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Clint Betts

John, thank you so much for coming on the show. You are the CEO of Talented Learning. You recently did a Talented Learning awards thing, which I want to talk to you about, but tell us what Talented Learning is and how you became the CEO of it.

John Leh

All right, well, thanks for having me. Talented Learning is an independent global research and analyst firm that studies the learning technology market. And so, as it turns out, there's a thing called a learning management system or learning management systems and big organizations, and it's very expensive to deploy and buy those. And as it turns out, there are about a thousand different options out there in the world.

So what Talented Learning does is we study that marketplace, we understand what these systems can and can't do, and we help buyers find the right type of systems for what they're trying to do. And we're now in our 11th year doing that.

Clint Betts

And so, how does it work? People reach out to you, and they're like, hey, we're just trying to figure out there are so many different options. Which one is the right one for our size of company, that type of thing? Or are you also working with schools and universities and things like that?

John Leh

Schools and universities are different markets, so I'm focused solely on the corporate side of the market.

Clint Betts

I see.

John Leh

But that's exactly it. So what I did 11 years ago is I just started blogging and doing public reviews about different LMS systems. And blogging about how to buy them better. And how to buy them more efficiently and find what you need. Slowly, over time, I started getting the first clients, who would then ask me to help them find a learning management system. And so the whole business was really built around that combination of thought leadership and marketing, which brings in outside inbound leads that we turn around and help one by one.

Clint Betts

And you have a podcast, and you do these awards and other things like that. And so the idea is, hey, we're going to provide a lot of information and basically become a domain expert in this field. And then through these various media channels and various things that you set up, you kind of get clients who reach out to you and say, hey, we actually want to work with you.

John Leh

Yeah, 100%. So we haven't, or I haven't. Made a single outbound call in 11 years. All of that is through this thought leadership marketing that attracts people into our net, and it's all interconnected and strategic to help organizations. And it's for the greater good because it's really confusing out there. And so I spend a big portion of my time every day just researching and learning about new systems, and existing systems, and updates and staying abreast on what the latest and the greatest is on all types of learning systems to be able to help our clients.

There's no one person who can do that on their own, so you have to go somewhere for help, or you may buy the wrong system, and that has a lot of implications at that point.

Clint Betts

Do you use your knowledge and invest in the market and stuff, the ones that are public?

John Leh

Do I invest in them?

Clint Betts

Yeah.

John Leh

No. I don't want to invest in the market. For some reason, I just think that's a gray line, so I want to stay completely neutral, and that's how I've tried to stay the whole time. I want my clients to know and believe that I'm basically like their lawyer. They're paying me to help be their independent guide in this resource, and I'm not being paid on the vendor side.

Clint Betts

Yeah, that makes sense. I guess that would be a bit of a conflict because then you could start pumping up the ones that you liked or you were invested in.

John Leh

Sure. Exactly.

Clint Betts

Tell us about the awards, these Talented Learning awards.

John Leh

Well, as it turns out, there are, as I said, close to a thousand different learning systems out there in the world. And so, I had a hard time figuring out how to contact them all and really research them proactively. So, I came up with the concept of just doing annual awards, where I basically asked the vendor community to fill out this obnoxious capability survey that I created and then spend an hour with me. And so I do this every single year. This year, I interviewed more than a hundred different organizations out of those thousand and invested all of that, really on my time, to be able to stay on the latest and the greatest of what's happening across the world in learning technology.

And so this year, we rolled out six different categories. We've been doing it for this is our 10th year. But this year, we had six different categories inside the corporate learning space, and we named 10 unique organizations for each one of those categories of the best that we've seen. So it's not just the annual awards, but all throughout the year, just constantly on a daily basis, organizations are reaching out to update me or to introduce themselves. And so the awards actually go beyond just that hundred in the summertime. But we just got done with that and released it here recently, and it's always a big deal for everybody on the list and for us because it's a huge effort to start it and finish it.

Clint Betts

Oh, for sure. So who won? I'm sure there are various categories, but who are the leaders in this space?

