The goal of SmallBusinessFounder.com is to to be honest about what it takes to run a business. This episode of Train Like You Listen is focused on what it takes to survive in the business of learning.
Only ~35% of small businesses make it to their 10th year. – U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2024
What does it really take to build a lasting business? Brian Washburn and I attempt to pull back the curtain on 10 years of grit, unexpected pivots, and hard-won lessons. No sugarcoating; just real stories from the trenches of small business entrepreneurship. The episode serves as both a celebration of our milestone and practical advice for aspiring entrepreneurs in Learning & Development or consulting.
Introduction to the Founders of Endurance Learning
Brian Washburn: Hello everyone. Welcome to a very special Endurance Learning podcast. I’m Brian Washburn. I am the co-founder and CEO of a company called Endurance Learning. Today I’m joined by Tim Waxenfelter, who is the other co-founder of Endurance Learning. Hi Tim. We’re gonna focus today on 10 years in business and creating e-learning and other engaging learning experiences for a variety of customers.
At a time when you know, half of small businesses in the US close after five years, and the average lifespan is eight and a half years, we wanna take a moment and celebrate the idea that we’ve been around for 10 years and reflect on some of those lessons learned and, and maybe even share those lessons learned, hoping that other folks who are building consultancies or other L&D professionals who are thinking about launching their own business, or perhaps those who have already launched something, they might be able to find some transferrable lessons when it comes to building a business or maybe even some things to avoid.
So, hi, Tim. Welcome. Anything you wanna add to the introduction?
Celebrating 10 Years as a Small Business
Tim Waxenfelter: Yeah, the wave that was for everyone else. Not for you. So no offense. I mean, I like you too, but I wanted to say hi to everyone else. Yeah, I think the only thing I would add is that I really do believe that we have something unique to offer. You know, that’s stat around eight and a half years and there’s some other stats with different numbers, and if we were a restaurant, it would be even more amazing that we are around for 10 years.
You know, I tried to avoid those numbers as we were going through the 10 years, so I only wanna pay attention to those stats now that we’ve passed those milestones. And I think if you and I looked at where we were at at eight and a half years I think we were really not wanting to pay attention to those stats.
But that’s one of the things that I think is I don’t want to give us too much credit for this, but that it is unique is that we’re. very comfortable sharing those stories of successes and failures.
Failure in the Early Years
Tim Waxenfelter: I think back to a podcast years ago where you and one of our colleagues went out to, I think Chicago and played a game, and we loved that game.
Brian Washburn: The Board Board Game. Yes.
Tim Waxenfelter: It was amazing. It was, we did it, it was one of our earliest customers. We did this series of sessions, two-hour sessions. It was amazing. And this was by far the best one. It was so exciting for us. We probably broke our budget on the design of the board game. Complete failure. And I think you may have, even, I think you, we didn’t do a podcast, but I think you and that colleague did a, I think I interviewed you for a blog post while you were both on your flights on the way home, about our failures.
And I think that that speaks to, we want other people to be successful. And we’ve, we’ve said from the beginning that we wanna share what we know with the field. So we want to be of the field. It’s something I learned from one of my previous companies, the value is being of the field not separate from it.
So we share what we know and yeah, I’m hoping, you know, we can share a lot of that on this podcast. And I think speaking of that, speaking of the very beginning, you’ve got the better memory of the two of us. So how did we start?
Origin Story in the Business of Learning
When we started, we didn’t know what kind of business Endurance Learning would ultimately become. We only knew we would be in the business of learning. As you’ll see, the shape of that changed over time.
Brian Washburn: Yeah, so this is a funny question– Thinking back, you know, ’cause 10 years, there’s a lot of stuff that happens in 10 years. And just taking a look at our company now, I mean probably 80% of what we do is elearning development. And then we work with organizations for instructor-led and classroom training.
We do train-the-trainer programs. We have all this stuff. And when I think back to like the origin story of endurance learning, none of that would–
Tim Waxenfelter: I am gonna pause you right there. That was absolutely the vision, that we were gonna be 80% an elearning company. That was what we were gonna do. I said from the beginning, this is where our skillset is. No. Don’t. Don’t go all revisionist history on me, Brian.
