Episode 9 Transcript | Jonathan Tanner of Nightingale College

Peter Stevenson

Welcome to By Subject Silicon Slopes marketing and brand podcast. I’m here with Jonathan Tanner, CMO of Nightingale education group and a really amazing man.

Jonathan Tanner

Well, thank you.

Peter Stevenson

Welcome. So tell me a little bit about you, your background, where you grew up and maybe your first role in marketing.

Jonathan Tanner

Yeah, so originally I’m from Arizona, from Glendale, Arizona, and moved to Utah before high school and went to high school here. Grew up here, call Utah my home. Love Utah. I got into marketing in a maybe not a traditional way in college. I was a biologist. You were?

Alysha Smith

Yes.

Peter Stevenson

I didn’t know that.

Alysha Smith

Yes.

Jonathan Tanner

I was studying to be a dentist. I was going to be pre dent and went all the way to graduation. Could not get into dental school.

Peter Stevenson

Where did you go to college?

Jonathan Tanner

BYU.

Peter Stevenson

You went to BYU?

Alysha Smith

Yeah. Okay.

Jonathan Tanner

I went to BYU and was one of a lot of white males trying to get into dentistry. BYU my first role in differentiation my first lesson, I should say, in differentiation of you can’t look like everybody else.

Alysha Smith

Yeah.

Jonathan Tanner

And anyways, couldn’t get into dental school. Left college with just no idea what I wanted to do. And I had grown up an environment with my dad and my brothers that it was heavy into business and finance and decided that I was going to just go take a job at the biggest company that would hire me and chose Enterprise rent a car out of college.

Peter Stevenson

Oh, you did that’s, right. I remember that.

Alysha Smith

Yeah.

Jonathan Tanner

And so went and worked for them for about five years, moved up to a manager, managed branches. It wasn’t my jam.

Peter Stevenson

Yeah, my brother did that and he still talks about how amazing the learning experience was there.

Jonathan Tanner

Yeah, what you learn is incredible.

Peter Stevenson

Did you do that here in the state?

Jonathan Tanner

No, I went up to Idaho.

Alysha Smith

You went up to Idaho.

Jonathan Tanner

So my wife is from Idaho, from Pocatello. And so we went home for a brief to her home briefly. And we’re in Nampa, just outside of Boise cool. Where her parents spent some of her time. Anyway, I was engaged at Enterprise. Kind of decided this isn’t my future, this wasn’t my purpose.

Peter Stevenson

I would got to imagine a lot of people about three years in realize.

Jonathan Tanner

That’S not your you got to commit. There is a commitment time frame where you got to be all in or it’s time to go. But that’s when I started my very first company called Assurance Financial. And I briefly, for a couple of months followed in my dad’s footsteps in the finance world. And I sold key person life insurance.

Peter Stevenson

What years was this?

Jonathan Tanner

This was in 2010.

Alysha Smith

Okay.

Jonathan Tanner

The beginning parts of 2010. That year I got my life insurance license and sold key person life insurance.

Peter Stevenson

Here in the state or up in Idaho still.

Jonathan Tanner

I sold five policies.

Alysha Smith

Okay.

Jonathan Tanner

And they were to some of the original founders of Nightingale college. Which we’ll talk about later. So that was my introduction to them.

Peter Stevenson

And how did you meet them?

Jonathan Tanner

So there was a group of finance people in Utah that were looking at new startups and were helping these new startups connect with finance.

Alysha Smith

Okay.

Jonathan Tanner

And I was coming to Utah and had sat on a couple of roundtables with them because I was known for sales and kind of looked at it from a sales perspective. Originally, this group, these original owners of Nightingale got in with this group and they needed key person life insurance.

Peter Stevenson

Okay.

Jonathan Tanner

So they bought five policies from me.

Peter Stevenson

Amazing.

Alysha Smith

Yeah.

Jonathan Tanner

So that was my introduction into Assurance Financial, which this is an epic failure as a business altogether.

Peter Stevenson

Well, five policies.

Jonathan Tanner

Five policies.

Alysha Smith

Yeah.

Jonathan Tanner

But I made more, I will say I made more money in five policies than I had in a year’s income at Enterprise. So failure not failure, but it was learning experience. It was a learning experience, but this was my introduction into maybe running an organization and it gave me insights into some of the things that companies need from a marketing standpoint.

