Three Years In This is a company

CPD Perspectives: Three Years In — Part 4 of 4

Year three is when things came into focus.

Not suddenly. Not with a single moment of clarity. If you are old enough to remember how photograph develops (or maybe you a a genZ who re-discovered Polaroid), details emerging gradually until you can finally see the whole image.

Working with a coach through the DOHE programme, I found the language I’d been missing. Not new ideas — the thinking had been there for a while — but the ability to articulate it clearly. What problem Open CPD solves. Who it solves it for. Why the way we solve it matters.

The answer is simpler than I used to make it: training providers need to issue credentials that mean something, at scale, without it costing a fortune or requiring a team of people to manage. We do that. Cleanly, automatically, and at a price that doesn’t require a course to sell out before it pays for itself.

What we got wrong

There were lessons in year three that I’d rather have learned differently.

We had real traction in a market that had found us — genuine interest, genuine customers, a revenue stream that was modest but real. And we handed it to partners before that trust was properly established. Both times, the partners didn’t deliver. The revenue dried up.

The lesson wasn’t that partnerships don’t work. It’s that you can’t hand over a relationship before you understand it well enough yourself. We know that market. We understand those providers. Year four, we keep trying until we find the right partner

When the penny dropped

The most significant outcome of year three wasn’t a product launch or a revenue milestone. It was something quieter.

Open CPD is a real company.

Not a project. Not a side hustle. Not a promising idea that might become something. A company with real customers who renew, who refer, who tell us that what we’ve built has changed how they work.

The product is good. The model is right — low entry cost, highly automated, no unnecessary complexity. The niche is defined and defended. And new customers at the close of year three suggest that what was built is beginning to find its audience.

What I know now

Three years in, here is what I would tell myself at the start.

Your niche is your strength. The temptation to broaden is constant. Resist it.

The right people matter more than the right tools. Every time.

Credibility is patient. The things you do in year one that feel unrewarded will pay off in year three in ways you couldn’t have predicted.

And the product being good is necessary but not sufficient. Learning to reach the people who need it — that’s the other half of the job. That’s the work of year four.

If you’re a training provider — small, ambitious, frustrated with the tools you’ve been given — I’d like to show you what we’ve built. Three years of learning went into it.

CPD Perspectives: Three Years In concludes here. The full series is available on the Open CPD LinkedIn page.