Today, one of my students from the Harbour.Space University course I teach in Bangkok published a post on LinkedIn. His team had just delivered a full end-to-end automation system for a real insurance company, Pansuk Insurance, three weeks after telling me he had never built a single automated flow in his life. Lead capture, email nurturing, a content generator, CRM onboarding, and analytics dashboard. The whole thing, live, for a real client.
He ended the post with this: “This class really changed how I think about marketing operations.”
I read that and felt something I rarely feel running three companies simultaneously. A specific kind of satisfaction that is hard to manufacture and impossible to invoice for.
That post is what prompted this article. Because people ask me regularly how I find the time to teach when I am running sendXmail, ZOPPLY, and HOT Leads, lecturing on digital law at Lusófona University and so many other institutions as well, and consulting across Portugal, Spain, the UAE, Brazil and, apparently, Bangkok. The honest answer is: I find the time because not finding it would cost me more than the hours I spend.
Here is the full case, as clearly as I can make it.
Teaching forces you to actually know what you know
Running a business lets you get away with a surprising amount of vagueness. You can navigate a client meeting on instinct, pattern recognition, and thirty years of accumulated experience without ever articulating precisely what you are doing or why. You cannot do that in a classroom. Students ask questions that clients never ask, because clients are paying you to have answers, and students are paying to understand the reasoning.
When you cannot explain something clearly, teaching finds that out within minutes. I have sat with a concept I thought I understood completely, started explaining it to a room of twenty people, and discovered mid-sentence that my mental model had a hole in it. That is uncomfortable, and it is also invaluable. No amount of solo reflection produces the same diagnostic pressure as a room full of people who do not yet know the answer and are watching to see if you do.
It also forces you to stay current. You cannot teach AI automation in 2025 with 2022 knowledge. The preparation discipline means I engage with research, tools, and developments that I might otherwise skim past when running day-to-day operations. That keeps my agency work sharper than it would be otherwise.
Preparing material is a content engine in disguise
Every course I develop produces frameworks, structures, examples, and angles I would not have articulated otherwise. The process of organising knowledge for a room of students forces a level of clarity and sequence that is directly useful in proposals, articles, workshops, and client conversations. The slides become source material. The frameworks travel. The examples get refined through student questioning until they are genuinely good.
This article, for instance, exists because of a Bangkok classroom. The thinking behind my recent piece on why you should understand your process before building any workflow was sharpened considerably by watching students make the exact mistakes I was writing about. Teaching and content production are, for me, the same activity running in parallel.
The room teaches you back
This is the part that surprises people who have never taught. You expect to be the one doing the teaching. You do not expect to leave sessions having genuinely learned something.
Students ask questions you have stopped asking yourself. After years in a field, you develop blind spots. You stop questioning assumptions because the assumptions have been tested and they work. A student who does not share those assumptions will occasionally walk straight through them, not because they know more than you do, but because they do not yet know enough to accept the constraint.
Some of the most interesting moments in my Bangkok sessions came from students presenting solutions I would not have considered. Not because the solutions were better in every case, but because the approach was different. And sometimes different is exactly what you need to unstick a problem you have been solving the same way for years. I have taken lessons from student presentations back to my agencies. That is not something I expected when I started teaching, and it is one of the clearest arguments for continuing.
Beyond that, the gaps in student knowledge are a reliable market signal. What twenty sharp, motivated students consistently misunderstand is, almost certainly, what the broader market misunderstands. That tells you where the real content and service opportunities are, before anyone else sees them.
It exposes you to problems you would never find otherwise
My client base across three agencies covers a reasonably wide range of sectors. But it is still my client base, shaped by referrals, geography, and the industries where I have the most track record. A classroom in Bangkok, or a lecture hall in Mirandela, or a seminar in Dubai pulls from a completely different pool.
In a single course, I encounter business problems from insurance, retail, hospitality, media, logistics, and whatever else twenty students happen to be working on. Each one is a different context for applying the same principles, which sharpens the principles considerably. It also, occasionally, opens doors. Students become future colleagues, collaborators, referral sources, and, yes, sometimes clients.
The institutional dimension is real
There is a type of professional credibility that classroom teaching confers that online publishing does not. Writing articles, posting on LinkedIn, and building a following are valuable. Standing in front of a room at a recognised university, having been invited to do so, is a different signal entirely. It says someone with hiring authority looked at your body of work and decided you should be shaping how the next generation thinks about your field.
I teach email marketing, marketing automation, performance marketing, AI agents and automations, behavioural automation processes, digital law, and several subjects adjacent to all of those. The range matters. It positions me as someone who thinks across disciplines rather than someone who has mastered a single tool or channel. In a market where most practitioners go deep and narrow, cross-domain credibility is increasingly rare and increasingly worth having.
However, as I mentioned on several occasions, I still believe that focusing on a niche vertical is the underrated way to break through the noise. 😉 Being a specialist or a T-shaped marketer is the way to go, in my case.
On the fee question
People occasionally assume that someone with multiple companies teaching at universities must be doing it for exposure or out of some sense of obligation to the industry. Neither is true. I charge for my time. Not at the same rate as consulting, but the fee is real, and I expect it to be.
This matters for a specific reason. A teaching engagement where one side is not paying is a different kind of relationship. The skin-in-the-game dynamic changes when money is involved, on both sides. Students who have paid for a course show up differently. Institutions that are paying an external expert treat that expert’s time and content differently. The fee is not the motivation, but its presence keeps the engagement serious in ways that goodwill alone does not.
The indirect commercial return, in any case, dwarfs the teaching fee by a margin that is not close. The content, the network, the sharpened thinking, the market intelligence, the occasional direct business relationship that starts in a classroom: none of that shows up on an invoice, but all of it compounds.
It makes you better at running companies
The discipline of teaching, specifically the discipline of explaining complex things clearly to people who do not already know them, makes you a better communicator in every other context. Client presentations, team briefings, proposals, onboarding documents: all of them benefit from the same muscle that teaching builds. Clarity under questioning. Patience with unfamiliar starting points. The ability to find three different ways to explain the same idea until one of them lands.
It also keeps you intellectually honest in a way that running a business does not always demand. When you are the expert in the room at a client meeting, you can steer away from the uncomfortable questions. When you are the professor and a student asks why something works the way it does, you either know or you do not. That accountability keeps you from getting comfortable with your own assumptions.
And then there is what Tanatat (Win) posted
Three weeks. One student, with no prior experience with automation, was part of a team that just delivered a real system for a real company. Lead capture so no prospect falls through the cracks. Email nurturing built properly. A content generator. A CRM onboarding sequence. An analytics dashboard. End-to-end.
His own takeaways from the project: identify flaws before your client does; test before deploying because credibility is hard to rebuild; and automation is never truly done, you improve it constantly.
Those are not beginner observations. Those are the lessons that take most practitioners years of client work and painful billing conversations to internalise. He got there in three weeks because he built something real, under real conditions, for a real client, with a team that had to figure out how to make the pieces work together.
That is what teaching can produce when it is done well. Not familiarity with a tool. Not the ability to follow a tutorial. A change in how someone thinks about a whole domain of work.
I cannot always point to that outcome this clearly. Most of the time, the return on teaching is diffuse: sharper thinking here, a useful contact there, an idea for an article, a framework that improves a client proposal. Occasionally, a student posts something on LinkedIn three weeks after a course, and you see exactly what the work produced.
That is why I still make the time. And why I always will.
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