Alysha Smith

Okay.

Jonathan Tanner

So I met this idea, it was a concept back then, this concept of Nightingale College. And they asked me if I would come and help them set up their admissions because of my sales reputation at the time. And I didn’t know if Nightingale was going to make it. The idea, the concept was kind of cool, but I didn’t know. So at the same time, in 2010, when I started to go and work for Nightingale, I started two other companies. One of them was an Internet marketing company, the other one was an app development company. And one of them was called Golden Services, and one was called Prop Developers.

Peter Stevenson

How often do you make those mess those up? At least that first year.

Jonathan Tanner

Yeah, it was crazy. I knew one of these would be successful.

Alysha Smith

Yeah.

Jonathan Tanner

And I was doing so I’d do Nightingale during the day and I’d come home, I’d have dinner, I was with the kids and then at night because I was really exploring outsourcing. And in 2010, it was pretty new to connect to people in Romania and Pakistan and China. And at night, because they’re on the off hours, I would work until like one and two in the morning with them doing projects either on Internet marketing or in the app world.

Peter Stevenson

So you started your own companies too. Were you sourcing the deals and doing the sales for those apps and marketing companies here?

Jonathan Tanner

Yeah, they were company apps on pro op developers. And that was for about six to seven months before we decided to build our first internal app.

Alysha Smith

Okay.

Jonathan Tanner

And we decided on a this is crazy, but we decided on this app called Parcor Free Running.

Peter Stevenson

Amazing.

Jonathan Tanner

It was a 3D running app and it blew up. It was like a massive success. It had like 2 million downloads it was the number one arcade app in the itunes store in Europe. And it was an incredible project that basically introduced me to something. I don’t know, I couldn’t keep the project going. I watched as millions of kids all over the world, I was contacted through the night on our Facebook page of people saying, hey, I’m engaged in this app, and I’m loving this. And the whole project, the whole experiment, was to basically increase engagement. It was quite an unethical experiment to try to say to children, our job is to capture your attention, or adults endlessly.

Alysha Smith

Right.

Peter Stevenson

That’s the whole goal of all of those.

Jonathan Tanner

It was pretty dark.

Peter Stevenson

And so were you utilizing both the app development company and the marketing company to generate those 2 million, 3 million downloads?

Jonathan Tanner

No. What I had discovered, and this is from my science background all the way back in school, was I was very adamant about when we engaged in anything, I would deep dive into the study of those things. So when we got into the app market back then, if you got a certain number of downloads in any one day, you would trigger a marketing piece that Apple would sponsor for you. So you were like, the top new app, then you were the top 100 app, then you were the top 50, and then ten, and then one. And if you could ride these waves, apple would basically take your app, your product, to the next level. If it was a good enough product, it could ride the next wave. So all you had to do was trigger the first wave. And so I partnered with the American Parkour Association, and they had 70,000 members at the time, and all we had to do was close 10% of them in the first weekend, and it took off the first wave. It cost us about $100, and we rode this to 2 million downloads.

Alysha Smith

Wow.

Peter Stevenson

And so you said that you couldn’t keep it going. So did you shut it down or did you sell it?

Jonathan Tanner

We could have kept it going. It was just an ethical thing that I had of watching these kids play this game endlessly, and then just questioning what I wanted my impact to be on life. And we had enough money at the time to launch it on Android, and that’s when the money would have really been big.

Alysha Smith

Right.

Jonathan Tanner

But I couldn’t do it. I could not let this thing survive. So just to give you an idea, this is how stupid this thing is.

Alysha Smith

Yeah.

Jonathan Tanner

It had three segments, three environments that you would run in. Each environment had twelve segments. And the algorithm that I wrote would put one of these segments in a row. And the whole purpose that I was trying to do is speed up the characters running like microseconds at a time. The longer they played, and eventually the character would be going too fast and they’d die.

Alysha Smith

Right.

Jonathan Tanner

And when they died, they would go to the screen where an ad was displayed to go download another very addictive app.

Alysha Smith

Sure.

Jonathan Tanner

And if you would watch it, then you would get coins that you could then use to put on a new outfit or try a new trick in the game. But the whole purpose of this app was to get them to die so they could see this ad.

