In episode 161 of the Teacher Career Coach podcast, host Elizabeth Suto chats with Peter Fuller, founder of The Workflow Academy and an adjunct professor, about transitioning from teaching to a career in revenue operations.
Peter shares his journey from a degree in Russian literature to founding a consulting agency. They discuss the essential skills for revenue operations, such as CRM proficiency, problem-solving, and communication. Peter offers practical advice for teachers, including leveraging online learning platforms, building a portfolio, and networking.
The episode provides actionable steps for educators looking to pivot into this growing field.
Listen to the episode in the podcast player below, or find it on Apple Podcast or Spotify.
Mentioned in the episode:
- Use code “TCC” to get 50% off of everything at Aspireship
- Our career path quiz at www.teachercareercoach.com/quiz
- Explore the course that has helped thousands of teachers successfully transition out of the classroom and into new careers: The Teacher Career Coach Course
Elizabeth Suto: Hi, and welcome back to the teacher career coach podcast today. I’m so excited for you to listen. We get to know Peter Fuller. Our guest, Peter is the founder of the workflow Academy, which is a rev ops consulting agency and bootcamp to teach revenue operations and CRM skills. Peter has been running his own business in this space since 2018.
He’s also an adjunct professor at a community college. Join us today to learn all about the career of revenue operations, how you can break into the field, and how narrowing down your skill set will benefit you in the long run. Hope you enjoy!
Welcome to the Teacher Career Coach Podcast. I’m your host, Elizabeth Sudo, and today we’re very excited to have Peter with us. Welcome Peter.
Peter Fuller: Uh, we should have gone over this. You need to call me the venerable Peter. The venerable Peter is here to talk.
Elizabeth Suto: and tell us why.
Peter Fuller: Um, it’s just what the queen of England said. I’m just, I’m just mimicking what she told me.
Elizabeth Suto: Well, welcome the venerable Peter. We are so excited to have you and to learn from you. Um, I feel like you have such a unique perspective, um, as adjunct professor at a community college, you’ve started your own, um, company that is a learning platform for people, and you’ve also kind of been on the hiring side as well.
So I think we’ll be excited to get to know you today.
Peter Fuller: Absolutely. Helped to be useful.
Elizabeth Suto: Well, tell us a little bit about your background and what kind of brought you into this world of education.
Peter Fuller: Oh man. Okay. I’ll, I’ll do the succinct version for anyone listening. Imagine that you were graduating with a degree in Russian literature. You quickly recognize. I shouldn’t say quickly recognize you recognize painfully near graduation that there are only four jobs in that space and that you know, none of the four people that have those jobs have died recently and thus you have no career prospects. You then start frantically looking. Okay, what what am I going to do post graduation? What am I going to turn into? And stumble into, in my case, HubSpot Academy and realize, Oh, these are some hard skills related to my start digital marketing. But as I grew, kind of grew into revenue operations, CRM, uh, sales operations, work like that. These are hard skills. That aren’t that hard to get. I don’t need a four year degree to learn how this works. And with that skillset, uh, kind of immediately went from digital marketing into more like operations than into sales operations. Then got laid off from a, from an economic development position that I’d been in for three months and kind of looked around, had a three month old and a wife had to figure it out.
I started a rev ops and CRM consulting business and everything else is kind of branched off from there. Um, so everything I’ve done in education has been kind of an offshoot of what I really have done to make money, which is revenue operations and CRM.
Elizabeth Suto: That’s amazing, thank you for sharing that, and I love to hear the bit about Russian literature, and quick sidebar, are you fluent in Russian?
Peter Fuller: Yes,
Elizabeth Suto: For our listeners, um, thank you, I don’t know what that means, but I think it means yes. Well that, it’s so interesting, cause it sounds like you kind of stumbled upon, um, Rebops.
after digital marketing, how did you even, when you stumbled, you know, you said you found HubSpot. How did you start figuring out these softwares and things?
