NZ Business Podcast - Paul Spain
00:42:27 · Jamie Beaton
[00:42:27] S0: Yeah. It's it's a really good question. So there's broadly two types of metrics. One is satisfaction. One is outcomes. Now one of our values at Crimson is student outcome obsessed, which basically speaks to the fact that ultimately, you know, you can make a child happy by giving them a doughnut, but what really, you know, matters is, you know, how the outcome's improving. And we strive to, you know, within a safe environment where they've got mentors, they've got mental health support, etcetera. But we we don't wanna make things easy because these are formative years where you wanna be growing academically. Sure. So a couple of metrics. First of all, Net Promoter Score, you know, easy one. So students and parents regularly, various key check ins through these NPS surveys, and they give us a sense of, you know, how the how the family is feeling. And there's benchmarks across the education industry within our particular subsector of the industry and the, you know, the broader satisfaction scores. That's one. Then there's the, you know, microfeedback after every lesson, which is kinda like the uber star rating, you know, one to five. And then that's often quite binary data with lots of fives and occasionally some zeros. And then that that is really useful data to collect and analyze as well. Then there are extra layers of data we look at. For example, if if you're my tutor and I'm your student, how regularly I book with you if I... If it's at my discretion is a really good indicator for engagement. Right? So those types of metrics. So that's some of the satisfaction metrics. Then on the outcomes, we do pretest diagnostics when people come on board around what schools we think they can get into based on their current stats, and also how they're currently looking in, for example, math and English. Then we can look at the, you know, the final outcomes. What do they get into? What schools do they get into? How did that sync to their, you know, potential when they first started? And then what value add is Crimson added, which I guess we call the alpha, which is a term from finance. So we look at those metrics at an individual per capita level, and then we look at this as an aggregate.
00:44:05 · Jamie Beaton, Paul Spain
So we've got company goals like how many students get into, you know, top x university, and then what percentage of kids get into one of their overall schools, things like that. And then, for example, within our school, we've got specific targets for, you what percentage of kids get certain grades, a a star, etcetera, what's their baseline improvement rates, things like this. So we're taking quite a systematic approach to this, which you don't really see in traditional schooling that much. [00:44:27] S1: Yeah. And then once you've got that data, how do you act on it? Right? You're looking in these, you know, whatever it might be, too many lower scores in one area or another, or, you know, do you track that back to the individual, you know, tutors and so on that are involved, and then, you know, that that plays out in in terms of, you know, the You bet. Yeah. Role within Crimson? How does
00:44:51 · Jamie Beaton
[00:44:51] S0: that look? Totally. So so we do a lot of filtering before we come onto the platform. Coming from the world's best schools, teachers from really great backgrounds. They go through a rigorous interview process, then a lot of training. So that screen... So, basically, the people on the platform generally are high quality. If we've got some bad apples and they get some bad reviews, we can, you know, I guess, boot them out pretty quickly. But generally speaking, we can use this data to inform things like pay reviews. We can use it to inform what students we match them to in the future. We can also use it to inform session cadence. So, you know, are kids performing better from twenty hours of this or forty hours? You know, should the student be in a one on one environment or a small group environment? How does that look? So we can make those tweaks. We can also optimize our student tutor ratios across different parts of the business, and sometimes that was also tweaked by geography based on some cultural expectations. So for example, funny story for you, when you run an event here in New Zealand about, you know, say, overseas study, we might, in a 100 person room, get sort of 70 kids, maybe 20 moms, 10 dads. In Korea, we get 99 moms and one dad, no kids. And, you know, over there, the expectation is really on mom to go ahead and do a lot of research and make these serious education choices. They basically go through the whole process, they let Johnny... Little Johnny know, okay. This is what we're doing. And then, as you can imagine, in those communities, the parents want intense updates on how things are going. And so we've gotta tweak some of our ratios and some of our offerings based on those expectations. Now we don't fully just do whatever the local market wants because we have a very specific philosophy as to what it takes for success, parent engagement levels, student engagement levels, what the the teacher should do. So we've got that Crimson quality with some of those customizations by geography. So that's kinda how we think about it, overall. And a lot of these things, particularly for online high school, come out of my research from Oxford.
00:46:30 · Jamie Beaton, Paul Spain
I spent the last three years doing a DPhil in online schooling on the Rhodes program, and my focus has been on what drives student satisfaction, student outcomes in online schooling, you know, doing things like randomized control trials, studies of literature, and so that informs, you know, some of these tweaks we're making in our school. We try and be as data driven as possible to ultimately help the student thrive. [00:46:49] S1: Yeah. I guess there's, you know, there's a huge amount of information that you you can draw Totally. And then it's working out [00:46:58] S0: What to [00:46:58] S1: do with it. What what to do with it and Yeah. And what are the things that that really matter the most. But it's certainly, you know, it's it's gotta help that there is plenty you can measure [00:47:08] S0: Yeah. And It is. [00:47:09] S1: You know, there are some pretty, you know, clear things that Outcomes. Are important for, I'm sure, most people that are that are working with you. That's good. Now looking looking at the the Crimson brand, how did that how did that name come about? How did Oh, the picture. And how did you decide, you know, what the, you know, Crimson, you know, picture needed to look like from a a brand perspective?
00:47:32 · Jamie Beaton
[00:47:32] S0: Oh, that's a great question. Yeah. Yeah. That's that's funny. Okay. So as far as the the name Crimson, I went to high school at Kings, and then I went to Harvard. You know, both... I guess, King's is more like maroon, and then Harvard's got the color of crimson. And many of our first mentors, you know, were all from Harvard. So there was obviously that connection. And then also, we really... We're looking into the connotations of words, which is like a Steve Walker, my old English teacher, you know, one of his favorite techniques. And Crimson's quite a bold, audacious color. And for lots of our students, you know, they're leaving these foreign countries, landing in America back in 2013, 2014 without much support, and then, you know, they're taking quite an audacious, you know, you know, not risk, but, you know, bet on their ability to thrive in this new geography. So I like the kind of boldness that comes with the color. It's quite distinctive. So that that was some of the things that flew into the, you know, Crimson. And then initially, we were called Crimson Consulting before we changed. I like the alliteration of the sea and the sea, although now at Crimson Education, which I like better. So, that was Crimson. And then the logo, first of all, design is not my strength and not the strength of either of my cofounders. So our first logos were a little bit funny, but we had this really talented fellow who came along called Byron He. He was our chief designer for several years, leading kind of architecture student here that went into technology user experience design. So he worked through the logo with us, and we set it on the sea, which is kind of tilted up with some books on it, which obviously reflect learning. And the tilting up reflects ambition, looking towards the future and what you can achieve. So that that kind of is where the logo came from and the name.
00:48:58 · Paul Spain
[00:48:58] S1: Cool. Now, you know, we talked before, you know, challenges. What challenge... What what other challenges can you sort of, you know, share with us from, you know, from your journey, from the story, and how have those things, you know, helped shape how you how you move forward? Because it's it's so often through the the pain points, you know, that that we really, yeah, that we really learn, and often that's, you know, the best learning to share with others. So, that, yeah, they don't have to go through the the same pain points. Right?