Alysha Smith

Right.

Jonathan Tanner

And that’s when I realized this will not be my legacy.

Peter Stevenson

So what I’m hearing from you is that there is a good opportunity for someone to build a Parcor game right now.

Jonathan Tanner

Yeah, it’s available. It’s open and available. It’s wide open.

Peter Stevenson

Wide open. The Hardcore Parkour app is available for somebody out there.

Alysha Smith

Yeah.

Peter Stevenson

Okay, so this was your first entrance. And one of the things that I have really loved about getting to know you over the last couple of years is there is this high level of ethics that’s part of your life. So you mentioned that you were working really hard at Nightingale. You talk about this really beautiful idea that Nightingale had come over and work on the admissions part. So I’d loved for you to sort of set the table with what that idea was at the start when they brought you on.

Alysha Smith

Yeah.

Jonathan Tanner

And this was a new introduction of doing good in the world. Nightingale College represents that in my life of, like, just like you said, what impact did I want to have? And Nightingale originally had talked about this massive demand for nurses across the country. And there was a very, very high wait list in a lot of the schools, and in Utah in particular, back then, there were some community colleges and universities that would make these kids wait year over year, and they would have to keep applying, and they weren’t moving anywhere. They would take more general education or they would put them on this guaranteed acceptance list. And you would go to school in like five to seven years from now, you would be in the next open enrollment, they called it.

Alysha Smith

Right.

Jonathan Tanner

And I looked at that and my sister actually, she was trying to become a nursing, she was trying to become a nurse, and eventually became a nurse. But I looked at that and I was like, there’s something utterly wrong with the system. You’ve got a need across our country for nurses, and yet the barrier is schools don’t have the resources or the ability to take on the number of nurses needed in order to fill the need that these which benefits all of us from health and all this. So I saw that as my first opportunity and looked at it and said, I actually think I have the resources and the influence that I could change this. And the original owners of Nightingale had that same kind of idea. It didn’t really take off until a year into our operations, nightingale was bought out and we had this amazing VC firm that came in. They brought with them this really incredible CEO, Mikhail Schneider, you know him. And it was then when we started to understand not only just helping Utah, but taking it to scale, leading out as an example of about how do we take this concept of solving the nursing shortage and really clarifying that problem and saying, how can we figure this out nationwide? And that was really when Nightingale became the story that it was.

Alysha Smith

Yeah.

Peter Stevenson

So you originally started in Admissions, which is a sales operations at the time. Was marketing underneath that admissions role or who was taking that role?

Jonathan Tanner

So marketing was outsourced from the college to a firm. And I was this quasi middle ground because I was also pedaling the school up and down the Wasach front. So I was giving presentations to all of these hospitals, trying to explain to them what Nightingale was as a new intro to Utah. When we had this transition in ownership is when I had looked at what I had accomplished in the app world, internet marketing. And we were experimenting with such unique digital media in traffic flows, and it was so different than what was going on at colleges. They were still running late night ads.

Peter Stevenson

Direct mail, a lot of yeah, direct mail.

Jonathan Tanner

And I looked at this opportunity in the education space and said, I have again the influence in the team that we could really make this change. And so I proposed to the new CEO that I basically delete everything Nightingale had done from a marketing standpoint and restart our brand from using this digital.

Peter Stevenson

Media platform, using your marketing operation that you had started. And so did Nightingale hire you as a company to do that? Or did you come on as the C, did you start as the marketer and then have your team kind of be outsourced from?

Jonathan Tanner

Yeah, originally we had because it was like an experiment, we had kept it under one of my outsourced companies. But the success of that eventually led to like an employee buyout. I had to resolve my conflict of interest, obviously, as it worked.

Peter Stevenson

Right.

Jonathan Tanner

I was curious about that, and I had to allow that team to eventually take over and run it. And some of those original individuals are still with us today. They still are engaged with part of Nightingale success.

Peter Stevenson

Those developers that you have and marketers in Romania. I’ve heard Rick, who works for you, just talk unbelievable at how great they are.

Jonathan Tanner

It is incredible. Before I worked with outsourcing, the world was way too large. Right. But as you start working outsourcing, you realize just how small it is and how connected you can be to top talent locally, but also across the world.

