Paul Spain:
Greetings. I’m your host, Paul Spain, futurist and chief executive at Gorilla Technology. I love seeing individuals and their organizations thrive. The New Zealand Business Podcast is all about this through sharing the business, leadership and innovation learnings of our most incredible leaders. In this episode, we are replaying an interview from late 2020 with Jamie Beaton, co founder and chief executive of Crimson Education. Jamie shares his remarkable journey from his early years and academic achievements through to the bold vision that led to the creation of Crimson Education, a global education powerhouse. Discover how a passion for learning, early family influences and seizing unexpected opportunities led to the creation of Crimson, a company now supporting thousands of students around the world to win placements in at the world’s most esteemed universities.

Paul Spain:
Jamie shares insights into scaling a business internationally, tackling rapid growth challenges and fueling innovation in online learning with Crimson Global Academy. And he offers honest reflections on mistakes made, lessons learned, and why bold ambition and adaptability are critical for entrepreneurial success. The New Zealand Business Podcast is proudly brought to you by One New Zealand and my company, Gorilla Technology. If your mid size or smaller organization is struggling to get the best out of it, or you’re worried about cybersecurity risks, then get in touch. Let’s grab a coffee together. Jamie Beaton, co founder and CEO at Crimson Education. Welcome along, Jamie.

Jamie Beaton:
Thanks. Great to be here, Paul, and congrats on the wonderful podcast.

Paul Spain:
Thank you. Thank you. Well, it’s a great opportunity, I thought, to sit down and hear a little bit about the Crimson story because I was looking back, how many years is it now since you started the business?

Jamie Beaton:
It’s crazy. We started this when I was 18, now I’m 25, so no longer a young entrepreneur.

Paul Spain:
Well, I think in most people’s books you’re still a fairly young entrepreneur. But look, yours is a really interesting story and the story of Crimson because you’ve had quite a successful journey, I think it’s fair to say both your personal journey from an educational standpoint and Then how you and your team have really built something around that. You’ve attracted pretty significant funding and you’ve expanded globally. So the current state, there’s lots of bits and pieces in there in the media about the hundreds of millions of dollars valuations and things like. But I’m interested in sort of learning a bit about your story, the challenges, the learnings along the way. So maybe we can start out with your school days and, you know, where you grew up and where you studied at school and so on. Tell us a little bit about your upbringing.

Jamie Beaton:
So I grew up in Glendowie in Auckland. And in my 18 years, I guess, in school, I lived once in 31 Elizabethan Gardens and I moved up the road to 29, so we were in the same street. My whole, I guess, upbringing, I was at St. Kent’s Prep year one to year eight and then King’s College on a scholarship from year nine to year 13. And I guess growing up, grew up with my mum and my grandparents on my mum’s side and we were a really close kind of three generational family. So I guess from my early days there was a big cultural focus on education at home. My mum always emphasised to me that education is the most powerful way you can kind of transform your own opportunity. My granddad, when he was 14, was offered a full scholarship to a British boarding school, but he couldn’t afford to go because of the uniform costs.

Jamie Beaton:
So he ended up dropping out of high school. And he worked for about, you know, 50 years or so in some very manual industries, you know, working hard, but was a very sharp guy. But the education opportunity was. Was challenging for him. Then that the kind of baton got passed to my mum. She went to Auckland University, she did an MBA degree, law degree, commerce degree and accounting degree back when university was basically free. She worked very hard, was an out of zone student at Epsom Girls Grammar School. And so I guess growing up I was very inspired by her tenacity and grit and, you know, love of education.

Jamie Beaton:
And that definitely infected me. So I guess that’s a bit about the, you know, upbringing so far.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah. So how did that sort of come through day to day? What were the things that sort of, you know, stood out as a, as a youngster at home? Did you sort of draw comparisons between your grandparents and your mother? What were the. What were the things that sort of, you know, settled in your, in your mind? And what did that sort of, that grit look like? That.

Jamie Beaton:
Totally, totally. So from a young age, my mum was, you know, really focused on supporting me educationally. So she made a lot of sacrifices to get me to things like tutoring. So I have this funny memory of being about 6 years old, going out to botany, to a tuition center with about 200 Chinese students and me. And I just thought this was normal, you know, Saturdays I would do my math and English tutoring. I used to do phonics down in Penrose. When I was about three, I think I went through numberworks, which is now a crimson company, which is quite cool, basically. Really enjoyed education.

Jamie Beaton:
It became something that I was really passionate about. And I have these very distinct memories up to the age of about 11 or 12 where I’d be sitting in like a Wendy’s in Otahu or something. My mum would be testing me on history or social studies and she would know the content, you know, probably better than I did. So we were a real team going through school. And she really helped foster that real love of learning within me. Then I think around those years, near the end of St. Kent’s Prep, I became pretty motivated to do well at school, I guess, you know, really intrinsically. And then coming into high school, you know, I was kind of all guns blazing, shooting to really do well at school, both because I loved my subjects and I really saw it as a really important path forwards to these top universities.

Jamie Beaton:
A key switching point for me was when I was about 14. Up until that point, you know, my mum and I’s goal was really to stay within New Zealand and probably do medicine locally. That was, you know, something if you’re good at science is a pretty respectable path. But I didn’t really have a deep reason for I wanted to do that. And I sat on a train from Glenones to Kings next to this guy called Ben Kornfeld, who was the dux of Kings. He was year 13 and he was an American citizen who’d just gotten into Yale. And he told me that I should consider looking overseas. So that really shifted my horizon because I really respected him a lot.

Jamie Beaton:
And I thought about, okay, what would it take to get into these schools I hear about in movies like Harvard and Yale and stuff. So I spent the next four years going pretty hard down that process. That led me to take about 10 A levels when most students do three or four, create a lot of different clubs, different extracurriculars and. And, you know, ultimately applied at a wide range of schools in the us, uk, Middle East, Singapore. And then after getting into all of those schools, you know, really had lots of families reaching out to me about My own education experience, and that was really part of the genesis of Crimson.

Paul Spain:
How were people finding out that you were doing that? Did you get some media coverage? Was it. You know, how was. Yeah, how was it that you were attracting attention at that point?

Jamie Beaton:
So, I guess going through Kings, you know, Kings is a very supportive community, celebrate achievements. So, you know, I would often go on to prize giving, winning awards for ducks or different subjects, et cetera, going up in assembly. So lots of the community knew me pretty well, and I was a prefect in the school and really involved with lots of younger students and things like debating and various sports like hockey and tennis. So I came back and I did the Leavers speech just after year 13 had ended. And I’d gotten into Harvard and Cambridge at that point, and so they got me to do a kind of a keynote speech to the students about my journey through Kings. And so lots of students, I think, were quite inspired by that because they saw that, you know, this didn’t happen that accidentally. Like, I was quite intentional from age 15 onwards about this goal. I guess I was kind of constantly pushing limits and kings around, what subjects I could take, you know, creating new clubs, things like this.

Jamie Beaton:
And so initially, it was a lot of just students knew of me through the community. So I was doing things like tutoring and giving some advice. And then I went to actually an internship following high school at the Ice House, which is, you know, the accelerator here locally. And I saw these entrepreneurs, you know, creating the different companies, raising capital, and I thought, you know, we’re making great traction doing this, and it’s all happening organically. Maybe we can kind of supercharge this. So that. That was really how it unfolded. So I remember our first event.

