Ninety minutes. You leave with your next thirty days built.
Ninety minutes. You leave with your next thirty days built.
Founder of the EdSales Revenue Machine
I built two education companies. Then I built the machine I wish I'd had.
Now I help education companies from zero to five million dollars build a Revenue Machine: a system that brings the right people to them on repeat, that they can run themselves.
2
2 education companies founded and exited
271
education companies have paid to work with us
1,000+
education founders in the Entourage community
2,600
hours coaching founders and EdTech CEOs
Coaching, repetition and a method you own. Build it once and it produces three to five qualified conversations a week without you pushing it.
From struggling start-up to a successful exit
Starting a business is exciting until reality shows up
You have a great idea. Then you find out that getting clients, making sales and scaling are three completely different games, and nobody hands you the rules to any of them.
I built two education companies. The first was direct to family tutoring, and I sold it at a profit. The second was Flex Academies, which ended up partnered with 82 schools across six states and more than 500 enrichment providers.
Both times I learned the same lesson the hard way, and both times it cost me a year.
The harsh truth
A good idea is not enough
When I started Flex, I went after the schools I assumed needed me most. They already had trusted providers. They did not need another one, and no amount of enthusiasm was going to change that.
So I stopped pitching and started listening. I asked what was actually breaking in their week, and I changed the offer to solve that instead of what I had assumed. Schools started lining up.
Then the leads stopped
Word of mouth is not a strategy, it is a season
For a while, referrals carried us. Then they thinned out, and I had no idea where the next school was coming from. That is a specific kind of fear, and if you have felt it you already know the one I mean.
So I built a system. LinkedIn, email outreach, and content that put me in front of the right people on purpose rather than by luck. Instead of chasing schools, they started arriving. That system is the thing I now teach, and it is why I call it a machine rather than a strategy.
Then I did the last part, which most founders never get to. I brought in the right people, wrote down how the work actually gets done, and automated enough of it that the company could run without me. Eventually I sold Flex Academies to my COO, who runs it to this day.
My first mistake was thinking I had to sell the program. If the offer is clear and it solves the problem the buyer actually has, the selling gets much quieter.
That is the difference between a business that runs on persuasion and one that runs on fit. One of them exhausts you. The other one compounds.
THE YEAR THE MACHINE GOT TESTED
Then my body sent me the bill
I was 46. I was not overweight. I worked out, I did not smoke, and I wore a ring on my finger that tracked my sleep because I like my numbers.
One night I was sitting on my own couch in Washington, doing nothing at all, and I could not catch my breath. I closed my eyes for two minutes and it passed. So I filed it under asthma, which I have had my whole life, and I got on with the week.
I filed it under asthma for about two years.
It was not asthma. It was a triple bypass, and I was closer to the edge of it than I like to think about.
My wife knew before I did. My ten year old knew before the doctors did. I was the only one still reading the numbers wrong, because I had spent twenty years training myself to push through anything that was not actively on fire.
And here is the good part
I want to be clear about one thing, because people get this backwards.
The bypass did not teach me to build the machine. I had already built it, twice, and I had already spent years teaching other founders to build theirs.
What the bypass did was prove the point.
I was out for weeks.
The machine kept running. The conversations kept arriving, the clients kept being served, and the business did not stop because I did. That is not luck. That is what a system is for.
So when a founder tells me they just need to work harder this quarter, I have a particular reaction to it, because I know exactly where that road goes.
A machine you build once keeps running on the days you cannot.
I am back on the golf course. I am building a house in Mexico. And the work is better than it has ever been.
What I do now
I help education companies build the machine
I kept meeting the same founder. Brilliant at the work. Loved by their clients. And completely unable to say where next month's leads are coming from. Whether they are at zero or at five million, it is the same problem, and it is the only one I work on.
The right person
We name the one buyer your business is really for. Not a category. A person you can picture, whose problem you can say in their own words.
A machine that feeds you
Nine stages that turn attention into conversations on repeat, so the pipeline stops depending on who happens to remember you this month.
Systems that hold
The follow-up, the nurture and the rhythm written down and running, so growth does not cost you your evenings or your health.
THE PROMISE
Do the work and your Revenue Machine produces three to five qualified conversations a week with people who could become clients. If we fall short, we keep working with you at no additional coaching cost until you get there.
People, not logos
Every line below is a logged client win from the last ninety days.
Stopped leading with the software and built the Peacemaker Pathway around what school leaders actually wanted. Nine pilots. Walked superintendents through it at one conference and booked twelve follow-up calls.
Narrowed from higher education to one teacher type, found them on LinkedIn, and heard back: "thank God you found me."
Raising a round to take the Peacemaker Pathway to every superintendent summit this year, with the Signature Solution as the backbone of the pitch and the course.
Boston University renewed the contract and increased it after a new dean arrived.
Rewrote her headline to name the principal's failed math initiative. Eight presentations booked, and her posts now outperform everything she wrote before.
The head of social-emotional programs for New York City's education department reached out to him because of his LinkedIn posts.
Launched his nine-step Signature Solution, hit 35,000 impressions on one post, and got featured in Newsweek.
Closed multiple deals in one week with the new closing system, then handed discovery calls to his team and watched one run without him.
The Josh behind the coach
Now for the fun facts
My career started behind a microphone as a sports broadcaster, which is where I learned that the story matters more than the slide. I have judged the Milken Penn GSE Education Business Plan Competition, mentored at StartED, spoke at 26 conferences last year, and I host the EdSales Edge.
A family man at heart. Betina, Camilla and I travel every chance we get, and those are the hours I protect first now.
We spent five years in San Miguel de Allende and never really left. I split my time between Mexico and DC, and I am building our dream home down there.
Triple bypass at forty-six. I keep this picture close, because a business that only runs when you do is not a business, and I had built two of them.
Let's find out where your machine is breaking
Fifteen minutes, no pitch. Tell me where the leads are coming from today and I will tell you which of the nine stages is costing you the most.
CT Living LLC · EdSales Revenue Machine
Founder's Field Notes
One email a week on what is producing leads in education right now.
CT Living LLC · EdSales Revenue Machine