Alysha Smith

Yeah.

Peter Stevenson

At Modern Eight, we use this outsourced team in the Philippines a lot, and they are like the smartest, funniest group of people, and I love working with them. Just because they’re so much more talented than you would ever even expect. Okay, so this is 2011. 2012, and Mikhail came on in 2011, if I remember.

Jonathan Tanner

2012 is when he is a really.

Peter Stevenson

Great story, and we’ve talked about him before in in various places, but, you know, maybe tell a little bit about his background, because I think that leans into where Nightingale has gone in the last ten years.

Jonathan Tanner

Yeah, like you said, he has this incredible story. He’s an immigrant that came over and to the United States started with I mean, you can’t even imagine how little they had and became a nurse here in the United States and wanted to. And his great gift is that I have just admired from the very beginning his ability to challenge the status quo of any system and relentlessly pursue that change is quite phenomenal to be a part of that story. And he has every step of the way, whether it was when he was a nurse, whether it was when he was a manager, a nurse manager, or whether when he went back to school and he ended up going to Berkeley and got his MBA and he’s run other nursing programs. But he has consistently challenged the status quo and decided that what is going on is just no longer acceptable. And he’s been a great voice of change his whole life, but, I mean, truly came from, like, nothing.

Alysha Smith

Yeah.

Peter Stevenson

Just an unbelievable human.

Jonathan Tanner

Yeah. Not only a great human, but just his love for humans is also what drives him of just making this world a better place and better humanity. He’s a huge advocate of help. That’s been his vision, and he’s been able to realize that with with, you know, obviously Nightingale College at yeah. Pinnacle.

Peter Stevenson

Okay, so let me jump forward a couple of years. So maybe two years ago, three years ago, you called Modernate, and we came and met you in your offices, and I had no idea who was the leader because you were all joking around in red T shirts that day. Again, I still look back and I think I would have never guessed that Mikhail was the one who was the CEO in that meeting, but apparently he was. So at the time when I came in, you were more involved in a different role than the marketing. You kind of had some marketing responsibilities, but you had some other roles. So tell me the path from like, that from 2012 to 2019, 2020.

Alysha Smith

Yeah.

Jonathan Tanner

So I had become the director of marketing through this shift and had kind of let go of admissions when they had come back to me and said, hey, would you stay with admissions and be the director of both of these functions? But as we grew, my main charge was to I mean, I was given the charge to try to figure out how to with the other team members. How do we solve the nursing shortage. And that question is part of marketing. But there is a lot of logistical, there’s regulations that’s happening. We have accreditors that were limiting our growth and where we could grow. And it got me into a space where I was really doing a lot of business development, new business development. And from that point, I was trying to figure out how to position the school so that it just wasn’t another school. It’s not just about nursing. It’s about what does that nurse shortage represent? And what we ultimately found out through this process is that the real client was the healthcare systems. And if we really wanted to push it even further, it was the care that these healthcare systems are promising their community. And by not having the nurse numbers, they couldn’t meet that demand. Hence, we have a very specific role in meeting that. And so, as I looked at that, I started to work with these healthcare partners in setting up new business opportunities and new partnerships. And we basically developed a new distance education model, a new blended distance education model, through this relationship between me and these partners. I was still overseeing marketing and admissions at the time, but it was through this new business arm, and we eventually called it the Nightingale Network that we were building. But ultimately that was and I had some incredible people that were working around me that really made this happen. But that is basically what I was doing as I was figuring out the operations of how to bring distance education, how to solve. The real problem I was trying to solve is the geographic proliferation of education. How do we keep access open to the most rural community that needs maybe even just one nurse, right? And most traditional models, they won’t go there for that. You have to have at least 20 to 50 enrollments per semester to even break even, right? So the problem that I was trying to solve is the nursing shortage, but it was a question of access, it was a question of opportunity. And so I was involved heavily in designing and partnering with these hospital systems. So, yeah, I was kind of part of operations.

Peter Stevenson

One of the stories that I heard you tell a couple of years ago is one that I actually think about a lot. And you talked about you got kind of put into this role by Mikhail about how to do this, and you said, look, I don’t think I can do this with the knowledge I have now. And so during this whole part where you’re trying to solve the nursing shortage in the world, which is not a small task, you decide to go back to school, right? So tell me a little bit about what it was that you were looking for, what that role was that you had taken on that you didn’t feel like you could meet, and how that new schooling kind of helped.

