Logan didn’t set out to build a CPR training business. He was an advanced EMT out of dual-enrollment high school, picked up summer skills-instructor gigs through college, and in 2021, a few months into his first year of med school, got headhunted by a local for-profit training center because he was the only one reliable enough to keep showing up. He got his AHA credentials, became the training site administrator almost by default, and in 2023 filed articles of incorporation for something of his own. For roughly two years after that, the business just sat there, a passive, side-hustle, one-or-two-on-a-weekend, colleagues getting together for ACLS instead of fighting their hospital’s ed department.
Then last July his training center mandated software. Free version was included. Premium came with a discount. Logan had to make a call: keep coasting, or actually treat this thing like a business.
He paid. And then he kept paying: for office space across the street from the Superdome, for a logo and a stamp and pins and a website refresh, for daily posts on platforms he’d barely opened. About ten months later, Heartbeat Heroes is running 30–40 instructors, has reputable EMS agencies, hospitals, government agencies, and school systems on the client list, signed a new 2,000-square-foot suite the night before we recorded, and is fielding a phone call from his AHA account manager asking if he’s thought about becoming a training center.
This conversation is about that decision to lean in. About what flips when you stop running it like a side hustle. And about why intentionality, not volume, is what most operators are actually missing.
1. The forcing moment. 7:00 – 14:00
For two-plus years Logan’s business was, in his words, “definitely just kind of in the back of my mind.” A handful of regulars liked taking ACLS or PALS through him because their employer’s ed department couldn’t schedule them or only offered Red Cross. He looked at a couple of software competitors. Bounced. The tools “were clunky. They were used for bigger organizations.” No urgency, no commitment.
He was sub-30 students a month. The math didn’t obviously work yet.
The total spend stacked up to roughly a two-thousand bucks once you counted all the pieces. Hefty for where the business was.
He bought it anyway — on the assumption that committing would force the volume to follow.
“As soon as I bought the premium version and I had a real infrastructure, I was like, okay — I expected that this is going to work for me, and now it’s going to work for me. I’m going to put it to use.”
The license wasn’t the decision. The license was the artifact of a different decision: that this was going to be a real business, and he was going to backfill everything required for it to look like one.
2. Decide the outcome, then backfill. 14:00 – 21:00
Once Logan committed, he didn’t ease in. He signed an office lease nine floors up in a downtown tower. He picked company colors. He ordered an official stamp off Etsy for twenty bucks. He had pins made for two hundred. Stress balls. Branded swag. A website refresh. And he started posting daily across every channel he had.
The trigger wasn’t “I have the volume to justify this.” The trigger was “I’ve decided what the business should look like, and I’m building toward that.”
Office across the street from the Superdome — partly because it’s where he wanted clients to walk in, partly because once you’re paying rent, every Saturday becomes a teaching Saturday.
Branded everything. Logo, pins, swag, stamp. “Practically going to get a branded toilet in my new suite.”
Daily activity on Google Business, Facebook, Instagram. Some of it was AI-generated holiday art. Some of it was Happy Mother’s Day. Most of it had nothing directly to do with CPR.
“Buy a brand. Buy an image. Make a name for yourself. That has really paid off and made a huge difference.”
“I took my inspiration from these Fortune 500 companies. Who do you think of when you see Amazon? You see the symbol. You see the worker in the blue shirt. It’s the brand. When I want you to think of Logan and Heartbeat Heroes, I want you to think of us as a company.”
This is backward from how most operators do it. The default move is to mimic a local competitor and hope the right customers find you. Logan picked the outcome first — the brand, the experience, the type of customer — and then built the infrastructure that outcome requires. You can see the difference walking in the door.
3. Activity is activity. 21:00 – 26:00
The Mother’s Day post sounds like a throwaway. It wasn’t. Google’s algorithms look at whether you’re updating your business. So do customers — most of the local competition has stale websites and some are still carrying COVID-era notices.
The 90-day adage held. Logan committed in July. October is when things started compounding. January was renewals plus a wave of new-legislation calls. February is when he “fell over the cliff” of “okay, I’m doing great now.”
SEO landed too. New B2B clients told him “we Googled — you were one of the first two or three that popped up.” That’s not luck. That’s three months of posts the algorithm got to read.
The point isn’t that every post moves the needle. It’s that consistency tells both the algorithm and the prospect that there’s a real business behind the logo.
