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Our Values

Our culture, beliefs and practice is reflected in our 5 key values. Read on to see how we’ve described what each value means to us here at Crimson.

Student Outcome Obsessed

Crimson is shamelessly obsessed with our students, and they dictate both our priorities and standards.

Our business was built on the back of the deeply personalized work our founders did to support students. Even today, most members of our executive team still work day-to-day with students - embodying our student-first focus. We are uncompromising in this desire to see our students achieve the best possible results.

We deeply believe in the life-changing potential of education - every year we see it transform our students’ trajectories. We see their potential as our ultimate responsibility: because our students have such capacity to achieve, we hold ourselves to the standard of helping them get there. We refuse to compromise our ethics in pursuit of these goals, believing the greatest student achievement comes without taking any shortcuts.

On a day-to-day level, this means we want employees thinking constantly about what students need and putting this need above their manager’s. Student needs are synonymous with business needs. This is emblematic of the “owner mentality” we preach to all employees.

Student Outcome Obsessed
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Hustle & Grit Is In Our DNA

Moving fast and moving deliberately are not mutually exclusive.

At Crimson, we believe if we are not making mistakes, we are moving too slowly. Our ambition requires us to grow to a scale where we can impact thousands of students.

Growth has distinct further benefits for our students: we can use scale to perfect our systems and refine our pedagogy, but also diversify and grow our Crimson network, offering benefits for everyone involved.

To do this, we celebrate “hustling” - taking an entrepreneurial get-it-done mindset that embraces unconventional and creative approaches to problem solving. We train and treat each employee as a decision-maker, giving each high trust and high accountability. We create quick promotion tracks for high performers, and judge performance solely based on results (not experience, age, degree, or background). When we enter into unchartered territory, we embrace the mess, and we grit our teeth through the mundane or the repetitiveness if it brings us closer to our goal.

Hustle & Grit

Level Up

Learning is not our goal, it’s our imperative - we are pro-growth in every respect, and constantly challenging every team member to reach that next level.

Our approach to professional growth is closely tied to our approach to student education. We are competency-based learners, focusing on skills demonstrated over courses taken.

Our Capability Framework, a catch-all document that shows employees the skills they need for every job in the company, sits at the center of our learning-first mindset. Like with students, we create nurturing environments to help every employee succeed but challenge each to lead the charge.

For our full-time staff, this means constant investment. We imbue them with early trust and authority, rewarding those who excel with quick promotions, putting them in positions to learn new skills. We give top performers room to extend vertically (rising through their department’s ranks) or laterally to other verticals.

We always look at internal candidates before soliciting external ones, reaching outside our network as a last resort. We promote our tutors and students into regular part- and full-time roles, having brought back 10 alumni to work at Crimson last year alone.

Level Up
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We Only Play To Win

We are proud of our desire to compete - to build not just the great, but the best.

While the process of education is tied closely to intrinsic motivation, we embrace competition and extrinsic motivation broadly.

We want to provide students with services that are not only the best locally, but globally. We welcome competitors who provide value for their students but unapologetically look to do better for ours.

We view this competitive attitude as healthy. It keeps us from resting on our laurels, and only puts our students in better positions to succeed.

We only play to win

Parents Are Our Teammates

In achieving exceptional student outcomes, we need to work in lockstep with parents. They are our teammates.

Our parents give unique insights into their children, can help drive alignment at home, report back any challenges in executing our Crimson strategies and help follow up with their children.

Parents’ reflections can give perspectives about what motivates their children and their mental health. Parents may have interesting local resources available that can help our candidacy development efforts. The parent ultimately decides to invest in Crimson, drives our referrals and become our biggest fans when we change the lives of their child and their family. We need to keep them aligned, informed and engaging on the thrilling journey with Crimson to university and beyond.

Parents Are Our Teammates
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