Jonathan Tanner

Yeah, the challenge that I was given, again, was scaling this to a national level. And at the time, I don’t want to sound ungrateful for my biology degree.

Peter Stevenson

You can sound ungrateful, but I don’t.

Jonathan Tanner

Remember this being part of that, any courses of how to scale an organization. And I felt very inadequate. And like you mentioned, I originally came to Mikhail basically asking for my boss. I said we need somebody. I was sitting in these board meetings. There were things being asked and put on my plate that I’d literally walk away thinking like, I’m going to go to the library and read a book. I mean, I don’t know.

Alysha Smith

Yeah.

Jonathan Tanner

I didn’t know where to go.

Alysha Smith

Right.

Jonathan Tanner

I don’t know if other people feel this in their career, but there are times when, yes, they do. You’re faking it, but it’s beyond faking. I don’t even know where even to begin.

Alysha Smith

Right.

Jonathan Tanner

And so I went to, again, the CEO, and said, hey, I feel very inadequate. I don’t understand how to do this. And it helped that we didn’t have any money.

Peter Stevenson

Right.

Jonathan Tanner

It did help that that was their case at the time. But he told me well, then he challenged me to get more education. He said, clearly, you need to have some kind of greater business awareness. And so we agreed on going back to getting my MBA, and he gave me until August to figure it out and get enrolled into a program. And then it needed to be an executive program so that I could do it on the weekends. And so that was the challenge, and I accepted it. And that journey in itself is a crazy experience because I wouldn’t consider myself an academic in any way. I had okay grades, but executive MBA programs are quite difficult to get into.

Alysha Smith

Yeah.

Peter Stevenson

And you went to BYU again for that EMBA.

Alysha Smith

Yeah.

Jonathan Tanner

So at the time, they were building out their Salt Lake facility and were inviting these incredible professors. They were kind of, like doing this heavy recruiting to build out their MBA program. They were inviting professors from all of these really great schools because it’s associated with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints. So they were pulling in members from different schools. And the professors they were bringing into that executive program were just incredible, incredible teachers. And so there was a great value there. And I’ll say this, though. They sent me a denial letter.

Alysha Smith

Okay? Yeah.

Peter Stevenson

This is one of my favorite parts.

Jonathan Tanner

Of the I got to tell this. So they sent me a denial letter. So they had put me on this waitlist. Which is the whole thing. I’m trying to solve a nursing school, right? Well, first they make me take the standardized exam, so I go take the GMAT, and I probably today carry the lowest GMAT score in the history of any person to ever attend BYU Business School. And I know that I am that dumb, because I retook the GMAT and got the same score after studying for, like, three months. Okay? They put me on this waitlist, and eventually they end up sending me this denial letter. And I was so determined to figure out what I didn’t know that I ended up calling the program director of the NBA program and saying, hey, you sent me this denial letter. I think this is a mistake. You’re not going to want to make this official until you meet me. And I don’t know what it was, but he agreed. He was like, well, now I’m curious.

Alysha Smith

Yeah.

Jonathan Tanner

And his name was Dr. Bingham. And so he goes, well, come down to Provo, and I’d like to meet you. And I went down, and for an hour, we sat in his office, and I just laid out the struggle that I was facing against Nightingale.

Alysha Smith

Yeah.

Jonathan Tanner

I was like, this is what they’re asking me to do. I need help. You’re the closest thing that I know of to turn to. And I laid it out for him, and he was like and he brought up the GMAT. He said, Well, I hate to tell you this, Mr. Tanner, but you would be, like, the lowest person we’ve ever accepted from a GMAT score. And he goes, I don’t think academically you’re going to do well in this MBA program. And I said, okay, I understand that. What do I got to do to get accepted?

Alysha Smith

Yeah.

