LearningRx Annual Convention 2017

Each year, LearningRx hosts its franchisees in Colorado Springs for our annual convention. On July 19th we kicked off our 16th annual event and enjoyed hosting over 100 attendees – franchise owners, their staff and families.

This was an especially exciting convention as we made a significant announcement that LearningRx has now trained over 100,000 brains! If you consider the students, their families and friends, many more than 100,000 people have been impacted. As you may know, learning struggles that aren’t addressed can lead to people not realizing their dreams and potential. It is thrilling for me to imagine all those brains trained and people positively impacted by coming to our centers. 

Also, seeing how happy our franchise owners were to learn about this milestone was a once in a lifetime experience and great celebration. They are our boots on the ground and are the people that make 100,000 brains trained possible. It takes a special person to open their own business and dedicate it and themselves to one goal: helping people. From Santa Rosa, Calif. to The Woodlands, Texas to Reston, Va. and most places in between (in the US and abroad) we have a wonderful foundation of partners that inspire me each day as they are unified and so dedicated to help as many people as possible to meet their learning goals.

Since my father founded LearningRx in 2001, I have spent so much time enjoying stories of success from our centers and have been honored to meet many of the families as I cross the country. Often people come to LearningRx a bit lost, frustrated, and not sure how they can help their loved one and that is where our franchise owners and directors step in to help with answers, hope and a plan to better, faster thinking and learning.

Our convention is so very important, as it provides me and my team the chance to deepen our bond with franchisees, share best practices, learn from each other, and simply enjoy the fact that together we are changing lives across the US and the world.

This year at convention, our network not only enjoyed their time to bond and share, but to learn! We hosted many educational tracks, and one I was very excited about was the work shared around SEO (search engine optimization)! Last year, LearningRx contracted a leading SEO team to help our corporate team and franchises ‘dance’ better with Google and additional search engines. We want to ensure that parents seeking help for their loved ones who are struggling or business leaders seeking a little extra brain strength, or anyone really, have easy access to finding LearningRx when they search for solutions to improve learning. I am proud to say our SEO efforts are well on their way and many of our franchise owners are seeing growth due to it. This effort will be a significant focus for us for the coming year.

I was energized by the research and convergence of evidence that is coming out of the Gibson Institute of Research. I’ve always known that our programs work. I’ve seen it so often with my own eyes. One of my favorite parts of convention is to watch educational psychologists, medical doctors, and neuroscientists present on and show the results of our ongoing studies. Hearing the quantified real life change data and to see real change in MRIs in color is amazing!

The two weeks following convention, we held franchise training for our new centers and owners at our headquarters where they were able to dive deep into their roles as owners. Together we talked brain training, marketing, team building, customer service and research to further deepen our foundation as a leader in 1-1 brain training.

As CEO it is important for me to spend time with franchise owners so they can have an opportunity to share their experiences with me and discuss where I can help them grow as owners. I want to ensure our corporate team is providing the tools and strategies they need in order to grow their businesses, help more students and make a deeper impact on their communities. When we, as the corporate team, are able to provide said tools to help them increase their impact, we are one step closer to reaching our next ten year goal of 300,000 brains trained. We are well on our way!

We will be celebrating our 100,000 milestone this October in our centers across the United States. I will be traveling to New Jersey where we will honor our student of the year while also taking time across our entire global network to cherish what we have accomplished while looking to the future!

Best practices across a network are critical for growth in a franchise organization. Not only do we conduct these communication channels internally, I am always focused on self improvement externally too. That is why this year I am going to attend many CEO roundtables across the US in order to become a stronger leader. I start this journey in Atlanta this fall and look forward to sharing new insights with you upon my return. The promise of learning from other CEOs from different industries is very exciting and I am sure I’ll bring back many new ideas to LearningRx.

As always, my door, phone and email inbox is open to you! Please feel free to write, call or stop by our corporate offices in Colorado Springs if I can be of any assistance to you or help answer questions you have about LearningRx history, our methods of training or to learn more about our plan to reach 300,000 brains trained!

-Kim Hanson, CEO