How a retired British academic is selling IT training online to India.

Welcome to the Silver Fox Entrepreneurs Podcast, the show for mature men with enterprise. Your host is Jim James, a maturepreneur himself, who's doing his best to introduce guests who will bring you useful information and the kind of inspiration that makes running your own business Profitable and fun. We're building a community too, so do rate and share the show afterwards.

Welcome to this episode of the Silver Fox Entrepreneurs Podcast. Today I'm going to be talking with David Ringsall, who's a maturepreneur who I first met when talking about attending technology startup events, which at the age of 62, David, mentioned made him feel a little bit awkward. Now, the truth is that David works with a wide range of technologies, including Angular and SQL Server, ones that frankly seem pretty new and complicated to me. David's a pioneer in technology, and he's built a business which is now selling IT training to India. So today we're going to talk to David about how he manages to use students to build his minimum viable products, Balances his online courses with his in-person tutoring and sustains a loving relationship with his wife of 20 years. And also, of course, the importance of having a cat. So tune in, and I'm sure that you will enjoy this conversation with David Ringsell as much as I have. David Ringsell, welcome to the Silver Fox Entrepreneurs Podcast.

Thank you.

It's been a pleasure to get to meet you here over the last few months in, in Bath. Can you just share a little bit about yourself and what you're doing?

Okay, well, thank you for the opportunity. I'm just going to go through a few basic facts about my life, really, to put a bit of context. Well, I'm 62 years old. I was born in London, now live in Bath, work out of here, Coworking Bath, one day a week. And I've been running my own business for about 20 years now. The business is primarily around educating people about technology, including software development. I've been doing this really in some form or the other most of my working life, and as a result of that, over the last five years, I've kind of innovated and as an entrepreneur set up my own startup business, which is about providing a learning online learning platform where people can learn how to code in easy stages. Just simply go on to the talk-it.biz website. Click from the homepage, and you're away. This is applicable to people of any skill level, and it's— we notice a lot of more senior people have also been coming along and actually using this to pick up those skills.

Yeah, and if we can talk about being senior, you mentioned you're sort of 62, but you're coding and showing people how to code, which is something that normally people think of as, you know, a young people's game. So, how did you get into this sort of teaching technology later on?

Good question, thank you. I mean, really, I've been working teaching technology pretty much for about the last 30 or 40 years. It goes way back to doing a degree in maths and computer science at Sussex University, then working for big corporates, including some time working actually for the EU, the Commission of the EU in Luxembourg City, and then moving into sort of career redirection and becoming actually a qualified teacher to teach in state schools. So I think I realized that my skills often were more around communicating, learning, teaching, mentoring, lecturing than they were actually working with pure technology. But at the same time, I was interested in technology, and I had that background in coding. And really what I've had to do as the technology has kind of moved forward at great pace— we all know how the digital age we live in and the incredible speed of change and evolution, I've had to really keep up with that. So, the situation now is, in terms of the sort of teaching I deal with, is I go into companies and I work with teams of developers. I suppose that I don't necessarily make such a big issue of this. Mostly, they're younger than me. They vary, but they might be in their 30s or 40s. mostly we talk about, you know, kind of technology. And I suppose I have been aware of an age gap, and I have been aware of how they might perceive me as an older person. I try, I suppose, not to focus on that too much. I think this can be, you know, a great source of doubts for older people, you know, in the modern world.

Yeah.

And I think actually I think it's quite important not to talk yourself into, you know, being old or too old or out of touch. But I'm very aware, you know, that those concerns are very much at the back of many people's minds.

And can you tell us then, from a sort of business point of view, commercial point of view, what sort of charges are you finding the B2B in-person training is more valuable in earning greater amounts of money? Or is the online, which is kind of almost passive income, Okay. Just talk us through the—

Yeah, that's an interesting area of investigation. And believe me, all of this, I'm going to be absolutely frank, is all— I'm unpeeling this and working it out as I'm going along, even though I've been doing it a year or two now with the online stuff. You know, it's not entirely new. There's lots of, as I said, in a fast-changing world, in a very dynamic marketplace, there's lots of balls to keep your eyes on, really. The idea would be to create a passive income in the sense of creating a product, putting it online, and this is— I know this is everyone's dream. People just come and, you know, the money goes into the bank account.

