You Get Found Out When You Wing It: Sifu Edward & Sifu Julliana Armstrong Sit Down With Charles T. Harper

You Get Found Out When You Wing It: Sifu Edward & Sifu Julliana Armstrong Sit Down With Charles T. Harper

Adapted from the recorded conversation; the guest's words are verbatim. The questions are reconstructed and voiced by Sifu Edward and Sifu Julliana Armstrong.

🎥 Video podcast coming soon. The complete interview will play here once published. The full conversation is transcribed below, and the audio edition will be available on sifuarmstrong.tv.

In a new Sifu Armstrong interview, the former commercial banker turned instructional-design expert explains why he refuses to record a single training video until he’s fully saturated in the subject.

Charles T. Harper didn’t start out building rebrandable training content. He and his wife were teaching at a boarding school, finishing a doctoral program in instructional technology, when the job ended and they had to make something else work. “We took what little severance we had and got involved in internet marketing,” he told Sifu Edward and Sifu Julliana Armstrong, a survival move that eventually became GainMindshare and The PLR Show, a business built entirely around teaching other people to teach.

Harper’s advice for anyone building something similar comes down to two words he’s carried since 2009. “You have to be prolific and you’ve got to be consistent,” he said. “That’s how you start, and when things start to decline, that’s what you go back to.” He’s specific about what that looks like in practice: the same training, the same podcast, the same blog post, at the same time every week, done “rain or shine,” whether or not the moment feels inspired.

What sets Harper’s process apart is how seriously he takes preparation before he ever hits record. Researching a new subject can take him a full month; the actual recording only seven to ten days. He won’t shortcut that immersion, because the gap is obvious to anyone watching. “You get found out real quick when you’re just winging it,” he said, a line that Sifu Julliana Armstrong recognized instantly from her own world, where a real practitioner can tell in a single technique whether someone has genuinely absorbed a form or is only imitating its surface.

The conversation’s quieter turn came when Harper described what all of this consistency is actually for. Having spent years giving his expertise away to boarding-school kids he still cares about, he’s now building a business specifically so he can afford to keep doing exactly that kind of giving. “To be a blessing to society, you have to create both income margin and time margin,” he said. The point was never simply to earn more, but to buy back the space to serve the causes and people his heart is actually set on.

Harper’s whole method resists the shortcut culture that surrounds so much of online business. Show up consistently, whether or not you feel like it. Refuse to teach anything you haven’t fully absorbed yourself. And treat the resulting freedom not as a finish line, but as capacity to give more of it away. It’s a standard that translates directly onto any mat: mastery is never granted to the person chasing the fastest path. It belongs to the one who puts in the unglamorous, repeated reps until the thing being taught is finally, honestly theirs to pass on.

In This Conversation

  • From boarding-school firing to building GainMindshare out of pure necessity
  • “Be prolific and be consistent,” showing up rain or shine since 2009
  • Why a month of research precedes every ten days of recording
  • “You get found out real quick when you’re just winging it”
  • Building margin to give more time to family, church, and causes he cares about
  • Where to find Charles T. Harper and The PLR Show

The Full Conversation

Sifu Edward Armstrong: Charles T. Harper is a former commercial banker with a doctorate's worth of training in instructional design (the science of how to actually teach something), and he's spent over a decade building rebrandable training content through The PLR Show. This series itself is a reconstruction of content, so we have a soft spot for a master of the craft. And he gave us two lines every instructor needs: be prolific and consistent, and don't ever wing it, because you get found out.

Sifu Julliana Armstrong: And what I love is how he prepares to teach. He immerses himself in a subject until he's saturated, and only then records, extemporaneously, as if you were sitting right in front of him. No reading, no script. That's exactly how a Sifu teaches a form: you can only transmit what you've fully absorbed into your body. He's describing mastery-before-teaching in marketing language, and I couldn't wait to talk to him.

Our guest is Charles T. Harper, founder of GainMindshare and The PLR Show. Charles, welcome.

Charles T. Harper: Hi.

Sifu Edward Armstrong: Take us to the beginning, because you didn't start in marketing at all.

