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Business Plan Courses

Explore a wide range of free and certified Business plan online courses. Find the best Business plan training programs and enhance your skills today!

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Protecting Business Innovations via Patent

This course assumes no prior knowledge in law, business or engineering. However, students with backgrounds in all three areas will find useful concepts or ideas in the course on how to protect business innovations using patents.

• 10 hours 10 minutes
• Free Online Course (Audit)

Construire son Business Plan

Learn to create a compelling Business Plan with Paris School of Business. Master the essentials, from drafting to financial planning, in a 10-hour weekly commitment.

• OpenClassrooms
• Free Online Course

Action-Driven Business Plan: From the ‘Classroom’ to the World

In this 6-week course by Technion, learners create a comprehensive business plan, refining it through peer evaluations and assignments, culminating in a final submission and a two-minute pitch video.

• 10 hours 8 minutes

Starting a Business 1: Vision and Opportunity

Interested in starting a business? This course will help you define your vision and discover opportunities to make it happen.

• FutureLearn
• 2 weeks, 2 hours a week

Protecting Business Innovations via Trademark

Learn how to protect business innovations using trademark laws with this 4-week course from The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Explore practical and theoretical aspects.

• 9 hours 44 minutes

Protecting Business Innovations via Copyright

Learn how to protect business innovations using copyright law with this 5-week course from The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

• 12 hours 41 minutes

The Ideal Business Plan

Learn the secret to business success from the founder of TEMENOS, George Koukis, in this TEDx talk. Discover how he turned a bankrupt company into a global leader in less than an hour.

• Conference Talk

Upper-Intermediate English: Business and Industry

Take your English language skills to the next level. Learn how to write letters, use appropriate verbal tenses and enhance your vocabulary and grammar, all within the context of business.

• 4 weeks, 3-5 hours a week

Innovating with the Business Model Canvas

Learn to innovate with the one-page Business Model Canvas in this 2-week course from the University of Virginia. Gain tools from design thinking and Lean Startup approaches.

• 3 hours 49 minutes

Planning: Principled, Proposing, Proofing, and Practicing to a Success Plan

Learn to refine your business startup into a scalable, replicable product with Michigan State University's 6-week course. Master business model creation, assumption validation, and financial projection generation.

• 22 hours 2 minutes

L'entrepreneuriat social: faire son business plan

Learn to create a social or environmental enterprise with ESSEC Business School's 4-week course, covering value proposition, economic model, financing, and legal status.

A Good Business Plan is - Follow Your Heart

In this TEDx talk, Thanassis Papadimitriou shares insights on creating genuine, worthwhile business plans, drawing from his experience in extreme adventure events and corporate travel services.

How to create a Simple Business Plan in Hours

Learn to create a simple business plan in just 1-2 hours, understanding its importance, key elements, and free resources for both online and offline creation.

The Complete Business Plan Course (Includes 50 Templates)

Everything You Need to Make a Great Business Plan by an Award Winning Business School Prof, VC & Successful Entrepreneur

• 8 hours 52 minutes
• Paid Course

How To Write A Business Plan And A Winning Business Model

Business plan template & business plan examples: Create a top business model & business plan for your business ideas

• 9 hours 1 minute

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Developing a Business Plan

The foundation of a successful business is a solid business plan. This comprehensive course dives into the details of developing a plan and students emerge with a first draft of a sound business plan.

What you can learn.

• Learn the key components for creating a business plan
• Identify existing customers and future customers
• Understand revenue forecasting methodologies, competitor analysis, small business finance, and how to transition from personal guarantees and credit lines to a self-financing business model
• Effectively plan, hire, and train staff with high potential
• Examine the legal aspects of organizing and managing a small business

About this course:

Summer 2024 schedule.

Enrollment limited; early enrollment advised. Internet access required.

Fall 2024 Schedule

Enrollment limited; early enrollment advised. Internet access required. 

Enrollment limited; early enrollment advised. Internet access required. Materials required.

This course applies towards the following certificates & specializations…

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Free Online Business Plan Courses

These free online business plan courses are here to help you lead your business in the right direction. With a strong business plan, your business has a solid foundation from which to expand and prosper, ensuring the safety of your interests in the future. If you want an effective and reliable plan for the future of your business, these are the courses for you.... …Read More These free online business plan courses are here to help you lead your business in the right direction. With a strong business plan, your business has a solid foundation from which to expand and prosper, ensuring the safety of your interests in the future. If you want an effective and reliable plan for the future of your business, these are the courses for you. Read Less

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Frequently asked questions.

• Small Business: The Business Plan

This is a great course for anyone who wants a thorough grounding in creating an effective business plan and covers risk, investors, franchising, mission statements and even contingency planning.

• Business Planning: How to Write Your Business Plan

Although this course is focused on Canada, it still has universally valuable lessons if you need back-up on branding, identifying competitors, generating financial statements and organising systems in your small business.

• Business Development Essentials

Another excellent option that will guide you through thinking about the right target market, competitive pricing, packaging, branding and many other factors that take your idea from being just a concept to being an actual company.

Simply put, a business plan is a formal document that lays out what you want to achieve and - more importantly - how you’re going to do it. You need to clarify your goals and the steps it will take to reach them. Writing, ‘I want to open a business and be a millionaire in five years’ time’ is not a true business plan - that’s the ultimate place you want to be. A business plan is the map that will get you to that place of success and financial stability.

Such plans are important because:

They make you think more clearly about opportunities and potential stumbling blocks. It is easy to get caught up in the excitement of starting a new business only to find that there are several major factors you haven’t considered (such as the cost of registering your operation, staff compensation, machinery maintenance, increases in the price of materials and so on).

Banks almost always want to see a full business plan before they lend you money. They are taking a chance on you and need to be assured that you have done your ‘homework’. A well-crafted business plan might convince them that you will be able to pay back the funds they lend you (with interest!).

Investors will also require an extensive business plan to be persuaded that your idea can work. Like banks, investors are taking a gamble on an untried business and need to be sure that you’ve considered as much as possible - all laid out in a comprehensive business plan.

The more detail - based on actual research - you can include in your plan, the better. Having a set of questions that you need to find answers to can shape your idea into something even better (it may also show you that your concept won’t work, which is disappointing but will save you time and money you can spend on a different concept!). Planning your business is crucial as it will prevent a lot of costly missteps down the road. Here are basic questions you should be trying to answer:

What is my business idea? 

What product or service am I seeking to provide?

What people or other businesses am I going to target?

How much money will I need to start?

What will this money be spent on?

Why will this business succeed?

Who will my competitors be?

Who will my customers be?

Who will my suppliers be?

What equipment or premises do I need?

What licences, certifications or qualifications will I need to operate legally?

Where will my business be based?

Who will create the branding?

What marketing will I do?

How much debt will I incur to get it up and running?

What are the biggest opportunities?

What are the biggest stumbling blocks?

Will I need staff to help me?

Do I need to open business accounts with my bank?

How will I ensure I am tax compliant?

What will happen if I run out of stock or don’t sell what I’ve ordered?

Where will I keep stock?

Do I need to copyright or patent my idea?

How will I pay rent on premises before I start selling?

When do I want to launch this business?

When do I need to start breaking even?

When do I need to start turning a profit?

How many potential clients or customers will I have?

Why will they use my business and not others?

Why do I want to start this company?

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Grow Your Business

8 steps to building an online course business (+ business plan template), share this article.

There has never been a better time to build a business selling online courses . By 2027, the global e-learning market is estimated to reach an enormous $521.8 billion ( Research and Markets ), signalling an enormous potential.  Millions of people are purchasing online courses, inside and outside of the traditional education system, in order to upgrade their knowledge and skills.

Skip ahead:

Step 1: Decide what to teach

Step 2: create a business plan for your online training business, step 3: validate market demand, step 4: create a compelling and unique brand, step 5: build your audience, step 6: create an online course, step 7: focus on customer success, step 8: scale your business.

It comes as no surprise that in response to this demand, entrepreneurs and subject matter experts from all over the world have started creating and selling online courses to share their knowledge with others.

At Thinkific, we’ve felt the effects of this demand first hand as thousands of individuals and organizations have started using our platform to create online courses .

Creating an online course is just one part of building an online course business. Building a business is the other part.

But let’s be real here. If you ask ANY type of business owner if it was easy for them to build their business, they will tell you that it wasn’t.

Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither is an online course business

At the beginning of 2017, I watched a close friend of mine open his own barbershop. It took him 3 months of renovations and tens of thousands of dollars just to get his barbershop ready for him to welcome his first customer through the front door. (I was his second customer, by the way. Someone else beat me to the grand opening by about 5 minutes!)

For my friend, those 3 months of preparation work was just the beginning. During the next 6 months after his grand opening, he worked 7 days per week to build up his clientele and recoup his startup costs before he started hiring more barbers. Why did he do this? Because that’s what it took to start his own barbershop. 

What does this have to do with building an online course business?

The point of this story is that it takes a lot of work upfront to build a business . It doesn’t happen overnight and building an online course business is no exception. There is a lot of work you will have to do, both before and after you create your course, in order to be successful.

Unfortunately, most course creators give up on their business before putting in the work required to ensure they will be successful. They stop digging for gold before they experience the big payoff that makes all the hard work worth it.

Even though it takes a lot of work to build a successful online course business, there are plenty of other people that have done it before (check out our customer stories to see some examples). 

With that in mind, we reached out to more than 40 successful entrepreneurs and online course creators. These people have literally built their careers by sharing their knowledge with others, many of them selling millions of dollars worth of training programs and online courses throughout their careers.

After reviewing all of the valuable insights these online course creation experts and entrepreneurs shared with us, we managed to distill the process of building a successful online course business into 8 specific steps (well, more like phases, since each one of these phases has several steps involved).

In this guide to building an online course business, we’ll be sharing these 8 steps with you.

8 Steps to Building a Successful Online Course Business

Before we jump into Step 1, there is something very important that you need to understand:

By itself, an online course is NOT a business

Without an online course to sell, you can’t exactly build an online course business. But creating your online course is just one part of building your business . Your online course is your product. It’s not your entire business.

As you can see from the graphic below, a typical online course business has many other parts as well:

This may surprise you, but creating an online course isn’t even the first step in the process of building an online course business. Out of the 8 steps we’re about to go through, creating a course is Step #6.

You’re welcome to skip steps 1-5 if you want to, but I would advise against it and here’s why:

If you jump straight to creating a course without strategically choosing a topic to teach (Step 1), creating a business model (Step 2), and validating demand for that topic (Step 3), you could end up creating a course that no one wants to sign up for.

Secondly, if you don’t build your brand (Step 4) and audience (Step 5) before you launch your course, you won’t have a way to stand out among your competition or have an audience to promote your course to.

