We were lucky to catch up with Duane Joseph recently and have shared our conversation below.

Duane , appreciate you joining us today. So, naming is such a challenge. How did you come up with the name of your brand?

Maranatha Educational Services, LLC (MaranathaEd) is actually named after my daughter Maranatha Joy Joseph. Her name means, bring your Joy quickly Lord. My ex-wife and I ask one of my teacher friends, Truela James, to name our daughter since she wasn’t able to have kids. One of the names she came up with was Maranatha Joy. We were super excited to know the meaning and fell in love with the name. Maranatha was a natural teacher straight out of the womb and Math was her thing. When I started my first company it was called Maranatha Math Institute, LLC and we focused on helping students get to grade level in Math, so when I started this company 10 years ago we wanted to offer more than just Math because we saw a need for Test Prep & College and Career Counseling. When Maranatha graduated from High School, she stated that she would be following in my footsteps and become a Math teacher. I tried my best to talk her out of it but she said with a straight face, Daddy just keep building the business and once I graduate I’ll take over the company. At that moment it gave me an exist strategy and I begin putting things in place to retire early and have her take it over. So, MaranathaEd will one day be ran by its namesake Maranatha Joy Joseph.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

I’m what I call myself an Edupreneur, Educator turned Entrepreneur. I’m an Educator by profession. 14 years in the classroom as a Kindergarten Teacher, Middle School History and Math Teacher with the majority of my career as a High School Math teacher teaching Algebra , Geometry, Trigonometry and Calculus. I’m a Navy Vet and also spent 4 years working for the Kauffman Foundation’s Kauffman Scholar program. After the reorg at Kauffman Scholars, I realized that the ACT Prep program I created while teaching in Louisiana at H.L. Bourgeois High School would be a great business opportunity. So, September 3, 2012 I launched Maranatha Educational Services, LLC (MaranathaEd). Over the 10 years we’ve worked with a total of 1,088 students individually and thousands of students via schools, school districts and organizations. Parents know if they are working with us, they can expect their student to increase his/her scores by 4 to 10+ points in Subject areas and Composite Score.

We offer a variety of hourly packages for students to choose: 10 Hours, 13 Hours, 15 Hours, 18 Hours and 25 Hours. We launched our One-Day Course, ODC to help students who may not have the time to do afternoon hourly prep and for families who would like to pay only a fraction of the hourly courses. Our ODC is called the BluePrint and we give students the blueprint to conquer the ACT in one day. We have seen scores jump between 3 to 9 points in an ODC. We offer One-Week Courses, OWC for schools, school districts, and organizations. If a student wants to work on just one subject area, our Subject Area Courses have been a huge hit in the last two years. I believe a company that can offer a variety of services position itself to be more than the one-size fits all approach.

2017 was I year of awakening. I realized that I had a great business model when students started inquiring about our services instead of the parents. Students started seeing their friends’ scores increase tremendously and began calling to work with us and we automatically knew the students had the buy in and we didn’t have persuade students to work hard. 2017, also brought on a new partnership with Ana Anchi Novicic of Anchi’s Tutoring for Math Prep. With Anchi onboard we saw our Math scores jump from a 26 to a 30 pre-pandemic and I guess I can say post pandemic is now 28. MaranathaEd’s average ACT Composite Score is a 29: English 32, Math 28, Reading 28 and Science 28. Anchi and I came up with the idea of publishing our own book for the ACT and we begin writing and creating the content for Rule the Kingdom of ACT. Our book came to fruition 2020 when it was finally published through Page Publishing.

There are a few things that sets MaranathaEd apart from the other test prep companies in Kansas and across the country. We are one of a few companies that has published a book, we are creating two more by the end of the year, average ACT score is a 29 as a company. We have worked with multiple siblings to where we’re beginning to work with the third and fourth child of those families. We not only help with test prep but with scholarships and college applications through our College and Career Counselor, Mary Kate Kelly and this is all FREE for students who go through our Hourly Package Courses. Our parents have saved tens of thousands dollars with help in this area. Parents, if you want your student to get quality test prep with an abundance of available resources, please check us out at ScoreBIG36 or call at 816.366.PREP (7737) for a FREE 30 Minute Consultation. It’s an investment that will pay dividends a long time.

Have you ever had to pivot?

