3000 schools globally and growing: learnings from Douglas Barton, co-founder of Elevate Education
Emerge’ network gives me the opportunity to share learnings from some of the most successful edtech entrepreneurs around the world. This month in my ongoing series of inspiring founder interviews, Douglas Barton, co-founder of Elevate Education shares his journey to creating a product that’s present in 3000 schools globally, as well as stories about how he got inspired to start the company including insights on raising capital and selling into education.
Take time to reflect as you read — these are purposeful long-form interviews. Why? Because we believe “there are no shortcuts to knowledge” (Ben Horowitz) and that “sometimes taking time is actually a shortcut” (Haruki Murakami). So go on — make a coffee, sit back, indulge yourself.
There were three signs we had product market fit:
🙋🏻The first one was when we had students sitting in a workshop who were engaged, laughing, interacting and were just involved in a sixty minute seminar about study.
👨🏻🏫The second moment was when all of a sudden we had teachers calling and telling us that their students want more seminars.
🏫The third moment was when schools started coming back to us and saying we’ve changed the culture within the school and that it’s no longer uncool for students to want to do well.
One line to tell us how well you are doing it?
I’m happy to say that today we work with about 3000 schools across Australia, Singapore, South Africa the UK and the US. We have about a million students every year and in Australia, we work with 42% of all Australian high schools, so it’s nearly to the point now where one in two Australian high schools will run one of our programs.
Your one line elevator pitch?
We help students learn how to study effectively which is proven to improve grades. This is modelled on the practices of the top performing student across 3000 schools globally.
So how did it all start? Why did you decide to become an entrepreneur? I’d actually say that I’d I never decided to become an entrepreneur per se. The term entrepreneur always makes me think of somebody building a company to sell on a few years later. We just kind of happened, we were doing something that we were passionate about and I don’t think we ever actively thought about building a company, taking on capital, or any of those kind of things. We just pursued a passion and it turned out that people described us as entrepreneurs down the track when things start to get successful. I don’t think it was ever a conscious decision, it was more just a labour of love, following something you love doing.
I think the other thing is that we’ve been doing this for seventeen years now, so we started in 2001, when I don’t think it was really cool yet to start a company.
A lot of the “how to” guides and the vocabularies have really been built up since then: things like venture capital, which we didn’t really even know what it was.
It must have been exciting. What has been the best thing about running your own company? Probably two things:
Number one is the freedom and the flexibility to choose what you’re working on, as a result of which I get to focus my time on the stuff that I am passionate about, that I love doing. I’ve been doing it for 17 years, and it’s never felt like work, it’s never felt like a grind. I wake up in the morning excited to get into the office and do what I do.
The second thing is that being able to choose the people that you do it with. I think we’ve been really fortunate that over the last 17 years we’ve built phenomenal teams. So not only do I get to do what I want to do and what I’m passionate about, but I get to do it with people I love working with as well.
One of the challenges we’ve always had as an organisation is that we want to create a place where people wake up on a Monday morning thinking “I can’t wait to get to work”, as opposed to thinking “Oh man, here we go again, back into the week”. I think being able to do what I love with people I love working with, who stretch me and grow me, is definitely an upside.
There are always challenges to overcome for a growing business. What has been the most difficult aspect of the entrepreneurial journey for you? It’s a double edged sword — it’s probably the travel. It’s amazing, I’ve had the great fortune to go to amazing places, like South Africa and do amazing things like go on a safari, meet amazing people I never would have met but for the company.
But after a lot of time spent on the road, you miss home. It loses some of its exoticness and you also end up living in a world of jet lag, so probably at this point in time, the travel is something that I could afford to cut down on.
Can you remember back to where the idea for the company came from? When I was a high school I think I was pretty much exactly like all the students we speak to. The way I got through school was learning a lot of information, then going to an exam and basically regurgitating it, whether that was what the examiner wanted or not. Just basically writing down everything I knew.