Even if you have the “perfect” course created today, without a compelling brand and an audience to promote it to, it will be very difficult to generate sales. No sales = no business.

So to save yourself many hours of effort and (potentially) thousands of dollars in course creation and marketing costs, don’t skip these steps.

Okay, let’s dive in…

The first step in building an online course business is deciding what you will teach. What topic do you want to become known for? What topic are you expert enough to teach to others?

To be an expert at something, you just have to know more about your topic than the person you are teaching. That’s it. To that person, you’re an expert. Don’t overthink this.

Choose your course topic

Between the combination of your life experience and your professional experience, there are likely several topics that you know enough about to create a course on.

To help narrow down a specific course topic , we recommend completing the following exercise:

On a piece of paper, draw 2 vertical lines to create 3 columns. Label the first column Passions & Interests . Label the second column Skills . Label the third column Experience & Achievements .

Next, start adding as many things as you can think of to each column (aim for at least 20 per column).

Once you’ve done this, identify the top 2-3 topics where your passions/interests, your skills, and your experience/achievements intersect.

For example, if you like science fiction ( passion/interest ), you’re a great writer ( skill ), and you’ve written several science fiction novels ( experience/achievement ), then “how to write a science fiction novel” is a viable topic to consider teaching to others.

“You’ve been given a talent, you’ve been given a gift, you’ve been given experiences in your life that are here to serve others.” – Alexi Panos

Identify a specific target audience

Once you’ve identified a specific topic to teach, the next step is to identify a specific target audience (aka a target market) that is interested in that topic.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that your topic (and therefore your course) will appeal to everyone. If you try to create a course that appeals to everyone, it will likely appeal to no one. I know it’s counter-intuitive, but trust me on this.

To give you an example, one of our customers ( Lizzie Lasater ) is a yoga practitioner and instructor. When she decided to create online courses , naturally, she decided to start teaching yoga online  

Instead of creating courses to teach people how to practice yoga (a very broad and highly competitive topic) she decided to narrow her target audience to other yoga instructors (more specific). With other yoga instructors as her target audience, she created courses that are specifically about how to become a better yoga teacher.

Once you have decided on what to teach and have sufficient clarity about your course topic, it is time to get your business plan ready. 

A business plan or business model is a formal blueprint describing how you will structure, manage and market your online course business. It is important to create one as it helps to ensure that your online course business will remain competitive and financially successful in the long term. 

You can choose one of the many software tools to create a standard business plan or use a regular spreadsheet or word processing software.

Now, as every business is different, their business models can vary drastically. However, certain aspects remain common to most companies. 

Here, we have laid out what you must include in your business plan:

Describe your business

A business description is needed to clearly state the purpose of your business, your target audience, and how you plan to deliver your products and services. 

When drafting it, you must be as objective and concise as possible regarding the nature of your online course and how it intends to help the target audience. 

Make sure to highlight if you will deliver your courses only online or offline. It also helps to state if your courses will be instructor-led or delivered through other e-learning methods. 

Identify your marketing strategy

Once you describe the nature of your business, the next step is to put together a marketing and sales strategy. 

Describe the strategies you will use to market your online course and how you plan to implement your email marketing, social media marketing, and other organic methods. 

In addition, you need to plan to allocate a budget for your paid advertisements and online marketing if you decide to opt for pay-per-click ad programs. 

Hiring and team management

While many online course creators choose to run their own shows, many opt to hire virtual assistants or full-time employees for help. Others choose to delegate tasks to freelancers or third-party vendors. 

Make sure to describe how you plan to delegate the tasks you cannot do. It is always a good idea to outsource tasks that do not require your intervention to save time for those that require your expertise.

Business operations

This section of the b-plan states how your day-to-day business activities will be structured and managed. 

You can include your course content, operational hours, telecom and IT-related necessities, insurance, etc. The more concise your operations section, the better ground it makes for you to validate your plan later. 

Every business requires money to run, and online businesses are no exception. In addition to the marketing and advertising expenses mentioned above, you will also need to factor in infrastructure, technology, hiring, etc. Remember to also describe what you plan to sell and how you plan to monetize your business. 

With this, make sure to have a detailed budget plan and allocate your resources to different expenses fairly. However, be careful to ensure that your budget is within what you can commit to and it does not make you feel overstretched. 

Please note that in addition to your online business course, you may also add other income streams such as selling ebooks, offering paid talks, etc. 

Two financial calculations you should consider initially are:

Gross Profit Margin: This is the number of courses you sell minus the cost of running your online course. It can be represented as a percentage. 

Gross Profit Margin = (Net course sale revenues – cost of running your online course) / net course sales x 100

Selling, General and Administrative (SG&A) Ratio : This figure tells you the percentage of your online course sales revenue used to cover your operational expenses. 

SGA = [Selling + General + Operational (Administrative) expenses] / Net online course sales revenue

While we have described the essential aspects of a business plan, it also helps to follow the structure of a formal Business Model Canvas .  This concept was popularized by Alexander Osterwalder in 2005 and consisted of nine building blocks. These include key partners, activities, resources, cost structure, revenue streams, value propositions, customer relationships, channels, and customer segments.

Once you’ve identified a specific topic to teach and have your basic business plan blueprint in place, the next step is to validate the demand for that topic.

As a course creator it sucks to spend several weeks, maybe even months (or years?!), creating an online course about a topic that you find out there is no demand for.

It’s a lot more efficient to validate demand for your course upfront before you invest time, effort and money creating a course.

Here are 2 ways you can validate the demand for your course topic:

Research your competition

See if you can find other people or companies that are selling courses and other forms of training about your topic (or a similar one), or who serve your target audience.

• Bestselling books on Amazon
• Other online courses
• Popular blogs and forums
• Top podcasts on iTunes
• In-person seminars, conferences, workshops
• Online events (virtual summits, webinars )
• Networking groups on Meetup
• Coaches and consultants

If you can’t find anyone that is profitably teaching your topic to others, that is a red flag that there isn’t enough market demand for that topic to justify creating an online course (or building a business). Competition is usually a proof of market demand.

What if there is no competition?!

On the rare occasion that you can’t find any competing products or services about your topic, that could mean one of two things:

• There is demand, but no one is serving that market yet (rare), or
• There is no demand, and you should pick a different topic

Either way, there are still two more steps you should take before you pull the trigger and decide to create (or not create) your course.

A great way to gauge demand for your topic is to use Google’s Keyword Planner to see how many people are searching for your topic per month. The higher the search volume, the higher the demand.

“Do not be afraid of competition. Their very existence validates that there is demand for the problem you’re trying to solve or for a solution to it.” – Greg Smith, CEO of Thinkific

Ask your target audience what they want to learn

If you have access to your target audience, whether online or offline, the best way to find out what they want to learn (and would be willing to pay to learn) is to ask them directly!

Here are a few ways you can ask your audience what they want to learn:

• Ask your list of email subscribers
• Ask your fans/followers on social media
• Ask your past and/or existing clients

With each of these options, you can send people a link to a survey, ask them open-ended questions directly, or ask them to have a quick call with you.

Another way is direct outreach (aka cold calling) to your target audience by phone, email or social media. Do this in a polite, non-spammy way of course.

See how many people are searching for your course idea on google

Engaging in keyword research is a great way to identify a course topic that can possibly sell like hotcakes, without directly asking your audience., keyword research essentially helps you to understand what people are looking for online by keying in terms on google or other search engines. , to conduct keyword research on topics that may interest your audience, you can use specialised tools such as semrush or ahrefs . , irrespective of the tool you choose to use, here is the basic framework to engage in keyword research:, identify your seed term, which would be an umbrella term for your course topic. , type in “course” + your seed term., get specific and find a niche area that has not been covered by other course creators but has a high search volume. check out this tool to identify search volume, continue to search and eliminate topics that are not feasible or interesting. , for example, if you wish to start an online course on gardening, type “gardening course” in the keyword search tool. you will see multiple results with different search volumes. these results will help you get more specific. for example, you may find that “gardening courses in semi-arid regions” is a possible course topic with a decent search volume. , alternatively, you can also use our search volume too l to discover popular course topic ideas. .

Remember: If you can’t find anyone that wants to learn the topic that you’re thinking of teaching, you should probably move on to another topic.

If you can’t find buyers before you create your course, you probably won’t find any after either!

The ideal scenario is you choose a topic that there is obviously a demand for (proven by competing products and services about that topic), but nothing that is for your specific target audience.

Facebook marketing , for example, is a broad topic with strong market demand (proven by all of the blogs, books, courses, consultants, seminars, etc. about this topic).

Now, assuming we want to create a course about Facebook marketing, let’s see what topics we come up with as we hone in on a specific target audience:

• Topic 1: Facebook marketing 101 (very broad)
• Topic 2: Facebook marketing for business owners (more specific, still pretty broad)
• Topic 3: Facebook marketing for local businesses (not bad)
• Topic 4: Facebook marketing for real estate agents (very specific)
• Topic 5: Facebook marketing strategies to get more listings (ding ding ding, we have a winner!)

If you are a real estate agent and you want to learn how to use Facebook to get more listings, which course topic is going to appeal to you the most? Which topic would you pay the most money for? Probably #5, because it is the most specific. It is exactly what you want to learn.

“The easiest way to know what to do is listen to what people are asking for and then give that to them.” – JJ Virgin , Celebrity Nutritionist & Fitness Expert

Once you’ve decided on a specific topic to teach, it’s time to start building your brand.

Don’t jump straight to getting your logo, website, and business cards designed. Those things do play a role in representing your brand, but they are not the starting point.

The starting point to creating a compelling and unique brand is making a conscious decision about how you want to be positioned in your industry. Branding is about positioning .

Your brand should position you as the go-to expert on your topic. Unless you’re positioned as an expert and a trusted authority on your topic, it will be hard to convince someone to buy a course (or any product or service) from you.

Even though we’re told not to, we do judge a book by its cover. Think of your brand as the “book cover” for your business.

Be strategic with your positioning

The biggest mistake that people (and organizations) make with their branding is trying to appeal to everyone. Don’t do that. Be strategic with your positioning.

Build a brand that appeals to your specific target audience. Don’t try to appeal to everyone, because everyone is not your ideal customer/client.

Here are some questions to consider as you create your brand:

How do you want to be positioned and perceived in your marketplace? What do you want people to think of when they think of you? Who do you want to attract? Who do you NOT want to attract? What do you stand for? What do you stand against? Why do you do what you do?

When your target audience is searching for information about your topic, you want them to find you and immediately feel like they’ve come to the right place. They should feel like they’ve found the exact person (or company) that can help them overcome a specific problem or achieve a specific outcome.

“A great brand starts with understanding who you are, what you stand for, understanding your marketplace and understanding your positioning.” – Re Perez, CEO of Branding For The People

Identify your Unique Value Proposition

An exercise that we recommend all course creators complete is creating a Unique Value Proposition (UVP). Your UVP is what will help you differentiate yourself from your competition.