Peter Fuller: Yeah, it’s a really good question. I’m going to kind of weave in a hypothesis or a theorem that I want to put in front of all the educators listening. So there are, I think that college prepares you really, really well with soft skills. And I really believe that. And I feel like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky do a really good job, like helping you think about how to be a better person, the value of a human life, the value of, of everyone you’re talking with, like how to just overall, like be a good human being, it’s a really valuable role of college, what my college didn’t do for me, and it’s not just humanities educations that, that don’t do well at, at preparing you for hard skills. My, my, my degree gave me no hard skills. And I think a lot of degrees don’t really focus in on those hard skills. And so that’s what I was, I was so pleased with my experience. I can’t say enough good things about HubSpot Academy. It doesn’t work for everyone. Not everyone can can log in to a free course and just start watching and tinkering and pushing buttons, but there’s a significant subset of, of, people who feel like, Hey, if I can just get my hands dirty a little bit in this career, like try it. Then I can actually get good myself without having to go get a four year degree. And that’s, that’s really how it was with me and HubSpot and other CRMs, uh, also platforms like Shopify and WordPress where I never had to be a programmer. I never once had to write a line of code until I would really was in like multiple years into the career. But just with clicking buttons and watching courses and kind of gritting my way through, Opportunities that I found to help friends and family and, and then some freelancing contracts and then kind of parlay that into a job like you can kind of get started really like grassroots in the career, rather than meeting like a formal education, a set of formal certifications and licenses. It’s really, it’s quite different from, from secondary or primary education. In that in, And my wife always makes fun of me. My wife is a high school teacher, of course, and she’s always like, how is this possible? Like, why do people trust you that you can do this work if you don’t have like a degree in it or a certification?
And that’s just kind of a difference between the two worlds.
Elizabeth Suto: Well, I’m glad you brought that up. I think it’s a very important piece of information. A lot of these teachers are on a career journey and they’re trying to narrow down What’s next and have this career clarity. And it is quite confusing because there’s lots of options. There’s lots of industries. I know we were talking about ed tech, um, health tech.
I mean, it’s just, so to narrow down, I kind of wanted to ask you about your work, um, when you created the workflow Academy, you wanted to go in and build a course about revenue operations. So tell us
a little bit about what that is. Um, what are the hard skills involved? So if our listeners are curious.
About RevOps,
um, what’s a direction they could go in to upscale?
Peter Fuller: absolutely. Um, so revenue operations is kind of a new buzzword. So don’t be, don’t be surprised if you bring that up to someone and they’re like, what is that? the buzzword that the more people know that’s really related is CRM. So customer relationship management, those are platforms like Zoho, HubSpot, Salesforce, pipe drive. Even you can consider a QuickBooks or a net suite to be kind of in that realm. Um, and if you asked, Pretty much at this point, any business, almost every single business on our planet, uh, in the U S anywhere has some sort of platform that’s doing this, the CRM work, right? It’s, it’s a customer database where they’re tracking interactions with their customers. Hey, here’s the people that give us money. How can we communicate better with them? How can we provide them a better experience? How can we make sure no one slips through the cracks? How can we automate? Our communication with them or the quoting process or the invoicing process or the purchasing process, there’s like all the things that go into helping a customer give you money.
So we call it customer life cycle and our job is to identify every single one of those points and kind of like an engineer. Make sure that we’re making all of those different steps in the customer journey, more efficient, more happy for the customer. Um, the, the God of capitalism, Adam Smith looks proudly on us every day, as we identify all the little efficiencies that we can add to make a business, more money.
Elizabeth Suto: This is helpful to know because from what you said, it sounds like many businesses and industries have this department.
