Although StudyPoint’s founders, Gregory Zumas and Richard Enos, don’t list magician in their bios, they have transformed living rooms across America into successful learning environments as adroitly as if they were Hogwarts wizards.
A leading national provider of private tutoring services, StudyPoint has offered an alternative to impersonal learning centers since its founding in Boston as StudySmart, Inc. Since inception, the company and its experienced tutors have helped more than 15,000 students nationwide achieve higher grades and test scores.
“We started the company in 1999 at the height of the dot com boom,” said Zumas, its president, who is based locally. “At the time, many of our Cornell peers were entering high paying jobs at startups in San Francisco or at banks in New York City. But my business partner, Rich Enos, and I were both interested in doing something more meaningful, and we wanted to do it on our own. Rich had worked at Kaplan (an education company) and knew the market. And as History and English majors, respectively, and both coming from families of educators, starting an education company made perfect sense.”
They must be doing something right.
Within the past year StudyPoint has been named to the Boston Business Journal’s Pacesetters List, acknowledged by I Love Rewards as one of the 50 most engaged workplaces in the U.S., and included in Inc. Magazine’s fastest 5,000 growing companies in America for the fifth year in a row.
“Battling huge companies like Kaplan (owned by the Washington Post) and The Princeton Review (publicly traded) is never easy because they have deep pockets,” Zumas explained, “but we’ve been able to become one of the largest and fastest growing one-to-one companies out there by growing our word-of-mouth business. Almost 70 percent of our business comes from existing clients.”
The ACT is becoming accepted more widely than in the past, which is fantastic for the huge group of students who do better on that test. More and more students are learning online, be that uploading their algebra homework to their teacher or tutoring online for the SAT.
In the Culver City area, we continue to see a lot of interest in California schools. There are great in-state programs, including high profile schools like UCLA, Cal and Stanford, as well as lots of regional and UC schools that have something to offer for basically every type of student, and they give enticing financial packages.
Asked about any special plans for the future, Zumas replied that “first, we are going to keep doing what we’re doing because it works. You simply cannot beat very focused, high quality, one-to-one tutoring, which is our bread-and-butter. Second, more of our kids are working online, and we are keeping up with that trend by offering one-to-one tutoring with one teacher anywhere in the world. In fact, we just enrolled our first international student in Egypt.
“The world is so competitive now that getting into the right college for you has never been more important,” he emphasized. “The good news is that great colleges exist for every type of student, as do great tutoring programs. You just have to go out and find them.”
Local parent Greg Kearns, who gives StudyPoint a top grade, did just that.
“We wanted to help our son improve his SAT scores and we thought a more focused individualized program would help him,” Kearns said. “My son had gone through the Princeton Review to prepare for the SAT the first time. We found StudyPoint through a Google search and we had contacted several tutoring services before deciding to try StudyPoint.
“Before my son started the tutoring program, StudyPoint spent a great deal of time finding out about him and then finding a tutor that would work well with him. His tutor knew that my son had a very busy schedule between his school workload and his extracurricular activities and she tailored his program so that he could get the maximum benefit out of each session.”
Kearns found StudyPoint “professional, flexible as it related to scheduling and they constantly had touch base conversations through the time he was being tutored to ensure that the progress we hoped for was being made.” He said his son, whose SAT scores went up substantially, believes StudyPoint’s focused tutoring was key in achieving that goal.
With apologies to the scientific community, there is something innately magical about starting a David vs. Goliath operation and attracting adept and caring tutors to spark the comprehension and self-confidence integral to assimilating knowledge. To learn more, visit www.studypoint.com which, while not a portal to Hogwarts, can lead to life-changing transformation.