To create your UVP, answer these questions:

• Who do you help?
• What do you help them do?
• Why is that beneficial for them?

Once you have the answers to these questions, tie them together in a single sentence.

To give you an example, one of our customers Ellie Diop aka Ellie Talks Money , is a business coach with a proven track record that helps you scale your business and have financial success. Pretty good UVP right?

Here is a screenshot of her website’s homepage:

As you can see, anyone who visits her website will be able to instantly figure out who she is, what she does, and who her target audience is. She has a clear and compelling personal brand . If you’re someone who wants to improve your business and reach financial success, it’s obvious you’ve come to the right place. 

Good branding makes your target audience feel like they’ve come to the right place.

Once you’ve decided how you want to be positioned in your market, it’s time to start building your audience.

Your audience is the sum total of all the people that you have the ability to communicate with through various distribution channels (your blog, social media, email list , personal network, etc.).

Why is it important to build an audience?

Without an audience that knows, likes, and trusts you, it will be very difficult to sell your course for the simple reason that you don’t have anyone to sell it to!

So the sooner you start building your audience, the better.

“Online courses are the wave of the future. They can help expand my content and message into places and countries that I have yet to physically visit. Online courses have boosted my income and helped me share my message with a much larger audience.” – Andrea Beaman , Health Educator & Author

Related: How to Create Epic Content Your Customers Will Love

How to define your target audience

It helps if you follow a systematic framework to define your target audience . Some useful steps to that end include: 

• Ask your current customers
• Get details on demographics like age, gender, location, etc.
•  Understand their needs and pain points
• Analyze the solution they’re hoping for
• Create a customer avatar

Download our detailed step-by-step guide for audience research

Size is important (but not the most important)

The size of your audience is important, but not as important as you might think. The obvious benefit of having a large audience is the ability to reach more people. If you have 10,000 fans on Facebook, for example, your posts will probably be seen by more people than if you had 1,000 fans (all else being equal).

But the size of your audience is not as important as the relationship you build with your audience.

It’s more valuable to have 100 people on your email list that open and read every email you send them than it is to have 1,000 followers on Twitter who rarely see your Tweets or engage with you in any way.

When it comes to building an audience, loyalty and engagement are the most important.

Here are some of the most common ways that online course creators are building their audience:

• Social media

Set up profiles and/or pages on the social network networks that your target audience spends time on. You don’t need a presence on every social media network. Choose the top 2-3 that make the most sense for you and focus your efforts there. Share your content, join relevant groups, start your own Facebook group , and engage in conversations. The goal here is to build real relationships with other people that are interested in your course topic.

Read More: Social Media Marketing Guide: Uncracking the Code for Course Creators

• Content marketing

Publish free content about your course topic as often as you can. Free content helps you build trust and authority in your industry. Common types of content that you can create are articles, videos, podcast episodes, images, and infographics. All of these help to increase traffic to your website and exposure for your business.

The more content you publish on your website and other platforms (like YouTube ), the more likely your target audience will find you as they are searching for information about your topic.

• How To Generate Leads With Content Marketing (6 Simple Steps)
• The Complete Content Marketing Guide: Organic Growth Toolkit
• Publicity & PR

One of the quickest ways to build your audience is to get in front of existing audiences. Writing articles for popular publications in your industry, getting interviewed on podcasts , and getting featured in traditional media (TV, radio, newspapers, print magazines, etc.) are all great ways to increase your exposure and build authority in your industry.

• Networking & joint ventures

Build relationships with other experts and influencers in your industry. It doesn’t happen overnight, but building mutually beneficial relationships with others can lead to a number of opportunities including guest blogging, interviews, joint ventures , partnerships, and customer referrals.

• Public speaking

Reach out to event hosts and organizers of conferences and seminars that your target audience attends. Offer to give a presentation on your topic. Some events will even let you sell your course directly to their audience, in exchange for a percentage of your sales. A major advantage of public speaking is you have the undivided attention of everyone in the room during your presentation, and that can be very hard to get online.

• Email marketing

When it comes to marketing your online course (or any product or service online for that matter), email marketing is hands down the most effective way to generate sales. An email list of people that have expressed interest in your course topic and have given you permission to communicate with them will likely be your most valuable asset as an online course creator.

Start building your email list as soon as possible. Stay in touch with your subscribers by sending them helpful emails and links to your content on a regular basis. This is a great way to earn their trust before you ask them to buy from you.

• Paid advertising

Even with a modest budget, paid advertising can be a great way to grow your audience. By utilizing advertising platforms such as Facebook, Google, YouTube, Twitter, and LinkedIn, you can target people based on specific criteria including demographics, interests, search terms, job titles, and more. In fact, many of Thinkific’s most successful customers have been using Facebook ads to grow their audience and generate consistent leads and sales for their online courses.

“Consistency is what did it for us. Doing something every week, at least once a week, helped us get better really, really fast because we were putting in the time and putting in the practice.”

– Jordan Harbinger , Author & Podcast Host

Creating an online course is definitely one of the more exciting steps in this entire process, but it can also be the most time consuming one if you’re not careful.

Most people spend several weeks (or months, depending on the course) creating their online course. Other, more experienced course creators have perfected this process and can create an entire online course in one weekend .

But regardless of how long it takes you to create your course, the process that you go through will most likely look a lot like this:

• Choose your course title and subtitle. 
• Ensure that your topic has high demand in the market
• Ensure that the learning outcomes are stellar
• Gather material for your online course content
• Create a lesson plan (aka course outline) and choose your lesson types (audio, video, text, etc.)
• Identify the best ways to deliver each of your course modules
• Film, record, and edit your online course
• Set up your online course, including a website
• Choose a price for your course
• Create a sales page and focus on marketing your course

Instead of going through each of these steps in more detail right here in this article (which would make it way longer than it already is!), I’m going to share a few of the most important lessons we’ve learned about course creation from the experts we interviewed.

Want to create an online course business, but unsure of where to start? Use Thinkific for free and get free training !

Or sign up for our free mini series that will teach you how to profitably create and sell an online course in just a week.

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Create a “Minimum Viable Course”

A concept that has been popularized by American writer and entrepreneur Eric Ries in his book Lean Startup is the concept of a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) .

An MVP is a development technique used by organizations (especially startups) in which a new product is developed with sufficient features to satisfy early adopters. The final, complete set of features is only designed and developed after considering feedback from the product’s initial users.

Applying this concept to creating online courses, that means that you should not try to create the perfect course the first time. Instead, create a Minimum Viable Course (MVC).

Here’s why…

The problem with trying to create the “perfect” course before you show it or sell it to anyone is that “perfect” is a very subjective term. What you think is perfect is probably not the same as what your customers/students think is perfect. Even if it is, your course does not have to be perfect in order to be valuable .

Perfectionism has stopped more people from creating and launching their online courses than anything else. Don’t let this happen to you. If your course (imperfect as it may be) is good enough to help someone, then it is good enough to publish. Done is better than perfect.

Create your MVC as quickly as possible so you can publish it and get real feedback from real students. Based on their feedback and other important data (such as course completion and engagement rates ) you can remove training, add training, and make revisions to your course to make it better.

“Don’t be a perfectionist because the world can’t wait for perfect. Get it done, get it out and get it sold. It’s not a book so you can always revisit it periodically but your number one priority is creating a transformation in your clients, so keep your focus there.” – Shazzie Love , Business Strategist

Course length ≠ course value

Read More: How to decide on the ideal course length ?

Another big mistake to avoid is trying to teach everything that you know about your topic in a single course. Doing this will most likely result in a super long course that your students won’t complete and that takes a ridiculous amount of time to create in the first place. Wrong approach!!

Your online course is the shortcut

The purpose of your course is to teach your student how to get from Point A to Point B as quickly and as efficiently as possible. It’s the shortcut.

Your online course is the shortcut. Help your students get from A to B as quickly as possible.

You absolutely should not overwhelm your students by brain-dumping everything that you know about your topic into your course. Your course should be as short as possible without sacrificing the key concepts in your training.

Don’t create 8 hours of training if you can teach your students what they need to know with 3 hours of training. As long as they learn what you promised to teach them, they won’t complain that your course was “too short”. Instead, they’ll probably thank you for not wasting their time with fluff or filler content.

Launch to a small test group first

Another important lesson we learned from the experts we interviewed is not to launch the first version of your course (your MVC!) to your entire audience.

Instead, you should promote your course to a small segment of your audience at a lower price than what you eventually want to charge for your course. If you do promote your course to your entire audience, consider imposing a limit on the number of students that can enroll in it. Once you hit your goal, you temporarily close enrollment for your course.

This strategy is often called a beta launch (similar to pre-selling ). The goal of this type of launch is to get your course into the hands of a small number of students who will “test” your course. In exchange for accessing your course at a reduced price, you ask your students to provide you with feedback to help you improve the course and testimonials to use in your future marketing.

Based on the feedback from your students, you can make changes to improve your course. When you have a revised version of your course that is better than the first and positive student testimonials to use in your marketing, you re-open enrollment for your course and sell it a higher price.

If you’re ready to start marketing your course, check out these 55 online course marketing ideas here .

Okay, let’s pretend that you’ve already completed Steps 1 to 5.

• You’ve decided what topic you’re going to teach. It’s not too broad, and it appeals to a specific target audience.
• You’ve validated market demand for your topic. Thousands of people around the world are interested in it, and they’re already spending money to learn it.
• You’ve crafted a compelling brand. You are known in your industry as an expert on your topic. When your target audience finds you, they trust that you can help them.
• You’ve built an audience. You have followers on social media. You have people on your email list. You have relationships with other experts in your industry. You’ve been featured in other publications, podcasts, and media outlets.
• You’ve created an online course. And after promoting your course to your audience, you are proud to say that you have customers. Your business is generating revenue.

Even though it is a HUGE accomplishment to get this far (and yes, you deserve to celebrate at this point!), there is still work to be done.

Acquiring customers is just the beginning. Now your job is to deliver on the promise you made to your customers.

Think of any local business you are a customer of. A restaurant. A nail salon. A coffee shop. A convenience store.

These businesses don’t stay in business because they are constantly attracting new customers. They stay in business because their existing customers come back more than once, often bringing their friends and family with them. This same rule applies to your online course business.

“We’re not in this business just to get people to buy our stuff. We want them to see the change and the impact and create the success stories.” – Nick Unsworth, CEO of Life on Fire

It’s a lot cheaper to keep a customer than acquire a new one

If you are constantly investing in marketing and promotion to attract new customers, but you’re doing nothing to ensure the success of those customers, it will be very difficult (and expensive!) for you to build a profitable and sustainable business.

When a customer purchases your online course, this should not be the end of your relationship with them. This should be the beginning.