Jonathan Tanner

And he told me at the time, harvard was doing these move at your own pace business courses. They were testing them. And he said, So this is what I’ll do. I’ll give you these three courses. It was stats. There was some general business course in English. And he says, if you can pass these and get the certificates for them, then I’ll allow you to start. And that was on Thursday, and classes started on Monday. And so I basically pulled a bunch of all nighters and enrolled in these courses and studied through the night. And I took one class at a time, and it was crazy. And ended up they basically were these courses. And then you’d have to pass this test, and you could get this certificate saying that you qualified. And so anyways, I showed up Monday morning with the three certificates in hand and handed them to Dr. Bingham, and he said, welcome to school, Mr. Tanner.

Alysha Smith

Have a seat.

Jonathan Tanner

And that was it. That’s how I got enrolled.

Peter Stevenson

It’s an unbelievable story. Not just like, for you as a human being, the fortitude and the excitement and the ability to go and craft your own story is kind of amazing. But for me, the thing that I think about it a lot is, like, in my life, when I think about that story and I’ve heard it this is maybe the second or third time I’ve heard it is the ability for myself to think, what am I accepting that I shouldn’t accept. Where am I saying I’m going to take this when I shouldn’t? And I actually think that it’s one of the best stories I’ve heard in a long time. So anyway, keep telling that one.

Alysha Smith

Yeah.

Peter Stevenson

All right, let’s go back to marketing. So we show up two, three years ago. You’re at a crossroads at nightingale. You have now figured out this thing that you were trying to figure out how to do distance education in nursing, and now you need to go and expand it. So tell me where you were. And I think it was the start of 2021. Is that right? So tell me where you were at the start of 2021 and kind of what led to that idea of having to go through a rebrand.

Jonathan Tanner

Yeah, we had successfully, like you had mentioned, we had successfully figured out this distance education model, and again, the MBA program paid major dividends into what that meant and how to expand a company and do all those things. That was wonderful education. But we were expanding. I don’t know if this is the right order to do things. We had successfully figured out how to do distance education. Nobody knew about us.

Alysha Smith

Right.

Jonathan Tanner

It was an incredible success story that nobody, if we were to shut down at that point in time, would have ever remembered us. We were so incognito, and the way in which we were doing digital media, people were finding us, we were closing those deals. They were like, okay, I’ve never heard of you, but sounds like this is an opportunity that would fit my needs. And we had just brought on a director of marketing, rick Benz, and he has incredible experience, right, great history.

Peter Stevenson

That’s all he’s done is education, marketing.

Jonathan Tanner

He’s in marketing marketer, and brilliant human being. And came on and looked at what I had overseen and built and was like, you’re kind of missing a very large piece. And it is this branding. And I had devalued branding for a long time because I was like, listen, the systems working, you were profitable and revolutionizing the way distance education was working. And I thought eventually they’ll figure it out. I didn’t realize the power of having a brand associated with at least that’s well defined when you enter new markets. Yeah, and I unfortunately had devalued that in my own marketing mix.

Alysha Smith

Sure.

Jonathan Tanner

And rick is the one that introduced us to modern eight and said, hey, this may be something you want to consider. And after meeting you guys, it was like, I see where the gap was now. And I saw it back then that I had really overvalued what we had built, and it needed a brand, it needed a story, which that’s where we were when we invited you guys to come.

Peter Stevenson

You now gotten to this place where you’d figured out how to do the thing that needed to solve nursing. And we came in and. Helped you work a little bit with the branding and that story and the messaging and some of the design and some of the wording. But tell me what’s happened since then. How has the new branding and the new messaging and as you’ve gone to try to build the pipeline of nurses in this nation and eventually the world, tell me where that’s gone in the last two years.

Jonathan Tanner

Yeah, it started really, I mean, after going through the exercises with Modern Eight, not only did it give us the messaging, but what it did for each executive, for each person that was part of that process. It gave us a unified voice. We were using the same language, we were speaking the same initiatives. Like, we understood how cross functionally one person’s efforts was going to influence another person’s efforts. That is something that branding did from a unification standpoint.

Peter Stevenson

Interesting.

Jonathan Tanner

Yeah, that was a phenomenal period of time. And in this rebrand, we also discovered that there were some operational that we eventually called divisions, but there were some operations that didn’t quite have their place. They were confusing the base operations of the college. And these eventually, through this rebranding process, came out as Nightingale Innovations.

Alysha Smith

Right.