John Leh

Well, the leaders in this space are long-time organizations like Cornerstone. BDEA is a name that everybody probably remembers, with Saba and SumTotal, which are organizations that they've acquired here over the last couple of years. But the newcomers that are not necessarily newcomers they all have 10 years under their belt at this point would be companies like Docebo, Absorb LMS, LearnUpon, CYPHER Learning, Thought Industries, SkillJar, or Litmus are examples of who's winning a lot of business across the corporate sector right now.

There are a lot of corporate flavors, from whether you train your employees, whether you train your customers, whether you train your partners, or all three of those at the same time. Are all really use cases with different solutions depending on if you're doing one or all of those and which one? And so that's how we look at the marketplace, which is really on a use-case basis of why you would use the system and then try to categorize organizations that would be best for these different particular uses.

Clint Betts

And these are mostly for internal training, internal courses, things like that that companies use? That's kind of the... When I hear LMS, we're in Utah, and when I hear it, I think of Instructure or Blackboard or these kinds of big. Because Instructure is a Utah company, it kind of started here. And then there's another kind bit of edtech company that started here in Utah called Pluralsight, which is training developers and things like that. So where do all of those play into what you do?

John Leh

So, inside the corporate space, there are a couple of different verticals to think about. The easiest and the longest-standing one is what you just mentioned, which is to train your employees. So, if you're a company with a thousand employees, chances are you have mandatory training that you want them all to do. You have mandatory training that you want them to do based on their job, their role, their organization, or where they live. And so, every organization that has 100 or 200 employees has learning or needs a learning management system to keep track of all the internal regulatory requirements and external regulatory requirements. And that was the main use case for decades when it was originally invented almost 40 years ago.

But what's hot now is not that. That's like cost stuff. That's like saving risk and saving cost automation. That's why organizations buy that to really be more efficient. But then there's another side of the equation, and that's where I primarily live. And that's on the making money side or on the actual using training and learning to make a difference, a competitive difference, in your organization that's measurable. So, you should sell more, sell more efficiently, have your partners be certified, and sell more and more efficiently, and represent your brand better. Increase your customer satisfaction rate, decrease your turnover rate, and educate your customers so that you can help onboard them faster. You can use education as a marketing tool, as a tool to onboard them, as a tool to support them over time, turn them into advocates, and help attract new customers.

All of that is part of the corporate space right now, and you're not training your employees in any of it. It's training your extended enterprise or the different audiences that touch your organization that empower it. So, the best organizations in the world right now are using training not as a necessary evil. Certainly, many are doing that, but the best organizations are using it as a strategic tool to be better in their industry and to compete better, and that's where Talented Learning lives on that side of the equation.

Clint Betts

So, what does a typical day look like for you?

John Leh

I'm busy. So, I'm a bootstrapping CEO and entrepreneur. And so there's nobody that's going to do it for me, which is really what I determined 10 years ago. And so my day is long. I try to do basically three three-hour blocks of work. And in between those three-hour blocks, I schedule fun stuff. And that could be anything from exercise to yard work to Spanish lessons, to taking a nap to reading a book. But I know that after three hours, I become less productive. And rather than slog away eight hours and become less and less productive the whole time, just do it in sprints, almost like a software developer company. So my day is a series of sprints all day long, and it starts and ends all in about two seconds, it feels like.

Clint Betts

How often are you publishing podcast episodes?

John Leh

I have two different podcasts running. I have the Talented Learning Show and that is my long standing one. I have 88 episodes, and I publish generally every two weeks on that. And very similar to this I find different experts on both the vendor and the practitioner side of the equation on learning technology and I found out what they know and what they're great at.

Then, I was released recently, at 18-24 months. A second podcast. What's more, it's an educational podcast. It's called Customer Education Nuggets. And that's just a little ten-minute podcast that I'm just teaching customer education professionals something new each time with a different guest. So, I've been doing that for quite a while right now. That's a lot of fun. Before that, I used to do webinars, a webinar series for a long time. And that kind of migrated into the podcast. And I've been doing blog posts forever. I've written about 400 serious articles now in the last 10 years, all about learning technology.

Clint Betts

And so I imagine your revenue model is one, the clients, that you kind of do a basic consultant type of contract with them. And then are you also making money on the advertising and all of that type of stuff of the podcast, or is that all just lead gen?

