#awinewith Thuy Pham: how to systematise your business and scale it into a franchise
✨ Thank you to IP Australia for supporting the SPARK podcast and women in business ✨
Thuy Pham started tutoring at 18 to help out her overloaded brother, and by the time she finished uni she had 300 students and a business she never planned. Twenty-five years on, Spectrum Tuition is a franchise network of 16 campuses across Melbourne, with its own IP on how children actually learn and a spot as a preferred supplier of resources to Australian schools. In this episode she explains why smart kids fall behind, how a stranger's persistence talked her into franchising, and why systematising everything is the only way to scale beyond yourself.
Why do smart kids fall behind at school?
Because schools group students by age, not ability. Spectrum ran its multi-level assessment across one Year 7 class and found abilities ranging from Year 3 to Year 8 in the same room. "That's what happens when you group students according to their age, not according to their ability." Thuy's answer is a five-band system mapped to the five elements, Earth through Ether, where every concept starts two year levels below and builds all the way to extension and mastery. "If we just group students according to year level, it's the same as saying that all 40-year-olds should all be at the same level in business, in relationships, in cognitive ability, and we know that that is not true."
The accidental business that had 300 students by graduation
Thuy never saw herself as the smart one, and her dream was a corner office as an accountant. Then her brother's tutoring side gig outgrew him, the students moved into their parents' office, and Thuy started teaching. "By the time I graduated, I had 300 students out of nowhere." Faced with a legitimate business she'd never planned, she went back to uni to study teaching properly and never looked back. Twenty-five years later, past students are bringing their own children to Spectrum.
How do you know when it's time to franchise?
Thuy ignored every cold email about franchising until one persistent woman, who was already using Spectrum's exam packs in her own tuition centre, refused to give up. "She messaged me again about a month later and said, are you ready for franchising now?" Six months and one suspiciously well-timed radio ad for a franchise expo later ("the universe is like, would you just go, woman?"), Thuy walked in, found a mentor who believed in her enough to fly down from Sydney monthly, and discovered her own assistant of six years had been quietly dreaming of running a campus. Those two became her first franchisees, and she built the model in real time with people who believed in it. Today it's 16 locations and five franchisees.
Thuy's one piece of advice for women in business
"Systematise everything. Everything. You need to document everything. When I started repeating a task maybe two or three times, I was like, okay, I need to outsource this now, I need to delegate this to somebody else. Any repeatable task needs to be delegated, because your time is worth so much money. Your time is the most valuable thing that you could ever have. Use tools like Trello and Loom to capture everything so that you've got resources. That's the only way that I could scale. What's really wild for me is that when I visit new franchise sites, I watch an 18-year-old teaching exactly the same way as me. That is insane, right? Because they follow a particular structure, and they make sure that all the students are being met where they're at, as opposed to where we want them to be."
Meet Thuy, Founder of Spectrum Tuition
Thuy Pham is the Founder of Spectrum Tuition, a Melbourne tutoring business she started at 18 that now spans 16 campuses through a franchise network, plus online classes across Australia. Spectrum's five-band learning system meets every student at their actual ability rather than their year level, from Prep to Year 12, with specialisations in scholarship and selective entry preparation. Spectrum is a preferred supplier of curriculum-mapped resources to Australian schools, and Thuy's next chapter is AI-adaptive learning that checks how a child is feeling before it asks them to learn.
You can find her here:
Full transcript
Danielle: Amazing! Thuy, welcome to Spark TV! Thanks for being here!
Thuy: Thank you so much for having me, Danielle. It's so great to be here.
Danielle: Amazing. Now, let's start out by telling everyone who you are and what you do.
Thuy: Alright, so my name's Thuy, and I have been in business for over 25 years.
Danielle: What? Okay, you're gonna have war stories.
Thuy: I actually started my business when I was 18 years old.
Danielle: Wow.
Thuy: And the way it all got started, it was actually all just by accident, right? So my brother was one of those really incredible people who always did well at school, he always got those A pluses, and ended up with a really high ATAR and got into dentistry. And 20 years ago, especially if you have a migrant background, if somebody has succeeded, then all the family friends want their child to be just like that person.
Danielle: Oh, wow, yeah.
