Established in August 2018, myAko helps small to medium-sized businesses improve how they engage, educate, and communicate with their teams. It is a cloud-based, scalable solution that can be launched within a few hours instead of days and weeks. Led by its founder and CEO, Kevin Ashley, myAko‘s primary mission is to continuously develop tools to make its client’s life easier and provide them with more time for the important stuff.
By utilizing a team of staff with more than five decades of experience in training across multiple sectors, the myAko team has realized that there’s more to life than spending several hours on ineffective and unengaging eLearning. Established with a mission to make learning quicker, more engaging, and easier, myAko quickly expanded into a multifaceted solution that makes manager’s and learners ‘ lives easier. While learning is still a significant part of myAko’s package, the organization also provides everything else that its clients need in one place, from training management to staff appraisals, accident, incident, near miss reporting, audit, risk management, task lists, and intuitive team dashboards.
The Veteran Leader
Being an army veteran, Kevin did not take the traditional route of attending university before starting his working career. After leaving the military, Kevin studied Business Studies and Service Excellence at the University of Wales and Open University. His commercial background was focused on telecommunications, senior operational management, business re-engineering, and consultancy before entering the world of SaaS software and digital learning. Kevin considers himself lucky to be a part of the One2One team that launched the planet’s first digital mobile network in the UK in January 1993. Since then, he has worked with many great people and held several senior management roles in many diverse industries across the planet.
Standing Tall amongst the Crowd
As the company’s founder, Kevin believes several key differentiators make myAko a different organization from its peers. myAko is a business partner and not just a service provider. It helps clients to set up their customized solutions and works proactively to maximize their user experience and ROI. The organization also actively listens to its client’s business challenges and needs and helps them find cost-effective technical solutions.
myAko’s clients can fully manage the platform and service for their learners without frequently seeking support from myAko. However, in case of any need, myAko’s client success team is always available to help. The best part is the firm’s clients influence its product roadmap and is actively involved in helping the company drive innovation. In summary, it offers small and medium size businesses an affordable enterprise solution where clients only pay for what they use.
Greatest Accomplishments
Kevin feels his greatest accomplishments are restructuring a business to increase its revenue by US$23m in 8 months and more recently supporting myAko’s clients during the COVID-19 crisis, ensuring they could still remotely complete their compliance training. This included growing the client base during this period.
Under his leadership, myAko has helped UK NHS to educate care home staff on dysphagia and partnered with Teleswallowing Limited, Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, and Mastercall to deliver remote Speech and Language Therapist (SLT) assessments into care homes, which significantly reduced the NHS dysphagia waiting list. It has also supported clients and charities to deliver interactive, innovative education programs.
“Our current initiatives are to educate the world on deaf awareness and the impact of menopause. We are working with some excellent partners to help educate and make a positive difference in people’s lives.”– Kevin says.
Tackling the COVID-19 Crisis
Kevin believes launching a brand and SaaS solution into a highly competitive market is challenging at any time. However, trying this during the pandemic was challenging, especially when companies had ceased office-based operations. The increase in home and remote working worked nicely for Kevin and his team, as many companies lacked robust learning management systems or appropriate training.
myAko also helped deliver digital learning on COVID-19 and safe working practices, which helped its clients massively. From a team’s point of view, myAko went from permanent office-based to remote working. The team quickly adapted and has been successfully remote working since. As the CEO and founder, Kevin also changed his communication method with regular video conferencing, which helped keep everyone aligned and motivated.
Looking at the Future
myAko aspires to continue to work with its innovation partners who share its passion and vision to make a positive difference. It will continue to deliver new digital features that guide and help its clients and their teams improve their skills, knowledge, well-being, mental health, fitness, and capabilities. Supporting them to achieve their career and life aspirations.
myAko will continue to expand within the UK and into several other key markets, including the USA, Asia, and Europe. The organization will achieve this by proactively working with passionate resellers and other software and education businesses, where myAko will complement its service offerings and give its clients a higher level of integrated features, products, and services. A good example is our partnership with Advanced in the UK, where they utilize a white-labeled version of myAko, to successfully deliver their product and service software training and resell myAko digital courses to their clients.