CourseCreek:

speaker-0 (00:00)

I’m Jeff Walter and welcome back to the Training Impact Podcast where we explore how training infrastructure can scale channel performance. I recently had the great pleasure of being invited to speak with Robert Lunt of Course Greek on his YouTube channel during live stream. It was a lot of fun, had a great time and I thought you guys might enjoy it. So without any further ado, here’s our episode.

 

And I’m looking at us with like a little bit of a time delay. We’re actually live right now. Hey folks, a little bit of time delay and it just looks really great. It’s fantastic. Technology is fantastic. Speaking of technology, we’re going to talk about technology today. Let’s do it. Let’s do it. Let’s get started. We are. Well, you and I tend to have some really good conversations that I learn a lot from. So I appreciate that.

 

That was fun. That was fun. And I brought back some of those fun questions that you and I shared when you were interviewing me, at least one or two of them. And hopefully we can get into the esoteric stuff again, once we get past all the business stuff. Those of you that are catching this, my name is Robert Lunti. I’m the CEO for a company called CourseCreek. We’re a boutique e-learning company that helps really anybody with a great idea, but typically enterprise and coaches and L &D departments build and implement.

 

online courses, learning programs. And that’s why we partner with EdTech companies. And today I have with us, Jeff Walter, CEO and I believe co-founder or founder of Latitude Learning, one of our partners. This is one of these learning management system platforms that we work with that has its own sort of special sauce and does its unique things. And we’re to ask Jeff Dakota sort of describe all that with us and.

 

He is a really fun partner. I’ll just say, Jeff, thank you for just when we’ve, when I first called Jeff, I hadn’t even finished my pitch and it’s like, yeah, let’s do it. Let’s do it. Let’s do stuff. Let’s get things done. And that was just great. He has, we have a really good chemistry. Jeff also interviewed me a couple of weeks ago. So I think you can catch that out of his website. He’s got a beautiful curated set of podcasts where he does a lot of this kind of work. But today is his special day.

 

Do you feel special, Hi, I always feel special, especially when I’m chatting with you, you’re a great host and a wonderful human being. Careful what you say, I’ve got some tricky questions in here. Not really. Hey, as long as it’s in the service of honest dialogue. Okay, so tell us about Latitude Learning. Who’s Latitude Learning? Your platform?

 

CourseCreek – And what makes you stand out from the other learning management systems? What’s your jam? Well, so we founded Latitude Learning over 20 years ago and we’re a training platform and LMS, a training platform. And what we do for a living is we basically sell training infrastructure software so folks can scale their channels and scale channel performance. And what makes us different

 

 You know, you say LMS or you say training platform, people think of the LMS, especially when they use it work. And what makes us different is we were born and started creating a platform so that you can train people that don’t work for you. Like do external learning, channel partner learning, train your dealers, your franchisees, your resellers. And, you know, in one regards, you know, delivering a course is delivering a course and it’s the same in both.

 

But the way in which you manage a training program for your employees versus your partners is very different. that’s where we started. We started way back in the day. We’re up here in Michigan. We started with General Motors and Chrysler and their dealer training. And it’s been a fun ride for the last couple of decades. But that’s how we’re different in a nutshell. OK, when I first started this business, I had a lot to learn. And one of the things that I learned not so long ago is that there are

 

that are designed to not go to the end user, not go to the staff, not go to the employee, but really to support the channel. As you say, the auto dealership franchise and the affiliates and things of that nature, right? Correct. it’s a different, what you don’t realize with employee training is that you can rely on the manager.

 

Right? You know, so you got an employee and you’re hiring them in and you need to onboard them. But the manager of that employee works for you. So you can rely on them to make sure the training gets done, to make sure the onboarding happens, to curate the right type of content or right type of courses that they might need. And when you’re dealing with your partners, you don’t have, and also at the end of the day with that employee, you can say, look, ⁓

 

You just need to take this training or else I’m not going to do a paycheck. Right? Like, you can’t do that with your partners and their staff, right? you have a different type of business relationship. You can’t rely on their managers to do things. Their managers are not part of your organization. You don’t, you know, nine times out of 10, you don’t even know the employees there. You’re relying on the partner to tell you Mary needs to be trained. Bill needs to be trained. This is the person that does this for me. This is the person that does that for me. Yeah.

 

So, so it’s a very different type of approach. can’t, you know, usually in, in employee training person, you hire a person, you say, got to take this training after that. They get reviewed by a manager and say, Hey, you know, Robert, you’re really good at A and B, but you use a little work and see, you know, Hey, here’s some training for C right. And Hey, Robert, what do you want to do five years from now? And you’re like, Hey, I want to be one of these guys. And I said, Oh, well, if you want to become one of those guys in five years, you should take this type of training and get these experiences and work your way there.

 

You’re training your partners or your customers completely different because you’re not really focused on the individual’s career path. What you’re interested in is does that partner have the capabilities needed to sell and service my products? Does that customer have the knowledge they need to use my products effectively? Right? Very different focus. So you as an employee, I got the onboarding, I got the review, I get your annual review.

