:

Class Visibility Audit

In about 20 minutes, we:

• Pull up your current class pages (Squarespace, Enrollware, custom site, whatever)

• Show you exactly what Google can and can’t see

• Compare that to how Hovn‑powered classes show up

• Identify the 2–3 biggest fixes

No fluff, no “you need a rebrand.” Just: here’s where you’re leaking students, here’s how to plug the holes.

If you want me to walk through your setup, hit the button below and pick a time. We’ll look at your real pages, not hypotheticals, and you’ll leave knowing whether this the right move for you.

Free Class Visibility Audit

Want to see a video of what Google actually reads on your class pages? » Here’s a 3-minute walkthrough.

If you’ve ever walked onto a hospice floor or into a room where things are close to the end, you know there’s a smell you don’t forget. Nurses can tell before the monitor flatlines.

That’s putrescine. Your body starts producing it when tissue is breaking down. Not after death — during it. Decomposition begins while everything on the surface still looks alive.

That’s what’s happening in the market right now. The model is still operating. People are still running classes, buying cards, posting to directories. But the smell is in the room. And the people who’ve been around long enough can feel something shifting underneath.

In December, I wrote Card Mills Aren’t the Problem and described what I called the death loop — the structural spiral that existing instructor networks get stuck in when the traffic they depend on starts to dry up. At the time, you could have read that and thought I was being dramatic. A warning about something down the road.

Three months later, I don’t think anyone is calling it dramatic.

If you’re sitting in your data, you already see it. If you’re not sitting in your data, the people downstream from you are talking about it.

Two things are happening at the same time. The first is that AHA’s directory — the one everyone has depended on — still exists. You can still post there. But it’s flooded with virtual listings, and providers who aren’t running virtual programs can’t compete with that volume. They’re getting buried — 30% drops in traffic or more, not because students stopped searching, but because those providers are no longer the ones being found.

The second is that AHA has shifted focus to CPRfinder.com, which only surfaces CPR Verification Stations. Not instructor-led classes. Not blended + instructor. Verification stations.

So the directory you built your business around is getting flooded by listings you can’t compete with. And the new one AHA is pushing doesn’t include you at all.

So let me update the metaphor. The golden goose didn’t just stop laying eggs. It opened its own restaurant.

If you’re thinking, “I just need to get a station,” read Two Truths and RQI. We covered why that’s not the whole answer. But for this post, the point is simpler: depending on directories is not the answer.

Am I Gonna Die?

“Death loop” is a strong phrase. I don’t think every training center running the old model is going to shut down. That’s not how this works.

Sears went bankrupt in 2018. You can still walk into a Sears today. There are stores operating — apparently owned by Kmart, of all places. I couldn’t tell you where any of them are, and neither could most people. But they exist. The lights are on. Someone is working the register.

That’s what surviving on the old model looks like.

You don’t close overnight. You don’t get a dramatic ending. What happens is slower than that, and in some ways worse: you just gradually stop being the place people think of. The traffic thins. The instructors who have options move on. The ones who stay are the ones who don’t have anywhere else to go. You can still operate. You can still sell cards. But you’re not building anything — you’re maintaining something that’s getting smaller.

There’s a version of this industry five years from now where there are still training centers running pure pull networks, the same way there are still Sears stores. They’ll have instructors. They’ll process cards. And nobody outside their immediate circle will know they exist.

That’s survival. It’s not the business most people set out to build.

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Is There a Pill for This?

The pain is real. Everybody feels the traffic dropping. And the natural response — the thing I’m watching people do in real time — is to go looking for the next directory.

New listing sites are popping up. People are being pitched on them. “Post your classes here, claim your listing, we’ll drive traffic.” And I understand the instinct. The faucet shut off, so you want to find another faucet.

But think about why the AHA directory worked in the first place. It wasn’t because someone built a good listing website. It worked because the AHA had something no directory can just create: the brand recognition of being where the certification lives. Hundreds of thousands of visitors going directly to AHA’s website because they need an AHA card. That traffic already existed. The directory just captured it. That’s what solved the cold start problem — the thing that makes any new marketplace almost impossible to launch. You need students to attract providers, and you need providers to attract students, and you need both at the same time.

AHA had both because they are the certification. A brand new directory has neither.

So what does a new directory actually have to do to get traffic? The same thing you would have to do: build SEO. Build a reputation. Build trust with Google, one page at a time. It’s the exact same work. The only difference is you’re hoping someone else will do it for you instead of doing it for yourself.

And even if they pull it off eventually — say a new directory is able to build traffic over the next few years — think about what that traffic looks like for you. Directory traffic forces price competition. You’re one listing among dozens, and the student is comparing you on price and location. The directory owns the brand. The directory owns the relationship. You’re five or six clicks deep from the student who started on that site. They don’t remember you. They remember the directory.

That’s the same dependency you just got burned by. You’re not solving the problem. You’re just finding a new version of it.

So What Do I Do?

The muscle that actually needs to get built right now — and this is true whether you’re a training center or an individual instructor — is building your engine. Making your business and your network visible.

For 15 years, nobody had to know how to do this. The directory handled demand. And the software that most of this industry runs on was designed for that world. It processes registrations. It manages paperwork. It submits rosters. It’s a cash register — and a cash register is a great tool when customers are walking in the door. But it doesn’t know how to get someone to walk in the door.

That’s the gap. Your software was built to operate on traffic it assumed would come from somewhere else. Now that traffic is leaving, and the software can’t help you replace it, because it was never designed to.

What needs to happen — and what the winning training centers are going to figure out — is that your software needs to become your visibility. The classes you’re already scheduling, the locations you’re already teaching at, the availability you’re already managing — that should be working for you. It should be published as real, bookable pages that show up when someone in your area searches for training. It should be turning every class you run into a building block for the next one.

If you’re a TC, the move isn’t just adding more instructors onto the same old system. It’s shifting your network to infrastructure that gives you real presence — where you can actually see your classes, your instructors, your availability across your whole footprint, and where all of that is visible to the outside world. The TCs that are going to lead this next phase are the ones who help their instructors build this muscle, not the ones who just hand them a login to a filing system and say “find your own students; upload your rosters”

If you’re an instructor, the move is the same at a different scale. Stop waiting for the next directory to send you business. Get your classes structured. Get them showing up in search. Build the SEO muscle so that when someone in your neighborhood needs CPR training, they find you — not a directory, not a homepage with a phone number, but your actual class with a date and a price and a way to book it.

When a student finds you through a directory, the directory won the relationship and you fulfilled an order. When a student finds you directly, that’s your relationship. That’s higher margin, stronger retention, and it compounds — because every class you run, every student you serve, every review you earn makes the next one easier to find.

That’s the difference between building a business and maintaining a listing.

It’s a Lifestyle Change

There’s no pill. There’s no new directory that’s going to magically generate the millions of visitors that go to an agency website. That took a decade of work and policy to do.

You can keep running the old model. There are still Sears stores, and there will still be training centers operating as pull networks, selling cards, processing paperwork five years from now. But that’s not the business most people set out to build — it’s just where they ended up because the golden goose made it easy not to think about it.

The change that actually matters is a shift in how you operate: getting your data structured, getting your classes visible, building the muscle of driving your own business instead of waiting for someone else to send it to you.

If you’re trying to grow over not just survive, we’re doing a limited batch of Class Visibility Audits this month.

In 15 minutes, we’ll pull up your footprint live, show you exactly where you’re invisible, and outline what “owning your own engine” looks like for a training center or network like yours. » Book a Walkthrough

Jon

This isn’t a growth-at-all-costs story. Ryan made a deliberate choice: stay small enough to maintain quality, go deep on B2B, and build a business that serves its instructors as much as its clients. If you’re trying to figure out what kind of business you actually want to build — not just how to get more students — this conversation is worth your time.

Here are the main topics we cover and where to find them in the replay.

1. The phone call that started everything

0:00 – 5:59

Ryan was an EMT-turned-paramedic who taught a few CPR classes on the side for extra money. No business plan. No ambitions beyond education. Then his training center coordinator called.

• A health college needed a contract instructor for rolling enrollments — roughly 50 students every six weeks. Ryan said yes without asking how many or who. It was supposed to be a one-off. It became a subscription.

• A month or two later, a large aerospace company called with the same ask. He said yes again.

• He formed a sole proprietorship — not because he had a vision, but because he thought he needed one. The business name? Medical Training Concepts. “How basic is that?”

• A year and a half ago, he rebranded to Respond 365 — a name that finally matched the mission: prepare people to respond to emergencies anytime.

If you’ve ever said “I just fell into this,” Ryan’s origin story will sound familiar. The difference is what he did next.

2. You don’t have to be the biggest — and maybe you shouldn’t be

5:59 – 17:00

Ryan’s business could sustain his lifestyle full-time. He still holds a traditional job — by choice, not necessity. That tells you something about how the math works when you’re intentional about size.

• Near triple-digit instructors across Illinois, Missouri, Indiana, Ohio, Iowa, Kansas, and Arkansas. Not huge. Not small. Deliberate.

• His quality bar is non-negotiable. Every instructor who teaches on behalf of Respond 365 is a W-2 employee — zero contractors. “I’m not fighting with the IRS.”

• The risk calculation: one rogue instructor doesn’t just put themselves in jeopardy — it puts every other instructor’s livelihood at risk. The larger you grow, the harder that is to control.

• He doesn’t have a hard cap on size. It’s more of a feel. “Some people would say you can’t run a business on feelings. I’ve done it for almost 30 years and it’s worked out well.”

• His bottom line: “I care more about my instructors than I do my business. If the business shut down tomorrow, it would be worse for my instructors than for me.”

If you think you need 5,000 instructors to be successful, this section reframes what “enough” looks like.

SitRep is a free weekly newsletter for CPR training operators. If this landed, subscribe so you don’t miss the next one.

3. B2B by design — not by accident

17:00 – 28:00

The first two contracts fell into Ryan’s lap. But staying B2B-focused? That became intentional over the last five to six years.

• B2B means you’re not chasing hundreds of individual students with hundreds of individual needs. You’re serving businesses that want one reliable provider — and they tend to stay loyal.

• The lift is different. No brick and mortar. No storefront. No posting classes hoping people show up. “I’m not chasing an individual. That’s part of my business model.”

• Certain processes go on autopilot over time. “It’s not set it and forget it — but you’ve gotten to the maintenance phase, and maintenance is far less work than the startup phase.”

• Ryan actually enjoys the backend — spreadsheets, P&Ls, the operational work most operators loathe. He was going to be a business and economics major before he stumbled into an EMT class. (He thought EMTs made enough to pay for college. They did not.)

If you’re running a hybrid or thinking about shifting toward B2B, this is the section that lays out why the model works differently.

4. Stop competing on price — sell preparation, not cards

28:00 – 43:00

Ryan isn’t the cheapest. He’s not close. And he’s not trying to be. Here’s why his clients don’t care.

• The first question he asks every new client: “Why have you chosen a new provider?” He doesn’t need names — he needs to know what friction they’re trying to escape.

• Businesses are more loyal and less fickle than individuals. They don’t want to babysit vendors. If you get in and remove friction, they want to keep you.

• Pricing yourself way below market is a red flag for businesses — not a selling point. “They don’t think the other 50 companies are screwing them. They think something’s wrong with you.”

• His pitch never leads with the card. “Our goal isn’t to come in and do the fastest class. Our goal is that if something happens 30 minutes later — or 18 months later — they feel more confident and better prepared.”

• He won’t drop his price to match a competitor. “I’m not gonna beg for us to be your provider.” If they go with someone cheaper, he genuinely hopes they get a great class. And if they don’t — his number is there.

• The daycare example: if an emergency happens with a child, there are only two news stories. Someone was a hero, or someone wasn’t. “I don’t want my name attached to the place where nobody had any idea what to do and they just had their CPR training last month.”

If you’ve ever been tempted to cut your price because someone undercut you by $10, this is the section to sit with.

5. Not everyone is your competitor

43:00 – 55:00

Ryan refers students to other providers — regularly and intentionally. Some people think that’s insane. He thinks it’s obvious.

• The luxury car analogy: “If I sell high-end luxury cars and somebody across town has a used car lot, we’re both selling cars — but we’re not competitors. Our target audience is very different.”

• He doesn’t do Red Cross. When someone calls asking for it, he doesn’t say “good luck.” He gives them a name and a number for a provider he trusts.

• He helped a large assisted living company train their own traveling nurses as BLS instructors — instead of taking the contract himself. “Did we lose money? Yeah. But what made more sense was for them to have their own people.”

• The industry math: roughly 10% of people who should be certified are. 40% say they want to be. “The bigger problem is that it’s hard for students to find providers — because everybody thinks of everyone as a competitor.”

If your instinct is to guard every potential student from every other provider in your area, this section challenges that.

SitRep is a free weekly newsletter for CPR training operators. If this landed, subscribe so you don’t miss the next one.

6. The common thread: be intentional about who you serve

55:00 – 1:06:00

Four episodes in, a pattern is emerging. Every guest has built something different — but they’ve all been deliberate about one thing.