Jamie Beaton:
I think I had about $40 in my bank account at this point. And then I think I got some funding from University of Auckland on the scholarship, and I created our first event on the Crowne Plaza in Auckland, cbd. We invited along a lot of students that had just gotten into overseas schools. We had about 200 parents come along, and that was the first kind of Crimson Kickoff event. And that really created a wave of our first initial students coming along to our services and then really got the ball rolling.

Paul Spain:
So as you developed the idea for Crimson initially, what did that first idea look like in terms of exactly what you’re selling? What were you charging? What did that actual. That version one, or whatever you want to call it, beta version of the business kind of look like? Yeah. What was that picture?

Jamie Beaton:
Yeah. So I guess to answer this question for A second, think about what high school career guidance looks like. So typically you think about a career guidance counsellor who often we’ll know a lot about New Zealand universities, maybe a little bit about Australian universities. Typically they’re going to recommend the universities that are, you know, most local. So if you’re in Auckland, maybe Auckland University, for example, and for one of these guidance counsellors, you know, these foreign universities are quite the unknown. And so, you know, generally they’re not going to recommend these options because it’s a bit out of their comfort zone. Yet for the students that have the potential to get into these schools, this represents a truly transformative opportunity for them in their careers if they can actually get in. So I saw first of all this kind of opportunity wedge where there were many kids that had the talent to get in but were not applying because they didn’t know A, they could B, how to, et cetera, and they didn’t have role models that had done that.

Jamie Beaton:
So that was sort of the observation I had. I saw other kids in my own year group at King’s and other schools like Westlake, McLean’s College, et cetera, that were, you know, really strong academically but ultimately weren’t successful getting into these schools because they didn’t have the right kind of profile and strategy applying. So that was my observation. I also had my co founder, Chandra. We met on a trip to Europe called the Hague International Model un. Actually, we met before that at Model un, but that was the trip we really got to know each other well and on that trip I was really impressed by her. She was the head girl of Albany senior, she was UNICEF youth ambassador and she was just very charismatic and care for vulnerable communities and she would have been an amazing candidate for US universities, but she had never been told about it. And so she found herself in the first year of Auckland University doing health science and she really wasn’t liking it that much.

Jamie Beaton:
You know, she enjoyed it a little bit, but, you know, she really could have been in a different environment and, you know, her experience, with my experience together, we realized this is a real pain point. Lots of kiwis could be going down this quite unique pathway. And so as far as what the offering was, I looked for inspiration as to kind of what my high school had been like. So my last year in high school I had tutors in seven different subjects, you know, math, English, biology, chemistry, physics, French, I think the SAT as well. And I was actually usually at the top of a lot of these subjects, but I used tutoring to get through 140 hours or so of content for, say, further maths in 30, 40 hours. Because I had so little time that I had to be hyper efficient with my learning. And I found that a traditional school classroom of 20, 30 kids really wasn’t that effective for me because I’d covered a lot of the content kind of before. So when we launched Crimson, the idea was to take students and give them a clear game plan as to what they could do to build their profile for these skills, or which would often involve a strategist, which would often be me in the early days, helping them make a plan for what activities to do when, what subjects to do, then finding them, this kind of network of tutors around them to make that happen.

Jamie Beaton:
And initially that was all done with kind of off the shelf tech, like Skype, things like this. And that was kind of how we got rolling. So I recruited the three other kids that got into Harvard that year from New Zealand, many of my classmates across New Zealand that I did debating with things like this. And then when I got to Harvard, I just began, I recruited all my roommates, all my friends from freshman year, et cetera. And that became the initial, you know, sale of tutors that, you know, began delivering for our Crimson kids back here in New Zealand. So that was kind of how the offering evolved as far as the price point, you know, there was reasonable market standards for what tutoring prices were. College counseling was a novel concept within New Zealand. And so I guess we thought about, you know, what our cost basis was and then also, you know, what kind of value we were bringing to people.

Jamie Beaton:
And I think about, for example, you know, an example like one of our students, Lucas Lee, he was at McLean’s College. I think he, you know, he bought a Crimson program. He probably would have gone to like a Big four or something within New Zealand, probably on a salary of 50, 60K. NZD came through Crimson, got into Harvard, now he’s on Wall street earning, you know, more than 100k USD. And, you know, even within one year, the earnings differential is just massive and will only grow over time. So we’re bringing significant value and there’s a lot of complexity. And so, you know, that means that the price point can be significant to reflect the value. And so that, that was some of the thinking that came into the initial logic.

Jamie Beaton:
But we were always focused on making sure that students were very talented, could always access our services. So we would have, you know, pro bono support or discounted support if people, you know, had demonstrated a financial need, which is a System similar to kind of what Harvard has for their financial aid policy. So that kind of got us going basically.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah, that’s cool. Now what’s the, the current scale of the business in terms of how many people do you have here in New Zealand, in terms of full time staff, how many do you have elsewhere and then how much do you draw on part time resources, whether that’s tutors in varying parts of the world or other people that you tap into.

Jamie Beaton:
So we kick this off with Chandra and I over in Albany and then today we’ve got about 4, 400 full time staff, a Fortune 100 based here in New Zealand across a lot of different companies. We have here sheltered up in Pau, you know, just actually a floor below the Ice House where I did my internship that kind of got a lot of this rolling. So there’s a bit of nice kind of poetry there. And then we also have thousands of mentors around the world. These mentors are often at schools like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, they’re in the Rhodes community, they’re in top schools like Tsinghua in China, they’re from Auckland Medical School, top schools in Australia, as well as great companies like Facebook and Uber and Google, things like this. So these mentors are the ones providing the service delivery to students as well as a team of strategists which are responsible for the students kind of candidacy plans. So that gives you a sense of the personnel. And Crimson’s now in about 20, I think we’re in 27 different markets now with offices in more than 20.

Jamie Beaton:
And each of these markets has localized teams speak the local languages, which has been quite instrumental to our success. That’s really the expansion. Key markets for us in terms of personnel would be China, would be America, would be actually Russia as well. We’ve got quite a lot of headcount in a lot of our different markets.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. Wow. That’s quite a bit of growth and a lot of people that you’ve got to look after. So how did you do that? What were the sort of the steps that have allowed you to do that? You obviously had to get some funding along the way. And then how do you, how do you operate in terms of deciding who to get what sort of resources you need to hire and how’s that journey tracked and who are the other people involved in terms of board and advisors? Because you’re obviously a pretty smart guy, Jamie, but it’s always useful to tap into other people. Right, so how’s that looked?

Jamie Beaton:
Cool. Okay, so I guess for some context, first of all when we started this, Fang Zhou, our third co founder, Chandra and I, we were all 18, right? So we had no previous business experience. I think I’d actually run, like a little party business that King’s, you know, momentarily. Chandra had done some tutoring, feng shui, done a bit of tutoring. That was it. So we really had to build a good team around us quickly, and we had to level up. That’s actually one of Crimson’s four values, level up, which really speaks about constantly learning. So you’re equipped for the next phase.

Jamie Beaton:
And we think about that as co founders that, you know, the Jamie, Chandra and feng shui of 2013, you know, could not handle the Crimson of today, and probably the 2020 version of ourselves can’t handle what we can become in. So we need to keep learning quick. So as far as each phase, I guess we think about what talent we need in the organization. A good example of this would be when we were going from 50 to about 150 staff. At this point, I was very naive. I still am naive, but I was more naive then. And I thought, HR people, this is just like admin. I don’t need this kind of layer of complexity inside Crimson.