 

I got your career path where you want to go, but you as a partner, well, you’re part of a company that’s selling my product. And I want to make sure that your company has the knowledge it needs to sell my product. And I’m not necessarily focused on your career path. You might be doing this today and tomorrow you might be doing something else over at whatever company you’re with, right? And so, when I’m…

 

What I want is I want to make sure that your company has at least five people that know how to sell my product, six people that know how to service my product. Or if you’re a franchise of mine, I want to make sure that you’re representing my brand well, that your people are representing my brand well. And that kind of changes everything because then you get into certification is much more important. I can’t force you to do anything. I kind of make that happen.

 

I don’t necessarily know who your people are, so I gotta delegate user management. I don’t have a nice HR system where I have all my employees, so unless I wanna get in the business of drowning myself in user management administration, I gotta create some type of delegated user management capabilities. And then lastly, this is, or I shouldn’t even say lastly, but there’s just a bunch of other things, and I can go into it forever and ever.

 

But also the other thing, and it’s one of the reasons why we have the partnership, is I can’t buy courses off the shelf. You know, when I’m hiring an employee, I can say, hey, you know, take our Microsoft Office training, right? Take our diversity training, take our OSHA safety training. And I can buy all those courses from a publisher off the shelf, right? Because there are publishers out there that have great courses in that. But when comes to selling, servicing, and using my product,

 

I can’t, there’s no publisher out there that has, here’s how you sell my product, here’s how you service my product, here’s how you use my product. And so the other big difference is I need to author courseware specifically to my products. And that’s very idiosyncratic. that’s another main difference. as we get into other things,

 

It’s the evolution of the software. That’s a key problem for our target market, for the people that are buying, that have large channels because they have to create content that’s unique to them because they are the only ones with that product. And that’s the truth. That’s well, you’ll know a lot about your business. I can see that. It’s just great.

 

comes to my mind is among other things, and then it’s obvious, but when you are training your employees and it from an L and D department, in a sense, you’re going to own those people. You’re paying them a salary exactly back them to show up. Right. Or maybe it’s just not good career path to not show up where, with the, um, with, with, channel partners, I guess it would

 

for you, don’t, you don’t, you don’t, you don’t own those folks. And that looks like sales training, doesn’t it? So mostly it’s sort of sales ish and marketing kind of training. Do do you ever, do your clients ever, use your software for something that isn’t oriented towards sales and marketing or that kind of not make sense? Well, the sales are, you know, so what are you using third, you know, why are you training people that don’t work for you? Right. On the channel side,

 

They’re either selling your products as, know, they’re a franchisee, they’re a dealer. You know, if you’re a franchise or they’re a franchisee, if you’re a manufacturer, they’re a dealer or a reseller or a manufacturer, but they’re selling your product. That’s one thing. The other thing is depending on the nature of your product, they’re delivering your product or your service, right? So there are certain operations, like if you’re a roofer.

 

Right. And you’re, and you’re a franchise or that does roofing. Well, we do roofing a certain way. do blinds a certain way. There’s a certain operation, right? We make our hamburgers a certain way. Right. There’s operational training, right. On, how to actually create the service. Right. Uh, or if you’re a manufacturer, you know, there might be installation, you know, training that your partners are installing your device, like, you know, solar, for example, uh, or they might.

 

or in service, installation and service, Maintenance, repair, that type of stuff. And so depending on the nature of your products, that’s why you might be training these partners. And then if you have a very sophisticated product, like we have a number of clients that are medical device manufacturers, well, they’re training medical technicians and sometimes surgeons to actually use the device for surgery.

 

And it’s a sophisticated, complicated product, but the end user, the customer needs that training as well. So that’s when you’re training people that don’t work for you. And it’s to do those types of things. It’s the sales, but it’s also the operational. It’s the service and repair. And then in the case of ⁓ especially complicated machinery or software, it’s the end user, right? Because it’s, know…

 

some of the stuff is not necessarily intuitive or the stakes are high enough, especially in medical equipment, that you want to make sure the person using it is skilled before they actually use it on a human. those are the use cases. Okay. Real simple, just super simple. What are three pain points? And I heard, we kind of heard that you went through it already, but you did with…

 

a lot of elaboration, but just for those of us that are not as sophisticated as you, what are the three pain points that your software and that approach, that channel software solves? As a summary of what you were just saying. Yeah, well, the first pain point is you’re organizing, what you’re going to organize around is the partner or the location.

 

So you want to organize everything around the partner so the partner can manage their own people, they can manage their own training and you want to track the training at a partner. So organizing around the partner is the first pain point as opposed to at org chart, right? If you’re doing employee learning. You hear you saying geography is something that you’re looking at a lot with like if you’re, the, would you sort of.

 

inferring geography a little bit there. it’s geography is in every location is the, you, you have a partner that has a particular, you know, again, it all depends on the nature of the business, but you have a, you, you have a partner that have might have many locations, right? They might have, you know, they might have an LA facility or store, a Chicago store, an Omaha store. Um, and so.