• Ryan’s version: know your customer, build the business to serve them, invest in the things that reduce their friction — some free, some expensive — and don’t try to be everything to everyone.

• “I could give you everything we do here and you not have a successful business.” Geography matters. Goals matter. What you want matters. There’s no copy-paste model.

• He loves learning from other operators — not to copy them, but to see how two equally successful businesses can do things completely differently.

• His closing thought for anyone watching: “There’s nothing to lose with people being more willing to share about what their business is and why it’s successful.”

If you’ve been looking for the one right way to run a training business, this episode — and this series — is making the case that there isn’t one. There’s only the one that fits.

When you’re done, hit reply and tell us which part landed hardest for you.

Jon & Shubs

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”All-in-one. Saves you time so you can get back to teaching.”

You’ve heard that line so many times it barely registers.

When every platform starts to sound the same, the question in your head is: what’s actually different? Is it worth switching?

The reason they all sound the same is that they’ve all solved the same problem. After fifteen years, the original challenge — getting online, taking registrations, sending email reminders — is solved. Every platform does it. Features that save you administrative time are commoditized.

But the new problem is different.

Find‑a‑Class is more saturated than it was two years ago. Directories are more crowded. The AHA’s latest investment in provider discovery — CPR Finder — is focused entirely on an instructor‑less model. The assumption that students will always come from directories is cracking, and the last six months have made it hard to ignore.

While admin time matters, features that shave minutes off your workflow are not going to decide who’s still standing in five years. The real challenge going forward is visibility: can students who need a class actually find your business?

To solve for visibility at the platform level — not as a bolt‑on, not as a weekend SEO project — the software has to be built from the ground up for that purpose. That’s a thing almost nobody wants to talk about, because for most vendors, it means a full rebuild. And the reason new entrants don’t start there is that building the plumbing for a real CPR data model is months of quiet investment in things users can’t see — the unsexy infrastructure that drives results later.

We saw this four years ago when we started Hovn. We built for it from day one.

Can Google See Your Sneakers?

Search “white sneakers near me.” Google prioritizes stores whose systems can prove inventory: these sneakers, this size, this store, in stock right now. Buried on page three are stores with websites that talk about sneakers but whose systems can’t show Google that the sneakers are on the shelf.

The difference is whether Google can read your catalog or just your marketing.

In CPR, your website says “We offer BLS, ACLS, PALS.” Your reviews say five stars. That tells Google you probably sell CPR classes and customers seem happy. It’s a promise.

Google wants confirmation — what it does in every other local service category — is to look at your digital shelves and verify: this provider has a BLS class on Saturday at 9am in Miami, $85, 6 seats left, certified through AHA. That’s not a promise. That’s confirmed inventory.

The technical name for this is “rich results,” which sounds like jargon. It’s simpler than it sounds. Rich results just means: can Google see and verify what you have in stock? Can it read your class catalog the way it reads a shoe store’s inventory?

Right now, in CPR, almost nobody’s catalog is visible to Google. Your platform shows a scheduling page. To you, that’s “my classes are online.” To Google, it’s close to a black box.

And that black box has a real cost measured in clicks.

With Hovn + rich results: A student searches on Google, lands directly on your session page — the exact class, date, location, and price they were looking for — and checks out.

Google search, one click, your brand.

Through a directory: The student goes to an agency site, searches by location and course, scrolls through a list of providers & prices that all look the same, picks one, lands on your page (maybe), finds a session (maybe), and checks out. Six or seven clicks, competing on a tile with minimal differentiation the entire way.

Every extra click is a drop-off. Every step on someone else’s page is a step where your brand doesn’t exist. Students from a directory are the hardest students to retain.

Why Current Platforms Can’t Get You There

The platforms in this space were built as applications, not publishers. They think in registrations, text fields, and calendars. Some are now claiming to offer “class SEO” and “rich results.” But claims and infrastructure are different things.

On most of these platforms, your footprint on Google is the same whether you run 10 classes a month or 10,000:

• One schedule page

• No catalog depth

The largest provider on that platform looks the same to Google as a single instructor teaching a few weekend classes. The admin features they keep shipping are the only game their architecture allows them to play.

Don’t take my word for it.

Pick your top competitor or someone you aspire to be. Grab their scheduling page. Go to https://search.google.com/test/rich-results and drop it in.

Then compare it to any Hovn session page. The difference is obvious:

Saw 'No items detected'? Book a 15-minute walkthrough and we'll show you what your classes look like when Google can actually read them.

To truly solve for visibility, the platform has to treat courses, sessions, providers, locations, and certifying agencies as first‑class objects in a structured data model — real entities with real relationships, not text fields on a registration form.

If your platform is someone else’s CRM under the hood, you don’t own that model. If it was architected fifteen years ago around a single schedule view, you don’t get to proper schema and thousands of session‑level pages without rebuilding from scratch.

That’s why this isn’t a feature. For most of the market, it’s a full rewrite. Providers who’ve tried to solve this on top of their current platform have spent six figures on custom development and still maintain it by hand.

Operations = Marketing

Hovn starts from a different assumption: your operational data is your marketing.

Think about what matters when a student searches for a class. What are you offering? Where? When? At what price? Under which certifying body?

That is exactly the information you enter when you schedule a class.

So Hovn was built so the act of scheduling a class is the act of publishing it. When you create a session — pick a course, set a date, choose a location, set a price, assign a certifying agency — a dedicated listing is born on the internet. That page tells Google everything it needs: what the class is, when and where it happens, how much it costs, how many seats are left, and who’s offering it. Automatically. No SEO plugin. No separate directory listing. No third website to maintain.

As of today, Hovn has over 8,000 provider, course, and session pages with structured data, growing every time any provider schedules a class. Every class you post is one more item on your digital shelves that Google can see.

When you connect that to your Google Business Profile, your reviews tell Google “I’m a five‑star local business” and your Hovn pages tell Google “here’s exactly what I have in stock, where, and when.” That’s the combination that makes a local business show up when it matters.

Hovn acts like a megaphone for work you’re already doing. You schedule a BLS class on Friday, and the internet knows about it.

A lot of platforms call themselves “built for CPR.” Here’s what that actually requires: courses tied to real agency course identifiers. Live integrations with AHA, ARC, HSI using real data. Certifying bodies, locations, instructors, and students as actual entities in the data model — not labels on a form field. If your platform doesn’t have that structure and those integrations, it’s software with a CPR name on it.

Expense vs. Asset

This is also why most platforms price the way they do.

Platforms that process students after they’ve already found the provider live inside the provider’s existing margin. They don’t create demand. They don’t make the pie bigger. They help slice it more efficiently.

So they price like overhead: cheap monthly fee, unlimited students, stack a lot of features to justify the line item. That’s not a knock — that’s their value prop. These tools sit at the intersection of your existing margin and your tolerance for admin spend.

A platform that makes students find you sits in a different category.

Organic students who show up because Google could see your session page are high‑margin — no ad spend, no directory fee, no marketplace commission. The platform created that opportunity by existing. For our customers, an increase in organic students is revenue they didn’t have to buy and often covers the cost of the software.

The cheap tool that never creates a single incremental student is expensive. You pay cash every month and you pay again in demand you never see — searches that didn’t land on your site, students who didn’t know your class was an option, employers who found three competitors in Google before they found you once.

You can’t measure what never hit your analytics. But your bank account feels it.

The Question

For years, the way you evaluated CPR software was: does it handle my classes, my rosters, my cards? Those are table stakes now. The market solved admin.

The question going forward isn’t just “does this save me time?” It’s: is this platform putting me where high‑value students are actually looking?

If your directories get 20 or 30 percent more competitive — and the last six months suggest that’s already happening — it won’t matter how many hours your admin tool saves you. There’s no growth to optimize when the students aren’t finding you.

Hovn built the time savings. Standardized course setups, baked‑in email best practices, student portal instead of email chaos, automated reminders. The time savings are real. But the difference is that while you’re saving time, the act of running your operation is also publishing your catalog to the internet in a way Google can read.

They save time processing the students you already have. We save time and make it more likely those students find you in the first place.

—Jon

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This isn’t theory. Mike lived it, measured it, and sold what he built. If you’re an owner-operator trying to figure out how to get from grinding to growing, this conversation is worth your time.

Here are the main topics we cover and where to find them in the replay.

1. Stop being a training company. Start being a marketing company.

0:00 – 5:59

Mike’s reframe around year four changed everything:

• He stopped shouting with one megaphone and built a system where every student becomes a megaphone for ten more people — drip cadences, referral programs, discovery calls.

• One financial services employee came to a local class. Through Mike’s follow-up sequence, that turned into a contract across 12 states.

• He shifted from thinking about expenses to thinking about investments. $300/month on a platform isn’t a cost — it’s a question of whether it returns $3,000.

If you’re still thinking “I teach CPR” instead of “I acquire and retain customers,” this section reframes it.

2. Dependency is the real risk

5:59 – 10:59

Most operators are heavily dependent on agency class postings for student acquisition. Mike’s take: that’s dangerous.

• A friend in the industry got hit with a bogus QA report. Overnight — valve closed, business gone.

• Mike diversified deliberately: B2B revenue, B2C revenue, product revenue (AEDs, supplies), affiliate channels, organic search.

• He tracked metrics most operators don’t touch — churn rate, CAC per channel, revenue per location per month, profit per student.

• He knew which location brought what revenue, which month, year over year — so he could predict and spend accordingly.

If your entire revenue comes from one bucket, this is the section to listen to twice.

3. SEO was the unlock — and he learned it for free

15:00 – 20:59

Mike didn’t hire an agency at $2K/month. He went to YouTube.

• Programmatic SEO: blog content by state, county, city, and keyword. Interlinked everything. Updated his sitemap daily.

• Moved from WordPress to Webflow for the CMS and page speed alone.

• 18 months before the compounding kicked in — but once it did, his CAC on organic traffic was effectively zero.

• His point: most operators don’t even know what an H1 tag is. The education is free. The ROI of learning it yourself is massive.

If you’re paying someone else to “do your SEO” and can’t explain what they’re actually doing, start here.

4. Retention isn’t a strategy — it’s a system

20:59 – 30:00

Mike built automated follow-up sequences that most operators haven’t thought about:

• Day-after email, day-three personal email from the CEO, text follow-ups, promotions, refer-a-friend offers — all automated.

• Different copy for B2B vs. B2C. He tested subject lines, measured open rates and reply rates, and adjusted.

• QBRs with B2B clients — quarterly business reviews to keep a pulse on where they’re at and what else they need.

• His philosophy: make the process so smooth and easy for the customer that it makes no sense to go anywhere else.

The $55 class posting example is worth noting: one student signs up from a $55 posting and you outsource it to an instructor — you’re net negative. That’s the math most people aren’t doing.

5. Build something worth buying

36:00 – 51:00

Mike exited to a local company looking to expand their footprint. Here’s what made it possible:

• A business that didn’t need him to operate. He stopped teaching around year five. His role became digital marketing and growth.

• Predictability. The buyer could see the numbers, see the growth, and model the payback.

• His advice: nobody wants to buy a job. Without systems and operational efficiency, you don’t have an acquirable business — you have a gig.

If you’re thinking about an exit someday — even if it’s years away — this section lays out what buyers actually look for.

6. If he were starting today

36:00 – 39:00

Mike’s answer surprised us. He wouldn’t touch the business first.

• Take $1,000–$2,000 and invest in yourself. Learn SEO, learn how to read a P&L, learn what a QBR is.

• Write down 10 things you want to accomplish in six months. Under each, four to five action steps. Work backwards from the number.

• And if you do one thing after this — download your student list, look at the email domains, find the businesses with the most people, and pick up the phone. Just ask: how can I help you more?

That’s it. That one call could be worth more than anything else you do this week.

When you’re done, hit reply and tell us which part landed hardest for you.

Jon & Shubs

Want a second set of eyes on your operation? 15 minutes. We review your setup. You walk away knowing what to fix first.

→ Book your free call

Two things can be true at the same time.

Truth #1: The American Heart Association is betting big on self-directed, manikin-based training. RQI, HeartCode Complete, automated skills stations. It’s not a rumor. It’s shipping.

Truth #2: The role of the instructor is more important than it’s ever been.

Most people in this industry treat these as opposites. Pick a side. Stations or instructors. Technology or humans.

That’s the wrong frame.

My Lane (and My Bias)

I’m not a medical professional. I’m not the person to tell you what is clinically sufficient for every use case. That’s not my lane.

I’m a co-founder of a software platform built for medical training businesses. I’ve led teams that have built large-scale international software. I spend my days on calls with training centers, instructors, and students — working on the unglamorous stuff: registrations, rosters, employer billing, card issuance, compliance.

The way I make sense of what’s happening isn’t clinical. It’s structural. I match patterns across industries. I watch how markets reorganize when technology changes the delivery model.

And the outcome almost always hinges on one question:

Is the job a pure transaction, or is it something more?

What’s Actually Happening

If you were at CASSummit or you’ve been watching the distributor landscape, you’ve seen the shift.