Brian Washburn: Yeah, well, yes. For somebody who had never used Storyline before we started Endurance Learning. So the, so I was on the bus, I can — I picture it still to this day, I was on the bus going to work. Working on like a lesson plan or something like that, just on my, I was using an iPad.
And I was like, Ooh, this is really neat.I can, I can actually do work on the bus. And beyond just kind of using a Word document, I was trying to think there a better way? Like could we, could I–? Could I create an app or did I know somebody who might be able to help me out and bring this vision to reality?
To create an app that would help people to put together lesson plans that were better, more effective. And this is what I thought the unicorn idea was going to be, right? We were, we were going to create an app that helped people put together lesson plans better, because everybody needs to put together training. We were gonna sell it for, I don’t know, $4.99 in the app store. And we were gonna retire after maybe one or two years.
So that was, that was my original idea. My original vision. Called you up, Tim, and said, “Hey, I’m gonna be in DC for this conference. I’d love to sit down and talk with you.” And somehow I, I sold this idea to you too.
Tim Waxenfelter: I think my first feedback was, it’s not gonna be an app. Can’t be an app. And that’s where I got, I got way into the technology, But I, I loved the, the type of thinking and I thought, “oh, this is great. We can, we can identify the learning styles that people–“. That was one of our original things that shows how long ago and our own enlightenment since then.
But we were gonna identify the learning styles in this app.
Brian Washburn: Yes. An app that helped us with learning styles. Are they auditory, visual, kin–. This was, was all before we stumbled upon Will Thalheimer’s work.
Tim Waxenfelter: Yeah.
Brian Washburn: We stumbled upon research that– of some of these things that are now debunked. So, yep. We, we had a design for a beautiful app.
Tim Waxenfelter: So that’s a good story about how we started. But that wasn’t, we didn’t have a business, right? So we didn’t–
Brian Washburn: No. Yeah.
Tim Waxenfelter: There wasn’t anything there yet.
Brian Washburn: We–
Tim Waxenfelter: What was the transition point? I have a memory of you writing a business plan and me saying you don’t need a business plan.
Brian Washburn: Yes.
Tim Waxenfelter: But I don’t remember.
I don’t remember where the conversation went from that point.
Brian Washburn: No. So I, yeah, I talked with other people that ran small businesses. Somebody suggested that I read a book called “The E Myth Revisited” which I got all into. And there’s like a step-by-step process of creating how to be an entrepreneur, right? And creating a business plan and creating an org chart.
And first of all, it’s just gonna be your name all over the org chart, and then, slowly as you hire other people, you take your name out and you put other people into specific roles. And all of that. You said, you know, creating a mission statement and a vision statement and organizational values and, and all of that stuff that goes into, you know, mature organizations.
And you said, “I don’t think we– At some point we’ll need that. Right now is not that point.” And so we, we kicked around the idea of, of a business for several years before we actually launched something. I was looking at a blog post today that was from 2012, so three years before we even formally organized something.
And down at the bottom of the resource that people could download was copyright 2012 Endurance Learning. So clearly we had an idea that this is gonna be something. But you know, as we started to wrestle with this idea for a while and, and really focus on this app or the not an app type of thing at some point you got excited about it and took the plunge.
Yeah. And so that was I think our, you know, you kind of buried the lead here, but really we, we did start the business with the idea of Soapbox. We had a different name for it at the time, and every once in a while it pops up in my documents, the name Perdisco.
But we, we had this idea and we wanted to see if we could build something and I spent a lot of, I think it was Thursday nights that I, I would stay after work and go to the Panera across the street from my office and code and just try to build out this pro prototypes of a product. And we just kept building. We did a bunch of meetings in person. We met in Chicago once and tested some things out, tested the concept.
And you know, it, I think it’s always hard when people think about like, how do I leave my job? And there are a lot of different stories. You and I have each have a different story. We have contractors who’ve left their jobs and have different stories. For me, it was a good time for me to leave my company and to make the break and start doing this.