Jonathan Tanner

And then nightingale solutions. And Nightingale Solutions was going to address kind of this different clientele of not the learners and the students. It was going to really focus in on the healthcare partners and their needs because they were struggling to get good education also for nurses that have graduated and are since in the field. So Nightingale Solutions became that Nightingale Innovations was this incubator of research and development, and it helped us to separate out through this rebrand, separate out these divisions that honestly were kind of causing a little confusion inside of the college. And once we understood the role that each one of these divisions played, it really did help us advance in new initiatives and do it safely without putting the college or the education at risk.

Alysha Smith

Right.

Jonathan Tanner

Which is at utmost is our priority. Right. We want to make sure the learners have this incredible experience. What has happened since then has been kind of an up and down. When we announced this to the organization, and I think you kind of went.

Peter Stevenson

Through a reorg a couple of months ago, right? Yeah, that kind of split out the college and Innovations. If I remember correctly, there were four different groups. What are those four groups again?

Jonathan Tanner

Yeah, there was the Support Services, which is really anyone who’s not learner facing.

Peter Stevenson

Right.

Jonathan Tanner

Then there was the college, and then it was Nightingale College, nightingale Innovations, which is the research development, curriculum design, like very forward thinking in nursing education. This is a wonderful division. And then Nightingale Solutions, which is about bringing solutions to healthcare partners. From what we’ve learned from the college and Innovations, we call this whole group Nightingale Education Group. Okay, but if you were to put me in one of those. I’m in the support group.

Peter Stevenson

Right. So then all the functional people who are not learner facing are now supporting those three other arms of the college. And then that’s when you took on that title of CMO, right, is when that split happened.

Jonathan Tanner

Yeah, I’ve been the acting CMO for whatever, but because I was so heavily involved in business development right. I have been had my hand in all of these things since the divide, I have taken on a very finite and focused role as the chief marketing officer.

Peter Stevenson

I guess my big question then is like, what’s working for Nightingale College right now? Where are you at in that? What channels are you pulling? How are you doing marketing across the nation?

Jonathan Tanner

Yeah. At our core, it has always been, because of what we built from the very beginning, our ability to have an online presence from SEO to PPC and retargeting and really understanding of the keywords that people search. Which of those individuals are really going to be successful here at Nightingale College if they become our student. That is our core marketing. But what has been added to that, which is again, the sweet part of the story, is our public relationships arm. Our communications arm has been built out led by Shannon Michaels.

Peter Stevenson

She’s amazing.

Jonathan Tanner

She is incredible. Yeah, I mean, this is a season.

Peter Stevenson

That was a solid hire.

Alysha Smith

Yes.

Jonathan Tanner

I mean, seasoned communications individual that honestly is one of my mentors and inspires me just every day.

Peter Stevenson

She’s great.

Jonathan Tanner

Yeah, I care for her a lot. She’s an incredible leader. But watching the communications arm about what messaging are we putting in, how are we being part of the story of just nursing in general, which, again, you guys challenged us in many ways is like, are you part of just nursing education conversations? And she’s really opened up a lot of different opportunities for us to be part of the conversation and persuading public opinion and how people really just feel about the nursing shortage in general. So we have a great PR communications. A lot of that is learner stories, partnership stories. What is our true mission impact and how is it being realized in each of these states that we’re in? Then we have our marketing arm that has I mean, it’s built out from not only digital spaces, but now they’re engaged in, we have one individual works for us that does nothing but partner with healthcare systems. And how do we do joint marketing campaigns just to build awareness around nursing education, right. And about becoming a nurse? Are we shaping the way people feel about the career of nursing? So we have that going on. We’ve got some incredible design people. We’ve got social media groups. And so I would say that at the core, we’re still doing a lot of digital media. But there is this new incredible message that I think is being given out.

Peter Stevenson

From Nightingale and how’s the response been? I know that you were facing a lot of pushback and you’re trying to change the world, and some people don’t like that. So how’s the response been the last year, year and a half of trying to get to the forefront of changing nursing education?

Jonathan Tanner

Yeah, nursing education is complicated. There’s layers because of it’s so highly regulated, and education in general is just a mess. It’s so regulated, it’s very difficult. I would say that we’re a positive influence in change, changing any kind of system that is so highly regulated and has got its heels so entrenched in tradition for good reasons.

