A Company Built on Math
There was a time when the Korean educational brand Noonnoppi was built almost entirely on mathematics. Today, Noonnoppi is the leading after-school education brand in South Korea, with additional branches abroad serving mostly Korean immigrant communities. But in its early days, before the brand became widely known, the company grew through a math program adapted from Japan’s Kumon system.
Things were still rough around the edges back then. We did not have the detailed marketing playbooks, customer data, or performance dashboards that companies depend on today. A lot of it was trial and error. What we did have, however, was word of mouth.
Parents began saying things like, “I went to the house of the smartest kid in the class, and they were doing that math program.” That was powerful. When parents believed that top students were using our materials, the program began to feel like a hidden secret to academic success, and trust spread from one household to another. Before long, the number of students grew quickly, and the company expanded its regional network around one strong subject: math.
Naturally, headquarters focused on math. That made sense. Math had already earned the market’s trust, so the obvious strategy was to use that trust to reach more households and secure more territory. In today’s terms, it was a classic customer acquisition strategy.
Why English Felt Like an Afterthought
Later, the company introduced English as a new subject. Headquarters did not ignore English, but the main energy of the organization was still directed toward expanding the math business. I did not think that was wrong. From the field, however, I saw another possibility: to me, English was not a separate battle, but the natural next step. If a household already trusted us with math, recommending English was not such a big leap. For parents, it meant adding another subject inside a system they already knew. For our instructors, it meant teaching one more subject in a home where they already had a relationship — more income, and less effort spent finding a new household altogether.
The real obstacle turned out not to be the parents. It was us. Our organization had grown on math, and many instructors were uncomfortable with English. They were confident teaching math, but English felt unfamiliar — some hesitated to explain it, some avoided recommending it, and in a few cases, even when parents showed interest, the instructors themselves grew cautious and talked them out of it. I understood why they felt that way, but I also knew we could not grow if we stayed that way, so I began talking to the instructors directly.
“Think about it,” I told them. “You are already visiting the home. If you teach one more subject in that same home, your income goes up. You do not need to be afraid of English. These children are just beginning. What matters is that you understand the structure of the material and know what the child needs to learn that day.”
I held regular training sessions on the English curriculum. I kept telling them that they did not need to sound like native speakers — their job was not to impress parents with fluent English, but to understand the lesson, guide the child, and notice where the child was getting stuck. Confidence mattered: when an instructor looked nervous, parents noticed, and when an instructor explained the material calmly and clearly, parents listened.
Doing the Work Before It Was Measured
At that time, English performance was not yet part of our official evaluation, so many regional managers did not pay much attention to it. But I kept pushing anyway — not because I was chasing an award or had seen a future KPI coming, but because I simply believed it was good for the company, good for the instructors, and good for the customers.
A few months later, the company’s direction began to change. After expanding its market through math, headquarters started placing more weight on increasing value within existing households, and the strategy shifted from simply acquiring new customers to retaining them and cross-selling additional subjects. Then the KPI changed, and suddenly everyone started paying attention to English. Other managers scrambled to improve their numbers. But my team had already been doing the work for months — the training had happened, the instructors had gained confidence, the parents already understood the value. So when the company finally started measuring it, our results were already there.
That half-year, our region ranked first in the nation, and I received one of the company’s top CEO awards. The recognition felt good, and I won’t pretend otherwise — but the award itself was not the real lesson. The real lesson was that sometimes the work that matters most is not being measured yet.
What This Taught Me About Metrics
Looking back on my career, this pattern appeared more than once. I rarely started by asking, “Will this improve my evaluation score?” Instead, I usually asked a simpler question: will this create real value? If the answer was yes, I tried to do the work, even when it was not yet part of the official scorecard. That approach was not always easy — sometimes it made me look like someone creating extra work for himself, and the results often stayed invisible for quite a while. But useful work rarely disappears completely. It accumulates quietly, until one day the company’s priorities shift or the numbers finally catch up, and that invisible effort becomes visible — as data, as performance, sometimes as recognition.
Metrics can drive action. But sometimes, action creates the metric first — and when you keep doing the work that genuinely helps the company, your colleagues, and your customers, the evaluation may arrive late, but it usually arrives.