Then I ended up getting into law school. And all of a sudden I got to university, where you can take all your notes into an exam with you, you can take your textbooks into an exam. It became less about how much you could remember, and it became about how well you actually understood the information.
I found myself going back to square one basically having to relearn how to learn. I got to the end of the first year thinking “Jeez, I wish I when I was in school I knew what I know now”. My best friend and I were talking about it and we said “Why don’t we do that?”. Why don’t we go into schools and share what we’ve learned. I think we were young enough and stupid enough that we didn’t think of risks or downsides or anything like that, we went and did it.
Everyone says “that’s so brave”, but thinking back on it now, we lived at home, we didn’t have a mortgage, didn’t have a wife or a partner or anything like that.
University was always something you can get back to, so the risk was actually much more imagined than real and if you’re ever going to do it, that’s probably the best time to do it.
Thinking over the last few years, what would you pick out as the key milestones you think happened to get to where you are today? Basically I think it was probably two things, two milestones.
The first one was when we developed the seminar programs we run in schools. We wanted to make the brand about much more than ourselves and what we tended to find was that our competitors, all the other companies in the market were founded by people who wanted to be the presenters, they wanted to deliver the seminars and be the face of the company.
We looked at it and thought that we’re going to be able to find better presenters and trainers than us, so let’s go out and get other people to do it. The beauty of it was that it freed us up, so we could actually build a business. Otherwise obviously you become a victim of your success. As the company grows, you spend all your time presenting the seminars and running the workshops.
The second thing which I think was really crucial, especially as we’ve grown globally, is that everyone that runs one of the business units has equity within the business, which has allowed us to build a really attractive value proposition for our own staff. They’ve got the financial upside of growing a business and building their own asset, and they also get the opportunity to work overseas.
The average age of the guys that run each of the business units is about 27, so they’ve got an amazing level of responsibility that they wouldn’t necessarily get in a normal corporate role. As a result, now we’re basically hiring people whose alternate choice is going to management consulting or to go into an investment bank. When we started, I never would have imagined that we’d have such high quality people. It’s the quality of the people you have that allows you to grow the business, so giving them an attractive value proposition I think was really critical.
Getting to “market-product fit” is essential for the success of any business. How do you think you knew you had achieved this? What were you measuring to know you had ‘got there’? There were three signs we had product market fit.
The first one was when we had students sitting in a workshop who were engaged, laughing, interacting and were just involved in a sixty minute seminar about study.
The second moment was when all of a sudden we had teachers calling and telling us that their students want more seminars. That was pretty mind blowing, because we had fifteen-year-olds and sixteen-year-olds saying they want to hear more about study.
The third moment was when schools started coming back to us and saying we’ve changed the culture within the school and that it’s no longer uncool for students to want to do well.
We had schools coming back saying that they just got their record results and that the programs were really a part of it. I think we’ve got two key audience members — the students and the teachers who buy the programs. When we had the students interested and engaged and when we had teachers saying this is actually beneficial and getting results, that’s when we knew we were onto something here.
Making an impact is really important in Education. How do you measure yours? We do two things.
The first thing is — generally with almost every school we work with, we’ll do a behavioural change study. Before we work with the school, we do a survey which benchmarks their students’ study habits and study behaviours. Then we come back and we survey them at a number of points later in the year to determine what’s actually changed, how many students have adopted an alternate or new study habit or study strategy.
The second thing is that with a lot of our clients, we also do controlled studies, where they’ll have some students go through the programs and other students who won’t. We’ve done it a number of times with schools in the UK and with some universities in South Africa.
In each case the group would come in after mid-year exams. In their final exams, the group that’s gone through the Elevate programs, has had their results increased by four times. Being able to demonstrate that there is a level of change and that there is a return on investment for a school is a is a massive thing, not only for us, but I think for almost any other EdTech provider.