Jamie Beaton:
So we didn’t have any company values. We didn’t have a lot of the classic kind of onboarding procedures you might have. And so I was confused as to why we were hiring staff, and they didn’t feel the kind of deep connection to the Crimson mission that our first sort of 50 staff did. You know, I quickly realized that a lot of these staff, when they were joining Crimson, we weren’t really onboarding them properly, and they weren’t really seeing the values that were making us who we were. So we brought on board this incredible Kiwi exec called Penelope Barton. She came out of zero and Vend as our chief people officer, and she worked with me to put in the team to put in place a number of these values which have really remained consistent since that day. And, you know, that really resulted in formalizing a lot of our things like performance reviews, you know, our org structure. Back then, you know, there wasn’t even a single org structure grid in the company.

Jamie Beaton:
You know, the contracts weren’t even in a very consistent state. So she came and put in place all of that structure, working alongside us as we kept learning about this stuff. And then that, for example, has really helped us ramp up our scalability on the people side. So now, you know, I just got off a call last night, which was a newstarter call. So for Example, whenever our new starters join, we run these calls with the co founders, walking them through the crimson journey. Our key values, what we’re about, our key KPIs and goals for the year, to make sure everyone’s singing from the same hymn sheet. And really, you know, there is one crimson across the world. So that would be an example of, you know, a key evolution on the people side, you know, pretty important for us.

Paul Spain:
How much pain was there before you made that decision to employ chief people officer?

Jamie Beaton:
Yeah, yeah, I would say there was, you know, reasonable pain. It wasn’t, it wasn’t too bad, but I think it could have gotten worse because we were hiring really quick, right. So we went from about 30 staff to probably more than 100 really fast because we had, I think, closed either an A or a B round at this point. And so we, you know, had a lot of capital, we had big growth targets and we had to ramp up in a lot of geographies. So, yeah, there was significant pain. And also we were going across into many markets very quickly, which was a very intentional strategy. And so doing that while fixing these procedures, you know, it’s kind of like fixing the engine while rolling forward. So there was some pain there.

Jamie Beaton:
Also a lot of other, you know, I guess, key learnings. When you bring in a leader, they’re responsible for building their team. You’re taking a massive leverage bet on that leader. So in my case, you know, I was very naive about digital marketing, for example, also about technology. And so in the early days, I brought on some people who, you know, were very good at convincing me they were legends in the space because I didn’t really know much about. And then they went on to build very big teams that, you know, weren’t particularly effective. And. And we end up having to basically replace those entire teams and start from scratch.

Jamie Beaton:
And now we’ve got a really wonderful technology function with a really solid cto, same in the digital marketing side, but had to just go through those natural learning curves. As co founders, we weren’t familiar with these different domains, but now I think we’re relatively well across all the key functions. We’ve got really solid leaders in place and a really good exec team. You also mentioned advisory board. That’s been very crucial to our success. I think one thing we’ve done pretty well is bringing on board great advisors at the various stages. So notable ones would be, I guess recently, you know, John Key, obviously, New Zealand, but in the earlier days, a guy called Jason Lenger, he was on the board from Tiger Global, he was the second in command at Seek over in Australia before he left Seek to and he was an early employee, went with him the whole journey. Then he went to Tiger Global.

Jamie Beaton:
And so he was instrumental in guiding us through the process of many of the kind of org chart development, things we had to do, building our operations functions, building out, you know, financial functions, et cetera. Other great people would be like Janine Manning, who from the early days made sure that we were doing things like auditing through KPMG and stuff, which is really useful for capital raising and putting in place really good financial controls. So yeah, we have a long list of advisors to this day on everything from the education side to the data science side to the growth side. A recent one would be Ed Baker. He joined us, he was head of international expansion at Uber, sold a company to Facebook, was there for several years and invested in us recently and has been a great advocate for how we can grow cga, our new school for example. So I’ve always.

Paul Spain:
This is your Crimson Global Academy, yes?

Jamie Beaton:
Oh yeah, yeah, that’s right, yeah. Crimson Global Academy, New Zealand’s first online. Growing really quickly, which is really exciting. So these different advisors have been instrumental as young co founders who’ve been trying to learn fast alongside a very strong kind of full time bench as well, which we keep improving and growing.

Paul Spain:
Now you talked about some areas of the business there, such as it where didn’t pan out so well. What were the triggers that helped you realise that it was the war you had was broken in some way and then how did you actually go about sort of navigating from what you had to what you had decided you needed and how hard was that? Particularly if you’ve employed friends and people that you know outside of the business into those roles and then you’ve decided, hey, this actually isn’t really what’s gonna fly for us for the next stage of the business.

Jamie Beaton:
So I guess the good thing is we’ve always had a pretty meritocratic culture in the sense that we really focus on performance, delivering results, et cetera. So when I was going through this process, the key thing was discovering that the outcomes were not there. Once we discovered those outcomes, it was pretty easy relatively to have transparent conversations with those leaders and then mutually agree it wasn’t working and then evolve and fix the teams. But as far as figuring out the outcomes weren’t working in digital marketing, it’s really interesting. So it sounds like an easy problem to solve. You know, if you spend money on Facebook or Instagram, et Cetera, how do you track end to end, whether that is actually converting and it sounds pretty simple and everyone’s pumping money into these different online platforms, but actually the complexity of tracking things across, you know, eventbrite different landing pages, you know, websites with, you know, various tracking codes, you know, it’s pretty complicated. And so for a while you might, you can’t attribute necessarily your marketing spend to what’s happening on the revenue side. Right.

Jamie Beaton:
Once you have more visibility into that, you can make much more sound decisions and you can set, you know, roas or return on advertising spend targets, things like this for various teams. And so I guess we had a bit of first principles, intuition for okay, if we’re putting this much money into this, these are the kind of outcomes we should be seeing. We weren’t seeing some of them. And then secondly we put in place better and better tracking which kind of ultimately shows what’s happening and kind of if things aren’t really working in the engine room, it becomes very clear when you have all the metrics. So I think that would be kind of how we helped find those problems. You know, functions, backgrounds, advanced computing minds, applied math. Lots of our team are pretty quantitative. So if there are no metrics in a unit, you know, we quickly put in place metrics and then sort of find the truth, I guess.

Jamie Beaton:
And I think that metric driven culture has been quite useful as we’ve continued to scale and scale and scale, particularly going from 150 to 400. That’s been a much more smooth, I think ramp up because we now have those KPIs in place and you know, infrastructure which we keep improving, but I would say it’s pretty robust. And we’ve got a really good chief operating officer called David Fried. He was a really high achieving student from Harvard, top in economics there was, went to Goldman Sachs, really strong data scientist and then he’s been hitting up our charge on the service delivery team, putting in place these metrics and that plus Penny for example, building a pretty good infrastructure. So I really recommend founders that are trying to go fast, raise a lot of venture capital, they need to go, that’s their mandate, to make sure they have those metrics so that if you do take bets and stuff, you at least can measure the outputs and then evolve and iterate and learn.

Paul Spain:
And when you’ve gone for funding, how, how ambitious have you been in terms of what you’ve put on the table? Cause you’ve raised, how much money have you raised so far? Share on that front?

Jamie Beaton:
Yeah, we’ve raised ballpark, about 60 mil USD. So that gives you a sense of how much capital we’ve raised, which sounds like a lot in New Zealand, I don’t think is that much compared to Silicon Valley companies we benchmark ourselves to. And broadly speaking, I mean, we are ambitious. So with both our college admissions offering, you know, we see a massive market all around the world. Lots of very, you know, ambitious families that want to make sure their children equipped to succeed in a very competitive environment. That’s a very big market. And so. And it’s also across many geographies.

