This post was originally published on this site
Getting into Oxford Learning Centre
http://www.azfranchising.com/getting-into-oxford-learning-centre/
Photos by DMN Photo Art, courtesy Oxford Learning Centre
By Jake Vella and Laurey Fawcett
My mother Laurey and I have spent most of our professional lives working in a training capacity. When I wasn’t helping improve safety in the workplace, you could find me on the football field putting players through their paces and coming up with interesting ways to motivate them. I’m pretty sure I got my love of training from my mom. She spent years working at our family’s cosmetics company, teaching staff at our major accounts across Canada how to use our products. So it should come as no surprise our mutual love of training and teaching would lead us to own an Oxford Learning Centre in Ancaster, Ont., and a second one in Barrie, about an hour north of Toronto. In the last six years, we’ve seen the difference the Oxford system can make in the lives of children struggling with school, which is why celebrating mistakes is so important to us. Sounds odd, but it’s the Oxford way and makes perfect sense to us and our students.
Jake
Although I now live in Barrie, I called Mississauga home for the first 11 years of my life. My parents were really young when they married and although they tried hard, things just didn’t work out and they divorced in 1983 when I was three years old. It was an amicable split, which made things less awkward for everyone when my mom married my stepdad, Russ. Although it was tough without my dad around all the time, I got the best of both worlds by having two fathers. They get along really well and both provided me with different skills and values. I was pretty lucky that way.
My sister Jasmine is two years younger than me, while six years separate me and my stepbrother Kyle. With three of us in the family, you can imagine things were pretty hectic at home, even more so when you consider my mom looked after four or five other kids every day to help pay the bills. My mother had a bit of a teaching streak in her even back then, drilling us in the letters of the alphabet and numbers. Our apartment sometimes felt like a mini school.
In 1991, we moved to Barrie, trading in our tiny apartment in a rougher part of Mississauga for a nice house with a yard. My stepbrother and sister and I were really upset about it at first, but it was a good move for our family. Truth be told, my parents were becoming a little concerned about some of the influences in our neighbourhood. I had always excelled in school, so they thought the best thing for me was to be in an environment where I could continue to do that, not just in academics, mind you, but all around. I was—and still am—a sports fanatic. Barrie made a lot of sense because it’s a big sports town. It didn’t take us long to make new friends.
Jake: At one point, I wanted to be a teacher. And while I don’t teach at our centres, I still have the satisfaction of knowing I’m helping children reach their academic goals.
My life pretty much revolved around sports, including hockey, basketball and eventually football. In fact, toward the end of elementary school, I was asked to help coach the junior girls’ basketball team. Coaching came easy to me. I guess had a unique way of relating to people, what with having so many kids around me at home. I loved being able to motivate others and figuring out the best way to do that. Coaching gave me the opportunity to turn the girls into better athletes and get them working as a team. Being the eldest in my family, I fit into this role. I was always helping my brother and sister, so coaching was natural.
Coaching eventually led to student council and, if that weren’t enough, I was also a bus patroller during my elementary school years. Patrollers are students who ride the bus to keep the older kids in line and help the younger ones on and off. I always gravitated toward a leadership role. I think it’s because I liked being in a position where I could make a situation more positive. I suppose I was really good at this because in Grade 8, I won ‘patroller of the year.’ Believe it or not, the plaque is still up in my old school, as a friend was happy to let me know when he caught a glimpse of it while voting in the last election. The picture he sent around to my buddies got some laughs, including a few from myself. But all those experiences helped shape the person I am. I suppose the writing was on the wall back then I’d end up in a career involving children.
I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do career-wise; I was kind of all over the place in that respect. I wavered between working for my grandfather’s company, Continental Cosmetics, or becoming a lawyer.
My stepfather was the only one in our family who had ever gone to college or university and although he was adamant I should go, I wasn’t too sure. That said, I was doing really well in school, all the while playing every sport I could. My school had a really strong football program and I eventually became team captain. We even won a few championships (which was unheard of in our area) and played some provincial-level games. Once again, the coaching bug bit me and I signed up to coach the girls’ flag football and rugby teams.
Toward the end of high school, I decided studying law wasn’t for me. I was leaning toward applying to a business program. All my years of playing football kind of paid off, as several universities tried to recruit me. That’s when I started thinking seriously about post-secondary education.