Charles T. Harper: I really started in 2007. My wife and I were working at a boarding school, and we'd just finished a doctoral program in instructional technology, everything except the dissertation. We started our first blog around 2006 and just dove in. It was all intuitive; we just liked it, more of a hobby, but it was part of our educational process. We were teaching people how to use technology, and that's where we got immersed. Then, around 2008, we were in the process of getting fired from the boarding school. We'd been there 13 years, thought we'd retire there, but they wanted us more involved and we had nothing left to give. So we took what little severance we had and got involved in internet marketing. We had to make it work. That's where GainMindshare came from. I thought it was a clever name, but really it was just: I'll do just about anything involving internet business to make this work.

Sifu Edward Armstrong: And the first thing that actually paid the bills was writing, but the breakthrough was something else.

Charles T. Harper: I knew I could write, and my wife was good at proofreading, so we got people to pay us to write. We were nowhere near rich, but it paid bills, survival mode. We wrote books for multilevel marketers who had money but couldn't write; I came up through commercial banking, so I understood business well enough to write from anyone's perspective. I just pitched it to someone we knew and he said, "Can you really do this?" And we did. Now, there were at least two instances where we did the work and never got paid, and that pushed us toward working with other marketers. But the real breakthrough came back to training. I was running the technical side of another marketer's membership, training the members on the technical aspects, how to create content, how to use the platform. The breakthrough wasn't income; it was realizing that people wanted what we had and we could deliver it. Around 2011, that was the genesis of creating content other people could use.

Sifu Edward Armstrong: That became The PLR Show. Explain what it does, and the gap it fills.

Charles T. Harper: We create over-the-shoulder technical and internet-marketing videos for people who want video content: whether to use in a membership, create their own product, or just learn. So we did a set of 20 videos on the Anchor.fm platform, for example. There are two groups: people who want to teach their customers how to use a platform, and people who just want to learn it themselves. And what we're really using is all the training we learned in that doctoral program, how to create a course that flows and makes sense. What we do is fill a gap: inside any product, a creator explaining strategy will say, "I don't have time to teach you WordPress, go get a WordPress site." There are lots of little technical processes like that they don't have time to explain. We fill that in, so their customer actually knows how to execute. And I recommend people don't revoice our content unless they're positioning themselves as a technical educator. In general, focus on connecting with your customer at the strategy level, and use our content as infrastructure, because strategy is what people remember you for, not the step-by-step processes. It's always changing, too. Right now I'm relearning Shopify because the interface changed; we just redid MailChimp this year. Everything constantly changes, and we've got to keep up.

Sifu Julliana Armstrong: Your advice for success is two words, and they're a fighter's two words. Tell me.

Charles T. Harper: When it comes to information marketing, you have to be prolific and you've got to be consistent. That's how you start, and when things start to decline, that's what you go back to. It's the one thing I heard back in 2009 that has stuck with me, if things aren't going the way I like, the question is, how can I be more consistent? Whether it's a launch, training, or email, being consistent and prolific, generating activity, tends to bring you up when you need to go up. And if I were starting over, I'd establish something on a regular basis and do it rain or shine: a podcast, a training, a blog post, at the same time every week, every time. You look at my YouTube channel and see that on Tuesdays and Saturdays I did a training, and I only recently returned to that this year, because I understand what it means to the people who buy our content and the people who want to. It builds trust. So it's content, consistent, and continuity, do it regardless, every single week.

Sifu Julliana Armstrong: "Be prolific and be consistent" and "do it rain or shine." That is the entire training life in a sentence. Nobody gets a black belt from the sessions they felt like showing up for. The magic isn't in the perfect workout; it's in the unbroken chain of ordinary ones, done on the tired days and the rainy days and the uninspired days. Consistency compounds into mastery the way nothing else does, and it builds the one thing you can't fake: the trust of people who've watched you show up, again and again, when you didn't have to.

Sifu Julliana Armstrong: And you prepare to teach in a way that's pure mastery. Walk me through it.

