How to Make Continuous Innovation a Core Value in Your Business

Speaker 1: Welcome to the ‎Process Breakdown Podcast, where we talk about streamlining and scaling operations of your company, getting rid of bottlenecks and giving your employees all the information they need to be successful at their jobs. Now let’s get started with the show.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Dr. Jeremy Weisz here, host of the ‎Process Breakdown Podcast, where we talk about streamlining and scaling operations of your company, getting rid of bottlenecks and giving your staff everything they need to be successful at their job. Check out past episodes. Kim, I always like to mention past episodes, there’s been some interesting ones, be David Allen of Getting Things Done, Michael Gerber of the E-Myth and so many more, amazing human beings in talking about operations and systems, which is sometimes the non-sexy… I consider the sexy stuff that makes thing work properly.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Before I introduce today’s guest, this episode is brought to you by SweetProcess. I don’t know if anyone out there can relate, I don’t know if Kim you can relate, but if you’ve had team members asked the same questions over and over, and you may have spent 10 times explaining it, there is actually a better way. There is a solution. SweetProcess is a software that makes it drop-dead easy to train and onboard new staff and save time with existing staff. I was talking with the founder, Owen, not only do universities, banks, hospitals, and software companies use them, but first responder government agencies use them in life or death situation. So I was like, okay I guess if it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for me. You could use SweetProcess to document all the repetitive tasks that eat up your precious time, so you can focus on growing your team and empowering them and you could sign up for a free 14-day trial. There’s no credit card required. Sweetprocess.com, it’s sweet like candy, S-W-E-E-T, process.com.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: I’m excited to introduce today’s guest Kim Kross. She’s operations and product veteran in the ad, tech space, working with companies like Sylvan Learning Centers, Wall Street English, and Meredith Family of Schools and she’s currently the COO at Elevate K-12, they’re the market leader in live streaming educational services. Specifically, they help also teach underserved school districts and you go on their site, you can check it Elevate K, and then 1-2, elevatek12.com. And basically they provide live streaming teachers in the classrooms of real time solving teacher shortages. So, Kim, thanks for joining me.

Kim Kross: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it, Jeremy.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: I want you to talk about the new normal. The company has been doing this for a while. This seems obvious now, but before it was not so obvious, so I love for you to talk a little bit about pre-COVID and then now the new normal.

Kim Kross: Right, sure. At Elevate K-12, like you said, we provide live streaming virtual instruction to schools across the country. We’re currently in, I don’t know, 70 plus districts, 150 some schools across the country, mostly underserved districts. So think of school in rural Iowa, where Physics is getting taught by the gym teacher because that’s who has the free period. We get a certified high quality Physics teacher with aligned curriculum on our tech proprietary platform and beam that in to that classroom, and those kids get a teacher they wouldn’t have otherwise had access to. So it’s pretty magical. But to your point [crosstalk 00:03:37]

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: But the huge need, the huge pain point because you could see like if just the restriction of Geography, there may not be a perfectly qualified person.

Kim Kross: That’s absolutely right, and that’s exactly what we’re solving is the zip code issue in the U.S. we don’t necessarily have the teacher shortage crisis that we talk about. It’s more about a teacher arbitrage, where the teachers that are needed are located in areas that aren’t where the kids that need the most. Whether that’s the stay-at-home mom that wants to keep her toe in the water and continue teaching, but has responsibilities at home that she’s balancing, or retired teachers that don’t want to go back into the classroom, but they still want the magic of seeing those kids’ light bulbs go off as they learn new concepts, we offer those teaching opportunities to all of those individuals and we make teaching flexible and fun. Honestly, to your point, we are the future of education.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: It’s so apparent now. I love to hear the objections. What were the objections you were getting pre-COVID and then I want to know here what the new normal looks like post-CO… Because it seems like, just so obvious now with all the getting used to virtual schooling and virtual everything.

Kim Kross: [inaudible 00:04:55] I would say two years ago, you’d walk into a school and you’d talk to them about their Physics program and that we’re going to provide this Physics teacher. In our normal model, all the kids are still in the classroom. It’s just the teacher that’s not there with them and you’d get the looks from them. They’re like, wait a minute. How has a teacher who’s in Montana going to engage my 30 kids in a classroom in Iowa? How does that even work? And that would be the main objection. And then in walked COVID [crosstalk 00:05:23]

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: How did it work pre-COVID? What were some good ways that they engage? Because this is applicable post-COVID too. So I love to hear how do they engage they’re in front, on the screen. There’s like a regular full classroom of kids just like they’re the teachers there. How would it work and what are some methods to best engage that?

