Over 1000 schools worldwide are using a digital learning resource developed by an Audacious Challenge winner.

By Claire Grant | Posted: Tuesday August 9, 2016

Education Perfect, based in Dunedin began as a language tool to help students with vocabulary retention, and has since expanded into English, maths and science modules. It’s fun, competitive effective, and supports key achievement standards.

Education Perfect CEO and co-founder Craig Smith puts its success down to taking it from the perspective of how the student enjoys learning, and because the business has taken feedback from pupils and teachers to adapt it along the way.

The company now employs 30 fulltime staff and has offices across Australia and New Zealand.

It’s been an interesting journey for Craig since the business idea won Audacious in 2007.

“The first stage was working fulltime and focusing just on the product. Making $100,000 was the next milestone stage, where we moved to a commercial business model. But it wasn’t until we reached $1 million revenue five years later that we felt it was a viable business comfortable about employing people. Now we’re entering a completely different phase of business management as we gear up to becoming a $10 million a year business.”

However, he said managing customer relationships is the one element crucial to each stage of development. “Priorities change, but we have learnt quickly that each time we take the focus off the core clients to work on something else the business suffers – it’s the people that count.”

“We struck rejection when we first started, but the support we eventually gained instilled resilience, and generated a great deal of gratitude which established our culture of service. We put lots of energy into improving the customer experience; it’s as rewarding and motivating for the staff to create that “magic moment” of satisfaction as it is for the client who feels like a VIP.”

Craig believes the fundamental issue at the heart of building a business is knowing what you want out of life – financial independence or fame and fortune. The pathway to financial independence is being prepared to push yourself, upskill, keeping trying stuff until you get traction, expect that things won’t go as anticipated and learn from the mistakes, and put up with years of hard work for little financial reward. The business is a reflection of yourself; learning and growing is the real end game.