Jamie Beaton:
So we needed to raise capital to dominate that niche across. Across the world. My strategy was very intentional. I didn’t want to go into America or particularly China that much in the early days. I wanted to focus on geographies that were quite uncontested. So I went into places like Russia, like Korea, like Brazil, and, you know, built up our operations there largely. That kind of foreign push has been pretty instrumental to our success.

Paul Spain:
So, yeah, just sort of stopping there for a minute. How do you actually do that as a business that’s operating in New Zealand? Things are a little bit different now in terms of terms of travel. But when you started doing that, what did it actually, you know, what did it actually look like? What were the steps? And, you know, what was the hardest thing, particularly if you’re in a country where English isn’t the first language, the.

Jamie Beaton:
Key thing to be is pretty opportunistic, right? About opportunities as they come up, I guess. So let me give you a funny story. So I went to Thailand for this competition called the Global Student Entrepreneurship Awards, which is like a student challenge thing that we were competing in. I was on a boat and I sat and I was next to this lady. I thought she was actually about my age, you know, which is kind of funny. And I got talking to her and turns out she was about 35. She went to Harvard, did Applied Math and Economics, same program as me. And she had recently been working in private equity.

Jamie Beaton:
But I had some young kids and was looking for a bit of a transition. And, you know, she spoke Thai. This is in Thailand, by the way. And immediately I leapt on that and said, hey, do you want to expand Crimson? It’s going really well in Thailand. And she became our managing director of Thailand and did an incredible job of getting that, you know, off to market. I went to Singapore to visit my Singaporean team. And I was in the cafeteria of Yale nus, which is a Singaporean university that had partnered with Yale. I was talking to this sharp New Zealander called Andy Chen.

Jamie Beaton:
And he told me, hey, look over there, that kid over there, he’s known as a really entrepreneurial guy on campus, does a lot of the startup competitions, is really good at computer science. You might want to chat to him. So I got speaking to him and turns out he was speaking fluent English, but turns out he spoke Russian. And I said, oh, how do you speak Russian? He said, I’m half Russian, half American. And I said, what do you feel like about launching Crimson in Russia? And then within a couple of weeks, he had confirmed his gap year and he had landed in Russia and was expanding us over there. So for the uk, you know, my early director, Janine Manning, one of our first investors, she was moving to the UK and so naturally, you know, she had the mandate to start us over there. And so it’s about getting the tentpoles out with people that know the local markets pretty well, figuring out what’s happening. And in many cases, these early entrepreneurial people figured it out pretty well figured out playbooks that we learned from and work with them to succeed in.

Jamie Beaton:
And then we kind of continued to optimize and optimize the country manager hiring process till we got it down to quite a consistent profile and. And then we were able to ramp from 5, 6 markets to more than 20 pretty quick. I looked for inspiration from Uber, their playbook for city expansion. They have actually quite a systematic process for who they hire.

Paul Spain:
They do, don’t they? And it’s not necessarily. Well, I don’t know all the ins and outs of their model, but it seemed as though it doesn’t necessarily have to involve a huge number of people actually to get a new operations start.

Jamie Beaton:
That’s right. That’s right.

Paul Spain:
So I actually think they pulled out of New Zealand was the last I heard, in terms of, you know, their, you know, boots on the ground and having an actual office here, as most of that’s now being run out of Australia.

Jamie Beaton:
We actually recently recruited the very talented man that launched Uber in New Zealand in parts of Australia, called AJ Tills. He’s our chief marketing officer for Crimson Global Academy. He’s been a real rock star on the team, which is very exciting. But yeah, so Uber, they were able to go all around the world super fast. And so we looked at this model and we really seek to replicate it. We brought up a growth operations team that was HQ here in New Zealand, and they were responsible for things like setting up legal entities, figuring out how on earth do you register in Russia or Thailand, things like this, you know, getting the early digital marketing going in those regions, onboarding the country managers to figure out, you know, how to engage with that market. Yep. So that was some of our tactics that we used.

Jamie Beaton:
We made some mistakes. We went into India in 2016, you know, we threw the sink at it. Not much cash, but a lot of people like Fangju, Aisha, Andre, we all hopped on the plane to India, brought on board this guy Adam Joseph, who I knew from Harvard. He was an Indian American guy, which turned out to be a bit of a problem because an Indian American does not know much about India sometimes, but he’s a super talented guy, you know, great friends to this day. So we went into India, I think after six months, you know, the revenue we made could hardly cover, like our food expenses. So we pulled out of there and focused on much more exciting markets.

Paul Spain:
I imagine in India where there are lots, lots of people seem to end up in US universities from India that maybe a lot of that was, you know, the models were already reasonably established and so that would have maybe made it a harder market than others to get into.

Jamie Beaton:
Yeah.

Paul Spain:
Were there other aspects that you thought were, you know, that you learned were the reasons that it was. Was tough there?

Jamie Beaton:
I think, actually. So Crimson around the World is really known as the premier place to go for college admissions guidance, at least now. So we’re partnered with U.S. news, the major ranking group in the U.S. times Higher Education, the major group in the U.K. and many of the world’s top schools, like Gems, Dulwich International, use us, as well as schools like Eaton Harrow, et cetera. We’ve done a lot of talks in, so we’re generally premium and we’re known for the best quality. The challenge in India, when we entered in 2016, some of that wasn’t built yet, but also the price points locally were very compressed.

Jamie Beaton:
So what we could provide in India, somebody in China would pay 10 times the price for literally 10 times the price. And so, you know, it was very hard with a USD cost basis to provide services economically in India and we didn’t have the network to get into the particular schools and things like this that, you know, were very relevant to. Yep. So that, that was some of the kind of reasons why it wasn’t successful. But, you know, for every loss we had, you know, four or five wins. And so, you know, that’s been really exciting and ultimately gave us the kind of competitive positioning we needed to go on to continue to grow, raise more capital, launch new units. And so looking back, that quite bold move to expand globally fast was one of our key early moves that I guess has been very successful.

Paul Spain:
Now I’m very keen to see New Zealand businesses that are growing their export base and growing globally. Certainly you’ve had success in that international growth, but how have you decided where it’s appropriate to send and set up a team versus sort of operating it from here? You know, virtual offices versus physical offices. How do you juggle that mix? You know, what’s important for you? For instance, you know, with some things you probably, you know, a lot of businesses will want to have a local Google listing. So you have to, you know, if you don’t have, you know, people in a physical office, you’ve got to set up some sort of virtual office. So people are googling. Oh, yep, there’s something here and they call. But obviously there’s been a real element where you have sent people and set up those physical locations. So how have you figured that out? Obviously having significant funding, really important to make that happen, otherwise those things aren’t sustainable unless you can be turning a dollar very, very quickly.

Paul Spain:
So, yeah, what’s been your thinking there?

Jamie Beaton:
Yeah, so there are a couple of different types of offices for Crimson. There’s basically offices in which the main role of the local sales and marketing, right, Building demand amongst families that can really benefit from Crimson services. And so all of the headquarter operations, the service delivery, our online platform, all the mentors, that’s pretty centralized. And so the team just has to go out there and essentially onboard students and localize parts of the offering for that community. So that’s the simplest type of office. The next one is an office which has some kind of global functions because we need that office to be a hub for our service delivery. So a good example would be, for example, the uk, where we have lots of tutors from Oxford, Cambridge, London School of Economics, these other great skills in the UK and the US too, where we have just a huge amount of mentors in the U.S. and so we need personnel in those teams that can actually do the supply side as well.