Kim Kross: Sure. Teachers on the front screen with the content that the teachers talking to, the kids all have devices in front of them, also with the content, but not with the teacher and they don’t see themselves because I think we can all, after a year of Zoom fatigue, I think we’re all tired of looking at ourselves. Kids do too, so we’ve eliminated that from the interface that the students see. But in that interface for the students, there’s a lot of engagement tools. There are individual private chats, there’s group chats, where the teachers can leverage to call on students. We have an interactive whiteboard where the teacher and students can answer problems together. So think of it as calling the student up to the front of the classroom, you’re inviting them to graph plots on the X, Y of an axes and really get into that depth of knowledge.

Kim Kross: Also embedded, we have formative assessments, so pop quizzes, we all hate that term, but we have those for the kids. So the teachers can really understand, are the kids getting what I’m teaching? And if not, then it redirects the teachers back to the concepts that they need to get to to make sure that those students really have a full depth of knowledge. We integrate all that together and we try to have fun. We do a lot of professional development with our teachers and make sure that they know that talking to Kids online and how do you really engage them and call them by name, even though you might not be able to walk up behind them, you still can call on them and get to know them over time through polls and SEL activities that we do as well in the classroom.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: You were mentioning the kids are looking at this too on screens and they’re seeing at the front. What are some of the engagement I guess you said? There is the pop quiz and this is all done within the Elevate K-12 platform?

Kim Kross: Yes.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Okay. From the teacher’s perspective, you mentioned a couple. What does it look like from the teachers that you have on? It could be a retired teacher. It could be someone in maybe a remote area that they want to serve another school district. Where do you find the teachers?

Kim Kross: We’re at schools we find teachers. There are a lot of sites that we use and leverage whether those are associations sites or things like we forged a partnership earlier this year with the military spouses program through the Department of Defense. Folks that can’t have a physical location possession, and that are looking for that freedom and flexibility that a remote work from home position allows. Again, with our teachers, all of them are certified and credentialed in their subject areas, so really leveraging those folks no matter where they are and then just seeking them out and continuing to bride awesome opportunities for them.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: So Kim, I can picture pre-COVID, normal classroom of kids, screen in the front, virtual teacher teaching. What does a new normal look like?

Kim Kross: The new normal is very different and there is no new normal. We have some classrooms that look like pre-COVID, where the kids are all still in a classroom. We have a Catholic school down in Texas we work with, they haven’t been out of school at all this school year, few days here and there. We have schools that are running all at home models, so all of the students are joining the classroom from wherever they are at home, but still joining into that classroom on their typical bell schedule. Then we have combinations of both, whether we have classes where half the kids have opted to come back to school and half the kids are at home, or some schools where Monday, Wednesday, half the class comes in and Tuesday, Thursday, the other half comes in, but every day they’re all together in this online environment together.

Kim Kross: The way that our platform is built, we’re able to do that. I think the biggest issue last spring had nothing to do with teachers not being able to teach online. Most teachers have the capability to have the online presence. It’s the fact that the tools that they’ve been using have been built for face-to-face instruction for this whole time whereas our tools have been built for the online modality from the start. Whether that’s content and assigned readings or worksheets for additional work or quizzes, all of that’s been built online where last spring, every teacher was challenged to figure out how to do it themselves and create fillable PDFs, and PowerPoints and all of that good stuff to jam it into Zoom or whatever they were using. There was a lot of time and effort focused on that. Whereas our platform has everything together from the start, so that no matter where the kids are in a classroom, dispersed, we can service those kids and really get to know them and really work with them on their learning continuum.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: I wonder, Kim, if you have seen this or where you think you will see this. There is a big pain point with underserved areas, but have you seen just not underserved areas go to Elevate K-12? Because like you said, they’re spending more time on creating these digital assets and kind of fitting a square peg in a round hole whereas like you already have it there. I say this because our kids they got a choice between hybrid and all virtual, and I’m like, why can’t they just both be in the same? You couldn’t choose either track and I understand why, because it was built totally different, but with your platform, it wouldn’t really matter. You could do both at the same time. You could have kids in the classroom and you can have kids who chose virtual and it doesn’t really change. Do you think you’re going to see businesses or schools actually who aren’t in underserved use Elevate K-12?

Kim Kross: I think we will and we do get some of those schools currently. The primary thing that we’re solving for is the teacher shortage crisis though. In a lot of those middle and upper income districts, they haven’t been hit nearly as hard and a lot of that gets back to the equity and the tax base of that school district and being able to support those teachers with higher salaries and things like that leading to then a lower teacher need in those districts.

Kim Kross: With that, I do see that our primary primary is the low income and underserved districts, but there are applications, you take a group of middle schools where each school has four or five kids that need to start taking Geometry because that’s a 10th grade course. It doesn’t make sense for each of those five schools to have a Geometry teacher. If they don’t have somebody on staff who can do that within the school, why not have an Elevate class where all of those kids from five different schools can have one teacher and then make that efficient for the schools. So we do have some instances like that where we continue to work with schools for their needs, but we’re always going to do what’s best for the kids, just like the school is. We don’t claim that the best stand-up teacher in front of the classroom is ever going to get replaced by what we do, but for those kids that don’t have a teacher, we’re a great solution, giving them a high quality certified instructor in that classroom.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: One of the things I want to talk about, we were talking before we hit record, was continuous improvement as a core value, so tell me what you mean by that.