Everyone's dream. Yeah, you know, I'm not sure anyone's really managed it.

Yeah, it's never quite as simple as it sounds, as I'm sure you appreciate. Even if you do get it up there and even if it's selling, you'd have to completely update and upgrade things on an almost kind of weekly basis.

Yes, because the technology keeps moving, doesn't it? That seems to be the A key point.

Technology keeps moving, people want the latest stuff, so that's always a kind of tension.

Yeah.

It's good to have the opportunity to talk about it. I'm sure I'm sorting this out in my own brain as I'm actually describing it to you here, Jim. The opportunities would be to scale up, which I think is what you're really asking, would be much more with the online model where you could wrap up the product, the courses, And I'm sort of, actually, I was in contact with a distributor called Learning Services just yesterday, and they've taken 2 of our courses, HTML and C#, they wrapped them up and they put them on their learning platform.

Nice.

They'll be selling licenses to, you know, we had Learning Direct, other sort of kind of big players could buy, like I said, it's early days and we're just getting some, they're putting a February offer out with 50% off to get us started.

Congratulations.

Yeah, thank you.

What sort of numbers are we talking, how much is that course? Is that selling, At what sort of price point are people buying these courses, and how did you set— and how did you decide what those prices are?

Okay, so let me bring some figures. It's good you're keeping it down to earth with some actual figures. Yeah, in that scenario, people would buy, um, let's take an individual license to run one course, giving them access for 6 months. We're sorting out prices. It does vary, and there's some discounts, but it'd be something like £20 or £30 for that to happen. Now, these, if you're going through the model where the courses have been distributed, they could buy perhaps 100 licenses.

Right, right.

So, there is, you know, if this takes off, there are kind of spin-offs really into that. In terms of actually working out the pricing, well, it wasn't such an issue. You essentially look at the competition, When I work with the distributors, generally I say to them, this conversation I was just having yesterday, yeah, um, I'm happy if you recommend that we price it at such and such. You know your market, you know your clients. I'm happy to take advice from you if you— we talked about having a special offer, and I said, I was asked by this distributor how much, and I said, well, what do you think? And we agreed 50%, right? He knows that works. I don't know, he's in his marketplace.

Yeah, right. Okay, so you'll— if you can charge £20 and then they're getting £10, you're getting £10, they do the marketing distribution.

Exactly.

That's great. And where are you— where are these distributors? Are they in Asia and Europe and the States? Where are people, you know, showing an interest in the skill sets that you're offering?

The— okay, the, uh, the, the, the people who are coming to, uh, the distributor, and they're basically— we wrap the courses up so they're in a very easily portable form and they can go into corporate management systems and learning systems, once it's on their platform, people from all over the world can come and look at that. I've got more, and I don't exactly know because it's gone via a third party, the people are coming to the talk-it.biz website, I've got more detailed analytics on that, so I can get demographics. So, I know, for example, that for quite a while now, if we just track visitors, It's less than 10% from the UK.

Oh, is that right? Interesting.

Yeah, it is interesting. Then it opens all kinds of— how do you market to foreign markets and so on.

So where are most people coming from, if you can say most? Where is it distributed across the world?

Last time I looked, and this seemed to be fairly consistent, a lot of people coming from India, a lot of people coming from South Africa, a lot of people coming from the United States.

Wow.

So, and it, again, it became an interesting purpose. I'm not actively marketing on that so much at the moment. When I was, and I employed some students from the local university to come in and do some marketing, we looked at how do we, how do you talk to an audience, say, in India. So one of the things we did when we posted on social media, we translated into Hindi, the top national language. That was, you know, a while back, but it seemed to be questions started to arise on how you address different audiences.

Yeah.

Which is, you know, very interesting, but quite a lot to, if you like, to think, to take those steps to realize that, you know, you're inviting potentially a global audience.

So did you ever think that you'd be, you know, a trainer to people in India or South Africa from the UK? I mean, that's That's a pretty big accolade, isn't it?

Yeah, yeah.

