I'll read the research disclosure quickly. For important disclosures, please see the Morgan Stanley research disclosure website at www.morganstanley.com. If you have any questions, please reach out to your Morgan Stanley sales rep. Chuck and Jason, thanks for joining us today. Tell us a little bit about the company because we don't cover you from research.
Sure. So we appreciate you having us. So Nerdy is a leading online platform, and we have a two-sided marketplace with experts and learners, and we use AI to connect them, and we deliver live learning at scale. So we have both a consumer business and an institutional business, Varsity Tutors, and you can learn any of 3,000 different subjects in a one-on-one small group live stream or asynchronous format. We brought them all together into a subscription all-access offering, and we kind of underwent a journey with introducing this new concept to consumers over the last two years. We recently did the same on the institutional side where we're selling it to school districts and making those products available at scale, and it's going great.
I have to say I'm a customer of the company not because I need tutoring and anything, but I have three kids, and it's a great value proposition for anybody who needs tutors for their kids.
Thank you.
You're the founder of the company?
I am, yeah.
How long have you been at it?
17 years. I started in college based on my own experiences and kind of grew from there.
Talk about the transition you've made over the last year, Learning Memberships, things like that? It was an 18-month transition, I think, which is impressive.
Yeah. So we had originally sold kind of blocks of tutoring as the way that the product was kind of denominated. And so what we've done, better than anybody else, is kind of build the underlying software infrastructure that allows for us to take what could be a very labor-intensive process that is a very data-intensive process and then make it look seamless on the outside. And so what we've been able to do in kind of bringing all these different products to bear then, instead of selling them as different transactions, a class, tutoring package, different tutoring package, a class, we were able to instead play the blended average game, move to a SaaS model, and then change the consumer psychology associated with how you learn.
And so when you get a learning membership, you're signing up for something that can support you as a student or as a parent, your student, over multiple academic calendar years across different subjects, across modalities. It's allowed for us to shift how people engage and the frequency with which they do so, ultimately leading to roughly doubling lifetime values at the first year and a bunch of other indications of happy customers. But it's really changed how people interact with the platform. It's also allowed for us to have just a far more efficient and scalable business model that then makes innovating and growing faster and kind of augmenting our offering slightly for a specific set of users very, very easy.
I will say great UI, easy to use. I'm able to manage it for my daughters from here because my daughters are right now in Austin, Texas, with my wife. And one of them is taking an AP tutoring class for AP Human Geography with a tutor in London. Late hour for this person, and he's great. I sat through one of the Zoom tutoring sessions. It's awesome. So again, thank you. 2023 was an impressive financial year. Talk about it in terms of what you produced, but also was it driven mostly by the transition of the Learning Memberships, or was it done despite the transition?
A little bit of both. So Chuck mentioned earlier we've extended our LTVs. They're almost double what they were in the historical package model at the 12-month mark. For the total company, we grew revenue $33 million during, sorry, $30 million during the year in 2023. Importantly, though, we were also able to improve Adjusted EBITDA by $33 million, so 108% flow-through. During the fourth quarter, we delivered 32% revenue growth. That was sequential accelerating growth each quarter. And then when you think about the two business components, within our institutional space, it's more nascent, but it's growing much more quickly. We delivered $11 million of revenue in the fourth quarter, and that was up 160% year-over-year. So we feel really good about how those results position us as we move into 2024. And I know we'll talk about the guidance a little bit.
Yeah. So I always focus on you guys from a consumer perspective because that's how I am, or that's how I consume the product, or my kids do. Talk about the institutional business because I think that's one of the great things about your business is there's a consumer component. You're building it once, selling it multiple times. There's a consumer business. There's institutional. Talk about institutional, which, as you say, is smaller but growing faster, must be a bigger market, different dynamics in terms of how you're selling, that sort of stuff.
