I have not been on this blog for quite a while for the simple reason that we had to make sure we all got through the challenges we had faced over the last 7 months. Now that many have been dealt with, we are moving ahead stronger. I will try to be more active in supporting you here as well.
I do understand the stress all this turmoil has caused and hopefully I can provide some clarity and comfort in that we are not a company to ever quit, and are focused on driving value for our shareholders. We have recently started a marketing product / business campaign that will provide many more updates in the market. we know we have been lacking here, but with a limited team, we needed to focus on the business. We had been trying to figure out how to continually update the market without always doing press releases. It is expensive and is not sustainable for everyday activities. We have launched our
https://corporate.betteru.ca/ and
https://readytogo.betteru.ca/ to provide more details on what we have been building.
We also launched our marketing campaign only this week. It will include promotions about Ready-To-Go, about the company, about clients, new innovations we have been developing and more. If you are not already following us on our social media channels, please do. Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter. We will also be launching our blogging site shortly
https://blog.betteru.ca/ that will also share more updates from us, our partners and the industry. This site is being developed further and more current details will be there soon.
I also wanted to address the comments about our SaaS product – Ready-To-Go and explain the structure. The back-end system we are using is from Ottolearn. Our app is also now available on the App Store and Google play under betterU’s brand. It was branded betterU in partnership with Ottolearn. We work very close with the Ottolearn team and have been developing cross promotions together, have created joint proposals for the government and even with some of their global clients. They have been promoting betterU to their clients, some of their other partners, have written a case study on us that they shared with their entire client base. They have told us we are the most active partner in their tool as we are developing a lot we need to support corporates. They are honestly a really great company and we are super glad that they see the vision we have been building for the skilling industry.
It is important to understand that technology is really only a tool. What you do with the tool, is where the magic happens. MS word, Shopify, AWS services and so many others provide technology services that it is up to the user to build their value within it. Ottolearn has a great tool and when we were developing our own skills platform, we came across them. Because they offered a tool that could support much of what we needed, definitely not everything, it made the most sense to partner. Our Skills Platform Ready-to-Go requires a lot of our own technology to be developed to support the many variables we have been adding to the system. We need a server partner (AWS), a delivery tool (Ottolearn), assessments (multiple partners), content (multiple partners), a management platform for our clients, their employees (betterU), a platform for automation of onboarding global content partnerships (betterU) into the delivery tool. There is a lot more we are developing. The entire combination of layers and tech is what makes up Ready-To-Go. The value of our offering is the scope of the system. The cost of Ottolearn ranges, but on average is $2/user/month. Our costs increase as we add content partners, assessments and the management tools required to be able to support our clients’ employees.
While this might seem like a simple process or product, let me provide another analogy so you better understand. While Expedia is more B2C, they have made complexity, simple. You select your destination, your dates and other variables you might need, like airline, hotel….etc. Then Expedia serves you your options. Very simple, but when you look behind the scenes, they have 1,000s of partnerships they have brought together, manage and developed the technologies to support this management. The delivery tool is only one piece. Their technology is not worth much when you strip away their partnerships and the innovation they created to support it all.
Their model works because they have created a solution to solve for all the variables. Skills development is the same. Someone needed to bring together all the variables to support an entire corporate requirements. Think about this a bit more. How many departments are there in a company? How many different skills are required across all those departments and even further skill levels from one employee to the next within the same department. Technology alone solve for this without assessments to understand individual skill gaps, without content to provide each person with what they need.
I wrote an article to better explain this.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/complexity-simplicity-skills-development-brad-loiselle/ Ready-To-Go provides corporates with access to the skills programs they need. Whether that means sales training, customer service support, leadership, project management, python, excel and the thousands of other programs that will be available and managed in a simple way.
Anyone can use Ottolearn’s platform, just like anyone can use MSword. It is a blank page until you do something with it. We are building customized dashboards, employee interfaces, employer management system so that they could assign programs and much more coming. We have also been closing deals with content partners to support reduced costing broken down into monthly fees for the courses employees would consume. The $19.95/monthly fee includes an assessment, plus 4 skill tracks per month. As the employee advances in their skills development, the tracks would be updated to reflect their requirements. These functions are all being developed by us. This provides employers with a very unique, easy, affordable solution.
To address to client comments. I also wanted to put this in prospective as I know many might not realize this. As we announced, we closed two deals before COVID-19 hit. One is Paramount Staffing in the USA. For those who do not know this, Paramount ($200M company) has over 300 employees and is owned by Proman in France. Proman is a $3B staffing company with over 50,000 employees across Europe and 20,000+ clients. We have been working closely with Paramount and their leadership, weekly meetings advancing our efforts together. They understand what we have been building and working with us to get it all right for not only them, but the growth we have been discussing with them. We have a growth plan in place starting with their USA team. Our goals are to support all their employees across the USA/CND with 2020 and then (if all goes well) move to help support their European employees as well. Paramount has been working with us to test our new tech, provide feedback on what else we should be adding and more to support their needs and future clients. This is critical because once completed, the system will be scalable, automated, and easy to grow globally without the need of a large team to manage. What is also amazing, is that using AWS’s language AI modules, all content in Ready-To-Go is automatically converted to be multilingual. Each of our clients have also been discussing with us the possible opportunity to leverage our tools for their clients as well. The pipeline of opportunities is significant, but as a small team, we need to make sure we are focused on execution.
TXM also wanted to do an interview of our efforts last week that they will be sharing next month across all their networks.
If you have not seen the news release, here are some testimonials form our clients to give you a sense of their relationship with us.
“With betterU’s Ready-To-Go platform offering so much value-add for a very appealing monthly subscription cost per user, it was a no brainer for us to work together as we train and develop our rapidly growing sales teams. Brad and his team have been incredible with their development work, turnaround time and innovative thinking on how to support us during these unprecedented times. We are excited about the many great things we will do together over the coming years!”
Tony Hegarty, Vice President Paramount Staffing. “The betterU team did everything – with almost no effort from us. They signed up our team and provided the communication templates announcing the tool to our group along with sign-up instructions. From there, when our team logged in for the first time, they get an automatic tutorial that shows them how to use the application. betterU was able to get our team up and running on the platform in just a few hours. We are looking forward to working closely with betterU in the weeks and months to come” Kaitlyn Buse, Positive Venture Group’s HR Manager. If you have any questions, I would be happy to address them to the best of my ability. Brad