Modern Operator’s Brief For CPR Certification Labs

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Prepared for: Jarrod Epps, Founder & CEO, CPR Certification Labs
From: Mark Malian, Modern Operators

A Note to Jarrod

On our call you said you want to stop being the entrepreneur and start being the CEO. You want a business that runs the same on a busy day or a slow one, whether you're in the room or not. And you've earned the right to want that. You've stamped out 50 unmanned CPR offices in about a year, you're opening roughly 12 a month, and you're pointed at 500. That's not a someday dream. You're already doing it.
The problem is how you're doing it. Google Drive folders, scattered spreadsheets, and a handful of people carrying the whole operation in their heads. That worked to get you to 50. It will not get you to 500.
This document is our honest read of three things: where CPR Certification Labs actually is right now, what's barreling toward the industry you're helping build, and what changes the day this company runs from a system instead of running through you and one or two key people. It's proof that we heard every word you said. It's also the clearest path we know from 50 offices to 500 without the wheels coming off.

What We're Seeing at CPR Certification Labs

~$2M run rate in year one, 50 locations, ~12 opening a month, 500 in your sights inside 18–24 months.
The friction, in your words and ours:
  • The company runs through you, and through one or two key people. You told us you want out of the day-to-day decision routing, that you're still the one everything flows to. And you were candid that when the person who holds "how we open and run an office" is out, even for a vacation, communication starts falling through the cracks. The real fix is systems, not people. The operation lives in heads, not in a system. Heads take vacations. Heads leave. Systems don't.
  • There is no single source of truth. SOPs, processes, and institutional knowledge are scattered across Google Drive files, folders, and spreadsheets. You're opening a new office roughly every 2.5 days, and each one is being stamped from a master copy that only partly exists. Most of it lives in memory.
  • Every new office and every new rep starts closer to scratch than it should. With 5 CS reps in the Philippines and constant hiring as you scale, "how we do it here" gets re-taught by interruption instead of learned from a system. That's a tax you pay 12 times a month, and it compounds.
  • You're flying without instruments. You want daily dashboards and real clarity on efficiency and profitability. Right now those numbers live in disconnected tools, so problems surface late and wins are hard to double down on.
  • You already believe in AI, but it's working in a silo. You've built in-house AI for pre-sales calls and inbound texts. Good. But without a central operating system feeding it your data, your voice, and your process, every AI tool you add is guessing on its own instead of pulling from one brain.
Every founder-led company hits this exact ceiling right before it either builds a system or breaks. You're hitting it at 50 offices. You do not want to hit it at 300.

CPR Certification Labs, As We Understand It

You run one core loop, thousands of times over. A customer books online (Webflow → Acuity) and pays (Stripe), completes the AHA cognitive course at home, then visits one of your unstaffed labs to complete the hands-on skills test on an RQI sensor manikin (depth, rate, recoil, ventilation, real-time feedback, no instructor), and leaves with a same-day official AHA eCard. HubSpot holds the CRM, the AHA backend issues the credential, and your in-house AI fields pre-sales calls and inbound texts. Slack and email hold the team together.
So look at what you've really got. CPRCL is a multi-unit, franchise-shaped physical-services business wearing a healthtech skin. Multi-unit businesses don't win on the product. A customer can get a BLS card in a hundred places. They win on operations: who opens the next location fastest, onboards staff fastest, and delivers the same experience at unit 200 that they did at unit 2. That's a systems game, and it's the exact game a CompanyOS is built to win.
You proved this yourself. In your own words to the press: "Once you remove the dependency on instructors, the entire system becomes faster, more consistent, and dramatically easier to scale." You already ran that play on the training side and it worked. The next move is to run the identical play on your operations. Remove the dependency on any single person, and the whole company gets faster, more consistent, and dramatically easier to scale.

The Industry, Defined

Let me name your market precisely, so we can talk about it like insiders. You sit at the intersection of three things:
  1. AHA provider certification (BLS / ACLS / PALS). Mandatory, recurring compliance credentials for clinical staff, valid two years. That two-year cycle is a built-in recertification flywheel: every customer is a future customer.
  2. Blended / self-directed delivery. AHA HeartCode online plus an in-person skills session on a Voice-Assisted Manikin / RQI station. AHA officially sanctions this model.
  3. Self-service, multi-location retail operations. You turn that skills session into an unstaffed box you scale like retail units. That's your innovation, and it's why your real problems are franchise problems, and franchise problems are exactly what a CompanyOS solves.
One sentence for your business: a self-service, technology-enabled AHA CPR certification network: healthcare compliance training, e-learning, and multi-unit retail operations fused into one.