Thuy: So my brother ended up tutoring up to 30 students, just going to their houses and helping them out, and he was also in the army at the time, and so it was just a bit too much for him to handle. My parents had an office, and we just invited all the students to come to that office, and I just started teaching a few students, my brother started teaching a few students, and it just grew from there. So now I have a franchise business, we have 16 campuses around Melbourne, and we've just been named preferred supplier for Australian schools.
Danielle: Oh, wow!
Thuy: Yeah, supplying our resources to Australian schools. And we're really, really excited because we've built our own IP around how children learn, because what we've discovered is that children don't just learn at one level, which is what we assume. Students actually learn on a spectrum, right? So at any one time, students will simultaneously be ahead in certain areas. Just say if they're in Year 5, they might be advanced in addition, but then they might actually be quite behind in measurement, or below level in fractions, right? So what we've developed is a five-band system.
Danielle: There you go.
Thuy: So every student who comes through Spectrum completes a multi-level assessment to find out what their core is. And then from there, students will always have access to two year levels below, and two year levels ahead. Because even if a student is advanced in a certain topic, it doesn't necessarily mean that they're always going to be advanced, so they always need to have that foundational knowledge. And what we've done is we've mapped it to the five elements.
Danielle: Oh, cool!
Thuy: We've got band minus 2, which is Earth, and that's stabilising, so we have engagement activities and introductory activities, just to set the tone for learning. We then have band minus 1, which is where we explicitly teach the content. So, for example, just say we're teaching a student how to add fractions with uncommon denominators. The Earth level will just be revising their multiplication and division, because they're the core concepts that are required in order to understand this particular concept. And then the Water, which is where learning starts to flow, that's where we explicitly teach the content, and we also give the students a guided practice question, just one question, called a have-a-go question. So we've taught the concept, we ask the students to demonstrate their knowledge through the one have-a-go question, that's then marked off, and then we reach Fire, which is where the learning is activated, and where the students can complete that work independently, just under guidance. But if we're finding that students are struggling at the Water stage, then that's where the teacher just keeps going through more and more examples. They keep repeating examples until the students have that aha moment, and then they just can't wait to move on to the Fire stage. And then after the Fire stage, we have Air, which is where learning starts to lift. That's where students start completing extension questions, they start seeing the connections between concepts. So for that particular Fire concept I just mentioned, adding fractions with uncommon denominators, the Air questions might be an integrated question which incorporates measurement as well as fractions as well as decimals, right? So now they're seeing those interconnections. And finally, we have Ether, which is complete mastery and independence, and that's homework, so that they're reinforcing that knowledge. And then the following week, they have retrieval practice, which is having that quiz every single week, so they need to be able to demonstrate their knowledge independently before we move on to the next topic. So that's Spectrum in a nutshell.
Danielle: Oh my god, this is incredible! It just makes me reflect on, you know, I'm an old person now, but when I was in school... it's just such a fascinating idea that somebody has bothered to look at students and how they learn and create a system that actually supports them. I always reflect on my schooling experience and just think how we never learned anything that I now use in the world, and I think, why didn't they teach that at school? I always say that about finance. But also the way we were taught, it was very much here's the textbook, read the chapter, sink or swim, you know? That's very much how I experienced schooling. So to hear that somebody has developed a system over, you said 25 years?
Thuy: Oh, yes, yes.
Danielle: Wow, I just think it's amazing, and I can only imagine the parents as well, who get to watch their child flourish in potentially areas that they might have been struggling in.
Thuy: Yeah, and amazingly, we have past students who are now bringing their own children to us.
Danielle: Oh, wow, that's cool!
Thuy: It just completely blows my mind, because the first time you see somebody is where they always are, right? So it's like, aren't you 10 years old?
Danielle: But what an amazing testimonial, that somebody has come to you as a child and is now bringing their children to you. That's epic.
