Someone Needs to Build the Airport
A year of SitRep. What owning your demand actually looks like. Looking forward to year two.
I wrote the first SitRep post on a weekend in May 2025.
I’d been on the phones all week speaking to training center owners, instructors, and providers. People who’d been in the industry twenty years and people who started last year. Shubs was working on a rollout to scale the number of providers on the platform, and where we thought the industry was going was breaking the horizon faster than most operators were prepared for.
Through all of those conversations, and months showing up in the Facebook groups, it was clear. The industry wasn’t full of operators trading notes about how to grow. It was full of operators trying not to lose ground to their competition.
The forums were active but the pattern was tough love. Anyone who asked a real question got told to “read the PAM” or figure it out. Everyone was sitting on their own pile of hustle, grind, spit, and glue. They’d learned it the hard way, and the belief was the next person needed to learn it the hard way too. The PAM is a compliance document and it was getting treated like a business manual.
We were personally posting in those forums for months trying to start real conversations, and we were getting told we were promotional. Separate pattern from the operator-on-operator one, same downstream effect: working on the industry did not happen in public.
That weekend I sat down and started typing.
The thing I wanted to say was this: nobody built the airport. Everyone is fighting over gates at terminals owned by somebody else. The CPR industry never built the shared independent infrastructure that would let operators run modern businesses and support agency channels, so every provider is stitching together their own stack from scratch. When the channels shift, the providers shift with them, and they call it a market problem. It isn’t. It’s an infrastructure problem.
That’s the conversation we wanted to start. SitRep was the place to have it.
How the void started
For years, the industry had an independent technology layer that worked closely with the people running classes.
Then, from 2020 to 2023, the industry went through everything. COVID. Blended learning growth. Remote monitoring. More training centers started growing into national footprints. The American Red Cross made serious investments in their discovery experience. The AHA brought Atlas to the US market. Everything was changing right when an independent technology layer needed to be most engaged in the conversation. The void was the independent technology layer.
An agency was never supposed to be the operator’s technology partner, and it shouldn’t be. The tech partner role belongs to the independent layer. In a sea of airlines, passengers, destinations… it’s the airport.
So providers built their own stacks. Piecemeal. A booking tool here, a website there, a custom spreadsheet for reporting. And a lot of what filled the void wasn’t helpful.
Today, I talk to providers every week who paid several thousand dollars for a website they were told was SEO-optimized, and a basic check shows no H1 in place. Providers charged hundreds of dollars to change a line of copy on a page they already paid for. Custom-built WordPress plug-ins to manage rosters. Thousands of dollars for Paid Ads to generate website impressions. These aren’t edge cases. This is the standard experience.
Because of that infrastructure gap providers are heavily dependent on specific channels. ARC is one of the strongest discovery channels in the industry. If ARC is one of your channels, the channel works well. If paid posting to ARC is your only channel, you’re running a channel-specific fulfillment business.
AHA’s CPRFinder is the same shape. It’s a channel that drives demand to providers. The channel has its mechanics. It requires that you have a specific modality: self-guided learning. Margin sits after equipment and distribution costs, and the student relationship lives with the platform. Used as a channel, it’s a real one. Used as the whole business… you’re in the delivery function.
Once you see that, the “saturation” framing falls apart. The industry isn’t saturated. It’s structurally arranged so the educator is a facilitator. They are dependent on channels they don’t own. So they compete on price, time, and location. To build a healthy relationship, the agency directory needs to be one channel in your business.
This is also where I want to be clear about how we think about the agencies at Hovn. We work with the agencies to make their channels convert better for students. Better-converting agency channels means more certifications and healthier training centers. Healthier training centers can invest in the student experience. A great student experience attracts more students to the market. That’s what we want. The agencies are partners in the outcome.
The drop, and where students are now
This dependency has reared its head in the AHA market. Providers who are instructor-led and dependent on AHA’s Find-a-Class for student volume are feeling the AHA’s shift to self-guided learning.
I’m hearing from providers down 30 to 40 percent on volume. I haven’t once, in the last several months of calls, heard from a provider who’s still getting meaningful traffic from the AHA website.
AHA’s growth energy right now is going into the new platform experience built around HeartCode Complete. If you’re running an instructor-led, classroom-first business, that means the AHA website isn’t going to drive your students for you. You have to build the demand yourself.
Where are the students? Google. They’re searching for a class near them, and the providers whose classes are still filling are the ones who perform in organic search. The directory play went quiet, and the operators who had been building for organic search are absorbing the demand.
