Reskilling the Workforce Through Education-as-a-Service
When an unfulfilled need meets a deep-seated passion and an individual with an entrepreneurial mindset who’s willing to take the risk to do something about it, it can form the foundation of a startup with great potential. This was the case for Nick Suwyn and his company, Promineo Tech, an education-as-a-service platform.
For Nick, the seedlings for Promineo Tech in 2017 when he worked as an instructor at a coding boot camp teaching people software development. He fell in love with the work and helping people develop new skills, so much so, that he was spending 12+ hour days at work. This led to a leadership position that afforded him a 360-degree view of not just the programming, but the operations behind it all — and that revealed some key improvements that could be made.
Nick began architecting what that could look like and the following year launched his own coding boot camp. Initially, he ran the camps out of his living room, but quickly outgrew the space.
But building the program was only half of the work. Nick had to develop the business side too as he worked to find the right avenue for distribution and hire a team to help. Today, Promineo Tech is a remote-first program teaching skills in high-growth industries to adults who want to gain new skills for a career change without having to go back to school. The programs are now offered in 35+ community colleges across the country and the business continues to scale both horizontally and vertically.
In this Collective Conversation, Nick shares his journey of building and scaling the business and offers his advice for creating a successful team.
What is Promineo Tech?
Promineo Tech is an education-as-a-service platform. We partner with colleges to help them launch their own coding boot camps and other workforce training programs. We run all of the marketing, admissions, and education for these programs for colleges. We co-brand or white label our programs to enable the colleges to run them, and offer programs like software development, data engineering, digital marketing, SaaS tech sales, etc. All of these programs are short-term, part-time programs with a length of about 16 to 26 weeks, depending on the specific boot camp.
They’re all geared toward adult workers looking to re-career into a high-growth industry. One of the important things about Promineo Tech is we’re a mission-driven company and we’re focused on making workforce training, especially technology workforce training, affordable and accessible. We do that through a unique flip classroom model and partnering with our colleges to get these programs into more locations.
How did Promineo Tech come to be?
In 2017, I started working as an instructor at a local coding boot camp and I absolutely loved it. I loved working with people who had never coded before and teaching them software development and then seeing them land jobs in the industry. I was spending 12 to 13 hours a day working there so I quickly moved up into leadership over the academic team. I worked there for about a year but started to notice some things that could be done better in the industry. I took another job as a software engineer while I started thinking about how to launch my own coding boot camp.
I got a group of people together who wanted to learn to code and I started teaching them out of my living room. I taught them how to code and helped them land jobs in the industry. Then I got another group of people together. I continued doing that until the class sizes got too large so we moved out of my living room and into a local co-working space.
Originally, I had designed all of the programs to have a remote-first aspect to them so that students could attend in person or remotely. Around that time COVID hit and it was pretty easy for us to flip the switch to remote learning. The programs are already designed to have the same quality of experience as in-person.
We then had an organization approach us and ask if they could white label our programs. We did that and I hired our first employee, Nick Barraclough as the Director of Business Development with the focus on exploring this white labeling a little more. It just seemed like a better business model. After doing a lot of research, we found the coding boot camp industry was about eight years old and community colleges had not participated yet. We started talking with some of them and found that there was actually a lot of interest in what we were doing. In the beginning of 2020, we rolled out our education-as-a-service platform and partnered with three of the local Maricopa community colleges. From there, we’ve been scaling out to more colleges.
How has Promineo Tech grown since?
Since we launched the education-as-a-service platform with the original three colleges, we’re now at about 35 colleges across the United States. We focus primarily on community colleges, but we have a handful of universities as well. We’re growing and scaling out vertically by adding more and more colleges, but we’re also starting to scale out horizontally by adding new programs. We started with the front-end and back-end coding boot camps and then launched the data engineering. In June, we launch the digital marketing program and then in Q4 we launch SaaS tech sales.
What’s been one of the biggest challenges you’ve had to overcome?
I think one of the biggest ones early on was finding the product/market fit on the B2B side. We knew we wanted to white label. We knew we wanted a platform. But who was the right profile for that? We spent a lot of time, money, and effort looking around. We tried with nonprofits for a while, figuring that might be something they would like to do, especially those focused on reskilling people to get into different industries. We talked with other companies along the way and when we came to the community college, we realized that was the way for us to go. Figuring that out was challenging but it was really great once we figured it out.
What’s been one of the biggest contributing factors to your growth?
I think one of the biggest contributing factors to our growth is our team. I’m a big believer in hiring great people who share the same vision and values. We have different thoughts but the same core values. I think we got lucky finding the right people at the right time to bring on who could help us continue our growth.
How has the experience been with StartupAZ Collective?
As a first-time founder, there’s a lot of “you don’t know what you don’t know.” Being part of the Collective, I learned a lot about what it means to scale a growth venture almost through osmosis — just being around other people who were doing similar things. I’m asking questions and answering questions where I can. I’ve gained a lot of knowledge and a more expanded vision of what we’re doing at Promineo Tech. Equally valuable are the connections that I’ve made. It’s been really great to get to know other people who are in a similar boat and share these journeys that we’re on.
What’s next for Promineo Tech?
We’re currently expanding outside of the United States. I used to always say that we’re an education-as-a-service provider that partners with colleges across the United States and I can’t say that anymore. We’re talking with a lot of colleges in Canada currently and then we’re looking at Mexico next. We’re always looking at what’s the next program in a high-growth industry to roll out so we can help working adults reskill without having to go back to school for four years.
What advice would you give to other startup founders in Arizona?
Hire a good team. I fully believe in finding the right people who have different thoughts but the same core values and believe in the mission. It’s important to find people who are smarter than you in the areas that your company needs. Each company needs different areas of expertise, but find those people who are great in that area and then ask what you can do for them to help them be successful and then get out of the way. Let them make big things happen. That’s been a learning opportunity for me and I’m starting to get good at it. I’ve gotten lucky with a lot of the hires that we’ve made. But the summary is to hire good people, give them everything they need to succeed, and get out of their way.
