Team training is hit-or-miss. Businesses either choose a generic version that doesn’t directly address their industry or a vertical-specific program that’s so complex the team fails to fully implement it. Jeremy Wall has a simple solution. He’s the co-founder and CEO of GoalMakers, a learning platform that bills itself as the 10-week MBA. Jason chats with Jeremy about the company’s ongoing evolution, its hybrid learning environment, and its secret to providing cost-effective facilitation.
“I almost look at it as a blessing that my background wasn’t in curriculum development [or] eLearning,” confides Jeremy, adding, “Otherwise, I would’ve been anchored to this is how we’ve always done it.” Instead, he began his career in wearable tech and product development, miles away from the rigid world of curriculum design. He continued to follow opportunities that interested him until he landed at GoalMakers in 2018.
Jeremy began his tenure transitioning GoalMakers from in-person training to a dynamic, experiential virtual learning program. The filming wrapped in early Spring 2020. Two weeks later, the world shut down, perfect timing for post-production. “We spent the next 12 months building the product,” he says. The result is a modern training environment that combines live expert facilitation with self-paced eLearning modules and interactive exercises.
You might wonder how Jeremy could teach programs for wildly different verticals.“That’s not necessarily my role,” he says. “I’m a facilitator of these discussions between peers,” he clarifies. “The absolute beauty of GoalMakers is we bring in subject matter experts from the industry.” Industry experts lend their knowledge to lessons, reinforcing evergreen business skills.
GoalMakers is currently prepping the next iteration of its popular training. “A 10-week program is a lot,” Jeremy admits, especially considering our ever-shrinking attention spans. “What we’re looking at is a sprint-based program where, in a week, you can gain not just knowledge but competency.” One aspect will remain the same: GoalMakers’ commitment to an experiential approach that creates measurable growth for the companies and associations it partners with.
The constant reinvention suits Jeremy’s entrepreneurial mindset. “It’s a moving target. That’s what gets me up in the morning; that’s what keeps me excited,” he says. “I love what I get to do.”
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QUOTES
“My exposure being around all these different organizations from a distributor side also just amplified the manufacturer voice in that same space. It reminds you of how much the world relies on that to work functionally without us ever thinking about it.”
“I am appreciative of all the companies that I’ve never heard of that get things where they need to be, that I’ll never hear of, that continue to make our world go around.”
“In a family business, you may never have had an opportunity to learn how a business should run. It was, ‘How did mom and dad do it?’”
“How do we create market opportunities to make learning more accessible, more engaging, and enlightening? Those are sort of our big three.”
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Distribution Talk is produced by The Distribution Team, a consulting services firm dedicated to helping wholesale distribution clients remove barriers to profitability, generate wealth, and achieve personal goals.
This episode was edited & mixed by The Creative Impostor Studios
Special thanks to our sponsors for this episode: Connected Peers, providing virtual communities for wholesale distributors, and INxSQL Distribution Software, an integrated distribution ERP software designed for the wholesale and distribution industry.