Jamie Beaton:
And then the other, you know, the final level would be like the teams in which we, you know, have real headquarter functions such as technology. So in China, where my co founder is currently living, and I was living prior to Covid, which spun the world around a little bit, we have a full engineering team as well as, you know, service delivery personnel and then our local sales and marketing efforts as well. And so we think about, you know, first of all, how big’s the market? Secondly, what’s the talent density like for, you know, those functions like technology? And then in our case, are there good universities where we can source talent from for our mentor pool? You know, if you’re, say, in the middle of Brazil, there are some good universities, but probably our mentor network. But if you’re sitting in the middle of, say, us, man, you know, there’s incredible universities there for our mentor network. And so we’re going to go hard there. Same as, for example, in China. There are great schools like Tsinghua University, we can bring our mentors for that are pretty globally relevant. So that’s kind of how we think about, you know, the market.

Jamie Beaton:
The other dynamics to think about would be like regulatory complexity, you know, how complicated is it to operate there? How does it affect our global kind of headquarters structures? You know, there are other considerations, but those are the primary considerations that I first talked about.

Paul Spain:
Now. Finding this, you know, pool of mentors and, and so on around the world. How have you gone about doing that? What are the things that have worked well? Where are the things you’ve maybe tripped up a little bit along the way and learned some lessons? How’s that played out?

Jamie Beaton:
Totally. So I guess at the beginning of Crimson, as I mentioned before, I brought on board a lot of people that I really respected from high school that were just rockstar academics that I really respected and looked up to. I also brought aboard many of my own tutors. So for example, I had this legendary math tutor called John Jiang. He helped me, you know, now further maths and university math and stuff. And we brought onboard in the early days to tutor other students. I think of Steve Walker, who was my head of department at King’s. And, you know, a lot of these schools, there’s a big variability in teacher quality.

Jamie Beaton:
But particularly Steve, I was amazed by him. Went to Cambridge University, was my tutor, helped me score top in the world in English literature, you know, great mentor of mine, brought on board a lot of those people as well. So I first hoarded kind of all the talent that I knew in New Zealand. And then when I got to Harvard, you know, really went on a bit of a recruiting spree. At one point, you know, all my roommates were working for Crimson. Two of them were doing video work, the other rest were doing tutoring. I would join different student clubs and then indirectly recruit people on campus. And there was definitely buzz building because we were raising capital, growing quick.

Jamie Beaton:
And so a lot of people would be hitting me up for these different tutoring opportunities. We had tutors on campus that Were, you know, paying for, you know, significant amounts of their expenses, doing this tutoring online through Crimson. They were telling their friends the word was spreading. So given that Harvard’s not a very big community, we were quickly able to get hundreds of people on the platform across Harvard. And because Harvard has a certain reputation, when we had that brand as having a lot of these kids from Harvard that were having a great time on our platform, other kids from other schools then got quite interested. And so we would then set up campus ambassadors at Yale, Princeton, the other top schools, and then start getting those kids coming on board. We’d put up tutor recruitment websites and stuff and we’d get lots of organic applications. Then we also had the incredible source of our students who would then graduate, get into university, then become our mentors.

Jamie Beaton:
And I love that because we train these students in our philosophy, in our different tactics for how they can be really effective students. And so they go through it, they have this amazing outcome getting into a great university. So they really love Crimson. Then they go become a mentor and they can really inspire the next generation. So there are a couple of different ways we got that pull. We learned pretty early on that building a really strong organic brand at these skills is important. So I personally went to Harvard and then I went to Stanford, then I went to Oxford, Now I’m Yale. And in each of these communities, you know, I personally go out and build a lot of relationships to get, to get that flywheel moving and then it, you know, sustains and sustains.

Jamie Beaton:
So we learned early on that like paid acquisition of tutors, etc is not a good strategy for us. That’s what companies like, for example, VIP kids in China has to do. They’ve got to pump lots of money online marketing to try and recruit like English tutors. And but for us, because we’re trying to recruit these premier people from these great institutions, the word of mouth virality is very important. And then we really care about their experience. So building good technology that makes it easy and efficient for them to work, giving them students they’re going to love. We’ve got a tutor student compatibility algorithm we use, which is part of my PhD work, to match students and tutors effectively. Things like that, make sure that, you know, when somebody logs online for mit, they have a rocking time and they tell their friends and the thing keeps moving.

Jamie Beaton:
So that will be a couple of tactics on the recruitment side. Now, recently we’ve had to evolve because of the Crimson Global Academy where we have to recruit not only tutors, but also more and more Teachers. And so we started by, you know, bringing on board the biggest heavyweight we could in New Zealand, which was John Morris. He was the head of Auckland Grammar School for, you know, more than 20 years. He’s been a teacher for 40 years. He’s a onzm in New Zealand, so definitely without a doubt the most respected headmaster in the country. So we brought him on board, which is a good start. And then we had more than 600 applicants for about 30 roles for our school.

Jamie Beaton:
And so while many schools have teacher shortages, we’re able to get top teachers from, you know, Kings, Maclean’s, Westlake, you know, Rangiuru, all these different places on board quickly and then get more teachers from the uk, other geographies. So I think starting with quality, just like we did at Harvard, and then with John Morris here, that creates a snowball that then, you know, makes everyone quite excited to be part of that community. So there are a couple of tactics we used on that side.

Paul Spain:
What challenges did you have, you know, along the way in that process? Were there, you know, there’s always, always some learnings and you know, things that don’t go so well. Tell us about some of, you know, some of the tougher things.

Jamie Beaton:
Yeah, it’s a great question. I would say tutoring has actually historically been a real strength of Crimsons, but a challenge that I could think about would be, you know, if you think about tutors, they’re going to have exams at pretty similar times and when you have waves of tutors having exams while their students are having exams that can create some irregularity because they might be like stressed about their own exams and, and unable to do as much tutoring for the student just at times where they’re most needed. And so for example, timing that seasonality is important. And so in certain functions we move to more full time staff to adapt for that. So if you think about Uber, when they launch a new market, they often pay drivers to do almost full time on the road, even if they don’t have demand, to make sure they are locked in capacity so that the rider in this case has a good experience. So for us at Crimson, sometimes we have to make these different hacks to, you know, buff supply, I should say in a certain time of the year. But at this point we’ve got a really deep network of tutors so it works quite well. But that would be kind of one move.

Jamie Beaton:
So we switched, for example, our strategy function from being part time contractors to being significantly full time to help really make sure that was super robust et CETERA and then also as another example, when kids apply to college, one of the key deadlines is January 1st, which is the day after New Year’s and it’s Christmas, et cetera, Boxing Day. And so lots of students, you know, in the early days, if they procrastinated, they would be trying to get these essays done right, when their mentors would be, you know, like in the middle of eating their, you know, turkeys or something with their family. So we need to, but we needed to basically set in place a lot of deadlines so that students would get these essays done far earlier. And so, you know, it’s better for the students stress level. And then our tutors can, you know, have a nice Christmas Day. So there are some different hacks we had to work through over time as well.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. And have you built some technology platforms to help, you know, support these processes and make it easy to get what you need, something that really is a really good fit for the outcomes that you’re looking for without just trying to use off the shelf tools that may not be always relevant?

