Strive Has Been Acquired By FranklinCovey to Drive Impact at Scale

Will Houghteling
3 min readApr 28, 2021

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Strive has been acquired by FranklinCovey, one of the world’s leading corporate training companies. Our team will join FranklinCovey to power the blended learning experience for the thousands of customers and millions of users subscribed to their All Access Pass.

Our mission at Strive is to help people realize their professional potential and become the best version of themselves. We achieve this mission by transforming managers into leaders, both accelerating their own career trajectories and creating meaning, belonging and opportunity for their teams and companies.

Over the last few years, our hard-working, innovative team has partnered with experienced coaches and trusting, forward-thinking customers to launch leadership development for thousands of learners. Our approach is unique — we combine content, community, coaching and analytics to challenge learners to not simply memorize lessons in a classroom, but to intentionally apply lessons in the real world.

After countless ups, downs, missteps, tweaks, and iterations, we’re proud to share that our unique cohort-based approach to generating behavior change at scale is working — 90% of learners and 100% of customers say they would be disappointed to no longer use Strive, the average learner improves by 10% on the skills they study, and our completion rates are 2–5x industry standards.

Far more powerful than these metrics of success are the notes of gratitude we receive and signs of transformation we witness:

  • The new manager who turned around a challenging relationship by approaching a (long overdue) critical conversation with heart and backbone.
  • The diverse leader who used their community of peers to crystallize their career path and developed the sponsor and mentorship relationships needed to make progress on their goals.
  • The experienced leader who managed to silence their most incessant inner critic.
  • The executive who learned to build psychological safety and fairness for their org by re-examining biases encoded in hiring and promotion practices, rebuilding their approach to be more inclusive and equitable.

It’s these human stories that motivate our uniquely diverse — 81% female, non-binary and BIPOC — and mission-driven team.

While we were fortunate to have many fundraising opportunities during our recent raise, ultimately we believe the best path to achieve our north star — impact at scale — is by joining forces with FranklinCovey and bringing our unique learning approach to 100x as many people as we reach currently.

FranklinCovey is one of the world’s leading and largest lifelong learning companies. Their books — including classics like 7 Habits of Highly Effective People — have been purchased >50MM times, and their courses reach thousands of customers and millions of learners around the world. Strategically, they share our belief in the importance of generating behavior change at scale — providing not just a library of lessons that check a box, but learning journeys that transform individuals and organizations. Culturally, they share our values of creating communities of inclusion, belonging and opportunity both internally and for our customers.

Four years ago FranklinCovey launched the All Access Pass, a subscription product that allows companies to access all 20+ solutions at once. The All Access Pass has grown from $0 — $100MM in revenue in the last five years, making it among the largest and fastest growing products in corporate training. Our team will join FranklinCovey to power the All Access Pass learning experience with our technology and blended learning approach. We will also continue partnering with our experienced coaches to provide our existing customers the unique Strive solution, and over time we’ll add in opportunities for our customers to benefit from the integrated FranklinCovey solution.

Building Strive has been the most challenging and the most rewarding experience of our collective professional lives. And we’re just getting started — the best is yet to come.

Read more in the press and FranklinCovey’s official press release.

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Will Houghteling

Bridging school and work @ Strive, x-Minerva, Google/YouTube, Harvard