All our teachers are Ontario-certified and have been trained in the Oxford methodology through online modules.
In 1999, I headed to Western University in London, Ont., after being offered a partial academic scholarship. In addition to having a great football program, it was also the school where my stepdad had gone and that really meant something to me.
While I enjoyed studying business, a bunch of my friends were working toward becoming teachers and I began thinking I might do the same. Midway through university, I started taking courses that would help set me up to go to teacher’s college. Then I changed my mind again and resumed my studies in business.
After graduating from university in 2003, I landed a job with International Pool and Spa in Barrie. I was their first and, for a time, only employee and got to dabble in all parts of running a business.
By the following year, I decided to head back to school and enrolled in the human resources (HR) graduate program at nearby Georgian College. In 2005, I got a job as a health and safety co-ordinator at Martinrea International in Vaughan, Ont., one of the biggest automotive manufacturing companies in Canada. For the next three years, I spent my days training employees at the company’s various plants and offices to help create a safer work environment. I enjoyed my job, but it did have its moments. Everybody I was training was older than me and most of them were long-term employees. You can imagine the resistance I felt as a 25-year-old just out of university trying to get all these people to respect me and the initiatives I was trying to implement. It was tough, but I’ve always enjoyed the challenge of achieving results when things look impossible. It’s something I would put to good use down the road.
My grandfather liked the work I was doing at Martinrea and, in 2008, he offered me a job. In a roundabout way,
I wound up exactly where I always wanted to be. Continental Cosmetics has been around for 40 years and still has an amazing team atmosphere. Some members of our staff have been with us for 30 years. I grew up around these people, having picked orders in the warehouse as a teenager.
We have an office in Montreal and sales staff across Canada, so I spent my first few years at Continental travelling to train employees. Things were going well and it wasn’t long before I started looking for investment opportunities, including picking up three rental properties. I was also thinking about owning a franchise. That’s when an unexpected opportunity presented itself in the form of an old friend from my university football days.
Matt Baxter and I had lived in the same complex during fourth year and he was hired right out of university by Nick Whitehead, founder and CEO of Oxford Learning Centre. Eventually, Matt became vice-president (VP) of development for Oxford.
Matt and I both happened to be in Montreal at the same time back in 2010 and he invited me to lunch with an Oxford franchisee, Marie-Eve Senecal. Now franchise performance and growth consultant for Oxford’s Quebec locations, she owned the Montreal NDG location at the time. Listening to her speak about Oxford inspired me to take a closer look. The business end of it was certainly attractive, but the fact she was helping kids really appealed to me.
There is a paper tree in the front entrance of the Barrie location decorated with leaves that carry the names of each of our students. We think of it as our family tree.
One of the things I liked about Oxford was the fact it takes a completely different approach to learning. Rather than having children memorize a lesson, Oxford shifts the focus from what they are learning to how they are learning, helping them develop cognitive skills they can apply to every lesson, regardless of the subject. The Oxford system recognizes kids have different struggles when it comes to school. Sometimes, it’s a gap in comprehension, a lack of motivation or even a matter of low confidence. Oxford gets to the root of the issue and allows teachers to develop a personalized learning program for the child.
The company itself dates back to 1984 when Nick opened the first Oxford Learning Centre in London, offering remedial and enrichment programs to elementary and secondary students. Using his doctorate in epistemology—the study of learning—Nick and his team of education experts used their knowledge of how children learn to create the Oxford program.
At the heart of it is the Dynamic Diagnostic Assessment, a proprietary system that evaluates a child’s capacity to learn. The assessment helps hone in on what exactly is at the root of the child’s difficulty. For instance, it may determine they are struggling in math because they are missing some knowledge in English and can’t properly comprehend a question.
With the traditional way of teaching, students are taught a skill or principle they use to answer a question, which is judged either right or wrong. Oxford is completely different—it’s about learning the process of learning and celebrating mistakes. When children figure out they’ve made a mistake and understand why it happened, they’re probably not going to repeat it.
Although I initially thought this would be a great venture for my sister and me, she had to pass. My mother, on the other hand, was completely on board with the idea. Even though she was working full-time, she had the same flexibility I had work-wise. We called Matt and inquired about franchises.
Barrie was our ideal location, although nothing was available there at the time. Instead, Matt and his team presented Burlington Centre near Hamilton as an option. Mom and I purchased that location in August 2010, along with the rights to eventually open another one in nearby Ancaster.