Peter Fuller: Oh, so this is a great question. I dive into this in my curriculum. Remember how I said that if you if you go up to any random small business owner or even some bigger companies and say, hey, who is your revenue operations specialist? They’ll be like, huh? I don’t know what that is. The reason is traditionally you’ve had a revenue team and even that is kind of, not everyone calls it their revenue team, but think of what is the revenue team, sales team, marketing team, customers, customer success, customer service. Anyone that talks with prospective customers or prospective prospects, like marketing, anyone who could become a customer. Then anyone who is on the way to becoming a customer and then anyone who already is a customer and we want to retain them, upsell, do more work with them, et cetera. Though those are the revenue teams. Traditionally, they’ve all been kind of siloed. It’s like four different teams. But the interesting thing now is we’re getting good enough at building tools like a HubSpot or a Salesforce where we can actually follow someone all the way from when they were just a. A twinkling in our eye of a prospective customer all the way through to they’ve been with us for years.
Here’s all their invoices. Here’s the last time someone for our team emailed them or called them. We can track that entire relationship and find ways to serve them better. that’s kind of like the, the philosophical underpinnings of why this is a job that people will pay you money for. is you are going to help their customers want to give them more money.
You are going to make their sales people’s lives easier. Their marketing people’s lives easier. Their customer service. You’re going to make everyone’s life easier, free up more time for them to be able to talk to customers, make money from customers.
Elizabeth Suto: That’s very helpful. And it makes sense too. I mean, it seems like. Everything that’s in the CRM is going to be helpful. Like for marketing, for example, they’re going to go work on an email campaign directed to these customers who are in this deal stage.
Peter Fuller: Yes.
Elizabeth Suto: very good. And so you work with a lot of students and I know you also work with consultants.
You’ve hired people to work along with you. So these people who. Are in this profession doing revenue operations. Do you notice or observe any specific skills that they have that make them
at the job?
Peter Fuller: Love it. Loving the softball questions. I’m going to hit everyone with one of my favorite metaphors. We, and it’s one of my favorite metaphors. I’m not saying it’s a good one, but I think it’s hilarious. Our job is to be RoboCop. I haven’t actually seen all of the movie Robocop, so I don’t know if that’s a good metaphor, but I’ll tell you why I say that. We are like part robot technologists, part of our brain has to say, Alright, so we’re setting up this HubSpot account, we need to get this data, which is in a CSV file in Excel, I’m gonna clean it all up, use a couple Excel formulas maybe, clean it up, get it ready to import. Okay, we’ve imported it. Now we need to integrate. QuickBooks so that when a deal is closed in HubSpot, it automatically creates an invoice in QuickBooks. How are we gonna do that? Hmm, I’m gonna, I’m gonna look at Zapier to create an automation that then takes closed deal and ports over the data into the invoice and creates it. Like you’re sitting at a computer for a chunk of this time, clicking around and looking into documentation of like, how does this software work and figuring out, Like it’s, it’s the type of person that gets on their computer and goes into like the system preferences and it’s like, Hmm, how, how can I customize my computer to work for me?
Like, that’s, that is part of what we need you to do. Right. But there’s still a human within this robot. We are not pure programmers. This job is not like here, go write this code and you’re constantly just only on a computer. There is a incredibly important human element. And the reason is we are working with customers and with the people who work with customers. So we need to understand, well, Hey, what are our opportunities here? Like what, Where are things being inefficient? What is your day to day look like salesperson? How can I make your life easier? What? What pain points to our customers have? Oh, hey, I set up the system for you. Let me teach you how it works. Oh, you have questions. Let me let me take in that feedback. And what it ends up looking like that I think some teachers are familiar with is more of like a product manager role, which is you need to be familiar with technology, but you also absolutely like need to nail the human element, like the human computer interaction.
How can you make sure that humans will benefit from the stuff that you’re building? Right? Um, so maybe the RoboCop metaphor is terrible because, well, I don’t know, but there you go. Half robot, half human.
