A handful of legitimate billionaires were listed on the Companies Office among the first non-New Zealand shareholders.
Ten years on, Crimson is now clearly a real-life success.
“When we first raised capital, we had $300k of sales. Last year we had more than $300 million,” he says while drinking what he describes as a “dodgy” green matcha in Parnell during one of his frequent – if brief – trips back to New Zealand.
Thirteen years since its founding, Crimson is still expanding and is understood to have grown revenues by more than half last year.
Beaton says he employs nearly 200 fulltime staff in New Zealand, where he said Crimson earned around a tenth of its revenues, with another thousand scattered across the globe. His United States team is around 500-strong, where his main business is done.
He’s expanded Crimson from its university admissions bread-and-butter to online secondary schooling, and even now operates a couple of brick-and-mortar secondary schools in Takapuna.
Threats have even been turned into opportunities. When the Trump administration threw a huge spanner into the works of international education by clamping down on student visas, Crimson spun out an immigration consultancy that Beaton says has been used to help Halter transport staff for its own push into the United States.
Beaton is cagey about detailed numbers, though, and is unwilling to go on-record discussing the finer points of his financials.
“Well, I can say for your entertainment that Crimson today is profitable, generates cashflow, has high revenue growth, and has a lot of scale,” he says.
“But you’ll have to wait till we have an IPO [initial public offer] prospectus for the details.”
An IPO is not imminent, he says.
The Herald understands Crimson has rebuffed several buyout offers over the years. And while capital raises along the way now mean Beaton holds a minority of Crimson shares – 16% of the company’s stock are held jointly with his mother, the largest single shareholder – this remains Beaton’s company.
With a decade of growth – and missteps – behind him, he is also of an age to better reflect on what went wrong along the way.
There was a pivot to EduTech that initially went nowhere, he says: “When I was first growing Crimson, you know, I had limited background in computer science, and so I hired a pretty big engineering team without a clear product vision initially. We had to really go through the pain of building a team, realising it wasn’t working, and then go through the whole process again.”
His first bid to conquer India was similarly ignominious. Six months after setting up a sales team and country manager, he found revenues were “less than the cost of our very modest breakfast”.
“So we pulled out of that market, and then we, you know, re-entered.”
Crimson is also no longer a gang of Lost Boys staffed exclusively by precocious teens. Ten years ago the Herald noted the presence of a token adult on the board. Now they’ve got several, including former Prime Minister Sir John Key.
Crimson Education founder Jamie Beaton with advisory board member and minor shareholder Sir John Key, pictured at the edu-tech’s Auckland office.
“We’ve also gotten a better sense of what makes our culture tick. So, in the early days we had a lot of 18-, 19-, 20-year-olds running around. These days, we have a more diverse set of leaders and managers,” he says.
Another question that loomed a decade ago is what would happen when Beaton grew out of being the Boy Wonder?
A large part of Crimson’s branding and identity hinged on Beaton using himself and his academic success as a role model for prospective clients wanting to navigate the international academic system.
“I think my academics helped us get that jump start, sort of the initial ignition, but I think it’s gone long beyond me,” he says.
Beaton has answered this question by never letting himself grow out of the student mentality.
The ridiculously lengthy education section of his resume has become a meme of sorts on LinkedIn after it was screenshotted and widely shared, showing degrees in everything from law (JD, Yale) to war studies (MA, King’s College London) and – the most recent addition – journalism (MS, Columbia).
He’s been a (largely remote) part-time student every year since 2013, collecting no fewer than 11 postgraduate degrees along the way.
Beaton also notes thousands of Crimson clients whom he has helped shepherd through university systems are becoming aspiration figures in themselves.
He also speed-runs through life. He listens to podcasts at twice the normal speed – sometimes faster – to digest information more quickly. This has fortified his motor-mouth, often being able to speak for two.
He does not have a lot to say about political aspirations, though, despite BusinessDesk reporting last year that he sounded out the National Party’s Tāmaki electorate for this year’s general election.
“I am really focused on building Crimson,” he says when asked about his interest in joining Parliament. He had admitted early last year to watching all party leaders’ state of the nation speeches – at double-speed, naturally.
“I mean, I’m interested in New Zealand, generally, of course, and any way that we can level-up the country.”
He modestly refers to his interest in politics as from the “policy wonk” perspective that doesn’t seem on-trend in a world of Trumps and Mamdanis who govern through memes and Instagram.
“I think politics is becoming an increasingly more acidic environment to be in, because of the dynamics of social media and sort of the attention economy right now, such that personalities tend to dominate,” he says.
His distance from New Zealand, with Crimson’s gravity centred on the United States, would count against his going to Wellington.
He was back in Auckland recently on one of his bi-monthly trips home. He is based in New York but still considers himself a New Zealander, despite conceding he isn’t in the country these days for long enough to qualify as a tax resident.
In this month’s travel he has been through Australia (Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth), Hong Kong and the United States (Texas and New York).
He hasn’t yet levelled-up his own travel budget.
“I’m still mainly flying economy. Fortunately, because of my slight stature, I can sleep well.”
Ten years into the future is a lifetime in Beaton years, but he says he now has goals beyond an IPO.
“Hopefully, I’ll have a big family with many, many kids running around compensating aggressively for my only-child roots,” he says.
Matt Nippert is an Auckland-based investigations reporter covering white-collar and transnational crimes and the intersection of politics and business. He has won more than a dozen awards for his journalism – including twice being named Reporter of the Year – and joined the Herald in 2014 after having spent the decade prior reporting for business newspapers and national magazines.
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