Yeah. So we originally were direct-to-consumer internet and have extended the platform to the institutional market. So it's been pretty exciting to see kind of the scale of impact you have. And you call it three years ago, we had been approached by school districts every single year in particular. And you can't kind of casually engage with them. It's a complicated process. And we thought it was important to kind of focus on building all the core building blocks in our consumer business that would allow for us to get to the point where we could kind of service all these different digital learning needs. And as COVID happened, as learning loss became very apparent, how acute it was, we felt like we were particularly well-equipped to deliver live learning at a district-wide scale in a way that otherwise couldn't have been the case.
And so much like we started off selling packages in our consumer business and then have evolved that to this access-based subscription, we've undergone a similar journey on the institutional side with starting off selling blocks of hours and then just this past September shifting to an access-based model. It allows for us to make for a far more simple conversation, deploy the solution across entire school districts up to hundreds of thousands of students, and ultimately build a business that is more predictable, far larger contract values, and get a lot of leverage out of a sales force that then can continue to sell in kind of a solution at different levels and grades and ultimately meet this kind of acute need that has become pretty severe over the course of the last several years and, frankly, isn't getting better.
So what's happening that we're pretty excited about is that as this need is also seeing a lot of political support related to funding it. And so you're seeing tutoring being the thing that is consistently working in schools. And there's a lot of bipartisan policy support for it. And so that kind of combined with shaking loose historical ways that schools operated and causing them to consider augmenting their kind of core building-level solutions with third-party online platforms has created this multibillion-dollar emergent industry in tutoring that previously did not exist. And so we feel very well situated to participate in that and kind of lead on what great looks like in that capacity. So we feel like we have a big head start.
We have all the kind of infrastructure that we built for our consumer business, and now we've been able to converge both platforms to really the same model.
So selling the same tutoring product, but instead of selling it to me for my kids, selling it to the school district, and are kids doing this during the school day, during a free period? Is it after school? So it's selling at the same hours they might have taken if their parents bought it. How do I think about that?
Yeah. So there's basically three different ways that schools can administer tutoring. They can have it centrally managed. They can have teachers prescribe it. Or alternatively, they can allocate that responsibility to parents, which we call our Parent-Assigned product. That's effectively just our consumer Learning Membership that schools can buy in mass at 1,000 at a time or several thousand at a time. So each of those solves a different specific problem that a school district have. Collectively, we feel like we can solve all of the problems related to tutoring and acute learning loss that a school district may have. Then we have all of these tangential services that can scale out across an entire student base that allow for us to have a positive impact and engage with much larger groups of students beyond that kind of core group that's receiving the paid intervention.
Maybe just to put some financials to the institutional business that Chuck mentioned. In the first full year, $19 million. In the second full year, $33 million, so 77% growth this past year. We also delivered the third consecutive quarter of $10 million+ in bookings. All the products that Chuck mentioned, Teacher-Assigned, district, and Parent-Assigned, are all resonating. They're all selling well. We feel really good that it gives us the product breadth to meet the needs of students across any niche need that a school district may have.
One of the things I'd add on is one of the exciting things we're now seeing is that halo effect associated with a school adopting our platform, lots of students using it, parents and students hearing about it, calling in and wanting to purchase additional tutoring, private paid tutoring, consumer tutoring outside of what the school is already purchasing. You kind of become, you get the implicit endorsement of that school, which has proven to be incredibly valuable. So as we've ramped up the number of district partnerships, it's been pretty exciting to see that occur. The platform and the software that we're building just naturally extends into other areas as well, like higher ed and B2B that we endeavor to get into in the not-too-distant future.
I do want to get to that because B2B is always, it's always K-12 higher ed, and then is B2B a potential? We all read every day about the issues in K-12, lack of teachers, lack of quality teachers. Outcomes for kids are way down. We all see the test results and everything else. What stops you from being bigger even quicker? Obviously, you've just launched this product, so you're growing it impressively. To me, every school district needs this. Is it a funding issue that they don't have the funds to do this? Is it they haven't bought into it? Teachers don't necessarily want it. They feel like parents should do it at home. How do I think about what are the limitations to the growth?