Market Size, Demand & Tailwinds

The wind is at your back. This is the good news, and it's why timing matters:
  • CPR & first-aid training market: ~$4.76B (2025) → ~$5.22B (2026), ~9.7% CAGR.
  • AHA and the American Red Cross together hold ~60–65% of U.S. certification volume. Credibility is concentrated, and independents like you compete on access, speed, and experience, not on the credential itself.
  • Digital course completions grew ~22% (2023–2025) and keep climbing. That's the exact shift your entire model is built on.
  • 40+ states now require CPR training to graduate high school. That's a pipeline of an estimated 4–6M new annual enrollments.
  • The 2025 AHA Guidelines (published Oct 22, 2025) expanded the feedback-device requirement to all CPR training. Every guideline cycle re-pulls the entire installed base through retraining.
Demand isn't your risk. Demand is large, recurring, compliance-driven, and moving toward exactly the model you bet on. Your risk is whether you can out-execute a field that's about to get crowded.

The Industry Is Moving And It's Coming For Your Edge

This is the most important section in this document, because it kills the assumption that your technology is your moat.
  • The AHA just commoditized your core model, nationally. In March 2026, the AHA and its partners launched a self-guided learning model with CPR Verification Stations available in 47 states (expanding to all 50), routing students to "Premier Distributors." Translation: the "no-instructor, self-service skills station" is no longer novel. It's becoming the official national standard, available to anyone. The manikin is not your moat. Anyone can buy an RQI station.
  • You already have direct look-alikes running your exact playbook. CPR Cart (self-service RQI stations, multi-state, ~7.2K followers, already outrunning you on social). Citywide CPR (RQI self-directed across 20+ states, brand since 2005). HeartCert (kiosk model, just acquired by Safe Life in 2025, which means private-equity consolidation has entered your space). Code One (100+ locations). The race to operationalize is already on.
  • Legitimacy is under scrutiny. There's active discourse, including from clinicians, questioning no-instructor certs, and some employers won't accept fully-online certs without a verified hands-on component. That makes the consistency and documentation of your in-person experience a brand-defense asset, not a nice-to-have.
  • Fraud enforcement is tightening, and it targets your collateral. Your own blog flags a surge of fraudulent CPR courses in Texas. The 2026 DOJ healthcare-fraud takedown ($14.6B, 324 charged) literally included a fraudulent CPR certification card. As you cross state lines toward nationwide, standardized, auditable, defensible compliance workflows stop being optional.
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Say this to yourself the way we'd say it to you: When the technology is commoditized and the regulators are watching, winning comes down to one thing. Who runs the tightest operation. Who opens fastest, onboards fastest, documents cleanest, and delivers the most consistent experience across every location. That's an operating-system problem, not a hardware one.

We've Done This For Companies Like Yours

You asked a fair question on the call: do we have experience with a business like yours? The honest answer is that your specific shape (a founder-led, clinical-trust business scaling physical operations) is exactly who we do our best work for.
  • Rewind Bar. A medical spa opening its second location. This one is the closest mirror to you: a founder who was the bottleneck, multi-unit expansion, clinical service delivery. Before us, Bilal's SOPs lived in one sprawling Google Doc and a pile of disconnected Google Sheets, and he was the point of contact "multiple times a day for very, very little things." We built him a live CompanyOS. SOPs tagged to roles, not people (so turnover never blows up the system), checklists split cleanly from how-to docs, and a custom SOP-builder AI agent so every new SOP comes out consistent no matter who writes it. Three months in: managers barely reach out, projects hit 95%+ on time, and he estimates ~10 hours a week back. His words: "There's a dollar value associated with my time and that's really what I was looking for." Watch the case study →
  • Colleen. Austin's #1 nutrition consultant. A clinical practitioner whose practice ran on scattered platforms and tribal knowledge, where her team constantly had to ask her where things were. We centralized everything into one Notion hub so the team self-serves answers instead of interrupting her, client notes live in one place, and nothing gets lost, all on an AI foundation that writes in her voice. Watch the case study →
  • Patriot Ambulance. Michigan's largest medical transport company. We're building their CompanyOS right now. Same DNA as you: a compliance-heavy, multi-location medical-services operation where consistency and documentation aren't bureaucracy.
Three founders, all in and around healthcare, all fighting the same fire you're fighting: a business that depends on them to function. We put that fire out, and built the system that keeps it out.

