Lee wisely sets course for success
LEE Corbett who heads up Nerang-based company Simply eLearning is a believer in the “content is king” mantra.
It is that single-minded focus on content, rather than website development or corporate training, that has taken her company from a onewoman operation to a business on the cusp of global growth.
Simply eLearning has signed a distribution deal with risk solutions provider Abbey Grey Group (AGG), which operates in the UK and the Middle East, for its security courses.
Ms Corbett is eyeing the UK Government and New York’s World Trade Center as clients in an industry, which will reportedly be worth $416 billion by 2025.
Ms Corbett started the company after a six-year stint working in business development at the TAFE South Bank campus in Brisbane and later at a Registered Training Organisation (RTO) where she set up their e-learning arm.
She described a common scenario for people who eventually branch out and start their own business.
“The RTO was developing a white-card (construction in- duction card) course with an external provider,” she said.
“And the cost was astronomical and I didn’t understand why. It was a cumbersome process and the end-product was of a poor quality. I believed I could do it better.”
Ms Corbett quit her job, and with $12,000 in the bank, started Simply eLearning.
“I had a lot of contacts in the training sector so I was able to fairly easily convince them to take their resources from teacher-led to learner-led elearning,” she said.
Her first major client was multinational mining company Anglo-American.
“I made a cold call to their training manager who just happened to come from the same town as me in Western Australia, and who went to school and teachers’ college with my mother,” she said.
“He just gave me a shot. That was it. My first job, in late 2007, was worth $40,000 and having Anglo-American gave me credibility.”
Simply eLearning develops content such as online courses and training for a wide range of industries. They include universities (QUT: palliative care for enrolled nurses) and telecommunication companies (Telstra: compliance training).
Ms Corbett said, due to the high volume of jobs the business handles, and its sole focus on content creation, the company is able to efficiently produce quality materials.
The average job runs for just a week.
She said the key to effective e-learning is to take complicated material and turn it into engaging content that uses plain English.
Ms Corbett said the future of the business lies within the export market.
The business has spent two years developing, with a former UK SAS member and counter-terrorism expert, security e-courses that it plans to sell, via AGG, to governments, companies and agencies.
The courses deal with subjects such as bomb awareness and situational awareness.
“We’re looking for a distributer in the US because it is mandated at the World Trade Center towers that staff have active threat training every 12 months,” she said. “It has also just become mandated, I believe, for the UK Government.”
Ms Corbett believes the company has a bright future, partly because it has experienced steady growth over a number of years.
“We have a massive foundation and clients that keep coming back to us.”