Thuy: I never thought that that would ever happen, because I feel as though I got into this business just by accident, right? Because my brother was the one. And it was actually really interesting, because I never saw myself as being the smart person, the person who would run an education centre one day. I actually struggled quite a lot. I just remember there was this one time where I was in a composite class with my brother, we were in grade 5-6, and the teacher was actually really struggling to teach fractions. Because she was my grade 2 teacher, and she happened to teach year 5-6 later on down the track. And that's the other thing about the Australian schooling system at the moment, it's very inconsistent. It just relies on the individual teacher to be able to set the program for the students, and not all teachers will understand all the concepts at the same time. So she was really struggling to teach this concept, and my brother was the one who said, oh, isn't it like this? He wasn't being a smartass or anything like that, he was just saying, don't you need to make sure that the denominators are the same? And then she's like, can you come up and teach?
Danielle: Wow! That's wild!
Thuy: And because I had such inconsistent experiences at school, it wasn't necessarily me, right? It was the system, because the system is so inconsistent. I just remember when we started hiring our staff for Spectrum, my brother's model was that he only wanted to hire top-performing university students. Students who had achieved 99+, who were currently studying medicine, law, dentistry, who had very positive experiences at school, so therefore they can then inspire the next generation of students and kind of pay it forward. And when I was speaking to these amazing individuals during lunchtime, I was just asking them, how did you get 99.95, right? Because it seems like such a faraway concept. It's almost completely out of reach for a lot of people. So I would just ask them, how did you get 99.95? And they would just go through fairly simple strategies. They would have a mistakes book, where they would just redo any questions answered incorrectly from the work that they got back, so they wouldn't just shove it underneath their bed. They'd figure out why they got the question wrong. Also, a lot of them did about 30 to 50 exam papers in the lead-up to their final exams, and I don't remember even doing three, right?
Danielle: I don't remember doing one.
Thuy: So there's just an imbalance in resourcing. What I was told at school was very different from what somebody else was told at school. And I spoke with this one person who achieved a 50 study score for English, and I asked her, what do you feel the secret to achieving these types of scores in English would be for other students? And she said, it's just all about structure, right? Because the thing is, when I was at school, I was just taught that there's no right or wrong answer with English. It's up to you. But in VCE, there's a rubric that you need to write towards. And so she said, well, there's just a structure. In the introduction, there are certain criteria that you need to reach, and then the body paragraphs are like this, and this, and this. It just completely blew my mind, because I was never taught this. And I did okay, I didn't do terribly, but I just feel as though if we can find a way to provide this information consistently to students, then it doesn't matter what school they go to, they can always get it at Spectrum, right? That was what the whole philosophy was. And in the past, we've had lots and lots of different students, but the main point that we like to emphasise is that all students are on their own spectrum, right? We might have a student who is in Year 6, but then we might place them into Year 4 English, and maybe Year 8 Maths, because that's just where they are. We've had a student in the past who was in Year 2, and we placed them into Year 10.
Danielle: Wow!
Thuy: Yeah, it's insane what some students can do, but in a class, they just stood out. They're just stuck, because it's just based on year level. And when you think about it, if we just group students according to year level, or by age, it's the same as saying that all 40-year-olds should all be at the same level in business, in relationships, in cognitive ability, and we know that that is not true, right? People will develop at their own pace, and they have their own interests, and it's unfair to group students in this way.
Danielle: This is so incredible. So what role do you play in the business now?
Thuy: Yeah, so I'm the founder, and so I set the vision and the direction for the business. And over this past year, I was on a bit of a sabbatical from the business, because I have a 14-year-old daughter myself, and the way that she's being taught at school is not compatible with the intelligence age that we are currently already in. Because the way that we've been teaching students has been the same for the past 200 years. It was in response to the industrial age, where we needed all students to be the same in order to fill a particular role, in order to be productive. And that was absolutely the case in order to build the society that we have today. But now, the linear pathway that we've been taught this entire time is no longer working, right? We can no longer rely on the do well at school, go to university, get a stable job, because the majority of those...
Danielle: Those jobs don't exist yet!
