The test preparation organization Career Launcher has introduced a low-cost franchise model to target entrepreneurs, individuals including housewives, and teachers who want to associate with the brand with minimum investment. The latest Virtual Business Partner program is part of the company’s strategy to strengthen its deep presence in the Tier-2, -3 markets and beyond.
"The Virtual Business Partner program is built on our vision to shape the lives and careers of the students irrespective of their location. While Tier-1 markets have obvious benefits over the students in remote areas in terms of access to quality education, we are bridging the divide with our online learning, where Virtual Business Partners will play a crucial role on-the-ground. This program enables the professionals, who lost their jobs for one reason or other or the entrepreneurs who had to shut their businesses due to the pandemic or any other reason, to start their own business in the online education space," said Himanshu Jain, President and COO, CL Educate, which owns Career Launcher. Housewives and fresh graduates, who want to become an entrepreneur, can also partner with us without any significant investment, he added.
Career Launcher has a presence in over 115 cities with 250+ test preparation centers run by 100+ franchise partners across the country. With the Virtual Business Partner program, the company is targeting to add over at least 200+ business partners across the country. It has already signed up three individuals as Virtual Business Partner in less than 15 days of the launch.
New Business Model
The Virtual Business Partner model enables the partners to operate from home and earn handsome margins on the sales. The partners just need to focus on customer acquisition through social connections and local marketing. The academic delivery and online learning are taken care of by the company and expert teachers. The entire academic servicing and classes are conducted on www.aspiration.ai – a Career Launcher proprietary platform for online education. The online test preparation training will include both live and recorded lectures complemented by e-books and test series.
The model calls for a one-time fee of Rs 10,000 for startup activities including initiation and rendering the pre-commencement training and ongoing support. Virtual Business Partners can earn over 10 percent of the monthly sales as their margins, which increases on the achievement of certain sales targets and milestones. The company claims that the partners can easily earn Rs 50,000 to Rs 1 lakh in a month under this model acting as a one-man enterprise.
The company pegs the online education market in India to grow to $1.96 billion with around 9.6 million students by 2021. It expects that test preparation will be the fastest-growing category in 2021, growing at a CAGR of 64 percent. Further, the company expects both the classroom and online modes of education to coexist. “The future outlook of test preparation category and the overall education sector is bright as GER (Gross Enrolment Ratios) continues to improve in schools and colleges. Both types of learning models – online and offline – will continue to exist. In my opinion, blended learning will be the way to go, wherein 30-40 percent of the course will be delivered in an offline mode and the balance 60-70 percent will be online,” shared Jain.
Robust Growth amid the Pandemic
As Covid-19 compelled organizations to modify their product offerings and delivery to an online mode, the traditional businesses were caught unawares and struggled to cope up with the sudden challenges. However, Career Launcher was not much impacted by the pandemic due to its focus on technology and innovation. “Career Launcher is probably the first Edtech organization and launched VSAT-based education as early as in 2003-04. We have been offering online programs to students in remote locations for the last 4-5 years. Hence, the students who were consuming classes in an offline mode were conveniently moved to online classes during the lockdown,” recounted Jain.
Without revealing the figures, he mentioned that Career Launcher has observed impressive student enrollment growth over the last nine months. “We saw a number of enrollments coming from cities where we were not having a physical presence. In addition, small coaching institutes were unable to offer online classes, hence those students moved to large players like Career Launcher. The enrollment numbers were impressive as we offered online learning through our time-tested and robust aspiration.ai platform as well as conducted aggressive digital marketing campaigns,” detailed Jain.
He added that the company’s aggressive online presence and initiatives enabled the franchise partners to survive and thrive through the pandemic. “Not even a single of our franchise center shut its operations as we enabled a seamless transition from the classroom to online learning in less than 24 hours. This helped our franchisees to conveniently move all their classes/batches to online mode without investing a single rupee or wasting any time. We partnered with various franchisees to seek their services for academic classes that were being run centrally. In addition, we trained and helped our franchisees to run digital marketing campaigns,” he shared.
Further, the company launched multiple program variants across various price points thereby giving manifold choices to the students depending upon their needs and requirements. This helped franchisees to market and sell various online program variants which were centrally delivered by the core academic team, thereby ensuring minimum impact on their revenues. Moreover, the company offered various incentive programs to franchisees on the achievement of targeted enrolments and revenues. These initiatives helped the organization to increase its student enrollments.