We had to pivot during the infamous Covid 19 Pandemic and we are now better for the transition. So, in 2020 we were already in transition to bring everything online since we had three sites at the time: Kansas City, Seattle and Omaha. We had planned to start our online courses and limit our personal face to face/one on one interaction for the school year 2020-2021. Once the world shut down in March 2020, it forced us to execute our online programs 5 months early. We had to quickly get on Zoom, digitalize our Subject content, train staff online etiquette, get our book: Rule the Kingdom of ACT into an ebook and work on the audible book. The real problem came when ACT canceled several April, June and July 2020 test due to Covid and many colleges and universities across the country allowed students to be admitted without the ACT/SAT. We went from having 25-35 students per test to 5 to 8 students. Those numbers began to effect our bottom line financially.

So, I called my dad whose the wisest entrepreneur that I now and asked for his advice to sustaining this pandemic. I wanted to keep all of my staff onboard and make sure they were paid and not go anywhere else. My dad suggest that I take a pay cut and distribute the money among my staff until our new fiscal year in July. He said that I would find other ways to make up my finances and he reminded me that I literally didn’t need any clothes, shoes, coats, jackets because of everything in my closet and stuff I have accumulated from Nike. I took his advice and paid out my staff until July and began planning our September test campaign which was successful. I did make up any needed income by delivering groceries for Shipt, Ubering and Lyfting. I also sold some of my Jordan and VaporMax collection and began making my own bow ties instead of buying them. My mom, Marilyn Willoughby hired MaranathaEd to work with the school I graduated from in Thibodaux, Louisiana because she noticed in her local paper that their ACT scores were way below the state average. She paid for all the books, resources, flights and salaries for staff. What an incredible gift to Thibodaux High School and MaranathaEd. We worked with them and the students increased their scores between 2 to 4 points with some students increasing their Composite score 5 to 7 points, The pandemic taught me to streamline and that I don’t need a lot to live on as long as my people and bills are paid. I really Thank God for making it through a time when most businesses had to shut down and call it quits.

What’s been the most effective strategy for growing your clientele?

I would say “Word of Mouth” has been our greatest strategy for growing our clientele. The focus for this strategy is doing our absolute best to get our students to increase their scores by 4 to 10+ points in the Subject areas of English, Math, Reading, Science and increase their Composite score by 4 to 8+ points we knew that parents were gonna tell others. We fostered this plan internally with a friendly $500 prize for the instructor who averages the largest increase per test. For the first three years of having staff, I was the winner every single test so there was a conscience effort from all staff to beat me. Finally it came in 2017-2018 school year, so I had them run the numbers back at least five times and it was accurate, I had lost. But it kept coming, so 2017-2018 with 7 test I was 3/7 which I loved because I realized my plan was working and we saw our student numbers increase tremendously. It was once the parents inquiring our services. I would meet with the parents and student to make sure the student had the buy in and if he/she didn’t, I would cancel or postpone services until the student was ready. Please understand, if the student didn’t have the buy in then I knew they wouldn’t work as hard. The student scores are our scores and that’s how we marketed our company. As mentioned in a previous question, it was that year when we begin to see the shift. Students began calling, emailing and texting to see if we could help them increase their scores. With that shift, I didn’t have to meet with the students to see if they had the buy in, it was automatic.

We also looked at one of our parents who we heard her name in many of the referrals, Hollie Muther. Hollie had both of her older kids come through our program and saw a 5 point on one and an 8pt point increase on the other. She told all of her friends and they told their friends which we saw the spike in clients. One day in the office we decided to place Hollie’s name in the middle of our white board and see who she had influenced and we came up with 48 names. We did the same thing with Brett and Joanna Posten and we came up with 42 names. So, when we ran the numbers on those 1,088 individual students we’ve worked with over the past 10 years 3/4 of the students in our program came via word of mouth.

The same thing has happened with schools, school districts and organizations. Leaders in all of those areas have referred MaranathaEd to others because of the work we’ve done in the classroom with increasing students scores. We are now in six cities across the United States: Kansas City, Seattle, Omaha, Lincoln, Houston and Thibodaux. Word of Mouth has been our greatest method of growing clientele mainly because we take pride in getting the best out of student clients.

Contact Info:

• Website: ScoreBIG36.com
• Instagram: @MaranathaEd, @imduanejoseph, @thetestprepgenius
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/duane.joseph.927
• Linkedin: LinkedIn.com/in/duanejosephsr
• Twitter: MaranathaEd
• Other: Tic Toc: thetestprepgenius

Image Credits
Duane A. Joseph Jr. Chancellor Adams