John Leh

Yeah, so I took it in a couple of key pillars, and I still do. So, the first one was to replace my W2 salary, and the first pillar was to occupy my own time with consulting work to be able to replace that. Once I was able to do that, I built Talented Learning as a property where you could do a lot of your own research. And so you wouldn't necessarily have to talk to me. So I've really made a lot of my research public on all the top vendors' demonstrations and videos, my reviews, and things like that. And so vendors join Talented Learning basically to have that right to be on that site. There's a thousand of them. I can't cover all of them, so I cover a smaller set of them, and I cover them more deeply. And so that was the second vein of revenue.

The third vein of revenue is that once we got that established, we started publishing premium content. So these are our marketer reports that are the latest and greatest in terms of the capabilities of the different vendor solutions in these different use cases. So we just recently released our customer education market report, our overall corporate education market report. We're just about ready to release one on association. And those are premium. And so that's generated a third stream of revenue from the content. As a part of that, we released our concept of the Talented Learning Center, which is our learning management system, not for our employees but for the public at large, where we have courses and micro-courses and lessons and videos to help train people. We have a monthly and an annual subscription to that.

So basically, the consulting, the membership, and then the premium publications are our three veins of revenue at this point. At this point, we haven't really got into advertising. Once again, it's on that line, that lawyer line. I try to stay on the client side of it.

Clint Betts

Yeah. It's kind of a bit of a gray area there, for sure. No question. So tell me what you read. What are you reading every day? How are you thinking about this stuff, and what reading recommendations do you have for other CEOs? Because I'm sure you're reading a lot of industry stuff, but what else do you read?

John Leh

So, if you see the bookcase behind me, I am a reading nerd here. I carry for about 20 years on a month-by-month basis on classical books. I got told to myself one at a time, classical fiction, and I stayed up with it. So I love reading anything old and antique like that. And I continue to collect and stay up with that. That's still my favorite thing to read. Of course, I'm inundated with all the modern stuff to stay up to date on my job, so I turn to history as my getaway. So that's generally what I'm reading. My favorite book, Old Man and the Sea, which I've loved ever since I was 18 years old, is by Ernest Hemingway. Everybody would say, geez, why would you buy a book like that? In terms of business, I think it's got some... At first, it wasn't business that I took out of it, but I have read it about 15 times now. Each time, I take away something else and something more mature, perhaps as I become older. But what I take away from that now is just the power of stick-to-itiveness of just not quitting and putting one foot in front of the other. And that's really one of my main drives in life.

But the main thing that I believe in is that you never get anywhere fast. Maybe sometimes you do, maybe it's accelerated, maybe you get lucky. But almost everybody who takes a steady, measured foot-by-foot approach will get to where they're going as long as they have stick-to-itiveness. And that's probably my biggest takeaway from that particular book.

Clint Betts

Well, they don't get any better than Hemingway. That's the gold standard there. One of the greatest writers, if not the greatest writer, is certainly an American writer. There are a lot of great Russian writers. Do you like that one more than The Sun Also Rises?

John Leh

I do. I feel that's a little bit easier to read than the Sun Also Rises though. That was the first one that I read for sure. For Whom The Bell Tolls, is another great one.

Clint Betts

Yeah.

John Leh

From a business standpoint, though, I think my favorite book is... When I first started this, and I had just a few blog posts up, the CEO of the industry reached out to me for a conversation. That was one of the CEOs I really loved about becoming a CEO. I had no idea the CEO network existed out there of other folks who were so helpful. And so that's been just time and time again, throughout my career, of how I get a hand up from different CEOs. But this particular CEO taught me about the book Inbound Marketing by the HubSpot guys.

Clint Betts

Oh, yeah.

John Leh

I always forget their name. Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah. They founded HubSpot. And the whole concept was that if you spend money on advertising, that's great. If somebody's giving you money, you've got your own money, or you're generating it, spend it on advertising, and you get inbound traffic, then you can sell them your stuff. But if you don't have that or if you want to be more efficient, content marketing is a way that you can get people to come to your site forever and ever. Once you write a blog post, it's out on the internet forever.

