Entrepreneurs in the spotlight: Will Orr-Ewing & Josh Pull of Keystone Tutors Limited

Will Orr-Ewing and Josh Pull are the directors and shareholders of Keystone Tutors Limited (Keystone), Ryecroft Glenton clients since 2015.

Keystone is a private tutoring and education advisory business with offices in London, Hong Kong and Singapore.

  • How do you stand out in your market?

Will: We like to think that Keystone has been a market leader in improving the standard of tutoring services in the UK. When we started Keystone in 2007, tutoring had a poor reputation amongst teachers and schools. The UK tutoring sector as a whole was amateurish. In response we applied lessons learned from more established tutoring firms from across the world, especially the US, whilst also bringing in the professional standards expected in other industries, such as law, banking and teaching. 

  • How has your business changed over the last 10 years?

Josh: In 2013 we hired our first full time employed tutor, we were solely UK based and our office team was just a handful of us.  We now have offices in Hong Kong and Singapore, just under 60 employed tutors, around 200 self-employed tutors and a 17 strong office team. 

  • What motivated you to start Keystone?

Will: when I graduated from university I started tutoring as a means to finance a documentary about a lost trail up to Machu Pichu. Needless to say, the trail remained lost and the documentary unmade…..but I did surprise myself by stumbling on the revelation that I really enjoyed tutoring.  So much so that, inspired by Dragons Den, I decided in 2007 to try to make a career out of it. In 2008 I managed to persuade Josh (we had both studied History at Oriel College, Oxford together) to leave his job as an investment banker to join me.  

  • How did you secure the financing you needed to start the business?

Will: by living at home and using the money I saved from not having to pay rent! We have never borrowed any money, not even from friends or family so the business has been 100% bootstrapped from inception.

  • What advice would you give your younger self with the benefit of hindsight?

Josh: we are a people business so a large part of the learning journey for us has been how to get the best out of our team at different stages of the business lifecycle. We’ve looked to maintain a warm and relatively informal culture throughout. The challenge has been to add more structure to the team and consistency to our management approach whilst maintaining the friendly culture that is vital to ensuring people enjoy working at Keystone. My advice to my younger self would be:

  • even when you are a small business, imagine yourself as a larger business and implement carefully thought through systems and processes that you can grow into
  • don’t put off difficult conversations and decisions; they never get easier through being delayed
  • delegate as much as you possibly can & don’t think that you are the only person who can do a particular task/role. You’ll be surprised how good people will thrive on being given responsibility and autonomy

Will: At the outset my advice would be to make sure that there is demand for your product before you spend too much time obsessing over the quality of it: on occasion we have been guilty of launching a new service which we loved but which failed to gain traction. Taking the opposite tack (and once you’ve got traction), I would also recommend never taking your product or service for granted: always look to improve it, do all the small things right.

  • What do you find most rewarding about what you have achieved?

Will: I find it very rewarding to have created a healthy business that delivers a quality service to grateful clients who care deeply about the outcome (their children’s education); whilst giving our staff the opportunity to develop their career in a friendly but professional environment.  It’s a virtuous circle where the effort that we put into delivering the best tutoring experience we can is rewarded in the feedback we receive from parents/pupils which in turn drives us to continuously improve.  On a personal development level, I feel that 15 years of running and growing a business has given me a much stronger level of professional judgement & decision making. It has also been a pleasure representing so many interesting tutors. One of our alumni is Ed Cooke, a ‘Grand Master of Memory’ who tutored for us for many years and then went on to co-found the app Memrise, winner of the best app at the Google Play awards in 2017.

Josh: I’m proud of how we have succeeded in growing the business in a financially sustainable fashion, taking the opportunities presented to us without ever overstretching ourselves. For example, our expansion into Hong Kong and Singapore was done in a very measured way to minimise risk and it has worked very well.

  • And what have you found most challenging?

Josh: I wouldn’t say there’s been on single thing that’s consistently been most challenging. It’s usually the exceptional instances that we haven’t foreseen that cause the most stress for us and our team members. However strong our team, systems and processes are, there will inevitably be instances where issues occur. It’s important to try not to dwell on them or take them personally; you can’t foresee everything that might crop up. The key thing is to deal with these instances calmly and wherever possible update and improve processes to try and prevent them occurring again.

Will: as a fast growing ‘people’ business, we have had to constantly re-think our structure and processes as we have grown to make sure that we can continue to deliver an excellent service whilst also giving our administrative and tutoring staff the best opportunities to develop their careers. Doing this without letting the end service suffer has been a constant challenge but it has been a pleasure to see team members consistently rise to it and develop new skills in the process.  

Keystone tutors children from 7+ through to university entrance exams. More information about Keystone can be found at: https://www.keystonetutors.com/

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