Jamie Beaton:
You bet. So in 2017, we launched the Crimson app and we’ve basically been heavily investing behind this. So it really makes student and tutor experience really efficient. So on the tutor side, you log online, all your sessions are tracked. After every session, you fill out a session report which, you know, gives us an update on how the student’s progressing. The student reviews the tutor experience as well. The parents can access analytics and reports on how those interactions are moving. The parents and tutors can access score reports as well for how the kids testing is going.

Jamie Beaton:
And then the student can log into all these other resources on the platform too. And then all of that’s synced to invoicings. The tutors can then quickly get paid efficiently so we can process large numbers of invoice payments around the world, you know, fast. And then there’s also community functions as well, where people can interact with one another. And then there’s secure chat, et cetera, which is very important for child safety. So yeah, we’ve gone pretty hard on those features and it’s been pretty essential for us. And we’re adding more and more sophisticated features. So for example, we’re adding some different kind of algorithmic analytic engines so that, for example, say you and I are speaking in a class, there’s five of us in a classroom, and you’re not speaking very much, or actually you’re speaking a lot.

Jamie Beaton:
And that’s a change because last week in economics you weren’t as Engaged. And we can, you know, really drive out those trends and engagement from, you know, student to student to student. And also how the teachers, you know, classroom style is evolving as well, and use those analytics to inform coaching sessions, pressure development, and also, you know, reports for the parents too.

Paul Spain:
And so because these are happening in an online context, which is revolutionary, you can actually draw all that data that, you know, in a normal classroom you wouldn’t have unless you, you know, unless you had some, you know, microphones, you know, auditing processes. So that’s fascinating.

Jamie Beaton:
Yeah. And think about this. So when you go through school, how much data do you actually know about, you know, your own high school performance? You do a test every so often, you do some exams, but you sit in hours and hours of classes and you don’t know, you know, how you’re engaging, how you’re participating, what that looks like compared to other successful students in the online schooling world or the online tutoring world. You know, we have all of these data sets of high achieving kids and, you know, what their engagement metrics were like. And then we can see when a child’s not syncing with those trends. And we can do that by geography, by personality, et cetera. And so the online analytics, I think, will be quite revolutionary in schooling. Even students that are doing part time online schooling, the amount of insights they’re gonna get from every hour they spend online compared to the physical world in which nothing is recorded or analysable, will be quite profound.

Jamie Beaton:
So that’s a good example where technology gives you quite a big leg up in the online world.

Paul Spain:
And what do you do in terms of measuring your customer satisfaction, measuring how parents are feeling about things, how students are feeling, what does that picture look like? And then how do you utilize that information?

Jamie Beaton:
Yeah, 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 donut. But what really 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, et cetera. But we don’t want to make things easier because these are formative years where you want to be growing academically.

Paul Spain:
Sure.

Jamie Beaton:
So a couple of metrics. First of all, net promoter score, you know, easy ones. So students and parents regularly, various key chickens do 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 sub sector of the industry and you know, the broader satisfaction scores. That’s one. Then there’s the, you know, micro feedback after every lesson which is kind of like the Uberstar rating, you know, 1 to 5. 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.

Jamie Beaton:
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 pre test diagnostics and 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 final outcomes. What do they get into? What schools do they get into? How did that sync to their 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.

Jamie Beaton:
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 the overall schools, Things like that. And then for example, within our school we’ve got specific targets for, you know, what percentage of kids get certain grades, A, A, et cetera, 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.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. And then once you’ve got that data, how do you act on it? Right, you’re looking and there’s whatever it might be, too many lower scores in one area or another. Or do you track that back to the individual tutors and so on that are involved and then that plays out in terms of their role within Crimson, how does that look?

Jamie Beaton:
Totally. So we do a lot of filtering before people come onto the platform. They’re 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 screens. 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.

Jamie Beaton:
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, our kids performing better from 20 hours of this or 40 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 we run an event here in New Zealand about say, overseas study, we might in a 100 person room get sort of 70 kids, maybe 20 mums, 10 dads. In Korea we get 99 mums and 1 dad, no kids.

Jamie Beaton:
And you know, over there the expectation’s really on mum to go ahead and do a lot of research and make these serious education choices. They basically go through the whole process and 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 got to 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 teacher should do. So we’ve got that crimson quality with some of those customisations by geography. So that’s kind of how we think about it overall.

Jamie Beaton:
And a lot of these things, particularly for online high school, come out of my research from Oxford. 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 and online schooling. You know, doing things like randomised control trials, studies of the 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.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, I guess there’s, you know, there’s a huge amount of information that you, you can draw and then it’s working out what to do with it, what to do with it, and, and what are the things that really matter the most. But it’s certainly, you know, it’s, it’s gotta help that there is plenty you can measure yeah. And, you know, there are some pretty, you know, clear things that are important for I’m sure most people that are working with you. That’s good. Now, looking. Looking at the Crimson brand, how did that name come about? And how did you decide what the Crimson picture needed to look like from a brand perspective?

Jamie Beaton:
Oh, that’s a great question. Yeah, that’s funny. Okay, so as far as the name Crimson, I went to high school at King’s, 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 were 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.

Jamie Beaton:
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, 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 liked the alliteration of the C and the C, although now a Crimson education, which I like better. So that was Crimson and then the logo.

Jamie Beaton:
First of all, design is not my strength and not the strength of either of my co founders. 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 kind of is where the logo came from and the name.

Paul Spain:
Cool. Now, we talked before challenges. What other challenges can you sort of share with us from your journey, from the story, and how have those things helped shape how you move forward? Cause it’s so often through the pain points that we really learn, and often that’s the best learning to share with others, so hopefully that they don’t have to go through the same pain points. Right?

Jamie Beaton:
Yeah, totally. That’s a great One. I guess I can think of two pain points. The first pain point is that for many years of Crimson, my co founders and I were going through university while building this. And so we had more constraints than probably the traditional 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.

Jamie Beaton:
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 building perspective, right, for our staff in a certain geography because they would say, never meet Fungzhou 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.

Jamie Beaton:
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. I think some of the pain that came from those, you know, I guess, balancing acts. And then what drove Crimson to come, probably another one 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 them 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 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.

Jamie Beaton:
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 acquired this company and it was, you know, for a tiny amount, and we were going through this court process and one of my legal team advised that we file for a suppression order. So basically the court dispute, you know, just, I guess, is handled within the vicinity of the court so there isn’t media scrutiny. That sounded like a smart idea. And then I learned what 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.

Jamie Beaton:
So she basically filed to, you know, restrain that. And then cause of that, there was all this coverage of her, you know, filing the claim. And so the photo of her house just went everywhere on the Internet and you can find it easily today. So the Streisand effect is this phenomena 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 it pays to just be open and authentic and transparent with things, particularly if they’re not a big deal. And that makes it a lot easier. So that’s been really a guiding principle for us in recent times. I guess it’s an important one for young entrepreneurs to know that it’s actually totally fine for organizations to cover your ups and downs, challenges, et cetera.

Jamie Beaton:
People are really open to respect the fact that it’s not always good and easy and there’s sometimes disputes and challenges. So that would be an interesting learning I had. The Streisand effect.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. Yeah, it’s fascinating. And the reality is that every individual, every organization will have its ups and downs. You talked about transparency there. How much transparency do you have within the business in terms of what you share and don’t share with your team? There seems to be quite a lot of variation from. And obviously where you’ve got sort of publicly listed companies, that’s quite different from a reporting perspective to private companies. You’ve got a number of investors, so there’s obviously data and so on that you have to share there. But what do you share in terms of objectives and key results, sort of company wide and so on.

