Great Companies: How did you get your idea or concept for the business?
Manoj Arachige: We believe learning should be an amazing experience, and we believe the best experience is when you have a "genius best friend" to help you out when you need it. That's the role we like our tutors play
We make sure to find the best tutors, then pay them some of the highest rates in the industry, with all new tutors starting at $40 per hour. It's not only the pay, but our communication and culture that attracts the best of the best performers.
What sets us apart is how we do our absolute best to delight tutors and customers alike. Our support team is attuned to customer feedback and passes this directly up to management every week. Similarly, we regularly ask for individual feedback from tutors, and have recently run an EOFY survey to learn about their needs and wants in the coming year. We always try to put customers and tutors first.
Great Companies: What are the various services provided by KIS Academics?
Manoj Arachige: KIS Academics pairs the highest quality tutors with students looking to ace their studies at school. We're passionate about learning and teaching, and believe our technology and people are our greatest assets.
KIS Academics has completed thousands of hours of tutoring, and similarly thousands of hours of videos from our affordable online courses have been watched.
Great Companies: What makes KIS Academics different from hundreds of other similar service providers?
Manoj Arachige: Here's one of our favourite reviews:
"It is my absolute pleasure to recommend KIS Academics to any parent out there who is looking for the right tutoring service.
We had a personal tragedy in our family which meant my daughter had an extended leave of absence from school, then on top of that COVID lockdowns also added an additional factor of difficulty.
I decided to contact KIS
After only 1 term with our amazing tutor Amelia from KIS, my daughter caught up and surpassed her previous academic standard. She has also received an early entry offer into university. We couldn't be more thrilled or grateful
Thank you KIS Academics & Amelia"
Our number one priority at KIS Academics is serving our customers and enabling them to get help from the best tutors in Australia. Results like these speak for themselves and we're honoured to help students around the country get into their dream degrees and universities.
Great Companies: What are the struggles and challenges you face?
Manoj Arachige: KIS Academics has $0 in funding or debt and was started by a couple of tutors who managed to put a few hundred dollars aside to start a better business. It has grown rapidly since then and the entire time, has been led by students. The vast majority of our executive team members are university students as well, along with our cohort of 250+ tutors.
KIS Academics started from scratch and thanks to creative thinking, risk taking and a relentless focus on customers and tutors, we've managed to survive a few very difficult years and persist despite countless challenges. This desire to always improve our services is what sets us apart from most other businesses.
Great Companies: How do you plan to grow in the future? What do 5 years down the line look like for KIS Academics?
Manoj Arachige: Our ultimate goal is to make education both higher quality and more accessible to students across the country. As a small company that is only a couple of years old, this can be difficult at times as ultimately keeping the ship afloat is our priority. However, as a team of students ourselves, we understand the struggles of learning during COVID. We started KIS at the beginning of the pandemic and
we made all our online resources completely free of charge until lockdowns lifted. This was to ensure that students who needed access to lessons, worksheets and more but weren't able to get the level of help they needed from schools, would have somewhere to turn when they needed help.
Great Companies: If you had one piece of advice to someone just starting out, what would it be?
Manoj Arachige: Take risks, innovate and always put the customer first!