“We went hard and heavy. I was posting every day to Google business profile, Facebook, Instagram, whatever.”
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4. From last call to first call. 26:00 – 33:00
The most interesting shift wasn’t volume. It was who started calling, and how they treated him when they did.
Pre-July: he was effectively invisible to the businesses in the area. They didn’t reach out.
January–February: reputable EMS agencies, hospitals, government agencies, school systems were initiating contact.
One walk-in HeartSaver student — a busy professional whose wife called mid-class asking where he was — stuck around for the whole thing because Logan didn’t fold to the “just give me the card” pressure. That customer turned into a B2B account worth roughly 300 students every two years.
“I went from last call to one of the first people they’re paying attention to.”
The reframe Jon kept coming back to: almost all of Logan’s local competition is running CPR as a side hustle, and most of them don’t realize it shows. The business doesn’t have to be big for B2B buyers to take it seriously. It has to look like a business they don’t have to babysit. That’s the standard. If that’s not what you’re sending out into the market, you’re invisible to the accounts you actually want.
5. Price is a lever. It is not the lever. 33:00 – 50:00
Logan actually lowered some prices over the last year. He’ll tell you why, and it’s not what you’d expect.
B2B contracts: he treats them like best friends. “I probably do more service industry than a bartender does.” If a small price move helps a recurring client stay, he’ll do it.
New segments: if he’s offering a comparable product on paper and the alternative is somebody’s garage, a competitive price pulls the right side of the market toward him.
But he won’t engage a price war. The customer who’s only optimizing on price has nothing keeping them in your business.
And not so low it cheapens the certification. If an instructor candidate can’t afford the course, they can’t afford the mannequins, and the brand starts to drift.
“If we got into a price war right now, and our customer is only concerned about the lowest possible price, there is nothing to keep them in my company. They’ll just go to the next one that’s cheaper. And then the next one. And then it’s, okay — how do you set yourself apart?”
The other half of this is segmentation. Hard-code customers and instructor-led customers are not interchangeable. Logan stopped trying to convert one into the other.
“We give you a five-star service. If you want to go somewhere else and be sketched out by taking this certification in somebody’s garage, be my guest. But we can offer you a premium experience.”
The trap isn’t charging more. The trap is pricing yourself against your worst-positioned competitor, and chasing customers who were never going to buy what you actually sell. Go find the customer who wants the product you offer. There are always more of them than you think.
6. Build the hub, not the class. 50:00 – 57:00
What Logan is building toward looks less like a CPR shop and more like a regional training hub for medical professionals.
Resuscitation as the anchor — BLS, ACLS, PALS, instructor courses.
NAEMT added: PHTLS, AMLS, EPC coming.
ATLS through a friend who’s an ER resident.
A possible phlebotomy program — quick certification, plays nicely with a hub for EMTs, paramedics, and med students.
2,000 square feet upstairs, lease signed the night before recording.
And the AHA account manager who already floated the question: “Have you ever thought about being a training center?”
“My goal was to be a one-stop shop for all my EMT paramedics and even doctors.”
The pattern emerging across this series — Mike, Darla, Ryan, Anthony, and now Logan — is that the operators who scale refuse to be just-a-card-shop. They pick a segment, anchor on a high-trust offering, and build outward. Logan’s anchor is medical professionals. Everybody else is welcome, but they’re not the segment driving the business.
Logan’s close
“I cannot for the life of me half-ass anything. I really did lean into it. This is gonna be me, this is my brand, this is who I am. I eat, breathe, and sleep this — and for good reason. It’s more than just I’m making money. There’s an actual purpose here.”
If Heartbeat Heroes shuts off tomorrow, hospital techs don’t get their renewals, EMS folks miss shifts, school staff lose compliance. That’s what flipped for Logan once he stopped running it like a side hustle: it stopped being about him, and started being about whether the network around him stays operational.
Logan Smith / Heartbeat Heroes on Instagram: @nolaheartbeat
Past SitRep episodes worth your time:
Live | The Instructor Is the Product with Anthony Corwin
Live | You Don’t Have to Be the Biggest with Ryan Johnson
Live | Build It Worth Buying with Mike Andolina
When you’re done, hit reply and tell us which part landed hardest for you. If you’ve been running yours like a side hustle and you’re thinking about leaning in — or you already made that call — we especially want to hear that.
Jon & Shubs
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