Shark Tank backing pays off as ISR Training rides next wave of growth

Gold Coast-based ethical sales company ISR Training is on a roll with sales up 300 per cent since Shark Tank sharks Glen Richards, Steve Baxter and Andrew Banks came on board in mid-2018.

Ryan Tuckwood (pictured right), who co-founded the business with Jack Corbett (pictured left), says business has gone from strength to strength since the sharks made their 30 per cent investment.

Not only does ISR include a solid chunk of the Young Entrepreneur Awards finalists among its clients, but in the current financial year it has signed significant training deals with companies including National Storage (ASX: NSR), Australian Skin Clinics and a major luxury car brand.

Tuckwood tells Business News Australia the sharks could have achieved a return on investment already if they wanted to, but they're still "very keen on leaving their money in the business".

"They've committed to a long-term play with us so they don't want to tap out just yet - they're calling this a seven to 10-year plan with us," he says. 

He says for the last five years ISR Training has been trying to solidify its presence in the Australian market, and the plan appears to be working.

"We've had that kind of stagnant phase where people have just been watching and watching and watching and then all of a sudden it's just gone 'bang'! I say 'bang' but we're still around 1 per cent of where we want to be.

"We're very active on the day-to-day, but we're patient on the macro side of things.

"To be a force to be reckoned with internationally, in my honest opinion we're probably around three to five years away."

ISR already has customers in the UK, Sweden, South Africa, Canada, the US and more recently Hong Kong through its digital offering, but the group hasn't made a big push overseas yet.

"We've just moved into New Zealand and had some good traction over there from a digital training perspective," says Tuckwood.

"Because we created the online program that gives us an ability to scale en masse, and I'm humbly and pleasantly surprised with the results that we get from digital," he says, adding that online customers get ongoing support, coaching and live webinars.

"We're going to go into the UK the back end of next year and then the US the following year, so I think in three to five years the aim is to obviously become the go-to ethical sales training organisation on the planet."

The company is built on the motto SWISH, which stands for 'selling with integrity and selling honestly'.

In their bid to give back to the community Tuckwood and Corbett - who were finalists at this year's Gold Coast Young Entrepreneur Awards and won the event's Social Entrepreneur category in 2017 - have aligned with LIVIN, an organisation that aims to break the stigma around mental health.

"We've coached just over 5,000 clients now in five years, and one of the major challenges that I saw with business owners or entrepreneurs is there's a lot of stress, a lot of anxiety," says Tuckwood.

"We've been able to get those guys (LIVIN founders Sam Webb and Casey Lyons) to come on board, and they've created content that is also going into our training program.

"We're a sales training company, but we also want to help people so that as they're growing they maintain their headspace."

Tuckwood, who like Corbett hails from the UK originally, notes at the last nation speaking tour the pair donated 100 per cent of ticket sales to LIVIN.

"We're going to continue to do that and we do a lot with some of the youth charities as well," he says. 

Business News Australia