7 Ways Your CPR Software Stack Keeps You Stuck in Operations
How well‑intentioned software choices quietly trap CPR businesses in operations instead of growth.
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.
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.
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 inviteOr 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.
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
Ready to upgrade to a platform purpose-built for medical training?