Paint The Town Crimson

For most of us, our early 20’s are a time of figuring out who we are and where we want to go – it can be a time of uncertainty, dodgy flatting situations and entering the workforce – but for Crimson Education’s Chief Operating Officer, Sharndre Kushor, her early 20’s have involved travelling the world, co-founding her own global business and being a finalist in the Westpac 100 Women of Influence Awards.

We sat down for a chat with 23-year-old Sharndre Kushor to learn more about her multi-million company ‘Crimson Education’ and what it’s like being a young woman in the business world.

How did Crimson Education begin?

Crimson started four and a half years ago and it was quite an unplanned experience when it started. I’d just finished high school and I thought I wanted to become a Doctor because I really wanted to help people. During high school, I’d also done a lot of stuff with the UN and I was involved with all of this stuff that was very linked with international relations.

At the very end of high school, I went on a trip for a UN Conference and we want to all these cities around Europe and I went with 19 other New Zealanders. While I was on the trip, about a quarter of the group were students who had applied to universities outside of New Zealand and were really interested in areas that seemed quite atypical for kids our age. I just became really fascinated with why they’d chosen to do that and I wanted to know about what the opportunities for them looked like on a global level, and I started learning about all of these careers that I didn’t even know existed. Then about six months after that trip
Jamie [Crimson Education co-founder] and I made Crimson and it was because a lot of the kids I was mentoring at the time were really interested in being the best versions of themselves and I figured that while I could help some of them in some ways, there were people outside of New Zealand who could support them in other ways. So, I built a network of mentors and that’s how we got started. It was a really interesting journey and it all started in a very organic way but it’s grown a lot since then.

Is there any kind of story behind the name ‘Crimson Education’?

When we were starting out, we wanted to help students build themselves up and be confident and bold in their own power, and there were so many different names that people threw out there, but crimson I think as a colour is one that is very bold and stands for that strength and so it came from the connotations of the crimson colour.

When you were starting out, did you have any inkling that it would become a global business?

What I knew was that people were getting a lot of benefit out of it – with mentors all around the world and they loved learning about things they didn’t have the opportunity to learn about in New Zealand. So, the idea of broadening horizons and inspiring people to believe and dream bigger than what’s in front of them was really cool to me and I thought, “hey, if people from New Zealand are benefiting from this then why not in other places in the world?” So, I think that sort of thought of being bold with Crimson and knowing  that people in New Zealand really loved it definitely was a foundation for us being brave enough to take it out of the country. We kind of took it step by step as it came but I think the fact that people around the world have benefitted from this mentor model.

So how can Crimson help students?

How it basically works is we typically have two types of students come to us. One knows what they want to do and they come in to find out where in the world they need to go to do this thing. Then we’re able to put together a plan for them to achieve milestones that lead up to their overall goal. It all sort of starts with a dream for students, how do I become the best version of myself? And then we help them to set out
the milestones to achieve those big goals. Then the other kind of student who comes to us, is the student who isn’t so sure with what they want to do so they might come in and say “I’m good at these subjects and not so good at this”. And we have an awesome network of mentors, we have about 2,000 of them globally at the moment, so we connect a student with one of these mentors who have worked in all of these different industries. It’s really awesome to be able to help students understand themselves better and set ambitious goals and help to achieve them.

Since this is a global company, do you have to travel a lot?

Yeah, at the moment I oversee all of our operations so I go around to make sure we have awesome people on the ground and launching new operations and making sure students are being supported in the right way.
So, it does involve a lot of travel. In fact, I’m jetting off this evening. I was in the US [before coming to New Zealand] and I’m heading back to San Francisco today for a few days. It’s really cool to be able to learn
from different cultures and meet different people.

Was it hard to adjust from living in New Zealand to constantly travelling to all these other places?

Well, I was actually born in South Africa, and my parents moved to New Zealand when I was eight and we were only meant to stay in New Zealand for a year, as like an OE-type experience and then we just
stayed longer and longer and it’s been many years now. But I guess, I kind of came from outside of New Zealand and had an appreciation for cultural diversity when we moved here but I never really travelled with this intensity at any other stage in my life so that’s been a bit different. It’s been really awesome to learn more about different cultures and languages but it’s also really helped me to build a huge appreciation for what we have in New Zealand – it’s such a special place. I haven’t been able to visit any other place in the world that feels quite the same.

What’s been the proudest moment of your career so far?