Elizabeth Suto: makes sense. No, that’s helpful. And it also sounds like there’s quite a few parallels. I mean, you were talking about efficiency, you know, teachers are problem solving every day, trying to make things more efficient, uh, having data for all their report cards. So
if you think of a teacher in the classroom right now who’s a little curious about revenue operations, they’re listening to the podcast, what would you recommend would be be a next step
or a resource to try to get more involved.
Peter Fuller: Okay. This, this is my favorite part of this particular career. This is also my personal gospel of career searching. I’m a big don’t quit your day job, career searcher. I’m a, I’m a big time. Let the man pay you. He’s paying you pennies. You’re a teacher. I’m really sorry. Like, I’d love to fix that. Um, but, but let the man keep teaching you because this is absolutely a career that you can make incremental progress in gaining hard skills while you are still a teacher. And I know that’s hard. Trust me. I’m married to a high school teacher. I understand that it’s not like you just have endless time after school.
You have. Families and things to do. I’m saying you can literally spend four hours a week at learning this stuff and make gigantic progress in six months. And the reason is all of the curriculum that I point people towards is so bite size and so applicable. There’s no fluff, there’s no nonsense. It’s all just immediately get in and start building stuff and start doing real life things within the revenue operations career. That you’ll be really surprised at how many certifications and things you can rack up really quickly and kind of like build your brain into a spot where you say, Oh, Hey, okay. I get this. Like this is an opportunity. So a few resources, I’m going to throw them out there. Obviously put a plug in Aspireship Um, if you are considering this even remotely, the first, the best thing about Aspireship there’s a million best things, but my favorite thing is that the first unit is always free. And my first unit of my Rev Ops Foundations course, it slaps, it kills it. It’s like this concentrated, no wasting your time, like take an hour, sit down on your phone and just see, are you interested in this at all? You can do that for free. Go do that right now. If you’re listening to this, like write down in your little note, Reminder, go do that right now. Then you can choose, Hey, do I like this enough that I want to pay for a spireship? It’s not much at all small investment, but if you’re still curious, then hop on over to either HubSpot Academy, which is what I recommend personally for people getting started, go and there’s a million. Million things in there that are relevant to revenue operations. Uh, the, the, the part I’d kind of start with is just their HubSpot platform introductions like marketing hub, sales hub, et cetera. Um, but there’s like pretty much anything in there is applicable. They also come with certifications that you can throw in your resume. The other one is Salesforce trailhead. My only caveat with Trailhead is it’s quite useful, but a lot of employers expect you to basically come out of it with a Salesforce admin certificate, which can take a chunk of time. Um, it’s, it’s not, that’s like a more than four hours a week thing to prep for. Um, and, and I want you to be a little more sure that you want to do this as a career before I send you down that path. Then from there, the world is your oyster. What I tell a lot of students is you can go freelance. You’ll see as part of the Aspireship course, we actually have you go out and go into the community and do like a Some form of, of project, um, to, to go do something real often pro bono. Um, but getting real life experience, uh, is the number one thing that I’ve seen gets my students hired. I had one student who he put on his resume that he was a CRM admin for three months at a real estate company. It turns out it was. like his mom’s company. Um, and it was not a company. It was like, she was a real estate agent that sold a few houses here and there, but he just built a CRM for her and, and made that work.
And that was real life experience. His employer was like, Oh, cool. I love that. Like you’re hired. Um, so yeah, there’s, there’s so much opportunity that you can do with incremental week by week, a little bit here, a little bit there compounding over a period of time, versus A lot of other careers where you can kind of get lost in the weeds of just taking courses and never really make any real world progress or get any kind of real world certifications or things that are relevant to an employer.
Elizabeth Suto: That’s very helpful. And it sounds like the project section is very applicable for your resume, um, potential consulting gigs.
when, tell us a little bit about when you interview for these different positions, do they, um, a lot of interviews these days, have you do a project? Is it something that the course would help you with?
Peter Fuller: Yes.
