He Was Teaching CPR Between Med School Rotations. He’ll Do 2,500 Cards This Year.
Logan Smith runs Heartbeat Heroes out of New Orleans. Nine months ago, he was doing twenty cards a month on the side. Today it’s a real business.
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.
Heartbeat Heroes, New Orleans LA
Before Hovn: 5–10 students/mo, 0–1 B2B accounts, AHA Find-a-Class as the front door, Square invoices sent by hand, every signup answered from his phone
Stack: AHA Find-a-Class + Square + email
After Hovn (monthly bookings):
September: 17
December: 37
January: 120
March: 158
Now: 60–70 direct students/mo, ~10 B2B accounts, projecting 2,000–2,500 cards for the year
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.”
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.
“If I didn’t have Hovn, I would not be able to teach all these classes. The processes would bury me. I’d work probably a hundred hours a week, eighty hours a week, more.”
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.
Want to see a video of what Google actually reads on your class pages? » Here’s a 3-minute walkthrough.