A handful of distributors have reorganized their entire business around manikins and distribution. Companies that used to lead with instructor-led training now lead with “put a station in your facility.” The pitch has changed. The economics have changed. The conversations have changed.

Training centers feel this. Some are leaning in. Some are panicking. Most are in between: watching, waiting, trying to figure out what it means for the classes they run and the instructors they manage.

Your business model is shifting. That doesn’t mean you’re being left behind. It does mean standing still isn’t an option.

The Logic of Replacing Humans

When organizations push to remove humans, they’re optimizing for a few things at once: standardize quality, remove variance, make outcomes more predictable.

For the mechanical layer of CPR — compressions, ventilation, the physical motions — a manikin with integrated sensors does all three better than a human instructor watching from across the room. Compression depth to the millimeter. Rate tracked in real time. Recoil quantified. Perfusion data captured.

Acknowledge it. Give it its due.

And the market conditions made this inevitable. CPR compressions are a mature, saturated market layer. When a layer reaches saturation, what follows is predictable: consolidation, verticalization, automation of the most defined work. That’s what removing the human represents. The natural maturation of the compression layer.

Now hold that alongside this: an industry built on judgment, relationships, and real-time decision-making is not a transaction.

A manikin can measure your compression depth. It cannot teach you what to do when you’re the only person in a daycare and a child isn’t breathing and three other children are watching. Knowing mom has no idea what has happened to her baby.

When Machines Took a Layer — and Humans Moved Up

We’ve seen this pattern before.

ATMs were supposed to replace bank tellers. They took over cash transactions. Tellers per branch dropped from 20 to 13. But branches got cheaper to operate, banks opened more of them, and from the 1980s through 2010, total teller employment grew — even as 400,000 ATMs were installed. The teller role shifted from counting cash to advising customers, handling edge cases, and selling financial products. The machine took the transaction. The human took the relationship.

MOOCs were supposed to replace professors. Free MIT lectures. Millions of students. Content delivery was “solved.” Completion rates across major platforms still hover around 5–15%. Delivering content is the mechanical layer. Teaching is the human layer — accountability, adaptation, reading the room, answering the question the student doesn’t know how to ask. A video can demonstrate CPR. A video can’t see that the nurse in the third row is quiet because she froze in a real code last month and hasn’t told anyone.

Simulators were supposed to replace flight instructors. Today, airline pilots can earn type ratings entirely in a simulator without touching the actual aircraft. But the flight instructor didn’t disappear. The role shifted. With students arriving to lessons already drilled on procedures, instructors spend less time on rote repetition and more time on aeronautical decision-making, judgment under ambiguity, and mentoring — the work a simulator can’t assess. Research shows that the instructor has more impact on student progress than the syllabus or the simulator itself. The machine raised the floor. The instructor moved up the stack.

The pattern is the same every time: machines absorb what’s standardizable. Humans move into what requires judgment, context, and adaptation.

The human layer gets more valuable — because the routine work that used to dilute it is gone.

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Three Emerging RQI Models

Not every RQI deployment is the same. I see three.

Model 1 — RQI inside a medical environment. Hospitals and training centers that still run serious instructor-led ACLS/PALS and use RQI stations for low-dose, high-frequency maintenance. Machines keep mechanics sharp. Humans run deep scenarios, team dynamics, and judgment. This is the original simulator dream.

Model 2 — Hybrid station networks. HeartCode Complete plus instructors on the periphery. Stations deployed in existing sites, with instructors and TCs still in the loop for onboarding, remediation, and employer relationships. Machines live at the edge. Humans oversee the network and handle complexity. This is where most training centers can win over the next decade.

Model 3 — Office-only, fully self-directed. A station in an office building, treated as a self-serve resource rather than a training relationship. Instructors are almost completely abstracted away. In practice, this model still depends on humans — small ops teams handling scheduling, troubleshooting, and compliance — but those humans are nowhere near the learner. The human work shifts from judgment in the room to logistics behind a screen.

Most of the marketing noise is about Model 3. Most of the initial success will come from Models 1 and 2.

The Layer That’s Just Beginning

The compression layer is mature. The judgment layer is early-stage.

And when one layer matures, it always exposes the next one.

What is the role of the instructor when compressions are handled by machines — but crisis response, team dynamics, scenario adaptation, employer-specific training, and decision-making under pressure are not?

Nobody has answered that yet.

Early-stage markets require humans. Not because we’re sentimental about the old model, but because discovery is a human function. Machines optimize what’s known. Humans discover what’s unknown.

The same way instructors figured out what good CPR looks like long before anyone built RQI, instructors will figure out what good judgment training looks like in a world of stations and HeartCode Complete. That discovery will happen in real rooms, with real people, in the messy space between a manikin’s data and a patient’s life.

The HeartCode Complete side is starting with an army of humans bridging product and reality — manual scheduling, disconnected checkouts, tracking held together by people, not systems. The “future” is running on past infrastructure.

Both sides are early. Both sides are messy. Both sides are human. What isn’t true: the idea that anyone has arrived.

The people who hold both truths and get to work on the messy middle will be the ones still standing in five years.

What This Means for Instructors

Your value lives in the part that can’t be standardized:

• Walking a daycare director through her specific facility and asking, “Where is a child most likely to choke or stop breathing here?”

• Dealing with the nurse who froze during a real code and hasn’t told anyone.

• Turning a daycare into a practiced team — not 12 people with cards.

• Running scenarios that look like their worst day, not the textbook’s.

The instructors who define that next layer first will own it. The ones who wait to be told what their new role is will be waiting a long time.

What This Means for Training Centers

Your job hasn’t changed: fill seats, develop instructors, serve employers.

What’s changing is what “seats” look like:

• Some will be manikin stations for mechanical skills maintenance.

• Some will be instructor-led sessions for high-context, scenario-based training.

• Most serious employers will need both, configured to their risks.

The centers that solve that infrastructure problem early won’t just survive the shift. They’ll lead it.

Your real constraint over the next five to ten years probably isn’t “will RQI exist” or “will instructors exist.”

It’s: Do we have the infrastructure to run whatever mix of manikin stations and instructor-led training our employers and regulators end up demanding — without drowning in admin and DIY tech?

That’s the problem we work on every day.

If you’re trying to hold both truths — run stations AND develop instructors — and you don’t have infrastructure that supports both, let’s talk about what that actually looks like. Reply to this or book a short reality check call. I’ll ask a few questions about how you run things today, show you where the model breaks as RQI grows, and walk through what a sane setup looks like.

No pitch deck. Just your reality and a clearer map.

— Jon

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Everyone in CPR training is trying to make things better.

• Credentialing bodies launch find‑a‑class tools and new modality‑specific directories

• Big TCs build their own “find a class” pages for their locations

• Agencies spin up nicer websites, funnels, and SEO campaigns

All of that helps someone. It’s like airlines improving their seats, apps, and boarding processes. That’s their job.

But it doesn’t build the airport.

Right now, the “plumbing” underneath most of the industry looks like this:

• Every TC has its own way of building classes in their registration software

• Coordinators maintain giant spreadsheets or Airtable bases to plan classes

• Classes get manually posted to AHA, ARC, or TC‑specific directories

• Instructors email PDFs and CSVs after the fact so someone can reconcile rosters and cards

You can put ten better class-finder experiences on top of that and still never get:

• Clean, reliable discovery for students

• Accurate, machine‑readable class inventory

• Easy routing for employers who just need staff trained somewhere this month

Not because the airlines/directories are “bad,” but because they’re only solving their slice.

An AHA or ARC directory will always be optimized around its own programs.
A TC‑specific directory will always be optimized around its own locations.
An agency‑built software will always be optimized around whatever stack the client is already on.

None of them has the incentive (or the business model) to build infrastructure that helps everyone:

• Standardized course + location data

• Shared, structured inventory of classes across providers

• Plumbing that stays accurate as reality changes (cancellations, guideline updates, instructor changes)

That’s the airport. It makes every airline more efficient. It attracts travelers who wouldn’t have flown otherwise. But no single airline builds it, because the airport helps all of them.

CPR is stuck in the “better airline, no airport” phase. We keep reinventing nicer front doors to the same brittle house. We keep fighting over the same people who are already certified, instead of making it easy for new people to enter.

Until the plumbing exists, directories and websites will keep hitting the same ceiling: they can’t outperform the data they sit on.

So next time you hear “we’re launching a new directory” or “we’re investing in SEO,” the real question isn’t:

“What will the homepage look like?”

It’s:

“Where will the data come from, and how will it stay correct when the real world changes?”

— Jon

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Every provider who says “our stack mostly works” is describing their operations and ignoring the two layers that actually grow the business.

Welcome back to Behind the Scenes.

Last week I asked you to do something most providers never do:

Add up the real cost of your infrastructure:
Tools + People + Missed Opportunities.

If you did that honestly, the total was probably way bigger than “our Enrollware bill” or “our website retainer.”

The moment you see that number, the same question shows up on every call:

“Okay, but I already have a stack that basically works.
What happens to it if I move to Hovn?”

This is the answer to that question.

The three stacks we see over and over

Underneath all the brand names and edge cases, almost every CPR / medical training business we talk to is one of three setups.

1. The Enrollware stack

What it looks like:

• Classes live on Enrollware.

• You link a single schedule page from your website.

• Students register and pay there.

• Enrollware sends reminders and basic notices.

• You submit rosters / eCards through Enrollware and agency portals.

• You export to spreadsheets whenever someone asks a “hard” question.

What it’s actually strong at:

• Operations: scheduling, registration, payments, rosters, eCards. The filing/admin side of “did the class run and did people get cards?” mostly works. That’s why people stay for a decade.

Where it’s thin:

Marketing:

• One main registration URL.

• Almost no true class‑level pages.

• “SEO” is a toggle and an email to support if you want a custom meta description.

Google sees a storefront, not your shelves. Enrollware doesn’t really help you get found.

Data:

• “Students” are rows in a registration table. You export to Excel because “Student Search” gives you a list of registrations, not a person.

• “Employers” are promo codes and filtered reports at month‑end, not accounts with staff and history.

• Campaigns are “X days before/after class,” not driven by real expirations or relationship value.

So Enrollware gives you decent Ops, and then you, your coordinator, and your spreadsheets quietly try to be Marketing + Data.

That’s where your “People” number from last week is hiding.

2. The booking‑app stack (Acuity / Calendly + plugins)

What it looks like:

• Prettier website home page (Wix, WordPress, Squarespace).

• Generic scheduling widget (Acuity, Calendly, etc).

• Sometimes that widget is bolted on top of Enrollware “for the look.”

• Behind it: Square/Paypal, Mailchimp, agency portals, shared drives, spreadsheets.

What’s actually true:

Marketing is still weak.

• You might have better keyword‑targeted pages.

• But the scheduler, Wix plugin, or booking tool still doesn’t generate real class‑level SEO Google can trust as inventory.

• Google sees “this business does CPR,” not “this exact BLS class, at this time, at this location.”

Operations are worse.

• Unlike Enrollware or Hovn, these tools are not integrated to AHA, ARC, HSI, etc.

• Rosters, cards, and blended links are all manual and spread across systems.

• If you stacked a booking plugin on top of Enrollware, you kept the marketing problem, lost operational simplicity, and added a facade your staff now has to maintain.

Data is basically non‑existent.

• No true student system of record.

• No real employer accounts.

• No network view.

You get nicer aesthetics, but Marketing is still shallow, Ops becomes manual and fragmented, and Data disappears.

You feel this as “we look better, but it’s more work and I still can’t answer basic questions.”

3. The custom‑build stack

What it looks like:

• Fully custom website or portal on top of a legacy or DIY back end.

• Agencies/contractors or in‑house devs did a big build.

• Every change is a quote and a wait.

What’s actually true:

• You’re now building the full stack from scratch:
  Marketing, Operations, and Data are your responsibility.

• Unless you’re very large, you will almost never get deep, maintained integrations to the agencies.

  • Every new AHA/ARC/HSI requirement is a dev project.

  • Every guideline change is a risk.

• You didn’t just buy software. You became a software company.

You feel this as “we can’t move” and “every guideline or agency change costs us real money.”

So where does Hovn fit, really?

Hovn is not “Enrollware but shinier,” and it’s not “a prettier booking app.”

It’s meant to sit in the middle and do three jobs at once:

Marketing layer:

• The class you post tomorrow is automatically its own, structured, bookable page in Google.

• You don’t email anyone, you don’t toggle a hidden setting, you don’t hire a dev. Your inventory is actually visible.

Operations layer:

• Registration, payments, blended learning delivery, reminders, rosters, certifications all run through one workflow built for CPR, not haircuts.

• The thing your coordinator currently holds together with five tools and a checklist becomes “how the platform works.”

Data layer:

• You can pull up “Acme Dental” and see staff, classes, and history without touching Excel.

• Students are real profiles you can track across time.

• Your catalog is version‑aware, so guideline shifts are a rollout, not a rebuild.

• Renewals and reporting run off actual history, not guesses.

We’re built to solve the real problem, not just crank out features.

For example: today, we also don’t give employers their own login to manage staff directly.