I think, importantly, a lot of the benefits that we're going to get from the shift to a subscription-based model and the ability to scale across an entire district haven't yet manifested in our historical results. So we got immense operating leverage, 2,100 basis points of EBITDA margin improvement this past year based on the fact that primarily our consumer business was seeing 2x LTV extension, holding customer acquisition costs flat, able to remove a lot of costs. We had a bunch of durable wins associated with either process automation or generative AI. But what we expect to be really large benefits that then come from taking this new access-based model and scaling it everywhere are kind of yet to pull through in the total answer, but are already starting to work in ways that get us really, really excited.
So in particular, the ability to get our platform embedded into school districts is a very efficient way to scale access across those 250 new districts that kind of signed up, really, and call it November and December for that. It's ramping quickly. It's something that we think can allow for us to very efficiently introduce ourselves to an extent that was never previously the case.
Yeah. You said 2,100 basis points of margin improvement. You are profitable today on an EBITDA margin. What are you prouder of, the growth rate that you produced, or the fact that you're now profitable and you produce such great margin improvement?
I think it's that we did it in the right way. Continuing to invest in growth, product innovation is critical to our DNA as a company. We almost doubled the size of our engineering team over the course of the past year. We're still investing in that space. Those engineers have delivered the products that Chuck mentioned to both the institutional space as well as Learning Memberships. They've also driven substantial automation and improvement throughout the business. We leverage AI throughout the tech stack to make sure we're giving customers a great matching experience from a tutor and learner matching basis, driving operating costs out of the business, bringing great new products to bear, whether it's AI chat-based tutoring, AI lesson plan generator, content creation that supports depth of subject information on the website and learning. So we feel really good about the durability of the Adjusted EBITDA improvements.
Those will continue to expand as we move into 2024.
Yeah. It's product enhancements that drove both improvements for the customer and, as a result, lifetime value extension and/or cost reduction. And so it was a really healthy way that's durable that kind of builds towards an even better product and foundation for 2024 that we feel good about, as opposed to maybe at the opposite extreme, just cost-cutting or something like that.
Yeah. You've both mentioned AI. Has it been a bigger driver of top-line growth or a bigger beneficiary on the cost side to date? And what do you think will happen where will it have a bigger impact in the future in the business?
We first started using machine learning in 2016, 2017 to match the experts and learners. And so when you have 1,000 tutors available and one student, who do you actually choose for that person? And the results that you're able to get through AI are so much better than what you could get through a human-based process that, in that case, it all deliberately manifests in higher repurchase rates effectively, higher lifetime value, and higher referral rates. And then separately, you also have less ancillary customer service costs and other issues that a business would experience. And so it really addresses both. In the case of this past year, when we funded a whole host of different generative AI investments, there were areas where some were very specifically focused at automating costs out.
We eliminated approximately 100 roles associated with customer service and tutor onboarding through a series of generative AI initiatives. We had others where they were generally customer experience enhancements, real-time call scoring on all inbound calls using generative AI algos backtested against rubrics and whatnot. That pulled through to happier customers, fewer costs, and ongoing service issues. And then we also had areas like lesson plan generators that are generative AI-based that allowed for tutors to be more prepared for lessons. It allowed for the student to get a more consistently great experience and AI tutoring as well. And so we kind of had both customer-facing ones and then back-end ones oriented towards either cost reduction or quality improvement.
Awesome. Wow. Were we not on mic earlier? Okay. Fourth quarter, you guys rolled out freemium products. We've seen Duolingo use those incredibly effectively. What's the rationale behind it? What have you seen it do in the business thus far?
We have some incredible lower zero-marginal cost products. We think there's an opportunity to use those to introduce more people to the platform at scale. And we're kind of leaning into that opportunity to register users and allow for them to get familiar with the product to then monetize on live in a way that we think is really effective. And we're really excited about kind of earlier results there. And we're making sure to kind of think of it as a net incremental strategy. So all the same go-to-market motion functions that we've had this past year and last couple of years will continue to occur.
