NZ Business Podcast - Paul Spain
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.
00:08:00 · Paul Spain
[00:08:00] S1: That's interesting, you know, that you were approached on on, you know, on that occasion. Have you had many of those situations arise where, you know, great great talent has come knocking knocking on your door and you you weren't, you know, may... Maybe aware of the the individual or the opportunity?
00:08:17 · Jamie Beaton
[00:08:17] S0: Totally. I mean, I'll tell you a a funny one. I was actually visiting a campus called Yale in US in Singapore, and I was meeting a Kiwi guy that I knew in high school called Andy Chen. This is back when I was 19. And I was in this cafeteria with him, and he... And we're talking about Crimson and what he was up to. And he looked across the room and he said, hey. That guy over there, Andrew, he's actually one of the best in entrepreneurship I've come across. He loves computer science. You go chat with him. So I went and had a a chat with him, and turns out Andrew was half Russian, half American. And, you know, we were thinking about different markets. And then, you know, he began to ask, well, what do you think about Russia? And he described some of the dynamics in Russia at the time. And, you know, I thought, actually, this could be very, very compelling. And so Andrew took a gap year from Yale in US, went to Russia, and began building the market out. And, actually, Russia, for a part of Crimson's early days, was our fourth biggest market. And then Andrew, super talented guy, he ended up becoming our chief revenue officer, and he built Crimson through an enormous wave of growth. You know, really interesting. And, you know, we found him when he was kind of 19 in college, and seeing that growth trajectory is, you know, is very inspiring. To answer your question, we've had a lot of opportunities of folks come to us, but we're always also reaching out, finding new people, you know, thinking of new, you know, new people that could fit in a certain area. Great example is Kevin Park, you know, legendary Kiwi entrepreneur. He helped us take Crimson Global, and he also helped us launch Crimson Global Academy. And then we thought, actually, Concord Visa in the immigration space could be really interesting for him as well, and he's just, you know, hit the ground running, and that business has grown really well.
00:09:44 · Paul Spain, Jamie Beaton, Paul Spain
[00:09:44] S1: Great. Tell us about some of these new things. Maybe start with over this period that sort of, you know, stands out. [00:09:50] S0: We acquired a business called Revision Village, which is the leading provider of international baccalaureate study resources. So if you're a student at Kristin or you're a student, for example, you know, St. Cuthbert's, and you wanna boost your score on the IB, our platform is the most popular for helping you study for those exams. We initially bought this when it was just a math product, and then we expanded it to all the key IB subjects. And then the leader is called Tim Vaughan. Tim used to be one on the exec team and one of the founding hires at Education Perfect, which sold to KKR. And then he joined as CEO of Revision Village. Now over the last several years, I think two and a half, we've taken that from being in zero schools to more than 430 of key IB schools around the world. And so we love Revision Village because it's a really good bang for buck for the students. Revision Village has been a major new part of Crimson and our first major b to b software division of the business. [00:10:40] S1: Yeah. Great. So maybe you [00:10:43] S2: can walk us through a little bit of the [00:10:44] S1: sort of history on the acquisition front because that's not the the only acquisition that you've done. This seems to have been, you know, actually a really important part of the journey so far.
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.