But under the hood, they already exist as first‑class entities in the data model. That’s the difference between “we can turn on an employer view when it’s ready” and “we’d have to re‑architect the whole product to do that.”

What I recommend based on where you are

Now the part you actually care about: what do you do with your current stack?

If you’re on Enrollware and it “mostly works”

Don’t rip and replace your whole world on Day 1.

Plan a migration that starts at the center of your network:

1. Start with the classes you directly run
   Your own corporate/group classes and core open‑enrollment schedule move to Hovn first.

   • You control both demand and delivery.

   • This is where the Data and Marketing gaps hurt you most.

   • It’s where you see the before/after fastest.

2. Prove the push model on your own inventory
   Once your own classes are running through Hovn, you can actually see:

   • Employer accounts with staff and history.

   • Students as real profiles instead of exports.

   • Classes showing up in Google as individual, bookable pages.

3. Then roll it out to your network
   After the core is working, you extend Hovn to your sites/instructors.
   Not as “here’s a new tool you have to use,” but as:

“Here’s the system we’re already using that can actually send you students and handle the admin.”

That’s how TCs and large sites are rolling out Hovn right now: core first, network second.

If you’ve been following this series, this is where the card‑mill death loop, the DoorDash problem, and the filing‑cabinet trap all converge: you’ve been running pull‑network infrastructure.

Starting your own classes on Hovn is the first step toward a push network.

If you’re on a booking‑app stack

Here, there is no network to shepherd. It’s usually you, maybe a small team.

The move is simpler:

• Switch to Hovn and use it as your operating system and data layer for your classes.

• Keep your domain, brand, and list.

• Replace the widgets and duct tape with an OS that handles the class lifecycle end‑to‑end and is actually wired to the agencies.

If you’re on (or scoping) a custom build

Stop paying to build generic infrastructure.

Use Hovn for the boring, repeatable plumbing and reserve “custom” for the 10 percent that’s truly unique to you.

Otherwise, you’re signing up to be a software company and an integration shop, on top of running a training business.

This week’s action step: Score your stack like an owner

Pull out last week’s list: every tool, every chunk of coordinator time, every “we just do it manually.”

Next to each line item, write:

• M if it’s really doing Marketing (helps you get found)

• O if it’s really doing Operations (helps you run & complete classes)

• D if it’s really giving you reusable Data (students, employers, history you act on)

Now total the dollars in each bucket.

Most providers discover they’re paying “all‑in‑one” money for a stack that is 80–90 percent O, thin D, and almost no real M.

That’s why it feels like your tools are “fine,” you’re working hard… and nothing truly compounds.

If you want a second set of eyes, that’s what we do on a walkthrough: we’ll map your stack live, label every line item M/O/D, and show you exactly where Hovn would fit and how that rollout would actually look for you.

— Jon & Shubs
Co‑founders, Hovn

If you missed any of the earlier posts in this series, here they are:

• BTS #1: Why We Built Hovn (And Why Now)

• BTS #2: The 8 Pillars of a Modern CPR Training Platform

• BTS #3: 7 Software Mistakes CPR Businesses Keep Making

• BTS #4: How We Turn Your Feedback Into a Living Platform

• BTS #5: What You’re Actually Paying For (It’s Not Software)

Next week: I’ll deconstruct Hovn’s core pillars – the actual building blocks under everything I’ve described so far – and walk through a feature-level tour so you can see how it all works together in the real product.

Subscribe now

Want a second set of eyes on your operation? 15 minutes. We review your setup. You walk away knowing what to fix first.

→ Book your free call

You’re embarrassed to send students to your checkout page. If you run a training center, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

The buttons have that glossy sheen Apple killed in 2013. The gradients are gray. The forms look like they were designed for an internal HR system. Students complete their registration and you hope they don’t judge you for it.

They do.

You think: “I’ll just put a better layer on top of what I have.”

So you talk to a developer, or a friend who’s “good with tech.” You check out a YouTube video about AI tools that can build apps in a weekend.

It sounds reasonable. Just a weekend Home Depot project. You’re not trying to become a tech company. You just want something you’re not embarrassed by.

The Facade

You keep your legacy platform as the backend. But you hide it. Layer a few pages in front. Add a booking wizard. Purchase a custom header. Use HTML to add a few images in the course list for visual structure.

From the outside, it looks modern-ish. Your branding instead of gray forms. Clean buttons, nice copy.

It IS better. It matches. It’s yours.

Fresh paint. Problem solved.

Paint Wasn’t Enough

A few months in, something’s still wrong.

Organic traffic isn’t improving.

The results aren’t showing when you add a new location. The wizard doesn’t sync properly.

So you go deeper. You start gutting to the studs.

You set up Zapier to patch the gaps. You ask your legacy platform for API access. You learn about webhooks, structured data, page architecture. You build naming conventions for courses and locations.

Now you’re spending weekends on technical work. Debugging why the wizard doesn’t pull the right classes. Figuring out why the booking flow breaks. Managing a stack of tools that each solve one piece of the problem. Traffic is still flat.

You didn’t sign up for this. But you’re in it now.

The Foundation

You gut to the studs — and hit the real problem.

The foundation.

It was poured for a different house. The plumbing and electrical are not up to code. It was designed in a different era. One where directories sent you all your students.

No amount of gutting fixes a bad foundation. You can only build on top of it — or start with a different one.

But you’re already in deep. What do you do?

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The Trap

You started as a homeowner who wanted fresh paint.

Now you’re a general contractor.

You’re debugging why your legacy platform doesn’t work with the wizard you built. You’re managing a stack of tools. Every time something changes — a new course, a guideline update, an agency system change — it’s your problem. Every time something breaks, it’s your weekend.

You didn’t want to run construction. You wanted to live in the house.

Quick check — are you already here?

• You know more about HTML, Wordpress Plugins, and AI builders than your top 10 employer accounts.

• The person who built your system is the only one who can fix it.

• Your “quick fix” list is longer than your sales pipeline.

• You’re already talking about rebuilding something you built in the last two years.

• When something changes, it kicks off a project, not a settings change.

• You’re asking your legacy platform for integration options just to make your own tools work.

• If that’s you, you’re not running a training business anymore.

• You’re running a software company on the side.

The Proof

The largest networks in the country went through this whole progression.

Six figures in. Custom front ends, booking wizards, branded search experiences, dev teams on retainer.

Still trapped.

Still maintaining. Still debugging. Still spending weekends on platform problems instead of building the business.

And after all that — they’re still losing to smaller businesses that avoided the trap.

Search “BLS class Setauket February.” You’ll see CPRNY with an AI Overview, session-level pages indexed, organic results for the exact class, date, and location.

The big networks spent six figures on facades. CPRNY started with modern infrastructure. Google can see what they're selling.

The directories are drying up » Read: Card Mills are a Symptom, Not the Disease.

The question is whether you’re building pages that replace them — or still debugging your wizard.

The Decision

You started wanting to fix a checkout page.

Now you’re solving platform problems.

Do you want to spend the next five years as a general contractor — debugging integrations, managing tools, fixing what breaks every time something changes?

Or do you want to spend it on the things only you can do — brand, network, demand?

The Way Out

Stop gutting.

Start with solid infrastructure. Put your brand, your marketing, your relationships on top of a foundation built for this era — not retrofitted from the last one.

That’s what we’re building at Hovn.

Not another facade. Not a legacy tool with a fresh skin.

Foundation that lets you spend your time on:

Brand — students remember you, not the agency or directory.

Network — instructors and sites align with you because you can actually help them.

Demand — you create your own business instead of renting it.

The teams winning the next five years aren’t putting a facade on a legacy platform

So…

What are you working on?

—Jon

Get a three-year head start on the next five years » book a foundation demo.

Click to Schedule a Demo

This is Part 3 in the software trap series: Card Mills are a Symptom, Not the Disease.

- Trap 1: The Legacy Platform Trap — when you’re solving everything with people

- Trap 2: The DIY Stack Trap — when you’re a DoorDash driver for hire.

Want a second set of eyes on your operation? 15 minutes. We review your setup. You walk away knowing what to fix first.

→ Book your free call

Last week in BTS #4, I shared how we turn your feedback and student behavior into a living platform – not “just another tool” that freezes the day you sign up.

Since I started this series, one question has come up over and over:

“So what does Hovn actually cost?”

Today I’m going to walk you through how we think about pricing infrastructure – what you’re really paying for when you choose Hovn – before we get into the exact tiers and numbers.

Everyone reading this runs (or wants to run) a training business. Whether you ever use Hovn or not, figuring out what problem you’re solving – and how your pricing grows with your business – is something you’ll revisit over and over. I’ll show you how we answered that question for ourselves.

What You’re Actually Paying For With Hovn

The industry is where it is because everyone has been operating off tools.

In the old game – the pull network – tools made sense:

• Become an instructor

• Get a classroom

• Post your availability to Find‑a‑Class

• Hope enough students show up

If you were an instructor, you needed:

• A way to post classes

• A way to take payments online

If you were a TC, you needed:

• A way to sell digital cards

• A way to receive and file rosters

In that world, a calendar, a payment form, and a portal got you most of the way there. The demand was “out there” on AHA/ARC. Your job was to be catchable.

That’s not where the industry is going.

Right now we’re seeing:

• Instructors who can’t depend on AHA as their only source of students anymore – it’s one channel, not the lifeline

• PLTPs and larger brands posting to ARC and then routing those leads to instructors under them

• Students finding classes through Google, employers, and brand names, not just directories

That’s the early shape of a push dynamic:

• Bigger brands and networks become where students discover classes

• Instructors and sites want to plug into that demand

• Directories are just one channel into a bigger system, not the whole system

In that world, the problem isn’t “give me a registration tool.” The problem is:

“Help me build and run a network that can get found, deliver a clean experience, and keep people current across instructors, sites, employers, and agencies.”

That’s an infrastructure problem.

How We Define “Success”

If we’re going to price against solving that problem, we need a clear success metric.

For us, it’s completions:

• A student who registers

• Shows up

• Gets certified

• Lives in a record we can use to drive renewals and convert employers to group training

So when we thought about pricing, we didn’t ask:

“How many features should come in Silver vs Gold?”

We asked:

“How many successful student relationships are we helping you manage, and how many moving parts are we orchestrating to make that happen?”

That’s the core of our philosophy:

• Align to success (completions)

• Scale price with the parts of the business that actually grow.

How Training Businesses Actually Grow

From watching hundreds of providers, we kept seeing the same growth dimensions:

• Student volume – more seats filled, more certs issued

• Instructor volume – more people teaching under your brand

• Agency integrations – AHA plus ARC/HSI, not either/or

• Affiliate connections – instructors and sites buying cards from you, or running under your PLTP

The details vary, but the pattern doesn’t: as those dimensions increase, you naturally move from a solo/small site to a growing site to a true center to a real network.

We designed pricing to map to those patterns. You’re not paying for “more knobs.” You’re paying based on where you are on that curve and which bottlenecks we’re taking off your plate.

What We Saw TCs Already Spending

When we started talking to serious TCs, we didn’t start with, “What will you pay Hovn?”

We started with, “What are you already spending to try to run this like a network?”

Typical answers:

• A legacy platform for registrations and card flows

• Custom dev and SEO to aggregate classes across multiple sites / instances

• Admin staff reconciling coupon codes, rosters, and B2B deals into something that looks like one relationship

• SOPs and naming conventions to fake standards the software doesn’t enforce

All in, many were spending well into six figures a year on:

• Tools

• People

• Patchwork

And still didn’t have:

• A clean student system of record

• Real B2B/employer accounts

• True network visibility

• A student experience anyone would recommend

Because they were trying to build a network on top of a platform that was built for a different era.

So when we thought about price, we didn’t ask:

“What’s a fair uplift on a ~$500 subscription of legacy software?”

We asked:

“What are TCs already spending to try to solve this, and how do we price Hovn so we only win if we actually solve it better?”

What You’re Actually Paying Us For

That’s why Hovn prices the way it does.

We charge based on:

• The number of successful student relationships we’re helping you manage (completions we’re responsible for), and

• The level of business you’re really running across those growth dimensions (students, instructors, agencies, affiliates)

We’re not in the business of taking a cut of your payments. Our job is to help you drive students and relationships you own.

With Hovn, you connect your own Stripe Standard account—not a sub‑account under us. Stripe sees you as the business.

Practically, that means:

• You have full access to Stripe’s platform and data

• You can plug other tools into Stripe as you grow

• At high volume, you can negotiate your own processing rates directly with Stripe

• Any savings from that go to you, not us

We wire Hovn into your Stripe once. As you go from solo → site → center → network, that same pipe and data model keep working harder. You’re not throwing away your stack every time you grow; you’re compounding on a foundation.

If you’re an instructor or small site:

You’re mostly paying on student volume. Maybe a few other instructors help you and you have a couple of agency integrations, but you’re not running affiliates or big B2B yet.