Kim Kross: Continuous improvement as a core value. I think one of my pet peeves in operation is when I hear people say that they’re launching a process improvement project or a continuous improvement project. To me and with my teams, it’s super important from the get-go that we’re always continuously improving, really making sure that teams are driving not to be perfect, that they’re always understanding that there are going to be gaps in how we can do it better. And I think also creating and fostering teams where it’s not shameful or embarrassing to come and be like, “Hey, we did that. Here are the three things we can do better.” And making sure that teams know that not only is that acceptable, but it’s expected, it’s expected that we’re all moving together.

Kim Kross: For Elevate K-12 is a very high growth organization. We’ve grown five X in the two and a half years. I’ve been here over the next year plan to grow another three to five X. A lot of that comes from the improvement of processes and whether that comes from technology enabling those processes, or just the way humans kind of put their work together, we all have to look for ways that we can make things better. That also fosters a culture of customer excellence, so every time that we’re looking and being reflective on how we can do things better, if we’re taking it under the lens of customer excellence, then we’ll continue to have the [inaudible 00:15:19] of customers who always know that while we don’t get it right maybe 100% the first time, we will always make it right and continue to make it better every time they go through those processes with us.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: So, Kim, I want to ask you about a mistake that led to a breakthrough. Before you answer that, how do you encourage the staff and the team to make a mistake? Because we’ve been trained over many years when we make a mistake or reprimanded, and sometimes even though you say that you mean that, I imagine if first the staff like… They’ll probably still hesitant to break things and to make mistakes even though that’s going to lead to breakthroughs. What things do you do to really set in place to make sure that they know they’re encouraged and to do those things?

Kim Kross: No. We, my SVP of operations, amazing background in the Air Force and she’s implemented something called trystorming with our teams. Rather than brainstorming, we trystorm. When you said think about a mistake that led to a breakthrough, I have a hard time conjuring that up because I don’t know that I would contemplate anything we’re doing right now as mistakes. We’re a bit of building the plane while we’re flying it in terms of solving problems. I think any good organization is always doing that because it means that they’re continuing to evolve at a pace that the rest of the market is.

Kim Kross: Trystorming is a great way to really dispel those rumors because we’re going to try it, we’re going to evaluate it for a couple of days. If it doesn’t work, we’re going to chuck it to the side, we’re going to move to the next thing. It’s really proven, particularly in our customer support and customer excellence processes, to be just a great way where everybody doesn’t get tied to new ideas, it keeps us agile in our ability to train people and change and make little tweaks and just do that on the fly and continue to just grow with everything that we do.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: What does the trystorm method work? Like when you’re going into trystorm instead of brainstorm.

Kim Kross: Trystorming, a lot of times, is whoever’s coming up with the ideas or the changes has thought through the process will introduce it to the team, let everybody blow it to bits first. And then, we’ll kind of come up with what it is out of those ideas or problems we’re trying to solve that we are going to try. And then we do that implementation, we evaluate and know how we’re going to measure whether it’s good, whether it’s bad. We know what that gating factor is going to be. In about a week, you’ve got some really good results.

Kim Kross: And again, on our customer support side of things, one of the things we did was changed how requests get allocated between the reps. That was a great example. So rather than having certain requests go to certain people, we started to train the pools, so they went round robin and we’re able to very quickly turn that on and see how much more or less efficient each of the reps got, as well as look at their CSAT scores that correlate against that to see how are the customer’s feeling. Did we put calls to people that weren’t prepared to handle them? And did that impact customer satisfaction? But with those measures and KPIs in place, we were very quickly able to adjust and see what we wanted to keep, what we wanted to continue to change and what we wanted to just stop doing, and an old fashioned start stop continue activity.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: I use mistakes as a replacement for things that were tried that may have served other purposes like… It always pops into my mind. I don’t if it’s the best example, but like the Post-it Note was not meant to be the Post-it Note. It was a by-product of trying something that didn’t work the way it was thought, and it actually had a great use in another use case. It seems like for you and the organization, you’re very customer service centric, so I love to hear more about from an operational perspective, what are some of the things that you make sure are in place to make sure that there’s a great customer experience?

Kim Kross: We have a pretty extensive process of handoff between our sales team and our operations teams, so we make sure that all the proper details are collected, that there’s a proper handoff, that the customer knows who their contacts are, both during the sales process and then beyond. Once they’re assigned an operations manager, that person sticks with them through the whole process, that is their account manager, that’s their go-to person, that’s their problem solver. In all of our customer surveys, the biggest feedback that we got from our customers that we’re awesome at communication and responsiveness. And honestly, a lot of times that’s what customers want and need. They want to talk to the person, they want to talk to them right away and they want to talk to the person that can solve their problem. So empowering your teams to be able to do that is super important.