And then we'll use this as a way where there's lower-intent channels, as an example, that we're able to engage users when there might not be a kind of acute need for tutoring, which is oftentimes the thing that causes somebody to buy a paid subscription.
Maybe just one thing to add. Chuck mentioned the freemium strategy on the institutional side is what's really going to enable us to scale through awareness in that space. We already signed up over 1 million students at 250+ school districts in the last three months on platform access. It's providing incredible opportunities to have commercial conversations with these school districts that we think will really kind of play out over the course of the next six to nine months. So we feel really good about that offering. Internally, we've given the sales team the ambitious goal to sign up 10 million students this year or 20% of the K-12 student population in the United States. So it's got an incredibly fast start. We've got high ambition, and we think it's the right way to drive customer awareness and.
Yeah. Both top-of-funnel revenue growth and ultimately significantly lower customer acquisition costs over time would be what we target.
Be a little bit more specific on the institutional side. When you offer the freemium product, the student is signing up for it at the school, and then the student is encouraged to go to the school and say, "Hey, I've signed up for this." Therefore then okay.
Go ahead.
Yeah. These are formal agreements with the school district where they're enabling it for their students via a single sign-on experience in their learning management system. And so students have effectively an icon that they can click on that opens up our platform, and they can automatically log in. And it's provisioned according to which services they should have access to, whether those are some of the no-cost, low-marginal cost offerings, or alternatively, if there are some of the paid subscriptions as well. So those kind of just scale across the entire district.
So you're landing with the school district itself. It's just that they're taking the Freemium model, try it, and see how it goes. It's not as though you're going the other way of having the student do it themselves and then go to the school district or to a teacher or something like that.
No. Although these platforms are converging, so the school districts are rolling it out to their student bases. Many of them are buying concurrently with both the access to the platform as well as paid products. Some are starting with low-cost access products and then buying subsequently. That's a channel that's proving to be very effective. The fact that we have these tools and capabilities that we're willing to give away is proving to be kind of this gravitational force for customer acquisition that we're finding to be very attractive.
I assume it's too early to say the impact that it's having in terms of sell-through and upsells or anything like that.
I mean, on the institutional side, we already have millions of dollars of bookings flowing in as a result of this. And I would expect that it's the super majority of our funnel in the future, introducing people to our products and then schools to our products and then allowing for them when they're ready to purchase additional services. So that one's farther along by quite a bit. And then on the consumer side, we're early in testing and getting lots of feedback. But that funnel's working at a small scale, but we have work to do to make it a kind of winning mass market strategy. But we're hard at work on that.
Does freemium on the consumer side have the potential to cannibalize on the learning membership side? Or will it slow it down at all? Or what have you seen thus far?
Yeah. We don't think it cannibalizes our core business at all. So the core business is live one-on-one tutoring. We've seen customers that are always willing to pay for that because they want the live interaction. They want the accountability that the relationship provides, the knowledge transfer. The freemium products are more self-study tools, chat-based tutoring, and homework help-style modules. And so we feel good that they're separate enough and that, in the consumer's mind, they have always shown and will continue to show a willingness to pay for the live experience.
Yeah. And on the consumer side, they tend to be affluent folks in the kind of top 10% of income. And then on the institutional side, the students skew to, call it, the bottom 20% of income in the United States, so primarily Title I and students that are kind of underachieving, which then over-indexes on that kind of demographic population base. So there's very little overlap. One of the things that has been exciting recently is the extent to which our Parent Assigned product, which is the consumer Learning Memberships that school districts can buy en masse, is resonating. So we've had school districts buy 500 Learning Memberships, 1,000 Learning Memberships. None of that's counted in the metrics that we share publicly for Learning Memberships.
We're getting that signal that it solves a very real need for schools, and they can kind of buy it at scale and then deploy it in a way that's really seamless and is resonating thus far.
I've got to imagine you've invested a lot in the product. You're not seeing a whole big payback yet on the freemium side. So the 2,100 basis points of margin improvement probably would have been better were it not for the investment that you've made.