Your customers should be so thrilled with the training and overall experience that you provide to them that they purchase additional courses from you in the future, and they tell others about your courses too.

Related: The Top Customer Success Strategies Used By Successful Companies

Here are a few ways you can increase your student engagement and retention rates:

• Gamify the learning experience

Create incentives and offer rewards to your students for achieving specific milestones in your course.

Related: Gamification in Training: The Complete Guide to E-Learning Gamification [2022]

• Help your students be accountable

Pair them up with an accountability partner, offer 1-on-1 or group coaching calls with your students, or create a private group or discussion board for them to interact with each other.

• Appeal to different learning styles

Don’t create training that appeals to just one learning style. Utilize different media types to deliver your content (text, video, audio, worksheets, quizzes, etc.).

• Create small, bite-sized lessons

Shorter lessons are more likely to be completed by students than longer ones. If it takes you a while to teach a specific concept, try breaking up the concept into several shorter lessons.

• Bite Sized Learning: A New Strategy For Teaching (How It Works & Tips)
• What Is Microlearning? The Case For Shorter, Bite Sized Learning
• Send reminder emails to your students

If you notice that a student isn’t accessing or completing the training in your course, send them a polite reminder email to re-engage them. Show them that you care.

The final step in building a successful online course business is to scale your business by creating systems and/or hiring people to ensure that it continues to grow.

According to Greg Smith, CEO of Thinkific , you should only scale something that works.

The 76 steps that came before this one are your chance to do just that. To prove that your online course business works. Once you have a business that works, it’s time to shift from spending the majority of your time working in your business to working on it.

This is accomplished by creating systems and hiring people to handle the repetitive, day-to-day tasks involved in running your business. The goal is to free yourself up to focus the majority of your time on activities that move your business forward, such as:

• Building your audience
• Building your network
• Creating sales funnels to acquire new customers
• Creating additional courses and/or services to sell to your customers

Here are a few of the key lessons we learned about scaling an online course business from the expert we interviewed:

1. Automate repetitive tasks

Identify the tasks in your business that are highly repetitive and not the best use of your time as an entrepreneur. Document the process for those tasks and delegate them to someone else, or use technology/software to automate that task for you. Every repetitive task that you automate today buys you more time to focus on other activities tomorrow.

“The way you multiply time is by spending time on things today that give you more time tomorrow.” – Rory Vaden, Southwestern Consulting

2. Build a team as early as possible

To grow an online course business to 6 or even 7 figures in annual revenue and beyond, you’re going to need some help. Very few entrepreneurs are able to build successful and sustainable businesses without a team of people to help them make it happen. There is simply too much to learn and do, and not enough hours in the day for one person to do it all.

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” – African Proverb

Hiring a virtual assistant or a personal assistant is a great starting point. From there, consider hiring help for other areas of your business including content creation and editing, marketing and advertising, branding, accounting, etc. These do not have to be full-time employees. Many course creators have teams that consist of freelancers and independent contractors from around the world.

Related: How to Hire a Virtual Assistant (An Entrepreneur’s Guide To Outsourcing)

3. Tie your business to a greater purpose

Sharing your knowledge by creating online courses is a great way to empower others through education and move humanity forward. But creating online courses is certainly not the only way to make a positive impact in the world.

There are countless organizations that are doing incredible things to make the world a better place. By partnering with other organizations and tying your business to a greater purpose, you ensure that as your business grows, so does the impact you make in the world.

“Whether you’re in the non-profit structure or the for-profit structure, you have a tremendous opportunity to use business as a force for good.” – Adam Braun, Founder of Pencils of Promise

This article was originally published May 2018, and refreshed with new information in February, 2024. 

As the Content Marketing Manager at Thinkific (2016-2019), Tyler Basu helped to create, publish, and promote content to help thousands of entrepreneurs learn how to create and sell online courses . Today, he works directly with entrepreneurs to help them create content that attracts and converts their ideal clients.

• 10 Steps To Creating A Wildly Successful Online Course
• How to Price Your Online Course (Complete Guide to Course Pricing)
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10 executive leadership programs that should be on every business leader’s radar

Many executive leaders spend much of their days in meetings with other people—and yet, their lives can also be very isolating.

“The whole saying, ‘It’s lonely at the top,’ is really true,” says Mike Malefakis, Wharton’s former executive education CEO and associate vice dean. Even though he recognizes this reality, Malefakis also champions the value of continuing education for execs. 

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These programs provide an opportunity for connecting, learning, and growing with others holding C-suite positions . The programs freshen up your leadership approaches, and some even offer a sabbatical from typical work life.

If you are especially looking for training that is not as extensive as an executive MBA , many of the nation’s top business schools offer courses and programs tailored for executives that align with leaders’ demanding schedules. Below are 10 executive leadership management programs (some all-online, hybrid, or all in-person) tailored for the C-suite covering topics including risk management, competition, and brand reputation.

The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania

C-suite life means long workdays, yet little time to reflect and learn from others. “That’s why the five weeks is critical to almost take a sabbatical from what you’re doing on a regular daily basis and invest in yourself,” Malefakis says. During the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania ‘s five-week, on-campus Advanced Management Program , you’ll attend breakout sessions, simulations, and experiential learning (think: team rowing exercises to practice communication and coordination) with fellow execs. You’ll leave with a methodology to pause, reflect, learn, then act in future business situations. Wharton also offers a hybrid version of the program in which executives make two bookend trips to Philadelphia and complete online courses. Both the on-campus and hybrid options cost $72,500.

Stanford University Graduate School of Business

The Black Leaders Program at Stanford Graduate School of Business is tailored for Black business leaders or those executives looking to advance Black leadership. The weeklong program focuses on race and leadership, power, negotiations, relationships, communication, and networking. The in-person program also provides a space to discuss barriers to leadership and Black identity in the workplace. Following the sessions, you’ll work on a capstone project focused on career advancement, with peer coaching and feedback along the way. Program director Brian S. Lowery’s research focuses on perceptions of inequity and how to reduce it. The Black Leaders Program costs $15,000 to attend, and you’ll receive a certificate of completion at the conclusion. 

The Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University

Kellogg’s yearlong Women’s Senior Leadership Program for top women leaders includes four sessions (three in-person, one live virtual reunion) focused on decision making, negotiation skills, ethical challenges, and external management. The jewel in the crown of this program at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University is a 360-degree assessment that provides feedback about your leadership style free of bias from your own organization. The assessment is made specifically to assess women’s leadership traits, taking into account your individual challenges. Leadership consultants provide check-ins throughout the year to help set your development goals and follow progress. Graduates of the program are CEOs, CFOs, CMOs, and presidents of organizations. Participants pay $25,150 to attend, which includes lodging and meals. 

Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth College

Dartmouth’s two-week, on-campus Advanced Management Program moves beyond the basics, offering a deep dive into strategy, competition, globalization, and brand management for senior executives. The program at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business is designed for executives with at least 12 years of work experience , and includes a hearty mix of lectures, discussions, excursions, and workshops. You’ll also work on a management action plan project to take back to your organization. Projects could be focused on addressing business challenges or new growth opportunities. “At the end of the day, it’s really all about impact,” says Phil Barta, executive director of Tuck Executive Education at Dartmouth. “That’s what these organizations are looking to see from their leaders when they send them.” Tuck’s Advanced Management Program costs $29,000.

University of Virginia Darden School of Business

The Executive Program: Strategic Leadership at the Top , hosted by the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business , includes in-person modules and online sessions on topics ranging from strategy to personal wellness, entrepreneurship, and risk management. While all participants of this six-month program are senior leaders, they come from backgrounds spanning financial services, government, education, health care—and even aerospace. “You open your mind to different ways of doing things and how people live and think,” says Elton “Neil” Wright Jr., a program quality executive with Boeing who participated in the program, adding that TEP gave him a better sense of the world economy. You’ll meet in person over two, two-week sessions in Charlottesville, VA or Washington DC. The Executive Program costs $53,350 to attend, and graduates can receive a discount on further executive education courses at Darden.

Harvard Business School

Harvard Business School offers a multi-week training that seeks to transform executives through a “life-altering program.” The Advanced Management Program: Prepare for the Highest Level of Leadership begins and ends with around three-week stints on-campus at HBS, with a virtual, live online and self-paced module in the middle. Overall, it is designed to empower executive to create change and renew competitive advantage within their own organizations. Past participants have include executives from companies like Marriott, Coca-Cola, and Maersk. The program fee of $92,000 covers tuition, books, case materials, accommodations, and most meals.

Yale School of Management

Yale School of Management ‘s 8-month Global Executive Leadership Program (YGELP) is taught in three, multi-day modules, allowing participants to apply course material at their respective organizations during intermissions. YGELP — which is designed for executives with at least 20 years of work experience—focuses on three pillars: leadership in business and society, global perspectives, and executive toolkit. Participants attend classes focused on personal insights, marketing, negotiations, and entrepreneurship. You’ll also be invited to Yale’s CEO Summit, which brings together global executive leaders. Upon completion of the program, you’ll be a Yale International Affiliate. “They are ready for big thoughts, big changes, and exciting new initiatives,” Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, faculty director of the program, says of attendees. The cost of the program is $60,000, which includes lodging and most meals.

Columbia Business School

You have a strategic mindset, natural leadership ability, and finance fundamentals under your belt, but numbers may not be your forte or your career focus. A solution? Columbia Business School ‘s five-day Finance and Accounting for the Nonfinancial Executive course, which caters to creative or technical leaders and covers managerial and financial accounting, ratio calculation, forecasting and valuation, and shareholder value management. This course, which can be completed online or in-person, can also serve as a good refresher for those people who previously held finance or accounting jobs but have since changed roles. Typically, about one-third of the participant mix holds general management roles. The in-person option is $11,950.

Pepperdine Graziadio Business School

During Pepperdine University (Graziadio) ‘s three-day, six-session Executive Leadership Essentials certificate program, participants will learn both virtual and in-person methods to engage stakeholders, recruit, and solve problems strategically through the lens of VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity). Participants are invited to complete a 360-degree leadership assessment, which allows them to reflect on personal leadership qualities. Attendees leave the program with a personalized leadership development plan crafted specifically to your organization during the final session. The in-person program is advertised to cost $3,599 but is on discount for $2,999.

MIT Sloan School of Management

MIT’s Sloan School of Management is inviting board members, the c-suite, and other senior executives to learn more about cybersecurity—one of the top worries of business leaders —in its course, Cybersecurity Governance for the Board of Directors . The two to three day online or in-person training seeks to teach individuals the best practices of cyber frameworks and regulation, including data protection and privacy concerns. The course also touches on cyber vulnerabilities like human engineering and supply chain. The price of the program is $4,700.

Frequently asked questions

What is an executive leadership program.