You have done well against a background where everyone says that selling in the edtech market is really hard — how did you do it? We’ve never really had a massive challenge or found it particularly hard to sell into schools. I think one of the reasons we were able to do it successfully and a lot of companies don’t cross that bridge, is because we’re taking the time to get into the customers’ shoes, in this case, get in the shoes of teachers. You’ve got to understand the challenges that teachers face on a day-to-day basis. They’ve got demands being placed on them from parents and from the school, they’re a punching bag in the media and so there’s a lot of challenges that teaches face. If you don’t understand those and navigate around them, it’s extremely difficult to connect with teachers.
I think the other big one is that a lot of companies don’t take the time to understand the challenges that a teacher faces when they try to drive behavioural change within a school as well. So basically people end up speaking a different language to the people that they’re trying to sell to.
Part of your journey involved raising investment — what did you learn from that? Funnily enough, we never have.
We’ve kind of come into Emerge through a little bit of a different loop. We’ve come in as investors and venture partners with Emerge, as opposed to coming in on the capital side of things.
We never raised capital, because we simply weren’t savvy enough to know what were the organisations that you could go to. Also, in 2001, the ecosystem was a lot different, you didn’t have accelerators or incubators or of these kind of support networks either. A lot has changed in 17 years.
If you had to pass on 3 golden rules for aspiring or current entrepreneurs, what would they be?
I think number one: Find a problem that you care about solving. That the path is going to be hard and what gets you over the difficulties and keeps you going is the fact that you’re actually working on solving a problem that’s meaningful to you and that you actually care about.
The second thing is focus on people, especially as the company grows. You are only as good as the people that you work with. Everyone always talks about the value proposition of their product or the value proposition of the company to the buyer, but I think the other thing that’s as critical as having a value proposition for your employees as well. Why should anyone care about working for you, why should they care about staying with the company as it grows.
The third one is culture. Inevitably the culture is going to form without your intervention, so you’re you’re much better off proactively shaping the culture. That’s going to be the invisible force that’s going to push the company to either achieve its objectives or fail.
As regards learning from others, is there one course or book you think everyone should take/do that has helped you? “Built to last” by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras.
I think it’s an awesome reminder that when you start building a company, you’re really doing two things: you’re building a product, but you’re also building a company as well.
I think once you’ve got the product pace right, building the company effectively becomes the really critical component. I think the book has some great timeless advice on how to build a great company.
In terms of the key components that founders need to succeed, Emerge focus on the right Network, core Expertise and access to Capital. Which parts were critical to you early on? I think for us early on easily the biggest one was expertise.
People talk about scaling a company and that there are so many challenges with it. We were straight out of uni, so we never even worked in a company ourselves, let alone built a company before.
All the challenges from how to hire effectively, how to build a culture, how to let go of people in an equitable way. Almost every one of the challenges that we faced, we faced alone and we made hundreds of mistakes along the way that were probably needless.
I think the most important thing is having the expertise, having that the mentors, the coaches, the network, so you can learn from their experience and not make as many mistakes.
So Douglas, what’s the next big goal for you? The next big goal is opening offices in 2019 in Texas and California. Continuing to grow the business globally is a big one for us. And our goal for the next four years is to open two international offices every year.
The second one is to take what we’ve been doing with schools and begin moving to a bit of a more B2C space. Over the last two years we have had thousands of parents approach and ask whether this is this something that they could do one-on-one with their children at home.
During the last twelve months we’ve launched a product that works with students and their families one-on-one, in the household, and the results for that have been amazing. The level of improvement in student performance is higher even than what we’ve got happening in schools at the moment. Continuing to grow that product in the B2C market is goal number two.
This interview was kindly given by Douglas Barton, co-founder of Elevate to Nic Newman, Partner at Emerge Education.
Thanks Doug!— Nic.
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Thankyou for reading… I would hugely appreciate some claps 👏 and shares 🙌 so that others can find it!
Nic
Nic Newman