There’s so many moments to be proud of, but most of them come back to students achieving really awesome things. Being able to work with a student and see them grow over so many years and see them achieve something that when you first met them, they didn’t think was possible is the most amazing, amazing thing to be able to be a part of. The moment that I’m proudest of so far at Crimson, was not very long ago when one of the students that I had personally worked with when I started Crimson, who was one of our very first students, recently found out she’d been accepted into the top schools she’d been aiming for in the US. I understood really carefully what her challenges were and saw her overcome them and it was amazing.
Seeing students achieve their goals and do things they didn’t they could is amazing and it makes me so proud.

What’s the most challenging part about starting a business?

There are lots of things that are challenging about starting a business particularly when you’re really young. One of the most challenging is really getting it right with building a really good team. [At Crimson] we’re a really large team, and our staff is spread across 19 different offices in 19 different cities so we’re working to build an awesome team and continue growing at the same time. It’s often hard to find the right people with the right skill set fast enough so that’s probably the biggest challenge. Another challenge is learning as you go, many people who have a business have a lot more experience, you know, they’ve been working for 20 years, but I don’t have that. But in some ways, it has been a real blessing because I have the opportunity to learn from so many other experienced people and I’ve now built fantastic relationships with amazing women who have done fantastic things.

Speaking of inspirational women, are there any women in the business world that you look up to?

One of the most awesome things that we’re lucky to see now is more women becoming visible in business. I have been really inspired by Sheryl Sandberg, who is the Chief Operating Office of Facebook. She uses her platform, which is a pretty significant one, to be a voice for good. A lot of the stuff that she does is about sharing the experiences she’s had a as a woman in business. She does a lot of videos with other women in business and uses that voice to inspire other people and I’ve learnt a lot from her. In everyday life I really look up to my Mum she teaches at Massey University and she’s a speech therapist and I’m super
proud of how she’s a Mum of two daughters, while doing amazing things in her career and she’s just finished her PHD. It’s super full-on and I think it’s so inspirational to see a woman so passionate about upskilling. She’s such an inspiration.

You’ve finished university, but do you think you’d ever go back and do further study?

Yes! I love learning new things, I’m a bit of a nerd that way, and I think Crimson is fantastic because I’m learning a lot by doing things – but at the same time I think doing more study is important to me so I’m super excited to jump in to doing some Master’s study some time in the next little while, it’ll be an exciting next challenge.

Where do you see Crimson Education in the next five years?

Our mission is to help people unlock their full potential through personalised learning. I think that there’s so much potential globally for what we’re doing, which is putting the power with students and letting them choose what skills they want to learn and having people to coach them through these kinds of things. In the next five years I think we’ll see Crimson grow a lot more globally. In the last 12 months alone, we’ve opened up in 12 new cities, so I think we’ll be in a lot of new places and hopefully we can reach for the stars in terms of making sure all students have great information about global opportunities.

How do you keep yourself motivated?

It all comes down to figuring out what things make you passionate. I never feel like I’m doing work at Crimson, it’s something that I really enjoy and doing something that you’re passionate about is really important. Celebrating small wins is another thing to do – recognise when you’ve done something awesome and really celebrating that with your team is fantastic.

At M2woman recently, we’ve been talking about pay equity and gender diversity, do you think that there’s a good amount of gender diversity in the higher ranks of the business world or is there still work to do?

I think it’s super male-dominated and that’s a big area we need to improve on – but in saying that I think it’s important for us to realise how far we’ve come and recognise that as a society we are more aware. I think the fact that we can sit here and have this conversation is showing that progress has been made from say, 50 years ago. In order for us to make business decisions and decisions for our society they need to be balanced and we need to have a lot of diversity in thought. And in order to get that diversity in thought we need to get diversity around the table in the forms of gender diversity, racial diversity and age diversity. Hopefully in the next five to ten years we’ll see a lot more progress happening.

Do you think there’s anything women can do for themselves to help push the progress along?

One of the things that I try and live by is to try and make decisions based on what I would do if I wasn’t scared. So, if I’m in a tough place or I don’t know what to do I always ask myself what would I do if I wasn’t nervous or anxious about the outcome? I think for women, a huge thing is that we’re constrained by societal expectation and stereotypes. If you’re someone in business that is really wanting to upskill and level up in a male dominated area, think about what you would do if that societal norm wasn’t there or that anxiety about being the only woman wasn’t there and let that guide you. It’s so important that we realised change won’t really happen by itself, every person is so important to making that change. As a woman who is doing something interesting or new it’s so important to be able to share that. If you think you’re doing something groundbreaking or innovative share it with others so you can inspire other people to do the same.