How Yoann Helps Others Reach Their Professional Goals

1. Who are you?

French born, Yoann helps others reach their goals through online knowledge sharing. He has managed business transformation projects during 10 years in international ERP projects for Cosmetics, Fashion and Logistics industries, and is a digital nomad for 6 years, having completed his first year long world tour in 2019 and actually waiting in Warsaw, Poland to start his next one.

2. What’s your course all about?

He creates business optimization courses around SAP ERP, and his most successful course is about corporate materials management, the principles and best practices behind procurement, production, and physical sales processes.

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3. What makes you an expert in this field?

During his career, he has worked in many positions, from data analyst through corporate trainer to project manager on worldwide business transformation projects for world leaders in their fields. Supply Chain Management has always been an objective of these projects, and he had the opportunity to learn, improve and teach a lot about procurement.

4. What is the transformation your course offers to the students?

The course he creates helps students get an understanding of what matters for businesses that want to get global and apply the industry best practices, skills that are rarely taught in standard schools, but are necessary as you want to climb the corporate ladder and improve your business processes.

Ultimately, by following other courses and full learning paths, the certificates delivered will help students get better jobs, promotions, or optimize their own businesses.

5. Which market does your online course serve and how did you get into it?

This course is designed to train corporate workers that want to become more valuable procurement specialists within their companies. Having helped various companies’ skilling up their procurement teams during the ERP implementation projects, the skills shared are coming from a long experience of answering questions about this topic.

6. Why is it important to you to serve this market?

It is important to get the understanding given by this course for anyone that has a role in procurement, because these processes are at the basis of company savings, improved production, and ultimately better sales.

7. Describe the moment when you decided to create your own course. Where were you, what happened and why did you decide to do it?

He decided to create online courses right after he left his corporate job, having reached the top of the ladder, and having completed several corporate training projects. He understood that this knowledge was difficult to get, as companies are being charged a lot for skills necessary for simple good business. Therefore, as he started creating his own online business, he decided to become a digital trainer and bring these skills to more people.

8. How did you overcome doubtful moments during your course creation journey?

When creating courses, it is quite common for trainers to reflect on themselves and doubt their credibility, why are they the ones teaching these skills? However, very few people were at the source of wheel’s discovery – yet each one of us is one day in the position to teach kids how it works. Therefore, whenever creating courses, it is important to try to reflect as if the student was there: before anyone tells you properly what a wheel is and how it works, you might not figure it out by yourself. And, as it happens, nearly anyone can teach you that skill. That is where, as an instructor, it is important to remember that the role is there: making complicated things simple and accessible.

9. What are some of your tricks to deal with imposter syndrome?

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10. How long did it take you to create your course?

It takes him on average a day to create a one-hour course now, but that one, one of his first, took him close to two days, as it is a combination of presentation and video recordings, and at first it was difficult to get the audio and video correctly recorded, especially regarding audio quality: a good volume with no interference is important, and any misspelling leads to start the whole recording all over again.

This slowly gets easier as you record more courses and get used to prepare what you are going to say in your head, to get a more fluent audio flow.

11. How did your first launch go?

The first launch of the course was not as expected, as creating a course is not even everything: after creation, you must market it to get your course to reach potential students and turn them into subscribers. This can days or even weeks, and at the beginning it can be frustrating to have put all this work and heart into a project, without getting anything that looks like a positive feedback.

12. How do you structure your launches in general now?

After this initial experience, every new course is now published alongside social media sharing: a teaser video on YouTube, shared on LinkedIn and Facebook as well, and a guest post written on a relevant website, focusing on one of the course’s slides.

13. Where does your traffic come from?

Most traffic comes from these articles that are published about subtopics of the courses, and that turns visitors searching for that topic into potential new students as they want to dig deeper, learn more about the topic and probably get certified for the corresponding learning path.

14. Which content do you like producing the most?

The most interesting content to create being guest posts, because it is always possible to correct any mistake afterwards, and it is easy to adapt: a video creation or audio recording that has already been published can hardly be changed, or usually at the cost of losing momentum as it will be published as new content.

15. What online course platform are you using?

He publishes courses on Michael Management website, an online portal specialized in business skills in general and especially in SAP, with plenty of courses on the topic and services provided around for students and corporations, such as system access.

16. What is amazing about this platform?

Their portal is easy to use, it does not try to hide any cost, and makes it simple for students to interact with instructors.

After having been in contact with various other international instructors, what is missing would be the possibility to share courses revenue, by either co-creating courses, or by translating courses created by one instructor into another instructor’s language.

17. Which features do you wish this platform would have?

Despite not giving the best commissions, this platform has the advantage of being well-known for more than only courses, as they are selling system access as well, and the most important is that they are selling full portal courses access on which instructors each get a share, proportional to their courses attendance. It makes it easier as a contributor to get subscriptions, as course creators are not necessarily good marketers, nor have the network for that.

18. Why did you choose this platform over other platforms?

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19. Which other tools do you use to keep your online business running?

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20. How many students have you served so far?

With 3 courses created in both English and French, it has been possible to reach close to 400 students enrolled in these business courses over 2 years.

21. How much revenue have you created during your first launch, and ongoing?

So far, each course has brought about $1000 income in total, for an average of 2 days’ work per course variation, with no cost to let them run online, as the publishing company takes care of that – after creation, it is pure passive income!

22. What are you running costs to keep the online course business going?

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23. What are some of the biggest mistakes you made along the way?

The biggest mistake has been to underestimate the potential of these courses, and not having created more of them with a global view: full school or learning paths instead of simple standalone courses.

24. How has your business changed since implementing an online course into the business model?

Creating online courses has the advantage of keeping alive a professional link with former businesses and colleagues, as they are targeted to similar audiences. It helps keeping a foot in the corporate world while taking more risks in other professional attempts.

25. How has your personal life changed?

On the personal side, it allows for acquaintances to keep thinking of us digital entrepreneurs as somebody sane they can understand; it is easier to refer to us as “online course creators” than as content creators or affiliate marketers. 

26. What’s the greatest transformational story you can tell about one (or more) of your students?

A former colleague, a client, from when he was a consultant, with whom he kept contact on LinkedIn, once saw his online course creation sharing, and came to talk to him, about 3 years after their last contact that was purely professional and told him his story.

He got fired as the implementation project was over and did not want to go back to his home country, having moved for the project from a plant in the UK to the headquarters in Switzerland, and being settled there for several years, was looking into getting more skills and a certification, in the field of these courses to get a new – and better – job in the same area.

Being referred to the course’s portal, he used some of his unemployment time to get more knowledge through these courses, and he now have found what he was looking for thanks to these courses, a new and better job without having to relocate!

27. If you could use a time machine and send yourself back to the time before you started out, what advice would you give yourself, knowing what you know now?

Knowing all that, it would have been better creating more courses, earlier, about more topics, and probably even a personal online school – but the most important is now, and what we can do now is to create courses as soon as possible, about the topics we know without realizing we do, and help others skill up and reach their own goals!

28. What is your million dollar piece of advice to those who are just getting started in their online course journey OR for those who are looking to scale?

Do not wait to create content.