Great. Great question. So we, we mandate, I hire, I usually hire three to four people a year. Um, for my rev ops consultancy, we, we, we work particularly with a platform called Zoho. We don’t do HubSpot or Salesforce. Um, but we, we love seeing people who’ve come from HubSpot land or Salesforce land because it’s all really like, there’s a lot of cross platform applicability.
If you get HubSpot certified, it’ll be much easier for you to get Salesforce certified. There’s a lot of kind of crossover. Um, so we, we pay people to do a project before we hire them. Uh, we pay, I think, 200 bucks to do like a, uh, a sample project. And a lot of companies are, Are hopefully getting closer to that.
I see it from time to time. It’s less that they’ll ask you to do an initial project. And it’s more that you’ll have internship opportunities, a lot of which are, uh, like, at least at our company, we have a don’t quit your day job internship. Um, so it’s, it’s 10 to 15 hours a week, and you can do it kind of at all times.
You just need to be available for at least 1 call at some point during the day. But we, we’d be willing to work around a teacher schedule. I think most employers would. The other opportunity is freelance contracts that you can find on Upwork. Those also will want to see a portfolio of sorts. Um, the final one is, is if you are gunning for like a full time position, yeah, the portfolio is really going to matter.
That’s really all that matters. Um, previous work experience is great. The number one issue that employers have when hiring someone from like the teaching field is, Not concerned that you don’t know how to work, but concerned that you just don’t have the technical skill or the kind of business acumen, the people, the ability to communicate with people and identify revenue opportunities and ways to help customers, there’s a concern that you just don’t have that.
And the number one way you allay that concern is with the project of sorts.
Elizabeth Suto: that’s very helpful. It goes back to what we were talking about at the beginning about having a hard skill, a specific skill,
um, that you’re able to apply and that portfolio sounds like, you know, you need a project. working with CRMs. Um, and in your case, when you’re hiring, uh, sometimes you have people do those projects.
They can use that for future portfolios. But I wanted to ask you in this hiring situation, um, since you have experience with it, tell us a bit about like what kind of character traits, I know you kind of went over the, the actual technical skills needed, and then there’s that human aspect, but people who really thrive at this when you’re hiring, what do you notice about them?
Peter Fuller: Yeah, really good question. Um, I’m, I’m a big, I, I use this metaphor in one of my courses. In writing, they always tell you to show and not tell.
Like, don’t, don’t tell me that the protagonist is, is incredibly strong. Show me him like fighting hand to hand with a 50 foot tall crab. And then, and then I will see that he is very strong.
Or, or show me that she is like, A genius negotiator or powerful witch or something like, show me that that happens. Right? So the, the number I’m a huge proponent of. When you’re interviewing for a job, and I’ll speak specifically about this niche, it’s so much less about like, show up to an interview and like, wait to be asked the right questions and then answer the questions and then be like, thank you.
And like, send a thank you email. Like that’s great. And that’s a good kind of bare minimum. I’m a huge proponent of, I want to see excitement. I want to see like, You care about this position. You you’ve, you’ve researched what our company is. You understand how we make money in the case of our company, the people that we hire, they come to our info session and they’re like, okay, I have looked up Peter on LinkedIn.
I’ve looked up the workflow Academy. Um, I read some of your customer reviews. This is what I understand. Like, this is how you make money is. You companies call you in, they’re trying to make more money. So they want to use Zoho CRM platform. They hire the workflow Academy to come in and make that CRM platform. Perfect. You might do X, Y, Z, and the CR like invoicing here, quoting there, whatever. Do I, am I right? Like, did, I understand that correctly? And I’m like, Oh yeah. I mean, whether you did or not, I almost don’t care. It’s more that you took the time to like, care about this as not just like a, Interview you got invited to, you know what I mean?
Elizabeth Suto: Oh, for sure. So it sounds like, you know, making it more of a conversation, coming in with lots of clarifying questions.
And that also, when you’re asking those questions, shows the hiring manager that you’ve done your research.