Paul Spain:
What does that look like?

Jamie Beaton:
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 monthly all hands call and we have very clear company KPIs for every year and actually every half. Everything from student outcome goals to revenue metrics to cash flow targets, et cetera, that are quite transparent with 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 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 kind of counterintuitive, like people didn’t need to know this and so I was much more guarded with it. But then now it’s wonderful. We share our employee engagement statistics, we share our revenue, share all the different goals, share all of our student success, which everybody’s really excited about.

Jamie Beaton:
So that would be my approach. Now you’ve got to be a bit careful because sometimes those statistics, 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 we trust the team so we share that openly within the all hands formats, et cetera. And I think generally as you get bigger and bigger, you kind of have to do that. So there’s a limit to how much kind of guarding you can do, particularly if you aspire to be a company of scale and significance.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. How much of a challenge was it for you to sort of get through that, knowing that really any private information soon is public information. Right. At one point in time or another or it can be. So, you know, there’s no guarantee that anything you say in a particular context won’t sort of end up outside of the business. Have you sort of had to work in quite tight sort of non disclosure agreements and you know, and processes to help with that? And yeah, like, I mean going from, you know, one end of the scale where it’s like, okay, well this stuff’s all private and it doesn’t matter to the team to you know, where you’ve landed. And I’m sure there are, there are variations beyond that too. Walk us through that.

Jamie Beaton:
So I guess if you think about, I’ll give you a fun example. Take Facebook, right. So they went through some challenges during the 2016 election when there was a lot of scrutiny around, you know, their handling off, you know, Russian hacking, etc. Every time there was a company, all hands call whatever zuckerberg would say would get leaked to all of the media. And so for him, basically, you know, he had to be entirely aware that whenever he spoke, that was just public information. Essentially, that was the test probably had to operate with. And so I think that, you know, the earlier you can get into a state where you just assume whatever you say, you know, everyone from your, you know, your grandmother to your customers to your parents to random stakeholders in the media would cover the better, I think. And we’re not in a particularly sensitive industry in terms of things like financial data such that it really is that big a deal.

Jamie Beaton:
What we really care about is student privacy. So protecting students, names and information, things like this, child safety standards, which have a very high bar. So that’s the area we’re kind of hardcore on. But as far as other areas of our strategy, et cetera, we share within the team, aware of the fact that there’s some risks involved, but we think net net it’s worth it. I think if you were like a company like Palantir or something, and, you know, you have a lot of scrutiny around you and you know, how, you know, your clients, et cetera, for various, I guess, political reasons or not, maybe you’ve got to be more careful in that environment, I think. Or if you’re like a venture capitalist and, you know, your deal terms for a certain company have to be quite private, I think it’s quite different. But for operation like us, we serve students and families and parents, and, you know, what we provide is pretty straightforward. It’s not so much a big deal, I think.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah. Okay. Now let’s talk about the next phase of the business, because you looking now at a younger audience, tell us what this online high school looks like.

Jamie Beaton:
Yeah, sure.

Paul Spain:
And how it came about. How did you make that decision to adjust the business or add this new area?

Jamie Beaton:
So rewinding all the way back to high school, right? In high school, I did 10 A levels, and most students were three or four, which meant I had to do many subjects kind of outside of school with self study, things like this. And I thought it was quite unusual how I had to go through school where, you know, this year I do this level of math this year to this level of math. And I felt quite constrained because in certain subjects I wanted to go faster. And so that was a personal observation I had. So when we first kicked off Crimson, I would recommend many of my kids take extra subjects. We help them, you know, enroll in private exam centers, things like that. And so I think about that boy, smile that I just mentioned. Or take Zonghuang.

Jamie Beaton:
Zong grew up in Maclean’s College. He now works for Google’s Waymo team in Silicon Valley. He went to Caltech and he took, I think, six or seven different A levels when he was in school. Yeah, now that was in the back of my mind. And then fast forward. We had many kids doing these subjects through tutoring, online, et cetera. And then when I went to the us, I saw the online high schools there. For example, there was an online high school that Elon Musk sends his kids to, and they were achieving incredible academic results.

Jamie Beaton:
And I thought, wow, this really syncs with what I’m seeing at Crimson across all these learnings. What could we do with this? So then that got me thinking and then triggered me to really create, you know, Crimson Global Academy, our online high school. So this is a fully registered high school, registered in New Zealand. And in America, we teach the British A levels as well as the ap, the Advanced Placement, the American curriculum. So we’ve got students from Keri Keri to, you know, Rimiera to, you know, Christchurch that basically are hopping online part time or full time. So part time you go to your physical school, then you take extra subjects outside of school, after school or on the weekends, and you’re part of our global community. There’s great teachers, the supercharged learning environment, or you go full time and this is your full school experience. All of our extracurriculars and other aspects included.

Jamie Beaton:
And that’s really what we’re building at the moment. So we launched that school earlier this year, about six months ago or so, and that’s really gone gangbusters. So past a lot of our growth expectations, we’ve now got kids from more than 20 countries. As I said, it’s headed by John Morris and also Mark Phillips, who came from McLean’s. McLean’s, the school we help guide the Ducks to get into Harvard five years in a row. Incredible student community, very ambitious. And we knew he was a bit of a rock star, so we brought him on board and then many other top teachers that have come out of these great schools. And the wonderful thing about an online high school is you’re no longer constrained to meeting kids that just live near you or teachers that happen to live near the school.

Jamie Beaton:
Our teaching pool is from the world stage, and our students are sitting in classes with kids from Russia, from China, you know, from Auckland, and learning together and also at this faster, accelerated pace. So about 45% of our kids are learning at an accelerated pace. And My goal is to make sure that any Kiwi anywhere in the country can tap into an education that will legitimately make them competitive enough to succeed anywhere in the world stage. Because there is a bit of an achievement gap between various education systems around the world. If you compare, for example, many of our Kiwi schools to schools in Singapore or Korea, there’s big gaps. And so I want to make sure that you can move to New Zealand and really be comfortable with the environment you’re in. And so CGA is really the next evolution of Crimson, and we really hope it will kind of broaden the access to our really, you know, quite powerful education system to more families.

Paul Spain:
And I guess it gives you a pipeline as well of, you know, of students to help them, you know, get into Harvard and the like.

Jamie Beaton:
Totally.

Paul Spain:
Yeah.

Jamie Beaton:
I mean, we’ve got students who are, you know, age 11, jumping into crimson Global Academy, who have the academic ability to take subjects normally you do when you’re 14. They come to Crimson. That really unlocks their potential. In February, we’re rolling out the pre igcse, which basically means, you know, even before you’re ready for one of those qualifications, you can start learning, getting ready for that as well. So the goal is really to make sure that, you know, when, you know, families have that ambition, when the child is excited, we have, you know, the school option for them, you know, anywhere. So this really throws at the idea of school zones. You know, anywhere is a, you know, Crimson Global Academy zone. And so you don’t really have to worry about, okay, I’m gonna be on Waikiki island, or I’m, you know, moving to a farmer now from Auckland, or, you know, I’m in Kauai.