 

What you care about is the unit that is within the partner. I guess the best way of saying it is back to your question of three things. Look, it’s all partner based and it’s all based on the unit and a partner may have multiple units across the geography. And so how do you support that and how do you organize training around that? And how do you ensure that each unit is properly trained? And that can be a little different even if it’s in the same company.

 

Maybe exactly. Yeah. Well, especially, especially when you go international, right? Okay. That, that, that, that unit, you know, let’s, let’s say, you know, sign a Rama sign a Rama makes the signs you see on outside of stores, right? Well, you know, how they set up and they operate in the UK is different than how they operate here. You know, um, you know, uh, I was just talking to the CEO of blaze pizza and we were talking about Singapore.

 

and setting up operations in Singapore versus the United States versus the EU and all the international flavors. So, but yet a particular owner, a partner might have units spread across the globe depending on who they are. Roofing is going to be different in Alaska than it is compared to Miami. 100%. The weather’s different and you’re going to use different materials and things. Okay, Pay point number two.

 

Pain point number one is location. It’s the unit and it’s the training of a unit. I think your example is, if I could just stick on that one for a second, because another one that’s real is ⁓ anything that’s highly regulated. You want that unit level stuff. For example, other clients of ours are in the healthcare industry and they have units like I was interviewing one person in the ⁓ elder care.

 

The regulations in Illinois are different than the regulations in Michigan are different than the regulations in Ohio. Yet it’s not unconceivable that an assisted living facility might have locations everywhere, right? And so anyway, gets back to that location, like you said, and where you are geographically can be different and how you organize and you have multi-unit operators and all that kind of stuff. But that’s pain point number one, right? Pain point number two,

 

is what I mentioned is the training content and how do you know that they got it. And so the training content is all product related. Now our platform does some stuff to help on that with some of the recent stuff we rolled out with Lumina, the knowledge assistant, but that’s where you need partners or that’s where the clients, this is a pain point for the clients is

 

they need to create that content. So how can we facilitate creating that content? Because the training content is all circles around their product. They’re the only ones that have their product and therefore there’s no publisher that has that content available. So you have to figure out the pain point for our clients is how do you create that content? And it’s sort of bespoke-ish, right? It’s a little bit like it’s going to be very customized, right? So how do you…

 

That’s a good question for me to ask you. How do you get that content done for your clients? Well, you know, I mean, historically for us is we have partners like you or our clients basically have a maker by decision. Should they build all that capability in house and or or do we go shop for that? The other thing and then and then, you know, where we’ve helped in the past is a lot of our clients will say, hey, we have some content here.

 

We have some videos, especially in the sales side, we have some videos for marketing sales. Can you wrap that into a course and put some questions on it and kind of do course development light, if you would. But it’s the same. So we can do that. Others go, no, want to do this installation course to install this type of whatever it is they’re installing.

 

It’s important. It’s a quarter million dollar piece of equipment. We want to make sure it’s done right. Do you know anybody that can help? We need help building that course, right? And we want it done properly because it’s an expensive piece of equipment and we want to make sure that people are trained properly. then where we look at AI and some of the things we’ll get to later is we’ve just rolled out a capability where you can take

 

content like a standard operating procedure and turn it into a study guide. And so you can start to take some existing content and turn it into learning content. And we have a couple of other things coming down the pipe, but that’s problem number two. There’s a bunch of different ways you can solve the problem. You can build the in-house capability. You can outsource it to your training, your LMS platform. You can bring in a pro like you guys, like Course Greek, that

 

builds custom content and makes it really sharp and excellent. You’re starting to see other tools emerge with AI, makes it little easier, makes some basic stuff. But that’s the second problem is, first problem is I got all these people all over the place and I’ve got multi-unit operators and how do I manage all that? And how do I get people access to the system and all that? Problem number two is where do I get my training content? How do I…

 

create the content because I can’t go buy it off the shelf because it’s all related to me and my company. Right. So I’ve got to figure that one out somehow. That’s that’s that’s number two. And then number three, and I kind of touched on this a little bit, it’s kind of related to number one, but it’s kind of different is people can wear multiple hats and they could work from multiple. They can work from multiple partners. And so you’ve got the

 

And what I mean by that is the way you do all this is everybody has their own job descriptions, right? And so let’s just take an easy thing. You know, coffee shop. I might call all of my people, I might have baristas and baristas only do this. And I have cashiers and they do this. I might, another coffee shop might call them something else. A barista might do everything. They might also be a shift leader. So you’ve got this other problem of standardizing

 

the nomenclature that a barista does this, a shift leader does this, a cashier does this. And now you, in your organization as a partner, which you call an associate, might do cashier and barista. So I got to train you on both of those. Where this other partner, they have separate people for barista, separate people for cashiers, right? Cashiers don’t make coffee, baristas don’t handle cash, right?