For you, Hovn is a foundation:

• It gets you off the DIY stack

• It turns your classes into pages Google can actually see and rank – real programmatic SEO built-in

• It turns every completion into a student record you can serve again

That programmatic SEO piece is important. It’s the kind of thing most people end up paying an agency or dev team thousands of dollars to custom‑build. With Hovn, it’s just part of the platform.

If you’re a TC or network:

You’re paying for infrastructure that can model how you operate across brands, regions, and agencies:

• Locations and sites across multiple regions

• Instructors and affiliates under different business units

• B2B/employer relationships across multiple states with varying certifications

• Multi‑agency pipelines (AHA, ARC, HSI)

• Routing demand to the right classes and instructors

• Making your real inventory visible to Google and students

For most networks we talk to, that ends up being a low single‑digit percentage of revenue – less than what they’re already spending (and wasting) on:

• Legacy registration tools

• Custom builds and maintenance

• Coordinators and SOPs acting as a fake operating system

• Missed bookings because classes are invisible or hard to buy

You’re not paying for a prettier registration app. You’re paying for:

• Fewer tools

• Fewer people as glue

• Fewer dead‑end searches and empty classes

• More completions you can actually see, support, and grow

  Book a Walkthrough

Today’s Action Step: Price the Problem, Not the Software

If you want a quick reality check on your own setup, don’t start with “what’s our software bill?” Every platform solves some pieces. The point of this exercise is to see what it really costs you to make the whole thing work.

1. Tools

List every tool you pay for that touches:

• Registrations and scheduling

• Payments

• Email/SMS and reminders

• Class pages / websites

• B2B/employer management

• SEO / ads

• Anything you use to move data into/out of agency portals

Add it up.

2. People

Estimate coordinator/admin time per week spent as glue:

• Moving data between systems

• Fixing errors, resending links, chasing students

• Manually building rosters and uploads

• Reconciling employers, coupons, invoices

Multiply by $30–$40/hour × 52 weeks.

3. Missed opportunities

Pick one honest number:

• Classes that don’t fill because they’re hard to find on Google

• Employers you say “no” to because you can’t support the complexity

• Renewals that slip because you can’t see who’s coming due

You don’t need perfect math. You just need to be honest.

Now add:

Tools + People + Missed Opportunities

That’s your actual cost.

That’s the number that matters a lot more than a single subscription line – and it’s the number you should compare any “software price” against, including Hovn.

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This week I’d like you to do one thing:

• Run that Tools + People + Missed Opportunities calculation for your setup.

• Then hit reply and tell me:

  • Which bucket surprised you the most, and

  • Whether you’ve ever actually priced your infra that way before.

Paying the right price for the right problem is more important than getting the lowest software bill.

What do you think?

Thanks,
Jon & Shubs
Co‑founders, Hovn

If you missed any of the earlier posts in this series, here they are:

• BTS #1: Why We Built Hovn (And Why Now)

• BTS #2: The 8 Pillars of a Modern CPR Training Platform

• BTS #3: 7 Software Mistakes CPR Businesses Keep Making

• BTS #4: How We Turn Your Feedback Into a Living Platform

Next week: We’ll break down where Hovn actually fits with the tools you already use – Enrollware, booking apps, and custom builds – and how to think about your stack in terms of Marketing, Operations, and Data. I’ll also share a simple way to score your own setup so you know exactly what to change (and what to keep) before you ever hop on a call with us.

Want a second set of eyes on your operation? 15 minutes. We review your setup. You walk away knowing what to fix first.

→ Book your free call

Right now, in your student’s mind, you’re DoorDash, not a restaurant.

You want to be the place they come back to by name. But your DIY stack teaches them the relationship is with AHA/ARC, not you.

The agency acquired the customer. You fulfilled an order. When they need it again, they’ll go back to the app.

Unless you convert that transaction into a relationship, you’re just delivering for someone else’s brand.

Every Touchpoint Is Training

Every interaction teaches the student where to go next time.

Here’s your current flow:

1. Discovery: Student finds you on ARC or AHA directory → “This is where I find CPR classes”

2. Registration: Through your booking tool, but immediately pointed elsewhere → “Okay, now I go to AHA to get my materials, or wait for my RCLC link”

3. Pre-class email: Comes from AHA Learning Central or Red Cross → “This is who’s actually delivering this”

4. Materials: Live on agency portal, agency login → “This is where my experience lives”

5. Skills check: You. Finally. For 2 hours. → “This is the location I went to”

6. Card: Delivered via email by Agency → “My certification comes from AHA/ARC’s system”

7. Renewal: → Back to the source they’ve been trained to trust

They spend a few minutes with you to pay. The rest of the experience is agency portals and email.

The only touchpoint you fully own is the physical skills check. That’s the commodity — location + time slot + a person with an instructor card.

When that’s all you own, you’re competing on location and price. Nothing else.

You’re not running a student experience. You’re coordinating deliveries.

What They Remember

Here’s what the student remembers:

“I got certified through AHA. I found a provider on their website. They sent me my materials. I did the online part on their platform. Then I went somewhere for the skills check. I don’t really remember where. The instructor was fantastic. When I need to renew, I’ll go back to the AHA site and find whoever’s available.”

You’re not a brand in that story. You’re a pin on a map. Interchangeable.

That makes you replaceable.

“But I Have Their Information”

Here’s what you’ll say: “I’m not a DoorDash driver. I have their name, email, phone number. I’m building a customer list.”

Having data isn’t the same as owning the relationship.

You have rows in a spreadsheet. But:

• You’re delivering the course through the agency’s platform

• You’re managing rosters through the agency’s platform

• You’re issuing cards through the agency’s platform

• The student’s entire experience IS the agency’s experience

Data in a spreadsheet isn’t a relationship. It’s a receipt.

A DoorDash driver could write down every address they deliver to. That doesn’t make those customers theirs. The next order still comes through the app.

Your setup looks like this:

• Agency portal (ARC Class Posting or AHA Find-a-Class) for acquisition

• Generic booking tool (Acuity, Wix, Alo) for registration

• Agency platform for materials delivery

• Separate email or SMS to remind students to “check spam”

• Spreadsheet as your actual system of record

• Manual upload to agency portal to issue cards

• MailChimp campaign you have to remember to run for renewals

You chose modern tools because you didn’t want to look like 2010.

But you didn’t build a system. You became the system.

Your Booking Tool Doesn’t Build Local Presence

Acuity, Wix, Alo — they weren’t designed for local search. They were designed to book appointments.

They list you as a business with calendar availability. Not a local business offering courses that lead to certifications. Nothing that tells Google “this is an AHA BLS class in Miami on Friday at 6:00PM.”

When someone searches “CPR class near me,” your inventory of classes is invisible.

Find-a-Class traffic is saturated. ARC is reliable, but if that’s your only acquisition channel, you’re standing on a platform you don’t control.

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Renting Demand Instead of Owning It

ARC is one of the best acquisition channels in the industry. You’re paying per class to post. Real money for real leads.

But every student you acquire goes back to the directory when they renew. You’re renting demand instead of owning it.

Your business should compound off historical students. The person you certified two years ago should come back to YOU automatically. That’s free revenue.

Instead, every student is a one-time transaction. You’re paying to acquire them again. And again.

DoorDash drivers don’t build wealth. They trade time for money, order by order, forever.

Restaurants build equity. Regulars. Catering contracts. A brand people seek out.

You want to be the restaurant.

What You Want Them to Remember

“I got certified through [Your Brand]. I found them through [Where You Post]. They handled everything — registration, materials, the class. They made it easy to share my card with my employer. My card and everything is in their portal. When I need to renew, I’ll sign in and register for their next class. Actually, they’re working with my employer to do group training for my office.”

Now you’re a relationship, not a transaction.

From Driver to Restaurant

The goal isn’t to abandon agency channels. ARC is real acquisition. AHA Find-a-Class still drives some traffic.

The goal is to convert fulfillment into ownership.

Same acquisition channel. Different touchpoints:

1. Discovery via ARC → acquisition

2. Registration through YOUR checkout

3. Confirmation from YOUR email

4. Materials in YOUR portal, instant access

5. Card in YOUR portal with history

6. Renewal reminders from YOU → pointing to YOUR classes

Now every touchpoint trains them that you’re the relationship.

The agency becomes invisible infrastructure — like Stripe when you buy something online. You don’t think “I bought from Stripe.” You think “I bought from that store.”

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The B2B Unlock

When you own the student profile — not a spreadsheet row, a real account — you capture employer information at verification.

That employer info becomes a B2B lead.

The student you acquired through ARC? Their employer needs 15 people certified. That’s a group training contract worth thousands.

You can’t do this when your “data” is a spreadsheet you manually reconcile.

You can do this when you own the student record, the portal, and the renewal relationship.

Individual → employer → group training → lifetime value.

That’s how you stop being a DoorDash driver.

How to Know You’re Driving — And What Changes

You’re driving if:

• You’re waiting to trigger the next step in another system

• Your student experiences everything in their email

• You manually upload to agency portals to issue cards

• Renewals are a MailChimp campaign you remember to run

• Students go back to the agency directory when they renew

• You class page doesn’t show up when someone Googles your course + your city

Restaurant ownership looks like:

• Student portal — the relationship lives with YOU

• Automatic materials delivery — no more “check your spam”

• Renewals automated — pointing back to YOUR classes

• Student verification — they confirm their info, including employer

• B2B pipeline — employer info becomes leads for group training

• Local SEO built in — classes indexed as inventory Google can read

• Time back — for acquisition instead of coordination

The Reality

If every email comes from the agency, every login is on the agency portal, and every touchpoint points back to the agency — you’ve trained students to forget you exist.

You’re not building customers. You’re borrowing them.

Walk through your last student’s experience. Count the touchpoints. How many were yours vs. the agency’s?

In two years, that student will renew. They’ll go wherever they’ve been trained to go.

If you don’t like that, let’s fix it. Hit the comments or reply and I’ll walk you through how Hovn turns your current ‘DoorDash driver’ setup into a student portal that you own.

Jon f/ Hovn

This is Part 2 in the software trap series: Card Mills are a Symptom, Not the Disease.

- Trap 1: The Legacy Platform Trap — when you’re solving everything with people

- Trap 3: The Facade Trap — when you’re building better checkout pages on an old foundation.

Want a second set of eyes on your operation? 15 minutes. We review your setup. You walk away knowing what to fix first.

→ Book your free call

Last week in BTS #3, I shared 7 ways your CPR software stack keeps you stuck in operations instead of out filling classes and signing employers.

This week I want to show you the opposite side of that coin:

How we use your feedback and real behavior to make Hovn a living platform — not “just another tool” that freezes the day you sign up.

The Tree Branch Problem

One of the hardest parts of building software for CPR is that many of you are first responders.

Your job is to improvise when things are missing. If you’re out of splints, you use tree branches.

The problem is when that improvisation turns into the feature request:

“We need more tree branches on the truck.”

In software terms, that sounds like:

• “Can you add coupon codes so I can accept cash?”

• “Do you have email tools so I can deliver materials?”

• “Can I edit a student’s information before class?”

If we just recreate those tools, we’re rebuilding the same problems on a prettier screen.

So we push for the story behind the request.

What We Heard → What We Shipped

Here are a few real examples of how this works:

“Do you have coupon codes for employers?”

What they were actually doing: Creating unique codes per employer, listing them publicly on their site, then reconciling who used what at the end of the month to build invoices.

The real problem: Employers aren’t discount codes. They’re accounts with staff, history, and billing relationships.

What we shipped: B2B employer accounts. One place to see an employer’s staff, group client sessions into a single order, tie classes back to the account, and generate invoices from real data — not coupon archaeology.

“Do you have email tools so I can deliver materials?”

What they were actually doing: Manually triggering email sequences after registration, hoping students opened the right email at the right time, then resending when they didn’t.

The real problem: Students don’t need more emails. They need one place to see what’s next.

What we shipped: A student portal where materials, instructions, and upcoming classes live in one place. Email becomes a notification layer pointing back to the portal — not the operating system itself.

“Can I edit a student’s information before class?”

What they were actually doing: Chasing students via email to confirm details, manually updating records, fixing typos, and still ending up with bad data on rosters.

The real problem: The admin was doing all the work to maintain a single one-time-use row in a registration. No student relationship. No verified data. No leverage.

What we shipped: Student accounts with verification. After purchase, the student confirms their own information on a single profile — not a registration row. This brings them into the portal (building a relationship beyond email), asks for employer information (which providers now use as leads for group training), and gives you a “Verified” badge on the session.

That’s peace of mind before class and a stronger data point if you ever face a chargeback dispute.

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How Feedback Actually Flows

We get input from three places:

1. Conversations — 1:1 onboarding calls, support chats, replies to SitRep and these BTS emails, and a customer advisory group. (Yes, we’ve registered for and attended classes from providers on Hovn.)

2. Behavior — Where students drop off in registration. How coordinators move through rosters. Which features get used heavily vs. ignored.

3. Patterns — The same complaint from multiple TCs. The same workaround story told three different ways.

Roughly half of what we ship in every release ties directly to something a customer said or did.