Executive leadership programs are advanced training programs for those working to run some of the world’s top businesses. The specialized trainings are designed to challenge executives to think outside of the box and freshen leadership approaches. 

Are executive leadership programs worth it?

Executive leadership programs can be a great way to not only refresh skills in the business world, but it is also an opportunity to hear fresh perspectives from leaders in academia as well as peer executives. While they can seem costly, the program prices often include lodging, meals, and other amenities.

Which executive education is best?

Most top business schools offer executive leadership training. While there is no one best program, prospective learners should pick the program that best aligns with professional growth opportunities.

Mike Malefakis has since left his role at Wharton .

See how the schools you’re considering landed in Fortune’s rankings of the best  master’s in public health programs ,  business analytics programs ,  data science programs , and  part-time ,  executive ,  full-time , and  online  MBA programs.

• Choose from our rankings of the best MBA programs to find the next phase of your educational journey.
• This list helps those looking for MBA program options that do not require submission of test scores to apply.
• Our directory of the most affordable online MBA programs can help you find the school that best fits your budget.
• You can work towards your career goals on your own time by selecting from our list of the best part time MBA programs .
• To help you pick the program that’s the best fit for you, we made this list of the best executive MBA programs .
• Interested in earning your MBA online? Here’s our ranking of the best online MBA programs .

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Are business leaders ready for ai here’s how to tell.

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AI is still in its early stages. Businesses are collectively figuring out how to best integrate it.

For many business leaders, discussions about Artificial Intelligence are clouded by unrealistic narratives. On one hand, they face a barrage of negative press stoking fears of job displacement and dystopian business futures. On the other hand, some portray AI as a magic bullet that can solve all their problems with a single instruction.

The reality, as with any major technological shift, lies somewhere in between. Just like past technological advancements that gradually permeated business operations, AI is still in its early stages. Businesses are collectively figuring out how to best integrate it.

Leaders often take a cautious approach to new and unfamiliar concepts. However, fear, uncertainty, and doubt surrounding AI risk is overshadowing its true potential to transform specific industries. This has led to a focus on short-term cost-cutting measures, hindering exploration of AI's broader transformative capabilities.

Shifting the Paradigm: From Cost Savings to Growth Engine

As someone at the forefront of AI commercialization, I can assure you: AI is here to empower your workforce, not replace it. Similar to past technological advancements, AI will complement human capabilities if it’s understood what it is you want to do with it. Take office work, for instance. AI can act as a powerful drafting and summarization tool, but its true value lies in its ability to identify patterns and insights beyond human perception. This fosters new perspectives and problem-solving approaches.

Northern Lights Alert: Beware ‘Head-On’ Aurora Displays, Scientists Say

Microsoft windows deadline—you have 21 days to update your pc, nyt ‘strands’ hints, spangram and answers for wednesday, july 10th.

The recent focus on cost reduction has led to a misconception of AI as solely an automation tool. While cost savings can be a byproduct, it shouldn't be the primary driver. AI's true value lies in its ability to streamline operations while exploring entirely new revenue streams.

Consider any of the industries that rely on technical report writing, plan checking or other document intensive review processes where delays are a growing bottleneck. In the pharmaceutical industry for examples, technical writers typically spend months crafting reports for approval. AI can automate this process by generating final draft level quality in minutes, allowing human experts to refine the output and significantly expedite the drug development cycle. This isn't just cost saving; it's a breakthrough in delivering life-saving treatments faster. The same can be said for many different verticals in our economy requiring intensive regulatory approvals.

A seasoned employee has enormous institutional memory but they can’t scale that knowledge transfer to new recruits without some tool that can ingest and retrieve that 24/7 on demand. AI tools can do that, it means that no matter what level of experience you have all enquiring minds can be seasoned employees and vice versa. The new recruits are the ones that are most adept at applying new tools to the work.

The Power of Human-AI Collaboration

Veterans bring valuable experience, new hires often excel at adopting new technologies. AI tools can ... [+] become the bridge that connects these strengths.

Experienced employees possess a wealth of institutional knowledge. However, transferring this knowledge to new recruits can be a challenge. Traditional methods often lack scalability and accessibility. AI-powered tools can bridge this gap. These tools can ingest and retrieve knowledge on-demand, 24/7. This democratizes access to expertise, empowering both seasoned employees and new recruits.

While veterans bring valuable experience, new hires often excel at adopting new technologies. AI tools can become the bridge that connects these strengths. This allows everyone, regardless of experience level, to become a "seasoned employee" by leveraging the collective knowledge base. Imagine AI-powered virtual tools providing patients pre-and post-operative support, answering questions, and even assisting with medication administration. This doesn't replace nurses; it creates a new avenue for care, extending support to patients who wouldn't otherwise have access to healthcare. The key takeaway is that AI excels at repetitive tasks and complex data analysis, allowing your human workforce to focus on higher-level skills like creativity, empathy, and strategic thinking. This human-AI collaboration is the true driver of innovation and growth.

Unlocking New Frontiers: Experimentation and Iteration

The most successful companies in the AI era will embrace experimentation and continuous improvement through rapid prototyping and iteration. Leaders who support teams to test new applications, analyze results, and refine approaches in continuous cycles will not only learn what works for them but will excel at creating a curious culture in the workplace. Leaders who embrace a critical thinking culture when looking at how to utilize AI have seen firsthand how this opens up many new ways of collaborating, sharing of ideas and cross functional problem solving that can spread across the entire organization. This iterative learning cycle is crucial for unlocking the full potential of AI within your organization.

For example, a retail company could leverage AI to learn how to analyze purchase history and predict future customer needs in several different ways. This allows for more targeted marketing, optimized inventory management, and a more personalized shopping experience. By constantly testing and refining the AI model based on team and real customer feedback, they can create a powerful flywheel for driving sales and customer satisfaction.

Building a Successful AI Strategy

Building a successful AI strategy needs Clear Governance, Data Security & Team-Centered Design

Your human workforce is, and always will be, your greatest asset. By co-creating with them to understand what their needs are with the right tools and training, you can help them leverage AI to augment their skillsets. My experience at the intersection of AI strategy and commercial implementation has shown that many leadership teams underestimate their role in shaping AI outcomes. I've had the opportunity to guide several companies through the exciting yet complex world of AI. Here are some key considerations for building a successful AI strategy that I lead with:

• Clear Governance: Establish clear guidelines for ethical and responsible AI development and deployment within your teams and for your customers.
• Data Security: Prioritize robust data security measures to protect sensitive information used in AI models.
• Team-Centered Design: Focus on designing AI solutions that complement and augment staff capabilities, fostering a seamless collaboration.

By following these principles, you can ensure that AI becomes a powerful force for positive change within your organization.

The Future of Business is Human-AI Collaboration

The future of business is not about AI replacing humans; it's about humans and AI working together. AI is not a magic bullet, nor is it a replacement for your workforce. By embracing AI as a collaborative tool, you can unlock new levels of innovation, efficiency, and sustainable growth. This is just the beginning, and I'm excited to be part of this technological shift.

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Sustainable Business Strategy vs. Business and Climate Change vs. Sustainable Investing: What's the Difference?

• 27 Jun 2024

Climate change is one of the world’s most pressing issues. According to the United Nations , the global average temperature is approximately 1.2 degrees Celsius higher than in the pre-industrial era, with the last decade signaling the warmest on record. While the increase might seem small, one change kickstarts an alarming chain reaction—causing prolonged droughts, rising sea levels, intense heat waves, and catastrophic storms.

“Climate change is one of the world’s biggest societal challenges,” says Harvard Business School Professor Forest Reinhardt, who teaches the online course Business and Climate Change alongside HBS Professor Mike Toffel. “Companies will have to play an active role if we, as a society, are to have any realistic hope of managing the challenges presented by climate change. At the same time, though, firms won’t be able to manage these challenges on their own.”

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To drive change, organizations must evolve their business practices and take a more purpose-driven approach ; investors must incorporate environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors into decision-making; and consumers must leverage their buying power and make more socially conscious purchases.

Educating yourself is an effective first step if you want to be part of the change. HBS Online offers three courses that can enable you to make sustainability a priority in your personal and professional life: Sustainable Business Strategy , Business and Climate Change , and Sustainable Investing . Here’s a comparison to help you decide which best suits your goals.

Course Comparison: Sustainable Business Strategy vs. Business and Climate Change vs. Sustainable Investing

Sustainable Business Strategy is a three-week online course taught by HBS Professor Rebecca Henderson that equips you with the knowledge and tools to become a purpose-driven leader. You’ll explore what businesses can do to help solve society’s biggest problems, including climate change and income inequality, and why collective efforts matter.

In the course, you learn how to:

• Identify and analyze business models that drive change
• Communicate the competitive advantages of being purpose-driven to organizational leadership and key stakeholders
• Examine the broader environmental, political, and social landscape in which you operate, including the role of government, investors, and customers

“I now have a better understanding of sustainability and which companies are doing it right,” says Brooks Wallace , a public relations professional who took the course to learn about sustainable business practices . “I’m armed with talking points proving that sustainability is good for business, the environment, and its people.”

Related : What Does “Sustainability” Mean in Business?

Sustainable Business Strategy is best suited for you if you’re:

• An early- or mid-career leader who wants to influence others using a values-driven approach in the for-profit or nonprofit space
• A professional who wants to drive strategy and become a purpose-centered leader
• A consulting professional who must articulate the business case for sustainability to help your clients achieve their corporate social responsibility (CSR) goals
• A leader or an entrepreneur interested in making a difference by integrating values into your strategy without sacrificing profit

While Sustainable Business Strategy references climate change, Business and Climate Change provides a comprehensive deep dive. This five-week course, co-taught by Reinhardt and Toffel, will teach you to identify and communicate climate risks and opportunities and implement relevant strategies.

In it, you learn how to:

• Understand climate change’s science , economic impact, and policy implications
• Leverage insights from real-world examples to inform future strategies for adapting to climate change
• Think critically and creatively to develop business solutions that mitigate climate change
• Explore climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts’ scalability, costs, and benefits

Related : Listen to Professor Reinhardt discuss climate change and the tragedy of the commons on The Parlor Room podcast , or watch the episode on YouTube .

“Wherever you are in your career, we hope this course will help you gain a fundamental understanding of how climate change affects businesses, how businesses affect climate change, and the role businesses—and society—can play in adapting to and mitigating the effects of climate change,” says Toffel in Business and Climate Change .

This course is best suited for you if you’re:

• A business professional or manager working in an industry affected by climate change who must rethink their organization’s strategy
• A CSR, strategy, or operations professional interested in developing creative solutions to mitigating climate change
• An entrepreneur who wants to develop new climate change-oriented initiatives
• An investor interested in financing ventures dedicated to tackling climate change

Another program to consider is Sustainable Investing . It’s a six-week course taught by HBS professors Shawn Cole and Vikram Gandhi that helps you evaluate ESG factors and measure and manage impact investments.