 

depends on how the partner organized their business. So that third thing is you’ve got a bunch of different business models where everybody names everything differently. You have to kind of create your standard job categories or position codes, we call them. And then you have to enable people to be able to have multiple jobs because we’re going to call a barista, you as one of our partners, that might be a barista and a

 

⁓ cashier. Does that make sense? It does. Yeah. You go into

 

So a client of yours has different job roles in their company that need to be trained. And just because we’re all doing coffee, that doesn’t mean that that are the way we staff and the way we title people and their roles and responsibilities are all the same. It would be impossible to achieve that anyways. And they’re big and that sort of thing. The big guy and the big guys are going to have more narrowly defined jobs.

 

And the small guys are going to have the same guy doing three jobs. Okay. And you said it relates that number three relates back to number one. So is it possible that the same company has baristas and checkout counter people in a sm in Boise and they do it a certain way. And then the same company has baristas and checkout people in New York city. And they

 

because it’s bigger and they’re getting more traffic or the, you know, whatever, maybe compliance or whatever, they have to do it a different way. Do you come across that situation? Exactly. And then the, the, the other part of that third thing. So it’s this whole defining job roles, but also that it take the New York city example, that person who’s a barista in New York city is also moonlighting at a different partner on weekends where they’re a cashier.

 

Right. So you, so you’ve got all these different, you know, partners that, that divvy up the job responsibilities differently. So you’ve got to standardize that and then allow people to wear multiple roles because you know, based on your standardization, the barista and the employee in Boise is doing both cashier and barista. Whereas in a larger place, like say New York, they’re just, they’re just doing one or the other.

 

But then also you’ve got the possibility if you have a very large network that, and you’re a large group that the person is moonlighting or working a second job with a different partner on weekends or nights. You know, we see that all the time in the automotive space, right? I’m a tech, you know, automotive, you know, you know, it’s, it’s your exact thing. The person doing the repairs in the back, the technician in the back and who’s selling parts is also selling vehicles, right?

 

But in Chicago, you’re doing one or the other, right? But then also his brother-in-law owns the, so he’s working at Eastside, but his brother-in-law owns Westside. And on weekends, he’s helping his brother-in-law out in some other role, right? You see that all the time. Well, it’s a mess. To me, it’s a complicated mess. Yeah, it gets very complex. It can become very complex. And that’s where we get an opportunity to maybe spin back and

 

talk a little bit about your technology. so it’s so therefore, Latitude Learning LMS platform has been developed to sort all that out. Exactly. the customer wants to hear if they’re watching this video. Yeah. And if you want to boil it down to one thing from a ⁓ training administration and management stuff, when you’re, when you’re dealing with employees, it’s a hierarchy. got a CEO,

 

a bunch of VPs, a bunch of directors, a bunch of managers and a bunch of staff in a nice hierarchy. When you’re dealing with partners, it’s a giant network, right? You’ve got a bunch of partner units all over the country. The ownership of those units is, you you’ve got a bunch of single unit owners and multi-unit owners, owners that also own units of, or represent competing brands.

 

speaker-1 (23:51)

Yoy.

 

speaker-0 (24:04)

And then you got people that are not nicely aligned. They can be part of one or many units that happen to be part of the same owner or multiple owners. so you’ve got a nice hierarchy versus a large, complicated, multidimensional network. And that’s the key difference if you’re boiling down. It’s managing a hierarchy versus managing a network. And our stuff can manage the network.

 

Imagine that works a little bit more the Wild, no more Wild West because you got less control over what’s going on. Exactly. And then you get into that and you got to do certifications and how do you, how do you, and how do you incentivize folks? And that’s a business thing. And then on top of that, you got the whole, can’t just go and buy the content. I got it. I have to somehow create the content either internally or externally. Well, we’ll do it for you. But yes.

 

⁓ So, but hopefully from that, you your listeners, you get a sense of, while delivering a SCORM course or a ⁓ video training is the same, it’s a person consuming a video, it’s a person consuming a SCORM course is the same. The way you manage all that, the training programs are very different in how you manage it how you, yeah. And I’m guessing in my educated guess as it was the case for me,

 

You think, if you’re on the journey of learning this business, you, you learn about online course, but you learn about, big enterprise B2B type platforms, the departments and multi-tenancy and you learn about score. And then for me on my journey, we came across you and there’s another, another company we partner with.

 

in Europe that does the same thing. I get it. There’s also this niche group that does this for channels. And they have to be there because of the points that you just made, which is radically different. It’s completely different. can’t put, I mean, you could try, but it wouldn’t be very effective. You can’t just like grow learn worlds at a big giant sort of channel thing and get all the features and the functionality that you.

 

But then if you do, and a lot of organizations do use an HR LMS to manage this, you end up sub-optimizing your training program. And then, because you don’t have that capability. And then it led to sell to one other thing is remember why you’re doing this in the first place. You’re doing this so that people can sell and service and use your products. That’s directly tied to your bottom line, right?