And so sooner or later, it could be 10 years from now. I get traffic from blog posts I wrote in 2014 and 2015. And so that book teaches you how to really create that super highway into your site. And I've been working on that super highway system, that interstate highway system now, for many years. And that book, which took me an afternoon to read, is still something I think about all the time here in our business.

Clint Betts

How are you thinking about AI? How is AI changing your business? How is it changing the industry?

John Leh

Good question. So, as part of this awards process this year... So two years ago, I would hear AI during the awards or these reviews that I do or machine learning and things like that here or there, but it was something that they would talk about. It was hard to see. It was easy to bluff. That was what I thought about it for years. This year, it was different. This year, I saw example after example of AI and learning systems changing everything, quite frankly.

So before my degree was in instructional technology, it would take two or three months to build an hour course. Now, you can build one in an hour using AI. You can give it parameters of what you want the course to be. You can upload videos and PDFs or point them to a folder of all your particular product and knowledge content or something like that. You can say, I want this in modules. I want lessons, I want pre-tests, I want a gamification strategy. I want to be able to ask the professional questions. I want to be able to have group assignments. I want a study guide. Go, build this for me right now. And AI will build that course. This is in ChatGPT; this is like it is up here. And it'll basically build that course for you.

And so now training and development professionals everywhere, like myself, are used to doing this in weeks and months and are now having to change their whole paradigm of thinking. How do we use this technology? You don't have the leisure of saying, I don't like it, or It's not as good because if you're using it for just cost savings, well, maybe you do. But if you're using it for a competitive advantage like I was describing, you don't have that luxury. So you have to learn how to do that. So the learning system vendors are all innovating not just on generative AI developing courses but also looking at the data and analytics and finding trends. Do an administrative test where you have learner bots that you can ask, say, tell me this or tell me that, and it'll go find the Learning for you. Go look at the videos and find the point in 6 minutes and 38 seconds, just to tell you.

These are all things that are here today. Administratively, it's super cool. You can go to an LMS, and you could say, okay, I want to look at Pennsylvania versus the state of Utah inside the city populations for only my managers that have more than 10 years. I also want to see what their employees' compliance is. Show me that now. You can do that in a voice command, and it's going to look at the data and come out there and, poof, show you this. That used to take what I just described right there; it might take somebody a week to put together that report. Now you can just tell-

Clint Betts

It's magic.

John Leh

I like it; it's Star Trek. So, in my industry, that's changing everything. So, for me, that covers the industry and tries to tell everybody and simplify it; it's changing everything. Because I've got to learn all this to figure out how I can understand it, to see if I can simplify it and tell somebody what's going on easier, and that's my challenge. So that's in the business of the business. But just using AI, I mean ChatGPT, has become part of my core stack. I'm in it every day. There's no way I can go a day without it anymore because it helps me with this, that, or the other. Not for doing stuff for me but for helping me think through things I think is how.

Clint Betts

Particularly for you, I imagine, as a research assistant, it's incredible.

John Leh

Oh, yeah.

Clint Betts

You kind of have this research assistant that costs 20 bucks a month.

John Leh

Yeah, that's exactly that. I'll say, go find me this. Go find me examples of that. This or that. Once again, that's the third time I've said that now in this conversation, it used to take me a day or a week or two weeks or an intern or something. And now it's seconds. I'll be like, oh, that's great. Now, is that the answer perfect? No. But does that get me down the path? Yeah. And that's what I need on that step-by-step process.

Clint Betts

How is that going to affect jobs in your industry? I imagine if a lot of this stuff can be automated... Or even I'm thinking there's those AI bots where it's not even a real person, but it looks like a real person whose teaching the course and things like that. How are you anticipating it affecting the industry from an employment standpoint?

John Leh

I think it's going to blow up a whole bunch of stuff, Clint, unfortunately. Like every technological revolution, there's going to be casualties. And I think there's going to be a lot of casualties for that. Once again, I will go back to that instructional design example from that course. It's really hard to pay that instructional designer now $100,000 or $80,000 when AI can get it to 80-90%. So who you're going to pay 80, 90, 100, or $120,000 is the person that can take it from 80 to 100. The person that has the broader vision.