And here’s the selfish upside: we prioritize feedback from people who are actually running on Hovn and willing to walk us through their workflows. Those customers see relief first — prototypes, early versions tuned around their exact setup. Once we’ve tested and hardened the solution there, we roll a generalized version out to everyone.

If you’re in the weeds with us, your pain gets solved faster.

Home Depot vs. General Contractor

Most CPR software works like Home Depot.

They add more tools to the shelf. More fields. More configuration. More “flexibility.” You pick the tools, you design the workflow, you bolt it together. If something breaks, you fix it. If something’s missing, you build it.

It’s cheap to add another color to the crayon box. The value is in the picture.

We’re trying to be the opposite: a general contractor who’s led large-scale software, worked with dozens of training centers and baked those lessons into the product.

You don’t configure Hovn. You use it. And it gets better — not because you customize it, but because we learn from thousands of transactions across the platform.

We ship major releases every two weeks. Code goes out almost every day. The product you’re on today is meaningfully better than the one you signed up for three months ago.

That’s what “living platform” means to us.

How to Know If Hovn Is Right for You

Hovn is for operators who don’t want to be the IT department — who want opinionated workflows that just work and keep improving as the industry changes.

If that’s you, you’re home.

If you want control over every field and workflow, you’ll probably be frustrated, because we’d rather go deeper on problems that affect many providers than bolt on every feature anyone mentions.

Why This Beats Building Your Own

A lot of owners respond by trying to become software companies: custom portals on top of Enrollware, Acuity plus a dozen integrations, months of configuration.

The problem: that stack only learns from one business. When you get busy, the product stops evolving. And the more you customize configurable software, the harder it is for anyone — you or the vendor — to improve it without breaking something.

We talked to a TC who built a custom multi-site SEO strategy years ago. It worked — he was ahead of the curve. Then Google changed how it reads inventory. His setup couldn’t adapt. Now he’s invisible in local search and on the hook to rebuild the whole stack: 40-80 hours of dev work, weeks of testing, plus the revenue bleed while he’s down. One shift, $50K+ bill.

That’s the tax of owning your own infrastructure: every industry shift is your problem.

Structured data is already built into Hovn. Everyone on their own stack is sitting on old tech, waiting for the next bill. Agencies get paid when you build. We get paid when you grow.

If you’re worried your feedback is “helping competitors,” consider the alternative: your ideas get locked inside a custom solution that only you pay for, maintain, and keep up to date.

With Hovn, you push those needs into a product you don’t have to host, upgrade, or keep ahead of Google and the agencies. We pressure test it with additional data. You still keep your real edge — relationships, instructors, employer deals — but you stop paying a solo tax on infrastructure.

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The Bigger Picture

The real enemy here isn’t the TC down the street.

It’s the antiquated, DMV-style student experience that makes people dread taking these classes and drives prices down. Flooded directories with fake locations. Confusing websites. Clunky registration. Fifteen emails to figure out what’s next.

Shared infrastructure that keeps improving based on feedback is how we raise that floor — for students, for employers, and for the providers trying to build something worth paying for.

Your custom stack learns from one business. Hovn learns from thousands of students and sessions.

That’s how the whole industry gets back to a place where providers can focus on teaching.

Three questions for you:

1. Are you trying to build your own student experience… and are you really investing in it? Be honest: are you building your own platform, or bolting tools in front of a DIY / legacy stack and then going on feel instead of putting real time, money, or a cadence behind improving it?

2. How are you getting hard feedback on your student experience and tools? What are the actual feedback loops you have today to learn from students and employers about how it feels to find, register, complete, and get their card — and where your software / stack is making that harder than it needs to be?

3. If you were on Hovn tomorrow, what’s the first workflow you’d want us to sit with you and watch end-to-end?

Hit the comments and tell us.

If you already know you’re done playing IT and want to see how our feedback loop would attack your specific setup:

Talk soon,

Jon and Shubs

Co-founders, Hovn

If you missed any of the earlier posts in this series, here they are:

• BTS #1: Why We Built Hovn (And Why Now)

• BTS #2: The 8 Pillars of a Modern CPR Training Platform

• BTS #3: 7 Software Mistakes CPR Businesses Keep Making

Want a second set of eyes on your operation? 15 minutes. We review your setup. You walk away knowing what to fix first.

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If you’re a Training Center that’s been around a while, your story probably sounds like this:

“We went digital early. We use [legacy platform]. It’s not perfect, but it does the job.”

Ten years ago, it did.

It:

• Took online registrations

• Turned paper rosters into digital records

• Helped you submit to AHA and stay compliant

For that era, it was a real edge.

The problem is that what you needed in 2015 was a filing system.

What you need in 2025 is an operating system:

• Something that helps you fill seats

• Grow and renew B2B accounts

• And actually make more money, not just prove you did the work

Right now, your software does the filing.
Your people do everything else.

In this post:

• Filing system vs operating system

• The ugly truth: your coordinator is the middleware

• Tax 1: Discovery – invisible classes, invisible revenue

• Tax 2: B2B – your best growth lever, throttled

• Tax 3: Network power – a network you can’t actually use

• Why this gets worse the more successful you are

• What an operating system lets you do instead

Most TCs treat software as an expense to minimize. But software isn't a line item — it's infrastructure. It either helps you grow or caps your growth. (We wrote about that shift here.)

Filing system vs operating system

Let’s name the difference.

A filing system:

• Stores registrations and rosters

• Issues cards and keeps audit trails

• Lets instructors “enter classes” and submit data

An operating system:

• Treats students and employers as real accounts with history

• Knows what classes exist, where, when, and at what price

• Lets you route demand into empty seats and renew expiring staff

Most of the “all‑in‑one” CPR platforms on the market today are filing systems with calendars.

You’ve been trying to use them like an operating system and filling the gaps with people.

The ugly truth: your coordinator is the middleware

On a legacy platform, the software is not the integration layer.
Your coordinator is.

You’re in the Legacy Platform Trap if your team is routinely:

1. Living in an email‑only experience

Legacy tools will fire blended learning links automatically.

But everything still lives in email:

• Access codes

• Online portion links

• Instructions

There’s no branded student portal. No single place to log in and see “here’s what I bought, here’s what’s next.”

Your staff spends their time:

• Resending links

• Answering “I never got it”

• Dealing with students who show up without the online portion done

The system “sent the email.” The experience is still on you.

2. Rebuilding student and client history outside the system

“Student Search” in these platforms is really registration search:

• You type “John Doe”

• You get multiple rows back, one per class he’s taken

That’s not a true account. It’s a stack of receipts.

You still can’t answer cleanly:

• “How many certs has John Doe gotten with us?”

• “How many Acme Dental staff did we train this year, and who’s expiring next quarter?”

So you:

• Export to Excel

• Clean up duplicates

• Manually piece together the story

The platform stores events.
You provide the narrative.

3. Doing accounting gymnastics for every reschedule

On a filing system, a simple “move this student to Thursday” really means:

• Cancel original registration

• Credit the balance

• Re‑apply it to a new class

• Make sure nothing breaks with rosters, payments, and reporting

It’s not one action. It’s a fragile little workflow someone has to remember and execute correctly every time.

4. Either overspending on custom dev… or accepting invisibility

The best way people have figured out to use their legacy platform is:

• Hide the stock pages

• Use it as the back‑end

• Pay north of $50,000 for custom dev to build navigation and location pages on top

Then you glue everything together and keep it in sync.

If you’re not doing that, your discovery is weak.
If you are doing that, you’re paying a lot to compensate for a filing system.

There isn’t a cheap, effective middle.

5. Manually managing instructor / site data

You:

• Chase instructors for updated locations, bios, and offerings

• Keep separate docs or spreadsheets “just in case”

• Live with a constant low‑grade fear that what’s on your site, in your platform, and in your head don’t match

The software doesn’t give you a clean, trusted network view.
You become the network view.

That’s not “it’s not perfect, but it does the job.”

That’s “we’re the job.”

Tax 1: Discovery – invisible classes, invisible revenue

Today, students and office managers start on Google:

• “BLS renewal near me”

• “ACLS class [city]”

Google wants to show:

• A real business,

• With real inventory,

• Near the searcher,

• Bookable now.

To do that, it needs machine-readable data:

Legacy platforms:

• Treat course and location as free‑text fields

• Don’t emit proper structured data on their own

• Don’t auto‑generate SEO‑friendly “course × city × date × location” pages

So you’re stuck with a fork in the road:

Option A: Spend big on custom dev.

• Use the platform purely as a back‑end

• Pay a dev team to build all your class and location pages, filters, and URLs on top

• Maintain that layer forever as things change

Option B: Don’t.

• Accept that your schedule is basically invisible to search

• Rely on directories and word of mouth to keep seats full

Either you spend a lot to duct‑tape growth on top, or you accept that the system you pay for can’t pull its weight in discovery.

An operating system should:

• Automatically generate clean, linkable pages for course × city × date × location

• Attach the right schema so Google understands what you offer

• Keep those URLs and inventories up to date from the system of record

You shouldn’t have to hire a software developer just to show up where your buyers are.

Tax 2: B2B – your best growth lever, throttled by fields and exports

In legacy systems, employers exist as values in a field, not as first‑class accounts.

That means B2B looks like this:

• Run a report

• Filter by company / code / notes

• Export to Excel

• Build a billing sheet

• Create an invoice and attach rosters

• Chase payment 30–60 days later

Every. Single. Month.

And that’s before you:

• Answer “who did we train at Acme Dental this year?”

• Figure out who at Acme expires next quarter

• Try to proactively propose a renewal plan instead of waiting for them to call you

Realistically, for a serious TC, that’s easily 4+ hours per employer per month between:

• Reports

• Fixing errors

• Emails and calls

• Invoices and collections

With just 15 solid employer accounts, that’s:

• 60+ coordinator hours every month

• Time that could be spent creating new B2B relationships instead of servicing them

And B2B is one of your strongest growth levers:

• Higher ticket

• More predictable

• Easier to renew

But your filing system makes it feel like a chore, not a strategy.

An operating system treats “Acme Dental” as an account:

• You click once and see 42 staff, what they took, and who expires when

• You can filter “employers with 5+ staff expiring in the next 90 days”

• You can send renewals or schedule private classes in minutes, not afternoons

Same employers. Same staff.
Very different ability to grow that line of business.

Tax 3: Network power – a network you can’t actually use

On paper, your network is your advantage.

In software, it’s an afterthought.

Instructors and sites use the platform to:

• Post classes (sometimes)

• Enter rosters

• Pay you for cards

Data and money flow up.
Almost nothing flows down:

• Students can’t easily discover providers across your footprint

• Employers can’t see “locations near our offices”

• You can’t quickly route a student or B2B opportunity into an under‑filled class

Even when vendors tease APIs it still assumes:

• You’ll do the work to design the views

• Or pay a developer to build and maintain them

When I ask, “Can you see who’s teaching BLS this Friday in [metro]?” most owners say yes.

What they mean is:

“If you give me a minute to run a report and clean it up, I can probably figure it out.”

That’s not network view. That’s network guessing.

Where we’re going with Hovn:

• The system already understands course, city, date, location, and agency

• It can automatically generate the concatenated URLs and pages behind those combinations

• Network‑level visibility and promotion become things you get out of the box, not custom projects you have to manage

You shouldn’t need to be a software architect to use your own network.

Why this gets worse the more successful you are

At 500 students a year, the pain is annoying.

At 5,000+, it’s a cap.

Every new:

• Site

• Instructor

• Employer

• Guideline change

…doesn’t plug into a smarter system.

It just increases:

• The number of reports you run

• The spreadsheets you maintain

• The “give me a second” moments when someone asks a simple question

Growth should mean: more output for the same ops.

On a filing system, it means: more ops to support the same output.

The market is consolidating. (We wrote about that here.) If your software can’t produce clean student records, help you fill seats, or prove retention — you’re not just inefficient. You’re less valuable.

What an operating system lets you do instead (and where Hovn fits)

A real operating system for your training business:

• Treats students and employers as accounts, not just rows on rosters

• Treats classes as structured inventory: course, city, date, time, location, price, agency

• Branded portals instead of email‑only experiences

• SEO‑optimized class and location pages generated from the system of record

• Gives you a clean view of employer staff, status, and renewals

• Reduces the glue work around blended, rosters, and renewals

Same staff. Smarter ops. More growth.

One small next step

Yes, migration is real work.
That’s exactly why most centers stay where they are.

So don’t commit to “switching platforms.”

Just see your own numbers and design a low‑risk test.

If you read this and thought, “This is exactly how we’re operating,” take 30 seconds and click the button below:

In 20 minutes, we’ll:

• Map your current setup (tools, workflows, B2B)

• Put rough numbers on the Legacy Tax you’re paying in time and missed revenue

• If it makes sense, sketch a simple, one‑class pilot so you can see Hovn run a real class end‑to‑end alongside your current system

You’ll leave with a simple comparison:

Keep the filing system
vs
Run a pilot on an operating system

If the pilot and the math say “change,” great.

If they don’t, at least you’ll know you’re not crazy for feeling like your team has become middleware.

Jon

This is Part 1 in the software trap series: Card Mills are a Symptom, Not the Disease.