Yeah. That's right. I mean, I think we're trying to balance growth and profitability, as Chuck mentioned. We think we're investing in all the right things, and they'll have short payback periods, probably less than 12 months here. But overall, we feel really good about the level of investments. And I think the key thing to mention here and Chuck said it a couple of times, but it's worth reiterating. The products that we're giving away free are low-cost or no-cost. And we think it's going to be an effective marketing channel to really pull customers into the broader experience at a nice scale.
Yeah. We're still continuing to optimize and scale our existing learning model.
If the freemium product were out there, I would have been a quick consumer of it, okay? It would have been great with me. Talk about the market. How do you see the market dynamics playing out here? Is it a winner-take-all, winner-take-most? How long does it take realizing that we're in a unique period post-COVID when every one of us who has kids can acknowledge that the learning loss that happened, regardless of what school your kids went to, is very real? We're going to be making up for that for a long period of time here. I think you guys are going to be a big beneficiary of it.
Yeah. Absolutely. It's unfortunate, but students are far behind. They've taken the national state exams. The National Report Card would indicate students are at 30-year lows in student achievement. There's teacher shortages in the United States that are pervasive. Teachers are overworked. We're trying to provide products that can help support them. That'll take time to remediate as well. And you mentioned that learning loss is really real. So I think all of those trends are tailwinds for our business in the future. We look to provide meaningful products that can support students, teachers, administrators, and parents. And we think that we've got that product suite to be able to do so.
Yeah. By giving away the platform, we think we can the zero-marginal cost products that Jason referenced, we also think we can start becoming something closer to the de facto tutoring platform in the United States and benefit from that kind of implicit endorsement and, as a result, have the consumer side benefit from a halo effect as well. We're already seeing kind of early signs of that.
What percent of the market do you think that you guys capture right now? And who else? And what's the next biggest competitor?
It's estimated to be a $15-$20 billion tutoring market and a $10 billion test prep market. The enrichment market's another $10 billion. Professional certifications and designations is beyond that. So on our consumer side, there's effectively 3,000 subjects you can learn. What we do better than anybody else is live. The actual subjects themselves could be translate. There was a point in time where Fortnite had a moment in time and was getting a lot of volume. But we can fulfill whatever the demand is out there. From our perspective, right now, the market's super fragmented. It's shifting online. There's validation that it's a better experience. It's more convenient. You can get a better person.
We think that by kind of having that best-in-class offering that's super convenient and also good value and just reliable and can serve you across all of those different learning needs, that we're in a place to be part of that learning journey for a student or an entire family spanning many years.
Maybe to put some numbers to it. On the consumer side, we had 40,000 learning members at the end of the fourth quarter. If you have 0.5% of the number of students in the United States, which is 50 million-55 million at any given time, you'd have 250,000 members, and that'd be a billion-dollar run-rate business. So it's early. It's completely achievable just given all the challenges that we mentioned a minute ago and the acceptance within both the academic and government circles that high-dosage tutoring is the one thing that's really working to remediate learning loss. So we feel really good about the direction of our products and the use of our products.
Yeah. I would say the amount of policy support and legislation that's being considered to specifically fund tutoring just dramatically step function changed up at some point in the fall. There's a lot of different bills now getting passed or being considered specifically oriented toward high-dosage tutoring within schools because it works so consistently, and there's so many studies showing this. We consider this to be this emergent multi-billion-dollar industry. There's an opportunity to continue to execute and lean into this opportunity and participate in that growth.
It's one of the rare areas that is bipartisan by and large.
Absolutely.
Educate me a little bit on this. Right now, my kids are in freshman, high school, and seventh grade. Therefore, I'm very focused on K-12. How much of your business is K-12 versus higher ed? Then you talked about corporate earlier. How much of it's in each right now? How does that shift over time?
