NZ Business Podcast - Paul Spain
00:01:59 · Jamie Beaton, Paul Spain
[00:01:59] S0: Absolutely fantastic. Great to be back. [00:02:01] S1: Yeah, really keen to catch up. It's been about just over five years since we last chatted. There's been a huge amount going on in that period. I think when we spoke last time, you you had a full time team of around 400 people. You mentioned that's grown to, what, 1,100 now? [00:02:17] S0: That's right. It's been a massive period of growth. And I think back when we spoke, we hadn't even launched our Crimson Global Academy at our online school, And building out all the schooling parts of Crimson in the last several years has been really exciting. But, now the team is really global, and The US is actually our biggest base of full time staff now. [00:02:32] S1: Right. So walk us through some of those areas of sort of growth and and and revenue. It'll help give listeners a bit of a bit of a picture on, you know, just how fast things have been moving.
00:02:43 · Jamie Beaton
[00:02:43] S0: Absolutely. So, of course, our adventure began in core college admissions, initially helping Kiwis going to The US. Then the next part of our strategy was to help more and more foreign kids coming into The US and UK. So we opened up in places like Russia, The UK, The Middle East, South Africa, Taiwan, and and we pursued the strategy of focusing on places where there wasn't much information about the college admissions process. So we began there. As our products evolved around 2017, 2018, we then went into more competitive markets like China, Korea, India. And then about eight years ago, we entered into The US market. Crimson built this really high performance training process for getting students into these schools across mentorship, online delivery, all this content. So we began first boots on the ground in in San Francisco and California. And then a major area of growth for us has been really building, you know, the nation's leading brand in America for college counseling, a bigger scale. We also acquired the third biggest player as well called Collegewise, which is a slightly different brand proposition to Crimson. And, you know, Crimson's focused on how do we take a student and really maximize their performance. Collegewise is very focused on applying to a broad range of US 100 schools and actually removing stress and pressure from the process. So that's really been a key evolution, the growth of our college missions. And then we've also launched this fully accredited online high school, Crimson Global Academy, now has nearly 3,000 students. And our recent online charter school, Aotearoa Infinite Academy, and even our first physical school here in New Zealand, the AGE School or the Academy for Gifted Education. So a lot of other different things happening to Revision Village or our Concord Visa unit. But I would really characterize the last five years as moving beyond our core to a whole variety of new adjacencies, new bits, and it's been really fun.
00:04:19 · Paul Spain, Jamie Beaton
[00:04:19] S1: Right. And in terms of revenue growth, what's that look like to the last four years? [00:04:25] S0: So in the last financial year, we exceeded 300,000,000 New Zealand dollars in in bookings, and, you know, that's up about four times over the last four years. So we've actually managed to sustain really rapid growth over the last period of time. Last year, for example, our North American operations grew a 150% year over year. So that was a really big breakout year, and that actually took America to being Crimson's largest market, which is exciting because it's also probably the deepest market alongside perhaps China and India as far as spend and investment in education services. [00:04:53] S1: Right. Now, last time last time we spoke, India was you'd kind of figured out India probably, you know, wasn't a useful market for you at that point. Is that still the case, or has that changed?
00:04:53 · Paul Spain, Jamie Beaton
[00:04:53] S1: Right. Now, last time last time we spoke, India was you'd kind of figured out India probably, you know, wasn't a useful market for you at that point. Is that still the case, or has that changed? [00:05:04] S0: It's actually funny. So back when we spoke, we'd gone into India, and it was very difficult. It was almost like a needle in the haystack. Because while there's more than a billion people, the share of families that are excited to send their kids abroad to The US for undergrad and pay for that process is fairly low. At that time, we're talking about less than 50,000 people out of a country for billion. What's happened in the last six years is India's gone through a pretty massive economic growth wave, have seen a lot of growth and willingness to spend and also desire to go to some of these different countries for education. And so Crimson actually relaunched in India about four... About... Probably just after I spoke to you, actually, about five years ago, led by a talented guy called Kanal who used to run the College Board, which administers the SAT in India. So he joined our team, and we've been able to now make India a a top six global market for Crimson, one of our fastest growing markets too. And that's an interesting example of how quickly some of these big markets can can shift. India still has a lot of unique dynamics where only a small portion of the country can afford to pay for, you know, US college tuition, but there's also been a huge growth in financial aid. And so more of those talented applicants from rural parts of the country can apply.
00:06:09 · Paul Spain
[00:06:09] S1: You know, you've shared in the past around, you know, chance meetings with people and, you know, new information comes in, and you make a quick change and you go for it. How did that play out in India from, you know, us chatting and just like, oh, yeah, India, you know, that's that's probably not... You know, it doesn't make sense for us at the moment, and now it's it's, you know, one of your one of your big markets.
00:06:33 · Jamie Beaton
[00:06:33] S0: Yeah. It's a classic example of this iteration process where I first hired a fantastic guy, but he was a Indian American from Michigan. And, you know, I naively thought, okay, he's got a lot of cultural connectivity back to India. A lot of his relatives are in India. So he and I thought we'll be able to figure it out. When he got on the ground in India, we quickly realized that actually that local connectivity is so critical, knowing how to get into the schools, knowing how to find the different parent communities, building that network out. So, you know, we tried, you know, we just weren't weren't getting that product cut through, and so we we got out of there. I think what changed is a couple of things. First of all, the market got more savvy when it came to college missions, and there was more willingness to pay for a high quality service. But also, the right leader came along. We found someone who had spent the last ten years of their career leading a college board and also a Coursera in India. And so he had taken a foreign company into India successfully. We thought he was, you know, good local knowledge, and he had a pretty clear game plan and actually sought us out and said, hey. I wanna expand Crimson to India. So, actually, we had a bit of an exec team discussion about this. And given we'd all burnt our fingers off in India the last time, there wasn't much appetite for it. But, you know, a couple of us said, hey. Let's do it. And, you know, we we sent in our man, Kanal, and we've been able to build now a great practice. The interesting thing about many of these markets, not just in Crimson, but in general, is that they can evolve in three or four years quite dramatically. And your go to market strategies, you know, with one team, it can be a total disaster. And in another team with different approach can be very successful, which is why entrepreneurship is messy and fun.