Peter Fuller: Yes. Yeah. It’s there’s this, there’s this notion of, which is counterintuitive to most people, what they think you want in an interview, this notion of being the dumbest person in the room and, and, and being there to ask questions like someone who has no ego. And it’s just like, Here’s what I understand.
Can you confirm that I’m understanding this correctly or I haven’t worked in this job before I have a guess as to what it looks like. Here’s my guess. Can you confirm that that skill is so it shows so much. It shows that you care shows that you’ve done your research shows that that You’re treating this as more of like a peer relationship and not just like a employer give me money and I will like attend my job. that, that’s, those are the types of students that, that’s not only that I hire, but I’ve gotten over 200 people hired in this space and it’s, it’s those types that get hired.
Elizabeth Suto: That’s amazing. And it just brings it back to that human element, you know, the robot, but also, also human and
the relationship aspect.
Peter Fuller: Yes.
Elizabeth Suto: So I did want to ask, um, when people, teachers might be looking for RevOps jobs, they might be upskilling. So when they’re looking at jobs, is it called revenue operations
Peter Fuller: Great question. Great question. And I’m gonna, I could answer in the short way. I’m going to choose to go the long, exhaustive way and give people a lot of keywords that they can start using.
so this is a, I cover all this in the intensive. There’s three spots that you’re going to find a job. The first is with a consultancy like mine.
That’s often one of the best and easiest ways we hire a lot of people entering the career like this really established. Uh, kind of hiring pathways. So a Salesforce consultancy, a HubSpot consultancy, a Zoho consultancy. So, so looking for just revenue operations or CRM consultancies, go straight to the consultancy and then look at their careers page or look at who works there. There’s, there’s often like we use a lot of disparate job titles. They don’t often show up. It’s just like an easy to find an indeed. That’s kind of like a going straight to the source and networking type approach. Uh, we call them CRM designers, rev ops associate. Uh, there’s just too many titles for you to easily find those jobs. The second is more kind of startups to mid market. And I won’t even talk about enterprise cause that’s a whole can of worms. And. There sometimes are opportunities there, but a lot of those companies, even they, I know it’s confusing. They often don’t call these jobs, revenue operations, uh, and. When I say these jobs, they often have revenue operations positions, but they aren’t necessarily at the entry level. Um, entry level, you’ll often get brought in as a marketing operations, sales operations. Sometimes they call it just operations. Sometimes there’s like, they call it like project management when it’s not really what it is, is like getting, just getting stuff done and they don’t know what to call it. So they just call it.
Project manager. Um, but that, that key title operations, that’s, that is the more important keyword of what you should be looking for. And then you kind of have to read between the lines of the job description and get curious. Like I mentioned, um, curious about what problems are they trying to solve?
How are they trying to make money? Um, the third tranche, which I think is often the most interesting and the most accessible to my kind of younger students, not younger, younger in career, like, To the people who are really just getting started, small businesses need this more than almost anyone. And they are the least likely to call this revenue operations because they’re like, what is that?
The, the, I’ll give you an example, an insurance agency that I know is hiring for a sale, what are they calling it? Like. A sales admin. And that’s what they’re calling it. And I’m like, guys, what you’re looking for is like a graduate from my program. And I don’t know that they’ll look for that, but they’re like, we just like, this is just what we’re putting. And so a lot of those small businesses just put things under sales, admin, sales operations, marketing, admin, marketing assistant. Marketing associates. And it does, you kind of read between the lines when looking at it and you say, Oh, you’re calling this a marketing admin. But if you come to an interview or reach out to someone to ask what you’re really wanting business is someone that’ll help you have less customers slip through the cracks or, or less of your leads slip through the cracks.
What you really need is. a CRM or someone who’s able to help implement a system like that, right? Um, so I gave you the long answer really anything related to a revenue team. So customer service, customer success, sales, or marketing, any keyword tied to that for an entry level position, there’s potentially an opportunity for you, uh, rev ops.
