Mohana Radhakrishnan, co-founder and COO, ExpertusONE
ExpertusONE
“Did you ever have to make up your mind?” asks the Lovin’ Spoonful song. “Pick up on one and leave the other one behind. It’s not often easy, and not often kind.”
Three times over the course of ExpertusONE’s 20-plus-year history, its co-founders—Ramesh Ramani and Mohana Radhakrishnan—changed the type of learning management company it is.
The global corporate learning management system (LMS) market size is projected to reach $7.6 billion by 2026, according to Valuates, a market insights company. Driving growth is continuous innovation in e-learning tools, the increasing BYOD (bring your own device) trend, enterprise mobility, and growing emphasis on continuous learning. Spotting changing market conditions and taking advantage of them is nothing new for Expertus.
When the company started in 1998, it wasn’t a cloud-based platform. Expertus managed its customers’ systems. Seven years later, it changed its focus to building a more usable interface, making it easier for people to find and launch courses.
More recently, the company built its own platform. “We evolved from a learning-services company to a technology-enabled company to a technology company,” said Radhakrishnan, COO at Expertus. She sets the company’s strategy and drives execution.
Pivots can be painful. “We were changing to something new,” said Radhakrishnan. “In some cases, we had to give up revenue.” When becoming a digital-learning platform, it was challenging to be in two places at the same time. Expertus was developing its platform while making its competitors’ platforms better.
The first pivot was an easier transition. “We just needed to offer our new technology-enabled service to our customers,” said Radhakrishnan. Customers converted and adopted the new service.
The most recent pivot required that Expertus stop marketing and selling its old service as it built its technology platform. “Our salespeople had to change from selling a service into a product,” said Radhakrishnan. “We didn’t renew the old contracts.”
All marketing and sales efforts were focused on the new platform. “We left some customers behind,” Radhakrishnan said. The company made the strategic decision to forego the stability it had in the market at the moment for the possibility of a more significant return in the future.
While many employees were able to convert their skills to the new product, not all were able to, especially salespeople. “This was painful,” said Radhakrishnan. The company prides itself on having many long-term employees but it needed people with new skill sets.
The company had to be nimble and agile to catch the wave early and ride it as it was building. To sustain a company until a new product catches on, financial resources are critical. Often, small companies don’t have the luxury of doing this. Medium-size companies between $10 million and $1 billion, like Expertus, do.
What gave Expertus the confidence to move forward? It had a lot of visibility into the market. It turned out that industry analysts, such as Gartner and Josh Bersin, saw the industry moving in the same direction as Expertus. The company gleaned insights from competitors it was supporting. “We knew what the pain points were because our customers came to us to solve them,” said Radhakrishnan. “We knew how to solve them for companies that had 150,000 employees and 200 employees.”
“A couple of pivot points coincidentally coincided with market changes,” said Radhakrishnan. Uncertain times complicate market trends. Sometimes for the better and sometimes not. When people are afraid to travel, e-learning initiatives grow. Cutbacks in travel happened after the economic shocks of 9/11 and Covid-19. Instead, corporations turned to train employees online. Companies cut travel costs and invested more in technology. Not so for the financial crisis of 2007-2009. “Some large contracts we were hoping to be signed didn’t happen.”
For corporate learning and development, digital has become a way of life and that is not likely to change. Expertus’ cloud-based learning-management platform is now used by over half a million people every month.
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