Thuy: So in the end, it's actually just about helping children find out who they are meant to be in this world, what role they need to play in this world, what their passion is in this world, and then building the pathway for them to be able to achieve that goal. Because we've had so many of our own tutors in the past who have scored the 99, who have gotten into medicine, who have gotten into law, and by year five, they actually quit, and they retrain to become a teacher. They just moved completely away from what they were initially trained to do. Because they were stuck in that trap of getting a high ATAR, so therefore you don't want to waste your marks, right? They were passionate about teaching, that's why they got into this particular role in the first place. And then, after the experience that they had, they realised, you know what, this is actually what I want to do for life. I can't see myself as a doctor, I cannot see myself as a lawyer, I can't see myself being placed into that role. This is the role that is for me. And that's how it should be for everybody, right? And so that's where we're headed as an organisation. It's about helping students find out who they are, and to build the path that meets them where they are, as opposed to where we want them to be. And so over the past year, I built four apps through RMIT.
Danielle: What?
Thuy: They're all AI-based apps. So the one that relates to Spectrum is the Infinityverse. It's a completely AI-adaptive learning system, where it actually considers a student's emotional state before learning, because that's really important, right? Because if you think about it like this, you might have a student who arrives at school, and they might have had an issue at home, they might have had an issue with their parents, they might be feeling a bit sick. There's not going to be any learning happening that day, right? If a student has had an issue at home, and they're coming to class and they're learning fractions, well, they're not going to be learning anything. Whereas I feel like it's more important for the very first question to be asked to that student to be, how are you feeling today, right? So the way that the Infinityverse works is, the very first screen that the students encounter when they log in is their own AI avatar that just asks them, how are you feeling today? And if the student feels good, then we just enter the Infinityverse. If they're not feeling good, then it actually routes them to their own AI companion, and the AI companion will say, well, what's actually going on here, right? It's more productive for that student to work through their challenges and their issues and their thoughts than it is to just go straight into the learning. So then, after they've had an opportunity to work through some of their thoughts and some of their issues, the AI will ask, how are you feeling about learning now? Are you ready to learn now? Then it'll go into the system. Otherwise, they'll just spend that time working through whatever challenges they're having.
Danielle: Wow, so your students are using that at the moment at Spectrum, or...
Thuy: No, no, that's the Infinityverse, that's the next-gen version of Spectrum. But what we do with Spectrum is we have reflections in every single class, so we always ask the students, how did you feel about class today? What do you still need help with? And that's part of our structure. Because then we'll be able to resolve that by the end of the class. If it's just something very simple, then the tutor can just address that. But I just feel as though a lot of these structures are missing in our schools at the moment. We don't really consider the students' state. There are a lot of challenges happening at schools, and it's not the teacher's fault whatsoever. What happened after COVID was that we found that students were two years behind, and so when the students returned to the classroom, the teachers at the time were under tremendous pressure to bring the children back up again. From parents, from the students themselves, from the administrators, from media. We need to bring our children back up to speed. So then what happened? Teachers quit. We have a severe shortage of teachers right now, where teachers don't even have the resources. And we did a study just after COVID where we provided our multi-level assessment to a cohort of Year 7 students at a high school, and we found that the range of abilities was anywhere from Year 3 to Year 8 within that one year level.
Danielle: Wow.
Thuy: And this happens everywhere. That was only one random class, right? And that's what happens when you group students according to their age, not according to their ability. So we had students in that class who were still learning how to add and subtract, and we had students on the other end of the spectrum who could do advanced problem solving around algebra. And yet, we're teaching them all the same thing at the same time. Imagine the class teacher who has to deal with all of those levels at once. How do you meet each of those students at that level? You just can't, right? So that's where our five-band system comes in, because we assume that students are going to start two year levels below where they're at, and then we bring them all the way through to extension and to mastery. That's why we don't teach at the core, which is what the norm is in Australian schools, to teach to the middle. And we've all heard that, right? But imagine a student like I just mentioned, at a Year 3 level in that Year 7 class, and the teacher walks in and immediately teaches how to add fractions with uncommon denominators. How's that student supposed to even engage with that? They just don't. So the way that we would deal with that is, firstly, we just assume that students are going to be two levels below, so now we're going to revise our multiplication and division, and then we move up. And students who are not within that band range, just say that core level is Year 7 and we've assessed the student to be lower than Year 5, because that band is Year 5 to Year 9, that's where intervention comes in. Where we have teacher aides coming in, where we withdraw the students from the class, and then they work with booklets that are more towards their band. So we're always able to meet the students where they're at, and that's how we get engagement from the students, as opposed to just saying, well, you're in Year 7, you're learning this, figure it out.