So I think a lot of the functional positions, kind of like the functional factory positions, got eliminated over the last few decades. I do feel that, unfortunately, that type of technical displacement or unemployment is probably inevitable. I think the same thing happened when mobile devices came, and the same thing happened with social media, and the same thing happened with the internet. And so, as a professional, as a CEO, it's your responsibility to get out in front of that. Get out in front of it now because if you wait two years and try to get out in front of it'll be too late. It's moving too fast.

Clint Betts

Yeah. What was the market like? I know the economy at the beginning of the year was a little shaky in some industries. Actually, it's kind of good in some. It's kind of like this weird economy where half the industries were in a recession, half of them weren't. It was just an interesting year with a lot of uncertainty, obviously, leading up to the election in the United States. But there were elections in 2025 in other countries as well. So there's some uncertainty around that. How did it look at the beginning, and how are you forecasting it for 2025?

John Leh

So our industry has been around, as I said, for a long time. For 30 or 40 years. But when the pandemic came, for the first time ever, we were heroes. We were heroes. I mean, it was hard to believe that instructional designers with virtual e-learning training would be heroes. But everybody needed it, not just for compliance but to get through the changes that were happening at the time. And so if you were a learning tech company that happened to enter that pandemic and didn't exit that pandemic 2, 3, 5 times the size, you did poorly. Everybody did really well. All ships rise on a high tide.

And so that's what happened. So that was the heyday. But what happened is after all those systems came in, it became more measured. And I think that's where we were at the end of the year. There's no longer hair on fire; I have to have a new system today. It's now, okay, I have a system, and I'm using it strategically, and I want to take it to that... So, we are taking just a more measured, structured, scientific approach to switching systems to upgrading systems. And so I think overall what that's done is it made some vendors pause. Things aren't as great. But from my perspective, I think they're great. What's different is that you have to earn your sale again. So there's a lot more intensity in the sales process. There's a lot more intensity in customer satisfaction. There's a lot more intensity in wrapping services around the software solution to add more value.

And so I think by the market pulling back just a little bit, has caused the best solutions to become a lot better. The best solutions though, aren't struggling for sure. But the market can't support a thousand at all times, especially... Well, it can't support a thousand so there's going to be winners and losers like there is an every market.

Clint Betts

Yeah, exactly. Finally, we end every interview with the same question, and that is at CEO.com, we believe the chances one gives is just as important as the chances one takes. When you hear that, who gave you a chance to get you to where you are today?

John Leh

So, I joined the Army at 18. I put myself through GI Bill college. I always look at myself as I pulled myself up by the bootstraps and made it happen. And for a lot of it, I think it was that way. I always felt like I didn't necessarily get handed... But at one time, I finished my undergraduate, and I had okay grades. I wanted to get into this graduate program of instructional technology, which changed my whole life. And I got into the program, but what I needed was a graduate assistantship. If I get a graduate assistantship, I can stay in the program. If I didn't, I had to get a real job.

And so I sat in that interview with the director of the program, Dr. Hank Bailey, at the time, and I basically told him all that and told him what a go-getter I was. And if he gave me a chance with that graduate assistantship, I'd get a 4.0. And he said I'll think about it. He came back and gave it to me, and I got a 4.0, and 30 years have gone by. So, I think that was the biggest leg up that I had gotten in my life at that point. And quite frankly, it changed everything. I mean, I was so lucky to fall into that program. And because of that program, I'm gainfully employed today. So that was a big bunch of taking in my life.

Clint Betts

That's incredible. John, thank you so much for coming on the show.

John Leh

You're welcome.

Clint Betts

Congratulations and everything. Tell everybody how they read your stuff and your podcasts and things like that. I want to make sure that we get that information out there as well.

John Leh

Easiest thing to do is just go to our website, talentedlearning.com, and everything is there. The different podcasts, the blog, all of our resources for learning system buyers. Most of it's free. 90% of it's free on there and you can use it to your heart's delight, and I hope that you do.

Clint Betts

Awesome. Thanks, John. Really appreciate it, man.

John Leh

Thanks, Clint. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.

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