He Changed One Thing. His Classes Doubled.
Evan runs OhioCPRCerts.com out of Columbus. Training center, four locations, six instructors, seventy-five affiliated instructors.
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.
OhioCPRCerts, Columbus OH
Before Hovn: 80–100 students/month, 4 locations, 6 instructors, 75 affiliates
Stack: Squarespace + spreadsheets + manual emails + CSV uploads
After Hovn:
Jan: +113% students YoY
Feb: +108%
Mar: +80%
April (mid‑month): +17% and climbing
Same schedule, same CPS, same ~$300/mo ads
Admin: 1–2 hrs/night → 5–10 mins/day
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.”
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.
“I changed nothing, to be quite honest. The only thing we’ve changed is we switched the booking platform to Hovn”
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:
“There are times I forget that one of my instructors is teaching a class tonight, and they’ll text me at nine o’clock. They’re like, ‘Oh, yep, everything’s in, roster’s in.’ And I’m like, ‘Oh yeah, I forgot you had a class tonight.’”
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.
Want to see a video of what Google actually reads on your class pages? » Here’s a 3-minute walkthrough.