The messaging displayed at Oxford Learning Centre is meant to reinforce the core belief that having the right attitude is critical to success.
She and I ran the business from afar and hired a manager to be on-site daily. We loved the work we were doing. Once we understood the franchise world a little bit, we knew it was time to expand. In January 2013, we opened the doors to the Ancaster centre. By that fall, a location in Barrie had come up for sale and we quickly snapped it up. We opened it in November and sold the Burlington location a few months later, as we felt owning three centres was a little too much for us at the time. We were also working on renovating a new space in south Barrie, as the lease on the original location was over.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise Oxford is such a good fit for my mom and me. We both have an itch to teach, which is why we’ve always been attracted to training. I think we felt like we already were teachers, although I have come to realize being in a school environment would have not been for me after all. A teacher friend of mine says burning out after 10 years is common, as the job becomes routine and you don’t have control over anything. Everything is dictated to you, along with how you’re supposed to teach it. I can see why it would be difficult to create the kind of impact on students you know you should be able to make.
I think I would have also missed the business end of things—I’m too interested in hiring and motivating people and trying different initiatives to see if they work. In many ways, Oxford gives us the perfect opportunity to do both: make a difference for kids and own a business.
I have to admit I wasn’t prepared for the impact we would be making on kids when we opened our first location. I simply looked at it as a really cool business that allowed me to teach. Once I was involved in the business, however, it confirmed we had made the right decision. We could definitely see the changes we were making in kids’ lives. We’re teaching them how to learn, so they can improve themselves in everything they do and build their self-esteem. It goes beyond learning how to solve a math problem.
We love seeing kids succeed, but it starts with having the right attitude. Celebrating effort and attitude is the idea behind Oxford’s ‘fish philosophy,’ which is based on the Pike Place Fish Market in Seattle, Wash. The first thing you notice when you visit the market is how cold, wet and stinky it is. Working there is probably something most people would run from or be miserable doing, but the employees smile, laugh and sing while throwing rather large fish to one another across the counters. They have turned the market into a fun place to work and a tourist attraction. At Oxford, we have stuffed fish that get tossed about every time someone achieves something with a positive attitude and a consistent effort. It’s one of the ways we like to celebrate learning and it empowers our students with confidence.
What are some of the challenges of setting up an Oxford centre? I would have to say the biggest responsibility is dealing with leasehold issues, such as negotiating the lease and rent rates. Beyond that, Oxford provides all the furniture for the space as part of its fees. The franchisor also tells you what computers to buy and the books you will need. In this respect and others, there is definitely a benefit to buying a franchise, rather than starting something of your own.
The seasonal aspect of this kind of business can also be tricky. The couple of weeks over Christmas and into the New Year can be slow, as holiday activities and travel plans tend to keep kids out of the centre. One of the great things about Oxford is it’s done a wonderful job creating summer programs. We’ve had some summers where we’ve done extremely well.
Laurey: Jake and I work mostly out of our location in Barrie, while a manager oversees the Ancaster centre.
All our employees are Ontario-certified teachers, who are trained in the Oxford methodology through online modules. It’s been my experience that finding teachers is the easy part, because they recognize an opportunity to make a more concentrated difference in the lives of students. Many of the employees we hire have completed teacher’s college and are trying to get onto a school board. I suppose we help each other out—we’re good partners because they need experience and we need teachers. We probably receive three or four resumés a week, even when we’re not looking. We also get applications from current teachers looking to supplement their income, as well as retired ones who miss teaching and want back in an educational setting.
Oxford is really good at providing support, but that’s not to say you won’t make mistakes. The good news is, like your students, you will hopefully recognize why you made a mistake and take the neccessary steps to not let it happen again.
Laurey
My grandmother was the strongest role model in my life and we were very close. My parents were young German immigrants and my formative years were spent primarily in her care.
I grew up in Edmonton, but don’t have a lot of memories from when I was a kid. My clearest are of my father. He was very entrepreneurial and always working on new business ventures.
When he was 16, he got a job delivering products on his bicycle for a beauty supply company. It wasn’t long before he decided to start his own business. I remember as a kid going to warehouses to work with him. He would be up on a ladder stirring vats of shampoo and conditioner and my siblings and I would stand below filling plastic bottles and sticking labels on them with glue and paintbrushes.
