£100k on Business Courses: What Was Worth It (Honest Review)

I have spent around £100,000 on my business education over the last five years. Some of it was worth every penny. Some of it was a waste of money. One of them was a total scam. This is the story of each investment and what it did, or did not do, for our dog training business.

Quick disclaimer first. This is for dog trainers who want to grow and scale, typically single operators or small teams aiming for the £20,000 a month mark (roughly $40,000 Australian or $30,000 USD). If you are not yet an established trainer who can solve people’s problems, this is not for you yet. Until you are good at the craft you should not be thinking about money. Learn to deliver results first, then worry about how to become a dog trainer who runs a proper business.

Once upon a time I knew I wanted to grow but had no idea what I was doing. Email marketing, sales funnels, building offers, all of it was alien to me. Today the company consistently turns over six figures a month. Here is how we got from there to here.

1. Content, landing pages and email marketing: 7/10

My first real investment, three or four years ago, was a course by a well-known personal trainer covering content, landing pages and email marketing. At the time $1,500 was a substantial spend for me, but it paid dividends. We started email marketing off the back of it and saw real growth and some new avenues of income.

Looking back there was a lot missing, and my knowledge has moved on a long way since. But for where we were, around £10k a month, it was worthwhile and I am glad I did it. Good return on investment.

2. Digital marketing programme: 7.5/10

Next was a digital marketing programme, about £5k for six months of support. It was pretty good. It helped us dip a toe into paid advertising, though not as far as we wanted. To be fair to the guy, I believe we hit our first £50,000 month off the back of his help. Other things contributed, we had a big online following for the time and were making some small mistakes, but he pulled a lever here and there that helped us use that audience better. Nothing bad to say. Some gaps compared to what I know now, but the return was exponential.

3. Ed Lawrence’s YouTube programme: 9.5/10

At this point I knew I wanted to get into YouTube. A couple of people in our space were hammering it and I could see it was the future. It is evergreen: videos we made almost a year ago are still bringing revenue into the business, whereas an Instagram post from a year ago is essentially dead. Long-form content is for education, short-form is for dopamine.

I had paid two people to help me grow and both times it had a kick-on effect, so we took a leap of faith and did Ed Lawrence’s programme, around £8k at the time. Bar one, this was the best return on investment I have ever made. The curriculum was so good I did not even feel I needed the one-to-one support. I knew exactly what to do.

Taking YouTube seriously was one of the biggest needle movers in the trajectory of our business. Our other channel is just shy of 100,000 subscribers. I believe one YouTube subscriber is worth ten Instagram followers because of the level of intent.

4. The scam: 0/10

This is where things went wrong. We invested around $12,000 in a programme that was supposed to teach me to grow the online side of the business. Big promises, a money-back guarantee nobody could ever qualify for, an aggressive contract, and I fell for it hook, line and sinker.

The curriculum was bad. Very simple concepts made to feel wildly over-complicated. Three-to-four-hour tutorials, Loom after Loom, a monotone voice reading through documents and going nowhere. Stuff we already knew, made more confusing with metaphors that did not even line up. I tried to attend four coaching calls and not one coach ever turned up.

Then the penny dropped. The money-back guarantee was conditional on completing the course, and the course was something like 3,000 hours long. Impossible to complete. If you have spent time in the online space you probably know who I am talking about. I did not ask for a refund. I took the accountability, I fell for it, lesson learned. A complete waste of money.

5. Webinars: 9.5/10

By now the business was consistently around the £100k a month mark and I wanted to kick on again. I kept hearing about webinars. I was hesitant after getting my fingers burnt, but I knew learning to pitch one-to-many was the next step. At $25,000 it was the most I had ever spent on education. I backed myself to make it back, and I was not going to let one bad experience stop me investing in my own education.

It was an amazing return. I did two modules out of the whole programme, planning a webinar and delivering a webinar, and that was all I needed. I sent my slides over, got some great feedback, launched, and generated a lot of new business. This is what finally sent us consistently north of £100k a month. I think the company has done close to a million dollars on webinars alone. For a $25,000 investment, that is a pretty good return.

6. Jeremy Haynes on paid ads: 10/10

Up to this point we had invested nearly $50,000 and seen mostly massive ROI, but there was one thing we had not cracked: paid advertising. I knew it would be the accelerator on top of everything we were already doing organically. So I did my due diligence and asked around: who has the knowledge I do not even know I am missing?

That was Jeremy Haynes. His programme now costs $10,000 a month with a twelve-month commitment (I pay around $5k to $6k a month on my terms). In the last three or four months alone we have added an extra £100k a month in revenue. The return is absurd and the delivery is 10 out of 10. This is the one that sent us into the stratosphere.

Are these programmes a scam?

I am happy with the investments I made, even the dud. That $12k was a lesson and I do not regret it. I do not like the rhetoric that all these programmes are inherently scams. I have benefited massively. It was knowledge I did not have, so I paid people who had it. A lot of it I did not even know existed.

Money is oxygen for the business, and the business exists to help as many dogs as possible. So I bring in people who have figured out how to make money so we can deliver that mission. It is that simple.

The honest caveat: how much you get out depends on the type of person you are. These work for people who are aggressive in their application. I am that type of person. If you are not going to do the work, no course will save you.

Key takeaways

• Five out of six investments returned many times what they cost. The one scam does not change the maths.
• YouTube was one of the biggest needle movers we ever pulled: evergreen, high intent.
• Webinars took us consistently past £100k a month; paid ads added another £100k a month on top.
• Red flags: unreachable guarantees, aggressive contracts, coaches who do not show up.
• Results depend on how aggressively you apply what you learn.

If you want to skip some of the expensive lessons and get everything I have learned repurposed specifically for dog trainers, that is what Vantage Pro Mentorship is. If you are doing £3k+ a month and serious about growing a dog training business, apply for a call and we will tell you honestly whether it is the right move.