Recommendation
Recommendations for Investors
My Educational Venture Analyst (EVA) recommendation is to invest in Skooli. Learning loss is a major pain point for educators across the globe; the disruptions due to COVID-19 as well as the difficulty for some students to flourish in online learning in general have accelerated this. By providing 24/7, on-demand access to tutors, Skooli is solving this problem for many students, schools, and districts. Skooli allows schools to extend the power of a great teacher beyond classroom hours at an affordable cost.
While other tutoring services exist, Skooli is one of a few, particularly in Canada, who offer on-demand and unlimited tutoring options. Further, they differentiate themselves by using a very high-quality teaching base (thanks to their Teach Away business). In Ontario specifically, students, parents, and schools are particularly concerned about the quality of tutors; Skooli's Unlimited tutoring service uses Ontario-certified teachers (of which they have over 1000), which no other competitor is offering.
Skooli has a unique advantage with it's sister company, Teach Away, as they have access to a continuously updating pool of roughly 1.5 million teachers. They work with teachers and schools all over the world to help place teachers in teaching positions, which means their services are known to schools and districts (their main targets). With their TVO partnership in Ontario alone, Skooli's service is known to 400,000+ students.
With the online learning market showing no signs of slowing down and the online tutoring service market set to reach as high as 18 billion USD by 2028 (Grandview Research, 2021), Skooli is poised to establish itself as the number one on-demand, online tutoring service in Canada, with huge potential to expand into the United States.
In addition to providing a much needed service to students, Skooli allows teachers to extend their earning potential and scale their impact by providing steady access to students in need of support. Teachers can generate additional income from the comfort of their own homes by working as a tutor.
Recommendations for Skooli
While Skooli's platforms are intuitive and function well, some updates to the aesthetics would be encouraged. While the Skooli.com platform appears to be relatively modern, the Skooli Unlimited platform has an odd choice of colours, font, etc. This would be a simple fix with the help of a web designer to come up with a new brand look and feel.
The two services make Skooli's offering somewhat confusing; they look different (as mentioned above), they function different, and they are even hosted in different places. Consolidating the two services would likely help increase brand recognition and simplify a number of tasks, including marketing. As the SWOT analysis noted, the unlimited feature is only available for math and science subject areas; Skooli should seek to expand the unlimited offering to as many subject areas as possible. A single offering of on-demand and unlimited tutoring for all subject areas would be an elegant and simple solution that will be much easier to market.
While Skooli is performing quite strongly in Canada, they need to push hard to get into the U.S. in order to gain a share of that 18 billion USD market. While Canada has a market of roughly 5 million k-12 students as of 2019 (State of The Nation, 2020), the U.S. had 53 million enrolled as of 2018 (United States Census Bureau, 2019). The market is tenfold in the U.S. as it is in Canada. In order to have success in the U.S., Skooli will need to adopt the same strategy they have in Ontario whereby they leverage their teacher pool from Teach Away and provide certified teachers for the local area. This will require them to ensure that they have certified teachers for specific states before try to market to districts and schools in the area. Fortunately, the Teach Away platform works with teachers from all over the world, with a large pool of teachers based in the U.S. already.