If you’re a live trainer offering pre-license education, you’re sitting on an incredible opportunity that many overlook: selling your own continuing education (CE) courses instead of referring students to an affiliate. While affiliate programs may seem easy to earn passive income, the long-term benefits of owning your CE offerings far outweigh the short-term convenience. By creating and selling your own CE courses, you fully control your client base, ensuring steady revenue and long-term financial stability.
Let’s talk more about some of the pros and cons, as far as the pros go, one of the most significant advantages of selling CE courses is that your pre-license students are your future CE clients.
Most learners will need continuing education, and this cohort can be very profitable over time, especially if you add new learners to the business from your live training. Instead of sending them elsewhere, why not keep them in your ecosystem? You’ve already built trust, so they are far more likely to buy from you rather than shop around for alternatives.
These clients will be with you for years, paying you consistently to maintain their licenses. Unlike pre-license training, a one-time transaction, CE courses create a recurring revenue stream. Your CE sales will keep growing in the background as you continue your live training sessions. Over time, this builds a reliable income source that requires less effort than constantly attracting new pre-license students.
Shuttering the business or hoping you can find another live trainer with energy to take the company over may be your only hope. Even if you decide to retire or scale back on live training, owning CE courses ensures you still generate income. Instead of walking away from the industry entirely, you’ll have a “gold mine” of recurring revenue that continues working for you. This allows you to transition out of live training on your own terms without losing the financial security you’ve built over the years.
Brand recognition is another benefit of keeping both exam prep and ce under one roof. Every satisfied customer is an opportunity for future referrals. Each one of these clients are also a source for referrals. These raving fans not only become future renewable businesses, but they help you further scale and grow both exam prep and the ce sides of the company. Where will your next corporate account come from? Will it be a ce client? Lets hope so!
Bringing your content in-house can massively increase your future earning potential, especially if you ever plan an exit. Think of how much more it would be worth if you had a substantial CE business, what if you could increase earnings by 20-30% with the addition of a CE business? Education businesses can easily earn multiples of 5x and as much as 10x EBITDA, so even a 5-10% increase in revenue can mean hundreds of thousands and potentially millions in a successful exit.
There are some downsides to owning your own content, such as:
With the right technology and content partners, you can mitigate some, if not most, of these risks.
CE clients typically require the least amount of support, and using a platform like Acadio can help you reduce your dependence on adding additional staff by providing better support tools and a simplified learner experience.
The cost to license and maintain content will be your most significant toll, however, this cost is less issue as you scale up this part of the business. Keep in mind CE business is like a subscription business, every month, you are adding new revenue to this pool of business
If you do not want to write new content, many publishers will license content for a very modest licensing fee. These publishers will also include annual updates to this content as well. Instead of earning a 15% affiliate fee, you can negotiate a 15% licensing fee to a publisher, keeping the other 85% of the sale. What if you made 5x more per CE client and did that year after year? How quickly would this add up?
Another way to reduce costs is to use a single purpose-built platform like Acadio. Acadio is one of the few platforms made to handle exam prep, CE, and training. This means fewer technology partners, reduced overhead, and the ability to service all of your learners through a seamless single point of access. Simplifying the learner experience is one of the best things any organization can do to save time and reduce workload.
Before signing a contract with an LMS provider, you must know whether the LMS will accommodate regulator requirements. Can it handle reporting to one or more regulators where your students need course reporting? If your students self-report, this is less of an issue, however, you will also need a way to issue certificates and handle custom data fields. These are all features of the Acadio platform.
While launching new CE courses may seem daunting, having the right content and technology partner can help scale growth and increase your company's value to prospective buyers. Owning your CE courses gives you greater autonomy over your business and eliminates the need to split earnings with affiliate partners instead of losing revenue to someone else’s program. In this scenario, you keep your hard-earned profits and solidify your position as the go-to expert in your industry. Don’t let this chance slip away—take ownership of your CE offerings and build a business that serves you long into the future. If you have questions on how Acadio can help, please click here for more information.