Charles T. Harper: I'm always researching. If you think about the research process, it could take a month for me to immerse myself in a subject, but the actual recording takes about seven to ten days. My process is that I have to be saturated in the subject before I can approach the videos. If I'm saturated, I can sit down and do it extemporaneously. I'm not narrating, I'm not reading, I'm explaining it to someone on-screen as if they were sitting in front of me. I can't do that unless I'm immersed in the subject matter. With Shopify, I've got to take in everything before I can sit down. And you can't shortcut it, if I'm just going to the menus and picking stuff out, it's evident. It doesn't make a good experience for the customer, or the customer's customer. You get found out real quick when you're just winging it.

Sifu Julliana Armstrong: "You get found out real quick when you're winging it." On the mat, it's one movement. A real practitioner can tell in a single technique whether you own it or you're faking it. You cannot transmit what you have not absorbed. That's why we don't rush people into teaching: you have to drill a form into your own body until it's saturated, unconscious, yours, before you can ever pass it to a student. Charles takes a month to get saturated before he'll record ten days of video. That's the respect the craft demands, and the student can always feel the difference between someone who knows and someone who's reading the menu.

Sifu Julliana Armstrong: You've said the whole point, now, is to create margin. What does that mean to you?

Charles T. Harper: It has changed me. I've gone from survival mode to looking at this as a way to create margin in my life, not that I'm not looking to earn, but I'm looking at it now as a way to create more time with my wife and to do things I really wanted to do. Early in our lives we gave a lot of our time to the boarding school. We gave our expertise away. But our hearts are still with those kids who came to us as house parents; we believe in education for teenagers. And to be a blessing to society, you have to create both income margin and time margin. So what's changed is I now know that if I run the business right, I can create margin and give myself to my church, to those causes, to people. Our kids have moved on to college and grad school (we're becoming empty nesters), and I've got the head space now. I don't love the word "legacy," it's overused, but the concept is there. I want to give myself and my wife to the things we care about.

Sifu Julliana Armstrong: "Create margin so I can give myself to the things I care about." That's the whole reason to build anything. Money and skill aren't the destination. They're what buy you the freedom and the time to serve. You gave your expertise away for years to those boarding-school kids because your heart was in it, and now you're building a business specifically so you can afford to do more of that. That's a warrior who's clear on what the fight is actually for.

Sifu Edward Armstrong: Charles, this has been genuinely valuable. Where do people find you?

Charles T. Harper: It's The PLR Show (theplrshow.com), where we keep all our present projects, with a free download at the PLR Show Academy that puts you on our daily newsletter. And our YouTube channel, youtube.com/gainmindshare. We're doing something almost every day: an interview, a game plan, a training.

Sifu Edward Armstrong: Charles, thank you so much for your time. We wish you all the best.

Charles T. Harper: Thank you. Bye-bye, everybody.

Sifu Julliana's closing word: Charles handed us two truths that are as much about the mat as the market. Be prolific and consistent (show up rain or shine), because mastery is the unbroken chain of ordinary days, not the perfect one. And you cannot transmit what you have not absorbed: he immerses himself for a month before he'll teach for ten days, because you get found out the instant you wing it. Then he builds margin not to get rich, but to give himself to the things he loves. That's the whole point.

Sifu Edward's closing word: Charles is a trained teacher who understands that the strategy is what people remember, and the discipline of showing up is what earns their trust. Be saturated before you teach. Show up when you don't feel like it. And build your capability into margin, the freedom and time to serve the people and causes your heart is set on. Consistency compounds, mastery precedes transmission, and the whole thing is for something larger than money. We don't entertain warriors. We create them.

Charles T. Harper, former commercial banker, founder of GainMindshare and The PLR Show (theplrshow.com); creator of rebrandable technical and marketing training. YouTube: youtube.com/gainmindshare.

ILLUSTRATIVE RESULTS. Any revenue, enrollment, margin or retention figure in this conversation is either a documented result from one of our own operations, a figure the guest reports about their own business, or an illustrative example, never a projection of your results.

Nothing here is financial, legal or tax advice.

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