[이데일리 김예린 기자] No matter how hard you exercise, if the method is wrong, your body will be ruined. This is the reason why many people quit gym personal training (PT) or Pilates taught by experts when they first start exercising. However, exercise leaders who teach customers also want to study. There are many motives, such as when you feel inadequate in the course of your classes, when you want medical-level exercise instruction, or when you want to secure a competitive edge that is differentiated from numerous sports YouTubers.
Brave Company is an edutech company that provides non-face-to-face healthcare education content ‘Efa Master’ for these exercise leaders. Yang Seung-yoon, CEO of Brave Company, said, “Physical therapists only provide treatment, and PT instructors only do ‘bulk-up’ exercises. To create a healthy body, both exercise and rehabilitation are necessary.” He said, “We will provide differentiated health care content that lies between specialized medical care and fitness by utilizing our sports medicine experts.” He added, “We will create content that can satisfy not only athletic instructors who want to study to improve their job competency, but also ordinary people who pursue wellness.”
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Brave Company is an edutech company that operates several brands in the non-face-to-face education and healthcare categories. As one of the health care brands, IFA Master is a program to help improve competitiveness by transferring theoretical lectures and practical know-how from experts in each field, such as doctors, physical therapists, health trainers, and Pilates, to national exercise leaders. In addition, various brands such as civil service exams and Daechi-dong entrance exams have been launched, and the strategy of transforming the offline-oriented market into a digital platform is gaining attention from investors as the market is paying attention. It has investors such as Softbank Ventures, Union Partners, Capstone Partners, and Lotte Home Shopping. The total investment is 93 billion won.
Escape from crisis through flexible pivoting
It was not initially focused on health care education. CEO Yang Seung-yoon entered the education world while working as a developer of special military service at Etus, an internet lecture company. After that, in 2017, the company changed its business direction to civil service exams and certified real estate agents, and launched the non-face-to-face lecture ‘Modu’s Public Officials’ to prepare for public officials, police, firefighters, and military service entrance exams, and the brand ‘Modu Authorized’, a lecture for certified real estate agents.
Pivoting was a godsend. By introducing famous professors’ former civil service exam courses at a reasonable price, it established itself as a powerful brand by word of mouth among examinees, led a profitable business, and surpassed 10 billion won in sales for the first time since its establishment in 2020. By combining the digital marketing, content production capabilities, and system development and operation know-how accumulated while training for the SAT and entrance exams during the Etus days, the categories were rapidly expanded.
Yang said, “In the mid-2010s, the civil service academy market was very old and was mainly offline. We pioneered our own market by utilizing the capabilities that players did not have at the time.” “If the existing public service academies brought in several instructors and competed with them, and then gave strength to the surviving instructors, we would find good instructors and develop teaching materials. I grew up by giving feedback on makeup and lectures,” he said.
Turning from the civil service business to healthcare was a choice for survival. Last year, the number of students preparing for civil service examinations (public servants) plummeted, but as Megastudy, a company with strong capital, started to enter the civil service market in earnest, sales in the first quarter of this year were cut in half compared to the same period last year. CEO Yang said, “Last year, due to the reorganization of the civil servant pension system, the attractiveness of the civil servant itself decreased and delivery riders made a lot of money in a short period of time, leaving the MZ generation public servants. The market has contracted to such an extent that it is said that the competitiveness of level 9 civil servants in the first quarter of this year is the lowest since the quarter,” he said.
Ifa Master filled the sales hole that had been drilled. Since the service started in May 2019 in preparation for the entry into Megastudy, it worked harder for business conversion last year, and was able to offset the sales cut from the civil service business. This is the secret to drawing an upward curve in total sales, including public officials and healthcare, from 9.6 billion won in 2019 to 10.9 billion won in 2020 and 12.4 billion won in 2021. He said, “As the difficulty of the exam became lower than expected and the attractiveness of civil servants recovered, the number of public officials who took the challenge again increased,” he said.
“We will prove the growth of our main business and new business”
Brave Company’s goal this year is to prove the stability of the civil service business and the growth of Ipamaster. If the business goes well, an investment round will be held in the second half of this year, and live ammunition will be secured to focus on new business. In the case of Ifa Master, it is aimed at exercise leaders at the moment, but in the future, it plans to expand the B2C area by providing content to the general public who want professional exercise. It is a blueprint to add information sharing and communication functions such as fitness center recommendation, employee recruitment, and sale of exercise equipment and center. CEO Yang said, “In the future, we will build an ecosystem where everyone from sports leaders to employees and the general public can gather by attaching community and recruitment services.”
Brave Company also released ‘Everyone’s Daechi-dong’ for college entrance exam preparation at the end of last year. It is a platform that provides real-time on-site lectures and learning management services for Daechi-dong Academy, helping students in rural areas to enjoy high-quality education without time and space constraints. In the healthcare field, an indoor cycling exercise platform ‘Everyone’s Bike’ is being prepared. CEO Yang said, “I want to be the ‘only number one’ rather than the ‘first mover’ in the fields we created, such as health care, civil service exams, Daechi-dong education, and indoor bicycles.”