Yeah. On the consumer side, we have about so the consumer business is approximately 80% of total. The institutional portion was launched about two and a half years ago and two years ago. On the consumer side, about 20% is K-5. 30% is, call it, sixth grade-12th grade. So you have a little more than over 50% is K-12 and then just under 20% for college and graduate. The remainder, that other kind of 20%, is adult and professional learning, so a lot of professional certifications and designations. It's kind of distributed throughout there. Within institutional, it's focused on K-12 school districts. We get plenty of universities and colleges calling us, but we want to stay pretty focused on making sure we really penetrate this market given the scale of opportunity.
But there's a bunch of natural extension there and then into other areas as well in B2B, like employer-sponsored benefits being an obvious one.
Last year, as I looked at your Qs, your revenue growth rate actually went up throughout the year. Is that a function of seasonality, or are you defying the law of large numbers, and it's always going to keep going up? Or how does it trend?
A little bit in 2023 was the transition we made from package-based revenue model to subscription-based. So there was a natural what we called a J curve as you made that transition. And so you saw revenue acceleration each quarter throughout the year from 5% in Q1, 16%, 27%, and then capping it with 32% in the fourth quarter. Collectively, that was 19% consolidated revenue growth year-over-year. As we look ahead into 2024, we're still projecting an acceleration. So at the midpoint of our guide, we'd be at 24% growth on the full year. If I break that down into the two component businesses, consumer, we expect to be up 15%. And institutional would be up north of 60%. So both businesses continue to grow nicely. The freemium strategy is kind of like icing on top.
As it works, it has the potential to deliver substantial outperformance because those numbers include just a very small amount of freemium revenue.
Back to the regulatory point, ESSER funding has been a big topic in education land recently. Talk about what it is, when it's going to go away, and how that impacts the business.
Sure. So there was something called the American Rescue Plan passed a couple of years ago. It had three different phases. The third one was called ESSER 3, focused on COVID learning loss. And it has until 9/30/2024, so September 30th is kind of the funding deadline. And depending on what sources you look at, call it $8 billion-$10 billion left to spend in that bucket. Very recently, tutoring has been elevated to the highest level of focus. And there was a recent White House directive maybe two weeks ago or so that asked school districts to specifically focus on spending that money to the extent services were provided beyond September 30th on tutoring or absenteeism. And so there's a lot of focus within school districts now of that deadline, but not just because of the funding. I think that's really important to note.
It's also just a big emphasis on, "You should be doing tutoring. You should be doing high-dosage tutoring. You should be doing it anywhere you can. It works consistently. It's the one thing in education that consistently works." And so it's a big opportunity to sign up a lot of school districts kind of independent of those funds. There are a lot of funds, and they can be used over the course of four years. And so there's a big opportunity there that's I think we have pretty modest assumptions in our plan relative to that $8 billion-$10 billion that is left to be spent. But separately, there's all sorts of other funding sources that are available.
We're seeing a lot of the existing contracts coming in are for things like special education and compensatory services and Title I and just durable operating budgets because a lot of the teaching roles remain open. I think it's 10%-15% of teaching roles across the country are open right now.
10%-15% of teaching roles are open. Is one of the products you mentioned earlier offering teaching at scale, or maybe it was education at scale? Is one of the things you offer. I know you guys as being or your company is offering one-to-one tutoring. Do you have? Is part of one of your packages the ability to offer a school, "We'll plug a teacher in here who can teach an entire class"? Or is that just not something that's capable right now?
I'd say it's not a 2024 area of focus. But we do get those requests, and you're seeing that becoming a big emergent industry but not something that we're focused on right now.
Yeah. The main product we have right now that supports teachers is called Teacher Assigned. And so what that enables is for any teacher in a school district to assign tutoring to the students in their classroom when they know that they need it. So think of it more as a co-teacher. We want to supplement the work that teachers are doing and make their lives easier. So this way, they don't have to come in before or after school or give up their prep hour during the day. And they can utilize our resources to support the learning that's happening in the classroom.
Yeah. That sounds super simple, but literally, nobody has ever done that in the history of the world. So it required building a logistical infrastructure to be able to take a simple request, a teacher's looking at a student saying, "Oh, they could use some help," and then figure out how to actually bring a live person to bear with the exact right expertise at the exact right time on the screen.
