NZ Business Podcast - Paul Spain
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?
00:49:25 · Jamie Beaton
[00:49:25] S0: Yeah. Yeah. Totally. That's a great great one. I guess I can think of two pain points. The first pain point is that, you know, for many years of Crimson, my cofounders and I were going through university while building this. Right? And so we had more constraints than probably the traditional, you know, entrepreneur has. So Feng Zhou was at Canberra University in Australia. He had to hop on a bus every week, go to Sydney, be in the office, go back for, you know, for some compulsory classes. You know, I was at Harvard having regularly traveled for this. China was at University of Auckland, you know, really engaged there as well. So what that meant is that our ability to travel for significant parts of the year was constrained, and also we were all in different countries. Now that made it challenging from a, you know, traditional kind of culture boarding perspective, right, for our staff in a certain geography because they would say never meet Fengzhou for a long period of time or see me, you know, four times a year. But what it drove us to do was to, you know, really articulate our culture well and articulate what made Crimson Crimson. And ultimately, being good at remote work made us more scalable, which really helped as we kind of opened all these foreign operations. So I think the constraint initially around, you know, ability to build culture, ability to, you know, know what everybody was doing drove us to, for example, have a really focused culture on KPIs. You know, you don't need to watch somebody and know they're in the office if, you know, they've got clear metrics of success, which they're held accountable to rewarded for, you know, after every three months, things like this. So that was one key learning. Think some of the pain that came from those, you know, I guess, balancing acts and then what drove Crimson to to come. Probably another one would be would be around media. So Crimson's always had pretty strong media coverage around the world because we have these students, like, say, Samil Singh, grows up in Hamilton, went to Hamilton boys, we help him with, you know, AP computer science, some a levels, got into Harvard, many other Ivy League schools, got over to Harvard, and then got into Y Combinator, the top, you know, business accelerator. Now he's, you know, in Silicon Valley cranking.