Danielle: So is there ever a world where your system makes its way into Australian schools, or will this rely on parents saying, I want better for my children, and coming to you privately?
Thuy: Yeah, so we've just been selected as one of the preferred suppliers for Australian schools.
Danielle: Oh, this is so awesome.
Thuy: So what that means is, we've got the prep to Year 12 curriculum all popped out, all banded. And when I talk about bands, it's per concept, it's not even per year level, right? So every single concept starts again from negative 2 to plus 2. So we've got that already, and we've got a digital bookstore where schools can jump on and they can just purchase books for their classes, for their schools. They can just work on intervention if they want to, they can just do a homework program if they want to. And we white-label them to schools, so they don't even need to know that it's from Spectrum, right? And it's all mapped to the latest AC9 curriculum. And that's how we'll be able to support teachers, because everything's all mapped out. Teachers don't have to reinvent the wheel, and that's the thing. The teacher that I mentioned, she had been teaching Year 2 for a very, very long time, and then all of a sudden, she was placed into the Year 5-6 class. She now has no material, so it's up to her to build that from scratch.
Danielle: Wow.
Thuy: And that's just how schools are, and that's how schools operate. And when I was at university myself, I was doing a Bachelor of Teaching in the primary stream, and there was a hurdle requirement. And I'm lifting a bit of the lid on this at the moment, but this is what I saw. There was a hurdle requirement where you needed to do a very basic maths test in order to pass. The extent of it was maybe percentages, in order to be able to teach in Australian primary schools. Some people failed that three times.
Danielle: Ouch.
Thuy: And so now, what we've got are teachers actually teaching in schools who don't really understand maths.
Danielle: Oh my god, yeah. This scares me.
Thuy: I remember... do you have children yourself?
Danielle: No, I don't.
Thuy: Okay. So at the end of one year, there was a student who had just gotten a scholarship the previous year, and he came up to the desk to re-enrol. And he travelled 45 minutes to attend the campus that I was at, which was the Footscray campus at the time. And I said to him, congratulations, you must have worked really, really hard. How are you going at Spectrum at the moment? And he said, I absolutely love Spectrum. And I said, oh, I'm curious, why do you love Spectrum so much? And he said, I'll tell you a story. This is an 11-year-old child who said this to me. He said, at the start of the year, my teacher taught us fractions, and it was only a few weeks ago that he taught us division. Now, it would have made more sense for the teacher to have taught division before fractions, right? Because when I was doing my teaching rounds, what I saw was, one day the teacher would be teaching addition, the following day they would be teaching capacity, the following day they would be teaching subtraction, the day after that they would be teaching geometry. There was no continuity, and that's not how you teach maths, right? Maths is all about building blocks, and so if you're not building those blocks properly, then what will happen is that students will say, I'm not good at maths.
Danielle: Yeah, exactly.
Thuy: But it's not them. It's because the system itself has been designed so that you've just got this fragmented system where people are just randomly doing things. And there's just no program or no structure in schools at the moment. I mean, I can just keep going on.
Danielle: Well, it's actually really interesting, because I feel like, as well, something you've sort of alluded to, it must be really frustrating for the teachers as well, right? I feel like they don't have a system of support, and I'm sure a lot of them got into it because they wanted to make an impact and wanted to help the next generation flourish, but they don't have the tools either.
Thuy: They don't. Right, absolutely.
Danielle: I feel like, if I was a teacher and in the system feeling frustrated, I would want to come and work for you, you know? I would be like, please, give me something.
Thuy: Yeah, and that's the thing, our tutors were so spoiled with our system. When they became teachers themselves, and they had to build their own curriculum... I've got this one tutor who is now one of our franchisees, and she works as a teacher in a school at the moment. She said that when she was on teaching rounds, the school was so understaffed that, even though her methods at that time were business management and mathematics, she arrived at school one day and they said to her, can you teach Year 11 legal studies? And she said, well, I've never really taught legal studies before, but because she was a pre-service teacher, I'll give it a go, if you can give me the resources. Right? So this school taught via PowerPoint, everybody just teaches via slide decks. So they had a slide deck from the previous year, and they said to her, well, you can't use this slide deck, but here are three pages from the textbook, go and build your own slide deck.
