Boss of education reseller Joskos: 'We want to top £25m revenue in three years'

Nick Madhavji opens up to CRN on his growth plans which include the first acquisitions for the education specialist

Edtech specialist Joskos is expected to climb to over £25m in revenue in the next three years, according to CEO Nick Madhavji.

Madhavji said that that the company is already on course to achieve that turnover figure as the reseller sees another year of growth.

"We don't measure the business in terms of revenue rather the number of learners and teachers we support," he told CRN.

"If we map out the number of schools and the market share that we want, that £25m directly correlates to the number of teachers that we want to serve and the organisation's we want to work with.

"In terms of strategy, it's very much in line with where we were going anyway and what we have been doing for the last few years."

As part of Joskos' growth plans, it is currently in the process of making its first acquisitions in its history, with one in the Midlands and one further north, Madhavji said, adding that he is on the hunt for other potential buys.

"We've got very strong growth acquisition plans," he elaborated.

"We froze on the due diligence efforts that we were making [pre-pandemic] but we started those up again this week. This is a great opportunity for us because there are some companies that are in the education sector that don't want to carry on.

"The pandemic has really woken them up to the fact that their business wasn't ready and that they don't want to grow into a size where they have to respond to situations like this. But we can provide the scale and the systems and processes for them to grow and thrive within the Joskos family."

Despite being eight months into the pandemic, there are still a huge number of digital challenges facing teachers and students as schools continue to learn how to navigate remote learning, Madhavji said.

"As much as we're a phenomenal nation, the digital divide in this country is huge," he stated.

"Children learning from home with five or six people in the house and only two devices - what happened there? And how does the teacher take that environment into consideration? Some places don't have broadband so how can vulnerable learners access education? Those have been some massive challenges for schools.

"But many have stepped up to the plate and some are still very much in the dark ages and we're almost having to drag them through."

Madhavji himself has had a chequered history with formal education, including being excluded permanently at 15 and returning to education in his late teens to gain IT skills, after which he set up a small firm that provided Microsoft certification to jobseekers.

Joskos began its existence in a classroom when Madhavji was visiting his old primary school and asked about the new computers still in their boxes in a corner of a classroom, only to be told that the school bought them but didn't know how to use them. Madhavji offered to provide the teachers with training and support to get set up.

"We set the network up and when it came to handing back the keys to network because we delivered our promise, the headteacher basically said, ‘No, we need you to stay, we need you to support us and to continue this work. And there are hundreds of schools out there with the same challenge'," he said of the firm's origins.

"The company was born in my former primary school nearly 19 years ago and we still support that school today."