TASS

TASS has been creating meaningful connections within school communities for over 35 years. Originally founded by an entrepreneur who spotted a gap in the market, TASS was the first school management system provider acquired by Volaris Group.

When Volaris acquired TASS in 2016, TASS already had a strong brand reputation, but there were modest targets set to attract new customers. To support a more ambitious growth trajectory, the leadership team tapped into Volaris’s proven financial metrics and ratios that benchmark best practice across the group. They were able to compare their business with sister companies across Volaris to understand their operational metrics, allowing them to identify opportunities for improvement.

Having access to benchmark data insights for the first time allowed them to develop a deeper appreciation of their business, customer base and industry.

Growth strategy #1: Ramping up marketing and sales investment

After observing other Volaris businesses, the TASS team quickly identified that while word-of-mouth referrals had built the business to date, next-level growth would require more strategic marketing. They expanded their marketing and sales team, introduced more sophisticated lead generation and digital marketing, and adopted marketing and sales lead tracking software.

Marketing investments take time to gain traction. You don’t see results overnight, so you need to have patience and trust that you will start to see results in 12 to 18 months.

-Lee Fisher, CEO, TASS

The investment paid off and within two years TASS was experiencing double-digit, year-on-year organic growth. TASS continues to invest resources into marketing and extending customer research to understand core challenges and needs.

Regular customer health checks are also conducted to reveal if customer needs are being met, what new skills are needed across the business, whether training is required to improve customer service, and how customers are experiencing TASS’s software solutions.

Growth strategy #2: Acquisitions

In 2017, Volaris Group acquired Edumate, a student information system that complements TASS’s own offering. The business was blended into TASS so that resources could be shared across the two business units and product sets. Customers from both businesses continue to use their preferred student management system.

As the businesses are working together, and not in competition, they can focus on their respective product road maps for the benefit of their customers.

TASS’s next strategic acquisition was TrackOne Studio in 2021. TrackOne Studio shared many common customers with TASS and the business’s learning analytics solution complements school management. Through TrackOne Studio, TASS + Edumate can offer greater insights into student learning journeys and performance, including measuring soft skills and overall wellbeing.

Growth strategy #3: Build something new

Having grown its customer base and completing the acquisitions of Edumate and TrackOne, the team surveyed school and parent communities to understand their unmet needs. The answer was simple: build mobile apps that make school communication and administrative tasks more convenient for parents and teachers.

TASS developed a business plan for the mobile apps, known as TASS Orbit.
The dedicated TASS Orbit team leveraged internal expertise from across Volaris while developing and validating the business plan. Research was undertaken by the team to identify features for the new mobile apps. TASS’s team used Volaris’s investment models to assess viability and timeframe for scaling up based on sales and revenue.

Being able to tap into Volaris’s network amplifies the success of a new product initiative. We not only hear about other initiatives and why they succeeded or the lessons from failures, but I could reach out to other teams who have built their own apps. It takes a lot of trial and error out of the process, increasing the viability of the business plan and product and helping us get to market far more quickly. The market is ready for this now, so the faster we could develop our app, the better.

- Annie Robins, Head of Product – Mobile Apps, TASS

A dedicated TASS Orbit Team was critical to ensure the new apps would get the attention they needed without being lost in the hundreds of enhancements in TASS’s backlog for its core offering. Creating a focused TASS Orbit product team also enables TASS to easily track financials separately, measuring whether Orbit is seeing a return on investment and if sales and key metrics are tracking against projections.

Within five months of launching Orbit we were already 20 per cent ahead of our forecasts. The wealth of experience and planning that went into creating the business model has proven how successful Volaris’s networking model and culture of sharing insights and information is.

- Lee Fisher, CEO, TASS

Looking towards the future

Since joining the Volaris Group, TASS has grown five-fold in seven years. This growth enables TASS to continuously deliver more value to customers by improving their service and product offerings. It's a virtuous cycle and important as Volaris Group never sell an acquired business.

We are always looking at how to improve our customers’ lives. We have established multiple channels to receive customer feedback and insights, which in turn influences our strategic direction and product roadmap. We are continuously gathering insights from industry, prospects, recently implemented customers, as well enhancement requests and questions from existing customers that come through our customer forum and support desk. Understanding our customers is key to being able to grow with them.

- Lee Fisher, CEO, TASS