 

Whereas on the employee side, I’m a big fan of, big believer in education, big believer in training, and it can change everything. But this is directly tied to your company’s bottom line. My investment as an employer in you as an employee in your career development is very important, but at some point our paths may veer.

 

⁓ and that’s true. And that’s true with partners too. But in the meantime, I, as an employer need to make sure that you’re as an employee are, are generating value. And here it’s, it’s directly tied to the bottom line. Are you selling more units? Is your customer satisfaction? I interviewed one franchise that they tracked the Google reviews of all of their unit of all their franchisees.

 

And as soon as they dropped a little bit, they would proactively intervene because it’s a leading indicator that something’s going on at that location. They had high reviews for months and months and months. Then all of sudden they dropped. And then what they found when they dropped is, is, is usually one of people usually the most usually what happened is a really good skilled installer left and they hired another one and they need to be trained.

 

speaker-1 (27:56)

Real.

 

speaker-0 (27:57)

Yeah. So, and therefore they’re not doing, they’re not doing as good a job. You know, and this was, this is a blinds company. They, they’re a franchise. They, they will install window coverings for folks. And Jeff, I’m going to, I’m going to ask you, want to ask you, ⁓ just in general terms first, to get into your tech and that that’s fair square, but in general term, AI, how do you feel about it? How do you feel about

 

artificial intelligence and

 

in the homo sapien species. So it’s a softball question. And where we’re headed, no pressure. Yeah, I believe it’s, I believe it is synonymous and it’s very similar to other major technological innovations that our species has gone through. And, you know, it comes on the scene.

 

looks like it can change everything. It gets over-promised, under-delivered, and then eventually changes everything. I think we will figure all that out over time. you just look at the world that we live in, and you go back to pre-steam age, post-steam age, pre-…

 

Electronics post electron, it, you know, initially comes on or even more recently, you know, uh, uh, you know, I’ve been around long enough and a bunch of us been around long enough pre internet, post internet. It’s like the internet hits and people were like, what do need that for? And, first they paid the cow paths and it’s like, well, a company will put its brochures online and then people can get information about it. And then, and, but then, and then, and then, then.

 

you know, somebody comes and goes, it’s going to change everything. We’ll do everything. And we have a dot com bubble and you know, people place a million bets and it’s going to change everything. And you’re not going to have to do anything ever. And we’re going to, you know, auction everything off and, then kind of that hype bursts, but then slowly the use cases get established and slowly over time. now here we are, you know, 30 years later,

 

And Internet has changed everything, right? Like, you know, don’t pay with cash, you tap, you know, you’re sitting in line, you’re popping on your phone, looking stuff up, you know, you’re scrolling social media that didn’t exist 30 years ago. It’s changed everything. So I think back to your question on AI, I think it’s very similar. Yeah. You know, the first thing you do is how can I apply this to immediate problems? And I call that paving the cow paths, right?

 

⁓ but then, but then once you do that, you start to think of it in new ways and you go, well, what new super highways can I create? And I think we’re just starting to see that now. you know, like with any technology, it can be used for good or bad. And, you know, bad things can happen and bad things will happen. you know, but. You know, I’m, I’m very bullish. I think it’s the next evolution of our economy and everybody’s economy and.

 

Yeah, we’ll to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and we’ll all live better lives at the end of the day. But that’s my answer to your softball question. It wasn’t too much of a softball. That most interesting part of our show so far. that is a pretty meaty, you know, metaphysical question there. Well, I owed you one because when you interviewed me, were, what the hell were we talking about? We were talking about

 

We were talking about the library at Alexander. my gosh, yes. I I imagine where it’s hard to imagine where we would be as a civilization if that had not been destroyed. I mean, it’s a crying shame. I once saw on, I think it was Carl Sagan on the Cosmos. On Cosmos, he had a little segment on his classic show. Well, when he was talking about, when he was talking about ⁓

 

the library to Alexandria and then a burn down and everything. You may recall from the show, he’d mentioned that had we retained all of that information, we would be a, a, a star fairing species by now. Like we would be flying to other stars and things because, but we had to like relearn Oculus all over again. Exactly. Exactly. Well, you know, I mean, it’s, it’s also really interesting.

 

You go back and you talk about that type of stuff. It’s also, know, is also thank, thank, thank God for the, uh, the caliphate back then, you know, as the Roman empire crushed and, and, and all that, and all of a sudden, you know, algebra and all that was all part of, you know, the caliphate and, and, and all those Greek texts and all that, like, um, I forget exactly what it was, but you know how we all use X for the unknown.

 

Well, it’s actually like, goes back to Arabic and some Arabic word and it means like, I don’t know or something like that. Like, but, ⁓ but all that, you know, all those texts and all that came, came through that back into the monasteries in the middle ages. And it’s like, your point on Alexander, you know, the, Alexandria would be the a beyond where we’re at now, but also thank God that there was a group of people that,

 

in the caliphate that saved all that Greek texts and all that. There would be so many things that would be even further behind. And it’s it’s amazing. Referring to how back in the early days, Islam was very helpful in saving a lot of the knowledge and expertise.