Danielle: Oh my god, what!
Thuy: She doesn't have a background in legal studies, she's had no exposure to legal studies at all, but she was expected to build a new resource from scratch where one already existed. This is insane.
Danielle: Insanity? Yeah, that's literally the word.
Thuy: So she had to spend that night building this slide deck for nothing, when there was one that already existed. So teachers are frustrated because they need to rebuild resources that already exist. It doesn't make any sense. And it's an expectation that you rebuild your own resources.
Danielle: Mmm, wow. That doesn't make any sense. Why reinvent the wheel? It's striking me, like, what I'm seeing right now is you have this incredible business brain, entrepreneurship, innovation, you can see the bigger picture, and you've taken that and applied it to education, and I just feel like it's so sad that we don't have that thinking in the education system.
Thuy: Yep. Because education, I feel, sits in its own bubble, right? You know, when they introduced NAPLAN, it was finally the year where parents finally got to understand at least where their child sits, because there are some schools at the moment that have no homework policies.
Danielle: Wow.
Thuy: So students actually miss out on the habits that are formed from doing homework, from being able to reinforce what was taught. Like, that whole five-band system, that independence and mastery, is really important for that long-term memory, the long-term retrieval. And so there are some schools that have no homework policies, and so then parents are really left in the dark as to what their children are actually doing at school, right? When we finally had NAPLAN, I was like, hang on a second, why is my child here, right? Okay, now maybe I need some support. Or, oh, they're actually doing quite well, maybe they can go for a scholarship or something like that, right? So it just gives data, it just gives information that parents may not have had before. But you hear it every single year, there's this whole backlash around NAPLAN, there are people who boycott it and all of these things. But what I see is that it's just a data point that is useful for anybody to understand. For parents, for students, for schools, for teachers. So education is just in its own little bubble, and I suppose there's just this status quo, because that's how we're taught at university, right? It's about personalising learning, but when you personalise without a structure, it just becomes chaos. How do you personalise learning for 25 students?
Danielle: Exactly. You can't.
Thuy: Right? So the way that it works for us is that we start two year levels below, and then we actually get some students up to a point where they are independent in our higher levels. So now, because we've got that structure, it then gives the teacher space to be able to work with those students who may need that extra support in the Earth and the Water levels.
Danielle: Yes, that makes sense. Wow. Now, you also mentioned franchises a couple of times. So you've gone from, and this is wild, your brother tutoring students one-on-one, to coming into your parents' office space, to now building the business and expanding into franchises. This is so incredible. How many franchises, or franchisees, do you now have?
Thuy: Yep, so we've got 16 locations around Melbourne, and of the 16 locations, we have 5 different franchisees. So a few of them have multiple sites.
Danielle: Wow. So what was that process like? Taking your IP, taking your model, and, I guess, empowering somebody to run it as their own business?
Thuy: Yeah, I mean, that was crazy.
Danielle: Tackling education was hard. Wait till you do franchising.
Thuy: But again, for me, I just flow. It's one of those things, right, where I think it might just be the feminine energy that we have, where we just flow instead of push. All throughout my life, even getting into my business in the first place, I wasn't really supposed to do that. My initial degrees were in commerce and arts, and my dream was to be in some corner office, being an accountant somewhere.
Danielle: Wow, that's so funny.
Thuy: You know, and in the end, what happened at that crossroads was, I was doing my degrees, and I had no intention of continuing on with Spectrum after I finished. It was supposed to just be a weekend job. But by the time I graduated, I had 300 students out of nowhere. So then I thought, well, okay, I've got a legitimate business here. Should I close it? Or should I just go back to uni and study teaching, and how to teach properly? And obviously I chose the second path. But in terms of franchising, it started because I've got an email list, and we've got an online bookstore as well, where we have exam packs, because one of our specialisations is scholarship and select entry preparation. And I would always get these cold emails where people would say, oh, are you looking to franchise your business? And I'd be like, well, it just seems like such a long and expensive process, no thank you. And there was just this one person, and she sent me a message, and she said, I downloaded one of your exam packs, and I used it for my students. I have a tuition centre already, but I don't know how to scale it, right? And I really like your model. Are you interested in franchising? And I said, well, not really. Maybe sometime in the future, but I really appreciate it. And usually it just stops at that. And then she messaged me again about a month later and said, are you ready for franchising now?