Kim Kross: And then on top of that, our operations managers then do weekly check-ins with those customers. Touch base, it doesn’t have to be big and elaborate, but just making sure that any things that you need, how is everything going? How are you feeling about things? Is there anybody else on your team that we need to talk to? And making sure that we’re doing that on a regular recurring basis, again, just make sure the customer knows that we care. And again, because we’re dealing with kids and we’re dealing with educators and we’re dealing with students’ lives, we want to make sure that everybody knows that we lead with care lead with that customer excellence, and that service aspect is what’s most important to us in those interactions with our partners.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Having that system, whether they’re reaching out, there’s always going to be a touch point where you’re reaching out, just so they know there’s always an open dialogue and they can always ask.

Kim Kross: Absolutely, absolutely. I think a lot of them have our operations managers on speed dial, just in case they need them for anything, but it’s a really great partnership that we have with the schools. We want to make sure that that stays intact, and part of that is through customer success.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Anything else, Kim that you can think of? The continuous improvement, the customer service, anything else that we should highlight about Elevate K-12, that’s really important as a core to the organization?

Kim Kross: I mean, I would just say it’s in kind of the curiosity of the team, that constant growth mindset that everybody has, asking why challenging the status quo using external sources. We are not smart as we need to be just in and of ourselves, so we need to go to podcasts and listen to them for better ideas and different ideas and read and absorb and talk to peers and other groups. We encourage that amongst the teams, because the worst thing you can say is that’s we do it just because that’s how we’ve always done it like that’s it. That is not a good answer. I think my team knows by now that that’s when they’ll get a pretty furrowed brow from me if anybody says that.

Kim Kross: We’re always working on challenging the status quo, so whether it’s our beliefs and the hustle and grit or that growth mindset. I think all of those things contribute to a philosophy and values in continuous improvement, knowing that we all want to be in competition with ourselves. We are our toughest critics. We are constantly looking for ways to do better today than what we did yesterday. I think that’s just something that permeates everything that we do in the organization.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Where did the idea come from?

Kim Kross: Our founder, she’s amazing, Shaily Baranwal. She has been doing this on and off in different incarnations. We initially started as an intervention business, so we were doing a lot of work in student intervention products and small group learning and kind of evolved over the last few years and grew into what it is now, which is having a huge arm in Gen Ed and really helping to fix the teacher shortage across the U.S.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Pretty amazing, what you’re doing. Last question, before I ask it, Kim, I want to point people towards elevatek12.com and check out more about the website and what you do. Are there any other places online that we should point people towards or anywhere on the website itself?

Kim Kross: No. I would say look at our LinkedIn page, look us up on LinkedIn. We’re doing a lot of hiring right now in a lot of areas, whether those are operations managers roles that we’re starting to post over the next week, or instructor roles basically in all of the subjects. We’re starting to hire teachers for next fall, so if there’s anybody contemplating leaving the classroom for any various reasons that they have, we’re a great option. I would say our LinkedIn page keeps you full of news about us, and then also the jobs that we’re actively hiring for right now. I welcome everybody to come to the site and check us out and see what we’re up to.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Sure. We all know people. I’ll definitely be pointing people, Kim, to your website. I know a number of teachers and it made people reevaluate what they want to do right now with what’s going on in the world. Check out elevatek12.com, whether you’re a school that you feel are underserved and you need some of these expert teachers in different subjects, go there. If you are a teacher or one of the other positions that Kim mentioned, check out Elevate K-12 and contact them there. Kim, last question is, what’s next? What’s on the horizon for Elevate K-12?

Kim Kross: A lot of growth. We’re going to continue to focus on State by State expansion. We’re currently in about 12 to 15 States. Over the next few years, really focusing on expansion within the U.S. and into new States and new markets. We’ve recently opened up some programs in Alabama, Mississippi, New York State, so really starting to grow as an organization, continuing to add new courses to our course library, always looking for some other things to really meet the needs of the schools we’ve added this year. Some additional foreign languages like German and American Sign Language and some Computer Science courses and Cybersecurity, and really working into the C Tech and maybe some work in SEL and some areas like that for different schools. And then we’ll see where the future takes us from there. We may not always be in the K-12 market, but for right now, that’s where our passion and focus lies. We’ll just kind of see as we continue to grow and provide amazing teachers across the country, to the schools and students that need them the most.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Kim, I first want to thank you. Thank you. Everyone, check out elevatek12.com. Check out SweetProcess, check out more episodes of the Process Breakdown, and we’ll see you again soon. Thanks everyone. Thanks Kim.

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