Because India is the home of software too, in many ways, right? And you're training into India. That's fantastic.

Yeah, that is. And I mean, through the face-to-face training, as I said, not long ago, I was actually in Europe, in Amsterdam. And I mean, I do talk to people, not all these requests come off, but training company I was talking to, they work a lot in Saudi Arabia. Rather amusingly, I was discussing it with the MD of the company, company, and he said, okay, if you go over there and run a course, don't talk about politics, don't talk about religion, because they get quite upset. And I explained, when I'm doing some work on a subject, doing a course, I always keep it pretty much on script. I don't even talk about the B-word, politics, you know, social things or whatever. And he mentioned over there that if you do start talking about, you know, religion and politics and all that stuff, they can throw you in prison. So I understood the restriction of not going off topic. Yeah, yeah, safe. But I'm just saying, you know, I think that is perhaps what I'd suggest for people to think about that might be most useful as a takeaway from this is, and I think it's a challenge for everyone, whatever their age, to embrace the fact that we are living in a fully globalized world and likely to continue more so for the future.

Yeah.

And I think it's more, uh, not getting stuck in the past, not clinging to the past, embracing the future. Being able to understand that this is the nature of the world we're going to live in. And I think that's a psychological change that people need to kind of, kind of need to take.

And what, if you like, prompted that insight? Because if you were in a place before working and then now you're starting your own business doing software, was there a particular moment where the penny dropped and you realized this could be global? Or was it something you always thought about?

I think I was surprised. If, like, the origins of creating my own web platform was just, okay, I've been doing some work and teaching and training, and I got some notes and stuff, and I'm putting together a website, I might as well put that stuff up on the website and other people can access it. Didn't even think of selling it at that time. And then because you can get such detailed analytics, you can actually see—

Yeah.

I'm sure many people in the audience are aware of this, what people are seeing and what people are accessing. And whereas, you know, I'm actually very widely traveled. I've traveled to many, many countries in the world. I've also lived and worked in Luxembourg, Australia, France, and Israel briefly. So I'm kind of, you know, fairly global. Yeah, global citizen. Yeah, I'm a global citizen, you know, all the clichés and stuff. My mother was Czech, my father was Polish. But I think actually when you start to see that you really are working with, potentially working with, or you're getting connections and networks that are global, I think it actually is something that you need to— well, I think at that point I kind of realized that to some extent, I suppose, things are kind of out of my control. We like to think we've got a nice little world, you know, we know Britain, we're British perhaps, or we live in Scotland or whatever it is, or Wales. And I think sometimes that sort of step to a more global perspective is interesting. And I think many people can say, yeah, sure, I agree with that. I've always thought like that. But I think it actually can be challenging to really start to say, yes, I'm prepared to work with anyone in the world anywhere.

And in terms of working with the things like the development for the courses going online, at the minute you're on your own, I think. Do you have— where are your teams? Are you outsourcing? We've spoken in earlier podcasts about people building in-house. When it gets to scale, they outsource, and then they bring it back in again later on. What— how are you doing the development and the productization from a practical point of view?

Yeah, again, a very good question. To develop the— stepping back a year or two, to develop the platform, and there was a big process of essentially writing the content, producing in-depth courses in these programming languages, including videos, downloads, code samples, etc., etc. At that point, I employed on a part-time basis students from a local university. I basically interviewed them in this room here that we're sitting in now. It's called the Green Room in the Google form. Yeah, we're in the Green Room. Green, green, looking around here, just reminding myself where I am physically, sitting next to Jim here. So, basically, interesting So, that was the process, selecting, recruiting, building a small team of 2 or 3 students over 3 or 4 years, particularly one student, Steve, who worked with me actually on mostly for 4 years. It was great.

Great.

He was actually, when I first started working with him, he just turned 19, and I was a bit shocked when I met him, interviewed him, that, you know, the guy was so young. And But I worked with him successfully for 4 years. Well, he did finish his 4-year degree. He's now finished. And actually, he was a lot of fun, very competent, gave me what was interesting in our relationship. I said, okay, we've got this. He was training to be a developer, starting to be a developer. I said, okay, I've got this stuff. I would like you to kind of write these courses, which he did very well. But I ended up talking to him about all aspects of the business, and he had insights and input.

