A Team Tuition scales to support 80% YoY growth.

At the heart of every successful business is a strong purpose and for A Team Tuition that purpose has been born out of its founder's life story. As a child, Hayden McEvoy struggled in school and was diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). A few years later, he turned to swimming to gain control and he not only excelled in the pool, but found a way to get his education back on track.

“It was the hardest year of my life physically, but I succeeded in becoming a national level swimmer and I thought why shouldn’t I be able to apply the same level of effort and succeed in school?,” said Hayden McEvoy, Founder of A Team Training.

Determined to make it happen, McEvoy spent the next year researching and developing a plan that would help him to take control of his learning. The plan worked and McEvoy lifted himself up from a D student to an A student and went on to study biomedicine and psychology. It was only when looking for a part-time job at university that he thought to himself that others might benefit from the techniques he developed and so he decided to become a tutor.

McEvoy took on one student, then two, then three and before long he was building a team in his mom’s living room to keep up with demand. A Team Tuition’s growth continued at a rapid pace of 80% YoY for the next eight years before its systems and processes started to cave under the pressure. Needing a way to scale and deliver a better experience to more students, the business turned to Salesforce.

Before implementing Salesforce, A Team Tuition had 200 tutors and a growing operations team and was still struggling to keep up with demand. As many as 500 parents were calling each month to book in their children and they faced delays of two to three weeks just to complete registration.

The business was also experiencing a new wave of growth after partnering with the Australian Boarding Schools Association. A Team Tuition was invited to design a framework for mentoring and coaching boarding school students, and soon began working with a number of the Association’s schools.

“We had a huge opportunity in front of us and it was just a matter of how fast we could scale. That’s why we turned to Salesforce; we wanted to provide as many students as possible with the opportunity to achieve at school,” said McEvoy.

One of the priorities for A Team Tution was eliminating the pain and inefficiency resulting from its patchwork of systems and spreadsheets. Data management was out of control and potential opportunities were slipping through the cracks. In fact, it was only while implementing Salesforce that the business realised how bad its data had been.

“We realised there was a lot of unclarity and inconsistency across our data and so we took the time to clean things up and used Salesforce to streamline our sales process. We’re now managing leads and data in a more consistent way and have a clear view of who our customers are,” said McEvoy.

In its first few months of using Salesforce, A Team Tuition has gone on to streamline many more of its processes and create vast efficiencies in how it does business. One of the biggest benefits for parents and students has been reducing the registration process from two to three weeks down to one day. This has resulted from the efficiency of using just one system and also by leveraging Salesforce Maps to match students with local tutors who are experts in the right subjects. In the past, this step alone would take 25 minutes of sorting through spreadsheets. Now, it takes five seconds.

A Team Tuition has also reduced the time and hassle of internal processes like payroll and reporting, and is able to better track the performance of tutors and students. It has also reduced the time and effort of preparing forecasts and increased forecast accuracy by 18%. 

A Team Tuition is now using Salesforce to improve other areas of the business, including communication with parents and schools. In the past, tutors would occasionally send email updates to parents, but there was no formal process in place to regularly track or report on students’ progress. This has changed with A Team Tuition now requiring tutors to provide a report on every session. The report is completed within a Community Cloud portal which has been launched for tutors and is then sent out to students and parents via Pardot. The completion of the report also triggers invoicing and payroll processes—motivating tutors to get it done.

“Parents love the new reporting and it is especially great for those with students at boarding school as they may not have as much chance to find out what’s happening in the sessions. They now have more visibility into their child’s progress and how we’re working with them to improve,” McEvoy.

In the future, reporting will be expanded to schools so that they too can see how students are progressing in relation to their tutoring. For example, they will be able to see how many students have lifted their grades and by how much.

Most recently, A Team Tuition has had to adapt and find new ways of supporting students in response to COVID-19. The disruption to the education system has been unprecedented with schools across almost all states and territories moving curriculum online and parents encouraged to keep their children at home. It has been a challenge for students at all levels, as well as for parents and teachers who have been working doubly hard to ensure children continue to learn.

Recognising this disruption and knowing that many students would need tutoring to get through this time, McEvoy made the decision to move all tutoring online.

“Our entire team moved online the third week of March and while there were a few early concerns from parents about how tutoring online would work, we’ve not had any issues. I couldn’t imagine being able to do this a year ago, but today our processes are mature and we have Salesforce to provide transparency of what’s happening,” said McEvoy.

While some students have paused tutoring over financial concerns, the business is seeing an overall increase in need as parents look for ways to support children studying at home. As a result, A Team Tuition is onboarding new tutors to support more families and digitising more of its resources. Some of these resources, like lesson plans, will be made available to tutors using Salesforce Knowledge within Community Cloud.

“Our tutors are more productive and reporting more focused engagement from students, so we know the model is working and we will continue to grow to meet demand,” said McEvoy.