My dad’s work in the beauty industry was always a family affair, even more so when he founded Continental Cosmetics in 1976 in Toronto, serving the niche market of estheticians. At the time, they could only buy supplies from companies catering to hairdressers. My father recognized there was a need for a company specializing in products specifically for estheticians, basically the kinds of things you would find in a spa, such as essential oils and detoxifiers. He travelled the world to find lines to carry in Canada, working long hours and holidays to build his company. We all admired his entrepreneurial spirit.
I married young and therefore was unable to finish high school. By my early 20s, I found myself divorced, although I was blessed with two wonderful children. I met my second husband, Russ, a few years later and our family welcomed another child, Kyle.
It takes a lot of patience to use Oxford’s strategies and methodologies, but they work. We’ve seen it happen over and over again.
Russ was very supportive of me going back to school, even though we were raising a young family and both working. It took seven years of correspondence to get my high school diploma. I had always loved school, particularly English class, and was determined to graduate. This is the same kind of determination I see in the students who come to our centres.
I’ve always enjoyed being around children and when health issues made it tough for me to work, I looked after kids in our home to help make ends meet. Some of the children were placed by the Children’s Aid Society and had special needs. We all did what we could to create a welcoming environment for them.
Back then, I worked two or three part-time jobs. Most days, I looked after kids until 4 p.m. and then headed over to a local restaurant to work as a waitress for a few hours. After that, Russ and I cleaned offices at night. Whatever we could do to make money and support our family, we did.
After going to school to become a makeup artist, my father asked me to join him at Continental, where I trained others to apply corrective cosmetics on people with birthmarks, scars and skin disfigurements caused by accidents, AIDS or cancer. It wasn’t long before he promoted me to sales and marketing manager, overseeing all the Shoppers Drug Mart, Hudson’s Bay and Sears locations that carried our lines. Through this role, I learned a lot about training people and found I had a knack for it—so much so, my father would send me to seminars in Europe to further develop my skills. This was an exciting time in my life and really gave me a wonderful foundation for working in a training capacity.
After more than 15 years at Continental, I accepted a position in 1998 as a national account manager for Manpower, an employment services company headquartered in Toronto. My days were spent working with different businesses to identify their needs for temporary staffing and match them up with the right employees. Within three years, I was in charge of one of Manpower’s largest accounts. In the meantime, I had also started my own home decorating company, was writing articles for Edge magazine and even hosted a television program on Shaw that lasted about 10 episodes.
In 2002, I left Manpower and joined Sherwin Williams Paints Canada as an assistant manager. I was promoted two years later to store manager at a location in Aurora, Ont. At the time, Sherwin Williams catered mostly to industrial clients, but was starting to develop its do-it-yourself (DIY) market share in Canada. I noticed a need in Aurora’s design community for someone to work with architects and designers to get products specified. So I took it upon myself to fill the role of an architectural account executive until the position was recognized as an official need. In fact, I was the only architectural account executive for all of Canada and one of the first women in a managerial role for Sherwin Williams’ Canadian division.
The loss of my brother during my 20s, my grandmother in 2008 and my father a year later made me acutely aware of how short life is. I wanted to find a way to make a real difference and leave some kind of legacy behind, something that would last when I was gone. When Jake told me about his idea to buy an Oxford Learning Centre, I knew this was exactly what I was looking for. Not only would it give me personal satisfaction, but it would also help children who needed it.
At the time, I was still working with Sherwin Williams and travelling extensively, which made the idea of buying a franchise a little overwhelming for me. But the more I read about Oxford’s methodology, the more I realized this was the perfect fit for Jake and me. I was intrigued by the idea of not focusing on academics, but rather on the foundation of learning. Not all kids learn the same way or have the same opportunities. Schools can only do so much. I saw this as an opportunity for us to do something that actually changed children’s lives. And to me, that was really enticing.
Jake and I bought our first location in 2010, along with the rights to the second one. Although the Burlington Centre location was established and had been open for 20 years, the Ancaster store was a completely new build. To get this centre up and running, I turned to my Sherwin Williams days to help write the specs for the space and to oversee construction. In 2013, we were ready to sell the Burlington location and opened a brand new space in south Barrie.