Right.

So I'd say, okay, he wanted to recruit someone else, I'd show him a CV. He said, nah, well, he basically told me who to employ and who not to employ based on his insight into how they wrote a CV or whether they included a good covering letter and that sort of stuff.

That's great. So how did you get Steve in the first place? Someone you met through, or was it like an advert? From a practical point of view, how did you find Steve?

I liaised with the university. They have a They have an online web recruitment thing for part-time work, something like JobSpec or whatever. And I basically put a description of exactly what I was looking for.

Nice.

Lots of CVs came in. I then interviewed people by not actually interviewing them, but asking them to do a bit of pre-work and sort of assessing them. I said, okay, this is the problem. We wanna sell more of these courses, for example, and what would you do? And they came back, they were very happy to engage in that and actually do some work. beforehand. And that gave me, you know, insight, not just nice people, like the guy seems competent, or girl, but they actually demonstrated there and then during the interview what they could do.

So, that's quite resourceful, really, that you thought to bring people from the local university. Then in terms of scaling, have you kept on just using students, or have you then recruited and have development overseas to match where you're Customers are?

No, in terms of scaling, in a sense, rather than— I decided that model had kind of reached the sort of end of its time once you got the content out. And what I brought on board is some basic associates who came in and did some more work, for example, on the website or marketing. I was also on some funded programs that I set up where I could get some sort of accelerator programs.

Right.

They helped just talking to people and some coaching, and I found it better. There's so much help you can get. I mean, here we're sitting in the Guild, and, you know, I don't know, there's 60 or 70 members perhaps. In fact, I put a request on the noticeboard here for someone to do some maintenance and development on the WordPress website that I've got. So, I'm pulling in more on a short-term basis people to do bits of work.

Yeah.

So that is essentially the sort of scale-up model. At the beginning of the year, I'm, if you like, I'm reassessing everything and work out where to put my energy.

Yeah.

So I think the over 50s, over 60s, over 70s, you know, I don't know where we stop.

Now we stop later and later.

Yeah, we do.

We stop when we drop, I think.

We do. I keep— I have these classes addressed at the over 50s, for example, the Pilates. There's an over 50s Pilates class and I've been doing the I don't know whether you call it the under-50s class. I did go along to the over-50s and it all felt a bit strange really.

More creaking as you get older maybe.

Yeah, maybe, maybe. But I also try not to overly identify with age because I think that can be a little bit of a stumbling block.

That's a really good point actually, yeah.

I think you can— I think we're very age-conscious. We're in an age where— and I think we can start to talk ourselves into the grave, really, by continually reminding ourselves how old we are. And that may affect all kinds of things like our physical health, our mental health, our mental capacity, our cognitive processes, and so on. Now, I'm not denying that some of these things are true, but I think there's an element that can be in a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Well, and I think certainly if we look at like people like Dr. Andrew Weil talk about the regeneration, the constant regeneration of your body, it's about how you keep Keep stressing it and keep pushing and testing the muscles.

Right.

And, and you've mentioned really that you stay young and you also spend a lot of time with your wife, which is great. Can you share with us then how has she handled the, the sort of lifestyle of the entrepreneur? Because many people— I heard one say that being married to an entrepreneur has been like being kidnapped, thrown in the back of a car with a blindfold and driven around a strange city because it's got its ups and downs, right?

It has. Yeah, it has. And ups and downs in income as much as anything. Yeah, absolutely. And that creates a lot of stress.

I know from my own circumstances.

It does.

Does your wife just have infinite patience, or does she lose her temper with you, or how does that work over the years?

Well, I think it does put a stress, and I also have to mention that my wife runs her own business as well.

Okay, so double the stress.

Double the stress. So we both pile in, you know, with our own stress and fight for airspace. Yeah, she's a business psychologist. She's actually Really building and growing her business very well at the moment, and she's working with a lot of clients, and she's getting more income in through that. She, I think, is really good at what she does. Because we share an interest in business, self-development, and being entrepreneurs, there are areas that we can communicate about.

Right, right.

I've been married for 20 years. We don't have any kids, but we have a great cat, Lula.