I’d saved up enough and I was able to go full-time. Your story looked a little different, didn’t it?
Yeah, I, I have never had enough money to feel like I’m comfortable covering, you know, six months, eight months, 10 months worth of living expenses before something.
Tim Waxenfelter: It was a short, it was a short window of time.
Brian Washburn: Right? So I did, I I, I had a very different kind of philosophy and attitude and you — And, and people, for people who aren’t familiar with this I’m in Seattle.
Tim is in DC so we were going to do something that was remote. And so when he says that we got together in person, every once in a while it– That literally is every once in a while. So we would, you know, kind of use our own personal funds to meet up in Chicago or in DC or whatever it might be in order to get some of these ideas going.
But for me, I. I, you know, I had a wife and kids and we realized that we needed to treat our spouses and our families as if they were shareholders for something like this and make sure that, that everybody was aligned with what our plans were. And so for me. I needed to be able to replace my income to some degree, almost to a hundred percent in order to be able to really take the plunge full time.
In the meantime, while you worked on coding this became kind of a, a side hustle for me, right? So I would work in the evenings and the weekends on, on, you know, whether it was working on this app or when we realized that you were gonna run out of money before we actually had something to put into the market. We had to come up with something else, another way that we could start to generate some revenue.
Our First Customer
It is great to say you are in the business of learning and development, but the reality is that you’ll do any work you’re capable of doing if the customer is willing to pay.
Tim Waxenfelter: I love– You’ve asked, I think you reminded me of this and of a story. I was at my parents’ house and all good conversations with my dad come over, we’ll say “a bottle of wine” late into the night. And you know, I had been up to this point, I’d really been supported well by my wife who said like, you know, we have this savings.
This is why we have it. I want you to be happy. I want you to do what’s gonna make you happy. And I was talking to my dad and he, he was a, he’s a high school teacher, right? He’s spent his years teaching. He’s this really smart dude. But when I would talk about business stuff, it would often be with my mom ’cause she worked– she was a nurse, but then she went into consulting.
And so, you know, my dad often wasn’t the one to have like the insights on this stuff, but boy he surprised me one day and he said, where’s your first customer gonna come from? I thought “Uh oh.” I don’t have an answer to that question.
Brian Washburn: No, it was a great question. We have–
Tim Waxenfelter: We really didn’t, and I feel like I, I feel like I hemmed and hawed and I thought, go, go get us another red.
Brian Washburn: Right?! What a, what a silly question. We’re gonna have this app and people are just gonna flock to it. Right?
Tim Waxenfelter: Right.
Brian Washburn: That was our thought. And then when that question came, it was like, oh, how did we not think of this question and how do we not have an answer for it?
Tim Waxenfelter: Yeah.
Brian Washburn: Where did our first customer come from?
Tim Waxenfelter: So, I still can’t believe this ’cause I was never, I was always felt like I was a good salesperson if I could be kind of in the middle, if I didn’t have to close, then I didn’t have to prospect. So I was always really good at like, talking people through everything that we have to offer, etc. once a prospect was warmed up. But we didn’t, we didn’t have that and neither one of us was good at prospecting or closing.
I was like, “uh oh, this is not good.” We’re both good at talking about it once it’s happening. So. I’ll bet I could still find the spreadsheets if I really looked. I did a bunch of research about associations ’cause we thought we can sell this product to associations and if not, maybe we can do some training work for them.
And I sent out a lot of cold emails to these associations and I got mostly quiet, no responses. But one guy in Virginia, and I was living in DC at the time, rejected me, but it was the most thoughtful rejection I had gotten and I thought, this is the first conversation that I’ve had. Like, so I responded to him and I said, would you be open to going out, you know, getting coffee at some point?
So I made the trek. He said, yes. I made the trek out to Virginia. I had no sense for how this conversation would go. And I think what he liked was our grit more than anything else. That we were willing to kind of put ourselves out there and try something and he gave us the opportunity. And I don’t do a whole lot of classroom training.
I can, but you do. And from the very beginning, we knew if we could pay, if we could get someone to pay you to fly out here. And so you and I could be in the same place and work on strategy and building the business. So we did that. He paid. That was our– I think that was our first paying customer.
