NZ Business Podcast - Paul Spain
00:10:55 · Jamie Beaton
[00:10:55] S0: Totally. Now, if I was to characterize my acquisition strategy at this point, it's really a a learning strategy. What we what we do is we find new verticals that we don't know enough about ourselves. Take Revision Village. It was a self serving IB platform that was being used by students in the IB at a certain price point that was quite different to Crimson. And we had a theory that if we acquired the business, we'd learn enough about the space to be able to really expand and grow this thing. And so we generally like this kind of buy and build thesis where we find something that is compelling as a standalone. We've got a good strategy of how we grow that. So that was the case with Revision Village. Another recent one would be Collegewise, which is the third biggest college counseling firm in The US. We were able to take our Crimson technology platform, put that into the Collegewise business, add a whole new range of enrichment products. So a family, for example, in Irvine, California, can benefit from our research training, different honors training, competitions, academic tutoring, and really enhance their performance. So that's another good example too. We also like to do lot of acqui hires as well. We recently acqui hired a team who runs sciencefair.io. They are America's best training for science fair competitions. So this will sound a bit funny, I guess, because we don't really have such a big culture for this New Zealand. But in America, there are massive science competitions where tens of thousands of kids are competing through these projects, and it's backed by companies like Jane Street, Top Hedge Funds, Regeneron, used to be Intel. And so students will often spend one or two years developing these projects. And so what we we developed now with this acquihire is a training program to help students with enhancing their skills for the science fair competitions, which in turn helps them get into top universities. So that's another example of of a recent acquisition. So we are very flexible. We're actually bidding on a really exciting thing right now, but I I won't jinx it, and then some other other things in the pipeline. But definitely, as you said, it's been a core part of the strategy, but it's worth noting that the the huge majority of Crimson's growth has come from the organic growth of our launched businesses.
00:12:50 · Jamie Beaton, Paul Spain
So although we do a lot of acquisitions, it doesn't it doesn't tend to be a huge share of our revenue relative to just the organic build out of Crimson Education's core college admissions business. [00:13:01] S1: And Number Works, that one's, you know, quite some time back. Tell us a little bit about, you know, that, how that how that's gone, and how that sort of fits into the overall picture.
00:13:01 · Paul Spain, Jamie Beaton
[00:13:01] S1: And Number Works, that one's, you know, quite some time back. Tell us a little bit about, you know, that, how that how that's gone, and how that sort of fits into the overall picture. [00:13:09] S0: Totally. Well, first of all, I'm eternally grateful for Numberworks. I I went along when I was, I think, 3.5 with my Numberworks coach, Lloyd. Mom would take me out there, and when I finished my Numberworks math and English, I'd go get a doughnut afterwards and some Papa Jack's, so that was good fun. And that was really one of the things that sparked my initial passion for math and English. So when the Numberworks team was interested in a partner to help them grow the business, we thought it was a great opportunity for us. And Numberworks caters to five to 14 year olds, and it's actually quite a world leader when it comes to using computer learning where students have typically one teacher supervising three or four students, and the results are really fantastic and has been for now going on nearly forty years. So we've seen Numberworks grow fantastic, really well under the Crimson banner, and they've got great traction in Australia, and they've got really a lot of popularity in places like Sydney and Melbourne, and then it's continued to do very well in New Zealand. So very proud of the Numberworks team. They've also rebuilt the platform and, you know, incorporated a whole variety of new tools and student experiences. So it's been fantastic, and it's been nearly ten years under Crimson now.
00:14:12 · Paul Spain
[00:14:12] S1: Yeah. Fantastic. Now, you've talked about The US market being your number one market now, and that's your biggest base. Walk us through that journey because it's not necessarily a predictable journey when you when you get into The US market. Right? And, yeah, it it can it can be pretty brutal too.
00:14:34 · Jamie Beaton
[00:14:34] S0: 100%. And, you know, it's funny. Last year, was teaching a class at the University of Auckland with my co founder, Feng Zhou, and we studied many of New Zealand's unicorn companies. And the recurring pattern in these companies, whether it be, you know, businesses like Halter or Rocket Lab or Pushpay, Xero, etcetera, is they typically have had to get, you know, quite massive US traction. And I think the thing about The US market is when you crack into it, there's high willingness to pay. It's a big market. And each state's almost like its own country, so there's a lot of depth there. But, of course, it requires a lot of, you know, nuance to adjust your go to market, your product to make it work. In our case, the good thing about what we have already built before we entered America is we built this training engine to get a 14 year old who's somewhat ambitious, make them really ambitious, help them find where they wanna go in their future, build all their core skills, and then get them into these top schools. And the same passion that a Singaporean mom has to get their child into Yale is very similar to an Upper East Side mom trying get their kid into Columbia. And so when we rolled into America, you know, we focused on some of the key states that have, you know, pretty fantastic universities. California's got schools like Stanford and UC Berkeley. You know, the East Coast got all the Ivy League schools. And so we focused on a couple of key states and used our city launcher model, began to get traction on the ground. We did all kinds of things from live event. Like, example, this summer, I'm doing about 30 live events across North America. I just came from one on Friday in Silicon Valley. There was 300 moms that turned up and dads, and they were pumped to hear about how to get into Stanford. We just had about 6% of the world's Stanford emits in the early round through Crimson. And so the families are really curious about that process. And as you can imagine, Silicon Valley families are very tech savvy, so they like Crimson's data driven, technology first approach to college admissions, and it really matches their intensity in terms of the ambitions they have for their child as well.
00:16:21 · Jamie Beaton, Paul Spain
So I think, overall, when we first entered America, The US market wasn't yet so focused on these really competitive colleges as as a primary goal for all of these families, but it's evolved now where that's really nationwide. And so we're able to get early traction in New York and California that really snowballed, and then we took that to more places like Chicago, Texas, etcetera, Florida, and we've really kept that growing. And then we're we're actually been quite fortunate to get some good, you know, marketing coverage in The US in places like The Wall Street Journal or Fox or, you know, CNBC and stuff. And that's helped to build Crimson as sort of the national brand for college admissions. But it all began, you know, I think our first thing was a... We had an ice cream social with about 20 kids in Palo Alto, California. You've gotta start somewhere. [00:17:03] S1: Yeah. Oh, that's that's good. And how how has your relationship sort of developed with the the universities them... Themselves?