 

mankind at that day. Yeah. And pushing it forward and pushing it forward. There are great scholars. Yeah. I mean that, which is the reason they saved all that. You know, they saved all those treasures of European civilization, Roman civilization, and then built on them. I mean, it was amazing. I mean, thank God for that. Thank God. Real quick. And it’s going to be a, it’s going to be a, ⁓ a self-pitchy thing, but that’s fine.

 

Okay, sure. Right. AI, AI and Latitude Learning. Tell us a little bit about what you’re going to do with AI because our viewers might want to know about that. in the context of what you just described to us, how is AI making all of that work in a really snappy way, in real like simple, quick snappy way? Yeah. What we’re doing in a quick snappy way is trying to attack that second problem that we talked about, that content problem.

 

Right. And, and, you know, the first piece we attacked was just access to information. You know, a lot of knowledge is tied up in documents and manuals and things like that. And that’s why we created Lumina or the learning assistant. It’s a, it’s a knowledge assistant. It allows you to ask questions to curated content, like your procedures, manuals and all that kind of stuff. So you can very quickly get the, know, how many tablespoons of coffee do I put into a double shot of espresso?

 

you know, how many foot pounds will I torque this down to? How do I set this up? You how do I do this installation? It doesn’t replace the training. It’s instant access to that knowledge, right? So that was the first thing we rolled out. Just a week and a half ago, we rolled out AI study guide where you can take content like that at the course level. You can say, Hey, here’s this content, documents, videos, et cetera, the knowledge base for this course. generate me a, generate a study guide for the students. Yeah.

 

And so that, you you’re getting down that part. Coming down the pipe, we’ve got the AI tutor where you can ask the tutor specific questions geared towards the content associated, the body of knowledge associated with that course, not everything. And then also ⁓ generate assessments, know, AI generated assessments. Now on each of these, you can go in and tweak it as an administrator or as a instructional designer. You can go in and modify it.

 

but it gets you decent content quickly that can then be improved upon. So that’s, I don’t know if that was snappy enough, but it’s, we’re trying to solve that second problem, right? And then we’re looking at other things down the pipe along with that of how can you take that content and turn it into a podcast? Can you take that content and turn it into a presentation with a AI generated voiceover?

 

Now that’s going to get you a lot of basic stuff. You’re going to need, in my opinion, in the foreseeable future. I was just at a conference last week at the ASC’s training manager council, which is all the automotive technician guys. they’re very, very advanced. There’s a lot going on there, but it’s all, but.

 

If you, get beyond basics, you’re going to need human intervention to bring it to the next level, you know, and the tools just are not, you know, so, and that gets back to, you know, AI is great. It can do some great stuff, but it is just a tool. You know, it is not, it is a tool. You know, it can, yeah. You know, there’s, there’s an app out there that, ⁓ is really popular with musicians.

 

And as you may know, I know the life, I’m a musician. You can go out to this thing and type in a prompt and say any style, whatever hit go and it’ll create something that’s like, Oh wow, that’s really amazing that it created a country song out of just an idea. Exactly. But if you get in there, but if you’re a musician and you understand the Godot and tension and release and things about harmony and melody and rhythm and

 

and you go in there and you work on it as a tool, you can make music that is more than just, that was pretty impressive. That’s a cool little toy thing into like music that will just absolutely blow your mind that only a musician could actually make if they had tool. And I, and I’ve been doing that recently and I cannot believe how amazing it is, but I worked my ass off. I reiterated the thing like 55 times and made all kinds of changes to get it right. But it’s true.

 

That if you really know what you’re doing as a tool, you can get more out of AI. You don’t just sit back and kick your legs up and relax. Not really. And if I take what you just said and bring it into the training and what we’re trying to do with the training, what I believe we’ll be able to do is take a piece of a standard operating procedure or a playbook or some existing content and create a nice jingle.

 

right? To bring it into the music world. But you need that artist. You need that that that need that human to make it into Beethoven’s fifth, right? Some experience. Well, that’s what I’m saying. It’s not going to generate Beethoven’s fit. Like, you know, you need that. And then that’s when it becomes a tool. And then and so it can it can put together a nice little jingle. And it’s like that. And

 

Hey, in training, there’s lot of need for, I just need something simple here, right? But then when you get into very complicated things, no, you need to really understand instructional design, you really need to understand how humans learn, you really need to be able to, like what you’re doing with the music, I can really create something really beautiful that then do and iterate it a hundred times.

 

That’s where I think we end up with AI. And I think the thing we’re gonna learn, it’s also very interesting. It’s like what’s old is new again, right? In the 90s, when computer technology spread all over the place, 80s and 90s, when mainframes went viral and client server went viral, now everything got computerized. All of your accounting systems and all that.

