00:10:35 · Jamie Beaton
And we saw in the student the potential to really take a lot of extra subjects, get into these crazy universities. We saw that he had a lot of untapped math skill, and so we recommended him this pretty ridiculous high school course load, six extra a levels, which is like almost triple a regular course load because he had his full school NCEA and all his subjects on top. Now he used probably 20 different tutors, teaching him all these different subjects online over the course of two years to learn all these subjects. And seeing this, I realized actually there are a lot of kids sitting in traditional high schools that have untapped potential, that are kind of wasting time, and they could be doing more, they could be going deeper, etcetera. Then at Stanford, I came across the Stanford Online High School, which was a school that Elon Musk had a child in, and I started studying it actually. And I I was very fascinated. 800 kids in the school, all online. I'd never seen an online high school before. I saw this concept, and I thought, actually, our Kiwi kids and Crimson kids around the could really benefit from this. So that led us to launch Crimson Global Academy. So that was internally built because the philosophy was very core to our ideology at Crimson. It had the same core capabilities of online delivery, teacher recruitment, quality control, content development. Revision Village, it was a brand new thing. E commerce, lower price point, asynchronous delivery, a lot of things that meant it wasn't in our wheelhouse. We'd actually tried things like that before and we'd failed. And so I thought buying it was a much safer play, and then we could actually invest more in it, and we've done a lot with it post acquisition. But, yeah, at Crimson, we're very open to buying or building, and we are pretty adaptable. But the closer it is to our core college admissions wheelhouse, we usually build that internally.
00:12:05 · David Booth
[00:12:05] S0: Yeah. I've got a sort of a visual image of a a funnel here, I suppose. And the the... As you say, so the closer something is to the core of the admissions business, the more likely it's be something exists in your core customer journey that you're gonna build internally, the more sort of a a content asset in this case or like, the the... I love the framing of the the low cost accessible revision support. There are so many threads I wanna pull here, but gonna stick on the business piece of it. When you think about the the moving pieces today of Crimson to reflect on, you've you've sort of walked us through the external experience in the... Of the journey. Internally, you have five, 600 people now across the board, across... Around the world. How do you think about the leadership of of these, you know, teams and setting each up internally for success? Are you are you founder mode in the weeds every day, or are you, yeah, hiring good people or handing off into the divisions and sort of to leading them for... From more of a distance?
00:12:59 · Jamie Beaton
[00:12:59] S1: It's a great question. First of all, I should say when I saw that founder mode thing go viral, I felt some sort of great relief. I, yeah, I saw this and I thought, okay. I really resonate with this because I think for Crimson, I usually snap between delegation, hiring, you know, empowering a leader. When there's a problem, going, like, really deep into it, talking to students, talking to customers, talking to parents, you know, going down to the most junior staff. And so I think at Crimson, I like to make sure that I'm never, like, flying in the sky, but also I'm not, you know, so in the weeds that I'm missing strategy. So to answer your question, these days at Crimson, we've got 800 full time staff. We've got CEOs of most of our key business units. We've got a leader for our college admissions business, our online high school, Revision Village, Number Works. And so what this means that I can actually spend a lot of time helping them, you know, thrive in their role and also looking at what comes next, and then, you know, double clicking on to what units need more help to hit hit the next growth milestone. So I would say it's evolved. For the probably the first five to six years of Crimson, I was deep in the college admissions founder mode on every aspect of the business, opening up the markets myself, flying around the world doing nothing but college admissions. These days, I probably spend my time across the whole group a bit more, and I'm thinking about what comes next and, you know, capital allocation.
00:14:12 · David Booth
[00:14:12] S0: Mhmm. That makes a lot of sense. And then some of them, there'll be more sort of expansion opportunities and new market growth and things going on as well. When you say online high school, and I I think it's fascinating. It's an area that I and I think many parents have followed very closely for the the past three or four or five years. Anybody who tried to parent during the the pandemic for a start saw that, you know, online education was clearly the future. I I built a big online education business during the same the same era, and then it seems like now everything is kind of pivoting back in person. And a lot of the... A lot of people are realizing that the going, you know, over the top or all in on virtual only or, you know, missing opportunities to build in person relationships and to sort of experience schooling early. I suppose in high school, it's it's a little bit better, a little bit further down the journey, and also your CGA students are getting a bit of bit of both. Right? But I'd be really curious how you see, like, the geographic nature of that business evolving and, yeah, how many of the nodes will be in New Zealand versus The US versus where else around the world?
00:15:10 · Jamie Beaton
[00:15:10] S1: Great question. So just this weekend, on Sunday, had a great event here in Manhattan with hundreds of parents coming out, Crimson parents. And actually, one of my students surprised me. Her name was Jade Skeets, and she was an early student from Crimson Global Academy, grew up in Keri Keri. She used our school initially part time. She was at Keri Keri High, an NCA school. She was finding it pretty slow. She hopped into our school part time, found that pretty exciting, and then she moved full time for three years. She got into Princeton. She got into Columbia for computer science. So now she's a freshman at Princeton. For students like Jade, the full time online works really well. But I would say she's very self motivated, there were certain things that she really wanted to get out of high school. For 70% of our learners, it's part time. So they go to a physical high school. They use our school alongside it to take more advanced math, more challenging law, subjects they couldn't take, curriculum that they can't access through their high school. So a lot of the time, it's about, you know, supplementing and enabling that physical environment to be even stronger and actually giving students the academic challenge they're craving from that physical school. Even for our full time students, there's lots of social meetups and events and extracurriculars, and they're spending a lot of their time doing sports, community meetups in different cities around the world. But I would say, you know, everyone needs intense physical interaction regardless of what your learning mode is. Mhmm. And I definitely find this... And even in the degrees that I've done, the purely online ones, I just feel far less of a connection Yeah. Than, you know, the Stanford MBA experience or something deeply in person.
00:16:29 · David Booth
[00:16:29] S0: There's something you say that that's possibly the most important bit of it all, which is the self motivation. And if somebody is motivated to learn a subject, they're curious to pursue it themselves, then the world is their oyster. If they're not, then it doesn't matter what, you know, prestige, you know, institution you're part of. How how does somebody get self motivated? What have you seen that really lights the fire under people to to drive them like that, or do they have to come into Crimson with that ambition prepackaged? So I would