• Trap 2: The DIY Stack Trap — when you’re a DoorDash driver for hire.

• Trap 3: The Facade Trap — when you’re building better checkout pages on a rotten foundation.

Want a second set of eyes on your operation? 15 minutes. We review your setup. You walk away knowing what to fix first.

→ Book your free call

If you run a CPR or medical training business, you probably didn’t sign up to be the IT department.

Yet across hundreds of conversations with Training Centers, sites, and instructors, the pattern is weirdly consistent:

• Outside of actually teaching, almost all of the human time is trapped in ops, admin, and tech glue.

• Almost nobody has dedicated time for sales, marketing, or B2B.

That used to work when directories and “Find‑a‑Class” listings pumped demand to you.
As that faucet dries up, it’s deadly.

This is the 3rd post in a 12‑week “Behind The Scenes” series on how we think about modern infrastructure for CPR training at Hovn.

• In BTS #1, I shared Why We Built Hovn and what we kept seeing behind the scenes at Training Centers.

• In BTS #2, I laid out the 8 Pillars of a Modern CPR platform – what “great” would look like if you were designing software from scratch.

This post flips the lens:

If that’s what “great” looks like…
why are so many training businesses still buried in admin and IT, even when they “have software”?

It isn’t because people are lazy or “bad with tech.” It’s because of the mental models they use when they choose and use software.

Here are the 7 mistakes I see over and over.

• Treating software as an expense instead of a growth lever

• Stacking tools at problem points instead of designing a workflow

• Using email and text as your customer experience

• Letting agency portals become your operating system

• Treating B2B like “just a group purchase”

• Confusing “independence” with “no network standards”

• Trying to be the IT expert and patch a bad foundation

Use these as a “do not repeat” checklist.

1. Treating software as an expense instead of a growth lever

Most providers optimize for “How cheap can our tools be?” and feel proud that their stack is only $X/month.

What they don’t count is the unpriced cost:

• Hours spent moving data between tools

• Fixing errors, resending links, reconciling payments

• Manually tracking completions and renewals

Your real infrastructure cost is:

Tools + People + Missed Opportunities

If a system doesn’t buy back time and unlock new ways to grow, it’s not infrastructure. It’s just another bill and another thing to babysit.

2. Stacking tools at problem points instead of designing a workflow

Most CPR businesses were built like this:

• Need online booking → add Acuity / Calendly

• Need reminders → add Mailchimp / automations

• Need certification tracking → add spreadsheets

• Need roster submissions → add Enrollware

• Need B2B billing → add QuickBooks hacks

Every leak gets its own tool. Nobody ever sits down and designs:

• The student journey: discover → book → complete → renew

• The employer journey: send a few staff → “you manage our whole team”

Result: you become the glue. Every day is jumping between logins and patching gaps.

Workflow should come first. Tools are just how you implement it.

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3. Using email and text as your customer experience

“If they say they didn’t get it, we resend the email and tell them to check spam.”

When every instruction, link, roster, cert, and renewal lives in email or SMS, those channels quietly become your operating system.

Students and employers experience you as a pile of messages they have to self‑organize. Your “brand” is an inbox search.

Look at any modern experience – food delivery, banking, travel:

• There is one place you go to see everything that matters.

If your local taco truck can have an online portal to track delivery, you can too.

Email and text should be notifications that point back to a student portal and employer view, not where the relationship lives.

If you believe you’re building a brand, it has to exist as a destination, not just a thread.

4. Letting agency portals become your operating system

For the majority of providers the agency will be the core LMS to host content. That’s fine.

The problem is how most providers use those portals today.

Common patterns:

• Student registers on your site →
  Someone on your team logs into an agency portal later and manually triggers the blended invite

• Or worse: you send the student to the agency to buy their own course/materials and “figure it out”

• After class, you log into agency portals again to build rosters and submit students for cards

If you teach for multiple agencies, that means multiple logins, multiple workflows, multiple places where the student’s journey “actually” happens.

It’s especially painful for blended learning:

• Access codes and links go out late because they’re triggered manually after registration

• Everything relies on email deliverability and students staying organized

• There’s no single place where student, employer, or staff can see what’s happening

On the back end:

• You rebuild rosters in agency portals

• You upload paperwork by hand

• You treat those portals as the place where the “real” record lives

That’s like using the IRS website to run your bookkeeping.

A better split:

• Agencies own content & certification rules

• Your platform owns experience & workflow

A proper setup:

• Delivers digital access codes automatically at registration

• Surfaces them in a student portal (not just an email)

• Builds and tracks rosters in your system

• Submits to agencies via integration, not copy‑paste

Agency portals should be back‑end plumbing you integrate with, not the operating system your whole business runs on.

5. Treating B2B like “just a group purchase”

Most B2B flows look like this:

• Coupon codes

• Bulk registration forms

• Monthly spreadsheets

• Manual invoices with rosters attached

It “works,” but it’s a fire drill every time. So B2B – the best growth channel you have – quietly becomes something you tolerate, not something you design for.

Employers aren’t just buying “a lot of seats.” They’re trying to solve:

• “Keep my staff current without chaos.”

• “Have one place to see who’s compliant.”

If your software doesn’t treat employers as first‑class customers – with accounts, staff lists, clean billing, and renewals – you’re starving the business of a stable, high‑margin revenue stream.

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6. Confusing “independence” with “no network standards”

Many TCs tell me:

• “Our instructors and sites are independent businesses. We don’t force them into our brand.”

That’s perfectly fine. They can be independent brands.

But if:

• You’re liable for what they do, and

• You only make money when they produce,

…why would you have no standards?

Without shared structure for:

• How to track courses and sessions

• How locations and availability are represented

• How students, employers, and certs are tracked across the network

• How affiliates plan to find and handle business

…you can’t:

• See network‑wide availability

• Route students or employers intelligently

• Streamline your own workload as the TC

Every affiliate relationship becomes a one‑off puzzle you manage in your head and in spreadsheets.

Independence doesn’t have to mean chaos. Standards are what let you protect yourself legally, reduce your own admin load, and actually grow when your instructors and sites grow.

7. Trying to be the IT expert and patch a bad foundation

When the pain gets high, a lot of owners don’t change infrastructure.

They decide to become software architects:

• Bolting custom portals and class aggregators on top of a legacy platform

• Hiring devs to “modernize the front‑end” while the back‑end stays the same

• Building elaborate DIY stacks instead of asking, “Is this even the right foundation?”

Best case: you spend $100K (or the equivalent in your own time) rebuilding what a modern platform should already do.
Worst case: you’re still on a foundation that can’t support the 8 pillars, and you’ve delayed the real work: sales and marketing.

Custom work should be the 10–20% that makes your business special, not the 80–90% that props up old plumbing.

What’s next in this series

In the next Behind The Scenes post, I’m going to share how we actually build Hovn:

• How we use direct customer feedback and support conversations to decide what to ship next

• How we research student and employer and turn those patterns into baked‑in best practices

• Why we ship on a tight, continuous cadence instead of big, once‑a‑year “versions”

If you’re trying to build your own “Hovn” on the side – custom portals, class aggregators, stitched‑together stacks – this part matters:

While you’re spending hundreds of hours (or dollars) trying to catch up, your competitors can pay a subscription to stand on top of a platform that gets better every two weeks.

One group is trying to be a software company.
The other is using software as leverage.

If you want to see how we think about that, stick around for the next BTS.

Talk soon,
Jon and Shubs
Co‑founders, Hovn

Want a second set of eyes on your operation? 15 minutes. We review your setup. You walk away knowing what to fix first.

→ Book your free call

Two weeks ago, Jon and I attended the CASSummit in Phoenix.

The science was solid. The people were thoughtful.

But the most important insights didn’t come from the stage. They came from hallway conversations and side meetings with people who’ve been in this business for years.

Training center owners. Instructors. National operators. Vendors.

Different roles. Same message.

“The way we’ve always done it isn’t working like it used to.”

The big picture

Here’s what we’re hearing everywhere:

• Classes that had waitlists are now barely filling

• Rent, labor, card, and operating costs are up, while class prices are flat

• Providers are graduating instructors faster than new students are showing up

• Technology is changing how training gets delivered

Our assessment is simple:

The industry isn’t disappearing. But it is reorganizing.

And not everyone is will make it through the next phase the same way.\

Consolidation is already here

You’ve seen the announcements:

• Single Source merging into LifeWork Education

• CardioPartners acquiring One Beat Medical & Training

• Safe Life buying HeartCert ⠀

You’ve also seen the quieter signals.

• Facebook posts asking about selling a training business.

• Owners looking for an exits

• Side conversations that never make the news.

This isn’t something that’s about to happen. It’s already underway.

Over the past several years, larger companies steadily absorbed smaller training centers across the country. That’s happening for one simple reason: the math is getting harder.

Rent is higher. Labor is higher. Compliance takes more time.

When that happens, businesses usually face three options:

1. Shut down

2. Sell

3. Try to grow by buying others

That’s not unique to CPR training. That’s how markets work.

What’s changed is how unforgiving the process has become.

What Buyers Care About Now

The things buyers have always cared about — students, retention, revenue quality, compliance — are no longer flexible.

You can’t just dump a report of students and a set of financial statements and call it done.

Buyers now expect:

• Clean, usable student records — not duplicates, not PDFs, not guesses

• Proof that students will return, not just one-time volume

• Clear revenue sources — open enrollment vs. employers vs. contracts

• Compliance records that are complete and easy to produce

If you can’t answer those questions quickly and confidently, one of two things happens:

• The price drops fast

• Or the deal doesn’t happen at all

And while you’re trying to clean things up, larger players don’t wait. They keep operating, expanding, and cannibalizing your customers.

That’s what consolidation looks like in practice

Training Providers: The Job Has Changed

Walking the exhibition hall at CASS, I heard a vendor say, while pointing at a smart manikin…

“You don’t need instructors.”

That’s uncomfortable to hear. It’s also a reminder: anything that can be standardized will be.

The technology is getting better. Automated stations are improving. Skills checks are becoming more common.

This isn’t just an instructor problem. It’s not just a training center problem.

It’s a training provider problem — across training centers, training sites, and instructors.

What’s changing

Instructors, your role is shifting.

In many settings, you’re now doing skills checks instead of full classroom instruction. That’s not good or bad — it’s just reality.

The instructors who stand out will be the ones who go beyond “check-the-box” training and make learning relevant to real environments.

Generic instruction is being automated. Good instruction still matters.

Training centers and training sites feel this even more.

You can’t be passive anymore.

We’re not going to re-argue the “card mill” debate here. Jon already covered it well in Card Mills Aren’t the Problem. The short version is simple:

Your responsibility is to fill seats.

There are already plenty of instructors. There are already plenty of classrooms and stations.

Demand exists—but it’s fragmented, unorganized, and pushed onto instructors.

Too often, instructors are left to market themselves, fill their own classes, and shoulder the risk alone. That isn’t sustainable.

What Your Job Is Now

If you operate a training center or training site, your job is filling seats — by owning, organizing, and directing demand for your instructors and affiliated providers.

That starts with new business:

• Finding students

• Building relationships with employers

• Making it easy to book, attend, and come back

If instructors aren’t generating revenue for you, the answer isn’t more instructors or cheaper cards.

The answer is better-directed demand.

That means: Calling daycares. Talking to dental offices. Working with clinics and employers.

But demand doesn’t only come from new customers.

Looking at who already sends you students— nd asking how you can serve them better—is often the fastest path to growth.

Where Demand Comes Together

That’s where your course catalog matters.

Generic CPR classes aren’t enough anymore. Customers are asking for training that fits their environment.

This doesn’t mean buying videos and pressing play.

It means designing training around reality:

• Allied programs

• Workplace-specific scenarios

• Courses built around actual job risks.

A daycare doesn’t need the same training as a dental office. A factory floor doesn’t look like a clinic.

Training providers who meet customers where they are don’t just win new business. They consolidate demand, deepen existing relationships, keep seats filled, and give instructors more meaningful work.

That’s not being “salesy.” That’s running a sustainable training business.

The Hardest Problem—and Where We’re Focused

You might be thinking, I’ve heard this before.

I agree. None of this is revolutionary.

What’s different now is scale.

We’re a platform talking to hundreds of training providers and thousands of instructors.

We see the patterns in the data, and we hear them reinforced in conversation

Even with all the new technology, one problem hasn’t changed:

**How do you get people to actually show up?

Smart manikins don’t solve that. Consolidation alone doesn’t solve that.

What we keep seeing instead:

• Too many hoops just to sign up

• Confusing scheduling and availability

• Friction between online and in-person training

That’s where we’re spending our time.

What We’re Building For

At Hovn, our focus is on the parts of this business that actually move the needle:

Making it easier for students to discover and book training.

Turning every scheduled class into a bookable, local, Google-friendly page.

Supporting blended learning in a way that actually gets completed.

Automating link delivery, access, and reminders so students don’t get lost between “paid” and “ready for class.”

Giving training providers visibility into demand—not just certifications.

Showing you which students and employers are due and directing them to your next available class.

