Franchisees at the Maths tuition service Mathnasium are celebrating a doubling of turnover despite the worst trading conditions in many years.

Master Franchisee John Preston says turnover in his first year in charge of the UK network rose by 109%, year on year, even though Mathnasium was hit, like most businesses, by successive lockdowns and restrictions.

He attributes the network’s resilience and success to being able to switch overnight to an online tuition portal that had been under development in the USA for several years.

It wasn’t due to be introduced to the UK for some time, but John brought it into operation immediately and, within a week it was rolled out across the entire franchise network and being used for hundreds of online sessions a day.

An instant success, Mathnasium’s bespoke online learning system Mathnasium@home allowed the franchisees and the network to remain in business, offering live face-to-face Maths tuition and support to students wherever they were.

“Mathnasium@home, combined with our unique subscription-based tuition model, is the reason our revenue didn’t go down to zero,” says John.

“In fact, our year-on-year revenue more than doubled - up by 109% for the period March 2020 to February 2021, my first year as Master Franchisee for Mathnasium UK.

“Everybody was adversely impacted by Covid, of course, and our revenue was initially down 30% across the board.

“So we decided to focus our efforts on our existing franchisees and looked at our marketing, our sales, every single aspect of the business,

“Until the pandemic, we only offered training to new franchisees In the UK, so we decided to offer extra training to our existing franchisees and that now forms part of our ongoing training programme.

“As a result, the average income per centre is massively up, year-on-year, and Mathnasium UK as a whole is up, even without adding any new franchisees.

“We really do care about our franchisees and the network at Mathnasium. If your existing franchisees are successful, more will want to join.”

And now, with Covid under control here and lockdown measures easing, John’s looking forward to welcoming two new franchisees to the network in the very near future.

And anyone who’s considering becoming a Mathnasium franchisee can take comfort from the fact that, in the worst possible trading year in living memory, the company not only managed to shield its franchisees from the worst effects but saw its UK revenues more than double.