 

One of the big things in the nineties that happened was re-engineering, flattening the organization. And what we learned was how much middle managers were really just information processors moving information. when we brought all this information technology in, we didn’t need them all. We didn’t need one person to manage 10 people, one person to manage 30 people, because mostly what they were doing was

 

moving information up and down the chain of command. so we got, you know, we did that in the eighties and nineties and we got very lean and efficient and you know, blah, and everything got cheaper and blah, blah, blah. I think the same thing’s going to happen with the AI. Yeah. We just thought, we just don’t know where or, you know, we have ideas of where it’s going to happen, but it’s the same thing. We’re going to find out that there’s a whole bunch of people that most of what they’re doing.

 

is fairly routine and easily repetitive. It’s the same thing that happened in manufacturing, right? We brought in an automation and all the routine stuff got squeezed out and a machine did it. And that was in the seventies and eighties and into the nineties. mean, I’m sorry, like I remember, like this was really wild, but at the early two thousands, I had the opportunity to go to three different engine plants.

 

that use three different sets of technologies. One was, it takes about 150 steps to make an engine. One, every station, 150 stations, had four to six people on it. And it was exactly what you would think. Chain driven assembly line, half a dozen people at each station hammering stuff in, making an engine. I went to another one that had, the next one had like the next level of technology, self-driving carts going down a rail, bringing the engine, same 150.

 

stations, except lots of automation, one or two people per station to make sure the automation is working. I went to the next one, next generation technology, one person per six stations. Their job was more of a technician to make sure that when the automation has a problem, it got resolved by the human. Right? So I think what you see there is, you if we bring it into AI, I think it’s, and using your music example,

 

It’s like we’re going to learn in a lot of these knowledge areas. A lot of what people were doing were fairly redundant, pejorative things in law and accounting, music, that you really didn’t have to use. Once you learned how to, it was pretty routine and just like popping a cylinder into a

 

into a piston or piston into a cylinder, you know, is fairly, you know, you know, like real estate transactions and being a lawyer. mean, I’m buying a house. mean, like, I don’t know. I’m sorry. I don’t want to offend anybody out there, but we’re going to find that these things are fairly routine. And when you have some, you know, something that can do some tasks like that, you know, automated, but then, but then for folks that get it, that use it as a tool, it’s going to take you to the next level.

 

No. Jeff, what makes you passionate about this business? I, well, I go back to what I said before. What, what I, he was instilled in me as a young child. and, and it’s just proven to me or all my rotations around the sun. Education is a game changer. It’s a leveler. It levels the playing field. Right. We’re all born into different stations in life.

 

Right? Like, you know, you know, a lot of people blessed to be born into this country. Other people are born into other situations, even within this country. Some people are born with loving, caring parents that can provide some are born into more unfortunate circumstances, but we’re all born into whatever situation we’re born into. And education is the big leveler. It’s the big thing that allows anybody from anywhere, from any walk of life, whatever their beginnings were.

 

However humble, however traumatic, whatever it was, education is the thing that levels the playing field and allows them to compete with the other person and make a better life. And so I’m very passionate about that. And it really allows people to grow and have their best lives. At the same time, and this is what’s beautiful about it, it allows all the rest of us

 

to take advantage of the genius of all these other people. No matter, you know, because, you know, because, you know, because they invented the next thing that makes our lives better, right? Whether it’s rock and roll music or a Fender guitar or clean drinking water or the internet or whatever. So anyway, I’m very, so I’m a big believer in that. I think it just helps all of humanity. It helps bring us out and, you know, and

 

I’m doing my little part on the commercial side. know, like, you know, if we’re selling stuff better, it means we got a more informed salesperson, which means at least a more informed consumer or buyer, better installations, less problems, take waste and expense out of this. Basically, you know, make the world better for everybody. So, but, but it all goes back to that education. I just, I’m a big fan of education.

 

would hope so. You are in the education business. You and our educators were teachers. So Jeff, yes, my last question for you, unless unless you want to keep ripping. What’s, what’s the biggest leadership lesson you’ve learned while running your company? Like, because you’re Yeah, you’re successful, dude. You know, you’ve got this big, beautiful company with world class

 

big, large global monstrosity amounts. Give us Jeff Walters three rules of successful corporate leadership, more successful leadership. Okay, well you’re going to me three. Well, I think we, and this is a matter of credit, one of our mentors.

 

you know, way back when I was first starting off, and I think this goes to, you know, just lessons for scaling business. said, Jeff, we have a really simple strategy here. I said, Oh, what is it? goes, we just do what we say we’re going to do. And then clients like that because it’s so unusual and they, and they give us more work. So I think the first, and this is not necessarily about scaling, but just in general.

 

If you just deliver what you say, do what you say you’re going to do as a business, that’s how you build loyalty. You build trust. People know they can rely on you and they’ll come back for your pies. They’ll come back for your whatever service you’re in, whether it’s B2B, B2C, they come back because you’re consistently delivering. So that’d be number one. The second, I think, is culture is…

 

upstream of everything else. Everything else is downstream of the culture of the organization and the, the call, you know, you really need to work on formulating a, a culture that basically building an identity, a culture, because that’s going to answer all the 101. Your culture is going to be the answer to the 101 questions that people have that they don’t know the answer to. And it’s going to be the culture that dictates how they operate. Right.

