Why One Company Runs Four Brands

One Child, Four Pieces of Learning

In the spring of 2025, a mother sitting in our counseling room put it this way: “English at the English academy, math at the math academy, exercise at the gym. But the only person who knows how my child is actually doing these days is me.” I could not shake that sentence for a long time. Each academy is diligent within its own subject. The problem is that the diligence never makes it across the subject walls.

A child’s growth is integrated. When fitness slips, focus slips, and when focus slips, English vocabulary stops sticking. Yet no one in the market is tracking that connection. Academies, gyms, and management apps each see only their own piece. The reason this problem stays hard is clear: stitching the pieces together takes real work, and nobody is paying for that work. So nobody does it. We bet the company on it.

The Math Behind Not Starting Four Separate Companies

ELA, Epic Prep, Playfit, Rubric. By industry, they are strangers: a language academy, test prep, a gym, and software. Most of the advice I heard while preparing to found the company in 2024 was to split the entities. Cleaner for brand identity, cleaner for fundraising, cleaner for a sale down the road. Fair points. But when I ran the numbers myself, a different answer came out.

First, the data is shared. As of September 2025, 37 children attend both ELA and Playfit. Their attendance, their engagement in class, and their fitness changes all accumulate in one place, Rubric. The setup where Kwan at Playfit can ask, “This kid seemed shaky in class this week. How are things on the academy side?” is possible only because we are one company. The moment you split the entities, that data gets locked behind four separate privacy consent forms.

Second, curriculum R&D happens once. Research on the attention spans of upper elementary students, on feedback cycles, on reward systems feeds English classes and PE classes alike. Had we started four companies, we would have done the same homework four times.

Third, operations overlap. We only need to build one set of processes for settlements, payroll and labor compliance, insurance, and parent consultations. When I priced out the extra accounting and labor costs of running four separate entities, it came to more than 20 million won a year. For a company of a dozen or so people, that is not small money.

The Bill This Structure Sends

None of this is free, of course. In the spring of 2025, we bolted Rubric’s academy attendance module onto Playfit as it was and tore it out within two weeks. The academy runs on a weekly timetable, while the gym runs on per-session passes, and we underestimated that difference. While the coaches held things together with paper logs and double entry, nine registration errors slipped through, and I called two families myself to apologize. We rebuilt Playfit’s session-based attendance in September, and this time I sat beside the coaches for two weeks.

People’s energy gets divided too. I am the CEO and the PO, and when an academy parents’ meeting and a Rubric sprint review land on the same day, one of the two inevitably comes out shallow. Four brands means four messages to explain, and a small team carries all of it. When Jamie said, “I still can’t describe our company in a single sentence,” we laughed together, but it cut close to the bone.

And honestly, I am still not sure this math works. Synergy is a word that never shows up in the ledger. Whether the data on those 37 children has actually led to better interventions, or whether I am just seeing the picture I want to see, is a question I put to myself again at the end of every quarter.

Still One Company, for Now

Even so, today’s answer is the same. Split us apart and each brand gets lighter, but the problem we said we would solve, connecting the fragments of a child’s learning, disappears with the split. That problem can only be solved at the seams between the four brands. So for now, we have decided to focus on lowering the cost of those seams. We will keep redoing the math, but I have not yet changed my mind about one thing: there should be at least one company that looks at a child whole.