NZ Business Podcast - Paul Spain
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.
00:51:11 · Jamie Beaton
Stories like that that are so inspirational, six years going from Hamilton to Silicon Valley, that really, you know, fascinates people and I think inspires many students, which we're really happy with. But because of Crimson's fast growth, we also, you know, attract, you know, very fair, reasonable, you know, scrutiny from all these different participants. And so I remember, for example, early on, I I acquired this company, and it was, you know, for a tiny amount, and we were going through this court process. And one one of my legal team advised that we file for a suppression order. So, basically, the the court dispute, you know, just, I guess, is handled within the vicinity of the court Yeah. So there isn't media scrutiny. That sounded like a smart idea. And then I I learned what I I refer to as the Streisand effect. So what this is is Barbra Streisand had this house in, I think, Los Angeles, and she was a very private person. She didn't want, you know, her house everywhere. So this journalist took a photo of it, put it online, and she was very annoyed by this. So she basically filed to, you know, restrain that. And then because of that, there was all this coverage of her, you know, filing the claim, and so the photo of a house just went everywhere on the Internet, and you can find it easily today. Yep. So the Streisand effect is this phenomenon online where if you, you know, try and cover something in the Internet up, you know, it will just become more viral. And so I guess a key learning from that is, you know, it pays to just be, you know, open and authentic and and transparent with things, particularly if that, you know, not a big deal, and that makes it a lot easier. So that's been a really guiding principle for us in in recent times. I guess it's, you know, an important one for young entrepreneurs to know that it's actually totally fine for organizations to cover, you know, your ups and downs, challenges, etcetera. People are really, you know, open to, you know, respect the fact that it's, you know, not always good and easy, and there's sometimes disputes and challenges. So that'll that'll be an interesting learning I had, the Streisand effect.
00:52:49 · Paul Spain
[00:52:49] S1: Yeah. Yeah. That's that's fascinating. And the, you know, the reality is that, you know, every individual, every organization will have its ups ups and downs. You talked about transparency there. How much transparency do you have within the business in terms of, you know, what you share and and don't share with, you know, with your team? That seems to... There seems to be quite a lot of variation from, know, and and, obviously, you know, where you've got sort of publicly listed companies, you know, that's quite different from a reporting, you know, perspective to to private companies. Totally. You know, you've got a number of investors. There's obviously, you know, data and so on that you have to share there. But, you know, what do you what do you share in terms of objectives and and key results sort of company wide and Yeah. And and so on? What does that look like?
00:53:37 · Jamie Beaton
[00:53:37] S0: So within our team, we really believe that empowering the team to be entrepreneurs and to help build the next frontier of Crimson requires them to have a lot of visibility into what's happening so they can make good decisions, and they've got the context that we have. Because two people with different contexts can think radically different things about the same scenario. So we have a a monthly all hands call, and we have, you know, very clear company KPIs for every year and actually every half. Everything from student outcome goals to revenue metrics to cash flow targets, etcetera, that, you know, are quite transparent with, you know, all the various aspects. We then do some work to kind of explain different financial metrics so people that aren't familiar with finance can, you know, determine kind of what this means and the implications it has, and then we all rally towards those goals. So in the early days, I'd say the idea of sharing some of these goals to me seemed kinda counterintuitive, like people didn't need to know this, you know, and so I was much more guarded with it. But then now, you know, it's wonderful. You know, we share our employee engagement statistics. We, you know, share our revenue share, all the different goals, share all of our student success, which, you know, everybody's really excited about. So that would be my, you know, approach now. You've gotta be a bit careful because sometimes, know, those statistics, you know, you want them to be empowered within your team, but then you don't want, for example, your competitors to have all your different goals right. So there's a bit of a balance, but, you know, we trust the team, so we, you know, share that openly within the all hands formats, etcetera. And I think, generally, as you get bigger and bigger, you kinda have to do that. So there's a limit to how much kinda guarding you can do, particularly if you aspire to, you know, be a company of scale and significance.