Elizabeth Suto: Thank you for being so specific because that is helpful. You know, that it’s kind of as you’re entering this career field, one might not know that right off the bat.
And just knowing those keywords like operations,
admin, you know, knowing the different departments that correlate with it is going to be very helpful.
Peter Fuller: yes, absolutely.
Elizabeth Suto: And then I did want to touch on this, you know, you are creator of the Workflow Academy, which your RevOps course is available within Aspireship.
And then also you’re an adjunct professor at a community college. So tell us a bit about this. How does this correlate, um, to RevOps
and what are working on there?
Peter Fuller: Yeah. Good question. Um, I, after I, um, partnered with Aspireship to, to kind of spread the, the curriculum everywhere, I realized that while it is, it’s like the curriculum is a great fit. For a certain type of person, that’s kind of like me, honestly, who’s happy to just like jump in and learn and just be like, I’m learning.
I’m learning. Oh, that’s cool. Oh, that’s cool. Like synapses connecting. Let’s go. But it is very much an asynchronous learning experience, which. Is great in compared to the alternative, which is nothing, which, because none of your community colleges or technical colleges have a course like this. So it’s better than nothing, but I, I really wanted a chance to teach this stuff over eight months, 20 hours a week.
Like this is like the, the bootcamp version where we are just like cranking. And I wanted to do it specifically in my local community. Um, so it’s like, it’s an effort by me to do this in a non scalable fashion, in a more like focus on each of my individual 20 students and make sure that like each of them gets across the finish line in their own way. So, yeah, I’m, I’m really passionate about it. We’re, we’re obviously using the same curriculum that we’ve used in the past, but there’s going to be a lot more hands on, mostly job search and, and entrepreneurial opportunities. So a lot more like, Hey, we’ve done the curriculum. Now let’s like work together to find who’s hiring lots of employer info sessions. Let’s have a couple of you start a business and we’ll look for contracts together. And, and yeah.
Elizabeth Suto: That’s amazing. I just love that, you know, there’s different paths. So if someone didn’t necessarily, um, go through the four year college path, there’s a way, and,
and these career pivoters and transitioners, you can learn a skill, uh, you know, you can invest in yourself. Yeah. Um, and you can make a change and, and
I’m glad that you’re bringing that.
I, did you say this? I’m making sure I heard it correctly. Did you say at your community college so far, that’s a revenue operations course, but at others there, people don’t have anything like it. You’re kind of like,
Peter Fuller: We’re, we’re literally, this is the first I’ve found on the planet, like an accredited revenue operations and CRM course. I think this is the first one ever. So
Elizabeth Suto: congratulations.
Peter Fuller: Yeah, thank you. it’s fun times. Thanks to Aspireship for making it easy for me to roll my curriculum out. Um, actually, I want to jump in and here’s 1 final somewhat unrelated, but highly relevant point. Your everyone listening to this, your job is to kind of like, identify a niche and that’s really hard because. You’ve been working in a totally different career field. And so you just have to go off of people like me’s advice of what niches exist and then kind of pick one. So revenue operations and CRM is one niche, but I, I want you to kind of open your mind. and think about what other niches exist out there. And I want to get some spit specific again. I’m gonna throw a few out there that are somewhat related, have similar skills, but aren’t quite the same. Shopify e commerce operations. That is a huge one that is gigantic. It’s growing quickly the ability to go into any kind of physical or digital product. And build an e commerce presence has never been easier, but it’s still, there’s like so much demand for, can someone take this like experience and put it on a website? And that’s less like web design, like graphics and more like, can you help make sure that people can order on their website and the orders get logged in Shopify and they get sent to go be fulfilled on the warehouse platform. So e commerce operations, e commerce software. That’s a huge niche that I feel that I’ll probably push a couple of my students into. It’s kind of generally under the umbrella, but a little bit different. Um, the, the