introduction
A passionate educator at heart, our founders used to operate a tuition matching service (tuition agency) with the same name AGrader.
It was during the years of operating a tuition agency matching teachers to tuition centers that we realized that many tuition providers in the early 2010s had no structured curriculum or worksheets.
The tuition centers would just provide the space and took in students without actually having any worksheets of their own, asking teachers to photocopy worksheets from assessment books, or just simply using “top school exam papers”, over and over again.
Now, this was a big problem because there was no structure in the photocopying, and the lessons were not well planned, let alone well executed.
tarting AGrader Learning Centre in 2013, we became avid curriculum writers, spending thousands of hours researching and studying all the textbooks, guidebooks, assessment books and top school exam papers on the market to create the most concise and “best” worksheets for our students.
Over the years, we grew in popularity in our 1st outlet in Jurong West and started the 2nd branch in May 2016 in Yishun (Chong Pang).
After our 2nd outlet was well received, we tried to franchise our brand in order to spread the high quality that AGrader brings throughout Singapore.
Our first few months in presenting our “franchise” were a failure.
We presented to hundreds of prospects but nobody was interested in buying our brand.
Why? We thought to ourselves. Weren’t we producing one of the best curricula available in the country and yet at an affordable price point to parents?
It was then that one of our teachers teaching in Jurong West asked us about the franchising opportunity, and commented that she wanted to be an operator too (she operates a branch today in the North-East area).
Then we realized that we were presenting to the wrong people.
We were presenting to investors, bankers, lawyers, engineers, and professionals who were not in our field of expertise and didn’t understand our true value proposition.
We then started to hold franchise presentations to teachers, and only teachers.
MOE scholars came. Principals of schools came. MOE Head of departments came.
And so they say - the rest is history.
A MOE head of department and a MOE scholar later - we had 4 outlets, and the rest was easy because as high ranking educators - they could instantly tell the quality of our curriculum and systems.
