Starting Up in Education

Having worked for 3+ years in the business development of a K-12 school, I learnt a lot. I was able to understand exactly how a school/local business runs. From my experience, I feel that this is one sector which has still not advanced or evolved at the same pace as other sectors. For budding entrepreneurs, there is still a lot of opportunity which  can be tapped.

I have tried to classify the opportunities I could see in broad categories.

Function Outsourcing: One can look at some function which the school is performing and which we can do better. For instance, in my experience, most schools are losing money or barely breaking even in their transport function. Schools would be willing to outsource transport to a third party, given the basic safety and quality guidelines are adhered to.

Selling to Schools: Selling new products/services is good way to startup. In an increasingly competitive environment, schools are looking to provide a better experience to their parents. Educomp (an Indian company selling tech products) was able to successfully do this and has shown immense growth. The only downside here is that the number of schools are limited and their payment cycles are bad and irregular.

Around Teachers: Recruitment services, networking, knowledge sharing between teachers are some examples of opportunities which one can look into.

Around Students: The number of students is good. A big concern is since school children are young in age, reaching them directly is difficult. Mostly they don’t have phones or tabs and parents tend to play a key role.

Around Parents: Parents are the influencers in most decisions around school children. Providing a service to them looks good to me as the numbers are great and a parent wants to give the best to his/her child. Classifieds, Marketplaces, Networking etc. can be looked at. An idea I had in particular was to start an Online School Tiffin Service (like a Faasos for School Tiffins).

Education is an exciting space and Edtech has immense scope according to me.