Danielle: I love the persistence, yes.
Thuy: And I said, maybe sometime in the future, right? Like, far, far future. Six months later, she messaged me again.
Danielle: Wow.
Thuy: And I thought, she's really interested, she's really persistent. There's something here. It's not like any of the other inquiries, this is a serious inquiry. And then, I was just in the car one time... are you in Melbourne, or...?
Danielle: No, I'm in Perth.
Thuy: Oh, Perth. So in Melbourne, there are the exhibition buildings, and just at the time, I was driving past the exhibition buildings, and on the radio, just at that point, they said, there's a franchise expo happening at the exhibition buildings!
Danielle: Oh my god.
Thuy: And this person's words were replaying in my mind, and I said, well, maybe there's something here, right? I may as well explore. And they said, free entry! The universe is like, would you just go, woman? It's like, there are all these signs here, just go in already. And so I walked in, and I was researching, I just went around to all the different franchise consultants, and the price range was anywhere between $15,000 to somewhere over $250,000 to franchise the business. And then I met this person, and I had a chat with him, and he said, oh wow, you guys were ready for franchising, like, last year. I believe in you so much that I'm willing to fly down from Sydney every single month to mentor you myself. That's what he said.
Danielle: Wow.
Thuy: And I thought, wow, that's really amazing. And so I thought about it a little bit more, and then I went to work on the weekend, and I spoke with my assistant at the time, and she asked what I did on the weekend. I went to the franchising expo. And she'd been with me for six years at that time, and she said, oh, if you're doing an information session on franchising, can I come along as well? And I said, I had no idea that you were interested, right? And I said to her, well, what actually interests you about franchising? She said, well, I see the way that parents come up to you, and they thank you for how you've transformed their children's lives. And one day, I dream that it would happen to me as well.
Danielle: Oh, wow. That's incredible!
Thuy: So then I ended up taking on those two, and they became my first franchisees. And because I had somebody internal already, she already knew the business, and somebody external, we were then able to build that franchising model. I just built it in real time, because they both believed in the model. And I was going through something really difficult at the time, so that was a really good distraction for me, to be able to build something, and to know that people just believed in me, when I didn't believe in myself. And that really helped, yeah, build out the model, so I just built it as I went.
Danielle: Oh, that's incredible. I love it. Oh my god, I could talk to you all day, but I'm looking at the time now. As I said, I could absolutely talk to you about this all day, I feel like we're gonna have to get you back on the podcast now. But I always love to wrap up these podcasts with one last piece of advice. So, reflecting on your time in business, what would be a piece of advice that you would give to another woman on her business journey?
Thuy: Systematise everything. Everything. You need to document everything. So, for me, when I started repeating a task maybe two or three times, I was like, okay, I need to outsource this now. I need to delegate this to somebody else, right? Any repeatable tasks need to be delegated, because your time is worth so much money. Your time is the most valuable thing that you could ever have. So, yeah, documenting everything. I use Trello. I mean, now, when I'm brainstorming with my ChatGPT, just having different lists for things, different boards for things, and then it's just really easy to then move that card to somebody else's Trello board. Everybody's got Trello boards in my organisation, and so then I can just move it to whoever it needs to be delegated to, right? Yeah, systematising everything, so using tools like Loom to just capture everything so that you've got resources. And that's the only way that I could scale, because in order to have somebody being able to run the business just like me... like, what's really wild for me is that we hire top-performing university students, and when I go to new franchise sites just to check things out and to visit, I watch an 18-year-old teaching exactly the same way as me.
Danielle: Yeah.
Thuy: That is insane, right? And they teach better than many of the classrooms that I've actually observed in Australian schools right now, because they follow a particular structure, and they make sure that all the students are being met where they're at, as opposed to where we want them to be. So, systematising absolutely everything is my piece of advice.
Danielle: I love it, and I think that is one of my favourite answers. So, Thuy, thank you so much for sharing your journey and your story and your wisdom with the Spark community. That was absolutely incredible.
Thuy: Yeah, thank you so much, Danielle.