Helping instructors and centers coordinate availability without manual work.

Letting centers build around availability without group texts and spreadsheets.

The market is going to reorganize with or without you.

Our goal is to give the providers who want to lead that shift the infrastructure to do it—so they can own demand, fill seats, run tighter operations, and adapt to how this market is changing. ⠀

Because if training providers don’t grow — we don’t either.

This is what we’re building for — and who we’re building with.

—Shubs

Want a second set of eyes on your operation? 15 minutes. We review your setup. You walk away knowing what to fix first.

→ Book your free call

Note: I do not believe in cutting compliance corners. Full stop. But if we pretend they are the whole problem, we miss the deeper issue: the business model almost every Training Center is running underneath.

If your Training Center’s pitch is “fair card prices” and “we’re hands-off—you run your own business,” you’re running a pull network, whether you mean to or not.

A pull network assumes demand gets created at the edges. Instructors and sites find their own students. The center’s job is to process whatever shows up: buy cards in bulk, transfer cards, collect rosters, submit to AHA.

In this model: instructors grow the center; not the other way around.

Your network’s value is purchasing power: more instructors → more volume → better pricing → more instructors.

That model works. As long as demand keeps growing.

If you’ve run your TC like this for years, you weren’t wrong. The market shifted. Now it’s time to adapt.

The death loop

Walk your current reality forward.

Your affiliates’ main lead source—Find-a-Class—is getting flooded by RQI/VAM and big players. Their classes thin out. Your card volume drops.

You have two moves.

1. Raise card prices to protect margin. This will squeeze instructors and they’ll start shopping for a cheaper TC.

2. Add more instructors to hold volume on paper. This will spread a shrinking pie thinner and strain your operations to keep up.

Your support gets overwhelmed. Response times slow. The instructors who were loyal start noticing.

Meanwhile, your affiliates make moves too.

1. They cut prices to maintain volume. Paired with your price raise it’s a double hit.

2. They pivot to instructor courses. Higher ticket price. Every graduate becomes a card-buying customer. Sounds smart… until you realize you’re flooding the market with more instructors who also don’t know how to drive demand.

You’re not solving the problem. You’re multiplying it.

And here’s the part nobody wants to say out loud: card mills aren’t a corruption of the pull network. They’re the destination.

Compete on price. Add instructors to grow volume. Strain operations. Watch compliance slip.

The TC you call a card mill isn’t running a different model—they just followed yours further than you have.

Nobody is structurally responsible for creating demand.

That’s not a rough patch. That’s a death loop baked into the model.

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What comes after

One TC told me last week that she’s making a move:

“If you get on the wrong train, get off at the next station. The longer you stay, the more expensive the return trip.”

You’ve hit the ceiling of the purchasing-power game. The next advantage won’t come from cheaper cards.

It’ll come from push networks: infrastructure that treats instructors and sites as logistics nodes, not just reporting nodes. Systems where the center can push demand down into the network—promote classes across locations, convert students into group contracts, coordinate multi-site relationships with one backbone.

That’s the shift the industry hasn’t made yet. From “we help you buy cheap cards and file rosters” to “we help you get, keep, and grow business.”

Where to start

The 2025 guidelines transition is going to force you to touch your systems anyway. Classes, materials, card processes—everything’s getting rebuilt in the next two months whether you want it to or not.

That’s either a tax or an opportunity.

If you rebuild the same pull network with updated course names, you’ll be back in the same loop by 2026. If you rebuild toward push—toward infrastructure that can actually create and route demand—you come out of the transition ahead.

Over the next few SitReps, I’ll break down how existing software traps you in pull-network land:

• Trap 1: Legacy platforms (built for filing, not growth)

• Trap 2: DIY stacks (you become the glue)

• Trap 3: The Facade (you become a software company)

Before you lock in your 2025 setup, ask yourself one question:

Am I rebuilding toward pull, or toward push?

Because in a pull network, when the easy demand dries up, purchasing power doesn’t save you.

It just takes you to the bottom faster.

If you want to see what push infrastructure looks like before you lock in your 2025 setup: Book a Demo — we’ll walk through how it works.

—Jon

Want a second set of eyes on your operation? 15 minutes. We review your setup. You walk away knowing what to fix first.

→ Book your free call

This week I want to answer a different question:

If you were designing a CPR training platform from scratch, what would “great” actually look like?

Until you define that, it’s hard to judge any tool – Hovn included.

Start With the Outcome, Not the Features

To us, a modern CPR training platform is infrastructure.

It’s the central system that owns the relationship between a student, their certifications, and the provider who trains them.

And it should do one thing extremely well:

Make it easy for people to take a class with you, have a great experience, and come back when they need it again.

For students, that means:

• They know where to go and what to do

• They get clear instructions and reminders

• Their certifications live in one place they can actually find

For providers, that means:

• You look professional to students and employers

• You’re not rebuilding the process from scratch for every class

Our constraint for Hovn is simple:

• If a feature doesn’t make the experience better for students and employers, or

• Reduce the manual work you do to deliver that experience,

…it doesn’t belong in the product.

You also shouldn’t have to be a UX designer, an e‑commerce expert, and a platform architect to run a training business.

Our job as the platform is to study what works across a high volume of transactions, learn from it, and then bake those best practices into the product – registration flows, reminders, employer workflows, catalogs – so you don’t have to make every mistake and optimization yourself.

We’re not designing for a single training center; we’re the infrastructure underneath. When we find a better way to deliver a student or employer experience, we implement it once and it improves for you automatically.

In practice, that means putting standards and structure under everything – students, courses, locations, instructors, employers – so Hovn behaves like a platform instead of a pile of disconnected tools you have to orchestrate by hand.

With that in mind, here’s the checklist we use to define “modern.”

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The 8 Pillars of a Modern CPR Platform

You can use this to review whatever you’re on today.

1. Student system of record

There is one student profile across your whole operation (and ideally across a network):

• You can answer “Who is this student?”, “What have we done for them?”, and “What expires next?” in one place.

• Their classes, certs, locations, instructors, and materials are connected like a travel itinerary, not scattered across five systems.

2. Standardized catalog and locations

Courses and locations aren’t free‑text guesswork:

• Courses use agency identifiers and standard names, even if you present friendlier labels to students.

• Locations are real addresses (e.g. Google Maps data) with sensible roll‑ups (city/region), so “everyone teaching BLS Friday in Phoenix” is a query, not a research project.

3. Instructor & site profiles

Instructors and sites have real accounts, not just rows in a sheet:

• Eligibility (“what are they certified to teach, where are they located, and what are they scheduled for?”) is stored once and reused.

• Updates happen in one place and propagate to everyone who should see them.

• A center can actually see its network of sites/instructors, not just names in a roster.

4. Online registration & payment flow

Registration that meets today's design standard:

• A clear “highway path”: pick your certification & modality → pick time & place → pay. Extra education and edge‑case info are on‑ramps.

• Information is revealed and requested as it is necessary, not as a giant wall of text & forms.

• Pages are mobile-optimized with machine-readable local SEO

5. Student portal & renewals engine

Students don’t live out of an inbox:

• One place where they see what they registered for, what’s next, and what’s expiring.

• Materials, instructions, and reminders all accessible from that system.

• Renewals are driven by the platform to the correct class, not a hope and a Mailchimp list.

6. Certification & compliance as one pipeline

Certifications aren’t a separate universe. The platform connects your rosters directly to agency systems so certifications are mapped to agency standards without extra steps.

• Registration → roster → agency → certification → student profile is a single pipeline.

• You’re not exporting spreadsheets just to upload them somewhere else.

• If a student has multiple certs across agencies, you can still see one picture.

7. B2B / employer accounts

Employers are first‑class citizens:

• Clients have profiles with their staff, cert status, and sessions.

• Open‑enrollment and group classes can both be tied back to an employer.

• Invoices are generated from orders in the system, not from someone reconciling coupons once a month.

8. Reporting and network visibility

You can actually see what’s going on:

• By student: history, expirations, classes, orders.

• By client: staff certification status, classes delivered, revenue.

• By network: “show me who is teaching BLS in New York City on Friday,” “show me all locations that work with Acme Dental”

If you don’t have separate concepts for students, orders, classes, instructors, clients, courses, and locations, you can’t really do this. You just have a registration log.

Why This Matters Beyond Convenience

This isn’t just about nicer software or cleaner reports.

When you put real infrastructure under CPR training – these eight pillars – something bigger happens:

• Training Centers and Sites can function like real networks or mini‑brands, not just wholesalers selling cards.

• Students can actually find the right classes and have a clean, professional experience end‑to‑end.

• Instructors have a real shot at building a viable business, because they’re not gluing together websites, spreadsheets, and agency portals on their own.

• Employers get a clear view of their staff and an easier way to work with providers long term.

That’s how the industry grows again: more people take classes, the topics get more specific to what students and employers actually need, and everyone stops fighting over the same saturated “required for work” renewals.

Today’s Action Step: Score Yourself

Take 5–10 minutes and run a quick self‑audit.

For each of the 8 pillars, give your current setup a score:

• 0 = Not really (we don’t have this at all)

• 1 = Sort of (we patch this together with spreadsheets / manual work)

• 2 = Yes (this is handled cleanly in a system)

Add up your score (max 16):

• 0–6: Duct tape – one human away from chaos

• 7–12: Limited and fragile – you’re making it work with a lot of effort

• 13–16: Modern – you’ve got real infrastructure under you

If you’d like us to review your score and show you what your setup would look like in Hovn:

Next, we’ll dig into the 7 mistakes CPR businesses make with software.

Want a second set of eyes on your operation? 15 minutes. We review your setup. You walk away knowing what to fix first.

→ Book your free call

In this SitRep Live, I talk with Darla Miller, the Founder and Training Center Coordinator at PumpLife CPR, an American Heart Association Training Center in Las Vegas. PumpLife is transitioning to Hovn, but this isn’t a product demo. It’s a look at how Darla actually builds a serious CPR business: pricing, corporate contracts, instructor quality, and time management.

Here are the main topics we cover and where to find them in the replay.

Follow Pumplife CPR: Website | Instagram | Facebook

1. Card hustle vs. real CPR business

13:39 – 21:37, 43:51 – 49:43

Darla is very clear about the difference between “selling cards” and building a real company:

• Why she hates the phrase “side hustle” when it’s attached to CPR.

• How she thinks about growing beyond public classes and one‑off cards.

• Moving into corporate accounts, AED programs, LMS courses, and new offerings like wheelchair securement.

• Why she wants instructors who are building businesses, not just picking up casual income.

If you feel stuck in the cheap‑class race, these sections are worth a listen.

2. Why her instructor course is $1,900

21:38 – 28:38

Most people in this space underprice the one thing that’s supposed to launch someone’s business.

Darla walks through exactly what’s inside her $1,900 instructor package:

• Full Prestan kit: 2 adult manikins, 2 infant manikins, AED trainer, barriers, bag‑masks, knee pads.

• Hard‑copy instructor manuals and videos (no one shows up to day one with only an ebook).

• One full day in‑person + teach‑back and follow‑up online session.

• Hands‑on help navigating the AHA instructor site so they’re not calling her for every small question.

• Ongoing Zoom sessions focused on growing a CPR business (corporate contracts, AEDs, LMS, etc.), not just issuing cards.

She prices it for entrepreneurial instructors who want a serious business, not a low‑stakes side project.

3. Corporate training and internal instructors

31:23 – 35:55

Here’s where she explains how corporate work became her retention engine:

• The story of a security company that was splitting staff between “fast cheap” classes and her longer ones.

• How that turned into:

  • All staff training through Pump Life, plus

  • Training one of their employees as an internal instructor.

• Why she’s happy to help corporate clients train in‑house instructors as long as she controls the standard and supports them.

If you want more stable, repeat B2B revenue instead of living off open‑enrollment traffic, this is the model.

4. Ensuring consistent quality across instructors & sites

35:56 – 43:50, 28:39 – 31:22

Darla spends a lot of time on network value and quality control:

• How she monitors internal instructors and corrects drift (like misunderstandings around “hands‑only” vs full CPR).

• Quarterly Zooms, newsletters, and her PumpLife Connect portal for keeping everyone aligned.

• The structure of her team: medical director, nurses, faculty, and administrator, so instructors aren’t “joining a one‑woman show.”

This is where you see the difference between “I sell you cards” and “I run a network you actually want to stay part of.”

5. She piloted Hovn, left to DIY… and saw the time gap.

43:51 – 49:43

Toward the end we talk about tech and time.

Darla:

• Piloted Hovn.

• Left to build her own stack on her website.

• Came back later because of time management and material delivery.

Her DIY setup:

• Created more questions for students, which meant more texts and calls.

• Still left people showing up to class without books, no matter how she wrote the instructions.

If you run a CPR training center or TC and you’re trying to move away from the “cheap card” race to the bottom, this conversation is worth a listen.

When you’re done, hit reply and tell me which part landed hardest for you.

Jon

Want a second set of eyes on your operation? 15 minutes. We review your setup. You walk away knowing what to fix first.

→ Book your free call