Graduation day for edupreneurs

These three entrepreneurs sold their successful education firms to big companies for big bucks.

By Ian Mount, FSB Magazine contributor

(FSB Magazine) -- Education companies have been rolling up small firms like it was 1999, a trend that accelerated in early September, when three entrepreneurs sold their companies.

Burt Cutler founded Educational Insights in Rancho Dominguez, Calif., to sell tools that he had developed to teach his daughter to read. Thirty-four years later (and with some 750 products), Cutler, 80, sold his $30-million-a-year business to Learning Resources, which paid $24.2 million and assumed about $5 million in debt.

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Stephen Kramer and Michael London were Babson College freshmen in the late 1980s when they decided to start a college-admission-counseling company, but it wasn't until 1998 that they got College Coach off the ground. With a staff of 50, the Newton, Mass., company sells individual admission-counseling packages, as well as corporate packages that firms such as Cisco (Charts), IBM (Charts), and Johnson & Johnson (Charts) offer to employees. The two 36-year-olds built their company to a $6-million-a-year ($1 million in profit) business before selling it to Bright Horizons Family Solutions (Charts) for an undisclosed price.

In 1996, University of Missouri undergraduate Kyle Yamnitz founded Lessonplanspage.com, an advertising-supported Web site that lets teachers share plans free. After a year of discussion he sold the Blue Springs, Mo., company to HotChalk, a provider of collaborative software for teachers, students and parents. "It's not something I was looking to do, but I found a partner with the same goals - making teaching easier without cost to educators," he says.

Please send feedback or column ideas to fsb_mail@timeinc.com.

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Most stock quote data provided by BATS. Market indices are shown in real time, except for the DJIA, which is delayed by two minutes. All times are ET. Disclaimer. Morningstar: © 2018 Morningstar, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Factset: FactSet Research Systems Inc. 2018. All rights reserved. Chicago Mercantile Association: Certain market data is the property of Chicago Mercantile Exchange Inc. and its licensors. All rights reserved. Dow Jones: The Dow Jones branded indices are proprietary to and are calculated, distributed and marketed by DJI Opco, a subsidiary of S&P Dow Jones Indices LLC and have been licensed for use to S&P Opco, LLC and CNN. Standard & Poor's and S&P are registered trademarks of Standard & Poor's Financial Services LLC and Dow Jones is a registered trademark of Dow Jones Trademark Holdings LLC. All content of the Dow Jones branded indices © S&P Dow Jones Indices LLC 2018 and/or its affiliates.