In Sustainable Investing, you learn how to:

• Apply frameworks to measure and monitor sustainable investment opportunities
• Analyze cutting-edge implementation strategies
• Identify investment opportunities' inherent climate risks and how to integrate those into financial models
• Think critically about how and where to add value while avoiding “ impact washing ”

“I believe sustainable investing is going to be at the forefront of all finance projects,” says Sustainable Investing past participant Akanksha Davera . “The course content is well designed and helps investors get a basic understanding of what sustainable finance is, its challenges, the path forward, and its key players.”

Related : What Is Sustainable Investing?

Sustainable Investing is best suited for you if you’re:

• An investment professional interested in learning how to evaluate, measure, and manage sustainable investment opportunities
• An entrepreneur or operator with a finance background who wants to manage and grow your investment capital
• A consultant or government, business, or nonprofit leader looking to gain frameworks and analytical tools to make future financial decisions that serve your clients’ or organization’s goals and objectives
• An early-career professional who wants to develop practical skills you can apply to one of finance’s fastest-growing fields

The HBS Online Learning Experience

No matter which course you choose, you’ll gain access to a world-class learning experience featuring:

• World-class faculty
• Self-paced online coursework
• Engaging, interactive content
• Social interaction with fellow learners
• Real examples of business challenges faced by experts
• The HBS Online Community , a global network of business professionals
• Career growth and a positive return on investment

Through HBS’s signature case method , you’ll be introduced to business leaders from around the world in a range of industries. They’ll share real scenarios they’ve faced integrating sustainability into their business practices. As their stories unfold, you’ll collaborate with peers and apply course frameworks and concepts to determine how you’d solve each challenge so you’re prepared when it surfaces in your organization.

This method of real-world learning pays off: In a City Square Associates survey , 42 percent of learners said their HBS Online course helped increase their salary by an average of $17,000—representing a 10-times return on investment. In addition, 31 percent earned a promotion, 36 percent made a career change, and 16 percent earned an average bonus of $14,000.

Choosing the Right Course for You

Climate change makes headlines daily. The need for purpose-driven business professionals who can combine purpose and profit to tackle this pressing global issue has never been greater.

Take the first step toward meeting that demand by exploring Sustainable Business Strategy , Business and Climate Change , and Sustainable Investing .

If interested in all three, consider taking a Learning Track to earn an advanced certificate. By completing all three courses within 18 months, you’ll receive a Certificate of Specialization in Business in Society—signaling to employers your deep commitment to professional growth, lifelong learning, and making profound societal change.

Get started today. Explore Sustainable Business Strategy , Business and Climate Change , Sustainable Investing , and our other business in society courses . Download our free flowchart to determine which is right for you.

About the Author

Illegal evictions are on the rise. And the police are failing to enforce the law.

Alfred Perry got word on Labor Day weekend. He'd just thrown one of his signature cookouts in the courtyard of his apartment complex in Las Vegas.

It was the kind of laid-back life he came southwest for. A Chrysler retiree from the Detroit suburbs, Perry enjoyed the warm weather and lights of Vegas as he was driving through over three years ago. He decided to stay. As luck would have it, he said, he had enough left from his pension and Social Security checks when Dan Wright offered him a studio apartment downtown. Perry put down the first month's rent and a deposit and moved in shortly after.

But when a relative told him to come back to the Midwest to handle a family emergency that September of 2022, Perry didn't hesitate. He had paid that month's rent, he said, and set out on the long trek to fetch his 5-year-old son, whose mother was in crisis.

When Perry arrived back home with the boy about a month later, his keys no longer opened the door.

Wright had been having issues with Perry over visitors to his apartment. So Perry was anxious that Wright wanted him out. The night Perry came back in the wee hours, he said, he and his son stayed with a neighbor. The next day, he said, Wright refused to let him back in.

Perry and his son started living out of his Jeep.

Previous convictions for drug possession made finding a new apartment difficult. Months passed with the pair living out of Perry's car. Someone reported the situation to law enforcement, a spokesperson for the North Las Vegas Police Department said, and officers pulled Perry over to do a welfare check on his son. Officers arrested Perry on charges including child neglect and driving without a license and turned his son over to Child Protective Services.

Perry said he spent a year trying to regain custody.

"I take my share of the blame for having my son out there like that," Perry said. "But if Dan hadn't locked me out, I'd still have my son today."

Perry filed a complaint saying Wright had locked him out illegally. That's when a landlord turns off utilities, changes locks, or otherwise keeps tenants from their home without first getting a judge's consent.

Protections against these kinds of extrajudicial evictions date back centuries. Today, lockouts are criminalized in six US states, punishable by imprisonment, and are banned by civil statutes, enforceable by fines and civil suits, in those states and 39 others.

But a Business Insider investigation has found that in cities across the United States, complaints about lockouts are on the rise. Tenants in crisis are mostly stuck calling the police, who rarely take action against property owners who may have broken the law, BI found.

Some police departments even instruct responding officers not to get involved, leaving tenants to face sudden homelessness despite civil and criminal laws intended to protect them from precisely that fate. The absence of a federal law banning lockouts, a patchwork of state laws, the lack of police action, and an uphill battle for tenants in court have together allowed many landlords to lock tenants out with impunity.

The nature of illegal lockouts means they are hard to track directly. To gauge how often they happen, BI reviewed thousands of 911 calls, housing complaints, and court records and found evidence suggesting that illegal lockouts have increased in recent years.

Their rise comes as half of all US renters — more than 22 million households — are facing financial stress over housing costs, spending more than 30% of their income on rent and utilities, a burden that makes it easy to fall behind on rent, and catastrophic to be abruptly thrown out into a tight rental market.

The rise in lockout complaints also came as more investors sought to cash in on residential property management and ownership during the pandemic. Some of them were inexperienced first-time landlords who may have been unfamiliar with landlord-tenant laws. Others were corporations and private-equity firms.

Landlords have a variety of motivations for wanting a tenant out, from unpaid rent to simply not getting along. Even if their reasons are legitimate, landlords in most jurisdictions are required to go to court to seek an eviction and provide a tenant with notice of the eviction filing. Bypassing that system is illegal in most states, whether the landlord's grievance is justified or not.

The lack of due process in a lockout means someone like Perry never gets to show a judge his rent was paid up or prove that he'd followed the rules of his lease. And the lack of notice robs tenants of a window in which to line up alternative housing.

In Perry's case, Wright claimed that Perry left voluntarily, with his possessions. "I know the laws — I don't mess with them," Wright said.

But Wright has a history of wrongful evictions, according to documents from the Las Vegas Justice Court: In 2022, his LLC was ordered to pay back nearly $900 for turning off the electricity on another tenant in Perry's building, and in 2020, he was ordered to restore access to a renter at another property after a judge found he'd illegally removed her.

Of the 2022 case, Wright said one of his employees got "overzealous"; of the other case, he said he'd tried to let the tenant back in.

"Just because tenants file something, it doesn't mean something is true," he said.

A judge never decided who was right in Perry's case. His complaint was tossed on a technicality. He'd missed the window to file.

Tenants and their advocates say lockouts are extraordinarily disruptive. People often miss days of work or lose their job as they prioritize finding somewhere to stay. Children fall behind academically or have to leave school altogether. Losing everything means starting from scratch, straining savings to pay for motels or to replace furniture, clothing, or medications.

"It is such a traumatic thing for a family to be locked out without warning," Charlie Bliss, the director of advocacy at Atlanta Legal Aid, said. "It's the beginning of a real bunch of trouble."

'I'm sick of calling the cops'

Lockouts largely happen out of public view.

But research shows they may be widespread. In 2015 a Princeton sociology professor, Matthew Desmond, surveyed Milwaukee tenants and found a ratio of two informal forced removals to every one where landlords went through a formal court process and got a judge's eviction order.

To piece together how often lockouts occur, BI sought records left in the wake of these illegal eviction attempts from police departments and housing agencies in eight large cities that have a high proportion of renters or tight housing markets, including Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, and Las Vegas. We obtained 911 call logs and audio, police reports, bodycam footage, arrest data, and housing complaints.

Lockouts briefly gained visibility during the coronavirus pandemic, as landlords sought to bypass a federal moratorium on evictions. But the expiration of the moratorium has not resulted in the abandonment of these illegal tactics.

Our investigation unearthed hundreds of cases in which data shows that the police did little to nothing when answering emergency calls for help with an illegal eviction.

The landlords rarely faced consequences .

In South Chicago, a landlord was ticketed for changing the locks on a tenant in January 2023; the ticket was tossed and he was let go with a verbal warning. On Christmas Day 2022 in Phoenix, a woman who called 911 said her landlord was hooking up her trailer to his red Chevy truck in an effort to evict her. When the police called her back two hours later, they couldn't reach her. The incident was closed as "no action required."

911 records from the winter of 2022-2023 indicate that a pregnant woman in Jersey City's McGinley Square neighborhood was locked out of her apartment for five days. She said she was stuck doubled up with her grandmother in a local YMCA.

"I'm sick of calling the cops and nobody doing anything," she tells a 911 dispatcher, frustrated after describing her situation multiple times to different police officers and call takers. "I'm freezing, I haven't took my prenatals in days, changed my clothes in days."

The first time she called 911 about being locked out, her landlord said it was because he did not want her dog in the house. He sat in the entrance to the apartment, undeterred by police officers telling him he could be arrested.

Lockouts are a crime in New Jersey. But the officers didn't arrest him or give him a citation, telling him to let the woman inside and take her to court. The landlord locked her out again two months later for four days, she reported to 911. A different pair of officers responded; bodycam footage shows them trying to reach the landlord by phone after the tenant says he's blocked her number. Then, they tell her to get a locksmith. She called 911 again not long after, saying the locksmith had asked for cash but her cash was locked inside her apartment. It was a Catch-22.

Bodycam footage shows an officer again trying to call the landlord, but the call goes straight to voicemail. One of the responding officers calls a sergeant over, who says there's nothing else they can do. Jersey City officials did not respond to requests for comment.

If she breaks back into her own home, the sergeant says, she'll shoulder the risk.

"We're advising against it, but you're a grown woman," one officer tells her. "What you do is what you do — it's on you." Meanwhile, with her uniform locked inside, the Jersey City woman says she missed days of work.

Lockout calls on the rise

In Jersey City, where a residential lockout can result in a criminal misdemeanor, a city clerk said he would be surprised if more than a handful of tenants had called 911 over an illegal lockout. In response to a records request, the same city clerk later identified 90 emergency calls alleging illegal evictions in 2021 and 2022. In Atlanta, a public-information officer at the Atlanta Police Department said officers did not get involved in such cases and initially identified only 13 calls over three years in response to a freedom of information request. They later found more than 2,000 such calls.

