Scaling an Educational Services Business to $50 Million: Todd Zipper, CEO of Learning House (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Is there a particular subject material or type of degree that you specialize in?

Todd Zipper: Good question. We are, essentially, generalists. Initially, my thesis when I saw the opportunity at Learning House was that I didn’t want to work with one particular subject area. Let’s say, teaching. That’s a big program online. Another big program online is nursing.

Sramana Mitra: Your competitors, like Hot Chalk, has a big nursing program.

Todd Zipper: Exactly. Hot Chalk is probably our biggest competitor. Our biggest client and their biggest client share the same name Concordia. Their biggest client is Concordia Portland and ours is Concordia St. Paul. We also have another Concordia at Texas. The approach that we took was when I go and meet with Presidents at universities, I want to take their entire school online. I just don’t want to do the MBA program. I also want to do a DBA because when you market business degrees, you want to have choices for people or else your cost of acquisition goes up.

What you’ve seen play out for Learning House over the last four years is that our school client on an average has 10 or more programs. We are tackling technology, business, education, and healthcare. It really runs the entire gamut of higher ed. About a year ago, we acquired a coding bootcamp because we saw a great opportunity in this new movement around what’s being dubbed as the just-in-time education where the thought I had was, “Why can’t our colleges offer these types of educational paths?”

We now own a company called Software Guild. We’re working on several different opportunities to partner with universities to help bring to their students the coding bootcamp model that is burgeoning right now. For us, it’s more of a market-driven approach around what curriculum we are going to offer. It’s everything from Associates to PhD. We have programs in that entire gamut and in all the different subject areas that I mentioned.

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like you got involved in this company when it was doing about $7 million. The company was based in Kentucky, right?

Todd Zipper: Correct.

Sramana Mitra: It was in 2011 when you got involved?

Todd Zipper: We got involved in November of 2011. It’s basically been four years. Over the last four years, we’ve grown from 75 employees and $7 million in revenue to about 370 employees. This year, we should approach $50 million in revenue. Obviously, we’ve had very nice organic growth.

Sramana Mitra: What were some of the strategic manoeuvres during these last four years that have helped you grow?

Todd Zipper: To circle back to the solutions, the company originally was just offering a curriculum. Where I saw the opportunity was around the marketing enrolment and retention services. It’s called the student acquisition, so to speak. That’s where the rubber meets the road.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Scaling an Educational Services Business to $50 Million: Todd Zipper, CEO of Learning House
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