 

whether they take that, whether they hop on a bus to go deliver the suitcase to the customer or they go the extra yard or they are passive aggressive and don’t do something because you have a culture of getting smacked if you step out of line. Like all that goes back to culture. So culture is just upstream of just about everything else. And even the whole doing what you say you’re going to do is culture, right?

 

⁓ It’s part of the culture. you really culture is is is just I think extremely important. What’s your and then the third I know before we do that. What’s your culture? Well one do what you say you’re do we operate with integrity And we respect each other. Okay. Those are our three core values, you know, do what you say gonna do Operate with integrity and respect other people. Okay, and you know

 

It seems to work. people tend to like working for places like that. Yeah, we have a very, very low attrition rate. Very, very low. And then the third thing, and this I think goes to the scaling part of your question. So those first two things you can do with any business. And I think it’s the key to success of any business. The scaling part is I think one of the hardest things for people to learn, the hardest lesson.

 

Because scaling requires process. Because as you scale, your staff, your partners get further and further from that center core, that founder, that CEO, the high priestess or priest of whatever the culture is, they get further and further apart. it’s process that allows you to scale. Because you can teach somebody process, right?

 

And so a lot of people, lot of entrepreneurs struggle as they go from say a 15, 25 person company, maybe even up to a 50 person company where the leader knows everybody, but then scaling to a 500 person company where the leader at a 5,000 person company, it’s just impossible. The leader does not know everybody. And the only way can make that happen is process. so creating processes

 

And that’s where culture comes in, that balance of process and culture so that it doesn’t become bureaucratic, right? Because at the end of the day, culture wins. So if the process is, if the culture is, take risks, it’s okay. I’d rather…

 

What is it we used to say here?

 

I’d rather ask for forgiveness than permission. Right? If you have a culture of asking for forgiveness instead of permission, it means people are proactive. If you’re a culture of treating people with dignity and respect, a culture of delivering on your word, you know, if you have that culture and then you have a process and you’ve taught people the process, but the process doesn’t really apply to this situation, that situation, or there’s this particular set of circumstances where it goes awry.

 

then the people feel comfortable enough to step outside the process. But if you have a culture that’s the opposite, then they’re going to stay inside the process and the process is going to become bureaucratic. And then everybody’s going to be like, you know, I got to do A, B and C. If I don’t do A, B and C, I get smacked. Right. And so, and I’m only going to do, I’m going to stick within the process and my job is only do X, Y and Z. And if I do anything other than that, is it, you know, but the scale, if you had that good, healthy culture,

 

and then you have processes and you can scale. Sounds like you said processes that are not rigid processes that also empower the individual to make upfront, you know, frontline field commands on the fly if they need to. Yes. Yeah. Within, within reason, you know? Yeah. Well, I’d say like, you know, I’d say take them as guidelines versus laws, right?

 

you know, and, and, ⁓ and, give people the ability to flex on them and then, and then look at them and, you, and your processes, you have to be iterative and review them and sit there and go, the world has changed. We, we now need to incorporate this other thing into our processes because everyone’s deviating. You know, we’re hitting this point and then everybody’s kind of deviating with some type of, you know, something to, you know, again, if we’re all have that culture,

 

like I said, a healthy culture, then people aren’t deviating because they’re trying to scam the system. They’re deviating because they’re trying to accomplish something for the business. And so, but then you got to look at that and say, okay. ⁓ you know what? You know, the internet’s here. You know what AI is here and this, this thing has to change. You know what? We started doing business in Canada and life is a little different up there and we got to adjust this process to the local norms, you know, like

 

You know what? Dot, dot, dot. you know, but I’d say those are the three things. It’s like, do what you say you’re to do, build a healthy culture, because that’s upstream of everything. And then to scale, you have to put in place processes. And otherwise you can’t scale. Otherwise you’re going back to the leader for every answer to everything. And that’s not scalable.

 

Jeff, where can people, if they enjoyed our call, where can they find you? What’s a good way to get a hold of you? Easiest way to get a hold of me is to go to latitudelearning.com and under the company, you do the contact us, you’ll get a hold of me, or my staff will get a hold of me, or my bio is under the company, so it’s latitudelearning.com slash Jeff-Walter.

 

is my bio and all my stuff. But I’m also on LinkedIn, so you can reach me through LinkedIn. And those would be the two best ways. You can email me at jeff.walter at latitudelearning.com as well. But the easiest thing is to go to latitudelearning.com and hit the contact us and say, want to talk to Jeff. That’s great.

 

You can also get a hold of Jeff through me. I’m Robert with CourseCreek and the CourseCreek.com and we’re partners by the way. I have a nice beautiful page out at the Latitude Learnings website. can learn about us there. You guys do great work. Thank you. we look forward to any opportunity to dazzle and take good care of your clients. But yeah, that was fun. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. Thank you, Robert. All righty. Bye. Bye.