The Atlanta police did not respond to subsequent requests for comment.

Of the cities we examined, only Chicago dispatchers had a specific label for 911 calls reporting an illegal lockout — a code that was introduced recently, in 2021. Some departments had categories for landlord-tenant issues, while others lumped calls about wrongful evictions under umbrella terms such as "disturbance." A few cities had no relevant categories at all. In these cities, BI requested service calls to 911 filtered by keywords such as "lock out," "shut off," and "landlord" dating back to at least 2020.

BI excluded calls with sufficient information to show they were not pertinent to a lockout. The analysis shows that calls to the police for help regarding illegal evictions haven't fallen since the federal COVID eviction moratorium was halted by the Supreme Court, in response to a challenge by landlords, in August 2021. Instead they have roughly held steady or increased. In Atlanta, the volume of these calls rose each year from 2020 to 2022. And in Houston, calls mentioning lockout keywords went up from 2021 to 2022.

Tallies based on police calls are likely an undercount, tenant advocates say. Some renters don't know lockouts are illegal; others are hesitant to call the police or report an illegal eviction to the city for a variety of reasons, including distrust of the police.

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Data from other agencies showed a similar increase. BI examined more than 41,000 housing complaints from 2020 through 2023 to the Department of Housing in Los Angeles — the same kinds of complaints cited by city council members in 2021 when passing an ordinance to prohibit landlords from using harassment and coercion to force out tenants. We found that these complaints rose 71% from 2020 to 2023. The volume of housing complaints illustrates how difficult it can be to track off-the-book evictions. For 2022, the Los Angeles Police Department turned over about 1,000 calls made to the police with keywords related to illegal lockouts or utility shutoffs. For the same year, complaints to the housing department totaled more than 11,000.

In Nevada, a state law lets tenants who were wrongfully evicted sue their landlord to get back into their unit. The number of such cases in one Las Vegas courts has modestly increased year over year, rising from 300 cases filed in 2020 to 353 in 2023. Texas has a similar law. In Harris County, petitions over lockouts and utility shutoffs — mostly from Houston — nearly doubled from 2019 to 2023, data shows, going from 88 cases to 153.

David Leibowitz, a spokesperson for the Arizona Multi-Housing Association, a group representing landlords and management companies, said that while the association does not condone self-help evictions — another term for a lockout — he didn't know whether the problem is pervasive.

"People call the police for all sorts of reasons," Leibowitz said. "Statistics are hard to come by in the legal circumstances — now you're talking about these illegal situations and it's even harder."

Lockouts by corporate landlords

Advocates for both landlords and tenants say, in their experience, unsophisticated mom-and-pop landlords are more likely to lock out their tenants. Buoyed by low interest rates in 2021, many new investors — perhaps unfamiliar with landlord-tenant law — purchased apartment buildings, only to find that profits had not kept up with debt obligations or the cost of regular maintenance .

But aggressive tactics to remove a resident are not confined to small landlords who may lack familiarity with the law. A congressional investigation into four major corporate landlords published in July 2022 found that they had collectively filed more than 14,000 evictions at the height of the pandemic, despite a federal eviction moratorium. The investigators describe the eviction filings as "aggressive" but not unlawful. Spokespeople for two of the landlords named in the report — Invitation Homes and Pretium — reiterated the latter finding in response to BI's queries.

But Kristi DesJarlais, a spokesperson for Invitation Homes , took issue with the characterization of the company's practices as aggressive. Words like that are not "accurate words to describe a company following a legal process," she said by email.

The investigators also found evidence that one of the companies, The Siegel Group, had engaged in "potentially unlawful practices," including instructing managers to threaten residents with calls to Child Protective Services, replace a functioning air-conditioning unit with a broken one, or threaten to tow their car to get them to move out.

Counsel for The Siegel Group, a real estate investment firm that services multifamily units and extended-stay apartments in several Western states, confirmed in an email to the congressional subcommittee leading the investigation that the company used lockouts instead of evictions in some states.

Sean Thueson​​​​, the general counsel for The Siegel Group, said the company's email only confirmed lockouts were used at hotels or motels "under state law that specifically authorize lock outs" and said "each individual property handles its own lock outs / evictions and follows the laws of the specific state."

When asked about specific cases in which tenants were granted judgments after wrongful evictions in Las Vegas, Thueson said that The Siegel Group had been improperly named and bore no responsibility.

In Las Vegas, BI found more than one in three landlords facing illegal-lockout claims are companies, including The Siegel Group and such major players as Progress Residential, the largest corporate landlord in the Nevada county and a subsidiary of the investment firm Pretium, and Invitation Homes, the single-family rental company founded by Blackstone . (Blackstone sold off its remaining shares of the company in 2019.)

BI found a similar pattern in Harris County, home to Houston, where about one in three tenant filings alleging lockouts from 2019 through 2023 named corporate landlords, including Progress Residential . (Some related to commercial tenants.)

Of the complaints against Invitation Homes and Progress Residential, none were upheld, according to justice courts in Texas and Nevada, whether because the lockouts were deemed legal, because no one showed up to a hearing, or because the tenant had been locked out by a family member.

"At no time has Invitation Homes ever evicted a resident without pursuing the action by legal means and obtaining a court order," DesJarlais of Invitation Homes said. "We cannot and will not unilaterally evict a resident from one of our homes."

"Progress Residential complied with applicable laws," a company spokesperson said by email. "Any implication of the contrary is false."

In March, Minnesota's attorney general settled a lawsuit for $2.2 million with Pretium, Progress Residential, and other related companies over chronic disrepair and illegally terminating people's tenancies at hundreds of single-family homes. While Pretium requested to be dismissed from the case, and denied any wrongdoing, Assistant Attorney General Katherine Kelly said there was no question Pretium was involved in the management of the units.

"They knew about it," she said. "They didn't stop it, they let it go on."

Corporate landlords have recently come under fire for other potentially illegal tactics. For example, in the past several months, attorneys general in Arizona and Washington, DC, have sued RealPage over claims it had assisted landlords in systematically jacking up rents above market price, an arrangement state officials described as a "rent-setting cartel."

"The lawsuits are wrong on both the facts and the law," Jennifer Bowcock, a spokesperson for RealPage, said by email. "The complaints are based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how revenue management software works and the significant benefits that it offers for residents, property managers, and the rental housing ecosystem as a whole."

Enforcement failures

The right to due process during an eviction is one of the country's oldest laws. Based on English criminal statutes that date back to the 1300s, some American colonies banned extrajudicial eviction tactics even before they formally joined the Union, considering violators a threat to public safety.

At least as far back as the 18th century, courts were involved in the adjudication of landlord-tenant disputes and tended not to support a tenant's immediate eviction, recognizing the hardship it would entail.

"Few things are more likely to lead to a brawl than an evicting landlord, throwing out his tenant by main force," William Prosser, author of the seminal work "Handbook of the Law of Torts," argued in 1941. "The public interest in preserving the peace would seem to justify the temporary inconvenience to the owner."

Today, however, illegal evictions are often left in the hands not of experienced judges but of undertrained police officers who sometimes abysmally fail to protect tenants' rights .

In four of the major metro areas BI examined, agencies explicitly direct tenants to call the police if they're locked out. So does guidance for New Jersey's superior courts.

In Los Angeles, which is governed by a state directive encouraging law enforcement to treat lockouts as a criminal offense, the city's Housing Department website instructs tenants to "call the local police at the closest precinct to help with re-entry." Welcoming Atlanta, a program of the mayor's office in Atlanta, where police typically treat lockouts as civil matters, directs people to "call your non emergency police line and report them as a trespasser," referring to the landlord. "The police officer should tell them that they must leave the property or face charges for criminal trespass."

But even in places where the police are clearly responsible for responding to an illegal eviction and taking action against the landlord, many officers choose not to get involved.

In cities across the nation, calls about a lockout very rarely lead to a police report, BI's analysis shows. For the rest, officers took some other course of action, whether persuading landlords to let a tenant back in, referring the tenant or landlord to another agency — or simply leaving landlords off the hook.

BI reviewed 8,268 911 calls about lockouts received as far back as 2020 in four cities — Chicago, Houston, Atlanta, and Miami — that included information on how police departments resolved them. BI also analyzed data on 911 calls in Phoenix from January 2020 through 2023 coded simply as landlord-tenant disputes.

Of 3,600 calls to the police in Chicago from February 2021 to July 2023, 17% led to a police report. Police officers filed even fewer reports elsewhere.

In Phoenix, where lockouts are civil violations, most landlord-tenant 911 calls were tagged as "no action required" and only 14% led to a police report.

Atlanta, Miami, and Houston were in the single digits. In Atlanta, 9% of lockout calls from January 2020 through early 2023 ended in a police report. Houston police officers wrote reports after only 8% of calls from 2021 to early 2023. And Miami police officers wrote reports for 8% of calls in 2022.

Police departments in Atlanta, Miami, and Chicago did not respond to detailed requests for comment.

The Houston Police Department issued a statement saying officers were trained in identifying criminal versus civil matters and officers were guided not to enforce the latter.

A Phoenix police spokesperson, Donna Rossi, said by email that calls about lockouts "could refer to both legal and non-legal situations" and that "police involvement would end if no crime has been committed."

The lack of reports stands in sharp contrast with enforcement of other, often less consequential, property crimes like shoplifting.

Police data from the start of 2020 through the end of 2023 in Phoenix shows an inverse ratio. While only 14% of lockout calls led to a police report, 86% of calls about shoplifting did. The Council on Criminal Justice has found that the median cost of shoplifted goods in 2021 was $100.

Even in Chicago and Los Angeles, where the police are explicitly mandated to stop illegal evictions — up to and including making an arrest — BI found a similar pattern.

From 2020 through the end of 2023, Chicago police officers made eight arrests of landlords accused of illegally locking out tenants. By comparison, they made more than 6,300 arrests of people suspected of shoplifting merchandise worth less than $300 over the same time period.

"If it's illegal to steal a candy bar from a store, why is there seemingly no consequence for turning someone's heat off?" said Sara Heymann, a community organizer in Chicago who advocates on behalf of tenants who are experiencing a lockout.

Though California issued guidance directing law-enforcement agencies to treat illegal eviction as a crime, police officers rarely make arrests, according to LAPD arrest data. BI tallied more than 41,000 housing complaints — which can range from landlords giving insufficient notice in the course of a formal eviction process to landlords locking tenants out or cutting off utilities — from January 2020 through the end of 2023 in Los Angeles. Yet over the same time period, the LAPD arrested only six people under the main statute cited by the attorney general as having to do with an illegal eviction.

An investigation by The City found this pattern in New York City, where the NYPD made just 39 lockout arrests in 2020 and 2021 out of more than 2,600 complaints.

