May 10, 2020
In this episode, I interview Cameron Sorsby, the CEO at Discover Praxis, an online career boot camp business that offers content, weekly meetups, mentoring, and project-based learning to entrepreneurial young professionals that Cameron started in 2014. Starting off with 14 participants, the boot camp has always focused on soft skills and mindset (not education for any specific role or industry) that expose them to most corners of the business so they can find and then hone their professional passion. At the end of the course, they’re placed in fast-growing companies seeking talented young people with what they have coined as “Forward tilt” (Young professionals who want to add real value, have initiative, and a sense of urgency)
At age 24, Cameron helped found the business, growing it from 4 full-time employees to 11 full-time employees within 6 years. With $12,000 for the 6-Month course, first-year revenue grew from $30,000 to around $1.5 Million in 2020. Since 2017, they’ve had over 100 participants a year and maintained a 90% graduation rate. The next stage of growth for them is ramping up their marketing while maintaining higher product quality aiming at reaching the 500 participants a year mark. Their funding was from bootstrapping for the first year and a half after which they took on $500,000 in investment in 2015. Cameron believes the hardest thing in growing a small business is persistence; the longer you go, the more likely you will survive and thrive. The advice he would give himself on day one is, practice patience. Stay tuned for more of his business growth insights.
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Music from https://filmmusic.io "Cold Funk" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com). License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/