What a CompanyOS Actually Is

A Company Operating System is a single connected hub that holds your vision, your workflows, your people, your knowledge, and your AI, all in one place, all talking to each other.
Tools help a person do a task. An operating system gives the whole company one source of truth to run from. Decisions get made without you. Work stops falling through the cracks. And the business stops depending on any one person, you or anyone else.
For CPRCL, that looks like:
  • A "New Location in a Box" launch system: the repeatable playbook and checklist that opens office #101 exactly like #100, so 12/month can become 20/month without more chaos.
  • Your operating knowledge extracted from people's heads into a searchable hub, so a vacation, a bad week, or a departure never again means comms fall through the cracks.
  • A role-based Team HQ with responsibilities and SOPs tagged to roles, not names, so onboarding a new CS rep in the Philippines takes days, not weeks of interruptions.
  • A leadership dashboard with the efficiency and profitability visibility you asked for, so you steer by instruments instead of by gut.
  • AI agents trained on your data, your voice, and your process. Maybe a new-office launch agent, a CS answer agent pulling from your knowledge base, a reporting agent that builds your dashboards. The shared context layer your in-house AI is missing today.
  • The documented, auditable compliance backbone the coming regulatory climate is going to demand.

The Case for CompanyOS at CPR Certification Labs

Everything you told us maps to something we build. Your words on the left, our deliverable on the right:
What you told us
What it really is
What the CompanyOS does
"I want to go from entrepreneur to CEO"
Founder bottleneck
Decision rules, playbooks, and dashboards so the org executes without routing every call through you
"Comms fall through the cracks when a key person is out"
Key-person dependency + tacit knowledge risk
Extract the knowledge into the system so the company holds it, not one person. Handoffs that survive vacations and departures
"Everything's in Google Drive files and spreadsheets"
No single source of truth
One central, searchable hub. The master copy every office and every hire is cloned from
"Scale 50 → 500 without growing the team"
Needs leverage, not labor
Standardized onboarding + AI agents trained on your data. Output without headcount
"Open ~12 offices/month, faster"
Every launch is bespoke
A "New Location in a Box" launch system. Open the 101st office exactly like the 100th
"I want daily dashboards / efficiency visibility"
No operational telemetry
Leadership dashboard + KPI layer inside the OS
"In-house AI for calls/text already"
You already believe in AI
The OS becomes the shared context layer your agents pull from. No more guessing in silos
Why the numbers back this up (so it's not just a story):
  • Digital SOP systems cut onboarding time ~60%. That's the single biggest lever for a company opening 12+ offices a month.
  • Strong knowledge management cuts information-search time up to 35% and lifts productivity 20–25%. That's your "scale without headcount" thesis, quantified.
  • 70–80% of company knowledge is tacit, trapped in people. That's the exact liability sitting in your team's heads today.
  • ~20% of turnover happens in the first 45 days, and effective onboarding drives 33% more engaged employees. Decisive when you're constantly hiring.
  • Founder involvement is cited as the cap on 75–85% of SMB growth, and owner-dependency directly lowers enterprise value, which matters the day you raise or sell.

