Total 645 words used.
Following the global COVID-19 pandemic, the Red Education Management Team faced a simple choice – transformation or extinction.
Red Education is a global information technology certification training company headquartered in Sydney, Australia, with hubs across the Americas, Europe, India, Middle East, ANZ and Asia. Providing a comprehensive suite of training programs covering the world’s major cyber security technologies, its purpose is to help organisations protect themselves against cyber threats by training skilled personnel to implement cybersecurity technology solutions.
Pre-pandemic, the company had been delivering training using a largely face-to-face classroom based model. Sales and account management took a traditional approach and behind the scenes the legacy processes and systems were manual and inefficient leading to delays and inaccuracies that impacted the student experience and business profitability.
The Management Team
When Managing Director Mike Baird joined the business in 2020, he started to assemble the current Management Team that was in place by the start of 2021. In addition to Daniel Storey, Owner and Chairman, and Mike Baird himself, this team is: Stuart Frampton, Operations Director, Aloke Bikkina, Marketing Director, Alex Hu, Finance Director, and Executive Sales Directors Raj Kumar and Will Cotis.
For his impact on the company and the industry, leading the Management Team through the biggest transformation in its history, Mike Baird has recently been awarded Cybersecurity Executive of the Year 2023.
Having assembled the right talent through internal promotion and external recruitment, Baird has embedded a macro management culture empowering staff throughout the organisation. The management team works to clear roadmaps and KPIs, with six-monthly workshops to plan and track progress. Weekly meetings monitor delivery on key initiatives, and global company-wide quarterly presentations share progress and plans. The student evaluation process is automated and detailed reporting shared, leading to continual improvement.
Initiatives and achievements
Together, led by Baird and with the full support and backing of Daniel Story, this Management Team began to plan and implement a program of initiatives to transform the company and drive its current success.
One of the key achievements, spearheaded by Operations Director, Stuart Frampton, was the introduction of Arlo training management and automation software, integrating with a new Salesforce cloud-based CRM platform. This was supported by a new company website, introduced by Marketing Director, Aloke Bikkina. Replacing manual legacy systems has fully automated communications with multiple trainers and students across many timezones. The creation of new course schedules is quicker, more efficient and less error prone, enabling growth, increasing profitability and improving the student experience.
Under Sales Directors Will Cotis and Raj Kumar, Red Education has embarked on an ambitious program of global expansion, driving revenue growth in new territories, including North and South America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa. These regions have added $570k AUD to Red Education’s annualised revenue since January 2021. In total, across new and existing territories, the sales teams have driven an increase in revenue of $1.9 million AUD over this timeframe.
As Stuart Frampton, Operations Director, has said about his team’s work: “Everything we do is customer-facing, so it all adds up to the customer experience”. Constantly optimising student satisfaction and quality learning outcomes is what differentiates Red Education from its competitors. In July 2021, Marketing Director Aloke Bikkina introduced an automated student review program, now with over 2000 customer reviews, 4.73/5 star rating, 98% of students saying they would recommend Red Education and a Net Promotor Score (NPS) of 75-80.
It would be impossible to gauge the success of any of these Management Team initiatives without the metrics and monitoring processes implemented by Alex Hu, Finance Director. As well as keeping the business on track with its financial goals, Alex measures the success of training programs in terms of customer satisfaction, helps the Management Team make data-driven decisions and identify areas for improvement and the company to become the leaders in the IT certification training industry.
Nomination Title: Leading Cybersecurity Education