third niche I want to push everyone to, you can go down a rabbit hole, all of the little sub niches I talked about of sales operations, marketing operations, customer success operations, customer service operations. And in each of those sub niches, There is a vibrant, like, it’s like, it’s like one of those Marvel movies where they like have the multiverse and you like zoom in on one multiverse and then go down and then subatomically, there’s like another multiverse or something. That’s crazy. Cause I’m talking to rev ops and that’s like a huge umbrella. I have a friend making amazing money doing customer success operations on a platform called gain site. And she’s like, there are not nearly enough people who have this niche skill set. So anyone here thinking customer success, you maybe want to look at customer success operations and find the firms doing that, right? So, so other platforms, uh, customer service operations, Zen desk and gorgeous e commerce operations, Shopify, big commerce, sales, Salesforce, commerce, cloud marketing operations. There’s there’s clay and HubSpot and, uh, Apollo IO, like. There’s infinite sub niches in here. where you need like a bouncer like me to you into the club and tell you that the club exists. And then once you’re in the club, you, yeah, it pays to niche down. It pays to not be like, I’m a marketing person. It pays to be like, I implement, or I understand what gorgeous, which is a Shopify customer service platform. Like I understand how that works. And I’ve done a project that I do want me.
That’s so much better for an employer I’m a generalist that knows a couple things. Sorry, that was a monologue.
Elizabeth Suto: No, that, was amazing because it, my, my last two questions, the first one you just answered in that question. And it’s, it’s really just, you, you’re bringing awareness. So there’s so many opportunities out there and some. Teachers just aren’t aware of,
and we don’t even know exist.
So that’s very helpful.
Might even have you back for a part two,
one these days to expand on that. And before we wrap up, I did want to ask you, um, we love ending the show with this question, but what have you learned about yourself during this process? Um, you know, as a content creator, as an educator and as a, in hiring and helping all these students.
What have you learned?
Peter Fuller: I’ll wax poetic for a second. I think I’ve realized that we all put a little bit too much like of our self worth, especially as Americans gets wrapped up into like what career we are. And that’s really hard because I also am a firm believer that like, You don’t get a chance to wax poetic about things until you have a career that like you can feed your family and live a stable life and everything. It’s kind of like a chicken or the egg thing. So I guess if you are, how do I put this? If you’re listening, it’s unlikely Like it’s, it’s likely that I felt just as down to the dumps about like my career prospects and everything as you did. And if I could like go back in time to 2016 version of Peter and just be like, it’s going to be okay.
Like. You just have to give a crap and try and talk to the right people. And like the gods of capitalism will look out for you, which makes me sound way too pagan, but, but like something can work here. And then when you get there, I need you to turn around and be the gods of capitalism for other people there.
I was,
I was not expecting that monologue. I don’t know if any of that was cogent, but there you go.
Elizabeth Suto: thank you for sharing that and for paying it forward, um, with your knowledge and for all these resources that you’ve left us with. We’ve really appreciated your time and now I’ll probably need to go read, um, Tolstoy after this conversation. And
Peter Fuller: Okay. I want to throw out there just so everyone knows. The number one gateway, at least that I propose, is the death of Ivan Ilyich. Because it is 70 pages. So you don’t, you don’t have to go straight like war and peace on the Karenina to start with. Like start with the death of Ivan Ilyich. And just like, I mean, it’s kind of depressing, but they all are like,
Elizabeth Suto: yeah, it’s depressing, but happy.
Peter Fuller: And I don’t know. There’s, there’s a lot of feelings.
Elizabeth Suto: thank you for the book recommendation. So
will you, will you teach us how to say, goodbye in Russian?
Peter Fuller: Dasvidaniya. Until, until we meet again. Dasvidaniya. Dasvidaniya.
Elizabeth Suto: Well, dasvidaniya, Peter, and thank you.
Peter Fuller: Um, Hey,
thanks Elizabeth.
Elizabeth Suto: Bye.