How we build it, done with you in ~90 days

We heard your objection loud and clear: a 90-day plan can feel too waterfall, and you want the granular breakdown so you can spot the failure points before you commit. Fair. So here's the honest structure, with working assets in your hands early, not a big-bang reveal on day 90.
Phase 1. Audit & Foundation (Days 1–15). Structured interviews with you and your top 2–3 people (including whoever owns office launches and CS) to extract what's in your heads and map how work actually moves. You get the foundation of your CompanyOS deployed, one fully-built office-launch playbook you can pressure-test in week two, and a custom report of exactly what's broken and the fastest path to fix it. You sign off before we build further.
Phase 2. Build & Execution Layer (Days ~16–60). We build the system your team runs on day to day: documented lifecycle workflows, the "New Location in a Box" launch system, a role-based Team HQ and searchable SOP library, and leadership dashboards. We connect it to the stack you already use (Webflow, Acuity, HubSpot, Stripe, Slack, Drive) instead of forcing a rebuild. Built in visible increments with sign-off gates, so you're steering the entire way, not waiting on a reveal.
Phase 3. Intelligence, Adoption & Training (Days ~61–90). We deploy up to two custom AI agents trained on your data and voice (natural first picks: a new-office launch agent and a CS/reporting agent), run live team training and role-based walkthroughs, and hand off with video guides, a 60-minute review call, and 30 days of post-launch support.
On your data-architecture concern. The 2,500-line database updated weekly, and whether Notion breaks or you need Airtable on the back end: it's a smart, technical question, and the answer is that we design to your data reality, not to dogma. Where volume and velocity call for it, we architect a hybrid: a database engine like Airtable as the data layer, Notion as the operating layer and source of truth on top. We'd validate your actual record volume in Phase 1 before committing an architecture. You won't get hand-waving from us.
Because every build is custom, we only take three implementations a month.
What happens after the 90 Days?
  1. You’ve got a system that you can expand on yourself.
  2. You keep us on as an operating partner. We either continue building, adding new workflows, agents, dashboards. Or we can even install an operator in your business to become your new right-hand.

What Happens If Nothing Changes

If CPRCL keeps scaling on the current setup, the constraints scale right along with it. 100 offices in three months means more launches stamped from a master copy that lives in memory. 500 offices means the day a key person is out, or leaves, you don't lose one office's knowledge, you lose the blueprint for all of them. More states means more compliance exposure in the exact climate where one suspended provider or one discovery ruling can turn a funded operation into a liability. And the moment a well-capitalized competitor, or a PE-backed consolidator like the one that just bought HeartCert, systematizes before you do, your head start becomes their catch-up.
Building the operating system at 50 offices is a weekend renovation. Building it at 300 is open-heart surgery on a moving patient. The cheapest, fastest time to install it is before the next 50, not after.

Why This, Why Now

Three clocks are running at once. The regulatory clock: the AHA making self-guided the national standard, and fraud enforcement tightening around your collateral. The competitive clock: look-alikes and PE money racing to operationalize the exact model you pioneered. And your clock: you standing at 50 offices, wanting to become the CEO instead of the bottleneck, with the team tiers ready to take it over the moment there's a system for them to run.
Companies that professionalize before scale exposes the cracks compound their growth. The ones that wait spend the next two years on expensive repairs, or absorbing a loss the system should have caught. You have the momentum, the capital engine, and the category lead. What you don't have yet is the system that lets your people run it without you. That's the whole reason for this conversation.

Next Steps

You told us you're evaluating a few options, and that's the right instinct. Most vendors will hand you a Notion template or a pile of SOPs that become a graveyard nobody opens. That's not what this is. This is a living operating system your team and your AI actually run on, built on your operation.
We’ve got capacity for you this month if you want to make the commitment.
 

Schedule a call with us here

 
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About Modern Operators

Modern Operators is a systems-first growth partner for founder-led companies who want to scale with clarity, calm, and predictable momentum. Instead of relying on heroic founders, scattered tools, or reactionary decision-making, MO gives teams a modern operating system: a unified hub for vision, planning, execution, automation, and AI that lets the business run smoother, faster, and smarter.
Co-founded by Damon Flowers and Mark Malian, Modern Operators brings together 27+ years of operating experience, brand strategy, and systems design to help companies move from reactive bottlenecks to a stable, scalable rhythm.
  • Damon Flowers has spent 20+ years building and scaling companies from early-stage to eight-figure outcomes. He is known for architecting operating systems, transforming chaotic teams into aligned execution machines, and mentoring founders through the transition from "doing everything" to building a company that grows beyond them.
  • Mark Malian brings 7+ years in growth strategy, brand positioning, and systems automation inside agencies and product companies — turning complex processes into clean, scalable systems across marketing, sales, and customer operations so teams build consistent pipeline and drive predictable growth.
Together, Damon, Mark, and the team at Modern Operators guide founders through a new era of business, one where clear structure replaces chaos and AI amplifies human capability, with a modern CompanyOS as the foundation for long-term, scalable success.