Entrepreneur Jeff Gargas Adopts Toy-Store Business Model for Highly Successful Content Business
Entrepreneur: Jeff Gargas
Biz: Teach Better Team
Tilt: Helping educators teach better and increase their impact through entrepreneurship
Primary Channel: Email (20K), Facebook (5K)
Other Channels: Instagram (5K), X (35.8K), YouTube (1.71K), LinkedIn (1.7K), blog, podcast
Time to First Dollar: 14 months
Rev Streams: Courses, membership program, professional development packages, podcast, community, mastermind program, merch
Our Favorite Actionable Advice
- Use what you’ve learned: Jeff used his experience as the founder of a record label and a digital marketing agency to build and expand the Teach Better Team brand.
- Possess patience: Jeff and his business partner Chad Ostrowski worked their full-time jobs and usually spent 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. creating the content for what would become the Teach Better team. It took 14 months to earn their first dollar.
- Consider the Toys R Us model: Toy stores target kids (the audience) to get them to get their parents (the buyers) to purchase the toys. That’s what Jeff and Chad did – targeting teachers with free, valuable content to get them to get their school districts to buy the products.
- Don’t hesitate to rebrand. Launched to teach Chad’s Grid Method, the business expanded with products, including a podcast and book, to help teachers teach better. So, they changed the business name from The GRID Method to the Teach Better Team.
- Diversify to add value: Add new offerings only when your business can sustain the divided attention. For example, Jeff recently added the EDUcreator Club to help entrepreneurial teachers with their new businesses.
A four-time college dropout, Jeff Gargas always chuckles that he founded an education consulting company teaching teachers.
“I wanted to be a rock star so I could be rich and famous, so I could use that fame and wealth to help other young people chase their dreams,” he says.
Jeff didn’t make it as a rock star but started a record label, working with numerous artists and putting on 150 shows a year. As the CD market waned, Jeff closed his record label and, in 2013, started ENI Media, a marketing firm that created and managed websites for small businesses and entrepreneurs.
Following Content Inc. modelA year later, Jeff reconnected with Chad Ostrowski, who had left band life to become a teacher and created a system for teaching and grading called The Grid Method. This system attracted the attention of other teachers, and Chad wanted to write a book explaining it.
“He called me about this ebook idea, and I just drove around my block for an hour listening to him tell me how this method had changed him as a teacher, changed his students, and changed him as a father and husband due to less stress,” Jeff recalls. “I said, ‘Dude, we are not doing just an ebook,’ and that was the beginning.”
Chad and Jeff hashed out the idea and decided to develop courses and professional development for districts. They followed the Content Inc. model created by Joe Pulizzi, founder of The Tilt.
“I said to Chad, ‘We are going to give it all away for free.’ And he’s like, ‘What do you mean free?’
“I said I wanted teachers to be able to come to our website, take the free courses, download some free resources, read some blogs, and be able to implement the Grid Method in their classroom without ever paying us a dime.”
Jeff theorized that if they succeeded, school districts would pay them for training and implementation help. From the beginning, the duo focused on providing as much value as possible to build trust and credibility within the education community.
Giving content away for freeIn 2015, The GRID Method, the company’s first iteration, launched with a free course, a paid course, and professional development packages. It also produced a weekly newsletter with free resources, exclusive discounts, and other offers, eventually growing to 20K subscribers.
But Jeff knew building an audience takes time. So they worked full-time jobs and usually spent 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. pumping out content to build the audience for their content business.
It took 14 months for the first person to buy the paid course, though Jeff refunded the sale two days later when they concluded they didn’t want to take money from teachers.
“We wanted to run a Toys R Us model. You know where they market to the kids, who pull on their mom and dad’s pant legs to take them to the store and buy,” Jeff explains. “In our scenario, teachers were the kids. We marketed to them so they would go tell their administrators they needed training on this. It’s the difference between your customer and your buyers.”
This model paid off a few months later, in February 2016, when the business was down to its last $378. Chad was invited to speak at a conference, which would cost $375. He went, and one person of the 20 in his session led to a three-year deal with a school district. To fulfill the contract, Chad quit his full-time teaching position.
The professional development revenue stream is high value because the offerings are tailored to the district, run over several years, and involve in-depth coaching.
Rebranding the growing content business
With steady revenue in 2018, the team was ready to launch additional content products. But they didn’t all fit under the Grid Method, so a rebrand was necessary. Teach Better Team was born from the founders’ desire never to tell teachers how to teach but to share something that helped Chad teach. (Teach Better was the preferred name, but those social media handles weren’t available.)
The first products launched under the new brand were a podcast, Teach Better Talk, and a book, Teach Better. Later, they launched the Teach Better Academy, charging $9 a month for access to all its courses and livestream library.
(Jeff describes the rebranding campaign as “a terrible launch.” The announcement email went out at 7 a.m. instead of 7 p.m. Internet troubles crept up when they tried to go live to talk about the rebrand, and they had to wait six months before Facebook would let them change the name. However, the rebrand ultimately worked well for the company’s future.)
Expanding their valueA year after the rebrand, Jeff applied his record label experience to launch the Teach Better Podcast Network to support two team members’ podcasts.
With over 20 podcasts in the current lineup, the network provides value to the Teach Better audience, expands the brand’s reach, and strengthens its community engagement.
In 2020, the Teach Better Team introduced the Speaker Network, a curated group of educators and experts available for keynotes, workshops, and training sessions. The Speaker Network is separate from the Teach Better Team’s professional development offerings.
During the pandemic, Jeff and the team launched a free administrative mastermind group as a listening station. The Administrative Mastermind meets weekly and gathers as a community through a private Facebook group.
Through this group, Jeff discovered a need for a community for educators building something outside the classroom and launched the $25-a-month EDUCreator Club+ to help educators grow their side gigs. “It helps teach business to educators,” Jeff says.
Demand for the EDUCreator Club+ prompted Jeff to add more support. The Mastermind level costs $79 a month and offers members one-on-one coaching, weekly sessions, and office hours for expert guidance on content creation and business development.
Jeff also launched the EDUcreator Club+ MBA program ($249 a month) to give established entrepreneurs everything they need to elevate their businesses. Members must pass the application review and attend weekly check-ins and Zoom meetings to ensure the group’s exclusivity and effectiveness.
What’s next?Jeff and his team have built a thriving community and have established Teach Better Team and the GRID Method as sought-after professional development for educators and districts.
According to Jeff, the Teach Better team is focused on narrowing their focus and “getting leaner.”
Jeff, who has always held fast to his overarching view to help as many people as possible, has discovered he loves working with entrepreneurs. He now has the time to dedicate to this passion through one-on-one coaching and launched Small Business BS, a podcast with co-host Adam Witmer, to help other entrepreneurs. Jeff also will be speaking at Content Entrepreneur Expo 2025 in Cleveland this August.
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