"We respond to the calls as best we can if it's within what we can enforce," an LAPD spokesperson, Detective Meghan Aguilar, told BI, but she declined to answer questions about the department's training on responding to lockout calls and its enforcement of criminal laws banning lockouts.

'What's your plan for tonight?'

Records show relying on the police for help on lockouts is a gamble.

In bodycam footage BI obtained of police responses to 911 calls about illegal evictions, officers' behavior appears almost improvised. Some recognize a lockout as illegal and direct landlords to the courts for a lawful eviction. But others don't appear to know the law, even in states where the police are tasked to uphold it. Some resort to searching the internet for guidance.

In one Jersey City incident in December 2022, a police officer appears to misunderstand a judge's order "staying" a lockout — a decision that the eviction may not be enforced — as meaning the tenant should "stay" locked out.

In another February 2023 case there, a baffled tenant asks officers responding to her 911 call whether her landlord could legally lock her out: Yes, they can, the officer wrongly says. New Jersey law states that even after a legal eviction is granted by a judge, only a court officer can remove the tenant.

Tenants' outcomes vary dramatically according to which officers happen to respond.

In two separate instances in 2021 and 2022, the Jersey City police conducted criminal investigations into landlords accused of locking out tenants or shutting off their utilities. In one case, a landlord cut the building's electrical wiring, leaving multiple families without power, heat, or fire protection for days. He received two court summons for the offenses. In the other, a woman said she came home to a padlock on her door and about $10,000 in missing property, including clothing and appliances. But the police could find no record of an arrest in connection with the event.

Other landlords were let off easy.

In January 2023, a woman identified as Misty Skinner called the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department after she and her daughter were locked out of their home in Spring Valley, on the outskirts of Las Vegas.

Wearing only a fleece jacket on a day with a low temperature of 34 degrees Fahrenheit, bodycam footage shows Skinner telling police officers her landlord demanded they leave within 24 hours. Scared, she and her daughter left, she says, but now they can't reach the landlord to arrange to gather their belongings, including her daughter's nebulizer.

"What's your plan for tonight?" one of the officers asks her.

"I don't have a plan — this is our plan."

"Do you have a car?"

"No, I do not, or we would be in our car, waiting."

"Do you have money?"

"No, I don't have money, 'cause we spent our money for two nights on a B&B."

Skinner says her landlord, Levi Wilhelm, lives next door. As they walk over, one of the officers tells the other to look up "illegal lockout" on his phone. In the footage, lights are on in the house and cars are in the driveway. But there is no response when officers knock on his door.

"It's gonna be on her," one of the police officers says to his partner.

"So what do we do now?" Skinner says, her voice breaking. "It's not right. It's not fair."

"Do you have any friends?"

"I don't have anybody here," she says, wiping tears from her cheek.

The officers say that since she hasn't been formally evicted, they won't arrest her if she breaks back in, say, with a rock. "I've had these before where we've actually supplied them crowbars from the tac vehicle to get inside their homes," one officer says.

Then the officers think better of her breaking in, expressing concern that Wilhelm could return and become violent.

They approach two neighbors to ask whether they'd let Skinner and her daughter come inside for a couple of hours. When the neighbors refuse, the officers advise Skinner to head to a gas station to warm up and give her a card to document the incident. Nevada has a procedure to let tenants back into their homes quickly in the event of an illegal lockout, but police officers direct her to the wrong agency. Records show the incident was closed that same night without a police report. Wilhelm filed an eviction with the courts 10 days later. He did not respond to calls and emails requesting comment.

In bodycam footage of another lockout call four months earlier, a different pair of officers respond. This time, the officers coach the tenant on how to break down his door and stand by as he does it. The Las Vegas Metro Police declined to comment.

Police training materials from multiple departments describe their role as keepers of the peace during a lockout, rather than enforcers of the law. In the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, a group of housing activists in Los Angeles began to break tenants back into their homes before calling the police, since they'd noticed that whoever is inside the residence when the police show up is often the party who will stay inside.

"Folks are left to their own devices as far as getting themselves back in," Jeffrey Uno, managing attorney for the eviction-defense center at the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, said. "There are punishments on paper, but in reality, they're being ignored."

Training failures

BI found training for police officers on how to respond to a lockout is spotty. Some departments, such as Miami's, said they didn't have any training materials on lockouts.

In Las Vegas, officers are trained on how to identify a squatter and on the criminal charges for breaking into a vacant property, but the guidance makes no mention of the laws surrounding illegal lockouts or the remedies they can offer tenants. Other departments effectively direct cops to turn a blind eye.

The Phoenix Police Department instructs officers to "not take enforcement action" after observing violations to the state's landlord-tenant laws.

The Atlanta Police Department treats calls about evictions as civil matters and tells officers to "not render any aid or assistance in official capacity to either party" in civil disputes.

The Atlanta police declined an interview request, directing BI to the county marshal. Maj. Deirdre Orange, a spokesperson for the Fulton County Marshal's Department, said marshals don't get involved in any eviction that isn't ordered by a judge.

In Avondale, Arizona, a policy manual says cops are to "persuade" people to comply with the law when it comes to tenant-landlord violations, but not to make any arrests.

But Daniel Benavidez, a community resource officer with the Avondale Police Department, said officers are trained to identify criminal behavior when responding to these calls. "One of our roles is to make sure that people are protected in their homes," he said.

"If someone removes someone from a home without lawful authority, that would be kidnapping," he clarified. "It could be stealing, it could be criminal damage, it can be criminal impersonation, fraudulent scheme. It could be any type of crime."

In a subsequent email, Sgt. Jenny Chavez said the department referred callers complaining of lockouts to the county constable.

In at least one case, police training openly undercuts state law-enforcement directives.

In July 2022, the California attorney general issued new guidelines on the illegality of lockouts to police departments and sheriffs statewide, directing officers to tell landlords to let tenants back into their homes. The state doesn't have a law explicitly criminalizing lockouts, but the bulletin emphasizes that lockouts violate other criminal laws and directs officers to "intervene to enforce the law and stop self-help evictions."

Nevertheless, an LAPD training bulletin, updated just two months after the AG bulletin, tells the police that while tenants behind on their rent will "very often" be locked out by their landlords, "officers lack the legal authority to demand that the landlord allow re-entry to the tenant."

A spokesperson for California's attorney general, Rob Bonta, did not make him available for an interview. The LAPD declined to comment on its training bulletin in light of the AG's guidance.

Only one department, in Jersey City, turned over training materials that detail how to enforce lockout laws. BI separately obtained a Chicago police training video, in which Eric Carter, then the first deputy superintendent, lays out that the police department "can use its authority to compel landlords to end unlawful threats or actions."

"Officers can and should respond to lockout complaints," John Bartlett, the executive director of the Metropolitan Tenants Organization, says in the video. "It is a common misunderstanding that lockouts, like most landlord and tenant disputes, are a civil matter in which the police cannot intervene. That is not the case."

"Both landlords and tenants are suffering through hard times, and the temptation to resort to unlawful threats and actions has never been greater," Carter says in the video.

A patchwork of laws

Complicating matters is a patchwork of disparate states laws governing what constitutes an illegal eviction — and the penalties for violating the law.

In Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, and Wyoming, no laws are in place that explicitly ban lockouts. In Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, and New York, lockouts are a crime carrying penalties of up to six months in jail; with the attorney general's directive, California became a sixth state with criminal penalties.

State law in New Jersey establishes that even a landlord's verbal threats can be criminal. Delaware, on the other hand, one of 39 states with only civil penalties for lockouts, bans only landlords' removal or exclusion of tenants from their home without a court order.

Even within states, definitions vary on what constitutes an illegal eviction.

While Illinois forbids landlords from tampering with utilities, the city of Chicago goes further, forbidding landlords from threatening a tenant with removal, attempting to keep a tenant from their home, or "incapacitating" appliances unless it is to fix them.

A 2006 bill that would have defined illegal lockouts for all Illinois residents was defeated.

In the 39 states where lockouts are only a civil infraction, landlords could be subject to fines and locked-out tenants may sue to recoup their losses. Texas has a uniquely complex statute on the books that prohibits lockouts only under very particular circumstances.

That Texas statute allows some landlords to lawfully change the locks or withhold electricity, for instance, as long as they have a signed lease that outlines this power and the tenants are behind on their rent. But landlords can't cut off a tenant's electricity if the National Weather Service projects a high temperature of less than 32 Fahrenheit. And it's too hot to cut off electricity if there has been a heat advisory within the past two days.

The law also states tenants can contest an electricity shutoff with a note from a health provider saying someone will suffer serious illness because of it, but that note is only good for up to 63 days.

After a legal lockout, Texas landlords must provide the new key upon request.

"Not all the landlords who do it, do it correctly," Fred Fuchs, an attorney with Texas RioGrande Legal Aid, said of the law. "That other states don't allow this or that doesn't get you very far in Texas."

Calls for greater enforcement

During the depths of COVID, there was a brief moment of consensus among federal officials on the importance of housing stability.

In March 2021, Democratic Rep. Steve Cohen introduced a bill in the House that would have standardized the need to go to court for an eviction nationwide during a national emergency — and set civil penalties if landlords did not comply. The act reflected a pandemic-era recognition of how important it was to public health to keep people housed. But it stalled in committee.

A year later, an effort led by Senate Democrat Michael Bennet to fund data collection on lockouts similarly stalled.

Even in the face of congressional inaction, Sarah Saadian, a policy expert with the National Low Income Housing Coalition, says there's room for federal regulators to step in. Both the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Federal Trade Commission, she said, have a mandate to monitor abusive consumer practices and could "focus more explicitly on renters."

In fact a White House Blueprint for a Renters' Bill of Rights released in January 2023 notes that the FTC was exploring ways to expand its authority and "take action against acts and practices that unfairly prevent consumers from obtaining and retaining housing."

Douglas Farrar, the director of public affairs at the FTC, declined to comment on any new enforcement measures. The CFPB also declined to comment.

Kelly, Minnesota's assistant attorney general, said state AGs could step up in enforcing tenant laws. "Every state has the authority to protect consumers," she said.

Fuchs from the legal clinic in Texas suggested that better police training could make a difference — as could solutions that don't depend on the police at all. Other states could learn from the model in Texas, he said, where locked-out tenants can file a complaint with a local justice court to quickly regain access to their home. Other tenant advocates said guaranteeing the right to counsel would help tenants assert their rights.

Heymann, the Chicago community organizer, said she'd like to see education and oversight efforts targeting private landlords as well as an increased investment in public housing. She suggested landlords who've been found to have locked people out should face mandatory classes, or sanctions if they're repeat offenders — including barring them from renting at all.

"Housing should not be dependent on some random person," she said, "who gets no training whatsoever."

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