Alysha Smith

Yeah.

Jonathan Tanner

When nurses innovate, bad things could happen. So I get why that industry is the way it is. I get why education is entrenched in incredible tradition, but it doesn’t negate the fact that there are problems and we’ve got to radically transform what we’re doing. Nightingale is a voice for that transformation in a good, positive way. We are trying to invite other schools, boards of nursing, to at least take the space to consider what we’re doing from an impact and possibly think that we can have traditional schools. But COVID proved out having only one type of education platform can be detrimental if something like a pandemic comes through and basically says nurse students can’t go into hospitals.

Alysha Smith

Right.

Jonathan Tanner

And so I think because of our desire to constantly challenge the status quo, we introduced virtual reality into the education platforms. We’ve just pushed the boundaries of saying, we got to do this better, and I think we’re a good force. We’re not the answer for everything. I mean, that’s not the point, but we want to be part of the story, for sure.

Alysha Smith

Yeah.

Peter Stevenson

One of the things that, again, this isn’t necessarily about marketing, but I do think that one of the real values that I came away from thinking about Nyingale College is similar to your story about getting into your executive MBA program. That test takers who don’t score as highly on tests don’t necessarily make them bad. Nurses. Like you may not have been the best test taker, but you were probably a really amazing MBA student. That real goal that you had of taking people who may not have been a traditional school student, but ended up being thriving nurses, I think is really this beautiful story that I’m sure has resonated really well across the nation, right?

Jonathan Tanner

Oh, yeah. I mean, the people that are coming to us are reshaping the way nursing is done. And you and I were kind of joking about Bedside Manor before we came in here. And the resiliency of the Nightingale student one, because they have been told no so many ways in their journey, and then on top of that, that our society doesn’t always create easy pathways for socioeconomic demographic diversity in nursing. These pathways are hard for these populations, and they need somebody who’s going to open some doors, create some pathways so that they can actually achieve the success of being a nurse. And as a society, we need them. We desperately need diversity inside of nursing. When nurses represent the populations they serve, health outcomes go up. So it’s not just diversity for diversity’s sake. It is a proven fact that we need to have a diverse nursing population and the fact that we need to draw from these populations in order to improve health of all of our communities.

Alysha Smith

Yeah.

Peter Stevenson

Local populations are going to end doing a better job treating their neighbors and friends and family, right?

Alysha Smith

Yeah.

Peter Stevenson

Okay, well, we are getting towards the end. So the last question that we typically ask is give us some restaurants, bars, coffee shop recommendations. You said you only go to one place a month, so this is going to be easy. But tell me a little bit, where should people go around this valley?

Jonathan Tanner

Okay, so again, take it for what it is because I’m not that. But if I do go out, okay, I love fish because we don’t have fish in our house for some reason, but I love it. But fried fish for some reason is like my cheat thing. So if I could go to catch and get fish and chips, salt Lake or if I go to Slapfish and get like their ultimate fish taco bowl of like clam chowder, okay, that’s my good place. That’s my catch.

Peter Stevenson

Or slap fish and some fried fish and chips.

Jonathan Tanner

Fried fish and chips.

Peter Stevenson

Are you a tartar sauce guy? I have all that tartar sauce.

Alysha Smith

Give it to me.

Peter Stevenson

You’re such a Utah. I love it. You know, the best fish and chips is at current.

Jonathan Tanner

No, I haven’t yet.

Peter Stevenson

Oh, my goodness. You got to go. Fried fish, just great fries, a ton of different sauces.

Jonathan Tanner

You already sold me. I’m in.

Peter Stevenson

Oh, no, it’s the best.

Jonathan Tanner

I’m in.

Peter Stevenson

You’re going to love it.

Alysha Smith

All right.

Peter Stevenson

Thank you so much, Jonathan, for being here and we’ll see you in two weeks. My subjects is production of modernate Agency and Silicon Slopes. Executive producers are Alysha Smith and Peter Stevenson. Editor and producer is Dave Meekum. Video production by Connor Mitchell development production by Eric Dahl production management by Shelby Sandland original music composed by Josh Johnson website designed by modernate please make sure to follow and share the show with your friends and your enemies. Thanks for joining us.