Jamie Beaton:
You know, what are the schools near there? You have access to this anywhere, which is really exciting. So that’s kind of how we’re thinking about the Global Academy.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, Look, I think it’s fascinating, and I always like to see how people are applying technology to make things better and do things in a smarter way than have been in the past. But I look back to my own childhood. There was a window of time where my family decided, hey, we’re going to travel. We’re going to spend a bit of time, in our case, going back to the UK where my parents and my brothers were born, and visit some other places along the way. And they weren’t so keen on it being a short school holiday type trip. This was something we were gonna be doing over a period of months. And so at that stage, a correspondence school was something you could tap into. I personally really enjoyed the experience.

Paul Spain:
But there was an aspect of accelerated learning even with us being sort of sent these booklets and bits and pieces where once you stripped away the other 20 odd people within the classroom and it was actually, you know, just you, you know, working on the things that a parent there to provide input and so on. But, you know, really, really good resources. I think we got through our school day kind of in the morning. Right. So by lunchtime you had the rest of the day available. And yeah, look, I’m, you know, I’m at a. Probably more middle of the road. Not someone that was, you know, expecting to head off to Oxford or anything.

Paul Spain:
But you know, if that applied to me in that context, I can certainly understand the value of what you were doing. In fact, you know, I remember a discussion with in one of the TV radio newsrooms in New Zealand when it was disclosed that, you know, the prior government was looking at a change to the education system that would allow people to do online learning. I was chatting to someone that was sort of throwing their hands in the air and saying how ridiculous it was and you know, thinking, well, there are technological resources that actually, you know, can be very helpful and get that mix right even better. So I think it’s, you know, it’s a great concept. I’m sure that there are lots of challenges to take that from. You know, what have you got two markets where it kind of operates on the, maybe a similar level to attending a local high school? Is that kind of where you’re at at the moment with New Zealand and the do you have to go through a certification process? What does that actually look like to be able to tick that box and for the state to say, hey, yeah, you can go to that school and not turn up to a normal local high school.

Jamie Beaton:
So because we’re accredited in both New Zealand and the US and we have an international license, we can actually take kids in any geography. Which is why today in our classes we’ve got kids from more than 20 countries. So today we’ve got learners from Costa Rica, from Russia, from Japan, from China, from New Zealand in the classes. So, so now we’re fully accredited. That was a massive ordeal, but we got through that and now it’s really exciting.

Paul Spain:
So you don’t need to do other markets. Like if somebody in Singapore wants to attend, can they do it full time or does it have to sit alongside a lot of.

Jamie Beaton:
Usually they can do it full time, sometimes they have to do it part time. But in most geographies full time is fine because the qualification that we’re teaching is A levels, which basically is the most popular qualification in the world. Schools like Westlake used to do it, King’s College, you know, Auckland Grammar, John Morris actually brought A levels to New Zealand, our executive headmaster. So this is kind of the next evolution for him. So basically A levels are recognized by all the major universities. I used A levels to get into, you know, most of the top schools in the world. So that is, you know, kind of a world class qualification that really sits above many of these national qualifications. And then the American curriculum, AP is also really exciting.

Jamie Beaton:
You know, we’re the first school in New Zealand to, you know, even offer the ap, which is really cool. Previously you could never tap into that here in a big way. So at this stage we’re fully good to go. How this looks like is you hop into a live class with typically six to 12 students. You’re speaking a lot more in that class than a physical classroom because you’re having to screen share, debate, engage. That’s part of your grade. The teacher’s holding you accountable. And so a lot of our families are telling us that the kids are actually growing a lot faster, not only from an academic standpoint, but from a social confidence argumentation, debate, content engagement perspective as well.

Jamie Beaton:
You can annotate, work with multiple kids on a math problem on screen together and then also watch recordings and have mum and dad learn from those statistics of how the child’s participating. So that’s happening right now and it’s already really exciting. Technology becomes very powerful when all the stakeholders in the current system are made better off by this. So today this gives parents a lot more visibility into schooling than they’ve ever had before. It gives students global classmates faster pace, a lot more choice and these top curriculums. And then it gives teachers the ability to work from anywhere and also be amongst really inspiring peers all the time and be tapping into really exciting kids and have a lot of flexibility. So this is significantly more exciting for all the stakeholders than a previous physical school. And I think it’s kind of the recipe for why I think this can be quite significant.

Jamie Beaton:
So the schools of 2030, the schooling infrastructure of 2030 is inevitably going to have a lot of families doing at least part time online learning and some kids that are, you know, quite significant doing full time online learning as well. And our school today, about 70% of kids are part time, 30% are full time. So the average kid still engaged in a physical school using this to accelerate. But we are Seeing, you know, a lot of full timers across New Zealand as well. So I’m really excited about this because I do think education’s something that everyone in the world experiences, but it really hasn’t evolved in a long time and it requires frankly a lot of push to make it evolve. But I think we definitely have the push and this is really moving quick. So that’s kind of how I see this playing in for, you know, parents across the country to access this quite novel education system.

Paul Spain:
Great. Well, I’m really interested to see how it evolves and certainly stay tuned and maybe some further discussion on that down the track because I agree there are a lot of aspects of our education system that haven’t really moved too much. And you know, we are in a very much in a technological, digital age where, yeah, we should be taking advantage of the technology more. So looking forward to seeing how it evolves. Anything else you’d like to add before we finish up, Jamie?

Jamie Beaton:
The last thing I’d add, I often say this to students, but I think it’s really relevant to kind of entrepreneurs, business people. Listening is that often you’re really only limited by your ambition in terms of what you want to achieve. So I guess we started this when we were naive, still naive, but we foolishly think we could take on the world and so just not having limitations like thinking, oh, Russia’s a funny market or China is a totally different world and just going for it can often get a really quite exciting result. So I would really encourage people to be really ambitious with their companies, think about what they can do offshore and how big they can make them. The second thing I would say is capital access has never been better, particularly as a young person today, the idea that my team of 25 year olds could raise all this capital, et cetera, it sounds a bit ridiculous a couple of years ago, but these days there are many venture capital funds that want to bet on good ideas with ambitious people that can create something meaningful. And that means that for young people and people in general, there’s a lot more capital available to fuel ideas than ever before. Also, it means the competitive environment has accelerated. So if you’re just sitting there with the business growing at a certain pace and your competitors are raising venture capital and going very quickly, that’s going to put pressure on you too.

Jamie Beaton:
So these dynamics basically speed up the life cycle of creating a company. And that’s quite a powerful tool for entrepreneurs to use. So a couple of final remarks I’ll leave the listener with.

Paul Spain:
Excellent. Well, thanks very much for coming on the show.

Jamie Beaton:
Thanks, Paul. Really enjoyed it. Great.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, I mean, and we’ll look forward to following where things head to from here and wish you every success.

Jamie Beaton:
Thank you. Appreciate it. You too.

Paul Spain:
All right, thanks, Jamie. Well, hope you enjoyed hearing from Jamie Beaton and learning about Crimson Education. Keep an eye out for a continuation of Crimson’s incredible journey here on New Zealand Business Podcast. And be sure to listen in to our other episodes featuring many of New Zealand’s most successful leaders, including founders such as Rod Drury of Xero Cecilia and James Robinson of My Food Bag, Sir Peter Beck of Rocket Lab, Brooke Roberts of Sharesies, Sir Michael Hill and many more. The New Zealand Business Podcast is brought to you by One New Zealand and my firm, Gorilla Technology. If your mid size or smaller organization is struggling with any aspect of it me, feel free to get in touch. I’d love to have a coffee with you.