Brian Washburn: It was, It was. I still have the check around here somewhere. It was $2,000.
Tim Waxenfelter: Which, which is crazy. You know, you can’t save the dollar bill anymore, like George Jefferson. You have to save the check.
Growth Lives Outside Your Comfort Zone
Tim Waxenfelter: But yeah, that, and I, I really, I think the thing that– I’ve had the conversation with several people, I would say a lot of people who are starting a business or trying to launch a product, that the thing you have to do is be uncomfortable.
If you’re not uncomfortable, it’s never gonna work because you’ve been comfortable being working in a job that’s really comfortable. You know, maybe not today. There’s a lot going on in the world. It’s not as comfortable, but in general it’s still pretty comfortable compared to, and then you, you get unemployment when someone lays you off, when you leave a job, there’s no unemployment, there’s no promise of anything.
You’ve gotta make yourself uncomfortable. And that process, and I– I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to do it. When we were really uncomfortable is when I feel like we ended up being the most successful.
Brian Washburn: Yeah, I, I would agree with that. You know, thinking back on that and then thinking how, how did we ever turn that $2,000 into this business?
Tim Waxenfelter: $2,000. Man. We were, we were swimming in it.
Brian Washburn: Yeah.
Tim Waxenfelter: That paid for nothing.
Networking Our Way to First Revenue
Brian Washburn: Or you were swimming in it. Right. So that was like kind of the agreement, was that we would try to figure out how do we start to bring in more revenue so that you could continue to work on this. While I, I had still had health insurance and, and a salary from another organization and was able to do this in the evenings and weekends.
And you know, we we started to land a few other customers. We, we put this initiative out there at one point that we labeled 50 by 31 where I–you know, ’cause I was the person who had the connections and the contacts when it came to the learning and development field. And so 50 by 31 was, we had a spreadsheet.
And our, my, our goal and you, you did reach out to some people, but we knew that most of this–
Tim Waxenfelter: Maybe like five.
Brian Washburn: Yeah. Was that we had to reach out to a total of 50 people by the end of July, so in 31 days. And all of those conversations, I had one conversation with a former colleague from another job that I had had like several jobs ago. And he said, you know, there’s this guy who I– a really good friend of mine, he’s a chef in Minnesota and I think that he might be looking for some help. And so we connected with, with this chef and his business manager, and we did like a PowToon project that was maybe $700 right, a $700 project.
Tim Waxenfelter: Yeah.
Brian Washburn: But we started to get something and another, at another point, somebody had reached out to me on LinkedIn who I had met in my Peace Corps days. Our time didn’t overlap, but I think I was leaving as he was just coming into the Peace Corps.
And so we were connected on LinkedIn and at one point he reached out to me and said, “Hey, we have a training role open on my team.” And I said, I’m not really looking for another job right now, but if you need some help if you need a helping hand, if you need an extra set of hands while you look for that right fit, we’d be happy to fill in.
And so that turned into another contract and that’s where we started to, to do some, to dabble in the world of elearning. And then at some point I actually started to land some big projects or some big clients or what we at that point considered big, right?
So I had a former boss that set, that sent us an RFP that we were, that we ended up winning. And that was a $20,000 project.
The Million Dollar Blog Post
Brian Washburn: And then around the same time somebody from Michelin, so the tire company came to us through a blog–
Tim Waxenfelter: I’m sporting it today.
Brian Washburn: There you go! Through a blog post and said, I think that this is really interesting: Do you know somebody who would be able to help us put something together? And that was another $20,000 project. So all of a sudden we are swimming in these $20,000 projects. And I reflected on this and I said, Tim, when we are roommates, the year after I, we graduated from college.
My annual salary was $20,000. And so now we, we have these two projects that are like, it’s one, i, I work for a company called Callahan and Associates, so it’s one, it’s the equivalent of one Callahan, a full year of working for Callahan and Associates. So that’s kind of our, our, our unit of measure now.
