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.

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.