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“Take the leap. With risk can come big rewards. Don't be afraid to start.”
There's a massive field known as continuing education, or professional development. Many licensed professions — architecture among them — require a set number of credits each year to keep your license, and someone has to provide that training. It's a huge industry, and today's story features Janelle Sultan in Sydney, Australia, who turned it into a profitable business.
Janelle spent 15 years as director of a marketing agency, and by the end every day felt like Groundhog Day — clients, tedious meetings, and stress. She knew it was time to move on, even without knowing what came next, so she began disbanding the agency and telling her clients. A couple of them asked for one last favor: help booking their Continual Professional Development (CPD) sessions for architects.
She agreed on a temporary basis — but it gave her an idea. Checking with other clients, she found big demand for CPD sessions and, crucially, no platform to organize them all in one place. She was spending time manually booking sessions and knew there had to be a more efficient way.
So she built CPD Box, an automated site where architects book their own CPD sessions and educators pay a fee to list their classes. Startup costs were minimal — around $500 for business registration, a website, and email software — because she had enough knowledge to build a lean minimum viable product herself.
The investment paid off. In her first month she billed about $7,500 AUD, and since launching in 2018 she's on track to gross roughly $120,000 AUD, running lean and onboarding new clients at a pace that doesn't overwhelm her. She's now looking at restructuring into a company so she can pay herself a wage and bring on an assistant.
Her advice for building a similar platform: build relationships within the industry you want to serve, create a database of contacts and emails, and set up an automated email sequence up front to save time later. And above all — take the leap. As she puts it, "With risk can come big rewards. Don't be afraid to start." She's no longer living the Groundhog Day life, and she plans to take CPD Box worldwide.