But we started to run into these projects and we realized if we did a really good job on the first project, there were opportunities for other work with these same organizations. And that’s where the flywheel started to go to a point where we call that blog post that Michelin came to us the Million Dollar blog post because it was a blog post that I had written. There was no fee to sign up for the blog. I had been blogging for several years and that one blog post caught the attention of a potential customer that turned into recurring projects and revenue that totaled well over a million dollars in, in the lifetime of that relationship.
So that’s where we started to really grow, and I was able to leave my other job and focus on this full time.
Tim Waxenfelter: Can I, can I ask you two questions around that blog post? And you may not, you may, you may say no to one. You may not have an answer to the other. So the first one is, do you remember what the blog post was?
Brian Washburn: You know, it was, I think it had an infographic in it. It was something about, like kind of the what leads to successful or profitable training. And so there, I have a vague recollection of it. It did somehow some other people picked it up and it had been circulating it, and so he, that particular person from Michelin didn’t even find it directly from our blog post. It was linked from something else.
Tim Waxenfelter: Right. So the other question is, can I tell the story about what you did with the blog post?
Brian Washburn: Yeah.
Tim Waxenfelter: after that question?
Brian Washburn: Go for it.
Tim Waxenfelter: Has enough time passed and nobody will know who the other people were that were involved. You called me up right after that, and again, at this point you were still working a full-time job and said, we just got this comment.
Should I turn off, should I turn off comments on the blog post so nobody else responds because there were several responses from other people that were vendors saying, “I can help you with that.”
Brian Washburn: Yep.
Tim Waxenfelter: And we were like, comments closed. We don’t, we don’t need any discussion. You said, you think it’s okay that I did that?
I’m like, “yes, that is our blog.” They do not need to be commenting.
Brian Washburn: So two people actually did reach out to this person and engaged him in conversations, and I mean, life could have– Literally, life could have been very different had that person been uh, engaged with, with the other people. He actually said thank you for your comments and your outreach, I actually would like to talk to Brian about this.
Tim Waxenfelter: Yeah. And that for context for us it’s, it was life changing. For our company. I mean, that was over six years worth of growth as a company working with, starting with one very small project at Michelin and eventually touching every division of Michelin North America. We did truck tires, we did large machines.
We did underground mining, we did aircraft, we did everything that was related to that. And not just about tires, really about sales, about customer support. Every topic imaginable. It gave us such great experience and a learning over that time. It was a big, it was a big change for us.
Brian Washburn: You know, and, and I think this is where we get into the, the conversation where this went from a, a concept, right? The app which turned into kind of a web-based tool, which turned into, that’s kind of our passion project, but now we have to start working with paying customers. And that turned into, we have enough work to, to put food on both of our tables, and then some. Maybe we need to start to hire some people.
And all of that snowballed into this is no longer just about kind of learning and development and lesson planning or elearning development or whatever it was. It really, kind of, started to get into the transition from a passion for learning and development to how do we run a business?
And I tell people all the time, I never, ever wanted to run my own business. And in fact. Endurance Learning would not be here for, for 10 years or more this not been a partnership as opposed to a, a solopreneurship. So I don’t, do you wanna talk a little bit about that transition from going from a passion for learning and development to the need to actually focus on running a business?
From a Concept to a Business
Tim Waxenfelter: I do, but I think we have taken up enough time today. I think we should make that a separate topic, and I think we have enough to talk about because not only did we add other people, you know, we always talked about us as a Venn diagram of skill sets. We had an overlap, but there were a lot of differences between what we knew and the experiences we had, but there’s so much more around the team we’ve built that I think it’s worth another full episode.
Brian Washburn: Fair enough. Fair enough. So I guess there you have it folks. There’s your cliffhanger ending and maybe a reason to come back. So I think that the next time when we, when we get together, we’re gonna talk about this idea of how do you go from kind of a concept and, and a passion for the subject matter, whether that’s learning & development or whatever you’re building a business on, into an actual business. So come back, join us and we’ll take that conversation further. Tim, thanks a lot for just kind of taking a stroll down memory lane with me and talking about some of these things.
Tim Waxenfelter: Now I’m waving goodbye to you.
Brian Washburn: All right. Bye everyone.