The cat is, I think, the key to it all.

If you've got a Yeah, we have a—

we have the beagle and the 2 cats.

So I think the pets are— you don't forget to include the pets in the family structure. So my wife and I understand that we have to work on our relationship. This is not a static thing. We talk pretty much about everything, given the time. Yeah. And we seek to understand how our personalities complement each other. So we understand, you know, that actually there are differences, and sometimes the differences You know, there's a sort of cliché that you're attracted to someone in the very early days, in the first meeting, by something that is startling and new and different about them. And that's probably something, a message for something about you that you're looking for. And then as you get to know them more, those things that are different can go from being, you know, a source of attraction to a source of kind of irritation.

Yeah.

So it's an interesting process, but I think we understand some of that process. I mean, it's a lot of psychological understanding.

Yeah, it sounds like you've done a lot of work on that actually.

Yeah, we have and we continue, we continue to do that and that keeps the relationship kind of alive and not static really. We're honest with each other, we argue with each other, we understand that, you know, as time progresses over 20 years, we're going away in Easter to celebrate over the holiday in Europe, our 20th wedding anniversary.

Congratulations. You're going somewhere nice?

Possibly Denmark. We haven't decided on a destination completely yet, but I think it's very, very alive. And I think there's something about how intimate relationships have changed also so fast. And we've swept away the rulebook really. It used to be 20 or 30 years ago, you knew what it was to be a husband, you knew what it was to be a wife. your role, their role, your kind of duties, if you like, and their duties.

Yeah.

I think now we're living in a much more uncertain time where we have to— where, say, the rules being swept away, a great deal of potential anxiety around that. I think we're replacing the rules with conversations. I think the ability to actually talk, talk out, you know, what on earth is going on. I think if you don't do that, the misunderstandings can actually, you know, possibly, you know, sabotage the relationship itself, really.

That's, you know, and do you talk about mistakes? I mean, it sounds like you've got a very balanced and mature and very Zen approach. Would you say there's a looking back on the last few years or 20 years, not just about the relationship, coming back to your business now, is there something that you've learned that you wish you'd done differently or that you'd say, this is what I want to do now because I've learned from, from a significant mistake?

Um, okay, so the biggest mistakes that I've seen with myself and other people is, I think, in terms of working with other people, relationships, not, not taking time to value and acknowledge those who, who help you, really.

Right.

To make sure you understand the, the network of people. I mean, people are the most important thing. I know it's a cliché, but I think it's true. Taking time to recognize that, even it's simply sending a thank you email or a sort of, you know, we've done this, what are we doing next kind of email. So, I think that's one of the big mistakes that I can make but try not to. Understanding, second potential mistake is underestimating the time and effort to get your venture off the ground.

Yeah. Yeah, really.

So, I'm sure, Jim, you'll understand that.

Yeah.

Being quite realistic about that, being able to change direction, being able to be responsive to your audience, you know, your customers. I talked about learning new technology. I talked about some strands of the e-learning kind of not paying off and then focusing in other directions. I talked about kind of looking where you're putting your energy and effort and being flexible about that. But I think, was that honestly because it all—

Yeah, just a mistake, or really it's a learning, right? So if there's a key takeaway for people listening and for, you know, after all these years of working, what would be your— what would be the key takeaway, the key thing that you think you'd like the foxes that are listening to take away. Yeah.

So I guess make time to take care of your health a daily habit. So I'm just stressing that. And I'm sure we appreciate the need for health and so on, but there's something about embracing that so it becomes an automatic understanding in whatever way that works for you. I'm not saying you need to get out and run for half an hour every day or whatever. You're old enough now, you've got enough experience to work out What works for you, but do it so often it becomes automatic. And again, make those self-care, well-being practices something that become absolutely part of your lifestyle.

David Ringsall, TalkBizIT, thank you for sharing with me today. And for people that would like to know more about David, we'll put it in the show notes. He's also referenced, uh, David Ringsall on LinkedIn. And we'll look forward to hearing from anybody that's been listening, the takeaways that they've had from today's podcast. David, thank you for sharing.

Thank you very much. I really appreciate the time.

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