Most providers haven’t internalized this yet. They’re stuck bidding on the same generic “near me” keywords as everyone else, fighting on the same pay-to-play ground, watching costs creep up while volume drops. The students showing up are looking for something specific. The providers winning are the ones building for specific. Class-first pages, not homepage-first sites. Real course pages with real schedules, indexed and optimized, so when a student searches “BLS class Saturday morning” Google has something to actually show them.
What survival looks like
We’ve spent a lot of the last year talking to providers building through this transition instead of getting flattened by it. Three of them illustrate the shapes owned demand actually takes.
Logan Smith at Heartbeat Heroes decided early that this was a business, not a side hustle, and built the brand and infrastructure to match before he had the volume to justify it. He went from twenty cards a month to a 2,500-card pace, and the breakpoint was infrastructure, not effort.
“I went from last call to one of the first people they’re paying attention to.”
The professional presence preceded the growth. He built demand on top of a brand.
Evan at OhioCPRCerts doubled his enrollment in 30 days without touching price or ad spend.
“I changed nothing, to be quite honest. The only thing we’ve changed is we switched the booking platform.”
His classes became visible to Google for the first time. The demand was already there in his market, looking for him. The old infrastructure was hiding him from it. He layered owned demand on top of the American Red Cross channel.
Ryan Johnson at Respond365 has been running a B2B-first operation for almost thirty years. Open enrollment is a channel for him, not the channel.
“I care more about my instructors than I do my business.”
His students turn into employer relationships and his employers turn into multi-year contracts. He isn’t panicked about Find-a-Class because his business never depended on it. That’s owned demand built through direct relationships with employers.
Three different shapes. All three operators stopped building purely as fulfillment endpoints for somebody else’s demand and started acting like businesses that have to create and own their own. They are intentional about building relationships with the customer. That is a win for the student, the operator, and the agency.
What I’d do this week if I were you
If you read this far, here’s what I’d suggest. It costs nothing. About thirty minutes of attention spread across your next two or three classes.
Talk to your students. Ask them why they chose you. Not “How did you hear about us?” Ask, “Why did you choose us?” Not via a form, chat, or email. Face-to-face. Ask the ones who walked in the door this week. Ask them before class, when they show up. Then, make a note to check in with them in a week after class. Did they get the value they thought they were buying? Ask the ones who return. Why?
You’ll get answers that don’t sound like the assumptions you’ve been operating on. Some chose you because they searched something specific and you came up. Some because their employer told them to. Some because of price. Some because someone at their gym mentioned your name. Some because they thought you were the closest, and they were wrong but they showed up anyway.
Then do one more thing. Take the most valuable reason and put it into a headline. On your homepage or on the class page they actually landed on. Match the copy to the reason people are choosing you, in their language.
Be intentional about the customer you want more of.
Speak to them. Help them find you. Tell your team. Make sure they get the value they thought they were getting.
That’s the first brick in owning demand instead of renting it. It’s free, and it’ll tell you something about your business you didn’t know yesterday.
The Next Year of SitRep
We started Hovn because we wanted to be the technology people who focus on how we help this industry get better. That means we work with multiple providers, we learn what’s actually working across them, we feed it back. It means working with the agencies on what would make their student experience better. It means building shared infrastructure so operators can own their own relationships and treat ARC and AHA as channels that work alongside the channels they build themselves.
That’s the role we want Hovn to play. Shared infrastructure that lets operators build the airport together, instead of every provider trying to build a private one out of duct tape.
This next year of SitRep is for keeping the conversation honest about that.
Three jobs:
Document operators building through the transition. Real numbers, real moves, real mistakes.
Surface what actually works. Across providers, across markets, across models. If a play works in three places, it’s a pattern worth repeating.
Keep the industry honest about the economics of rented versus owned demand. Where the margins really sit. What the channels are good for. What the benefits are for everyone, including the agencies, when we build the infrastructure that moves the industry forward.
The recurring mechanism for the next year of SitRep is a new series we’re calling Green Hat Series. We’ll feature providers who’ve crossed a growth milestone on Hovn. We want to help you learn from others instead of guessing at it.
The ask
We can grow this industry if we stop acting like fulfillment stations and start owning the student experience across the industry. If you’re bought in, send us a reply. We read every email.
If you’re new here and you want the one piece to start with, read Airlines, Airports, and Why CPR Keeps Hitting a Ceiling.
Jon