Another area where you've invested a lot of capital and probably are waiting for that payback to come over time.
Well, I mean, on this one, this is the entire basis for our business and why we're so much better than people on both the consumer side and on the institutional side. And frankly, why we continue to just pick up contracts from other competitors that lose it is that reliability and logistical infrastructure. And it's why I think we were talking about this earlier. Half of the top four layers of our company are ex-Amazon because you have to take a complicated process, make it look simple to the consumer school, and then do that with software. And others haven't made that investment. It's taken a lot of work to get it right, but it's a significant competitive advantage.
I mean, you've outlined great organic growth opportunities ahead of you. You've made a lot of investments that are going to be paying off over a while. I'd be remiss if I didn't ask about M&A given I am a banker. I will tell you that I think everybody in this audience will tell you, "Don't do any M&A. They'll pay more for organic growth." But are there any areas where you'd say, "You know what? We see an opportunity here that with something that we could buy, it might help us accelerate the growth of the company," or anything like that? I was going to touch on international. Maybe international is I don't know how much of the business is international today, but maybe an acquisition into it will help you expand in international markets. So two questions there.
Maybe on the first one, we think to have a truly great company, you need to be able to build your own products. And so we've been able to demonstrate that pretty consistently over the course of the company's history, especially as you think about the last 2 years with the introduction of all the institutional products and learning memberships. We think in the near term that our focus will be on organic growth. So the opportunity set in the United States is substantial. We do have a small international business primarily in Canada, but we are focused mostly on the U.S. space just given, again, the nascency I mentioned earlier on the number of students we have on the platform on the consumer side as well as the significant need on the institutional side.
Yeah. I mean, the kind of volume of, I know, every company's kind of bandwidth constrained when it comes to engineering and driving innovation. But when I look at the kind of backlog of what we call shovel-ready work, which is properly scoped with a known and expected outcome that we had kind of tested on a smaller scale and therefore have a high degree of confidence in, that list of things that either drives conversion improvements or retention improvements is so long that I think we feel good about just continuing to methodically work through that and then how that builds both throughout this year and subsequent years.
You said 13 years. Is that how long?
17.
17. Sorry.
Each year in tutoring is like seven years. That's like 100 and I'm just kidding.
The last three, four years have been a transformation of the business. Where are you in terms of is it going to be more transformation over the next three, four years? Or is it, "We've built a lot. Now it's time to harvest a lot of what we've seen and do some of these other shovel-ready projects"?
I think we've outlined the vision in this latest shareholder letter to where we'll be focused. And it builds towards a modern, evolved business that we think can be highly competitive and differentiated and target that many billion dollars opportunity on the consumer side and this emergent multi-billion-dollar industry in institutional. So we think it's a big opportunity. We just need to keep refining the experience and scaling what we think is a winning model. But yeah.
Awesome. Anything to add, Jason?
No. I was just going to say, as we scale based on the products that we have built you've mentioned harvesting. We will continue to drive Adjusted EBITDA margin improvements. We've got it to over 500 basis points in 2024 alone in our march toward what we think will be typical marketplace best-in-class EBITDA margins of 25%-30%. So there will be some level of harvesting, but there's always going to be a level of innovation and product-led growth at our company. And we always feel good about that. I feel like if you look back over the course of the last three years, the team's really been able to skate where the puck's headed. And that's clear.
The transition and the level of execution we've been able to exhibit as we've moved from a package model to Learning Memberships and then how we've quickly scaled in the institutional space. Frankly, we're just getting started in both, so.
Yeah. Maybe the harvesting analogy didn't land with me. But certainly, the product investments we've made will now allow us to take significantly more market share, in our opinion, faster than would have historically been the case, which we would expect to accrue to growth rates and then ultimately EBITDA margins.
Awesome. Well, thank you for my personal experience. Thanks for taking the time today, Chuck and Jason. We're out of time. It's 5 o'clock somewhere, and it's 5:00 P.M. here. So thank you.
Thanks, Steve.
Thanks, Steve.
Do appreciate it.