These days, my time is spent meeting with parents and their children to discuss the assessment process and how Oxford can help. By the time parents come to see us, they have already identified areas of concern or focus. Our goal is to hone in on what exactly their children need to build on their strengths to overcome their weaknesses. Each assessment—which takes about
2.5 hours—is extremely thorough and identifies a child’s cognitive strengths and weaknesses and where they are academically at that point. It also gives us a good idea of how they handle stress and cope with challenges.
Based on the Pike Place Fish Market in Seattle, Wash., Oxford’s ‘fish philosophy’ celebrates effort and attitude. When one of our students achieves something with a positive attitude and consistent effort, we toss a stuffed fish about.
Once we have the results, we develop a customized program to help develop and strengthen the child’s cognitive skills. What this does is build the student’s confidence, which can be false in a lot of cases and a stumbling block to learning. Fortunately, the tools a teacher needs to help children understand how to overcome the specifics of their difficulties in learning are built right into the Oxford booklets and how they’re taught.
Even though all our teachers are Ontario-certified, we find it can take them a while to learn the Oxford teaching system. It also takes a lot of patience to use the strategies and methodologies, but they work. It’s amazing when you see how successful they are with students, particularly with those who for whatever reason, seem to be lost in the system.
To maximize results, we recommend children come to the centre at least three times a week. The more often they come, the more opportunity we have to make a difference. In fact, we suggest a minimum of eight hours a month; if a student comes less than that, they will likely not retain what we’ve taught them.
It’s kind of like an athlete in training. If they don’t work hard, they simply won’t get stronger or faster. In fact, we’ve seen how improving cognitive skills in the classroom helps make some students better athletes. They’re more focused and able to break down information handed to them and can see the bigger picture. And for kids who display bad behaviour in school, it’s often directly related to poor self-esteem. By building a student’s self-esteem, we can see significant changes in their attitude and in their ability to learn.
As the centre director for both our locations, I guess you could say I’m kind of the principal, although getting sent to my office isn’t always a bad thing. At Oxford, students come to see me when they have done something of which they are really proud. We celebrate having a good attitude and making the effort to learn. In fact, I’m more excited when they get a question wrong but don’t let that discourage them. If they make a mistake and recognize where they went wrong and take the risk to try again, that’s something to celebrate.
Our focus right now is trying to find ways to develop connections in the community, as this is our customer base. One way of doing that is to get involved with sports teams, which can benefit from our study skills program. We help an entire team become stronger by teaching them to effectively analyze and apply information, as well as strengthen their organization skills.
Demographics are critical to a business like Oxford. For instance, we’ve found some cultures respond differently to the uniqueness of its philosophy and teaching methods. Cost may also be a concern for families with a lower income, which makes picking the right location a high priority. While tutoring in a particular subject can certainly attain specific results, the Oxford teaching method is a long-term approach, employing highly qualified staff and implementing proven programming that develops the whole person in the child, rather than acting as a quick fix. Consider the student who is lagging in all subjects and is three or four grade levels behind. It’s likely he/she requires more than a few tutoring lessons to catch up.
I became an Oxford franchisee hoping I could help make a difference in other people’s lives. I know that I’ve done that, but I want to do more. One way Jake and I are doing that is by giving away a free annual scholarship at each centre. It’s not unusual for a teacher or coach to tell us about a child who needs our assistance, but whose parents cannot afford Oxford. The scholarship allows the student as many hours as we can fit them in or they are available to come.
I have a paper tree in the front entrance of the Barrie location we redecorate with the season. Right now, there are 59 leaves on it, one for each of our students. We call it our family tree. We’ve come to realize Oxford is more to us than a business. We bought our centres to enable us to make a difference and I know we’re doing just that.
Jake Vella and Laurey Fawcett are co-franchisees for Oxford Learning Centre in Ancaster and Barrie, Ont. The can be reached via e-mail at jvella@oxfordlearning.com and lfawcett@oxfordlearning.com.
OXFORD LEARNING CENTRE
Established: 1984
Date of first franchise: 1991
Franchise/corporate units: 114
Investment range: $100,000 to $225,000
Initial franchise fee: $40,000
Website: franchise.oxfordlearning.com
E-mail: mbaxter@oxfordlearning.com
The post Getting into Oxford Learning Centre appeared first on AZ Franchising | Franchising dalla A alla Z.