Success is NEVER guaranteed - even when you're one of the lucky businesses that's booming because of the COVID-19 pandemic. You've still got to fight, tooth and nail, to beat the new challenges that come with being a high-growth business.
Jarryd Van Poppel, Co-Owner and Managing Director of Euka Future Learning launched his business in 2015 with $1500 and a vision to provide tailored, home-school education to children. Jarryd was flipping traditional education on its head and focusing on the specific needs of each student. Although Jarryd and his two co-owners each brought their own set of skills to Euka Future Learning, they soon realised that none of them had experience in building a successful business. Despite seeing steady growth in the early days, they knew it would not be sustainable without up-skilling.
Before we actually came to The Entourage we had had some really good growth and we were finding some good traction, but the actual management, or creating the business around it, the systems, the operations, was all very all over the place. We didn’t have any experience in it and the result of that is that the owners were wearing all the hats.
The three co-owners found themselves wearing every hat of the business and doing every job, from teacher to marketing manager to head of finance. They were stuck doing it all and were unable to spend the time needed to work on the strategic direction and operational structure of the business, which is what would allow Euka Future Learning to grow sustainably.
In 2017, Jarryd and his co-owners joined The Entourage under the Accelerate program. And over the next 12 months they learnt what was missing from their business, how to implement structurally sound systems and the basics of marketing. They walked away from their first year with over 1000 pages of notes filled with their learnings and lessons.
In December 2019, Jarryd made the decision to rejoin The Entourage under the Elevate program. At this point, he had no idea about the direction his business would take over the next 12 months.
With the sudden boom in demand for home-education services as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, Jarryd and the business’ two other co-owners had to quickly focus their efforts on how to best support their current clientele, whilst also having the systems in place to allow the business to sustainably grow.
Without having the constant guidance from the Elevate team I think we would have really struggled to be able to actually handle the growth that we were experiencing.
Since joining the program, the business hasn’t just had their best year yet - they did an incredible $1,500,000 in the year, and have enough in the pipeline to do at least $2,5000,000 the following year. He’s also on boarded an experienced Sales Manager, grown the database from 5,000 to 16,000, and stepped out of the day-to-day tasks of the business and into his true role as a business owner and leader.